The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

Note: This is a review of the online presentation of Real Time which featured at the BBCi webpage.

For the second online Doctor Who story, BBCi turned to Big Finish to produce it and the result is Gary Russell's Real Time starring the popular combination of the Sixth Doctor and Doctor Evelyn Smythe. After BBCi's first presentation, the unconventional Death Comes To Time, it was said that they wanted a more traditional approach for this one and so the Cybermen return to menace the Doctor once more, but the final play in itself is fairly unusual, despite possessing the familiar trappings you'd expect in such a story.

Like the previous online venture, Real Time was presented episodically online complete with additional illustrations by Lee Sullivan. While these were strictly complimentary to the drama - rather than necessary - Sullivan's fine, imaginative artwork does add an extra layer of enjoyment to the story, even if the animation does render it akin to Doctor Who: The Slightly Animated Series. The fact that Real Time consists of six relatively short episodes means that the script is tightly focused on the main events and as such there are no unnecessary, rambling subplots to take away from the central premise of the story here. It also makes good use of this structure with the traditional cliff-hangers hitting the mark each time, and with the story broadcast weekly, the importance of this is much greater than on a regular Big Finish CD release where the next episode can follow immediately. Episode One's is blatantly a homage to The Tomb Of The Cybermen, but the rest all provide a suitable moment of tension to ensure the listener should want to come back the next week to find out what happens next.

After a couple of prologues, the most intriguing of which suggests some kind of time anomaly occurring, Russell's script throws the Doctor and Evelyn right into the action which dispenses with the need to explain their presence and become accepted by the archaeological team investigating the temple. This is a refreshing change of pace as it forsakes the customary conventions of the Doctor blundering into a situation as he's there with a purpose, which allows the development of the story to flow naturally without any superfluous exposition. Indeed the whole story is very streamlined of extraneous elements (so much so that when they do occur - such as Goddard's Cyber-history lecture - they do feel out of place) which enables Russell to infuse a great deal of tension and suspense into the story, so while little may seem to happen in some of the early episodes, the slow pace is offset by the compelling nature of the dialogue.

The presentation of the Cybermen is one of the stories main strengths. These are not the weak knockdown Cybermen of the late 80's, but a race driven towards the brink of extinction and now border on the verge of desperation, so much so that the Controller has been reduced to only partially converting the captured humans to save resources. While Sullivan's illustrations of these half human, half Cybermen are peculiar, they convey just what the Cybermen have lost very well. The Cybermen of Real Time are very much a credible threat, evidenced by the lengths that the converted Doctor Savage goes to in order to discover more about Goddard from her former colleague Renchard by crushing his skull. This scene shows the depths the Cybermen will traverse in order to obtain their goals as it both shocking and brutal, but also demonstrating the level of how desperate they have become to survive. It's also expressed through the fact that the Cybermen aren't as alert as they could be, most aptly demonstrated through their attempts to fit the TARDIS through an opening in which it clearly won't fit, but rather than showing them as dim-witted it reveals their dependency on technology is failing.

The tone of the story during the final three parts is quite violent, but not needlessly so. It adds credence to the threat of the Cybermen and displays the nature of their inhumanity through the horror of the conversion process. The good thing about audio stories is you can imagine them as graphically gory or as tame as you wish, but with the illustrations it does add a sense of tangibility to them which is quite startling even more so because they choose to hint at what's happening, rather than explicitly show them. Seeing the reaction of Administrator Isherwood as he finds himself covered in the blood and remains of Renchard's head is far more powerful than had the animation team decided to show the incident itself.

The crux of Real Time resolves around a paradox that stems around the fact that Goddard is from a deviant timeline where the Cybermen conquered Earth through the use of a techno-virus that mutated the human's internal organs into Cyber technology. Paradoxes and the web of time are both themes that have featured heavily in quite a few of Big Finish's recent output, but Russell's script keeps things interesting by making the paradox less obvious until it's almost too late and with a personal resonance to one of the main characters of the story, surprising too.

The level of performances is on the whole very good. Colin Baker, the logical choice for this online presentation given how well Big Finish have treated his character, is - as ever - superb with him demonstrating his Doctor's passion and pragmatism in equal bounds. Perhaps the best example of this is early on when he is resolute in his determination not to surrender the TARDIS to the Cybermen when they threaten the life of his friends. Baker's performance really conveys how determined he is to make a stand and do what is right for the good of the many, rather than the few, and he delivers his lines with such conviction that it's impossible to even consider he may only be bluffing. Maggie Stables, consistently excellent as Evelyn Smythe in the past, does the same here with another fine display providing a lot of the story's best scenes. Her encounters with the Cyber Controller where she questions him regarding his humanity and who he was before conversion are very powerful, and the listener becomes acutely aware of the irony of this after the full extent of the story's twists are revealed.

The main guest stars of Real Time are the comedic duo of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring who play Carey and Renchard respectively. Playing off their comic partnership, they form a genial duo who initially seem to be there to provide the light relief but over the course of the story both have good dramatic moments, particularly Lee as his enforced Cyber conversion breaks down and he realises his friend has been killed. Jane Goddard makes quite an impression as Doctor Savage during the first episode in only a few scenes, despite the preliminary banter with Carey and Renchard sounding a little forced. She conveys the determination of Savage to try and discover what happened to the previous survey teams well, showing her recklessness to save their lives capably. All of this serves to heighten the effect on the listener when she returns from the Portal partially converted and it makes a stark contrast between her initial character and the inhuman and uncaring being she becomes. Yee Jee Tso puts in an oddball performance as Goddard, which serves to emphasis his characters difference to the other humans well, but quite convincingly, dispels any notions of suspicion from him until the script is ready to indicate them. Tso is certainly enthusiastic which occasionally borders into slightly overacting although he makes up for this with a very convincing final scene with the Controller.

The final episode of the story is it's most potent, and as such it ends on a high note. While it doesn't answer all of the questions raised, it does clearly emphasis that there is more to come with the final scene being very ominous in tone, even though the characters aren't aware of this. The failure to provide total closure to the story is vaguely unsatisfying in one respect, but it wets the appetite for more investigation into what has transpired and solutions to the stories unanswered questions, which given the nature of the conclusion, would seem to be Russell's intent.

Real Time may not rank amongst the best Doctor Who stories that Big Finish have produced, but it is representative of their high quality output in that it is a thoughtful, well written story with first rate production values. Gary Russell's script maintains a taut, absorbing atmosphere throughout which is immediately engaging. With good performances, and a cliffhanger that just begs for a follow up (again on BBCi perhaps?), Real Time is a gripping, often brutal, story. It's roots may be in the long standing traditions of Doctor Who, but when the story is as good as this is, there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.