The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

‘I picked it up from the Reich Museum in Amsterdam in the 33rd Century.’

‘You stole it?!?’

‘No - of course not! The museum burnt down. I nipped in an hour or so before hand - I rescued it!’

The Doctor and Ace are on the way to the planet Duchamp 331 to ‘rescue’ Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream to add to the TARDIS art collection, as it is about to disappear under mysterious circumstances. They’re soon greeted by a situation where something decidedly strange has attacked part of the plant and the only remaining survivor can’t stop talking about the dust. The Doctor can’t help but get caught up in the investigation. They aren’t the only ones drawn to Duchamp 331 though. Their old friend Bev Tarrant is present too, but more interestingly a huge pleasure cruiser called ‘Gallery’ is on its way to witness a spectacular, but enigmatic, work of art in progress that Madame Salvadori has organised. But someone else has their own agenda too.

WARNING - SPOILERS FOLLOW!!

I don’t usually put Spoiler Warnings in my reviews, but Dust Breeding is an exception. This review examines Dust Breeding in such a way that will give away one of the stories surprise plot elements, and in order to get the best out of Dust Breeding, I advise you to listen to it before reading this review.

Mike Tucker’s notes in the inlay booklet for Dust Breeding says never to throw any ideas away, and this is certainly advice that he has taken to heart with this story seeing the return of two of his previous creations. Louise Faulkner returns as Bev Tarrant from Tucker’s previous audio The Genocide Machine, and as the superb cover illustrates, it also features the return of the Krill from Tucker and Robert Perry’s BBC PDA Storm Harvest. It’s also notable for being the first Big Finish audio to feature a television companion in the form of Caroline John, who played Liz Shaw with the Third Doctor during season 7, playing a different character instead.

Although Tucker’s previous audio The Genocide Machine was good, it failed to live up to its expectations with the Daleks not being used as well as they could have. Dust Breeding is a much better story and it delivers a far more satisfying piece of drama. The really appealing part of it is the storyline which works really well here. The two distinct strands to the story do seem very detached from each other for the most part with the Duchamp 331 storyline seemingly separate from the Gallery pleasure cruiser story but Tucker brings them together at the end to make a fitting conclusion to an excellent audio. Of the two sub-plots, the Duchamp 331 seems to be the more interesting one for the first two episodes before a shock revelation makes the Galaxy storyline come alive with interest in what happens.

Sylvester McCoy’s performance here is superb. Some of his performances in previous audios haven’t sounded quite right somehow and he failed to capture that quality that made his vivid characterisation of the Doctor on television such a pleasure to watch. Here he recaptures that quality perfectly, and his repartee with Sophie Aldred is one of the highlights of the audio. There is a splendid scene at the start of episode one where the Doctor is explaining to Ace how he acquires the paintings that make up the TARDIS Art Gallery which is very well written and very amusing.

Aldred’s performance herself is generally good, although she does tend to overplay some scenes, particularly those that involve her screaming, which detracts from her performance but this doesn’t detract greatly from what is essentially a good performance. Although it is getting increasingly difficult to reconcile Ace the character to Ace the voice as Sophie’s voice is becoming more mature sounding all the time which makes it hard difficult to picture her as the teenage girl she was depicted as on screen. More stories like The Fearmonger and The Shadow Of The Scourge where Ace is given the more older characterisation would be welcome for Sophie’s future appearances.

Dust Breeding continues Big Finish’s increasing trends of having very good casts. Louise Faulkner, whose performance was one of The Genocide Machine’s highlights, returns once more as Bev Tarrant, the slightly shady trader of merchandise that of interest to a certain kind of dubious parties. She doesn’t have quite as big a role as she did in The Genocide Machine, but she still turns in a tidy performance which is very enjoyable to listen to.
Caroline John’s performance though is a little disappointing. Big Finish have stated their position on old companions is that they’d rather not use them as reunion stories involving one of the Doctor’s past companions meeting the current Doctor tend to push credibility to the limit (a good example of this, albeit a slightly different version of the same situation, would be the BBC PDA Asylum where Peter Darvill-Evans takes great pains to involve Nyssa in a Fourth Doctor story from before he met her but then completely wastes her involvement) and they would prefer to use the actor in a different role. And in this case, Caroline John is not playing the scientist Liz Shaw, but instead appears as intergalactic art dealer Madame Salvadori, complete with requisite dodgy accent. It’s the accent that causes the problems with her performance as she’s supposed to be a slightly sinister, unethical character but her accent undermines any sinisterness that she otherwise conveys. It’s good to see Caroline John involved with Doctor Who again as Liz Shaw was a good companion, who should have featured in more stories really to realise her potential, but it’s a shame that the accent she uses makes her appearance here rather comical, which I don’t think was the intention of the script.

The rest of the cast are good and perform their roles well, with Johnson Willis being the standout as Damien Pierson, but one of the most interesting things about the whole play is Geoffrey Beevers casting.

Beevers, who is incidentally Caroline John’s real-life husband, has got previous links to Doctor Who. He appeared in the video version of Marc Platt’s Downtime and he was involved with a 1981 Doctor Who story as well. Beevers’ performance is excellent here with his character seeming very sinister immediately from his very first appearance. There is a real mystery about his character Seta which Tucker builds well through his actions and the way he acts.

And this is the SPOILER part...you’ve been warned!

The cliffhanger to episode two is one of the best, and most surprising, ones that Big Finish have done so far. The moment when Seta answers Klemp’s question of ‘Who are you?’ by saying ‘I am the Master and you will obey me!’ was certainly incredibly unexpected and was a very dramatic ending to the episode. The clues as to Seta’s identity were there, but although there was obviously more to Seta than he was letting on, I never suspected that he was the Master and the revelation that he is the Master was so totally unexpected I did find myself replaying the scene again just to confirm it. The most surprising thing about this though was not that Beevers was playing his version of the Master out of time, like the Delgardo Master was in the EDA Legacy Of The Daleks, but that this is the Master who has lost the body of Tremas and reverted to his previous form. This is a very bold move for Big Finish, influenced by their failure to reach agreement with Anthony Ainley about him playing the Master again, and offers some very good potential for future stories with the way that Dust Breeding ends. Geoffrey Beevers’ Master in The Keeper Of Traken had potential and he demonstrates that here with his good performance. Although this is another example of Mike Tucker undermining the continuity of the New Adventures, in this case the NA First Frontier, it’s a very significant development in the audios and a welcome one.

I’ve not been too big a fan of some of Russell Stone’s previous work and although his score for The Holy Terror was excellent, some of his others have felt a little intrusive at times on the main drama and this was most evident in Red Dawn. Here though the music compliments the drama perfectly, with it being by far Stone’s best work for the audios. The production on Dust Breeding is superb, as always. Although saying that there is one effect that is used repeatedly in the background of a ‘Dalek scream,’ as one character calls it, which soon becomes very irritating and more than a little annoying.

The script isn’t quite the same calibre as some of the recent releases, but this is overcome by the strong storyline. The dialogue does occasionally fall into the trap of being overly descriptive with the worst offender being during Gary Russell’s cameo appearance. One other minor irritant about Dust Breeding is that the reprises at the beginning of each episode are rather long, and after getting used to the longer length stories like Minuet In Hell and Loups-Garoux, this helps to reaffirm Dust Breeding’s relative shortness at just over 100 minutes in length.

Dust Breeding isn’t the best Seventh Doctor story Big Finish have produced, but it does rank well. The Master’s return is the audios highlight, and the character has been brought back in a very unexpected way which worked spectacularly well. The Krill’s audio debut isn’t particularly impressive though. Based on this and Storm Harvest, they’re a species that would work better on television if that was possible. Although Dust Breeding does at times feel like two separate stories, they combine well (eventually) which results in a very good Doctor Who story. Dust Breeding is definitely an audio that gets recommended, even if it doesn’t quite reach the level of excellence of some of the previous McCoy stories.