Sunday, November 27, 2016

The Eye of Horus by: James Goss directed by: Scott Handcock: I'm Just an Old Man in the Desert

The Eye of Horus stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, Lisa Bowerman as Professor Bernice Summerfield, Sophie Aldred as Ace, and Gabriel Woolf as Sutekh.  It was written by James Goss, directed by Scott Handcock, and released in June 2015 by Big Finish Productions in The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield: Volume Two: The Triumph of Sutekh Box Set.

 

Ok Big Finish I get it, you’re emulating the New Adventures and characters in those novels don’t always appear.  That’s great.  It really is and the stories of this Box Set really are, but, and this is a pretty big but, stop crediting Sophie Aldred on the front of the case when she barely appears in this audio.  She isn’t staring, she’s supporting in this one.  That said, Ace’s role in this audio is done really well as she plays the background role while Benny is the one doing a lot of things in the audio to get through the story.  The story from James Goss who wrote the excellent The Lights of Skaro from the first Box Set and comes back to write the third installment in this Box Set.

 

The story by James Goss is actually similar not to anything that the New Adventures would really do, but similar to something really that the New Series would do.  Take an hour long episode, put its focus on a historical event, and add some science fiction elements.  There’s your story right there and James Goss does this masterfully taking the audience back to Ancient Egypt really to see how the Osirians influenced Egyptian mythology and culture.  It takes us to the reign of Hatshepsut where the Doctor, who of course has amnesia because he’s implanted his memories into the Pharaoh’s brain.  Benny arrives after the events of The Vault of Osiris to find herself wrapped up in political drama as the Pharaoh’s son Tutmosis is going through stress as his stepmother has kept the throne.  He of course goes out into the desert on the east side of the Nile where Sutekh is as an old man and basically ends the reign of Hatshepsut.

 

What strikes you about the plot of this part of the box set is that Big Finish actually brought in a specialist to do a lot of fact checking the production.  Yes this fictional account of the downfall of a Pharaoh had a fact checker on hand to correct mistakes and to be honest how easy it was to fit in the Doctor and Benny into the historical events almost makes you wonder.  I don’t know what about, but it makes you wonder.  Goss’s characterization of Hatshepsut as played by Sakuntala Ramanee comes across as this mix of power hungry femme fatale and loving mother.  A lot of the conflict surrounding her is because there is miscommunication which is really the biggest flaw in the story.  It comes across very much like it’s a sitcom plotline but at least composer Steve Foxen doesn’t include a sad trombone in the score, which is an attempt to emulates Ancient Egypt in a weird way.  Hatshepsut also gets to be engaged to the Seventh Doctor who is posing as her confidant from history, so that’s just interesting to see the way she and McCoy play off each other.  They both are great together and make the relationship believable even if you can tell that the Doctor is just using her as part of his latest master plan against Sutekh.

 

Tutmosis as played by Matthew J. Morgan is also an interesting character to see as he is almost a pawn in Hatshepsut’s own master plan to create Egypt as this sort of steampunk, futuristic version where she rules the world.  Tutmosis is almost like an angry teen, but it is justified as the throne should be his and as he is pretty young, it’s easy to see why he would be influenced by Sutekh into destroying his stepmother’s work.  Yes Sutekh is the actual villain of this story and does it very much in the way that he was in Pyramids of Mars where he is in the background until the very end.  The ending of this one really does feel like the Doctor has lost and Sutekh is going to destroy the world which is very bleak.

 


Benny also gets to have another chance in the spotlight in this audio as she has to be the one to figure everything out.  The Doctor really isn’t any help to Benny in this story as he’s got amnesia and she’s the one trying to further his master plan.  The conflict comes because she isn’t in on the plan and is trying to find a needle in a stack of needles that all look identical as well as trying to keep the stack intact so it can be carted off to its own life.  Yeah this is a great performance from Lisa Bowerman as Benny is lauded as a goddess and is trying to get everything on track, but she just keeps failing.  It’s really good and Handcock directs the entire cast really well, more on that in the next one.

 

To summarize, The Eye of Horus, while not having anything to do with the actual eye of Horus as seen in Doctor Who, is a great story.  It works at setting up the conclusion to the box set while giving us some explanation to the characters of the story it wants to tell.  There are problems with some of the story feeling too much like a sitcom and Ace really not appearing in this one much, but it does a lot to keep the tensions high in preparation for a conclusion.  90/100

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