The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Gallifrey

"You turn a blind eye to my doings for the next three hours, after which I shall furnish you with the information your require. Dynamite it is, dynamite!"

A woman, whom history records as killing herself that very night, departs Germany unexpectedly onboard the Vienna to Calais Transcontinental Express after receiving a telegram purporting to be from her long lost sister. By midnight she should be dead, but thanks to untimely intervention, she will live. Her name? Cecilia 'Sissy' Pollard…

As the first Gallifrey series trundles towards its conclusion, it returns full circle with a second script from Alan Barnes, the man with the monopoly on the big Time Lord stories for Big Finish. But for A Blind Eye Barnes has created a story far more evocative of his fine debut Storm Warning rather than the more recent Zagreus and Weapon Of Choice. Perversely for a series called named Gallifrey, the wretched place is shunned completely in favour of an Earth steam train. The period pre-War setting invests this drama with the feel of the parent series - a sense that is accentuated by the presence of a certain actress playing a certain character's sister…

After two and a half unsuccessful attempts at taut political thrillers, A Blind Eye is far more unassuming with the drama based on a more intimate level rather than universal Armageddon, even despite the connotations of the Neverland scenario involving Sissy. Almost no heavy-handed political allegories, no temporal-power sabre-rattling and no empty threats about Romana's unassailable position. While the other stories have evoked the Gallifrey subset of the Doctor Who genre, A Blind Eye follows the more common "threat within a confined environment" type which makes it a very claustrophobic drama. Indeed with minor rewriting, this could easily have been a proper Doctor Who audio. On one hand this is symptomatic of Gallifrey's biggest problem in that it's still too close to Doctor Who but on the other, it's an area where Barnes excels and it makes this by far the most consistently enjoyable of the four releases.

With the nature of the timeonic device debated in tedious detail in The Inquiry, the only ongoing threads which remain unanswered are the fate of Andred and the unveiling of the individual responsible for Romana's woes regarding Gryben. Justin Richards' story made the former patently obvious but Barnes confirms the suspicions (providing incidentally ample justification for the character's earlier gross incompetence) in as dramatic way possible with Leela's brutally apathetic response to the truth providing Louise Jameson with her finest moment in the series. The biggest problem with this revelation is that it only makes sense if you completely ignore an unwritten convention of how Time Lords perceive each other which stretches back as far as the Doctor's first meeting with the War Chief in The War Games (1969). This selective amnesia shown by Big Finish simply makes the characters look foolish as the duplicity shouldn't be possible.

As for the problem of whodunit, this is how Barnes justifies Romana's direct involvement as the roguish Arkadian, played by Hugo Myatt who greedily steals the show again by getting all the best dialogue, invites her to the train to discuss Sissy's predicament but also to bargain for three hours of freedom without the possibility of reprisals from the Time Lords. Romana naturally refuses until Arkadian dangles the name of the instigator in front of her which soon changes the President's tune. It seems this lady may not have a reverse gear, but she's certainly for turning. The explanation as to who was behind it all is very tidy but something of an anticlimax, given its build-up, although the hint that not everything is as it appears is intriguing despite a lingering sense no one is taking the threat seriously enough. After all the perpetrator went back into Gallifrey's past and stole a powerful artefact - what's to stop them doing it again and pilfering something even more dangerous?

All three of Barnes' scripts for the main line have revolved around the Eighth Doctor's first audio companion, Charlotte 'Charley' Pollard, and like a crutch he can't let go of, A Blind Eye features the indulgence of introducing her sister Sissy (played also by India Fisher) whose presence on the train threatens the web of time as someone is trying to prolong her existence in an attempt to recreate the breach which allowed the Anti-Time to flow into the universe in Neverland. In a way this makes this a very loose sequel to the whole Charley arc, but this is not an area Barnes dwells on much. Charley and Sissy are very different characters, with the latter being a fully paid up, card carrying member of the League Of English Fascists, friends with Sir Oswald, and someone who considers Hitler the greatest individual ever to live.

While it's a dramatic convention to cast the same actress in a sibling role, Fisher proves to be A Blind Eye's weakest link. Her voice is already extremely distinctive and so to distinguish between the two sisters, she gives Sissy a hideously affected upper-class accent that is difficult to take seriously as it comes across as simple caricature. Given that the character is, as Arkadian puts it, a "fascist bitch," it's very difficult to identify with her and her unpalatable views but to be fair to Fisher, the moment the script starts treating Sissy as a real person rather than a bad stereotype in the play's final scene, she produces a genuinely moving moment of tragedy which evokes more sympathy than the character deserves.

The usual suspects (bar one and a half) are rounded up for the last hurrah but while Lalla Ward continues Romana's ice queen impersonation, Leela is becoming a more interesting character all the time. Even Narvin gets to show some cunning at one point before Barnes remembers the Coordinator is supposed to be humbled whenever possible. The guest cast is completed by two season 16 actors, Susan Engel and David Warwick. Engel, who was so impressive as Vivien Fay in The Stones Of Blood (1978), does as well as she can with the inconsequential part of Ms Joy while Warwick is far more impressive as Erich, a brutally effective CIA agent who will do whatever is necessary to achieve his goal.

David Darlington's post-production has been very consistent throughout the series, but he seems to relish, like the listener, the chance to visit somewhere other than the colourless environment of the Homeworld as his sound design captures the idea of the train and its motion in very atmospheric fashion with his music mixing the period feel with the house style he's established. Unfortunately his Gallifrey theme, after giving it four chances to make an impact, remains rather insipid and bland.

While A Blind Eye has a number of flaws, Barnes' script transcends these by being extremely enjoyable and this ensures the series ends on a high, but it is certainly the exception. These four stories have shown there is merit in the idea of a Gallifrey series but the execution here has not realised that potential because the stories have been too cautious and predictable. As a second series has now been announced in the pages of the Doctor Who Magazine for release in 2005, the five writers need to take the safety brakes off and let the concept ride wild. The best CD spin-off ranges, namely Big Finish's own Dalek Empire (in all it's volumes) and Magic Bullet's Kaldor City, are those that forge their own identity away from their origins which Gallifrey hasn't yet done as it seems content to play as pseudo-Doctor Who, which is redundant when you have the real thing released monthly alongside it. With darker, edgier storylines Gallifrey could be potentially great, but this first series has failed to distinguish itself and is lamentably unremarkable.