MR 085: Red

Red. Red. Red. Red. Red. RED. RED. RED. RED! RED! RED!!!!!!!!!! RRRRRRRREEEEEEDDDDDDD!!!!!!

Oh what did I just murder someone? Huh. That's strange. Ah well. That taste of violence is a work of art.

Welp. Another day another mediocre Seventh Doctor story. There's some interesting ideas here, but ultimately it kind of collapses under its own narrative, particularly at the end.

We start our story in a large living city called The Needle. It's very strange. It manipulates the structures around you to move you to where you're going. I'm not sure what that's about, but sure. It's a cool idea. The super computer that runs this place (because there's always a super computer right?) has chipped everybody in the city to suppress all violent urges. Only the chips are malfunctioning and occasionally having the opposite effect.

There is also an undercity filled with people who have left The Needle and deactivated their chips, wanting to experience what violence is like. And there's an intermediary in The Needle who works with the people from the Undercity and wants to experience violence, but doesn't actually want to deactivate the chip. That in itself is an interesting dichotomy. She wants to feel it when it's safe, but actually going down to the undercity would not be safe, not really.

The Doctor gets chipped and Mel falls out of the Needle into a waiting car. She's pretty appropriate for this story since she's called Red by the characters, being a red head and all. When the chip malfunctions, causing someone to kill someone else, they start shouting red over and over again. For some reason the Doctor is linked to it too.

Mel gets to experience the undercity and see first hand what being deprived of violence for so long has caused. There are people whose entire job it is to push the human body as far as it can and see how much it can endure. That is rather grim in and of itself. The people are fascinated by Mel, especially, because she's not chipped so she's capable of much more violence than any of them.

Meanwhile the Doctor investigates the killings. This is where the story starts to collapse in on itself. It turns out that it is sentient technology from the future or some such? And it was brought here by another time traveler. It is a sentient program that has infected the super computer and has thus infected all the chips. The Doctor is linked to it because he's also a time traveler. Again, it's a very strange explanation. I'm not sure what this writer was going for. I would have been perfectly happy to just say it was a manifestation of decades of repressed violence coming out as a glitch in the system. I would have loved to see an ending where all the chips malfunction and the entire city starts killing each other. That is not quite what happens, though that really would have committed.

Instead, the super computer starts killing people. It sees its responsibility to stop the violence and the only way to stop it is to kill the chips and thus kill the people with the chips. Which is certainly.... a choice. Mel uses her expert computer programming skills of... turning it off and on again to reset the computer and ultimately shut it down. Only The Needle is linked to the computer and collapses as well.

There's a lot of stuff that happened in the middle but I don't really remember it. I do think this one needed a couple more drafts before being put out there, though. The ending and explanation didn't need to be this overly complicated.

Oh and it does need to be said that McCoy's overacting is a bit much here. His performance in the show is very much physical and that physicality is obviously missing with just audio. A lot is lost hearing him dramatically shout "Red" over and over again. It's like Unregenerate. They just let him chew the scenery for an hour, but it's just not that interesting to listen to after awhile. I don't want to dislike McCoy's Doctor, but he really has gone down the rankings since I started main range, ah well. Maybe one day he'll have interesting audio stories.

What an interesting story. It is not a story you often hear described as a Big Finish “classic”. Perhaps this is because it’s release #85 in the Main Range, from 2006, it hasn’t got the sheen of the range’s early years that fan’s adore so deeply.

Red is about a society that has such a poor frame of reference for pain and suffering that their incapacity to feel these sensations makes them seek it and simulations of them. They want to be scared, they want to be hurt - now that's a Doctor Who pitch.

You also get to hear Mel (the health nut) on drugs which is a hell of a listen! The fact they were allowed to do this at a time when the new show was back on BBC1 is flabbergasting, but it really works. I was recently reading an archive issue of DWM from 2003 where I saw that some fans were dismayed at the idea that Bonnie Langford was being employed by Big Finish, she was being held up as one of the problems with the show in the 1980s. Red is proof, if any were needed, that she is a stellar actor and the character has so much potential for development left in her following season 24. So many avenues to go down.

Oh, also. Shout out to Sandi Toksvig who has an incredible guest turn as a fascinating but unscrupulous, serious but funny, well written lesbian character. She adds a lot of dynamism to the story. It’s always nice to hear a familiar voice too.

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

Previous Story: Unregenerate!

I'm gonna be honest, I'm not sure I get what everyone likes in this story. It's a cool concept, but beyond that it's really not much. McCoy gets to be delightfully cold and brooding here but almost too much. There's a lot of really edgy lines about how the Doctor has killed before and enjoyed it and it's just not my cup of tea.

It's also just a bit boring, there's a lot of repetitive cliffhangers and the whole story is full of people saying "red" over and over. I'm sure that on TV this would've been coupled with a cool visual but on audio it really just sounds like people saying the same word over and over. There's no flair or anything and it gets really stale really quickly.

I wanted to like this one and I'm sure there's a lot to like but it really isn't my thing.

Next Story: Paradise Towers

The Monthly Adventures #85 - "Red" by Stewart Sheargold

The EU is a strange place. It’s a messy, extravagant, imaginative playground with just the slightest hint of depravity and every so often, it forgets where it came from. A common topic discussed within Doctor Who fandom is how dark can the show go? When do disturbing themes turn to pointless cruelty? Already, some of my favourite stories are criticised for this; Project: Twilight I loved for its well realised grittiness whilst some others loathe it for the same reason. So, what am I meant to do with Red? Headed by a pair I’d dare to call the goofiest TARDIS team, Red is a story that truly shook me to my core, and I’m not certain if I loved it.

The Needle: a symbiotic apartment complex that changes with its inhabitants, who have all lost the need for violence thanks to the ruling supercomputer. But the loss of primal instinct has made the residents bloodthirsty, and something’s letting the rage out.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I guess the first thing I have to say about Red is jesus christ, this thing is f**ked up. Genuinely, I think this is the darkest Doctor Who story I’ve seen by a mile. In a futuristic society where violence has been eradicated, a mysterious, sentient virus is causing people to go on violent killing sprees. It’s a really dark, miserable time with some absolutely horrific stuff in it. Combined with some brilliant world building and you have a deeply unsettling story about a society obsessed with feeling pain. If you ever wanted to hear Sandi Toksvig calmly talk about her obsession with having violence inflicted upon her, then boy do I have the story for you! The world of Red is some truly incredible stuff, the little details we get about how the society functions, how the Needle works, how the lack of any kind of violence has affected the population, it’s really immersive and endlessly fascinating.

And that’s where Red’s greatest strength lies: its immersion. The atmosphere is on point all the way through - there’s a real grim oppression to everything with some neat cyberpunk leanings. The sound design is a tricky one for me because it’s sometimes incredible and sometimes noticeably awful. I love the rain sodden sounds of the undercity and the mechanical glitch noises used for the absolutely terrifying Red Virus but then sometimes things will just be completely silent when they really shouldn’t be and break the immersion the story’s built up so well. Also, I am a hundred percent sure they use that shitty violin sound effect those “GHOST FOUND AT 3AM!!!” videos use at least a few times. For the most part though, it’s great and at its absolute best when realising the villain.

Our main antagonist - the mysterious Red Virus - is an absolutely terrifying entity. Randomly infecting the chips that suppress violence in the Needle, they cause those infected to become deranged, chanting “red” and releasing corrupted, static sounds. Genuinely frightening stuff that really unnerved me when I listened to it (I love creepy motifs). McCoy is also doing some weird s**t with his voice in a performance that just teeters on being silly but manages to land on the side of utterly bone chilling. Langford’s also putting in a good - if more restrained - performance.

However, Red is a very style over substance story for me. I loved the aspects of the world and the ideas and the atmosphere but I really did not take to the plot of this thing. There are a lot of things going on in Red, Sheargold throws around a lot of ideas but he really struggles to make a lot of them clear. A lot of the story feels like it would be better with visuals and because of that it’s really hard to follow. I struggled listening to this one because I kept getting lost - so much happens and so much feels like it's lacking the image that should be going with it. This would never get made on TV, which is a shame, because that feels like the only place that could properly house it. And even looking past the convoluted elements, Red just hasn’t got a whole lot of substance past its ideas. The story is very slow and consists mostly of watching things on a monitor, the rest delegated to running around empty corridors and needlessly extending the story with extra plot beats. Also, as much as I love the creativity on display here, you have to know when to cut your losses. Sheargold had way more than one story’s worth of ideas bouncing around here, with stuff like the time-altering drug Slow and the supercomputer Whitenoise having temporal energy in it from time travellers. Yeah, that was the bit that really lost me, I still don’t know what the whole “Celia was a time traveller” reveal meant or why it created the Red Virus.

Red is a masterclass in atmosphere, disturbing themes and detailed world building but as an actual story, I wasn’t too into it. I loved just existing in this world and getting creeped out by the absolutely horrific things happening in it but I couldn’t really have cared less what happened to the characters.

7/10

Pros:

+ Great performance from McCoy and Langford

+ Atmospheric and disturbing

+ Brilliant central concept and antagonist

+ Oppressive and unnerving sound design

Cons:

- The script struggles to make things clear to the listener

- Story is pretty uneventful and poorly paced

Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#085. Red ~ 10/10

◆ An Introduction

Season 24 constantly gets a bad rap from the fandom, who often cite it as being the worst run of Classic Who (partly down to the hammy writing, and partly because everyone went deaf when Bonnie Langford decided to start screaming like a banshee!) BigFinish have done a lot to redeem this era, but what happens when you take ‘Paradise Towers’, and recreate it as a psychological horror? Well, you get a masterpiece from Stewart Sheargold. Beware violence… beware red! Red! Red! Red! Red!

◆ Publisher’s Summary

Subject 2660 ­ Celia Fortunatè, designated citizen of the needle. Subject experiencing traumatic, violent delusions during waking moments. Subject remains passified and under control of Whitenoise. Medication has been prescribed.

Subject 0357 Vi Yulquen, designated Matriarch of the needle. Subject is under constant surveillance due to her wish to experience harm. This is in direct contravention of Whitenoise's programming. Also supplier of the drug classified as Slow. Editing is required.

Subject 0841 ­ Chief Blue. Technician in symbiotic relationship with this Whitenoise system. Knowledgeable in human psychological evaluation. Subject has been diagnosed a voyeur, and has a dangerous obsession with the Red Tape. Machine augmentation is favoured to curb this defect.

Subject [error] ­ Melanie Bush, designated companion of subject 3999. Subject [error] is not chipped and is a threat. Her ability to harm has not been checked, compromising the continued security programming of this Whitenoise system. She must be inhibited.

Subject 3999 ­ The Doctor. Subject has committed homicide. This subject now in constant redline. His propensity for violence remains unchecked. Analysis suggests synchronisation with the killer. The Doctor will attempt to kill again. He must be stopped.

◆ The Seventh Doctor

Sylvester McCoy cannot be faulted in ‘Red’, not with a performance that is this amazing.

The Doctor wasn’t attacked in the vortex, but his TARDIS was – some violent time disruption played havoc with the telepathic circuits, so whatever happens to her will happen, to an extent, to him. All the more reason to go looking for whatever caused the disruption! He believes that you should never presume anything about a foreign society. Apparently, he’s a dab hand at prison breaks, and at least they’d get some answers if they were locked up. The Doctor is always the random element, the spanner in the bonnet, the bee in the works… he always gets exactly where you don’t want him to get! How frightening is it to hear him under the influence of the Red Infection? He ends up synchronised with another victim and is forced to kill an innocent, rolling his r’s as he chants “red! red! red!” like a deranged psychopath!

◆ Mel Bush

‘Red’ sees Bonnie Langford bringing her A-game, in what I’d easily call her character’s best story.

Mel isn’t good with heights, so isn’t particularly happy when the Needle pushes her high out into the bleak sky! She wonders why it’s always the same wherever they land (referring to the dead body lying in front of her, and the chaos that is likely to unfold). She is likely to tell their captors anything if torture is on the cards. The name is Mel, not Red… she had enough of that in school. Despite being half paralysed and threatened by a maniac with a knife, she still has a good swinging arm, and proves that by smacking Draun over the head with a bottle! She’s an honest person, to a fault.

◆ Story Recap

The Needle is a living apartment complex that exists symbiotically with its inhabitants, expanding and shifting its dimensions to accommodate the travel needs of its population. It’s exclusive luxury accommodation where crime has been completely eradicated, all thanks to a miracle chip.

Administered by the ruling artificial intelligence, Whitenoise, the chip allows him to monitor the residents and give their brains a slight electric shock when they have violent thoughts. But violence can never be truly eradicated; it always bleeds through.

A form of digital infection has been hopping between the residents and causing them to “redline” (a condition where Whitenoise looses control, and their suppressed anger bubbles over, turning them into single-minded killers). After coming across someone who has just been murdered by their partner, the Doctor and Mel soon find themselves separated – the former is chipped and forced to synchronise with the killer “Red Infection”, whilst the latter falls hundreds of floors out of the Needle… and finds herself paralysed amongst the homicidal rabble below!

Murders are being committed left, right and centre, and it’s up to the Doctor and Mel to reunite and stop them.

◆ Blazing Anger

I’ve owned my copy of ‘Red’ since 14th November 2017, and it’s still one of the most fascinating stories in my collection. It’s important to remember that anger is a normal emotion, and one that can rarely be avoided. It’s sometimes an inappropriate emotional response, but that’s why it is so important to learn to control your anger and find a healthy release for it (one that doesn’t harm yourself or anyone else).

People might suggest having a long hot bubble bath with a bunch of scented candles, having a nap or going for a walk. Speaking as someone who has pretty much always struggled with anger issues, writing these reviews is my way of healthily releasing my anger. It’s often why I get really sarcastic and venomous when I write a review of a story I dislike, something like ‘Minuet in Hell’ - I find it really cathartic (especially if I’ve had a dreadful day).

If someone told me they could give me a chip that would take away my ability to act on my aggressive instincts, I would honestly take it in a heartbeat, and I can understand why all the people living in the Needle would too. But the chip cannot get rid of anger completely, and it becomes like hot oil in a pan… eventually getting so hot that it ignites and goes out of control. I think that is definitely a life-lesson to take away from this story – it’s always best to let your anger out when it’s at its lowest, because keeping it to yourself is just going to make you explode with rage!

◆ Sound Design

Never forget that this is, first and foremost, a psychological horror story. The sound design here is often violent and homicidal, and Jenkins really manages to conjure up a disconcerting and utterly unhinged atmosphere. It’s extremely effective.

There’s a background hum present throughout the entire Needle that really puts you on edge. Whitenoise and Chief Blue examine the Red Tape, listening to several people chanting “red! red! red!” as they murder their partners. The voice of the Red Infection is almost like pure static; creepy and utterly mischievous! Violent blood sports play on the television inside of Yulquen’s apartment. The scene of Whitenoise restraining and chipping the Doctor is gruesome; a needle piercing his skull, and that blood-curdling scream! Rain trickles onto Draun’s dirigible, as Mel regains consciousness following her fall from the Needle. The world slows down around Mel, as she comes under the influence of Slow. Towards the end of this adventure, Whitenoise completely flips his lid and starts burning out everybody’s chips… causing their skulls to pop like balloons! It’s horrifying. As Whitenoise is finally switched off, the Needle crumbles into nothing.

◆ Music

The score for ‘Red’ is being handled by Andy Hardwick, and it really managed to put me on edge for the whole adventure! The music twinkles like it’s some sort of twisted lullaby about chaos and hatred. It’s utterly brilliant, and it saddens me that this story came out long before the isolated scores would be included on the CDs.

◆ Conclusion

“I want your violence…”

I’m sure a lot of you rolled your eyes more than McCoy rolls his r’s when I compared this adventure to ‘Paradise Towers’, but I implore you to give ‘Red’ a chance.

In a society where the ability to act on violent urges has been eradicated, the possibility of a murderer on the lose is even more worrying than usual… because all that subdued hatred can be used to turn even someone who seems rational into a savage killer! Fellow reviewers definitely have a point when they say this is a story that pretty much only has one idea, but you cannot deny that Stew Sheargold milks the idea for all it’s worth!

Our regular cast members deliver some of their best performances to date, and they’re accompanied by a brilliant guest cast (with QI’s own Sandi Toksvig doing a marvellous job as Needle matriarch, Vi Yulquen. John Stahl also manages to steal the show with his performance as Whitenoise, playing the unhinged computer in a manner similar to HAL 9000).

‘Red’ has been in my collection for six years, and it remains one of the greatest things I have ever purchased. If you’ve not heard this one, you’re really missing out!