The Monthly Adventures #044 - “Creatures of Beauty" by Nicholas Briggs

Nick Briggs is one of those strange writers who, once in a blue moon, will just decide to shy away from their usual torrent of mediocre to bad stories and produce something like Creatures of Beauty. Where this level of quality was when he was writing the pilot for The Monthly Adventures, I do not know, but it seems that all of the convoluted messes and suffocated worldbuilding or earlier audios have finally been made right by a story of grim injustice and horrific truths that left me feeling shaken like no other story before it.

The world of Veln is an ugly one, putrefied by a toxic atmosphere caused by a negligent alien race. When the Doctor and Nyssa arrive, they find themselves in a whirlwind of conspiracy, as the world tries to make itself beautiful again, and a truth too horrible to bear draws ever nearer.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

It’s a pretty big event when you get a story you really have not seen before. In previous, lesser Briggs audios, such as The Mutant Phase or Sword of Orion, you could always tell his biggest strengths and his biggest weaknesses. His stories were always rich with ideas and imagery, worlds that were unique and ideas that boasted great merit but then he simply refused to take them anywhere. His vast worlds always felt hollow, populated with dull characters and a decidedly bland narrative that made all his often melancholy, always evocative landscapes turn dull and banal. Not Creatures of Beauty though; it still does contain a number of his more insidious faults hiding in there -  they’re not obvious without searching and I will highlight them later - but for the most part, this is the story where his ideas work. From the beginning, great premise: a world in the wake of an environmental disaster has become plagued with genetic defects that are slowly killing the planet’s species and the Doctor has been caught up in a conspiracy involving the aliens who polluted the planet in the first place. Immediately interesting and a great playground for some really sad, contemplative ideas. Does Nick stick the landing? Yeah, actually, the tone here is great. This truly feels like a world in its death throes and through the twisted characters and hopeless vistas we’re presented with, Briggs builds a palpable and funerary atmosphere that persists throughout the whole script. And what a script this is, this is grimdark done to perfection; even though I’m a fan of something like Project: Twilight, I can’t argue this is a much better execution of a similar tone, taking these nasty and cruel characters and using them as paints in a tragic portrait, victims of a disaster not of their making. And I think what really helps them along is the dialogue; I’m not the biggest fan of Briggs’ characters, I think they tend to come off on the more bland side and whilst they’re definitely not deep here, I can at least praise the words coming out of their mouths. The dialogue here is beautiful but not artsy, it feels real and grounded and sombre. That speech right at the end by viscous chief security officer Gilbrook, about his great-grandfather witnessing the pivotal explosion that leaked the deadly pollution into the planet’s atmosphere, finally giving reason to the whispery “beautiful”s we’ve been hearing, is a sublime little monologue. Although, on the character front, I can praise Five and Nyssa, two characters I find to be consistently boring are genuinely great here. Seeing Five struggle to control his fears and Nyssa slowly breaking over the course of the plot is easily the best work I’ve seen from Sutton and Davison thus far. And on the more technical side, one of Creatures of Beauty’s biggest selling points is its unique structure. We’re deep in experimental Big Finish territory right now and Briggs has decided to deliver us a story told in a non-linear format, jumping between different points in the story to expertly build a tension and mystery, starting with Nyssa being interrogated for murder and slowly unravelling the horrific events that lead up to it, dancing between the beginning and end, drip feeding us information all for the merit of that one, final moment. I have issues with Creatures of Beauty’s second half, but as for the end, like the very end, I have none. I actually clocked the twist a ways in, but luckily had forgotten about it enough so that the final reveal still hit me like a truck. So, it turns out the Doctor accidentally caused everything that happened by crashing the TARDIS into the ship carrying the radioactive waste that polluted Veln. It is a gut punch of an ending and the way it's revealed, finally bringing all the separated plot threads together for one, singular scene is glorious. Throw in Five and Nyssa’s ambiguous reactions to it all, whether the Doctor knew or not, Nyssa’s guilty conscience and you have the makings of a perfect closing moment.

But, Briggs is not a perfect writer, and this is, for all of its achievements, no perfect story. Remember when I said that for all of Briggs’ worlds and ideas and imagery, he was always unable to fill it with substance, well, Creatures of Beauty isn’t much better. The story is a fine narrative: simple and a little bit uneventful obscured by the complex structure. Because we never see anything in order, constantly piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle, it’s easy to overlook that the story basically just jumps between five or six scenes with a few quick moments in between. The story feels like it's missing something, like we skipped over some important development in the plot that would’ve helped things flow better. By Part 3, everything had begun to blend into one and what was a slowly drip-fed plot became a plot that stopped moving, ending halfway through and going on out of necessity. There are a lot of double edged swords here, the structure being one of them because it becomes overbearing after a while and ends up dragging out of the pacing of the story. And another one of these swords is the characters. As I said before, they’re dialogue is brilliant, and a couple of them are even engaging but so much of the cast feel almost personalityless, more vehicles for the plot than living, breathing facades. And, in the end, trying to diagnose the issue, I find that Briggs once again forgets to explore his world. Creatures of Beauty is very plot heavy and, because of that, we miss out on the intricacies of the setting and the characters. We never really get time to breathe and whilst Veln is built to be this massive and detailed society, we see such a small amount that it falls in between the cracks to a sort of liminal space where everything just feels a little incomplete, somewhat empty. And that’s a shame too, this story had some much going for it, it’s upsetting to see it stumble because of the writer’s repeating flaws.

However, Creatures of Beauty is pretty unlike any story I’ve heard before, and likely will not be like any story I hear again (maybe The Natural History of Fear, they have quite a few similar ideas). Nick Briggs knocked it out of the park, I think, and whilst he didn’t rectify many of his issues as a writer, he certainly improved upon them and I think this is his one script so far where what he wants to work, works. Could use some polish, but no doubt an impressive and sombre tragedy.

8/10

Pros:

+ Decidedly dark and brooding in a glorious and palpable way

+ A truly grim story that uses it torments for a purpose

+ Brigg’s dialogue is both realistic and deeply poetic

+ Writes Five and Nyssa better than any story before

+ Interesting and complex non-linear structure

+ Has one of the most horrific twists I’ve seen in an audio

Cons:

- Is a somewhat uneventful story that feels as if it's missing a few crucial moments

- The world is significantly under explored

- The cast is, for the most part, underdeveloped

- The structure is a double edged sword that causes issues with the plot in the second half