The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

Winter For The Adept sees the return of the McCoy era script editor and author of the exceptional 'War' trilogy of New Adventures Andrew Cartmel return to the world of Doctor Who with a Fifth Doctor and Nyssa story for Big Finish.

By reason of an experiment of the Doctor's that goes awry, Nyssa finds herself alone stranded in the Swiss Alps of 1963. After being rescued by a member of the local police force Lt. Peter Sandoz, she gets taken to the only building in the area - a Young Ladies Finishing School which has been snowed in by the blizzard, where strange, mysterious events have been occurring and the only apparent explanation seems to be supernatural in nature. After Nyssa and the rest of the occupants of the building witness something very disturbing, the Doctor's arrival seems fortuitously timed.

Every one of Cartmel's previous novels for Doctor Who featured the Seventh Doctor, and given the fact that he was the script editor who formulated the so called 'Cartmel Masterplan' to put the mystery back into Doctor Who, it seems an odd choice that he has written a Fifth Doctor story rather than a Seventh, but the result is one of the most interesting Fifth Doctor stories that Big Finish have produced.

Cartmel's story takes the old idea of a haunted house and gives it an usual Doctor Who style twist. As well as having one of the most intriguing titles to feature on a Big Finish audio, Cartmel has composed an intriguing plot. He chooses an interesting way to begin the story and set the scene, by having one of the main characters narrate a flashback sequence and then continues to have the younger version of the character act as a narrator throughout the majority of the first part. This approach works to a certain degree as it helps to set up the scene of the story being in the Academy, but it does deny the listener the chance to formulate opinions on the characters without having the narrator's opinions first.

Key to the story is the idea that a Poltergeist is at large, although the Doctor is quite sure that there is a more scientific explanation for what is happening. The problem with this though is that it becomes necessary for the characters to describe what is happening when inanimate objects start to try and attack them. The idea of this would be easy to convey on television as it would be readily apparent what they were doing. But on audio, it's much more difficult to convey that a ski pole is rising up and moving towards someone on sound effects alone, and so this leads to overly descriptive dialogue such as 'They're rising up. They're floating into the air' which doesn't really help to convey the terror that such a spectacle would inflict on the person seeing it. This happens on several occasions throughout the story and although it doesn't spoil it to any great degree, it does become annoying. It would have been very difficult to convey what is actually happening in these scenes without this descriptive dialogue, but it would have been better if some of this dialogue had been toned down a little and not been so overtly descriptive.

Youthful, or rather being too youthful, was always the charge made against Peter Davison's Doctor on television, and here his performance is hard to reconcile with the way he was played on television. It's not just that he sounds older, which of course he does, but that he seems a much more mature version of the Doctor, whose less prone to the outbursts of anger against his companions that he was prone to in the television episodes. This works well in this audio and Davison's performance is e xcellent. Sarah Sutton is also good as Nyssa, particularly in the first episode when the Doctor isn't present for the majority of the episode.

Peter Jurasik is the special guest star of Winter For The Adept, and his performance is excellent. Jurasik, best known as Ambassador (then latterly Prime Minster and finally Emperor) Londo Mollari of the Centauri Republic in the epic science fiction series Babylon 5, puts in a superb performance as Lt. Peter Sandoz and succeeds to convey him as the local policeman who seems very suspicious of everyone.

India Fisher makes her first appearance in the audios here as Peril Bellamy, a girl who knows what she likes and does whatever is necessary to get it. Her performance here isn't as good as in the later McGann stories where she is simply excellent as Charley, but it is a good performance and she shows what a good actress she is. Liz Sutherland plays Alison Speers who acts as the introductory narrator in the first episode, and she forms a very good partnership with Fisher. The cast is also notable for the inclusion of The Invasion's Sally Faulkner who is very convincing as the slightly disturbed Headmistress Miss Tremayne.

The music in Winter For The Adept, provided by Russell Stone, is often very melancholic and this feeling helps the production to gain an atmosphere of this tone. The production sound effects are also excellent here, with the sound of the blizzards being very realistic and only being let down a little by the actors not really sounding unaffected by it, but apart from this it is a very successful production.

The overall result of Winter For The Adept is a success, if not a resounding one. The sound effects and the setting blend to create a very evocative tale and the performances of Davison, Sutton, Jurasik, Fisher and Sutherland (in particular) help to ensure that it is a good story, but saying that there isn't a bad performance amongst the cast. Cartmel's script is good as you would expect from a former script editor of the television show, but it is a shame that the overly descriptive dialogue was necessary to convey the images of the scenes that Cartmel wanted. The sudden change of direction that takes place in the last episode seems a little out of place, but it works and concludes the story in a satisfactory fashion. Winter For The Adept falls short of being a classic entry into the audio line of Big Finish, but nevertheless it is a very good one, and certainly one of the most interesting stories that Big Finish have produced.