We have LIVE 34 and one of the most ingenious stories Big Finish has ever come up with. A prime example of early Big Finish’s experimental nature as the entire story is presented as a news broadcast on an Earth colony world that has fallen into a benign dictatorship through corruption and faked terrorism. And over the course of the broadcast the Doctor and friends show up in the background from various stories and features as they try to organise a revolution in order to expose the government. It’s one of the most intense and confrontational Doctor Who stories I’ve ever come across that doesn’t sugarcoat its real-world parallels whilst tearing apart it’s news channel counterpart that it’s parodying. The only issue I and a lot of fans had a problem with is the ending does wrap itself up a bit too easily with what devolves into 25 minutes of heavy-handed exposition. The direction LIVE 34 was going in with it’s nasty and depressing depiction of a society under a corrupted dictatorship, I feel there was a much cleverer ending we could’ve got rather than resort to Doctor Who’s usual quick fix scenario. Aside from that though this is a highly recommended listen.

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Dreamtime

This early experimental era of Big Finish can be really hit or miss sometimes. But when it hits, it hits. The use of radio broadcasts throughout the whole story is perfect for the audio medium and it immerses you in a way no other story really can. I was sat there listening to this as if I truly lived in Colony 34 and was following along with the news. We get some great stuff for both Ace and Hex. This is great, especially in Hex's case given Dreamtime didn't give him much in the way of development. I love the backstory we get for him and Philip Olivier is fantastic at playing him.

The subtle ways in which you can see how corruption effects LIVE 34 throughout the story are brilliant. In fact, the way the whole story emphasises just how awful and corrupt Colony 34 is (and it gets dark) make for one of the most cathartic moments I've ever had the pleasure of listening to in Doctor Who. When the Doctor arrives at the big speech given by the fake Premier and just shuts the whole thing down. The entire story is building up to that, it's like the scene at the end of a murder mystery where the detective gathers everyone into a room and explains everything that happened only it's been amplified to a billion. This speech alone might be Sylvester McCoy's best performance yet and it'll be interesting to see if he can top it. This story feels extremely suited to 7, I really couldn't see any other Doctor here.

I'd heard a lot of good things about LIVE 34 and it still managed to exceed my expectations. Truly a story everyone should listen to at some point.

Next Story: Night Thoughts

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Now the weather. It will be unseasonably warm today with highs in the 80s, make sure you wear that sunscreen. And turning now to traffic, the M9 has been closed down today due to a transport crash. Yes, government sources are confirming the death of Resident Doctor, the leader of the FDP, Freedom and Democracy Party. The government has ruled out any foul play and is blaming the crash on pilot error. The party is in shambles after its landslide election loss to Premier Jaeger yesterday and the tragic death of its leader leaves it with an uncertain future. The FDP have submitted complaints of widespread election fraud by the government, but no proof has been offered as yet and their complaints will likely go unheard. We go live now to Premier Jaeger's victory celebration on the steps of city hall.

This is more like it. So far the Seventh Doctor has had the most conservative stories of the main range. He always had the reputation as a rebel and it felt very unearned, but this is probably the story where he gets that reputation. I feel like most people forget what actually happens in Fearmonger, Flip-Flop, and Dreamtime, but they remember this one vividly. That's absolutely fair. This one is much better than those. No "both sides are bad." No "reject modernity and embrace tradition." No "immigrants want to enslave us actually." The Doctor roundly rejects all of those notions in this story and is the rebel against the fascist government. The story does not attempt to make the fascist look good in any way or say that those who oppose him are bad. The Doctor works to take down the fascist government and that's it. It's refreshingly leftist for a change and I'm so here for it.

Every episode is a different day's broadcast of a radio station: LIVE 34. This is yet another experimental format and it works quite well for this one. A lot of early main range have experimental formats. They don't always work out well. Like The Rapture, the Divergent Universe arc, or Flip-Flop (to be fair, Flip-Flop could have been remembered as a classic if it didn't have a bad moral). While others work out very well like Creatures of Beauty, Natural History of Fear, and Doctor Who and the Pirates.

The first episode has the radio announcer interviewing the Doctor from a transport on the way to the studio, but it was waylaid. He is the head of the FDP and is trying to force the government to have elections after the Premier has suspended them. Indeed, the Premier has suspended a lot of individual rights and freedoms and you can hear him give his reasons for all of it in this episode. It's good set up. It's the barely concealed face of respectability on fascism before we get to the ugly, hateful truth underneath. There's a hint of what's to come here. Blaming immigrants and trying to link the FDP with rebels. There's a couple of explosions, one at a government office and one at a factory with workers in it. The Doctor points out that the factory explosion doesn't make any sense for the rebels since they want to recruit those people, not kill them.

The second episode sees Ace as the media styled "Rebel Queen." There's an undercover reporter who sees the poverty stricken side of town and interviews Ace as she talks about the conspiracies that the government is covering up. They hide poverty from the main three cities on the colony and have travel restrictions so nobody can see the slums for themselves. Nor the death that occurs daily over food. The government comes and collects these dead bodies and nobody knows why.

It's astounding that the government even allows this story to be broadcast. It's also astounding that none of the higher ups at LIVE 34 pulled the plug on this story before it was aired, before the reporter even went to interview Ace in the first place. Normally in our world, a story like this would never be allowed to be played. The corporations that control the media wouldn't want people to see images of poverty in their own country on tv because then they might start asking questions.

Indeed, the next episode starts with the government censuring LIVE 34 and forcing them to pull the broadcast of that episode as well as the mysterious suicide of the reporter who did it.

It then leads into an apparently regular segment on the show where they follow around a working person on their shift to show what that's like. They're following around a paramedic tonight and naturally that is Hex, who I completely forgot existed until Thicker Than Water last story. This feels like how they used C'rizz for his second story in the highly experimental Natural History of Fear. We're using Hex for his second real story in the experimental LIVE 34 (Dreamtime doesn't exist, you can't convince me it does). So once again we can't really get to know him very well. To be fair, this one has Hex actually being himself rather than C'rizz being an aspect of a personality (It's complicated, go listen to it).

The reporter sees that there's ben excavation of dinosaur bones under the hospital. I'm not sure why this was here because it doesn't seem to mean anything to the rest of the story. She then goes to see Hex. They see a mysterious van coming to pick someone up from the hospital before they go off on their shift in the ambulance. Hex almost drives into a massive hole on a call to a lady who fell into a hole in her house. The hole extends out into the road. Hex goes down to investigate the hole which smells like sulfur while the reporter tells him to come back. But the hole is horrifying. It's a mass grave filled with dozens of skeletons, some even kids. They've all been shot and burned. But then before we can properly process it, Hex and the reporter are arrested by government security agents and the broadcast fails.

I'm less surprised that this broadcast happened. It was supposed to be live, after all, and the station wouldn't have had any idea of what Hex was going to find. The government takes over the station completely and the reporter gets fired while the segment gets heavily edited and censored, of course.

The next day we see the results of the election and Ace, the "Rebel Queen" getting arrested and tortured. Which definitely sucks. Ace goes through so much doesn't she? I'm surprised the FDP managed to force an election at all, but naturally the results show an overwhelming 80% victory for Jaeger. The FDP tries to submit claims of election fraud, but what with the communication lines being shut down to avoid outside interference, the Central Colony Commission is unlikely to hear their complaints.

Tragically it seems the Doctor has died in a crash as well, his transport crashing in the mountains between the cities. Oh dear oh dear. What will the FDP do now that their party leader has died. This is when the gloves come off. The fascists believe they are safe. They've won the mandate. And now they can reveal their true colors. They get a confession out of Ace threw torture, getting her to confess that she's linked to the FDP and that it was all a conspiracy by immigrants to strip mine Colony 34 of its resources. Sounds EXACTLY like what Flip-Flop said about immigrants. Except this time it's the bad guys saying it instead of the supposed "heroes." I was absolutely waiting for immigrants to get the blame. That is critical in fascist regimes. The outsiders are always to blame. They're always out to get you. Indeed, Jaeger says the "great replacement" white nationalist conspiracy. Immigrants want to replace the residents of Colony 34 and steal their jobs and lives. Flip-Flop, itself, also advocates for this conspiracy. This is good stuff. Putting this rhetoric in the mouths of the villains is all too prescient considering the fascist age we live in right now.

The Doctor is not dead though. He knew Jaeger would try to kill him and didn't board that transport. He's fifty steps ahead, naturally. They actually did get a communication out to the Central Colony Commission. It turns out that Jaeger isn't really who he appears to be. He's a security agent meant to look like Jaeger because the real Jaeger had a disease that got worse and worse and looked horrible. They needed someone to speak to the crowds. But the security agent Jaeger ended up taking over. They won elections since Jaeger was popular, but there was a sudden energy crisis as the energy resources dried up. Jaeger was going to lose as politicians always do when prices go up. So he came up with a plan. Humans made for a fantastic source of power. So the government dug up bodies from graves, but that wasn't enough. They needed more fuel. They actually invited immigrants in on the promise of good jobs and good lives and then exploited them, killing them for fuel.

It definitely does remind me of how undocumented immigrants come to the US looking for a better life and then they're exploited. They're not quite killed for fuel, but it's close. They're worked half to death in fields and factories and they can't complain. If they complain about work conditions, they'll get deported. Corporations will hold that over their head. If you form a union, we'll just call ICE. And then undocumented immigrants still get blamed for everyone's problems as they always are. Like I said, hatred of immigrants is a vital part of fascism. We get to see that play out quite strongly here in this story.

The Central Colony Commission thus declares the election null because the candidate running wasn't really the person he said he was and the Doctor was officially dead. I wish we had a strong central government that could come and save the US, but unfortunately the US is one of the strongest countries in the world. Nobody is going to stop it. The central government IS fascist.

I do like the reveal that Jaeger is not the real Jaeger, for this story, but it's not so realistic in real life. It's a neat wrap up to the story, of course. We get to see Jaeger dragged off by the crowd and killed, begging for his life. The same crowd that was cheering him on adoringly not five minutes ago. And then.... the story just ends. In real life, however, fascist dictators don't become such because they're impersonating a "real" political. They ARE real politicians. Trump didn't just get into office on a pretense. He ran and his ideas were popular and he won. Simple as that.

Still, despite that one bit, this story does a fantastic job of showing how fascism works. There's even a little bit of 1984 in here when Jaeger brings Ace on stage and the crowd gets the hour of hatred against her. It does a good job of showing the way fascist government suppress any and all dissent, mostly by going after media, and it does a good job of showing how fascists maintain power. By blaming immigrants and generally shifting the focus away from themselves and onto groups that are powerless. Right now, of course, that is undocumented immigrants and mostly trans people.

This is a stellar story, one that is intriguing to listen to from start to finish. It plays with its format and it pays off very well. Every bit and every clue and every scene work to make a cohesive, strong whole. And that ending is phenomenal. Very well done. Well acted, written, directed, and edited. Whoever worked on this should be proud.

Due to the disturbing nature of this week's review, the Central Review Authority, a new branch of the government, has redacted several sections of this text. Rest assured, we here at Slytherindoctor Reviews take this very seriously. We care first and foremost about our readers. So, the writer in question has been fired.

LIVE 34 é mais uma história do chamado período experimental da BIG FINISH. Esse é um áudio dito por muitos como "um 10/10 certeiro"... Olha sinceramente, pra mim ficou um pouco longe disso - Novamente temos mais uma sátira política que aborda os mesmo assuntos clicherizados de sempre, um político vilão, corrupção, um grupo de rebeldes sendo a resistência, um alto controle das informações, um cenário de eleição acirrado e tudo finalizando com a máscara de um político caindo. Mas o motivo de muitos rotular LIVE 34 como algo "Conceitual" é pela sua forma diferenciada de como o seu conteúdo é entregue e reproduzido ao ouvinte, toda a história é relatada através de uma transmissão de rádio que em vários momentos é noticiado os acontecimentos que envolvem a política do local. De verdade...Inicialmente eu pensei "Uau, genial isso" mas conforme a história foi progredindo aaaah cara...isso me cansou MUITO, caminhou para uma narrativa bem chata de se acompanhar cheia de discursos politizados e linhas de falas gigantescas dos jornalistas trazendo as notícias, além disso o áudio também possui aquela mania do Moffat de ficar testando a inteligência de seu público, você passa vários momentos questionando os personagens principais, o contexto da historia, questiona se realmente está entendendo e etc etc. Em resumo, não me entenda errado, a trama de LIVE 34 é ótima SIM, o que não me ganhou mesmo foi sua """narrativa"" diferenciada (o lance de transmissão de rádio) e a temática política repetida...Ah e a conclusão...nada de surpreendente, pode se dizer até mesmo que foi um pouco apressada.

This audio is top tier. It is so immersive. Through a combination of interesting worldbuilding, increadible sound design and clever exposition, it is hard to avoid being enveloped by the setting and the plot. The entire plot is conveyed through radio broadcasts which is very creative and works very well. This audio is tense, exciting and full of mystery. My only gripe is that the ending is a little bit rushed.

This is also a good standalone audio. All you need to know is that the Seventh Doctor is travelling with companions Ace and Hex (Hex being original to the Big Finish audios).