This is the third and
final Audio Visuals play to be adapted to the Big Finish Monthly Range and the
only play for Big Finish to be written by writer Alan W Lear who fell ill and
passed away in 2008. The history behind
this is that Alan W. Lear rewrote his original scripts and purposefully moved
the setting to America to add social commentary on televangelists of the 90s
and early 2000s and to boot add in an homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Now you would think that this would clutter the story, but it really
only starts to clutter in Part Four.
This is due to the fact that Alan W. Lear wasn’t able to finish his
scripts after Part Three for the deadline so Gary Russell had to take over
writing for Part Four and rewrote the scripts.
This is very evident for Part Four as the pacing just becomes really
choppy and the episode starts to drag.
This wouldn’t be a problem except for the audio is already at a long
running time of 2 hours and 30 minutes which with the odd pacing accounting for
about ten minutes of nothing really happening.
The change in writing style is enormous that I found myself asking where
Russell could go as everything had pretty much wrapped up.
That plot is honestly one
of the highlights of the story. Taking a
page out of the Virgin New Adventures, we find ourselves in the newly formed 51st
state of the United States of America Malebolgia home of the newly inaugurated
Dashwood Institute, a mental asylum. In
the institute there are two very strange patients, both found on the same night
and both mad as hatters. One is the
enigma Zebadiah Doe who claims to be in his own personal hell and journalist Gideon
Crane who both claim to be the Time Lord known as the Doctor. That is only one arm of the plot as the
Dashwood Institute is a front for Reverend Brigham Eliza Dashwood III and Dr.
Dale Pargeter to run the Hell Fire Club a den of iniquity where they have
summoned the demon Marchosias to get Dashwood to become the state’s governor
and eventually to the White House. They
also have built a machine to make brain surgery which is being investigated by
Brigadier Lethebridge-Stewart on a mission for the United Nations.
So yeah the plot is
pretty full and that isn’t even including Charley’s subplot which I will get to
later. For now let’s move on to the
Doctor and Gideon Crane played by Paul McGann and Nicholas Briggs
respectively. Now the Eighth Doctor getting
amnesia is nothing new as throughout the BBC Books run and during the TV Movie he has amnesia. Here, even though it is obvious from the
start that the mysterious Zebadiah Doe is the Doctor you still have intrigue as
to how everything is going to play out as Doe’s insanity ramps up leading to
the revelation that he is going to have to be lobotomized. Paul McGann, while still giving a good
performance has the show stolen from him for the first three parts of the story
by Nicholas Briggs. Gideon Crane is such
an interesting character as even though he is a human he still feels like he
could be the Doctor and if this is how he played the part in the Audio Visuals
it immediately increased their quality.
His argument as to why he is the Doctor is nearly perfect as what he
does is something the Doctor would do to blend into the situation. McGann however shines in Part Four when he
gets his memory back and gets to work off the Brigadier. Courtney and McGann have some great chemistry
here, which is even better than the chemistry between Courtney and Colin Baker
in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor.
Moving on to India Fisher’s
Charley Pollard has one of the more adult subplots. She is captured by the club and forced into
being a prostitute and meets up with Buffy Summers homage Becky Lee who is a
demon hunter from the Order of Saint Peter.
They both are the leads for most of the story as we follow them which is
for the best as Charley doesn’t understand modern technology and Becky Lee
doesn’t believe in time travel. They
eventually team up with her grandfather who has the worst American accent of
the performers. It’s stereotypically
Southern, but I love him as a character.
He is played by Morgan Deare who also plays the demon in this story,
Marchosias. That performance is much
better suited as he gets to be sarcastic and a trickster which is great. The two human villains of this story are
Dashwood and Pargeter who are both great together and Pargeter’s eventual fate
is chilling.
To summarize, Minuet in Hell is an underrated gem as
it sees an oddly atmospheric and very adult story reflecting the Virgin New
Adventures full of demons, sex and some pretty interesting characters. The pacing in Part Four and some bad American
accents are really what bring it down, but much like The Stones of Venice it isn’t for everyone. 80/100
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