Nekromanteia

The Monthly Adventures #041 - “Nekromanteia" by Austen Atkinson

Ok, so, I doubt this’ll go down well, but I think Nekromanteia is fine. Not good mind you, it’s just fine. It’s an average-as-vanilla script with a very regrettable scene in it. I can see why some people may consider this the worst audio story, but I frankly don’t get it. Remove five minutes from this audio and it becomes just another story. In fact, there is quite a bit of this script I can genuinely say I liked, I don’t think Nekromanteia is as bad as everybody makes it out to be. Does it deserve less hate though? That remains to be seen.

Called to a forgotten sector of space - dubbed Nekromanteia - the Doctor, Peri and Erimem come face to face with a corporation hellbent on discovering the secret to an age old magic and a coven of witches ready to feast on the flesh of heretics.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This story is flawed. Very, very flawed in fact, but I can’t help but say there are parts I thought were genuinely worth admiring. The first part to Nekromanteia feels like an entirely different story, it’s not as grim or bloody as the rest of the audio, mostly takes place in a different setting and acts as its own little bit of lore. We’re in the Garazone system, with Pakhars returning from Bang-Bang-a-Boom!, which one, is a weird story to link with this godforsaken thing and, two, I’m only now realising were a species from the VNAs. It’s dripping in atmosphere, which the whole story is but it’s strongest here, and does a fantastic job at worldbuilding. I actually think Atkinson’s greatest strength is his world; even when we get to the witchy planet Talderun, the descriptions are so stark and the sound design so great that the imagery we’re delivered is stunningly macabre and beautiful. As for the story, whilst I think it’s the primary reason Nekromanteia is so hated, there were some moments that I actually love. The Part 2 cliffhanger is the Doctor literally getting decapitated by witches, which people seem to hate for some reason but I love. And then following this, he winds up in a cricket themed afterlife where he makes polite conversation with god. See, this is fun! Nekromanteia can be fun, guys! It’s not all bleak and a lot of it is just darker than average Doctor Who, the whole story isn’t heinous. That or I’m wildly desensitised, I don’t know.

However, what I do know is heinous is that scene. That’s right, it’s finally time to talk about that scene. I’m not going to skirt around the issue so I’ll just say it, there’s a scene where a character tries to rape Erimem. It is implied she fights him off (which I think people tend to forget) but still, what? And then it’s just not brought up again and the would-be-rapist survives the story; in fact, he goes out in better shape than when he came in. Again, what? It’s a bizarre little mistake that is actually sickening and very much the primary thing people think of when they think of Nekromanteia. But here’s the thing, it’s incidental. It’s one scene with absolutely no bearing on the plot, and looking at it, it looks like it was added at a later point; it comes out of nowhere and goes back to nowhere without a second thought, there is no reason for it happening. When you could remove a page of a script and it loses its primary reason for being so hated, I don’t think that constitutes the worst story ever. And really, that’s the only particularly bad scene. The other moment people are quick to point out is when Peri wakes up naked on an altar but it sounds a lot worse than it actually is. I don’t think this was written with any direct sexual connotations in mind, it’s brief and she only encounters a witch trying to kill her and a respectful man who gives her her clothes whilst in this state. It’s barely commented on and easily glossed over, so I don’t think it’s worthy of any real criticism. Now, I’m not trying to excuse that scene, but I’m pointing out that it’s only one scene and isn’t something that affects the rest of the story, so whilst it’s indeed horrible and unnecessary, it shouldn’t be the only reason people rate Nekromanteia a 1/10.

As for more usual negatives, our cast this time round is terrible. Not a single character here has any real depth and most of them are just outright unlikeable. Even our regulars, they are all oddly apathetic and out of character, they don’t even react to each their friends’ deaths or even rapes. And I think the second half of Nekromanteia massively drops the ball. With all the mini subplots, the underbaked corporation villain, the twist that the witch coven aren’t actually the bad guys, an alien intelligence in Erimem’s cat sacrificing itself and more, it becomes over bloated and very quickly confusing. So much is so quickly explained to the listener that they just lose interest and, at least for me, I lost track of what was happening by the end of Part 3.

And that was Nekromanteia! Was it the worst Doctor Who story ever? No! Cut out five minutes and you have another run of the mill boring audio, maybe a bit darker, but nothing special. Take a really awful story, like Winter for the Adept, and try editing that into something better. You can’t, not unless you remake it entirely. And there were actually some good things in Nekromanteia. Part One especially I never hear talked about despite being neither that grim and also pretty damn good. There is something to admire here, shame it got overshadowed by that scene.

5/10

Pros:

+ Genuinely great world building and imagery

+ Dripping in atmosphere from start to finish

+ Has a few utterly brilliant moments

+ Fantastic first part that expertly sets the tone

Cons:

- That scene is as bad as people say

- Has a sidecast of one-dimensional, nasty characters

- Story gets over bloated and overly confusing by the end

14.09.2022

Oh, Nekromanteia. Truly, The Space Pirates of Big Finish.

A considerable amount of time is spent with characters you cannot care less about, all indistinguishable from one another. When the main characters are in the center of attention, it's either incomprehensible, disgusting or both. Was the rape really necessary for the story? (it was not)
Doctor died in this story. He was given a new body. That happened. Doctor numeration is difficult enough as it is, but now you can confidently subtract four as well, I guess.
0.5/5

MR 041: Nekromanteia

Is this a joke? Am I a joke to you? Am I being punked? What is this? Why is this? This is an absolute MASTERCLASS in what to do wrong in a Doctor Who story. Everything about this is terrible. It's boring. It's overly complicated for no reason. It's violent, dark and edgy just for the sake of it. It's overly sexualized just for the sake of it. The story is amateurish and basic. The dialogue is badly written and immature. The only thing it needed was a surprise conservative moral like Kerblam to complete the bad Doctor Who tropes list. All this immediately after the excellent Jubilee and the fun Bang-Bang-a-Boom! This felt more like a badly written Ao3 fanfic than an actual professionally produced audio drama with the original cast.

All that to mention that there is a pointless first part as well. The Doctor visits a space station with a friend who helps get him black market parts for the TARDIS, but that is completely irrelevant to the story. They're just suddenly transported into another world out of nowhere. And that's where the story really begins.

There's a large cult of evil witches who most of this story's pointlessly gratuitous content comes from. They're guarding a relic that contains their god. A corporation is after that relic. Ok cool. The corporation sends a ship that gets destroyed by the technologically superior witches who then kill everyone in it and stack up the corpses in a room where the TARDIS lands. There's a scene where the witches are "crawling on the outside of the ship" like they're insects. They of course eat the people they kill, obviously they're cannibals.

The only corporate survivors find the Doctor, mistake Erimem and Peri for witches (knowing this story probably JUST because they're women) and shoot them. Peri gets captured by the witches and then she gets taken to be stripped naked and bathed in oils. Again with the gratuitous sexualization. And then one of the survivors attempts to sexually assault Erimem. Why though? Why is this here? I don't care if you're sexualizing for the sake of it in fanfiction, but the main range is one of the most prominent non-tv Doctor Who spin offs. You NEED to have a reason for doing stuff like this and the story offers no excuse. It just does it just because it can.

Not only that, but the second episode ends with the Doctor GETTING HIS HEAD CUT OFF by the witches. Of all the Doctors, of course it happens to this one. The Fifth Doctor is true to form in this story: getting led around by the plot and taking a passive role. But this takes that character trait to the extreme. I always talk about how easy this Doctor is to bully, but even I feel a little bad for him. Just a tad.

When he dies, he goes into the relic which is one random guy's version of heaven, a cricket game in the Olympics, for some reason. And here we learn that he's been maintaining his afterlife for thousands of years with the witches watching over him, but the corporation is after him. The survivors of the attack steal the relic and then the corporation CEO destroys the ship with the relic on it, all of which potentially is going to cause the system to be destroyed because of the power it takes to maintain it.

The Doctor gets put back into his body by the guy in the relic and now it needs a new person to sustain it so it doesn't get destroyed. The Doctor offers himself, then Erimem, then the cat just randomly jumps up and gets taken as the new god. Huh. Sure, I guess. Poor Andronak.

The only interesting thing here, to me, is when an archeologist gets his tongue and heart cut out by the witches for desecrating the temple (more gratuitous violence), Erimem says that he deserved it for violating a temple. Which makes sense for her as she believes that violating a temple is one of the worst acts you can do. It just hit me when she said it that she is from a VERY different culture and time and it plays into that.

Otherwise, this is just terrible. I don't know why this was commissioned as a script in the first place. Nevermind acted out and edited. Oh yeah and the sound mixing is terrible too, like Loups Garoux. Just talking about the summary, you can tell how awful this was to listen to from start to finish. This one goes into the F tier bin and good riddance. Legend has it that Peter Davison asked that this writer never write for Big Finish again and good thing too.

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

Previous Story: No Place Like Home

Thank God that's over. I've listened to some awful stories on my chronological watchthrough *cough* The Boy That Time Forgot *cough* but this one is by far the worst. I'm not going to bother with a long review but this is genuinely some of the worst Doctor Who or Doctor Who adjacent material I have ever had the misfortune of listening to. Obviously there are the notorious scenes and they're as bad as you'd think but it's the consistently awful dialogue that I also despise. None of the characters are written like they're supposed to be. The Doctor is written with such disregard for his companions, Peri is suddenly completely incompetent and poor Erimem is only two stories in and she's already gone through something awful and the worst part is neither Peri nor the Doctor even cared! I'll choose to picture this story as an awful collective nightmare that they all had until I forget about it's existence (hopefully soon).

Next Story: The Axis of Insanity