Starring Sylvester McCoy, Tracey Childs, Miranda Raison, David Sibley & Christian Edwards
Written by Jonathan Barnes
Directed by Ken Bentley
The Umbrella Man is back. But when the Doctor recruits UNIT's Scientific Adviser Elizabeth Klein for an off-the-books mission to the apocalyptic final days of Hitler's Germany, he isn't expecting Klein's hapless young assistant, Will Arrowsmith, to be joining them too.
The Doctor isn't the only alien creature seeking to loot a very particular secret from a Nazi base in Dusseldorf, however. Strange and sinister beings are converging on the same time/space location in search of the scientist Schalk, who experiments are the key to a devastating power...
The power of Persuasion.
Now, any story that features Elizabeth Klein should be brilliant. She's a brilliant character with a wonderful backstory and plenty of potential, and she's wonderfully played by Tracey Childs. So normally, any Klein story would be received by me with great love. However, in this instance, Persuasion is utter rubbish. It's a real shame, because there are a few brilliant ideas here, and a lot of promise reguarding the rest of the trilogy. However, for the most part, it's generally pretty dull and uninvolving.
The first of many problems with this story is that it isn't resolved before the next part of the trilogy. Now, of course there are trilogies which flow more like an interconnected story, for example the 2009 Stockbridge trilogy or the 2012 Elder Gods trilogy. However, each of those examples had a distinct story for there individual parts, which is something that Persuasion doesn't have. It's the first part in a three part story, which would have been fine, had the arc had a satisfactory end. Now while this is the fault more of Daleks Among Us, rather than Persuasion, it still has an effect on this story. Because some of the later development in Starlight Robbery and the aforementioned Daleks Among Us, it makes it look very much like there is little cohesion between those two stories and Persuasion. Another problem, however (and one that is solely Persuasion's fault), is it's poor pace. The first episode is really good, really dramatic and building up the arc elements really well. However, from here, Persuasion drops off the scale massively, with the story crawling to running on the spot for it's remaining three episodes. The story therefore doesn't really fufill all the potential that it could, and it just wanders with undeveloped ideas. This means that these ideas and odd moments like characters just saying things has to be explained in later stories, which meant that one story in the trilogy was going to be padded down with trying to explain all these moments from this story, and, prehaps wisely, Matt Fitton forged ahead with telling his own story and left it for Alan Barnes to clean up. The Doctor's defeat of the main enemy in this, the god like creatures, is also something that doesn't sit right with me. Now, any other Doctor (barring John Hurt), I could see locking them inside the TARDIS' Star Chamber (what a great idea!) on a Time Lord prison planet. However, with Sylvester McCoy's Doctor, I feel he would go the extra mile to defeat the evil, so this 'stop-gap' solution somehow feels wrong. Yes, it's an older seventh Doctor, but considering a comment he makes about Doctor number 8 earlier in the story, it makes less sense why he would use this method. And the villains themselves are very similar to the Elder Gods that played out in the most recent arc for the character. So why use similar characters here? It just makes it look like that the writers have run out of ideas for McCoy's Doctor, which is a shame, since number 7 has been greatly enhanced in recent years by Big Finish.
Certain characters in this are sadly lacking. The main complaint for this is levelled at Will Arrowsmith, who seems to have generic 'nerd' character facets. It would have been nice had they played about with his character a little more. And considering that he's practically ignored in Daleks Among Us, we only really have Starlight Robbery proving that the character is any good. I know many wrote off the character before this play had even finished. And as for Schalk, the less said about him, the better. Schalk is a character that cannot be empathised with and who makes the audience go 'how did he invent the Persuasion Machine?' Well, he didn't, but that's because of the revelation in Starlight Robbery which prolongs the misery. But you would think Big Finish would have tried to decive the audience so that they would be mislead. Instead, they signpost it massively with this druken fool. Sadly, David Sibley (The Eminence in The Seeds Of War & Dark Eyes 2) doesn't inject the part with much greatness either, making the whole character a waste of time. Sylvester McCoy, while good, gives his weakest performance for quite some while, and Gemma Whelan is wasted as Castra, who is completely lacking in any sort of motive, meaning she ends up as 'generic plot device'. She's much better as the Khlect entity, really giving it the beans. Even Miranda Raison and Christian Edwards are sadly unmemorable, and Ken Bentley's direction is pretty average. Really, only Tracey Childs, trying to give it her all to make something of this, and Andy Hardwick, who gives us his best score proberbly since Lucie Miller & To The Death, are up to any sort of listenable standard.
So to conclude, Persuasion is a limp horse of a story. It's boring, dull, annoying, fustrating, and makes Big Finish look very half hearted. If it wasn't for a good first episode, Tracey Childs, Andy Hardwick's music, some good comedy and Simon Holub's beautiful artwork, this would be one of the very worst stories that Big Finish has put out there. As it is, it not the worst, but it's down there.
TARDIS Rating - 3/10
Comments
Post a Comment