Dust Breeding
is full to the brim with brilliant ideas that author Mike Tucker brings to the
table more than his original play, The
Genocide Machine. The plot reveals
that throughout his life the Doctor has been stealing paintings as soon as they
go missing to preserve the art and how this allows him to discover a creature
living in “The Scream” by painter Edvard Munch a la the six fake Mona Lisa’s in
City of Death. This becomes part of a plot with the Master
who is teaming up with the Krill, an alien created by Tucker and Perry for the
novel Storm Harvest, to restore his
body by harvesting this creature on a dust planet. There is also an intergalactic art convention
with a mad artist melding his body with the dust for his art and a comedic
woman running the place played by Liz Shaw actress, Caroline John. The audio itself is too cluttered for its own
good trying to combine so many different ideas that it takes a lot to keep
everything straight in your head. I’ve
never read any of Tucker’s novel work, but as most of his work has been with
Robert Perry I feel Tucker is the idea and character man while Perry actually
does the plot structure. This is evident
in Dust Breeding just because of how
cluttered everything is even though the characters shine through.
The Doctor and Ace have
characterization on par with that seen in The
Fearmonger and they feel more like they were equals during this story. Ace in particular has her own subplot where
she gets to be independent of the Doctor and Sophie Aldred pulls it off. While it is obvious Aldred has aged I think
her voice works better on audio than it would have if this was still 1989. Some of her delivery is off in places. Ace has a few good cracks at the Doctor and
questions the morality of stealing paintings.
Sadly that debate is never really resolved as the plot continues on
without any real looking back on previously established conflict.
The villain of the piece is
the Master with Geoffrey Beevers making a quiet return as the character post Survival. Tucker goes into nice enough detail about
what happens but don’t expect it to make it the perfect resolution with the
books and how David A. McIntee saw him post Survival. It also makes it hell to keep track of the
different versions of the Master as Beevers has two incarnations now. Nothing on Beevers however as he is brilliant
and you won’t see the Master coming as the alias is perfect. He teams up with the Krill who are an
interesting idea for a villain even though they don’t do much.
The side characters are
varied with Guthrie basically being the mysterious old man who gets a few
laughs. There is the return of Bev
Tarrent from The Genocide Machine who
works better here when she isn’t a carbon copy of Benny. She would steal the show if it wasn’t for
Damien who is the camp secondary villain and Madame Salvadori who is Caroline
John let off her leash and allowed to go full pantomime. The rest of the characters are rather dull
and unforgettable and Tucker falls into the same traps of The Genocide Machine with great ideas, but a badly structured plot. It doesn’t help that the music for the story
is also forgettable even if I can praise its sound design for just being great.
To summarize, Dust Breeding just doesn’t do it for
me. I mean it is a good story with some
great ideas which I really can get into, but there are many flaws that keep me
from liking it. Music is very
forgettable but the sound is nice and the characters are mostly varied from
what we have seen before. Tucker just
cannot write a coherent plot if it was the only thing he could do to save the
world. A real example of wasted
potential. 65/100
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