PHOBOS

Continuing their broadcast of Big Finish’s 8th Doctor adventures, BBC Radio 7 aired Phobos last Sunday evening.  In his quest to get Lucie back to her own time on Earth, the Doctor lands the TARDIS on one of Mars’ moons in the future.

There they meet a group of thrill-seekers, near-hippy like.  The history of the moon is that it was once to be terraformed as a resort but it didn’t happen so now holidaymakers go there to experience the “natural” thrills of the environment.

Of course, all is not as it seems.  The people encountered are a rum bunch of typically questionable psyches and people are being killed off by unseen monsters that some old guy has been warning people off for ages (no one’s believed him).

It turns out that, having been mocked for so long, the old guy had adapted discarded mechanical robots to scare the heebie-jeebies out of people – just to convince them that he’s not an old fool.  What he doesn’t know is that there’s an all-pervading evil creature buried at the bottom of a deep pit that’s trying to break free by feeding on people’s “positive fears”.  (The kind of enjoyable fear you get from the Big Dipper, not the kind of dangerous fear you get from Jason and Freddy.)

The Doctor eventually sees the creature off by dangling on a rope down the pit eulogising about all the terrible scary things (negative fears) that he’s experienced in his time.  Reminds me of TV’s The Satan Pit.

Thoughts

What began as an interesting back-story continuity (Lucie’s mysterious hunter) has turned into a Torchwood type of “arc”. It gets mentioned once per episode, but nothing develops.

Then there’s Lucie’s character. At the beginning the character was interesting and full of promise, but the lack of any development or of any maturing of the Doctor/companion relationship doesn’t help.Doctor, not a poor-man’s rip-off from RTD’s vision.

On a technical note, the supporting cast leaves a bit to be desired. Whether this is due to the actors chosen, or the director not doing his job, but a good proportion of the characters sound the same – making it incredibly difficult to figure out who’s talking to who and whether the scene has changed to somewhere else. I picked up the CD of the first part of the Dalek story (that I missed on the radio) and that was similar. You have two major characters in the story – the acting president and the chief baddie – who spend almost all of their time together and yet they cast two women who sound exactly the same as each other. It’s incredibly difficult to work out who’s having a go at who, why, and the motives for the person talking.

I think the problem is that they’ve given priority to “named actors” who are familiar to us from the TV (a visual medium) and haven’t chosen actors for their vocal prowess. Having listened to several audio dramas and audio books in which one actor can produce numerous voices and accents to make every character sound different, these BF audio adventures don’t come across so well simply because the voices sound the same most of the time.