Inspired by the recent Doctor Who interview I conducted I thought about reviewing a Whovian podcast. When I saw that a group Darker Projects had put out their own Doctor Who audio dramas, entitled “Doctor Who: Time Tales” I was very excited about the idea. I’m interested in the art of audio drama. It’s a medium that is all but dead in the United States but kept alive in Great Britain, not the least of which are the Doctor Who shows by Big Finish. I was a little wary of fan fiction but at this point the actual Doctor Who program is very much fan fiction so how bad this could be.
Hoo boy.
All the hopes I had for an amateur Doctor Who production were dashed when I listened to “Materia, Part 1” and heard what the realties of an amateur production are. My first question is why was there no narrator? I thought that was a convention of the medium. If they wanted to define that convention that’s fine but when there are stretches where you’re just hearing footsteps it certainly would have helped if we could get a sense of where the characters were actually going and what they were doing. Instead we get cheats where The Doctor’s companion escapes from capture without explanation.
While I thought the actor playing The Doctor, Mark Kalita, did an alright job, he thankfully didn’t try to do an impression of Tom Baker, John Pertwee or any other Who actors, he might have done a better job if he didn’t have to say things like “there’s something strange about this situation…and I don’t like it.” The Doctor’s been having adventures for most of his 900 years in the universe. He probably burned through clichés like this in the first 100.
I wanted to give the show another chance, though. I downloaded the first episode of the show “The Grave White North, Part 1.” I was glad to hear a show that was a bit livelier. The shows works around not having a narrator by having character speak a lot of exposition. It’s about members of the North American branch of UNIT discovering The Doctor so it sort of makes sense that people would be explaining time travel and regeneration to each other. While the story was at least competent it was also unremarkable. I didn’t see the point of a show that spent so much time introducing the concept of Doctor Who. Let’s face it, anyone listening to Doctor Who audio fan fiction is more than familiar with the inner workings of the TARDIS.
Listening to both these shows I got the sad feeling that the creators were basically entertaining themselves. A lot of “Materia” was devoted to The Doctor explaining the dangers of altering time. Besides the fact that this is The Doctor’s modus operandi putting such ideas at the forefront of a show is the opposite of entertainment. I enjoyed reading Tom Powers and Marc Schuster write about the subtext of Doctor Who but if David Tennant and Freema Agyeman stopped the action cold to discuss the minutia of the series I’d switch the show off in a flash. Even “The Grave White North” has fan service moments, most notable when The Doctor’s penis is compared post- and pre-regeneration by one of UNIT’s physicians (really!). The energy put into writing those bits could have been given to come up with neat plot twists or characterization. I suppose we’ll wait for the real deal to come back to get any of that.