Monday, September 5, 2016

Animal by: Andrew Cartmel directed by: Ken Bentley: You Will Come to Know Harm

Animal stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor with Angela Bruce as Brigadier Winifred Bambera, Anthony Lewis as Scobie and Beth Chalmers as Raine.  It was written and adapted by Andrew Cartmel, directed by Ken Bentley, and released in June 2011 by Big Finish Productions.

 

Filling in the third slot for the Season 27 adaptations for The Lost Stories was always going to be a tricky task as the original ideas for the story for that slot were Night Thoughts, Transit and Illegal Alien which were already adapted in the Main Range, the Virgin New Adventures and in the Past Doctor Adventures respectively.  They could have adapted Alixion by Robin Mukherjee or even Avatar by future Doctor Who novelist David A. McIntee, but McIntee already used Avatar in his debut novel White Darkness and Mukherjee never got back to Big Finish for adaptation rights.  Then of course the team at Big Finish noticed that Andrew Cartmel actually had a different idea going into the writing of his novel Warlock.  It was essentially the same story but safer for television, so this is what they had decided to adapt for the audio under the original title Animal.  The plot is very similar to Cartmel’s novel, but with quite a few key differences.  First the drug storyline is taken out of the audio drama completely and the villains of the story are actually the Numlocks, an alien race of beings that make sure we will come to know harm if we eat meat.  It is still a story about animal activism and veganism which is really interesting for a story.  Second the story’s setting is moved to Margrave University where UNIT has a research lab testing on plants which have become animals and Brigadier Bambera is in control of the situation.

 

Third the story includes Ace and Raine instead of Ace and Benny which gives the story a completely different dynamic.  Raine played by Beth Chalmers gets a real chance to shine here as we delve into a lot of her past.  She went to university and can easily fit in to university life which is hilarious as she has to be the one to investigate some of the underworld workings going on at Margrave in the first half of the story.  In the second half of the story however she reverts into more of a companion role where there isn’t much for her to do.  This isn’t as big of a problem as a lot of them can be, but it still presents a problem.  Ace as she never got to university has a more difficult time and here it is even funnier as she has to act like she is a vegan for the majority of the story.  It’s hilarious and Sophie Aldred pulls it off brilliantly.  She also is interesting because she is written very much like the Ace in the Virgin New Adventures as this feels very much like it was written off an early draft of Warlock.  It really does come across that way.

 

Angela Bruce returns as Winnifred Bambera which is a great move on Big Finish’s part as if there were more UNIT stories, she would be brought back.  Bruce gives a great performance in this story as she doesn’t take anything from her subordinates.  She has an operation to do here and she is going to do it and finish everything that she starts.  Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor is actually great as he works with the Numlocks, even if he doesn’t have any sort of master plan to get everything to go back to normal and really it lets the story down in quite a few ways.  The wordplay is good though.

 

To summarize, Animal is pretty much a toned down version of Warlock which quite a few of the same problems to boot.   It does a good job of making itself a really good villain and some creatures that may as well be the Krynoids if the Krynoids weren’t as scary as they would usually be.  Most everything is good, it just feels like a copy with some shaky characterization in quite a few places and things that really just feel out of place.  80/100

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