Monday, November 21, 2016

The Pyramid of Sutekh by: Guy Adams directed by: Scott Handcock: I Am The Servant of Sutekh

The Pyramid of Sutekh stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, Lisa Bowerman as Professor Bernice Summerfield, and Sophie Aldred as Ace with Gabriel Woolf as Sutekh.  It was written by Guy Adams, 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.

 

The biggest fear in my mind when Big Finish announced they would be including Sutekh in the second volume of The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield was that it would be a set for spectacle and no substance.  My fears only increased when Big Finish released “Transmission from Mars”, a video trailer to increase the hype for the story.  The trailer was of Bernice Summerfield warning people on Mars that Sutekh is back and increased hype for the release of the set.  It was a really good trailer and the trailer actually turned out to be a filmed version of a sequence in the first story of the box set.  While it is prefaced in the story with a bit of a prologue explaining Benny being on a dig, the Doctor being in a sarcophagus and the servant of Sutekh, and the guide being killed, the story only increases in tension from there.  The plot is a bit weak from there however as it is a rehash of Part Four of Pyramids of Mars for like ten minutes, before we get to the character drama.  The story remains to escape from the pyramid, but once the version of the two doors with two guards comes up everything comes to a different place.

 

The roof explodes and one of the mummy guardians decides to help Benny escape, but this is only interesting because it has the voice of Jason Kane.  The mummy thinks it’s going to help Benny and a lot of the puzzles are interesting, but Benny has a lot to say to her dead husband.  It’s really something that allows us to see how death affects the character in the long run of the stories which is a development that I really like overall.  Then it’s reveled that it’s the mummy that always tells lies which increases the heartbreak.  Lisa Bowerman really plays to her strengths in this audio as she knows the ins and outs of Benny as a character and is having a good time working with Gabriel Woolf and Sylvester McCoy. The story pushes Benny to her limits as she has to ingest Osiran DNA, and become a literal god to try and destroy Sutekh in the end.  It would be a good plan if it wasn’t for the fact Sutekh can just take away the colonists to the land of death with a blink of an eye.  Benny nearly dies because of this which sets the tone for the rest of the box set as a more tense series of adventures dealing with a literal god of death.  The story doesn’t drag at all as the tension continues to rise through the hour long runtime of the plot until the end where Ace shows up.  Yeah, while Sophie Aldred is billed on the cover of the story, Ace appears in the last three minutes to take Benny away in the TARDIS.

 


Sylvester McCoy on the other hand is in the story much longer than Ace is.  He really isn’t playing the Doctor for very much of it, but the servant of Sutekh, killing people, bringing death to the land.  He goes completely over the top in the story whenever his mind is taken over which is a good way of doing the story as you see the reserved Doctor break through whenever Sutekh loses his grip.  Bringing Sutekh back into the story is the Doctor, who while under his influences grafts together a body using flesh looms which is a terrifying image as you see Benny come across an entire room of bodies.  Sutekh played by Gabriel Woolf is almost more intimidating while on audio as you can imagine the body made of differing flesh, grafted together from different parts which makes the god even more terrifying than he was in Pyramids of Mars. Woolf is having fun unleashing that voice and it helps the story along.

 

To summarize, The Pyramid of Sutekh has the flaw that it rehashes a lot of plot from Pyramids of Mars as a set up for the box set.  This isn’t the worst thing that could happen for the story, but it isn’t very good either.  The story still manages to be an entertaining base under siege style chase through the tunnels of a pyramid with the brilliantly written and performed characters of Bernice Summerfield, the Doctor, and Sutekh.  Guy Adams’s story is still a flawed story but it is a great one.  85/100.

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