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Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Review, TV | Tagged: Audio Drama, bbc, big finish, doctor who, doom's day, russell t davies, Sooz Kempner
Doctor Who: Doom's Day: Multimedia Mixed Bag of Missed Opportunities
James Goss's final chapter of Doctor Who: Doom's Day couldn't get us to care about Doom's fate. Here's why the multimedia event didn't work.
Doctor Who: Doom's Day is about Doom (embodied by up-and-coming UK standup comedian Sooz Kempner), reputedly the best freelance assassin from the 51st Century, who has only 24 hours left to live. Death is stalking her, and she has decided to take a job an hour across Time and Space in the hopes of finding The Doctor on one of those missions, hoping that he or she might help her stay alive. And now we've reached the end.
In "Out of Time" by James Goss, Doom finally comes to the end of her journey, her mission to find The Doctor and escape death. She arrives at New Venice, the original site of her assignment twenty-four hours earlier (and nearly three months ago for those following her every chapter) where The Doctor tried to warn her not to carry out her assignment. She did, killed her target, and ended up stalked by Death, or so she thought. So she has spent the last twenty-four hours going through Space and Time, from prose to comics to audiobook stories to mediocre phone games to a prose novel to a full-cast Big Finish audio drama and now back to prose again. Does she survive? Does this series stick the landing? Well… sort of.
"Doctor Who: Doom's Day" Forgets to Make Us Care for its Heroine
We won't spoil the ending for you. You can go read "Out of Time" yourself if you're curious. It reveals at last which Doctor originally tried to warn Doom and how he shows up to help. You'll just think, "Of course, it would be this Doctor! It was always him!" It brings Doom full circle and also features Terri, the resentful, passive-aggressive administrator who schedules assignments to Doom and the other assassins in the Assassins of the Lower Order of Oberon. Turns out Terri is the one truly evil one in the whole story who set Doom up all along. Not the most surprising twist in the world. Why The Doctor became involved in Doom's dilemma and how he helps resolve it also becomes clear. The Doctor – and that Doctor Who general sense of morality – wins out in the end, after all. The problem is, it all doesn't really matter in the end.
Doctor Who: Doom's Day ends up inessential and inconsequential. It doesn't convince us that this is a special event. You don't know why they even bothered to come up with it at all, considering there's already the Doctor Who: Once and Future (whose title spells out why it matters as a 60th Anniversary event) multipart audio drama crossover event from Big Finish to celebrate the series' 60th Anniversary before the mothership TV show returns in November. Nothing in Doom's Day even indicates it's part of the 60th Anniversary celebration. The BBC's own podcast drama spinoff Doctor Who Redacted, at least, tells an interesting story with interesting characters and celebrates the show's history and its fandom while bringing the LGBTQ representation that was always part of the show to the surface. You come out of the end of Doom's Day wondering, "What was the point of all that?"
Doctor Who: Doom's Day completely fails to give us any reason to care about Doom as a character, despite the heavy lifting of casting Sooz Kempner as her face and voice. She's effortlessly funny when you finally hear her perform the role in the audiobook stories and the Big Finish audio, but the writing undercooks her. It fails to convince us that we should care why Doom, an amoral, remorseless, and glib murderer-for-hire, lives or dies. Even James Goss, one of the wittiest and sharpest writers in the Big Finish stable, seems to forget to show us why Doom matters at all, while the beauty of Russell T. Davies's writing has always been to show us that anyone and everyone matters.
The Problem with Cross-Media Events
Doom's Day also proves once again that cross-media events don't work. It makes a niche spinoff even more niche. At least an audio drama event like Doctor Who: Once and Future is consistently easy to find – you just buy each installment if you're interested. Doctor Who Redacted can be streamed from the BBC Sounds website. To keep track of Doom's Day from the show's official website to comics to phone games to a paid audiobook to a paid prose novel to an expensive audio drama, then back to a free prose story again is confusing at best and tedious at worst – it's practically a part-time job to keep up! And at the end, the story isn't even substantial enough to make it feel worth the effort. Doom has no emotions or heart, and none of the different installments of her story really connected with each other, so none of it matters. It's just as well, then, if you never bother with Doom's Day because she wasn't that bothered either. Sooz Kempner deserved a better character and better writing.
Doctor Who: Doom's Day - "Out of Time"
5.5/10
A final prose chapter that neatly ties off the story and brings everything to a conclusion, but once again, the writing fails to make the main character compelling or nuanced enough to make us care about whether she lives or dies. Why should we care about an amoral, glib, remorseless killer who doesn't change? The inconsequential story makes this one of the most inessential Doctor Who spinoffs ever.
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