When last we checked in on
the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana, they were in two very distinct kinds
of trouble – the Doctor was prrrrrobably sacrificing himself to a tribe of
semi-savages as a way of appeasing them for the crime of deicide, and Romana
had been abandoned by her best old school chum on a planet of jellied eels,
which swallows you down under its hungry surface if you dare to stop moving.
So…no pressure then.
Add in a book that writes
the future of the world, a supercivilised TV crew come to study the natives,
and one extra-special villain, and you’re in for a treat.
The Thief Who Stole Time,
beyond its somewhat clunky title, is remarkable in another way too – Tom Baker,
the actor who is by definition ‘most people’s’ Doctor, having played the role
for seven years, rather than most actors’ three or four, is now in his
eighties, but here he’s beyond a shadow of doubt the life and soul of the
audio, sounding like a super-intelligent child, all energy and ideas. It’s
evident that Baker’s having enormous fun with writer Marc Platt’s dialogue and
narration, some of which is written in an approximation of Dylan Thomas’ Under
Milk Wood, all rolling, sea-like, overstretching lines and vivid, bone-deep,
doubled-down images, which is meat and drink to actors like Baker, with his
rumbling voice, and also Des McAleer, who gets his fair share of those lines as
Blujaw, the village’s former ‘skald’ or seer. Not for nothing, these are
techniques that make both the previous episode, The Skin of the Sleek, and this
one, absolute joys to listen to for the sheer rolling poetry of the language.
Imagine an hour of Richard Burton growling low space-time gobbledegook in your
ears – that’s worth the admission price on its own.
Platt has created a highly
unusual world, peopled it richly, and given it a central secret worth digging
for – the extra-special villain has a plan to steal Something Powerful from
this planet of jellied eels, and while in part 1 of the story, they busied
themselves breaking into archives, killing eel-gods and double-crossing
do-gooders, here they escalate their villainy to artefact-thievery, cold-blooded
murder and turning themselves into a timeline-determining god. What’s fun on
the one hand, and a little obvious on the other, is that the extra-special
villain here has the ego and the emotional intelligence of a teenager, stamping
their foot and stomping off to paint the universe black because they never
asked to be born. That means on the one hand, much of the Doctor’s usual
response, trying to talk sense to the villain, doesn’t work because it’s
swamped by the raging ego of that self-revolution, and on the other hand,
played wrong, it can sound a bit like Adrian Mole-meets-Hitler. What’s
extra-specially pleasing here though is that Romana, played by Lalla Ward, has
more emotional range to play with than she’s usually given, her cool
superiority genuinely shaken in this episode, and Ward goes the extra mile to
give her Romana an arc in this story that promises good things for future battles
of wits against the extra-special villain here. The Doctor has had his humanoid
arch-nemesis in the Master (now Missy) since the early 1970s, and this two-part
story goes a long way towards giving Romana her own equal-and-opposite
character, her own Moriarty to face and fight.
Taken as a whole, The
Thief Who Stole Time is a deeply satisfying second part to the story of events
on Fundarell, the planet of the jellied eels, and it rounds out the latest
series of Fourth Doctor stories leaving the listener satisfied that they’ve
been well-served – Baker and Ward sound on top form here, Platt’s
world-building is suitably complex and realistic, and the dilemmas come
naturally, one after the other as the arch-villain moves towards the
culmination of their cunning plan, and then is (spoiler-alert) defeated. For
listeners who demand texture, depth, engaging problems, and solid characters
and societies in their audio Who, The Thief Who Stole Time is hard to beat. On
top of which, the arch-villain is something new and delicious, the Under Milk
Wood tones are gorgeous and rich like a chocolate fondant, and there’s a sense
of immediate energy that powers the storytelling through from its unusual
beginnings to its judicial end. The short way of saying all that, of course, is
‘Pick up The Thief Who Stole Time today – the title might be naff, but
everything else is excellent.’
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