The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

'What are you?’

‘The future...’

When the Doctor and Evelyn’s trip to South London, and more specifically the Slow Boat Chinese Restaurant, is disrupted by a spate of animal carcasses which seem to have been eaten, it isn’t long before they’re investigating what’s been happening. Elsewhere, something very strange is going on at the Dusk Casino where strange experiments are happening. The events are connected somehow, and it’s up to the Doctor to find out how...

Cavan Scott and Mark Wright’s Project Twilight again features the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe. The Sixth Doctor stories that Big Finish released have all been of a very consistently high quality, most recently demonstrated by Jonathan Morris’ excellent Bloodtide. Would Project: Twilight continue this trend? The answer is a definite yes...

Several of the Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures books have featured the Sixth Doctor in a contemporary setting, and they have worked superbly well. Project: Twilight exploits the benefits of this to its advantage to create a believable setting for its story, and the way that London is realised formulates a suitable mood for the story.

It’s no secret that Project: Twilight sees the return of the vampires to the world of Doctor Who in their audio debut, and whilst the Vampire legends have been heavily expanded upon within the context of the Doctor Who fiction in books like Goth Opera, Blood Harvest and Vampire Science, Cavan Scott and Mark Wright offer a fresh interpretation on them, and the vampires of Project: Twilight are unique amongst their Doctor Who appearances. The plot itself is very interesting in the way that it forces the Doctor into particular position where he must overcome his instincts as a Time Lord to consider the bigger picture, and this leads to some very effective scenes.

It’s becoming very repetitive to say that Colin Baker’s performance is excellent, but once more his performance as the Sixth Doctor is again magnificent. Whether it’s elucidating the advantages of the Slow Boat Chinese take-away or the despair in the Doctor’s voice at the end of episode three, Baker’s performance is faultless. And although it does seem a little odd that the Doctor doesn’t realise the true nature of Amelia and Reggie sooner than he does, Scott and Wright have done a good job with the characterisation of the Doctor as events begin to slip away from him.

So much of the pleasure of listening to the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn audios has been hearing the repartee that Colin Baker and Maggie Stables have worked up over their stories, and Project: Twilight is no exception with Maggie Stables being in particularly good form here, getting some good material to work with especially during the closing scenes of the third episode and the fourth one.

Project: Twilight has an impressive guest cast. Holly De Jong (who incidentally appeared in an episode of BlackAdder II) plays Amelia Doory well, with her performance ensuring that the ambiguity as to her characters motivations is fully realised. Her performance and that of Rob Dixon are the stand outs of the cast, with Dixon relishing his role as a South East London gangster and throwing himself into the role totally. Stephen Chance and Rosie Cavaliero complete the main players of the story in their roles as Nimrod and Cassie respectively, and whilst both are admirable performances, Cavaliero is the one that really catches the ear with a very confident offering, especially during the fourth episode.

One of the most successful aspects of Project: Twilight though comes in the form of Jim Mortimore and Jane Elphinstone’s wonderful score which I found reminiscent of Evan H. Chen’s work on the Babylon 5 spin off series Crusade, but much darker in tone. This music was very evocative of the story, and the constant use of the same kind of subtle beats and rhythm running through the score really reflects the story well. It’s very different from many of the other pieces of incidental music used in the past by Big Finish and the freshness that it brings helps it to stand out from those that try and rouse the same kind of feel that much of the music in the series during the 1980’s had. The production work is once more superb, with the sound effects realised in tremendous manner, although this does mean that some of the more grisly effects used sound very realistic and may make some listeners wince in response..

There are some negative aspects to this story. One of the scenes in the first episode suffers terribly from having the characters describing what is happening, but given the context of what is actually happening in the scene, it would be hard to convey without this description, and when something similar happens later in the story there is no description then as the listener already knows what’s happening. It’s also the shortest release for quite some time, and while this isn’t really a problem, its relative shortness is noticeable.

Project: Twilight is a very well written, performed, produced and directed piece of drama, and meets the levels of high quality that has become expected of Big Finish after so many previous good releases. The vampires work well in the modern setting, and with uniformly good performances from the cast, Cavan Scott and Mark Wright can be very pleased with the final result. And once more I can’t recommend highly enough the musical score to Project: Twilight which is so fitting to the story that it heightens the tension to high levels indeed. Project: Twilight never threatens to break into the very best that Big Finish have done, but it’s certainly well up there with the best of the rest, and it’s very highly placed amongst them too. And the ending of this shows that there very well maybe a sequel, and I for one would welcome that prospect.

And watch out for the amusing out-take right at the very end of CD2...