The Monthly Adventures #92 - "Nocturne" by Dan Abnett

There is a comfort in formula. I have often been a campaigner for the seven out of ten, for the pieces of media that strive to be nothing more than a pleasant and predictable time. Just look at Ubisoft’s entire game catalogue: formulaic but enjoyable all the same. Doctor Who is an interesting example of this phenomenon, because it both heavily relies on constant change and a lingering sense of familiarity, sometimes leading the generic stories to be good pieces of fun, and sometimes making them feel like they got old a couple decades ago. Nocturne is a script that teeters on the precipice between these two aspects of formula, constantly begging to be a classically thoroughfare runaround, but barrel rolling into pure, dreadful boredom. But does that mean there is nothing of quality to note?

The artist’s paradise of Glast City is a favourite getaway of the Doctor’s, whose oftentimes gone to peruse its concrete streets and vibrant art scene. But this time, something’s wrong. A violent murder by an unseen killer has set off a chain of events, and it all leads back to the disappearance of a troubled young composer.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Nocturne, for all its faults, has the makings of a great Doctor Who script. An utterly alien world deep in the throes of a renaissance, stalked by an unnatural killer brought to life by an abnormal musical composition. You could really do anything with the premise - from deep and gorgeously atmospheric world building to heart pounding tension - but instead, what we get is really nothing at all. Nocturne lacks the heart it needs to be truly brilliant and it adheres to no single tone or aim, simply opting for a bare bones structure reminiscent of some of Doctor Who’s oldest tropes. Some of the slower moments are saved by Abnett’s inherent skill as a writer, but most of this script drags like hell.

It’s competent enough to not be a complete trash fire and I at least liked a few of the ideas. The war torn, brutalist cityscape of Glast City was a brilliantly evocative location and the ideas of a future renaissance seems like a no brainer. I’ve brought this up in other reviews, but I adore when we run into little connections the Doctor has made in unseen travels, like, for instance, his firm friendships with a number of the major talents in the city. It’s things like this that made Nocturne feel like a real, lived in setting and I was decently immersed the whole way through the audio.

Another thing I’d like to throw praise towards is the idea for our antagonist: an empathetic, living piece of music that pulls emotion from wherever it’s composed; Nocturne, being a war-torn planet, has caused it to become incredibly deadly and begin hunting down and killing artists. You already know I adore villains that make use of their story’s format and the idea of living music being the villain of an audio play is incredible. Unfortunately, very little is done with it.

The biggest sin of Nocturne is probably the fact that it’s just wasted potential. The story could’ve been something super fun - maybe even great - but all we get is a derivative chore that moves at the pace of a stalled car. There’s so little here I would dare to call innovative or original, a good 90% of what we see is clichéd. We have the Doctor being called a spy, a random self sacrifice, robots getting corrupted by the antagonist, scene after scene of rehashed dialogue and story beats. By the end of its runtime, Nocturne had become exhausting.

And the thing that really clinches it for me is our sidecast, who are just awful in every regard. There is not a single person here who feels unique or memorable, every performance is fine and every character is serviceable. Except one, actually; the police chief Reeney was a confoundingly terrible character and I feel I have to bring her up. So, she’s the deliverer of the whole “he’s a spy!” speech (which she ends up doing twice, by the way) and her entire character flip flops depending on if the script needs padding. She arrests both the Doctor and Hex, assumes they’re both spies and murderers for literally no reason and then immediately trusts and is subservient to them for again, literally no reason. It’s moments and beats like this that really destroy Nocturne for me.

And the plot is full of them. I think the most egregious is when a character randomly decides she’s on the side of the psychotic living music entity (it was set up in one scene and not very well) just for some pointlessly shoehorned in tension. However, Abnett also manages to slip in some bizarrely great moments here and there too. Notably, veteran Will’s conversation with Ace as to his short time in at war is genuinely heartbreaking and phenomenally acted, which is weird because so little else is. And then there’s Ace’s conversation with the Doctor as to his duplicitous tendencies or the music creature being driven off by a character’s terrible poetry. There are moments of genuinely great Doctor Who in Nocturne, but that’s all they are, moments, reprieves.

Inherently, there is nothing wrong with formula. However, there is something wrong with blandness. Nocturne is not a story I would say is worth listening to, because its moments of greatness are brief and the rest derivation that can be found in better stories. It’s a competent script with some genuine merit but an astoundingly small amount of worth. Could’ve been so much better than it was, unfortunately.

5/10

Pros:

+ Great idea for a setting

+ The antagonist was a really cool concept

+ Peppered with moments of fantastic quality

Cons:

- Utterly derivative

- Dreadfully boring side cast

- Straight forward and predictable plot

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

Previous Story: Muse of Fire

This has all the makings of something good, and then it isn't. I enjoy having the Doctor meet characters he already has an established history with, but having them be so dull and uninteresting really makes me question why the Doctor keeps coming back. I did quite like the idea of treating some made up future time as if it was a proper period of history in the same way the Victorian period or the Renaissance are.

The idea of a music monster is a good one for audio but I don't think they did as much as they could have with it. There's some nice emotional beats but all in all I think this story was a bit of a miss.

Next Story: The Dark Husband