“Was the night before Christmas and all through the house… absolute armageddon.” But the production values don’t sell it.
The third episode of Big Finish’s Thirteenth Doctor Adventures, Lionesses in Winter, is lacking in many areas but the most significant are the editing and use of sound design and music after the first six minutes. There are multiple points where scene cuts are unclear, the auditory environment the characters are in is almost non-existent, and music is also used so quietly in key scenes that it’s scarcely noticed.
Given the stature which Big Finish Productions has, and has had since it began producing Doctor Who audio dramas over a quarter of a century ago, it’s always unusual when there’s an absolute howler of a production and particularly in a heavily promoted range.
These deficiencies not only undermine the selling of the story, but also for placing it in the era of the television show for which it is set. Little in Lionesses in Winter feels big, despite it being a story featuring the king and queen of England and a world-destroying creature from a parallel universe.
For those who know their history, and based off this writer’s research, the use of the word ‘lioness’ in the title refers to the family of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wife of King Henry II. It has nothing to do with the immensely successful and popular England women’s national football team. Lionesses in any sense refers to women, but this episode is primarily about the sons of these two monarchs. However, it is a ward, who is a young woman called Alys (Dolly Webb), who assists the Doctor and Yasmin Khan (Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill, respectively) in advancing the plot.
The plot seems to depend on Alys until late on, when it’s made clear the huge names of royalty could have been at the centre of the story instead. Rather than explore the reasons and consequences behind why this is a family in which wife and children mount insurrections and rebellions against the king, we instead get the Doctor doing the EastEnders cliffhanger music and referring to the Kardashians while the royals themselves toast “to family, however dysfunctional” over their Christmas dinner.
At the start, the acting is quite wooden, but Kevin Mathurin (King Henry) and Debra Baker (Eleanor of Aquitaine) get into their groove late on.
There is zero friction between the Doctor and Yaz, and the closest thing to proper character development that occurs is when the Doctor delivers a coda about happy endings and Yaz says the Doctor doesn’t like endings. But that line’s not backed up by a shift in the music or any other production detail; it’s just dialogue to ensure the story ends with them going on another trip in the TARDIS.
It’s hard to spot where the reward would come for a Thirteenth Doctor fan from listening to Lionesses in Winter. It’s a simple take on the Doctor and Yaz, to a degree where at least the first half of the episode feels like it’s aimed towards a young audience, and the main duo’s dialogue often lacks gravity and sometimes even a sense of location due to what feels like major deficits in some production areas.
There are some positives though. Dolly Webb does a great job as Alys and that character does actually get fleshed out step-by-step rather than at the dinner table at the end. The way the Doctor is introduced is also a strong visual, with her sitting on the king’s throne. And it still made England’s royal family of 1183 sound interesting enough that they were worth searching up online. Admittedly, that was primarily to understand what the title of the episode meant…
The Thirteenth Doctor Adventures: Lionesses in Winter is available now from Big Finish.
