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The Company
of Friends
JULY 2009
(4 EPISODES)
MARY'S
STORY
It is the final episode of The Company of Friends
that I feel will be talked about the most. Even before listening to it, I had the
distinct feeling that Mary’s Story was going
to be ‘the odd one
out’ as it were – since when was Mary Shelley a bona fide companion, hmm?
- but even so I didn’t expect it to depart from the tone of the
release as markedly as
it does. Benny’s, Fitz’s and Izzy’s episodes were
each trivial, diverting little jaunts; a joyous celebration of the eighth
Doctor’s life, if you will. The story of how Mary came to travel with the
Doctor, on the other hand, is a dark and morose affair; the spectre of the
eighth Doctor’s inevitable demise looming large throughout.
“As he drew closer, I saw that he was suffering the most terrible
injuries.
His skin was charred a glistening black, and his features contorted…”
How Morris managed to pack so much plot into just thirty-one minutes is a complete mystery to me, and it’s certainly a challenge to try
and summarise the same here! Mary’s Story is the complex tale of
how a mortally-wounded eighth Doctor is drawn to the Villa Diodati in
1816, where the TARDIS knows that a laudanum-laced Percy Shelly will
“re-animate” him by using a machine that doubtless inspires
his wife to pen Frankenstein. And how does the TARDIS know that the
Villa Diodati in 1816 is where the Doctor can be “re-animated”? Because it
remembers as much from when it experienced these events before, when a ‘young’ eighth Doctor (pre-Storm Warning) was drawn to
the Villa to answer the distress call of another (well,
the same) TARDIS…
However, though the plot
is as complicated as they
come, the characters
are
not overshadowed. In fact,
the temporal conundrum
proves a
delightful way in
which to inaugurate the
unhappily-married Mary
into the fantastic world of
the Doctor, as the character has no choice but to employ her sharp wits
and fortitude right
from her first encounter with the monstrous, moribund Time Lord. Julie Cox
does a superb
job with the character too, single-handedly forcing the narrative forward
for at least two thirds
of the episode’s running time.
“And the corpse you re-animated was me?”
And
with two of him running around, McGann’s Doctor is not neglected
either. In fact, this episode is one that I think eighth Doctor fans will
be talking about for a very long time to come. Morris’ story has a gorgeous
symmetry to it; the ‘young’ Doctor is full of verve of enthusiasm, the very
embodiment of McGann’s TV Movie persona; whilst the ‘old’ Doctor
is
much more irascible, not to mention burned and scarred and with a TARDIS
to match. Nonetheless, the Frankenstein-esque “re-animation”
of the ‘old’ Doctor brings the events of the TV Movie just as much to mind
as the ‘young’ Doctor’s vigour does, really helping to square the circle
of the eighth Doctor’s long life.
“On my own this time. Something to be thankful for.
So long ago, so many companions, all gone. And now so sad.
Trix. Charley. Lucie, Alex…you. We travelled together for years, don’t you
remember?”
Mary’s Story
also explicitly ties together the eighth Doctor’s timeline in a way that
has never been attempted before. Hearing Charley, Trix and Destrii being
mentioned in the same story actually gave me goosebumps – I still can’t
believe Big Finish have actually done it, particul-arly after their whole
Zagreus ‘multiverse’ swerve. Filtering whole ranges of stories into
par-allel universes simply to appease a few continuity blunders never sat
right with me – after all, isn’t a man the sum of his memories, and a Time
Lord even more so? Well now the history
of eighth Doctor is unified, and isn’t it much more fun that way?
What’s more, Morris has just as much fun with what he does not say as with
what he does. Exactly how the ‘old’ Doctor and his burnt-out wreck of a
TARDIS came to be in such a sorry state is only hazily elucidated upon,
but the implications of a “temporal storm” and “vitreous time infection”
together with the ‘old’ Doctor’s hostile disposition might imply that a
certain conflict has begun…
And so The Company of Friends ends on a high note, satisfying
many a pent-up appetite and even whetting a fresh one. A Doctor and Mary
series? Now that I would like
to hear…
If not the best, then The Company of
Friends is without a doubt the most exciting of Big Finish’s four
Doctor Who anthology-style releases to date, and I hope that
its success is enough to persuade them to commission some equally
audacious projects in the future.
Who knows, with thirteen slots to fill
each year and four three-story ‘seasons’, perhaps an annual dip into
Doctor Who’s many manifold ranges will become something of a
summer tradition? Fingers crossed…
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