Three's a Crowd by: Colin Brake directed by: Gary Russell: Three is Company

Three’s a Crowd stars Peter Davison as the Doctor with Deborah Watling as Auntie, Nicola Bryant as Peri, and Caroline Morris as Erimem.  It was written by Colin Brake, directed by Gary Russell and released in May 2005 by Big Finish Productions.

 

What strikes me about Three’s a Crowd is that it almost seems to have meant to be the ending story for Erimem, but at the last minute that was changed so she continued on for more stories.  This mainly has to do with the fact that the story was released the month after the new series began airing on television and Erimem almost seems to think her time travelling might just be over as it isn’t becoming fun anymore.  Yes she does stay, but the story making it feel like she is going to leave makes the ending feel like an extreme copout as the buildup is there.  It is really an easy fix if Brake decided to go back and just remove the hints and change some of the dialogue.  I mean his story already needs another draft as it is an extremely predictable story with a rather interesting premise.

 

Yes Colin Brake knows how to make the premise of his story one of the best Big Finish has done.  The Doctor, Peri and Erimem land in a crashed human colony ship where the colonists have become completely antisocial and can barely stand to be in any larger room or any room with more than one other person in it.  Of course because of this the colony has been slowly failing as people aren’t forming the relationships needed to reproduce.  There is a conspiracy to get people together in large groups of four or five while alien lizard men are feasting on some of the colonists.  The premise should be a nice twist on the base under siege format which always works really well, except here as the characters are so over the top and unbelievably silly, it isn’t nearly as good as it could be.  The characters come across like this was the first draft for Brake and he intended to go back for some rewrites.

 

Brake really only succeeds in properly characterizing the main characters and what I think could be the villain of this story, Auntie played by Deborah Watling.  Now I could barely recognize that it was Deborah Watling playing Auntie who has aged drastically since her turn as Victoria in the 1960s.  Here she plays the crazed leader of the colony who has made a deal with the Khellians who are the lizards giving them some of their people for protection from the elements and has been slowly killing people off.  Of course the problem is that she doesn’t get any sort of just desserts and actually gets to go off scot free as I think she was supposed to die with Erimem taking her place.  Watling does a fine job with the character but there really isn’t much to say about everything.  Of course Peter Davison, Nicola Bryant and Caroline Morris are all great as their respective characters even if Brake writes them as extremely bland characters.

The supporting characters go way to over the top with their reactions to other people by hyperventilating and having this airy tone to their voices.  Now I don’t know how people would act, but I do know they wouldn’t be loud if they never interacted with other people as they wouldn’t be using their voices nearly as much as the actors portraying them.  They are also extremely clichéd in almost every aspect which makes this story really hard to get into.

 

To summarize, Three’s a Crowd isn’t really bad, but it isn’t very good either.  There are quite a few interesting ideas present that I wish were explored more than they ever were, but still it isn’t enough to save this story from mediocrity.  50/100.