Persuasion

The notes I took while listening to this episode were very brief, and said, simply: it was fine. And I think, writing this up a few weeks later, that is my enduring memory. It was fine. I haven't listened to any of the UNIT stories with Klein in, though I don't feel I missed any context.

The Doctor meets again with Klein, now safely in her job at UNIT, and her assistant, Will Arrowsmith. And poor Will... well. He's annoying. I haven't felt this irritated at a reccuring character since Thomas Brewster, and even though I wanted to like Will, he's just grating. He feels like a proto-Osgood, in some ways, but without any of the charm.

But enough griping. What else is there to say? Writing this after listening to the full trilogy, it's very obvious that the whole point of this episode is to be a prequel to what's to come, setting up the Persuasion Machine as an evil device to control the universe, and the characters. And so, in that sense, it is successful. But as a story? Well, it's fine.

Persuasion involves a superweapon created by a Nazi scientist called Schalk being pursued by more than just Earthly nations but also by extraterrestrials. It also sees beings from another universe entering ours and the Doctor co-opting the services of Elizabeth Klein in investigating the device and its creator.

Persuasion has a lot going on but it takes a while for the disparate parts to come together. The super beings from another dimension, the Shepherd and Shepherdess, are tangential to the story for a fair while before influencing human characters as angels may in myths and legends. They are a difficult aspect to get a handle on due to being the sort of all-powerful, amoral beings that Doctor Who often loves to include but can’t always satisfactorily develop. To be honest, these two are a bit too similar to the Elder Gods, the Guardians and the Eternals to really be particuarly interesting (although the performances of Paul Chahadi and Miranda Raison are excellent).

This is one of those audios which maintain interest throughout but, afterwards, you’re hard pressed to actually remember a lot of the plot. Schalk has a terrible super weapon which behaves a bit like the Conscience of Marinus (and this time round the Doctor thinks its a bad thing, unlike in that story where he actively helps a man who wants to control the thoughts of an entire planet…..). Various aliens want the device (including the Sontarans apparently – they’re not in this story which is a shame because, despite BF’s arguable overuse of them, they might have made it more interesting).

The overriding take-away from this story, though, are the characters of Klein and Will Arrowsmith. The Doctor turns up at UNIT and basically tricks Klein into joining him in the TARDIS. Unknown to both of them, Will stows away and ends up challenging Jeremy Fitzoliver for the crown of ‘most ill-judged and annoying companion ever’. And that’s the problem with this story – Will overshadows everything about it. I’m writing this review a good couple of months since listening to the story and I don’t have much to comment on aside from Will.

He is terrible. I’m sure that Christian Edwards is a perfectly good actor, but this is basically Jeremy Fitzoliver 2.0 – he’s stereotypically posh, stereotypically useless in the field, stereotypically annoying. Is he supposed to be these things? If he is then the writer, actor and director have absolutely nailed it -but why would you want such a character in your story. If he isn’t meant to be like that, then at what point do the creative team step in and say ‘hold on a minute, maybe we should tone this down’.

Will thoroughly weakens the character of Klein too. Klein is a complicated character – alternate versions and all that, but giving her a ill-judged ‘sidekick’ does nothing to lighten the character or give Tracey Childs a chance to develop Klein in any sort of interesting way (which is a shame after the way the character was developed in her first ‘return’ trilogy).

There is also some mildly amusing business with an alien race called the Klecht who are like a company who goes around buying out other species so that they can eventually get what they want (in this case, the Persuasion machine).

But overall, this is an audio which has a lot of elements, none of which gel in a particularly satisfying way. This may be because, ultimately, the situation with Schalk and the machine is resolved at the end of the trilogy of releases (this is followed by Starlight Robbery (with the Sontarans) and Daleks Among Us) but neither of those are necessarily satisfying continuations or endings of the arc – or of Klein and Will’s time aboard the TARDIS.