The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Gallifrey

"Madam, my business is dirty enough. Damned if I'll stoop to politics..."

Since the original Doctor Who television series ended, the subsequent adventures in new media have been fascinated with the exploration of the Doctor's homeworld, Gallifrey. The New Adventures delved into its gothic history, BBCi's first webcast Death Comes To Time showed it as home to the all powerful Time Lord "Gods Of The Fourth", whereas the BBC's own novel range presented the planet as the focal point in the "war in heaven" against an unseen enemy (an idea which Lawrence Miles has continued in his unlicensed Faction Paradox offshoot series) before eventually wiping out the planet completely in The Ancestor Cell. Big Finish themselves have been unafraid to use Gallifrey and the Time Lords in stories such as inaugural adventure The Sirens Of Time, The Apocalypse Element, Neverland and Zagreus.

For their latest spin-off series, Big Finish have taken a different approach towards Gallifrey by focusing on it as the centre of galactic temporal politics, showing how the pressures of maintaining a coalition of the Temporal Powers affects the lives of the administration, led by President Romana. Set against this is the story of Leela, the Doctor's other former travelling companion residing on Gallifrey, who represents the blunt instrument deployed when diplomacy is inadequate and more direct action is required. With the drama split between these two characters and concerns, it's easy to see why producer Gary Russell described the series as "The West Wing meets Spooks" but if you're comparing it to contemporary genre shows, on the basis of this first story Gallifrey probably has more in common with the spirit of 24 with ongoing political concerns driving the action side, albeit without the frenetic and furious pace.

As writer of Neverland and co-writer of Zagreus, Alan Barnes seems an obvious choice to pen the first adventure of the series. Unfortunately, the plot of Weapon Of Choice has distinct parallels to his earlier Neverland, which featured a group of anti-people seeking to destroy the rigidity of the timeliness through their powerful weapon of anti-time. Here, the story revolves around the Free Time terrorist group who are seeking to destroy the Temporal Powers' stranglehold over the timelines through their powerful timeonic fusion device. The threat is centred on the planet Gryben, a kind of intergalactic Casablanca where illegal time travellers are sent for processing before either being sent back to their homeworld, or if they choose to claim asylum, they remain on the planet. As an initiative instigated as an example of the progressive policies of Romana, its success is important to her but if Free Time can activate the timeonic device, the ramifications of the destruction of a planet of asylum seekers could mean the end of everything her administration has worked for...

Science fiction has always been a fertile area for the exploration of contemporary political concerns, and there is no doubt that the fusion of politics and science fiction can work in a Doctor Who context - Magic Bullet's superlative Kaldor City series has proven that time and time again - but to be truly engaging political drama needs to have razor sharp characterisation, and as Weapon Of Choice is the opening adventure, establishing this becomes an acute concern. The lead characters of Leela and Romana are already familiar to the listener from both the original Doctor Who series and their most recent appearances in Zagreus, but Barnes' script still needs to ascertain their credibility in their positions and, certainly in the case of Romana, this is an area where it disappoints. Given that Big Finish have tried to separate the continuity of their audio dramas from those of the Doctor Who novels, the question of how Romana became President here is now an unknown factor if the build up to her appointment in Happy Endings is discredited in the audio series. To obtain and keep the position of leader of an ancient race like the Time Lords, whilst being able to fundamentally change their non-interventionist constitution to one that promotes active participation with other temporal powers would require a capable and cunning politician, particularly when it is clear that the President has many foes both within her own people and her allies. But the Romana of Weapon Of Choice often comes across as an ineffective leader who makes weak, impulsive decisions that ultimately enable her to blunder her way to a resolution of the crisis at hand, but not without creating a host of other problems that seemingly will continue to beleaguer her throughout the series. This lack of credibility within this drama severely undermines her position and her authority to govern successfully - particularly given her recklessness in throwing herself into danger at the hands of Free Time.

This incredulity extends to the position of Gallifrey as one of the foremost powers in the universe too, given the way that they are depicted. After ten millions years of absolute power and as the senior figures within the Temporal Powers coalition, you would expect the Gallifreyeans to have acquired some degree of savvy, but it seems even in their own series they cannot escape the degeneration of their society introduced by the great Robert Holmes in 1975's The Deadly Assassin. Barnes' opening scene perfectly illustrates the nature of the coalition that Romana has formed with other time-active powers but the fact that Gallifrey is represented by Commander Torvald - a man so incompetent he makes those Chancellery Guards duped by the Doctor's cunning ruse of a pipe-smoking, coated hatstand in Holmes' story look good - and that he and the other members of the Time Technology Assessors are so easily fooled by a human into letting her waltz off with the dangerous equipment they have been sent to obtain, does little to establish any confidence in these races' capability as the most powerful in the universe.

Barnes balances the considerations of the political aspect and the action fairly well, but it doesn't conceal the fact that Weapon Of Choice is fundamentally a typical Doctor Who story involving fanatics and dangerous doomsday devices, with a slightly different emphasis to usual. It is the scenes set on Gryben where Leela becomes the focus as she and Torvald are sent undercover as slaves of the vicious robot criminal, K9 Mark I, to infiltrate Free Time. The reasoning behind this is that the group's leader Nepenthe is more likely to empathise with Leela, as they are both disenchanted with the Time Lords. Leela's disassociation with the alien culture she has been subsumed within is brought in from her opening scene, where she tries to join a tribe of outsiders to escape the claustrophobic confines of the Capitol, and the unhappiness she feels following the mysterious disappearance of her husband Andred. With the amount of emphasis given to his inexplicable desertion, it would not be surprising if the question of his fate is not inexorably linked to the ongoing arc of the series, which seems to be about someone's manipulation to depose Romana as President. Leela's grief is moderately moving but diluted by her perception of him as a "lion" not really matching Andred's presentation in The Invasion Of Time. The characterisation of Leela is often over-earnest, which has the disastrous effect of making her seem that she has hardly developed at all as a character, despite being on Gallifrey long enough for the Doctor to regenerate four times. The idea of her as a rogue element is good, but Barnes underplays it so it's always obvious where her loyalties ultimately lie.

Free Time is embodied by its leader Nepenthe, played well by regular Big Finish performer Helen Goldwyn, despite some occasional uncharacteristic histrionics when shouting the name of the group. What's quite startling about the play is that given the way the Temporal Powers are presented, Free Time's arguments begin to make sense as Nepenthe's impassioned pleas that the Time Lords and their ilk are essentially a tyrannical dictatorship, oppressing lower races "for the crime of invention", ring true. While Romana is right to decry Nepenthe's methods of forwarding her cause, her noble sentiment that with "power comes responsibility" is rather hollow in the face of the evidence of the play, which shows the Time Lords as hopelessly ineffectual and one of their allies, the Monan Host (first heard in The Apocalypse Element), as self-aggrandising warmongers out for all they can get. Nepenthe's description of the coalition as a "cosy club" is apt, as the Temporal Powers alliance is mutually beneficial both to the aristocrats of time and the young pretenders. The Time Lords can keep the newer time-active races in check, who in turn can freely wield their temporal power without the fear of comeback from the universe's oldest race. But at the same time they all end up subjugating the potential of the lower races, to ensure that none of them can gain enough power to become a threat to the current status quo.

Weapon Of Choice introduces Narvin but Barnes must have been kicking himself for killing off Vansell in Neverland as his successor as the Coordinator of the Celestial Intervention Agency is very much cut from the same cloth, being both obsequious when necessary and yet scheming to destabilise the President when she's not around. Miles Richardson's Cardinal Braxiatel seems to be the calming voice of Romana's counsel, proving himself to have a greater grasp of the 'bigger picture' of temporal politics than the Madam President herself. While it's good to hear Richardson involved, what is unsatisfying about Braxiatel's involvement here is the absence of any attempt to reconcile his Gallifrey appearances with those in the Professor Bernice Summerfield range as it makes it look like the character was drafted in for the convenience of having an excellent actor playing a Time Lord in another series to save the trouble of creating a series specific one. Hopefully subsequent stories will give Brax a sense of purpose, but his presence is a great benefit to Weapon Of Choice regardless, even if without defining the context of the appearance there is some conflicting characterisation - the scene where he tells Romana he's "not qualified to make the decision" regarding Gryben seems very out of place in relation to the assured owner of the Braxiatel Collection. The best of the original characters by far to feature here is Hugo Myatt's roguish Arkadian, who steals every scene that he's in through brilliant delivery of his outrageously ornate dialogue.

Weapon Of Choice is a disappointing opening to the Gallifrey series as it lacks the sharpness and complexity to achieve its intent as a taut, political thriller but it highlights the potential of the idea behind the series which can be obtained with stronger plotting and characterisation. As with Barnes' last two Doctor Who plays, it is verbosely written and thus overly long which drains the drama of its inherent tension due to the lack of urgency behind it. Of all Big Finish's spin-off ranges (Excelis and Doctor Who Unbound excepted, obviously) Gallifrey is the closest thing to Doctor Who they have produced but Weapon Of Choice struggles to differentiate its own distinct identity separate to the parent series as it fails to find the edge it desperately needs to become the kind of story it wants to be.