Sunday, November 27, 2016

The Tears of Isis by: Una McCormack directed by: Scott Handcock: The World Ending Means the World Ending

The Tears of Isis 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 Una McCormack, directed by Scott Handcock, and released in July 2015 by Big Finish Productions in The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield: Volume Two: The Triumph of Sutekh Box Set.

 

Good Night, Sweet Ladies was a hidden gem in the first The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield Box Set and its writer, Una McCormack was brought back to do the finale for the second box set.  The finale does something very interesting as it takes place at the end of the world after Sutekh has taken over.  It takes the crazy doomsday conspiracy theorists who say the world is going to end next Tuesday, and has the world end next Tuesday.  Sutekh literally causes the end of the Earth before this story starts, except for the country house where these doomsday cultists are staying.  They are getting ready to sacrifice their leader’s daughter to Sutekh as a way to let them have power over the universe.  Yes this one is really dark yet has a lot of dark humor that comes off as oh so delightfully British.  McCormack does such a good job creating this scenario and the sound design again by Steve Foxen, is brilliant.  I’ll give you one example which is Sutekh’s arrival.  It’s been thirty minutes and everything has been pretty upbeat.  There’s been dark scenarios, but the tone is light with Benny having an outburst at the cultists for their stupidity.  Everything goes quiet and it stays quiet for ten seconds.  A sense of fear comes over the listener when the next sound you hear is a knock on the door.  That is just one hell of an entrance for the literal god of death.

 

Gabriel Woolf is having too much fun as Sutekh in this audio as he is the one who has everything in his pocket.  His voice is smooth as silk when he enters as he has the situation right in his hands making it scarier than anything else he has done in the box set.  The voice almost lures you in with how calm it is and makes you want to get close to Sutekh yet it repulses you as to how Sutekh wants you dead.  He truly believes that he is the one bringing peace to the universe which is just terrifying in this audio.  It makes you extremely scared for your life even though you’re just listening in on a fictional story.  Sutekh isn’t the only god in this episode as the titular Isis makes her appearance as a literal deus ex machina.  Now I am usually the first one to decry a deus ex machina being used as a way to close a story, but that’s excusable in this one as the villain is a literal Egyptian god.  How else can you reverse things to the status quo?  By getting Isis, the god of life, to return life to humanity.

 

Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor still stays in the background in this one which is really good for this one as the Doctor gets to reveal of course his master plan for defeating Sutekh when he realized that yes they would be facing Sutekh after he escaped his traps from Pyramids of Mars.  It’s all really clever in the way that the master plan actually plays out and Sutekh is actually killed in this story and it really works.  Sophie Aldred as Ace also really does give a great performance in this story as well.  She and Benny have great chances to work off each other and she’s trying to figure out just how these things could happen.  She wants to try and make things right, but she can’t figure it out.  It’s a really good performance from Aldred who is just stellar as Ace.  Lisa Bowerman as Benny is also perfect as usual as she has to make her way through this country house where these doomsday cultists are.  Benny is just there to act all sarcastic about how they didn’t seem to realize the end of the world means the end of the world.  It’s a really funny script for Bowerman as it plays to her strengths.  Benny has to help the daughter of the cultists who were going to sacrifice her to Sutekh.  These scenes just make her bring out her leadership skills which are great to listen to throughout the story.

 


Finally we have the two cultists who are a husband and wife tag team.  Matthew Bates plays Russell Courtland who is really just greedy.  He wants to be taken seriously by the world at large and of course make a lot of money so he’s researched the cult of Sutekh, but really he’s just spineless.  He even sees the error of his ways before he is killed by Sutekh which is pretty good considering he’s really being controlled by his wife Susannah.  Sue, played by Rachel Atkins, is a woman who actually takes this god of the dead, we want to rule the world stuff seriously and believes that Sutekh is coming to improve them.  She abuses her wife and eggs him on to kill his own daughter as a sacrifice to a god.  Basically she’s just an awful person who actually deserves to die and Atkins does a great job.

 

To summarize, as a conclusion to the box set The Tears of Isis is a story that knows just how to get us afraid of its villain and tell its story in a tense way as you just want to figure out how the Doctor is going to win.  It seems for once that the Doctor can lose to Sutekh and the performances from the actors, the direction, and the sound design do a great job at communicating that fear to the listener.  McCormack has made the story great and it laves you wanting more.  100/100.

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