The Monthly Adventures #96 - "Valhalla" by Marc Platt

Sometimes you get a story where there is simply so little to talk about that you end up filling your word count with rants about how little there is to talk about. Valhalla is very much one of these stories. Platt is a bizarre writer to me because he both lurks in the legendary annals of fandom, being a key figure in the Wilderness Years, and frequently pens utterly lambasted scripts; for every Spare Parts or Lungbarrow, there’s about five Valhallas. And that makes it seem like this is some travesty, but it's really not. It’s a lot worse. It’s painfully alright.

The lunar colony of Valhalla is a dead end, a commercial centre selling junk and broken dreams. But there’s a new seller in town: he calls himself the Doctor and he’s here about the colony’s bizarre termite infestation.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

If there’s one thing that Platt does undeniably well, it’s atmosphere. From the gothic shroud that encircles Ghost Light to the chilling coldness of the corrupted TARDIS in Time’s Crucible, all his work has a very specific tone to them that helps them stand out from the crowd. And Valhalla is no different, its titular colony being easily its biggest pro. The slapdash, rotting world is brilliantly realised on audio but the script definitely doesn’t slack off either. From the bookable riots to the casual indifference of all the miserable residents, Platt manages to build a powerful setting that truly does envelop you. But that’s also where the problem for me lies, because this audio is utterly, undeniably competent. It’s incredibly well put together in my opinion and there’s very little that’s actively bad, but there’s also very little that’s actively good.

This is a creature feature at heart and it really struggles to be more than that. I find its downfall comes in the fact that rather than go all in on the b-movie aspect of its plot, it tries to make it a more serious and nuanced story about slavery and purpose. In summary, the termites underneath the colony have become intelligent and are planning to enslave and sell the colonists. The Doctor saw an advert for their trade a year in the future and decided to go back and stop them. Now, where this could be a big, shouty, shallow but endlessly fun monster flick, it instead chooses to try and be something deeper, which really shoots it in the foot. The termites, when they’re big scary monsters, are just that: big, scary and monsters. However, during Part Three it’s revealed that they possess human level intelligence, including speech. And it’s here where things really go wrong for me because I find them so boring. There is another story that has faceless, dull, amorphous insects as its antagonist and that story is The Creed of the Kromon so that’s how you know Valhalla f**ked up. I’m not interested in a bunch of personalityless bugs and for the most part, I found them annoying.

Not to mention that the story feels like it's going through the motions the whole time; there is not an original bone in this script’s body, it just trundles along through familiar beat after familiar beat as we wait for the inevitable outsmarting to happen. Not to say that there isn’t something to be enjoyed here: Platt’s pacing is excellent and there’s a very nice rise and fall of action, the momentum never gives up and the story never feels stilted. However, there’s nothing to actually interest me within that movement, the story is completely banal in every way. There’s also an attempt at introspection on the Doctor’s character, with him considering settling down, but it goes nowhere and is basically just window dressing. 

There’s a lot I simply don’t know how to talk about because I felt so apathetic towards it. Michelle Gomez is in this story as a one-time companion but her performance is utterly fine, the character is utterly fine, it doesn’t interest me or enrage me, which is what can be said about a majority of this audio play. It’s a story seeped in derivation with very little making it stand out and that’s super unfortunate, because Platt is a writer who absolutely can do great stuff, this just doesn’t know what it ought to be.

Valhalla is a forgettable story, it’s a story with very little that makes it worth a listen. In fact, the only thing I can think of is the inclusion of Michelle Gomez years before her debut as Missy and if your only claim to fame is the inclusion of a soon-to-be well-known actor, that’s probably not really a positive. There’s very little to say on Valhalla, it’s not actively bad, but it is actively mediocre.

5/10

Pros:

+ Rich and fleshed out world

+ Good pace and momentum

Cons:

- Incredibly generic and unthreatening antagonist

- Plot points are derivative and boring