The second season of the
Lost Stories ended with the finale to the adaptations of Season 27 in Earth Aid, but that isn’t where the
season really ended. The season really
ended with a special treat Big Finish had prepared for us. In early September
2011, presumably with jelly babies as bait, they coaxed Tom Baker to come into
the recording studio and for the first time in thirty years have him portray
the Fourth Doctor once again alongside Louise Jameson as Leela for two
specially produced Lost Stories for release in October 2011. The first story featured in this box set is The Foe from the Future by Robert Banks
Stewart, the story that inspired Robert Holmes to write The Talons of Weng-Chiang once it was revealed that Banks Stewart
had scripts that were too expensive to film.
Most fans had this story dismissed as an inspiration that would have had
the same plot as The Talons of
Weng-Chiang, but it actually is much different. The story concerns the Grange, a manor where
the mysterious Professor Jalnik lives with his butler, Butler and how anyone
going to the house or being in the surrounding town disappearing in time
corridors that keep popping up. The
Doctor and Leela are dragged into the area with Charlotte a girl from the
village and investigate the house. Part
One and Two play out very similarly to portions of The Talons of Weng-Chiang as people have been going missing and
seem to be being eaten by Jelnik, but Part Two reveals that Jalnik is from the
future. In this future he was involved
in time experiments and has mutated, The
Fly style into a human plus praying mantis hybrid that has to eat flesh to
survive. This twist catapults us to the
future where everything in humanity is forced into domes and are trying out
time experiments to avert their fate.
However the people in charge of the projects have ulterior motives to
take over the world with Jalnik wanting to infect everyone with Pantophageon
DNA making them hybrids.
The plot of the story
feels very much like a Hinchcliffe story with a lot of body horror and classic
horror tropes. The images that just come
through the story is a lot of pant wetting terrifying scenes of the hybrids
near the end. This is Banks Stewart’s
third story for the series and may just be one of his best with a lot of the
great things in the story. John Dorney
does the adaptation for this story which is great as he improves on a lot of
the body horror as in the notes he says 50% of the story is down to his own
creative liberty. The story is about
three hours long and it is extremely easy to listen to as you have such a good
story that really fits in well with the Golden Age of Doctor Who. There is this atmosphere in the early
portions of the story which is great as characters are forgetting quite a lot
of what has been going on which is a good idea for things to happen. The Doctor and Leela also feel very much like
they don’t have any clue of what could possibly be happening which is great for
this story as it gives it a good feeling of mystery. Jalnik is a great villain as he is really
disturbing as he eats the people he knows which is really quite a good angle to
take the villain. He wants to see the
human race evolve into a form where they aren’t vulnerable and are
carnivorous. They are very similar to
the Krynoids in that they would eventually die out from eating every sort of
meat.
Now to close this review
before my summary, let’s talk about that elephant in the room. Tom Baker has returned to Doctor Who and it
is glorious. He has not lost any of the
magic that made him the Doctor and just to hear this performance from him is
worth the rather hefty price tag for this box set alone. He really is in love with this script and
uses a lot of things that are done in the story that feel like it is made in
that period of 1977 where there really is a lot to work with the material. He even gets along better with Louise Jameson
as they have had a relationship improvement with time. Louise Jameson as Leela also has not lost any
of the magic for the character, mainly because of the Gallifrey spin off series and the Companion Chronicles range which
had her reprise her role. Jameson is an
actor who is really too good in the role of Leela. A real sense of comradery has begun with Tom
and Louie mainly because of how nicely they get along with each other in this
story. They really feel like they have
had enough time to have a friendly relationship build up after their rather
antagonistic relationship behind the scenes of the show.
To summarize, The Foe from the Future begins very much
like The Talons of Weng-Chiang but
with praying mantises, but turns into a much more terrifying story with body
horror and gore that really allows the story to work. John Dorney comes crashing in on the Big
Finish scene with a bang as he probably didn’t have a lot of time to adapt the
script. Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are both very good and have created the
beginning of a series that will finally bring us more Fourth Doctor stories in
the future. 100/100
No comments:
Post a Comment