As part of its Audio Originals series, BBC Audio’s latest budget-friendly release turns its attention to the Doctor who saw out the original television series; writer, Adam Christopher takes a surprising direction with this incarnation by giving the usual brooding strategic characterisation a break, and in its place playing up his gifted scientific knowledge – presenting us with a Doctor of science and cosmology.
The result is… interesting. While the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) was often seen carrying electronic gadgets during his television reign (1987-1996), he wasn’t known for giving ‘science-speak’. But in a prose format, a writer and script editor don’t have to concern themselves over an actor’s limitations in memorising and delivering complex science-based exposition. And so a slightly different and more ‘educated’ slant is given to the character here, as he ponders how to rewrite computer systems and explains the fourth and fifth dimensions to Ace and a captive audience.
With a striking cover from Lee Johnson, and a very engaging reading by Sophie Aldred, Adam Christopher’s idea for What Still Remains is, at heart, very basic Doctor Who fare. Set somewhere around the time of the 50th Century, in a research station that sits on a neutron star, we learn that this station exists in this environment by utilising time distortion technology. But out of the original 64 staff members, only four now remain, and this is just seven weeks after arrival! There is something here that has been disturbed by the arrival of the station, something from beyond our reality… and as we will learn, at least one of the crew knows what it is.
There are parallels to be had with 1975 serial, Planet of Evil, or even the 1997 Paul Anderson film, Event Horizon, as some unknown, unfathomable force exerts itself and ultimately Ace herself begins to be endangered by it. But while those stories fully exploited the dread and heavy sense of the unknown entering our universe, the production of What Still Remains fails to capitalise on this obvious and inherent ambience. In an audio landscape, it would be very easy to create this feeling of dread, a suspenseful atmosphere where the six cast are being hunted by something they cannot see, and with no way out of their situation. However, the sound design completely fails to rise to this opportunity, and so what is left is Sophie Aldred’s reading of the story. And that’s enough to make the difference, thankfully, as she captures the dynamic between Ace and the Doctor well and has a natural affinity to putting across Ace’s own position and responses to what is happening around her. Yet there is still a strong impression that this story has been let down by the lack of daring from the editorial and production side, and possibly even been edited to remove some of the more suspenseful material. It’s not a bad end result, but neither is it what it should have been. It should have been tense, and it should have been claustrophobic. And it isn’t really any of these things.
Because of this absence of tension and atmosphere in the opening introductory scenes, things only begin to happen until well after the some 30 minutes (of a 78-minute story) have passed, which lends support to the feeling that the writer was expecting the producers to use sound and direction to fill the first half with that building sense of dread. Their failure to do that means that there is instead a whole lot of talk, a lot of corridor walking, and it isn’t helped by the three to four station crew all being very basic archetypes and lacking a sympathetic front in terms of their characterisation.
The way the threat is eventually dealt with is fine, owing a debt to a certain 1984 Peter Davison story. Aldred’s reading is also fine. Though her attempt at a Scots accent for the Doctor is poor, she knows it is, and yet ‘winks’ at us in such a way that we are in on the joke. It seems Scots is the one accent that will defeat most actors; Aldred’s attempt is no better than Jaye Griffiths attempt to mimic Peter Capaldi’s in other BBC Audio release The Cuckoo — this being a reading of a prose story means the inherent drama of reading a book first-hand can often be diluted by the translation of it into an audio reading. I do wonder whether Adam Christopher was fully satisfied with the way his story was translated to audio.
Nevertheless don’t let the grumbling above lead you into thinking this is a story you should miss entirely. It isn’t a bad story at all; just rather generic and will leave you with the sense that it could, and should, have been something more memorable in its production style…
