Whovember - 2020 to 2023

Our last Whovember!  What a journey it’s been, looking across sixty years of this remarkable franchise, with bits and pieces from so many forms of media!  Let’s wrap up with another TV episode and a pair of boxsets from Big Finish…

Year 58: 2020 to 2021 - Village of the Angels

Flux is something of a marvel; to get a fun marriage to the older serial format with the pace of new Who is great enough, but to have gotten a story with that much scope made under COVID conditions is nothing short of a miracle.  Each episode is fun in its own way; amongst other things this has to be one of the best outings for the Sontarans ever, one of the strengths of the Chibnall era is a very strong understanding of the character and personality of the classic monsters.  Also, the new villains the Ravagers were instantly iconic, both in characterisation and with their 12-Rated cenobite look.  However, it's easily episode four which is the stand out.  Now a Weeping Angel had turned up throughout the previous episodes, introduced with one of the best scenes involving them since their introduction in Blink, which also acts as a good catch up for any relatively new viewers not familiar with them.  But it's in this episode that thread pays off magnificently.

What's remarkable about this one is how it doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to them; for the most part the Angels don't get any new powers or anything, it's pretty much all things that we have seen up untill now.  It's just all pulled off very well, making fine use of all their tricks, and it's genuinely terrifying; it leads to a very visually different sort of Base Under Siege story.  What's more, it ties into the story arc of the season well; learning that Division, the Time Lord group the Doctor has been hunting for answers, uses the Angels as their agents serves to highlight just how morally bankrupt they are.  But it all climaxes in one of the most memorable cliffhangers in New Who; it shows us the Doctor losing for once, which makes up for a lot of villain decay suffered by the Angels over the years  That visual of the Doctor turning into one is something that I am sure will be a cultural touchstone for a lot of kids who saw it, one of those “DUDE YOU REMEMBER WHEN” moments, a proper Scarred for Life touch for the new age. 

Couple on sidenotes before moving on; I am still sad we never got the second series of Class, I would have loved to see where that storyline with the Angels would have gone.  C’mon Big Finish, get Patrick Ness to spill the beans and carry on the story!  Secondly, sticking with Big Finish, they have done some great Weeping Angel stories in recent years; it's remarkable that monsters with a visual gimmick can work so well in audio.  I recommend in particular the Fourth Doctor story Stone Cold, and the Eighth Doctor story Albie’s Angels, whose writer Roy Gill wrote my next pick.

Year 59: 2021 to 2022 - Way of the Burryman/The Forth Generation

In 2021, Christopher Eccleston returned to the role of the Doctor on audio, something I’d have scarcely hoped for before then.  He left the role for a lot of personal reasons, ones I can respect entirely, but it's so nice him coming back into the fold, and given his performances in these and his appearances at conventions, he seems to be genuinely enjoying doing so.  (That video of him and Matt Smith embracing at a convention warms my heart just thinking about it.). I tell you something else, he’s had some damn good stories to work with since he came back too.  Now early on in his new run on audio, we knew he was getting a Cyberman story, Monsters in Metropolis, and it's a great listen, where he literally meets one on the set of Fritz Lang's classic.  But then, on the morning that his fourth box set came out, the finale to his first “Season”, they suddenly revealed “Oh by the way, did we mention that it's a Cyberman story?”. (Although if you remember the line about Old Friends in Dalek, you probably could have guessed it).

This is a great and very Scottish story; if you're wondering, the Burryman is a ritual that happens near the Firth of Forth, close to the famous Forth Bridge.  It looks pure Folk Horror, but it's actually quite clever how this thing is used in this story.  Also in this one, we get a proper UNIT story, something that never happened in Eccleston’s TV run, featuring a guest role from Warren Brown as Sam Bishop, a character introduced in Big Finish’s UNIT spin off series.  The main guest though is Jon Culshaw playing the Brigadier; I have been liking his take on the character, which does feel like a proper heartfelt tribute to Nicholas Courtney, and he and Chris get some strong moments together.  As for the Cybermen, this story delivers the image of hordes of them climbing all over the Forth Bridge, and it gives Nick Briggs something different to do as Kreel, an old Mondasian model who, after a long time on his own, has gone a bit… odd.  It makes for a great finale to this batch of adventures… incidentally, the other story in this box set, Fond Farewells, is a damn good one too, with a fun gimmick of a funeral parlour where the deceased can join in the service.  In fact, yeah, just go through all the Ninth Doctor adventures, enjoy all the Chris!

Year 60: 2022 to 2023 - The Diary of River Song: Friend of the Family

Big Finish have been giving River Song her own adventures for quite a few years now, including a whole bunch of encounters with various Doctors and monsters.  I particularly like the fifth boxset, featuring four times she’s run into the Master and Missy.  But this one does things a bit differently; instead of four connected stories by different writers, this is four parts to one big story by Tim Foley, who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers working for Big Finish.  In this one, River is looking into some pages of her diary that she hasn’t written yet, which have turned up in an old house in England.  She soon finds herself back in the house’s past, bouncing around four distinct generations of the family who lives there between 1936 and 2014, and to get out of it, she needs to follow some clues left by herself.

It’s not just the format that’s very different to the other River Song stories; this is not one of her fast running action pieces, with witty callbacks to the Whoniverse’s past; this is her just helping out one family throughout the years, and working out her part in their history.  It’s far smaller scale than any of her previous stories, but it’s incredibly immersive as a result; you really get a connection to the Mortimer family across the years, through times good and bad.  The paradox River finds herself in is timey wimey to the point that even Moffat’s head will spin at it all, but it all comes together beautifully by the end, as the strange riddle in River’s diary all becomes clear.  Oh, and did I mention that this story is gloriously gay as all hell too?  This story is a wonderful standalone, you really don’t need to have heard any of the other River Song audios to enjoy this one, just give it a go, it’s a wonderful warm hug of a story by the end.

Well, this has been fun.  I think next year what I might do is a quick follow-up piece, I might have annually on the 23rd of November from now on my favourite Who related things from the past 12 months, a little addendum to this massive undertaking (though it will probably be more like a top five rather than just the one choice).  For now, hype and fan speculation begin for whatever is going to be in Wild Blue Yonder on Saturday…