After listening to the
awful Scardey Cat I really needed a
break as that story left me emotionally drained. Luckily James Swallow’s first Doctor Who
audio drama is miles better than that tripe story that draws you in with an Invasion of the Body-Snatchers style
story that sees the Doctor and Turlough arriving in the middle of the
twenty-first century Moscow where they get embroiled in the mystery of the
Somnus Foundation which promises to know the future of mankind and promises to
read your aura, but because it is a day ending with the letter y, not all is
well. The Doctor and Turlough save Lena
Korolev, a woman whose brother Alexi has disappeared into the Foundation and it
is up to the Doctor and Turlough to save him.
They find not all is what it seems as people who submit to the Somnus
Foundation have their souls ripped from their bodies and put into alien bodies
in the future on a dying planet. The
first thing that strikes me about Singularity
is the fact that it feels very much like an espionage thriller for the first
half until it morphs into a traditional science fiction B-movie thriller which
is honestly some great stuff. The idea
behind the plot is nothing new and we’ve seen it before, but Swallow’s writing
just draws you in to the story which is great, but by the end it does become a
bit predictable and after the villains are defeated there are still fifteen
minutes which are rather boring.
Swallow is a man of
characters and he nails the dynamic between Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor and
Mark Strickson’s Turlough. They are both
antagonistic to each other because of their differing philosophies and Swallow
uses this to show how close in thought they actually can be as they both will
help out wherever they can, even if Turlough doesn’t want to admit it. Peter Davison while closer to the wet noodle
we saw on television mixed a little bit with the characterization of Sylvester
McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, still gives a really effective performance in this
story as he plays the Doctor very much in the background of the story. Mark Strickson actually gets to shine more in
this story than he did in any other story as he plays in the foreground for
most of the story. He gives very much
the same performance seen in Loups-Garoux
and it really works here with a few exceptions, mainly when there are winks to
the audience that he has a dark side which just takes you out of the story,
making it harder to enjoy fully.
The supporting cast don’t
really stand out as individuals, but that really isn’t much of a problem in
this story as most actors and actresses are playing double roles due to the
rather easy to guess premise of bodies being stolen. The performances often have to compensate
switching from a Russian accent, to an English accent to a voice modulation to
sound a bit more robotic throughout the story.
One of the perks of audio is that this can be recorded out of order so
to have a continuity of accents to stand out much better. The music also really feels like the story is
taking place in Russia and I can’t really tell why. It’s probably the choice of instruments to
realize the score that does it. There
are problems with the story however as some of the Russian accents are really
stereotypical and some performers just slip out of them at times when they
really shouldn’t be. The plan of the
Somnus Foundation also could have been fleshed out much more than it actually
was.
To summarize, Singularity author James Swallow really
knows how to balance between two different genres and write compelling Doctor
Who. He fails however at keeping the
pacing consistent throughout the story with the ending coming out at you for
being dragged out to the proportions of The
Web Planet while some of the early material just goes by really
quickly. The acting is also not really
that good in comparison for some actors who have problems sustaining their
different accents and Gary Russell doesn’t fix it when he really should
have. 65/100
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