Dethras, the latest Fourth
Doctor story from Big Finish, is a tale of science, politics, strength, fear,
responsibility and a chimpanzee. It’s almost ridiculously timely in an age when
anti-science feeling is running high in politics, and the threat of science
being shackled by the needs of political gain is both real and frightening. An
age where a march for science is deemed a necessary thing.
Written by Andrew Poynton,
it’s mostly a study in fear and weakness, but it’s far better and less lofty than
that makes it sound. When the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana (Tom Baker
and Lalla Ward respectively) land on a Second World War submarine, they find it
can’t last long where it is before the outside pressure cracks it open like an
egg. And then, because this is a story that fits into a very specific time
period when Douglas Adams (he of Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame) was
Script Editor of Doctor Who, they discover a locked room full of scared people
and an inexplicable chimpanzee.
Chimpanzees were not
standard issue on World War II submarines, in case you were wondering, so the
chimpanzee would be inexplicable under normal circumstances. But this
particular chimpanzee, who goes by the name of Franklin, is altogether more
inexplicable than most, and is also integral to the plot of Dethras, which only
begins to make sense when you realise there’s a strong thread of evolutionary
theory at work here, twined around what is essentially a power struggle between
science for its own sake and the politics which makes use of it, with the
Doctor and Romana ending up on different sides, playing each towards the
middle. This is the debate over splitting the atom, and then using an atom
bomb, but given a science fiction twist to make it modern and interesting.
Poynton takes his core
elements – the World War II submarine crew, the chimpanzee, evolutionary theory
and the battle between strength and fear – and weaves an intriguing quadruple
helix out of them, which dares to ask questions about scientific ethics, paid
research, politicians who are governed by fear of the other, and the choice
between fear and reason that it’s necessary to make, both in science and in
politics, if your endeavours are to ultimately be of benefit to humanity,
rather than being advances used purely for profit and war.
No, honestly, we promise
it’s not an ethics lecture. That’s what it’s about, but in the
foreground there are wars, and hiding, and ultimate weapons of mass
destruction, and stand-offs with battleships and green globs of potentially
universe-destroying goo and low-level telepathy. There’s Romana being brave and
the Doctor being angry and politicians being stupid in a way it’s easy to
recognise, and people not being what they seem to be. And, as an added bonus, there’s
a chimpanzee!
There’s more even than
that, but some of the plot elements make for great reveals and cliff-hangers in
this story. Poynton, and director Nicholas Briggs, keep things moving at a
steady pace, developing threat, mystery and thrill, and eventually opening out
the drama on a broader canvas than you initially suspect is even available to
them. It’s impressive, engaging stuff, driven by some standout performances at
the core of the story that help make the world against which Dethras is told
seem bigger and broader and more real than the two simple episodes of the
story’s length normally allow: there feels like there’s a world off the corners
of the audio screen, that these are real people with real grievances and
motivations, rather than characters created to ask important questions about
science, war, and fear.
Alistair Petrie and Sheila
Ruskin particularly bring a deep level of realism to their antagonism that
hooks you in and doesn’t let you go till close to the end of the story. And,
for what this is worth, John Banks is a darned effective chimpanzee. The world
is helped to feel real too by some impeccable sound design – from the very
first scene, you absolutely feel like you’re listening to a TV story from the
early Eighties. You can almost hear the boxy sets, the vinyl spaceship command
chairs, the early computer-generated effects and the plywood corridors. Big
Finish is frequently renowned for its sound design, but here it’ll genuinely
make you prick your ears up. Then you’ll nod and smile.
And as for the title, it
would spoil you to find out in advance what Dethras, but suffice it to say that
Dethras – a great ‘Doctor Who’ word, that gives no clue whether it’s a planet,
a person, an ultimate weapon, a process, or some other thing entirely - is at
the centre of the story, the element on which everything turns.
Dethras does a lot with
its two episodes. There’s all the high-brow stuff about fear and science and
politics, sure, but that’s all woven into the fabric of the character
motivations, rather than foregrounded, so it never beats you over the head with
its subjects. But there’s also lots of action, lots of surreal, unusual
imagery, and some engaging subsidiary characters too, so you care what happens
to everyone in the story. There’s tense, Das Boot-style drama, there’s a Star
Trek Wrath of Khan-style standoff, and there’s ultimately a sense of accepting
and living up to one’s responsibilities.
With a run-time of an
hour, Dethras never feels like it has the time to drag, but you come away
feeling like you’ve spent at least twice as long on the edge of your seat, and
have absorbed an enormous amount of world and argument and action along the way.
Dethras is a classy piece of many moods, cogent arguments, and perhaps most of
all, an entirely wonderful chimpanzee.
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