Sunday 8 October 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ The Silurian Candidate


Tony’s getting political.

The Silurian Candidate is the latest Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama to feature Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor. The fact that it’s written by Matthew J Elliott will probably make anyone familiar with the range prick up their ears, as Elliott, while still fairly new to the company, has delivered a couple of outright crackers prior to this release, both featuring the same Tardis team – McCoy, Bonnie Langford as chirpy eighties computer programmer Mel Bush, and Sophie Aldred as her TV successor in the Tardis, Ace. So we’re pre-disposed to like this one, because Elliott has form.

It's also worth giving at least half a cheer when you realise this story is more or less a direct sequel to Peter Davison’s TV Silurianfest, Warriors of the Deep (which – in the writing at least – had some excellent potential).

The Silurians of course are famous in Who history for having been the first intelligent life-form to have evolved on planet Earth, but then disappeared into cryo-sleep when they thought the planet was about to be devastated by an interplanetary impact…which never came. They slept on, and in the meantime, the furry ape-things they’d treated as animals evolved into Mankind. That’s about as much as you need to know in order to really get the most out of The Silurian Candidate – and to be fair, you don’t really need to know even that in advance, as the pocket guide to Silurian history is helpfully given to us throughout the course of the story. But while the Silurian story is more or less the same each time they’re used – Silurians wake up, get cross, try to wipe us out, fail – there are interesting elements to their use too, and those have made for the drama of their stories before. Firstly of course, you can’t treat the Silurians as ‘alien invaders’ because their point of view is that we’re the invaders of their planet, and it’s a point of view with which it’s hard to argue. And secondly, like probably only the Ice Warriors in Who history, the Silurians were never depicted as being monolithically-minded, all-out invaders. They were a civilisation equal and opposite to our own, so they had leaders, disagreements, strong and divergent opinions, just as we do.

In their original appearance on-screen, that complexity of character was crucial to the solution of their story, and Elliott runs the same sort of game here too, with the ruling Silurian triad having significant differences of opinion on what to do with a planet of the apes.
It’s worth keeping all this in mind throughout the Silurian Candidate, because as the title suggests, it’s a pretty devious affair – the Doctor, Ace and Mel get tangled up with an expedition actively looking for the Silurian cryo-chambers, and uncover a plot to use some very specific humans as plots to push the world towards a nuclear Armageddon. There’s a degree to which that sounds positively satirical as two political madmen in our own world push each other’s buttons and drive us towards a nuclear extinction. Here, for instance, just seventy years on from our ‘present day,’ the world is once more divided into two paranoid power blocs, east and west, and the leader of the Western block is a brash, self-revolving egotist with a toupe, barking out incendiary remarks about his opposite number in the east, who is the archetypal courteous bureaucrat. For those who’ve watched the relative stability of the Obama years torn up and a new nuclear brinksmanship replace genuine diplomacy over the course of 2017, it teases the classic science-fiction question: Are they trying to get us all killed, or are they just that incompetent that the deaths of millions will be the result? And if they are trying to kill us all, are they acting alone? There’s a delicious tie-in there with some of the less intellectually rigorous conspiracy theories in the world, which claim that leading humans in the world of politics are actually lizards in human-suits, because here a lot of the drama is derived from the question of who actually is the Silurian Candidate? One of the two bloc leaders? The fair-minded but emotionally distant Ruth Drexler, who goes looking for the Silurians? The mild-mannered flunky, seemingly moving events to a peaceful resolution? The Doctor himself? It’s a high-stakes chess game of the kind at which the Seventh Doctor so excelled, except here he’s not out-thinking Elder Gods on a trans-temporal chessboard, he’s bargaining at baccarat with the lives of everyone on the planet Earth, human and lizard alike.

Elliott gives us a third power-punching Seventh Doctor story here, bringing back an old favourite ‘monster’ and giving them enough of their old oomph to satisfy long-term fans, while adding something fresh to their legend and their tactics, and delivering a richly satirical storytelling thread to give us a knowing wink. McCoy and his companions feel energised and help push the story along at pace, and the SIlurians sound ‘right’ in a way they haven’t since the seventies – complex and emotionally rich, yes, but nevertheless, properly different to the human voices around them as they plan to drive us beyond the point of nuclear no-return.

The Silurian Candidate’s worth several re-listens and while there’s plenty going on, it doesn’t demand your intense attention, so you can enjoy it while getting on with your life. After all, with politicians like these, you never know how long you’ve got…

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