Red Dawn
is a rather odd story. It is the
introduction of the Ice Warriors to the audio dramas which was a big thing as
at the time the Ice Warriors were very popular as The Seeds of Death and The
Ice Warriors had been released on VHS recently and to good sales. Justin Richards was also the editor for the
BBC Books range so he was an easy pick for the writer of the story especially
considering his own book and previous audio output. That said Red
Dawn sounds like a story that should really stick out as it takes place on
Mars and mixes The Ice Warriors with The Tomb of the Cybermen mixing two of
the most highly regarded Troughton stories.
Almost nothing could go wrong except it did. A lot of things went wrong with this audio
for a many number of reasons. It isn’t
all bad however as there are quite a few things to really like about this
audio.
First and foremost Peter
Davison and Nicola Bryant have such a good chemistry that wasn’t really
explored much on the television series.
They interact great with Bryant’s Peri being almost tourist like and
gets extremely excited with getting to Mars.
She is far from the damsel in distress on television while here she
takes part in the events with relish.
Finally she gets a script worth sinking her teeth into and she gets to develop
a relationship with the Doctor to keep her going when he eventually regenerates
into his sixth self. Davison also gets
to have a good performance as he clearly relishes the chance to be the Doctor
again and just has all his faith that Big Finish will succeed in their audio
series. The voice acting on the Ice
Warriors and Ice Lord in this story is top notch. They’re a lot better than the odd Dalek
voices from The Genocide Machine and
they really help with the atmosphere, making it feel a lot like you actually on
the planet Mars. The basic plot of the
story and its premise, while traditional as Justin Richards is known for, is
still pretty good overall but when you get to the supporting characters you get
all the problems.
The largest problem in
the story is the villain. The villain is
not the Ice Warriors, but is Paul Webster played by Stephen Fewell, who is a
human motivated by greed. That is nothing
terribly bad except the character is a spoiled rich brat who is used to getting
everything he wants. This makes the
story insufferable. The rest of the
supporting cast is also just as boring with a lot of them being Americans or
Canadians brought in to try and make it sound like a NASA mission. I applaud the effort, but there isn’t nearly
enough here. The other large problem of
the story is just how slow the pacing is.
It is four parts and they are pretty short parts, but there isn’t enough
substance to keep the story going for the four episodes. It honestly made the story suffer from being
what could have been a pretty good story.
To summarize Red Dawn tries to be a mashup of classic
stories and includes some great Ice Warriors.
The Doctor and Peri are great but the supporting cast is awful and the
pacing is really quite slow. A weak
point in Justin Richards’ career. 45/100
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