THE HAUNTING

Following from The Haunting, episode 1, episode 2 of Jago & Litefoot & Strax : The Haunting from Big Finish begins with the resolution of the cliffhanger.  The cliffhanger of Jago being accosted by Multravers and her gun results in … Litefoot and Strax finding Jago in a confused state, not aware that he’d met anyone.  As neither Strax nor Litefoot saw anyone either, they decide to regroup and reassess at the Red Tavern.

Their investigations then lead them to rumours that the house has been haunted for many years, from long before the murders began a month ago.  They get no help from the local library, but are directed towards Finch, a local historian who’s a bit of an expert on hauntings.

Finch tells them that, over the years, a ghostly apparition has been seen around the house.  Initially it was a monstrous form, more of a hideous shapeless creature than a person.  With each subsequent sighting, the apparition has become more human.  The most recent sighting was by an amateur artist who drew a picture of a perfectly ordinary looking woman.

Litefoot doesn’t recognise the woman, and Strax just believes all humans look the same, but Jago sees something in the drawing that he can’t quite pin down.  Strax believes that Jago’s mind has been affected by a perception device, and he uses his scanner to free his memory.

He determines that the device used to affect Jago was precisely tuned for humans, which leads Litefoot to wonder what might happen if it was used on a non-human and whether this could explain Strax’s own mental confusion.  Strax doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with him, but he does concur that such a thing could happen if the device used wasn’t tuned to the species targeted.

With Jago’s memory returning, they all revisit the house to re-enact what went on between Jago and Multravers.  He recalls the woman with the brain, and being shot, and vaguely seeing her disappear through a secret door in the wall.

Locating this secret door, the investigators discover a strange room with odd paraphernalia in it.  Strax discovers where his alien readings came from and he recognises a transmat device, and it’s not long before they all find themselves on a spaceship orbiting the Earth.

Multravers is on the ship, and she traps them all in a “force bubble” within which she escorts them to the science area.  She explains that she isn’t real, she’s a construct made by the ship to walk among the population.  The construct had to adapt and evolve over the decades, hence it gradually looking more and more human.

The ship is powered by mental energy, and she’s been repairing the ship for a long time.  It’s repaired now, but it needs mental energy before it can power up fully.  Mental energy that’s in abundance on a planet full of human brains.

The ship’s crew are in cryogenic capsules, awaiting the day when repairs are complete and there is sufficient energy to revive them.  Litefoot examines some of the bodies and discovers that they are, in fact, all dead.  The damage to the ship was too much to sustain them in cryo.

This revelation turns Multravers into a fury, but she is tricked into using too much energy, thus weakening the force bubble.  The investigators rush to escape, and Strax is ready to deploy his arsenal of weapons that includes a particularly handy grenade.

Once the dust has settled and they are all back at the Red Tavern, Strax receives a message from Madame Vastra asking why he’s been missing for several days and that Miss Jenny requires his assistance.  Strax finally realises that Litefoot and Jago are, indeed, the real deal.

The quality of the first episode continues in the second and, whilst the cliffhanger with Jago’s lack of memory does seem to be there to stretch the story out a little longer than it might otherwise be, it does so in a good way.

You rarely get a sense of urgency from the story, until the revelation at the end.  Multravers’ “info dump” of the whole plot is, perhaps, the only let down.  Having had well over an hour of the story, some of this “info dump” could have been fed in long before now to save this eleventh-hour explanation.

On looking back over the story as a whole, it wasn’t really necessary to have Strax here at all.  Jago & Litefoot could have done the whole thing themselves via the haunting, the bodies, and the abandoned house.  However, that isn’t the point of the story.  The point is to have Strax meet Jago & Litefoot.

The adventure is followed by fifteen minutes of interviews, mostly of the “luvvie” type that doesn’t give us much of an insight beyond the fact that it was Moffat that gave the idea of Strax confusing Jago & Litefoot with Jenny & Vastra.  Finally, there’s a 10-minute music suite.

I can’t help but feel that if there was going to be this kind of crossover between classic and new Doctor Who, this was the right way to go about it.  Had Vastra and Jenny been in the story, then I doubt we’d get much of an adventure out from under the women showing up the men all over the place.  But, with Strax, we just get three complimentary male characters playing off each other’s strengths and weaknesses.  What we have is an enjoyable story with fun characters.

Definitely one I’d recommend, particularly if you’re a fan of Jago & Litefoot.