The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

"It's time I stopped watching people die!"

In the Doctor Who Magazine preview for Arrangements For War, the esteemed Colin Baker suggested that love "isn't something very often allowed into Doctor Who" but he has obviously not been keeping up with the wider Big Finish series as this powerful emotion has played a part in virtually every release since July 2003's Flip-Flop in some way be it as a central theme, as in Scherzo and The Wormery, or as a means for motivation for characterisation, as featured in Davros, Master, The Natural History Of Fear and The Twilight Kingdom.

Paul Sutton's debut script for Big Finish approaches the idea of love in a very old fashioned way with the setting being the world of Világ - a place where the two main states, Malendia and Galen, have brutally waged war upon each other for over a century but are finally due to find peace through a symbolic (but loveless) union between their prince and princess, who have agreed to the marriage for the good of their people. But as is obligatory in this type of romance, there are parties opposed to the union be it the scheming enemy who wants the war to continue or the princess' own lost love who returns at the most inopportune moment, inadvertently rekindling long suppressed passions.

Set in the immediate aftermath of the Sixth Doctor's half of Project: Lazarus, this adventure deals directly with Evelyn's inability to accept the Doctor's dispassionate reaction to all the death and destruction they have witnessed together in their travels, culminating with the recent murder of Cassie. The climax of that story gave an implicit suggestion that Evelyn's relationship with the Doctor had been irrevocably changed as she woke up to the truth that he was an alien with a wildly different perspective on mortality. Sutton doesn't shirk away from embracing this fallout and Evelyn's request to go somewhere the Doctor doesn't "have to help the underdog or rally the resistance" leads them to Világ - a planet the Doctor knows is due to be invaded by the Killorans in a few weeks time, but that the recently established Kingdom Alliance will have the power to repel.

Evelyn's desire to get away from the Doctor allows Sutton to divide the regulars credibly and allow both of them to explore differing aspects of the theme of love. Evelyn's encounter with the governor of a neighbouring state, present within Galen to act as a peace arbitrator, leads to a gentle romance which allows her to forget her troubles with the Doctor and her own memento mori. This places Arrangements For War in a similar position to the earlier Eighth Doctor release Scherzo in that both stories deal with the consequences of a dramatic incident which has driven the Doctor and his companion apart and concentrate on restoring their parity through a work exploring love. Sutton's approach is to give the Doctor and Evelyn a degree of the other's perspective independently so both can understand and experience each other's attitudes towards death and how they can deal with it through attachment to others.

Balanced against this is the story of Krisztina, princess of Galen, and her true love, Corporal Marcus Reid. This is where Sutton's focus often rests, and these characters' passion is most typical of the romantic genre, with Krisztina belonging to the nobility and Marcus being the common son of the palace gardener, now part of the country's infantry, who won her heart. But his unexpected return (and some influential words from the Doctor) endangers the foundation of the alliance and thus puts the future of the whole planet in jeopardy - a fact only the Doctor and Evelyn are aware of. Given his involvement in creating this imbalance, the Doctor's role throughout the early part of the adventure is to facilitate their romance whilst trying to ensure that he hasn't doomed a planet in the process by ensuring the alliance is completed. It is from this that he develops an almost fatherly bond with Krisztina. While this Doctor has travelled with young women like Peri and Mel, his relationship with them was always rather antagonistic and so his paternal affection for Krisztina is a chance to explore a different facet of the Sixth Doctor.

When taken alongside the machinations of the various political leaders of Galen and Malendia (as well as the visiting arbitrator Governor Rossiter), there is quite a heady mix of characters and sub-plots but Sutton's great skill is how he unifies these together quite magnificently whilst still creating an epic sense of scale for the drama to play against. Sutton uses the Doctor's advanced knowledge to inform the listener of the historical perspective of the conflict on Világ, which interestingly implies the Time Lord's uncertainty over the exact details of the alliance may be suggestive that his actions may already have been part of history before he committed them, but the political situation is also established clearly through an effective scene showing a celebratory ceremony to mark the union being struck by a terrorist attack by forces opposed to its fruition.

With the threat of imminent invasion looming over the proceedings, the play has significant tragic overtones as war erupts once more because of love and it is the examination of the human condition which makes Arrangements For War so fascinating. The best of Big Finish's audio dramas create characters the listener can feel for and care about, and Sutton achieves this task with effortless ease here in Krisztina and Marcus as their romance is so true that it justifies its position as the most important part of the narrative. With other characters of complexity and ambiguousness - even if this doesn't necessarily show, initially - like Mortund and Suskind, the role of the Doctor and Evelyn becomes one of support. Sutton has important things to say about the Doctor and Evelyn's relationship, but the former university lecturer slips to the sidelines of the story during the second episode and remains there until the adventure reaches its conclusion. This approach allows Evelyn's confrontation of her own mortality to run tangential to the main plot, but allows her to gain perspective of the Doctor's character while he gains insight into her emotional state through his bond with Krisztina.

Given the range of emotions involved in Arrangements For War, and especially the use of conventional romantic fiction archetypes, it is easy to see why producer and director Gary Russell described this on its announcement as "something akin to a Mills and Boon story set on an alien planet" but because of the quality of the script, the play transcends these influences. The danger with stories of this nature, and perhaps one of the reasons why Doctor Who resisted focusing on love for so long, is that it's very easy for them to become melodramatic and overly sentimental which can diminish the power of the drama. Sutton strives to ensure that the relationships between the characters are credible, which creates authentic emotion and as the script is often very restrained and clever, he certifies that it doesn't descend into nausea inducing schmaltz. Indeed, the only really mawkish element of the entire story is the final scene, which is necessary to explicitly complete the reconciliation between the Doctor and Evelyn but it's done in such an indulgent manner that rather than being a touching and emotional act of forgiveness, it comes across as self-important mutual backslapping that is far too syrupy for words. But even this blip in the script cannot undermine the overall impressiveness of how well Sutton handles this thorny territory.

Perhaps one of the most effective elements of Sutton's script is the way he creates the magnitude of the play. Set over a number of weeks, each episode advances the storyline's timeframe forward cleverly through skilful use of news broadcasts that inform the listener of the developing situation within Galen and Malendia as the tenuous peace between the two nations breaks down and the fighting resumes. But these have a secondary purpose as they offer insights into how deeply the Doctor and Evelyn have become involved in the planet's situation as well as how they are perceived by the common man. These have the effect of helping to maintain the drama's focus without unnecessary material interfering with its flow. This resourcefulness is extended into the overall evolution of the play, which is another aspect where Sutton is particularly successful, with the tone of the lighter earlier episodes convincingly giving way to the darker brutality of the conflict. The fact that this progression is so natural ensures its effectiveness as the inevitability of death and destruction comes.

With a story as epic as this, Sutton makes good use of the size of his cast to ensure the important characters are all developed well, although as it is set on a grander scale the limitations sometimes show by what isn't mentioned. On several occasions Rossiter's daughter is mentioned but never appears, and perhaps most notably the prince of Malendia, whom Krisztina was due to marry, is conspicuous by his absence. This is slightly disconcerting as it seems a missed opportunity to present a more balanced and sympathetic viewpoint of the Malendians, which isn't always present with the attitudes conveyed by their sole representatives, the nefarious duo of Suskind and Pokol. Also, while the imminent prospect of an alien invasion adds a great deal of tension to the drama, the lack of a strongly drawn motivation for why the Killorans are attacking Világ seems a significant oversight, particularly since this is their first appearance outside the Professor Bernice Summerfield series where they have been presented rather differently than the snarling force of senseless destruction they are here.

Sutton initially has some problems getting to grips with the characterisation of the regulars with both the Doctor and Evelyn seemingly slightly off. Even considering the ramifications of the Project: Lazarus ending and their potential to effect the characters, Evelyn's petty selfishness as she flounces out of the TARDIS while the Doctor's sudden burst of doubt and hesitancy in his own actions is a big leap for the characters to make. The indecisiveness in the Doctor is perhaps the most difficult to make credible, because the Sixth Doctor has always been very determined and pragmatic and to hear him stumbling to find the right turn of phrase as he advises Reid on how to go after the girl certainly shows how the softening of the character Big Finish have undertaken can be detrimental if taken to extreme levels. But as the first episode concludes, the Doctor's inadvertent actions give him a cause which returns some of his steadfastness and the compassionate but unbending version which Colin Baker has taken so much to heart returns, with Baker robustly conveying the Doctor's great care for Krisztina which makes his actions in the story's denouement all the more compelling.

Although Evelyn's romance with Rossiter is played in a very genuine manner, the script's essential implication that she may choose to leave the Doctor and stay with the man she's fallen in love with are undermined by the fact that details of her next adventure, Medicinal Purposes, have already been released. So with the possibility that she could remain on Világ afterwards never coming close to being a realistic possibility, reconciliation is inevitable so it becomes simply a matter of how the Doctor and Evelyn's relationship is restored, rather than if which deflates the tension of this plot element. But even without the uncertainty of her destiny, the focus on rediscovering the joy of life through Rossiter gives Maggie Stables plenty of emotional material to deliver a performance of depth as Evelyn reflects upon the notion that how she deals with life is just as important as how she deals with death.

Arrangements For War succeeds because the characters of Krisztina and Marcus Reid are well drawn people who the listener can come to feel for. This is particularly true given their importance to the play overall, but while Sutton has laid the groundwork with strong characterisation, it is the performance that brings them to life superbly. From the moment that Katarina Olsson utters Krisztina's first line of dialogue tinged with such a sad sorrow, it speaks volumes about her character's attitude towards her situation and is symptomatic of the commanding and captivating performance Olsson is to deliver. She expresses Krisztina's conflict between her desire to perform her duty and her own passions with such conviction that it makes her dilemma all the more realistic, made even more so by the way her display has such an impressive range veering from joyful delight to heartbreakingly genuine pain. As Krisztina's returning lover, Lewis Rae brings a natural likeability to the part of Marcus, showing how he would risk everything for love brilliantly.

For Evelyn's love interest, Governor Rossiter, director Gary Russell casts Gabriel Woolf against type and while he's best known in Doctor Who terms for his villainous portrayal of Sutekh, here he is absolutely convincing as the kind-hearted and honest leader of a third state, who is both a romantic and a realist and a perfect match for Doctor Evelyn Smythe. Plenipotentiary Suskind is the ostensible villain of the play, seemingly occupying the role of aggressor determined to undermine the peace at any cost, but he's a more complicated character than that as events later in the play show. Philip Bretherton delivers a similar style of performance to his role in The Draconian Rage in that Suskind seems an underhand character, capable of doing whatever is necessary to maintain his belief that Malendia is stronger standing alone, but has hidden layers of depth. Perhaps the only disappointing characters of Arrangements For War are Mortund, who's played well by Geoffrey Leesley, but is underdeveloped and Suskind's right-hand man Commander Pokol, who is a typical psychopath who can't let his unbridled hate for the Doctor go unfulfilled.

Steve Foxon takes control of the post-production and scoring for the first time on a Doctor Who release and the results are extremely impressive. His music is stirring yet soulful, reflecting the tragic mood of the play perfectly but it is his superb sound design that has the biggest impact. It's an engaging and imaginative soundscape that helps the script create a vivid setting for the drama to thrive within, be it the rousing noise of crowd that soars as Mortund makes his speech at the beginning or the beautifully realised palace gardens to epic battles of the final episode. There are far too many magnificent moments to list, but a prime example is how Foxon uses a subtle rhythmic beat of a heart to remind listeners of Evelyn's medical condition, without the need to make it transparently obvious.

This is fundamentally an old fashioned love story, set against the backdrop of impending war, but one that never looses sight of its status as a Doctor Who adventure. Arguably Sutton's greatest achievement is taking a plot that appears so pedestrian and forging it into something extraordinarily powerful and moving due to the impact of its characters. Arrangements For War is a deftly wondrous tragic drama which deserves credit for finding something refreshingly different to say about its central theme, even if it is something not as uncommon in Doctor Who as it once was.