The Monthly Adventures #051 - “The Wormery" by Paul Magrs and Stephen Cole

The Wormery, from its very beginning, was a mistake. Despite being the 51st release, it came out alongside Master, before Zagreus and, even in correct listening order, is this odd break in tension during the Divergent Arc. However, despite its bizarre placement and messy release, I had high hopes going into this; Paul Magrs is a writer who particularly intrigues me and whose previous audio in the Main Range - The Stones of Venice - I found enjoyable. Stephen Cole is most definitely a writer I’m not too fond of, what stories from him I have experienced being mediocre, but I assumed his involvement would be minimal, what with The Wormery being the introduction of Magrs’ most popular character - Iris Wildthyme - into The Monthly Adventures. I was wrong.

Bianca’s is a very exclusive little club, a decadent little corner of Berlin where you could find the meaning of life at the bottom of a glass. The Doctor has come here to put his feet up, but the sudden arrival of time travelling adventuress and alcoholic Iris Wildthyme puts a spanner in the works. But there are dark things going on in Bianca’s, things in the shadows, and they know Iris. All too well.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Before anything else, the plot of The Wormery interested me; the blurb was a lot of intriguing ideas I couldn’t wait to dig into. And a lot of them revolved around one Iris Wildthyme. Being somebody who has been anxious to get into Paul Magrs’ extensive catalogue for a while now, I was very excited to finally meet his most popular addition to the Whoniverse. And for the most part, I wasn’t disappointed. Iris was a lot to handle at first, she comes in loud and proud and is sort of a sensory overload but as the story goes on, Katy Manning’s enthusiastic performance and a distinct consistency in characterisation turn her into a fun and wholly chaotic character that easily brightens what is an otherwise exhausting story. Not that she needed to brighten the setting itself, however, the mellow and velvet-lined Bianca’s is a really fantastic locale that not only exudes a palpable atmosphere but also includes a nice sci-fi twist, being a space station accessible by a number of wormholes throughout time and space, including one in 1930s Berlin. And Bianca herself, owner of the club, makes for a really great antagonist. Nice performance aside, the idea that she’s Iris’ version of the Valeyard, the darker amalgamation of her that crept out towards the end of her life, trying to steal her former self’s remaining regenerations, is a wild concept that I think works superbly and fits in with the magical realism thing Cole and Magrs were going for here. And that’s it. That’s everything I liked. At least, everything I could understand. Seven shows up at the end, McCoy gets one line and then the story ends but it’s sort of fun I guess, was a nice little refresher after slogging through the rest of this god forsaken mess.

Can I say I didn’t like The Wormery? Yes, but not without a “but”. Afterall, how can one dislike something they couldn’t understand? This story is utter bullshit, and there is no cleaner, kinder or easier word to describe it. Cole and Magrs throw so many ridiculous ideas at the wall and it’s fascinating how few of them stick. I don’t know if it was just me, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention or something, but this story is so nonsensical and confusing and overpacked with technobabble that it just loses me. There are worms in the drinks, and they’re alive and there are also living shadows that are infecting the clientele and they’re like the worms but only what the worms could’ve been and this all somehow ties into the Bianca plot and also the Doctor is in love now. Yeah, this audio tries to do some interesting characterisation, especially with its leads, but it completely and utterly fails. There’s this whole subplot where the Doctor falls in love with Bianca, much to Iris’, who seemed to be in love with him herself, dismay. The Doctor falling in love is a concept as old as time that has rarely been done well. It’s so well established that the Doctor finds it hard to love, his life like stepping stones, never being able to settle and being so superior to everybody around him inherently, it would take a lot of care to positively say that he had fallen in love. If you want a good example, see the very next audio - Scherzo - which I think executes this better than anything before it. It’s brief and undefined and ridiculous and it’s a shame that Cole and Magrs tried any character development because their cast is a group of cardboard cut outs with funny voices. Every person here is a cartoon, besides maybe Bianca or the Doctor, and it is gruelling to sit through. I did not care about anybody here and the entire time I was waiting for different people to stop talking. And I wanted people to stop talking the most when the story kept flicking back to a pointless framing narrative. For some reason, this story is being told by an older version of one of the characters and they won’t stop interrupting. There is a bit in part one where she interrupts literally every five minutes to tell us about the thing we just listened to and it is not only patronising but endlessly irritating. Unnecessary narration seems to be a thing that irks me, when there is nothing added through it, it just becomes an interruption.

And that is all I have to say about The Wormery. I would go a little more in depth, talk about which parts of the plot I liked or didn’t like but, to be honest, I can’t. It is a confusing, self sabotaging, patronising, exhausting mess and I have never seen anything fail so miserably at every single thing it wants to do. Nothing works, no idea comes through. That blurb, the one that made me so interested in The Wormery, might as well be pointless because every intriguing thing on there is completely sidelined so Cole and Magrs can keep blabbing about shadows or some other crap.

3/10

Pros:

+ Iris was infectiously fun and chaotically realised by a stunning Katy Manning

+ Bianca’s was a great setting with a fun idea behind it

+ Bianca herself, both in concept and character, made for a good antagonist

+The cameo from Seven was a nice amendment

Cons:

- Is a maelstrom of poorly conceived technobabble

- The cast is overflowing with one dimensional cartoons

- The narration is utterly pointless and keeps interrupting

- Tries and fails to work in interesting character development

- Muddled story that is near impossible to keep a track of