Early Big Finish is hard to criticize in quantifiable ways, really. The Land of the Dead, written by Stephen Cole in his first appearance as a Big Finish writer and released in 2000, is a good example. Before this, Cole was head of merchandising for the show, now deep into its hiatus, as well as editor of both the BBC Eighth Doctor books and the Past Doctor Adventures line; with this in mind, the fact that he was chosen to write one of the earliest Big Finish stories makes a certain sort of sense. He’s far from an experienced writer, but as head of merchandising with the Beeb, he’s a good hand to have on board when you’re trying to figure out what a new, alternate vision for Doctor Who could look like. Unfortunately, combine a first-time writer with a format that no one is quite sure how to work with yet and you end up with something that doesn’t really understand itself. I hesitate to say The Land of the Dead is a mess, but it is messy.
The premise is thus – The Doctor and Nyssa arrive in 1990s Alaska, where reclusive billionaire Shaun Brett (Christopher Scott, whose performance is a high point for the story) is building a mansion in the Alaskan tundra, constructing vast rooms made out of pure materials drawn from the land around him – stone, an entire stretch of coastline, a room made out of bones, you know, normal stuff. He’s assisted in this by artist/architect Monica Lewis (Lucy Campbell, reduced to making “witty” remarks anytime the action threatens being tense and not much more), but in doing so has really cheesed off the local Indigenous tribe, the Koyukon, represented here by Gaborik (Andrew Fettes, unfortunately also reduced to the role of “mysterious sage-like tribesman”, something best left in 1982, and giving a rather flat vocal performance that gets easily lost), a member of that tribe. Caught in the middle is Tulung (a plucky Neil Roberts. Important thing to note, both Roberts and Fettes are white British actors, which makes the affected accents in this story rather teeth-clenching.), Brett’s assistant, who is half-Koyukon and therefore caught between two worlds. There is also a dark history with Brett and Tulung’s fathers, and a secret only The Doctor and Nyssa know.
So far, so Season 19 – I don’t mean this facetiously, this is almost but not quite a reworking of Kinda – The Doctor and Nyssa have arrived at a situation already at its breaking point, with circumstances compounding to blow the lid off the pressure cooker, the final crank being the appearance of the story’s monsters, the Permians. The Permians are skeletal hybrid creatures fossilized in the rock, who exude a forcefield that sends you mad, and also eats all matter, including their own skin which is why they’re skeletons, and when they kill you they absorb your DNA and they’re evolving but also...look, remember when I mentioned the story being messy? It basically starts and ends with the Permians.
To put it simply, the Permians don’t work as audio monsters. They’re supposed to be wretched pain-wracked amalgams of different creatures, absorbing information and evolving as they chase The Doctor and company around the mansion, occasionally dissolving a person here and there. But there’s no sense of threat to them – Nicholas Briggs, still very early in his career with Big Finish (he hasn’t even deployed the ring-modulator and showed us his real talent yet) doesn’t put enough oomph into the sound design to make them convincing – there’s no weight in their movement, and hardly any of the noises we’d expect from predatory creatures who are constantly in pain. What we do get is a lot of dialog explaining where they are, what they look like, and where they’re going.
Remember when I said no one was quite sure how to work in this format yet? That’s a big indicator – trying to make up for the lack of a visual aspect by simply pasting over the cracks with exposition. Sadly, telling instead of showing often doesn’t work, and the same goes for the description of how the Permians work – every episode of this story stops dead anytime the Permians come up so that we can technobabble and justify why they exist or why they’re skeletons or how many of them there are, but none of the work is done to make them properly scary. It’s also pretty impossible to follow the action through the house, a fact that I think even the gang at BF knew, because this is, as far as I know, the only release to ship with a helpful map so that you could follow along with the action.
I can’t fault this story too much for that though. As I said, it’s early days, and what I want to do is take this story at another angle, because what this is also, if you believe the fan-assembled timelines over at tardis.wiki, right after Time-Flight. We are now in what I will tentatively dub SEASON 19.5, the interstitial period where it’s just The Doctor and Nyssa traveling before we return to Amsterdam for Season 20. And I think that actually, as an extension of Season 19, a particularly imperfect season that yet somehow manages to maintain pretty solid vibes throughout, this works. I’ve already drawn the Kinda comparison, but to elaborate, this is another story of environment versus colonization, but also a story where by the time The Doctor arrives, everyone has already been driven a bit insane by the circumstances. It’s remote, it’s claustrophobic, it’s trying to say things about Indigenous peoples and not doing the best job of it, the story and monster are a bit confusing and naff, the whole thing draws up to a rather stilted climax (with obligatory explosion to keep the spirit of Eric Saward happy) AND we are once again breezing right past the fact that a companion, this time Tegan, has left the TARDIS. In fact, the commitment to flippancy is so there that Nyssa makes an offhand remark about knowing about the extinction of the dinosaurs “better than most people” in a way that reads much more like smirking comment and less like “because our friend had to die for it to happen.” Clearly, in 2000, we’re not yet ready to redeem Adric, either.
The Land of the Dead is a mess, so I can’t rate it highly, but it’s a mess I can forgive because it’s very clearly a first go-around. Christopher Scott gives us a baddie we can hate (dunking on billionaires was not quite the easy win in 2000 as it is now, but Brett is still distinctly Musky) , meanwhile the two leads give very solid recreations of their television performances, despite being away from them for nearly 15 yeas by this point – it’s not contemptibly bad (we all know which story featuring Five takes that crown) but it also, I don’t think, is much good, either.
