Paul Sutton (2)Critiques

I listened to the first season and half of The Eight Doctor & Lucie Miller incredibly close together and back to back, so all of them are going to end up with the same review for the moment while I'm fixing up my forgotten rec's and clearing out my Currently Reading Folder (which shouldn't be 40 books, it should be somewhere relatively close to right under ten).

I have loved meeting Eight, and his resigned but inspirational way of being. I love Lucy's moxy, and her mouth. Her mouth may be the best thing on the planet. Even though I know the episodes are roughly the same length as tv episodes, from single one hours to double-extended two hours, somehow they end up feeling like bite-size, leaving me wanting just a little more from every single one.

An enjoyable story½

A nifty historical, though the portrayals of the historical figures felt a bit off (I did enjoy the Tolstoy crushing on Ace bit, though. Tee and also hee). The bootstrap paradox flavor was appreciated as well. And now I know how the black/white TARDIS stuff got started. Not sure how eager I am to get into that but we'll see...

Not yet satisfied by her domination of audio dramas, novels, and collections of short stories, Bernice Summerfield now moves into a new format: the trilogy of novellas. A Life in Pieces is made up of three novellas that interlink to make a complete story.  Given the series's success with the interlinked short story format in Life During Wartime and A Life Worth Living, I was looking forward to this, but I actually ended up being somewhat disappointed.  Nothing is bad, but the book never forms a cohesive whole, either.  It doesn't have to, of course... but I think it might want to.

The first story is by Dave Stone, who I always remember as writing the weird stuff.  That's as true as ever here: Bernice and Jason go on vacation... only it turns out they're secretly on reality television?  There's not so much a plot here as a series of jokes, some of which are funny.  Not all of them, unfortunately, and maybe not even most of them, but there were a couple good ones, and one belter. (When Bernice figures out how to circumvent the reality TV cameras, if you're interested.) As a story, it's kinda there: it wants you to laugh, but you don't want to, so everyone is just standing around awkwardly most of the time.

The next is by Paul Sutton, one of my favorite Big Finish writers, as he's penned Arrangements for War, Thicker Than Water, and No More Lies.  His contribution here is very different from those big, emotional stories, but it's still very character-driven.  It follows Adrian Wall, Bev Tarrant, Irving Braxiatel, a couple cops, and a host of criminals on Earth as everyone tries to get their hands on the Purpura Pawn, a valuable artifact from an alien planet that's recently been stolen... by Jason Kane?  It's a dark, tangled story, but Sutton's knack for character strikes; it's perhaps the most insightful story about Adrian and Bev we've ever had, and there's other good stuff, too, especially with the cop character.  Dark and ominous; I'd call it noir if I knew enough about the genre to feel confident enough to make such an assessment.

Finally, there comes a story by Joseph Lidster about Jason's trial for stealing the Purpura Pawn.  It's the flipside of the events in Sutton's tale, told as a series of reconstructed documents a couple generations later. It's an interesting idea, and I like the narrator of the piece, a very likable and driven fellow who is completely and utterly wrong. The thing is, I think I'd prefer to get into Bernice and especially Jason's heads more than the format allows.  Intellectually admirable, and with some good stuff to say about how we try to uncover truth, but it left me kinda cold in the end.

The three stories are all decent at least, but the book feels lopsided. Stone's story is so goofy compared to the other two dark ones, and its tale is completely irrelevant to the later ones, making it feel like it doesn't even belong in the same book.  I like the idea of the book, and I liked the book itself more than I didn't, but I feel like it could have been done better.

Arrangements for War was an unusual Doctor Who story, in that despite including an alien invasion and all that malarkey, the plot was the emotional lives of the Doctor, Evelyn, and the guest characters. Its sequel, Thicker Than Water, is much more typical, with the emotional moments coming occasionally in a pretty typical Doctor Who plot about hostage situations and medical experiments gone horribly wrong. I absolutely loved Arrangements for War-- it's the most affecting Big Finish story I've ever heard-- but Thicker Than Water doesn't live up to the high standard set by its predecessor. There's nothing wrong with it, but it has two standout emotional moments, whereas Arrangements for War was coated with them from end to end.

Taken on its own, Thicker Than Water is a fine adventure for the Doctor and Mel, and once you throw in the way it wraps up Evelyn's character arc, it's a good listen on the whole, with some great moments. As an Evelyn fan, I've ever so glad that this story exists. But as a follow-up to Arrangements for War, it can't not disappoint. Like Snakedance did to Kinda, it takes the good ideas of its predecessor, but wraps them up in a more generic packaging.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

There's one word I want to just keep on using time again in this review, and that’s "lovely." Arrangements for War is a lovely story, with lovely performances, lovely acting, and lovely sound design. It's character driven, featuring the Doctor and Evelyn-- and Colin Baker and Maggie Stables-- at their best. The Doctor's attempt to reassure a distraught young man, Corporal Reid, soon results in a major political incident that disrupts the TARDIS travelers' planned vacation. But despite that, there's not a lot of action in this story. Instead, the Doctor finds himself an advisor to Princess Krisztina, Reid's beloved, who is obligated to marry a prince from an opposing nation to secure a lasting peace. Meanwhile, Evelyn has fallen in with Governor Rossiter, who is from a neutral nation in the conflict, and the two find their feelings for each other gradually increasing.

I've never cried listening to a Big Finish Doctor Who audio. Not during Neverland, not during Scherzo, not during The Girl Who Never Was, not during Blue Forgotten Planet, not even during this month's To the Death. I still haven't, to be honest. But Arrangements for War is the closest I've ever come-- while listening on my iPod to the last few scenes, I made my wife hold me until they were done. Thanks to the writing of Paul Sutton, the direction of Gary Russell, the performances of Colin Baker and Maggie Stables, and the sounds of Steven Foxon, these scenes had me completely within their emotional control. Everything about them worked. Even now I'm getting a little misty-eyed thinking about them.

I can't believe that I skipped over Arrangements for War on its original release, and I'm quite glad that I recently decided to jump back and pick up some of the Evelyn audios I'd skipped the first time through. This is one of Big Finish's most masterful productions in every regard, showing the real strengths of its characters, its stories, and its format. Lovely.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

yet another Wild West story - I think we've had three or four audio tales with that setting in the last couple of years - but a good one, with Richard Cordery playing Sam the sheriff, and Maggie Stables playing her own character Evelyn, and the Sixth Doctor, and everyone else as well. It's interesting in that the only sfnal element in the story is the Doctor's own presence. Stables is excellent and it's a good tale of revenge and confusion, written by Paul Sutton.

Paul Sutton sometimes bites off a bit more than he can chew, and I think this happened in The Angel of Scutari: it's a nice idea to have a fragmented plot, presented out of order, but Big Finish has done this before and better (most successfully with Creatures of Beauty). It seems also like an attempt to give Hex some character development, presumably in order to get rid of him some time next year, but ends up with Philip Olivier doing a one-note nursing whine while waiting for Florence Nightingale, while the Doctor and Ace shift rather confusingly between British and Russian captivity. The cast admit to their bafflement in the CD extras, and one can sympathise.

In the third episode of The Three Companions, the Something we have been waiting for actually Happens and it all seems to come together well.½

I may be unfair to No More Lies but I didn't think it worked at all. Suddenly the Doctor and Lucie are chasing time-travelling wrongdoers - where did that come from? And where did the timeloop they get inserted into come from? And it's kinda cute to bring back the Vortisaurs from the first Big Finish story with McGann's Doctor, but maybe someone could have taken the time to explain to Nigel Havers what he was doing? Because he doesn't seem to know.½

Exotron has Five and Peri arrive on a newly colonised planet with apparently hostile aliens; but the real problem is the colonists' robots, and the fact that the chief scientist is the military leader's ex-wife. It's a fairly standard sf setting but the cast (including guest stars John Duttine and Isla Blair) take a decent script and do it well. Very enjoyable.

I was prepared to like Urban Myths as a funny piece about the Doctor and Peri feeding the Celestial Intervention Agency an antidote to their misremembering of recent history over dinner. Then unfortunately it ends with a really stupid and offensive joke about Peri waitressing all evening, which killed any charm it might have had.½

a story of the Doctor trying to get Evelyn's mind off recent tragic events and ending up getting over-involved in a local political situation. Indeed, really rather too involved for my reading of how both the Doctor and Evelyn normally operate. But the whole thing hung together well, with a grim and tragic story which yet found some redemption at the end.

Paul Sutton's Thicker than Water takes an unusual continuity angle of visiting Evelyn Smythe after she has left the Doctor and married Rossiter from Arrangements for War: Six takes Mel to visit her, Mel having expressed interest in meeting the woman who tamed the Doctor after the unstable start to his regeneration. The actual plot is rather straightforward - emotional conflict between Evelyn and her doctor stepdaughter, with a rather minor sfnal element of alien tech captured from the Killoran invaders - but there are lots of reflections on parental and quasi-parental relationships, including a twist at the end involving a brief appearance from elsewhen in continuity. Actually rather satisfying.

Zardox Break by Dave Stone

When the Doctor Who New Adventures were being published, I followed the series so obsessively that I knew the publication dates and just happened to pop by Forbidden Planet every day for about a week before a new one was brought out on the off-chance that they might have it on the shelves early. What a thrill it was to get hold of a copy several days before it was due! And a new Dave Stone novel transformed the thrill into a roulette-esque game of chance as the novel would assuredly be either a masterpiece likely to challenge my preconceptions about what a Doctor Who novel could be, or, frankly, a steaming pile of poo. Or possibly both. And not because I had some preconception that a Doctor Who novel couldn't be a steaming pile of poo, either. Dave's novels were often quite barmy, and perfectly suited the boggle-eyed extremities of the seventh Doctor's on-screen persona but they could also be infuriating, Dave The Author hanging over the narrative like some smugly arrogant deity, with one hand sensitively portraying the characters as real, frail, flawed human beings and with the other sneeringly pointing out the real frailties of his flawed, human characters.
Well, forunately two of those characters survive to take part in this particular tale and it's pretty much what you'd expect from Mr Stone. There's about as much plot in this novella as a lesser author would waste on a short story and the rest is filled out with the usual Adams-esque Guide To The Galaxy style meanderings and general thought-provoking musings on the nature of the universe. So, there's nothing to complain about here; it's not up to his finest standards but it certainly doesn't scrape the same barrel-depths as the poorest of his previous works. Not that as a mere reader I could ever be bold enough to judge any of the author's previous works as anything so insulting as "poor". Except "Burning Heart". That was a steaming pile of poo.

The Purpura Pawn by Paul Sutton

My previous encounters with the works of Paul Sutton have been a handful of audio dramas he's written for Big Finish's Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield ranges and I recall finding them quite enjoyable. From what I can make out, this novella is his longest piece of prose fiction to date and it's pretty solidly written. It's taken it's cue from noir-ish detective fiction with a nice chunk of classic sci-fi dystopian future chucked in. The action takes place between lush hotels, casinos and seedy bars, there are plenty of chases, fist fights and explosions and all-in-all it's just much more of an all-out adventure story than the previous novella in this collection. And from that point of view, it's a success. It's pacy and enjoyable and the balance between plot and description is pitched just right for the novella form.

On Trial by Joseph Lidster

Again, most of my contact with this author's work has been from Big Finish audio dramas but that seems about to change since he's begun writing for the Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures TV shows. Hopefully, for his sake, he'll begin to branch out from writing Doctor Who spin-off material before his TV writing career gets much further!
On Trial kind of ties up the ongoing story from the other two novellas in the book, although it asks as many questions as it answers. Little hints here and there seem to build up and intertwine, to refer back to previous stories and set things in motion for the future. The tale is rather cleverly written from the perspective of an investigator looking back at the events from a historical point of view. What makes it more interesting is that the writer clearly doesn't believe what he is being asked to report and the whole story is tainted with his own political perspective. The writing style works pretty well with only the odd quibble from me - I got pretty tired of the typically wacky sci-fi conceit of spelling ordinary names in an unexpected way to make the society seem more alien; Kristoffa, Marck, Roja etc. Not convinced. The slow reveal of facts works pretty well though and the end result is that this novella ties up the events of this particular collection nicely, if not the overall storyline.½

3,0