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Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Review, TV | Tagged: bbc, BBC Audiobooks, Darren Jones, doctor who, doom's day, peter capaldi, Sooz Kempner
Doctor Who: Four from Doom's Day: Mixed Bag of Missed Opportunities
Doctor Who: Four from Doom's Day is an audiobook where Sooz Kempner finally reads her character, but the stories are average at best.
Doctor Who: Doom's Day is the 60th Anniversary multimedia serial event 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. In the latest chapter, Doctor Who: Four from Doom's Day, we get four prose stories where we hear Kempner read two of them in full performances instead of those little videos on social media. It's just too bad the stories are totally average and unexceptional.
All four stories are written by Darren Jones, a former film editor and prolific screenwriter who has worked in animation and written several Doctor Who audio adventures. Kempner reads the first and fourth stories. In the first, "The Steel Cascade," Doom shows up on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean in 1966 and encounters the First Doctor's former companions (and his first) Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, shortly after they leave the TARDIS. She draws them in her search for her latest alien target that she must kill in an hour, unaware of their connection to the Doctor. Kempner has some fun reading Ian and Barbara's old-school Received Pronunciation BBC accents as they express bewilderment at this weird undercover waitress who talks nonsense.
In "The Martian Dilemma," read by Jaye Griffiths and one of the more fun and interesting stories, Doom pops into ancient Mars and gets drawn into the Martians' Game of Thrones-style power struggles when she's hired to kill a Martian queen.
In "An Ood Halloween," Doom goes to Halloween Night in 1999 San Francisco and finds herself supervised by a fellow assassin from her order that employs her, Brian the Ood Assassin, who has orders to kill her if she's not up to snuff on her work as they team up to hunt her target. Reader Silas Carson had previously voiced Brian the Ood Assassin in several Doctor Who audios, and the darkly funny oddness of the character is the main appeal of the otherwise generic story. Unfortunately, Carson also has to read the lines of American bystanders and revelers, and there are few things more painful than a British actor trying to sound American and failing miserably (American actors trying to sound British are equally agonizing).
Kempner returns to read "Dark Space," where Doom shows up on a dying planet and encounters an old guy in Raybans and a Scottish accent who immediately annoys the hell out of her with his insistence on helping whoever sent a distress signal. They discover the signal is a trap designed to snare time travelers and work together to survive, defeat the baddie, and do the right thing. it takes a while for Doom to realise this is the Doctor, specifically Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor, but not the right Doctor she needs to find either, so she's off again. The next, climactic chapter is the full-cast Big Finish audio drama Doctor Who: Doom's Day – Dying Hours.
Doctor Who: Four from Doom's Day again serves up fan service galore – Ian and Barbara, the Ice Warriors, an Ood, and the Twelfth Doctor – to keep fans satisfied, but there are no real surprises. They don't make you care about Doom any more than the earlier stories did. She just moves through the plot again, and you don't necessarily care whether she lives or dies unless you enjoy her snarkiness, but the writing here is less witty than the previous two entries in the serial. The four stories are amusing enough, but feel like average placeholders in a serial that's hopefully heading toward a decent payoff. Does this mean the Big Finish audio drama is the real climax and jewel in the crown of the multimedia event? We'll find out in September.
Side note: "fan service" has a very different meaning in Western geek fandom and Japanese anime fandom. In Japan, "fan service" is depictions of fan favourite (usually) female anime characters in shots that show their underpants and overly sexualized poses for the titillation of heterosexual male fans. The rest of mainstream culture and society in Japan find this as creepy and distasteful – as everyone else on Earth. This is why hardcore anime geeks in Japan are called "otaku" – it is not a compliment at all, close to calling someone a sex pervert. The irony is that Western anime geeks have adopted "otaku" as a defining slang for their geek identity, not always aware of the negative connotation it carries in Japan. In the West, "fan service" does not mean gratuitously leering shots of female characters but showing easter eggs, emotional moments, and the appearance of fan favourite characters, including showing 'shipped couples kissing or flirting. In the case of Doctor Who, that means trotting out former companions, old villains, cameos, or bits of lore in new stories, not to mention crossover events and team-ups of multiple Doctors and companions.
Doctor Who: Four from Doom's Day is available now in the US on Audible.
Doctor Who: Four from Doom's Day
6.5/10
Four more prose stories from the Doctor Who: Doom's Day multimedia event, this time as audiobooks that are entertaining enough, but again feel average and unsurprising, serving little function beyond fanservice, but the actors reading them add some fun and spark.
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