Thursday, July 7, 2016

Something Inside by: Trevor Baxendale directed by: Nicholas Briggs: I Can't Stand the Confusion in My Mind

Something Inside stars Paul McGann as the Doctor with India Fisher as Charley and Conrad Westmass as C’rizz.  It was written by Trevor Baxendale, directed by Nicholas Briggs and released in June 2006 by Big Finish Productions.

 

This is a story that people often have two vastly different reactions to.  One they ignore that it ever happened or two they loathe it for being the collected tropes of the Eighth Doctor, especially with the Doctor becoming an amnesiac yet again and companions that really don’t do much.  Yet Trevor Baxendale is still great at putting in some great ideas that actually improve above the rather traditional and clichéd manner of telling the story, but what is that story? Well it revolves around a high security medical prison called the Cube where psychics, made to fight in an intergalactic war, are being imprisoned because they are not thought of as human beings anymore.  This is Baxendale’s first of two strokes of genius as if we ever had actual psychics on this level of automatically knowing everything in others’ minds at a glance, something like this facility to experiment on them in the attempt to understand them and revert them to non-psychics would probably occur in the world.  This is mainly down to the theme of fear of the unknown as we don’t understand the psychics.  The second stroke of genius was explained by Stubagful in his He Who Moans Guide to the Eighth Doctor Audios Part 4, where he points out a lot of the references that on their own are good ideas.  I like the idea of the Brain Worm, which is the classic The Thing alien that inhabits minds and is chasing down the inhabitants of the Cube and killing people.  The thing is we know what the worm wants, it wants to get out which may be noble but as it is a creation of several humans, it suffers from extreme greed that isn’t happy when it gets out near the end.

 

The characters however aren’t nearly as impressive with the Doctor played by Paul McGann, while not having his memories sounds quite bored at times.  It isn’t nearly his worst performance as whenever Charley and C’rizz are in danger McGann is giving effort to sound distressed, but I think unlike Minuet in Hell McGann has difficulty being an amnesiac here as he is still forced to be the Doctor and not a madman.  He is still obviously giving his best efforts here and likes the scripts but doesn’t have the ability to pull off a good performance.  This cannot be said for India Fisher as Charley who although I love her character, Charley is really there to try and lead a group of characters through the Cube in a sequence which is just forgettable.  She eventually leads to the reveal of who the Brain Worm is hiding in, but of course the character really just appears and there is no way to discern them from the others.  It’s really Conrad Westmass as C’rizz who is the shining one in this story as he is tortured, again why is C’rizz getting tortured so entertaining, and has to guide the Doctor.  Westmass actually gets to get some of his murdering things off his chest which allows a slight bit of closure for his character as time approaches his departure.  The villains of the story, at least the human villains, Twyst and Rawden, are completely mad and I find them to be hilarious and almost threatening which is great.

 

I also have to say just how the direction and music stand out.  Now Nicholas Briggs directed this story and his style is again completely different from Gary Russell’s and it makes the audio seamlessly flow from scene to scene that are just works.  The music done by Joseph Fox also is really good as it feels a lot like something from a setting like this which really helps me to picture the setting in my head as the cover art only gives you some vague covers of a bed that is all we get from the Cube.

 

To summarize, Something Inside is nowhere near perfect and hey it really isn’t that good but there is enough here to like from C’rizz, to the ideas and to the direction and music which is a breath of fresh air.  58/100

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