The Monthly Adventures #036 - “The Rapture" by Joseph Lidster

There are a few Who writers who stand above all others, a few Who writers who pretty much always deliver quality stories, a few Who writers whose presence in a range will cause buyers to throw any amount of money at a release to get it. One of those few writers is Joseph Lidster. Renowned and revered in equal measure, Lidster is an immensely popular author still writing for Doctor Who to this day who has had his name attached to just about every range you could think of, from The Monthly Adventures, to Torchwood, to Bernice Summerfield, and it all began here, in a blistering rave of odd ideals and a fundamentally messy story.

Ace wants a break. Using her old name and determined to live a normal life, just for a day, she’s been taken to Ibiza by the Doctor, to take part in the new, hit rave everybody’s talking about: The Rapture. But not everything’s right at the Rapture; for the owners are planning something big and deadly, and vacationing college student Liam just so happens to have Ace’s picture in his coat pocket.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Lidster is a writer who is near unrivalled when it comes to one thing: character work. We’ll hit some of his best stories as we progress through the Main Range, which boast some of Doctor Who’s greatest character pieces, but The Rapture itself is nothing to sneer at. It has a whole lot of problems, which I will get on to, but I have to come out and praise Lidster’s greatest qualities, which all shine here. Front and centre is Ace (or McShane for a few audios but I sure as hell won’t be calling her by that misguided choice), who, on a break from travelling with the Doctor, meets none other than her estranged brother. Such a big introduction to canon feels like it shouldn’t work, but Lidster manages to mould the situation enough so that it feels natural and allows this to become a very touching reunion for these two characters. I’m actually quite sad we never got to see Liam again after this because he was a genuinely very sweet character and that paired well with Ace and felt like a really good way to see more intricacies of her personality. As for the audio’s other defining factor - the music - I really dig it. Jim Mortimore is once again leading the soundtrack and has, this time around, given us a score of house music and dance pieces that not only really help to build the setting but also double as actually pretty good bits of music, especially the remixed intro theme that sadly seems to cut off early at the beginning of each part. Another thing I felt was significantly special about this story was the editing, something I haven’t really touched on as of yet in these reviews. The Rapture takes a very unique approach to intercut scenes and has lines flow into one another, a character will say something that’ll be relevant in the scene it cuts to, or a line will be finished by another person in another place and with this technique, Lidster at one point manages to interlock three scenes in what I consider the highlight moment of the audio, especially with Caitriona having the world’s jazziest drug trip, flying through the sky as Sylvester McCoy growls into a microphone about being the “sandman”.

However, for as much nuanced character building and psychedelic wonders there are, I can’t deny that The Rapture isn’t very good. Lidster’s strengths clearly lie in character and, because of that, he can often really struggle with the story. This whole script is messy, and that’s the only word I can think of to adequately describe it; it’s littered with problems that all just pile on top of each other to make for a somewhat disheartening time. Our antagonists, Gabriel and Jude, aren’t particularly threatening or empathetic, simply just there to create the story, I wasn’t too interested in their pasts and both turned out to have very little to them conceptually, just escapees from a dimensional war who are using religious imagery to trick one of them into forgetting his PTSD (that actually sounds a lot more interesting than it is on paper). They’re not terrible, they’re just not enough to hold up a story. Also, I think that acting in this audio is, on the whole, pretty bad. Chief among them is Caitriona ; Anne Bird really can’t do drunk acting well. However, pretty much everybody phones in their performance at points, in particular during rave scenes. I don’t doubt that it’s hard to recreate the passion of a nightclub in a silent audio booth but the undeniably forced performances make all the moments set in The Rapture near impossible to sit through. And then there’s the whole thing about depression. See, the character of Caitriona is described as being a “manic depressive”, and mental health struggles are pretty much central to the plot, but it’s handled incredibly poorly. We see no stance taken on issues surrounding mental health except for those of our villains and, whilst I don’t think Lidster himself believes that “being depressed is selfish because our ancestors had to fight in wars”, he never really presents a counter argument so all we’re left with is a ridiculously harmful and ignorant viewpoint that really just rubs me the wrong way. And it’s here where Lidster fails in character writing because there’s no point to any of this focus on manic depression as none of our characters have really grown at the end, they just seem to be how they were at the start with Liam and Caitriona still in a weird, toxic friendship where they each ignore their own problems by helping the other with theirs. I think it’s just a well-meaning allegory that was poorly executed (or at least I hope it is) but the way it’s written feels somewhat scummy. As for the plot itself, it’s just pretty badly written. It has one too many plot holes for me, there’s a part three twist where the Doctor’s old friend, Gustavo, turns out to be working with Gabriel and Jude, but that whole subplot is dropped five minutes later. Why Gabriel’s music can hypnotise and even kill people isn’t ever really explained besides “his music’s really good” and the use of PCP (though I think it’s funny that the “angel dust” Gabriel uses to help people ascend was fully just the drug angel dust, no subtlety whatsoever). The whole thing feels underbaked and is really a B-tier Doctor Who episode with nothing wholly special or unique about it, which is a shame because there were some good ideas knocking around in here, Lidster was just clearly having an off day.

The Rapture is a really poor debut for one of my favourite audio writers. The 17 blistering tracks advertised on the front cover make for a dizzying sensory experience with some absolutely wonderful character work thrown in, but it all feels surface level. Kind of like a rave in that respect, so maybe this whole thing is genius and I’m just missing the point. But the mishandling of mental health and a somewhat uninspired story make The Rapture overall a disappointment. There are things to admire here, but nothing that makes the story worth it.

5/10

Pros:

+ The material with Ace and Liam works surprisingly well and is genuinely quite sweet

+ The rave-fuelled soundtrack is incredibly fun

+ Really interesting editing style that makes for some very fun sequences

Cons:

- Gabriel and Jude make for underwhelming antagonists

- Littered with some pretty bad performances

- Has some weird, shaky morals surrounding mental health and depression

- Messy plot that feels very underdeveloped