Start to Finish: 1.02 - Fear of the Daleks

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

The first series of The Companion Chronicles contained one story for each of the first four Doctors, so episode two features an adventure for the Second Doctor, Patrick Chapman's Fear of the Daleks, narrated by Wendy Padbury as teenage computer genius Zoe Herriott, and featuring Nicholas Briggs in the role which will surely fund his retirement and put his children through university, as the voice of the Daleks.

Once again, it's a story within a story, as Zoe Herriott recounts a story of her past travels to her counsellor. Now, this presents something of a challenge, as her memory of her travels with the Doctor were erased by the Time Lords, so instead she recounts her story as that of a recurrent nightmare, in which she stowed away in the TARDIS and traveled with the Doctor, encountering his archenemies, the Daleks.

The story makes much of the paradox of Zoe's memory; that she forgot her travels when she was one of the first major television characters to have an eidetic memory as a character trait. Captured by a mad scientist working with the Daleks, her mind is used to power a weapon and to create an assassin avatar to wield it. 'Companion gets mind controlled for the purposes of murder' is not an original conceit for the series, but the mind projector is a creepy conceit and Padbury conveys the sense of helplessness well.

In terms of other characters, Padbury's vocal range is limited. Her Doctor has some of Patrick Troughton's intonations, but her Jamie lacks even a Fraser Hines-quality Scots accent. Her Zoe, however, remains assured after all these years, from her slightly smug accounts of her own intelligence to her fear in the face of loss of control, and distinguishing clearly between the old and young versions of the character. Although the dominant mood is Zoe's fear of the Daleks and of losing control of herself, that theme of melancholy nostalgia is present again, this time through Zoe's amnesia.

As with Frostfire, the Doctor is a slightly tangential presence in Zoe's story, the first person nature of the narrative meaning that it has to remain solely with her. In fact, the Daleks are almost a secondary presence themselves, with the mad scientist Attreca as the primary antagonist.

Fear of the Daleks is another decent entry in the series, with a wildly high concept to go with its bare bones production.

Next up, The Blue Tooth, with the late Caroline John as Liz Shaw, and Nicholas Briggs and his Moog ring modulator as the Cybermen.

Start to Finish: Introduction and 1.01 - Frostfire

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Next month sees the release of the final title in Big Finish Productions' Companion Chronicles range, at the end of a seven year run. To mark this occasion, I've decided to re-listen to all 80 Companion Chronicles, plus the bonus releases The Three Companions, Freakshow and The Mists of Time.

A few words of introduction for the uninitiated. Big Finish Productions was founded years back to produce audio plays based on the adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield, a Virgin New Adventures Doctor Who Companion-turned-solo adventuress. After a few years and modest success, the company gained a license to produce plays based on the adventures of the classic era (and at the time, only) Doctors, and attracted the regular participation of a great many original cast members, including Peter Davidson, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and - after the first year - Paul McGann and many of their original companions, as well as adding some of their own.

Of course, this left four of the eight Doctors unavailable, due to the death of three actors and Tom Baker's disinterest in continuing involvement in the franchise (a decision now reversed, leading to his involvement in the company's work). The answer to this was The Companion Chronicles. In each of the releases in the series, one of the original companion actors narrates the story of a 'lost' adventure, lying between episodes in the existing canon, with an additional actor providing one of the voices in the story and sound effects and music to add depth to the reading.

The first title in the series was and is Mark Platt's Frostfire, an adventure for the First Doctor narrated by Maureen O'Brien as Vicki, a young woman from the future who was rescued by the original TARDIS crew (in The Rescue) after the departure of Susan, and who eventually left in The Myth Makers to take the name Cressida and marry Prince Troilus of Troy and Carthage.

Like most of the Companion Chronicles, and all of the early offerings, the play is a story within a story, as Vicki narrates the tale to the Cinder, a sepulchral-voiced creature (the voice provided by Keith Drinkel) dwelling in an icy vault beneath the temple in Carthage. The story which she tells is of a visit to a frost fair in 1814, and an encounter with Jane Austen and the mysterious Phoenix Egg, an artefact which seems to suck heat from the world and exercise an unhealthy fascination on the minds of those who look upon it.

One of the themes which resonates through the Chronicles, and begins here, is one of melancholy reflection. Perhaps as a result of framing most of the stories as the reminiscence of a past companion now much older, and perhaps in part from the nature of the project, harking back to the early years of the beloved show, the story is a nostalgic reflection of Vicki's glory years traveling with the Doctor.

In connecting the past and the future versions of the companion through the tale, it also features a central plot device - the Frostfire, both phoenix and egg - which haunts the companion into their later life. It is this, the link between the story and the story within the story, that is perhaps the most effective part of the narrative. It gives the play its shape, and creates a wonderfully circular pattern which suits a series about time travel.

The story itself is effectively framed by the cold weather of frozen London and the ice-blue flames of the Frostfire. It feels cold, and the peril has a strangely desperate edge because of it. The plot has elements of Dracula (although the setting is much earlier) with a life-stealing force stalking through London's streets and setting its sights on our heroine, even featuring a 'Bloofer Lady' possessed by the same force that first consumed her. The historical setting is less effective than the science fiction elements, in part because of the similarity to the more dominant Victorian era, and the mass-slaughter occurring in the centre of London is striking in its lack of impact.

Also, Jane Austen appears in her later years as a slightly crazed adventuress, punches out a possessed fire-eater and saves the day, so there's that, even if having Jane Austen declare your story beyond her imagination as a writer is an unnecessarily ballsy move.

The Doctor is a somewhat tangential presence in this story, but then it dates to an era when he was only just beginning to be the star of his own show, coming into his own after the departure of his original 'crew'. Perhaps as a result of the early focus on Vicki's activities, his bravura appearance at the end of the story is a little deus ex machina, but not out of character. Maureen O'Brien's impression of the First Doctor is pretty good, although her Steven Taylor is less convincing.

Frostfire is a good start to what was, at the time, something of an experiment. It's not perfect, but it combines compelling imagery with a convincingly monstrous peril.

Next up is the second release of series 1, featuring Wendy Padbury and Nicholas Briggs in Fear of the Daleks.

Pretty Woman

Once upon a time there was a little script who wanted to be a serious drama. The little script was the script for a dark drama about the ugly nature of the sex industry; about (roughly) a drug-addicted prostitute hired to act as escort for a rich man in order to make enough money to go to Disneyland and ultimately ejected from his life when she proved unable to stay clean.

The little script tried to get produced as a hard-hitting major motion picture, but all the studios said "No."

Then the script's fairy godfather said; "Don't worry, little script; you shall go to the production green light ball!" And he waved his wand and removed the gritty commentary and the female lead's drug habit and replaced them with a flutter of shimmering dialogue and a whimsical, upbeat ending.

And lo, the little script became the most successful romantic comedy of all time, and they all lived happily ever after.

Pretty Woman is a film that I saw for the first time yesterday, a mere twenty four years after it came out. It's a bubbly, lighthearted romcom; an artfully made feelgood movie, with superb performances and a typically 80s (although it actually came out in 1990) attention to its soundtrack album potential. It is a highly-enjoyable modern fairy tale, provided you are able to ignore a number of basic and unpleasant facets of the sex trade while you're watching it.

Is it a good film? Yes. Is it uncontroversial? Hell no. As a depiction of prostitution it sucks and it hits about as hard as a sponge, but ultimately it is a lot more fun - and was far more commercially successful - than the original concept would have been and it's sort of pointless to compare the two (he says, during a comparison of the two). The original script (working title, $3000) would never have attracted studio backing; it would have lacked the gloss of the actual product, and probably ended up in the same milieu (and with much the same takings) as the no-frills Ken Russel film Whore which came out a year later (and which I have not seen).

As it is, Pretty Woman is ultimately a flawed product, and some police sources in the 90s blamed it for a rise in prostitution in the same way that The Nun's Story bolstered recruitment in the convents. On the other hand, people blamed Fargo when someone froze to death in Minnesota, and that turned out to be nonsense, so press statistics are important. It's not a complex film, and it ducks many of the issues, but then again it's a fairy story, and by that measure it makes some attempt to convey a message about prostitution, but overall focuses on being a well-made romantic comedy fairytale.

And the message is 'marry Richard Gere and get off the streets', of course, which lacks general application, but it's something.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

I went to see the Amazing Spider-Man 2 in its first week and, naturally, went to join the big queue at the door.

"Is this for Spider-Man?" I asked.

"No; Captain America."

It's pretty damning when a franchise can't compete with a rival over a month into its run, but it's actually not unfair. Spider-Man has a lot to like about it, but not very much that surprises and there's not quite anything to love. It's not a bad film - it's not even a bad superhero film - but that just makes its failure to deliver a more powerful indication of how much the main MCU has raised the bar since X-Men and Raimi's first Spider-Man were the canine genitals of the sub-genre.

Now, this is not to say either that I didn't like the film. I had a good time. Andrew Garfield is mostly likable in a lead role that desperately needs its actor to be likable, despite a couple of failures of Dawson casting (he is just a bit too old to be so stroppy), and Emma Stone returns as a formidable interpretation of Gwen Stacey. Jamie Foxx brings a wonderful fragile rage to the role of Electro and Dane DeHaan is basically already a goblin as Harry Osborn. The effects are good, as they have to be, and the action set pieces properly dramatic, if occasionally a little hard to follow.

But we've seen so much of this before. Spider-Man kind of needs a new direction, and while 'with great power comes great responsibility' will never get old, the 'can I, can't I narrative' of Spidey's love life needs a gear change, and not the one that comes from dating Gwen Stacey.

Actually... and here's a thing that needs some spoiler warnings.

I know, on some level, that Gwen Stacey was always going to die, that it is what she does. I still wish that they hadn't killed her. I liked her as a character, and I'm not convinced that the narrative benefited from her death.

I guess it's kind of a fixed point of comics history - it did kind of end an age and all - but this isn't the Silver Age, and post-Incredibles I think that we could stand to move away from heroism as the preserve of the superpowered. It's what I like about Black Widow and Hawkeye in the Avengers, and it's what I liked about this Gwen Stacey, but her death makes her into another victim and I think that she deserved more. If nothing else, she deserved to die doing, not falling.

And unfortunately, that is the impression I take away from TASM2; that they made Gwen Stacey awesome, only to shove her into the fridge.

Noah

Darren Aaronofsky made the film π. It was small, incomprehensible in parts, and deeply bizarre, assuming a techno-magical basis to Jewish mysticism. Aaronofsky's Noah is like that, only huge.

The film describes the antediluvian civilisation of the descendants of Cain as a vast, world-spanning technological empire based on the exploitation of 'zohar', a mystical stone holding a spark of divine power. Having corrupted and destroyed both Creation and the Watchers, fallen angels who once tried to help them, men have proven unworthy and the Creator decides to wipe them out.

It is to the line of Seth that God entrusts the saving of the innocent; the creatures that have never fallen from the grace of the Garden. Aided by the surviving Watchers, Noah and his sons create the Ark, and place two of every animal in a drugged stupor to ride out the coming flood.

Antagonism is provided by Tubal-Cain, last king of the people of Cain, and by the clash of Noah's conviction that all men must die and his family's hope to begin anew in the new world.

The film is a weird mashup of Biblical narrative and pseuod-divine science fiction, and there is a weird inconsistency that comes from not really cleaving to one in preference to the other. Overall, it is an interesting film, with some fantastic cinematography and production design married to decent performances from a strong cast. The palette of the film is predominantly grey and brown, which can be a bit wearying on the eye, but in that palette the design is sumptuous, and the exceptions are striking for their contrast. On occasions, the actors are shot purely in silhouette against a vivid sky, while the green land where the Creator (never God, at least not from the descendants of Seth) still has some sway stands out starkly against the barrens of the Cainites.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I love this version of the poster

I never expected to enjoy Captain America. He's one of those superheroes, like Superman, who is just so uptight that he's not a lot of fun, and besides, every other film version has sucked mightily.

The First Avenger blew me away. It might not have been ground-breaking as a movie, but it blasted through what I thought I knew about Captain America. It played the origin almost identically to the 1990 Albert Pyun version - that's right, Bad Movie lovers; Albert Pyun made a Captain America movie - but with just enough changes to make the difference. Weakling Steve Rogers wasn't a wannabe hero anymore, he was a hero constrained by his physique, and once he became a super soldier he was shown to be heroic, but also human, with flaws and humour just like anyone else. The Avengers built on this characterisation, and brought us up to the point of The Winter Soldier.

Spoiler free to start with: The Winter Soldier is an action movie, but it is also a post-Cold War Cold War conspiracy thriller. It's watchwords are 'trust no-one', although its moral is actually to trust in people, and its calling card is betrayal. The casting of Robert Redford, erstwhile poster boy for the fight against corrupt governments (All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor) as a slick politician is a clear nod to its origins.

Other new faces in the film are Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie), very nicely pitched as a scarred veteran soldier who happens to be black, Agent 13/Sharon (Emily VanCamp), and Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo), while Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson and Cobie Smulders return as SHIELD agents Nick Fury, Natasha Romanoff and Maria Hill. Toby Jones and Jenny Agutter also reappear in smaller roles as Emil Zola and the unnamed British World Security Council representative. This is a pretty sizable ensemble, and yet everyone gets their moment.

The spoilery stuff will start after two more paragraphs.

The plot of the movie follows Steve Rogers as he uncovers a conspiracy woven throughout SHIELD, and plot which threatens to bring about total world domination. It falters a little on the occasions when you wonder why in the name of Stan Lee this isn't worth assembling some form of team for the purposes of, perhaps, a little avenging, but that's a minor quibble and can actually be taken care of through fridge logic: Tony Stark has (publicly at least) blown up all of his suits and had his chest reactor removed; Bruce Banner is presumably in seclusion; and Thor is being as subtle as he can be. We can only presume that Hawkeye is sufficiently undercover that even he doesn't know where he is.

We bounce from set piece to set piece with just enough quiet time to get caught up and see what's happening, just as an action thriller ought to be. There is also some musing on identity and loss, which is brief, but surprisingly poignant.

And now, the spoilery stuff.

Much of the film actually approaches cinematic perfection. In particular the quieter moments transcend what could be trite material to be quite touching, especially when Natasha is questioning her own identity after years of assumed roles. I also applaud moving the character out of the fanservice zone, putting her in formal suits and casuals away from the trademark catsuit.

Speaking of costume, I loved the switch back to the original fighting uniform to signal Cap's commitment to an ideal instead of a pragmatic cause, and Falcon's flight suit was a thing of beauty. The Winter Soldier was chillingly realised by the somewhat baby-faced Sebastian Stan, even if he could have had his own Image Comics title in the nineties with that look.

If I were more of a comics geek than I am, I would probably have suffered some sort of terminal nerdgasm. I'm not sure, but I suspect that pretty much every named character was either reappearing from an earlier film, or has a long and venerable history in the comics, down to the naming of Stephen Strange as on of Insight's prime targets. I strongly suspect that you would find the same if you were able to read every target name that flashed up on screen (I was watching in 3D and barely caught 'Anthony Stark').

On the downside, The Winter Soldier does something that The First Avenger impressively avoided, and many of the larger ensemble succumb to second hero syndrome in the finale, wherein the loyalist SHIELD agents basically exist to confirm the extent of the HYDRA infiltration and the Winter Soldier's reversion to mission by getting slaughtered in droves. I think my only other criticism is that I really wanted it to be 13, not Falcon, who put Rumlow on his arse, because anyone that macho just has to be taken out by a tiny blonde.

Oh, and that the climax of the movie would have been rather more tense if we hadn't seen the Insight helicarriers crashing in flames all over the trailers.

The film has a dramatic effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, signalling as it does the end of SHIELD; it will be interesting to see what it does with that. I am particularly looking forward to next week's episode of Marvel's: Some Guys on a Plane.

Muppets Most Wanted

So, I love the Muppets, always have done. I have always loved The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppet Movie grew on me as I got older. Muppets Treasure Island and Muppets Christmas Carol are amazing, although Muppets from Space was a bit of a let down for me.

And then there was The Muppets, a bold gamble relaunching the franchise for a new generation. Some didn't like it, most did; I loved it, as did Hannah. And now our daughter loves the Muppets as well - the memory of sitting on the sofa, watching Elton John being savaged by crocodiles as Arya fell asleep in my arms is one I will always treasure - so naturally we went to see the advance screening of Muppets Most Wanted on Sunday.

I had a great time. The movie has all the usual Muppet energy and fun, loads of great bad jokes and songs and dances. I do have to say that, for my money, it's not as good as The Muppets, but that's not that much of a caveat.

The film begins with the Muppets left alone at the end of the last movie - and, just FYI, you may find the revelation that that heartwarming crowd scene where the Muppets were welcomed by their devoted fans is now, in-universe, written off as peopled entirely by hired extras to be utterly devastating - and segues into the first musical number, the self-deprecating 'We're Doing a Sequel'. We then meet our antagonists, 'tour manager' Dominic and Constantine, the world's most dangerous frog, and the film swiftly carries us into a story of the Muppets' comeback world tour being used as cover for a series of audacious crimes, while Kermit is replaced by Constantine and thrown in a Siberian gulag.

The plot is mostly used to string together a series of set-pieces. It's more substantial than the 'getting the band back together' riff of The Muppets, but there are two things slightly lacking. Jason Siegel's script absolutely crackled with love for the Muppets, and the new film isn't quite willing to go all in in the same way. Also, in the unpredictable manner of musicals, this time Bret Mackenzie hasn't thrown up anything to match The Muppets. 'We're Doing a Sequel' is fun, but pales beside 'Life's a Happy Song' (or 'The Rainbow Connection', 'Hey a Movie', 'Shiver My Timbers' or 'Scrooge', making it perhaps the weakest Muppet opening number of all), and the big show number, 'Something So Right', is no 'Man or Muppet', Celine Dion or no Celine Dion.

That being said, on its own lights there's a lot to like. 'I'm Number One' is a fun villain song, the gulag chorus singing 'The Big House' is both enjoyable and a nice call back to Caper, and the 'Interrogation Song' is much better than it has a right to be, thanks to the energetic byplay between Ty Burrell and Eric Jacobsen as Sam. 'I Can Get You What You Want (Cockatoo in Malibu)' is an oddity, being the most Conchordesque of the songs in the film, and sticking out in much the same way 'I'm Not Crying' did in The Pirates.

There is also the usual parade of cameos, and just as I was too young to get a lot of the cameos in The Muppet Movie the first time around, I think I'm too old to get a lot of them this time. Still, there are plenty of faces I did recognise in between the twelve year olds, and contrary to my fears from the trailers, not everyone in Europe ends up being an American doing an accent.

So, overall, Muppets Most Wanted wasn't the Muppet sequel I wanted, but it was the one that I got and I'm okay with that.