MR 012: The Fires of Vulcan

Now this is more like it Mr. Seventh Doctor. This one covers on a lot of topics I find interesting about Doctor Who. The idea that your fate is set in stone by having foreknowledge of events. The idea of changing history and what that might mean. And just a really interesting setting.

Not to mention this is the first appearance of Mel in a BF audio! That's very exciting. Mel gets to be in a story that isn't a panto for once! And she does a fantastic job here. She's every bit as friendly and full of life as I know her to be just with 100% less top of the lungs shrieking.

The TARDIS gets found at the site of Pompeii in the 1980s while the Doctor and Mel land in Pompeii where the Doctor thinks he's just met his fate. It's an interesting idea that foreknowledge of events will lead to a different event in the future. If the Doctor just immediately leaves then he won't know that the TARDIS is found here in the future and thus won't immediately leave, leading to the TARDIS being buried here. It implies that time is constantly happening over and over and over again and would create a double time loop. It changes into something different each loop. Instead the Doctor creates a single loop by letting the events play out.

This itself is an interesting idea because the Doctor often does this: he makes sure to avoid as much foreknowledge as possible. It means that time travellers should NEVER study history either. Because when they go to that time period they can't change anything because they'll create the double time loops.
Speaking of which, this audio only lightly touches on the idea that we can't save people involved in historical events. Which, to me, always felt arbitrary. The Doctor is a time traveller and so there's no reason why he wouldn't have foreknowledge of, say, the Margaret Thatcher government in The Happiness Patrol or not have foreknowledge of Pompeii. These are just events to the Doctor, equally part of history, but because the audience knows about one and doesn't know about others, we can't alter one of them. It's really less so the time traveller having foreknowledge and more the audience having foreknowledge of historical events that makes them unalterable.

I quite enjoyed the setting as well. The idea of the Doctor and Mel being messengers of Isis was said at the beginning, but it has drastic political implications throughout the story. Isis is a foreign goddess to Pompeii, and the Roman priestess sees this as a heretical religion. So you have the priestess wielding her influence in trying to discredit Isis and thus attacking the Doctor and Mel. It then comes out to look like Isis is punishing Pompeii when the Doctor and Mel get arrested and attacked because they are supposed to be her messengers.

There's also another plot thread where the Doctor is constantly getting challenged by a gladiator after the gladiator loses to him at dice which is kind of hilarious. Again, making it look like the goddess Isis is smiting the city for her messengers being attacked. McCoy gets some good stuff here as well when he's yelling at the gladiator about how it won't matter because they'll all be dead soon anyway.

I like that, in the end, we don't actually see the fate of any of the characters. We don't know if they've managed to evacuate or if they've died. And that's better, I should think. It does make me wonder, though, how much history could bend, just a little, if the city was evacuated before the eruption. Hmm...