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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