The Macros

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

Previous Story: The Song of Megaptera

I'm surprised to see how spread out the ratings are for this one. I suppose it really depends on what you expect from it. After going through stories like Mission to Magnus my expectations were very low so I was pleasantly surprised by this one. The start is full of mystery, really evocative of the first part of The Space Museum and while it doesn't keep up with this for too long it definitely doesn't fumble as hard as The Space Museum did.

I love that the main setting of this story is based on actual historical events and does the great Doctor Who trope of taking a historical mystery and explaining it in some alien way. After this is where it seems a lot of people stopped enjoying the story as much as I did, as we shift to some sort of alternate dimension/planet connected to the disappearance of the ship. I'll admit the side-plot here is fairly generic alien dictatorship stuff that was really prevalent in the particular era of Who this story is emulating, but it serves the story really well and I don't have any complaints about it.

This is probably the most modern-feeling story so far, it never feels like you're watching a Season 22 story with your eyes closed and always feels like something modern Big Finish could put out. With most adventures in the Lost Stories range this wouldn't really work but when it comes to an era like this I think it helps a lot. As always the performances are great, the soundtrack is alright. In general, it's just a solid story

Next Story: The Guardians of Prophecy

6️⃣🔽 = FINE!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“A BOAT BETWEEN DIMENSIONS!”

The first season of The Lost Stories comes to an end with The Macros, a story written by Ingrid “the worst guest actress in the history of the show” Pitt and her husband Tony Rudlin and dealing with the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment, which attempted to turn the USS Eldridge invisible.

Our story kicks off with Six and Peri materialising on the USS Eldridge, but on a different spatial and temporal plane than the crew of the ship. It’s a slightly confusing and very mysterious beginning to the adventure.

This is the sort of historical story that suggests alien involvement in a seemingly strange real-life occurrence. It’s much more interested in exploring the dimensions and timey-wimey science than the actual event and the people involved, though.

There’s a strong sci-fi element here as well in the form of Planet Capron and its ruler Osloo (a sneaky nod to Norway, I’m sure!) which just feels like a shoehorned element in a historical event that could work well without it. The worst part is that the script is so interested in Capron and its tiresome court politics that it leaves no room for the historical narrative to flourish.

Part 1 rolls along but does nothing to make the characters interesting or the story interesting to listen to. The shocking cliffhanger reignites my interest for Part 2.

Part 2 gets more focused on actually solving the problem at hand, but it’s too little, too late. It’s a pity, because the second half is more dramatic and a bit more tense as well.

The President doesn’t turn truly interesting until Part 2, when she opposes the Doctor and his attempt to save the day. I also love the climax and the little twist ending—something of a mashup of The Time Monster and The Sun Makers.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

• This story was apparently twice lost, because when BF contacted Pitt and Rudlin about adapting their unmade script for The Macros, they had just lost their computer, which held the original scripts, meaning that they lost access to Part 2 and parts of Part 1 and had to recreate the story from memory.

This audio was a particular disappointment for me. I had let the story get me all excited over the prospect of us exploring The Philadelphia Experiment with the Sixth Doctor. The real world ship disappearance felt like a prime way to have some fun with a navy ship going into some sort of dimensional void. Instead, however, things get horribly derailed as we go to the planet Capron and things get weird, typical to the original run of Sixth Doctor nonsense from the show days. As always, Big Finish does a good job at faithfully recreating these stories, but sadly, it seems to often result in just faithful recreations of a very troubled era of Doctor Who. With it comes all the problems of this time, including the bad effect it had on Colin Baker's performance. Peri feels similarly wasted for the same reasons. It's just not worth anyone's time, really. Sadly. Tragically. A serious rewrite leaning more into the Philadelphia Experiment would have gone a long way to improving how I feel about The Macros but as it stands this story just outright lost me after a certain point - right around when Osloo showed up, actually. Nothing against that performer but I just lost any sense of engagement once she started throwing orders around. No thank you.

The first series of Big Finish’s Lost Stories range concluded with this story from the writer team of Tony Rudlin and Ingrid Pitt – yes, that Ingrid Pitt. Ingrid ‘Queen Gallelia and Doctor Solow’ Pitt. Ingrid ‘karate chop a Myrka’ Pitt.

It’s more or less the most interesting thing about this story because, otherwise, it’s a very run of the mill ordinary Doctor Who story.

The 6th Doctor and Peri arrive aboard a ship but just like the first episode of The Space Museum, no one can see or hear them. The crew also seem to be in a time loop and the ship itself is covered in a strange green rust. It is revealed, fairly early on, that the ship is the USS Eldridge – the infamous ship at the centre of The Philadelphia Experiment, an alleged attempt to develop the facility of invisibility to the Allied war effort in 1943.

Here is the kernel of a fascinating Doctor Who story – a classic example of Doctor Who explaining a real life mystery. The USS Eldridge disappeared and was never seen again – although the official story was that the ship had been renamed and given to the Greek Navy. Unfortunately, The Macros, squanders this premise and instead shifts the story to a generic alien world with a generic dictator and generic world-invading ambitions.

The world of Capron with its mad, dictator Presidenta Osloo is such a pointless waste of story it just frustrates every time the action shifts there. The disintegrating Eldridge and the two characters aboard who haven’t been stuck in the time loop – the Bosun and Professor Tessler (responsible for the experiment itself) are constantly shunted to the sidelines so we can spend time with the thoroughly boring Presidenta, her generic stepson and his rebellious girlfriend. To be fair, the cast make the very best of what they are given and Linda Marlowe is suitably scenery-chewing as Osloo but the plot is just so dull it really does make me wonder why they couldn’t have thought of something more interesting to do with the Eldridge plot.

The extras reveal that the reasons for this may have been two-fold. Firstly, this was a last minute replacement for the planned finale of the season, the fabled The Children of January. Secondly, the original script was lost in a hard drive crash. It seems that this story was rewritten ‘from memory’. I wonder if Rudlin and Pitt could only remember the bare bones of the two parallel plots and ended up leaning into the simpler, more straightforward ‘mad dictator’ plot rather than the intriguing ‘solving a historical mystery’ plot. It’s a real shame.

Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, are really good of course, and this audio seems to be working towards softening the relationship which seemed to leap in dynamics on screen between Season 22 and 23.

Historically, the Philadelphia Experiment is an interesting mystery. Based on the alleged observations of merchant sailor, Carl M Allen, it is an event denied outright ever happened by the US Navy. The alleged event involved not only the USS Eldridge being made invisible for a short time, but it also being teleported briefly before returning to the harbour. The actual story around the USS Eldridge is fascinating with elements of conspiracy theory, Einstein’s unified field theory and sailors being melded with the ship after teleport! There is so much story in the mystery of the Eldridge and The Macros just uses them as a backdrop.

Even the mildly interesting element of Capron being in a micro-universe is never explored much beyond the Doctor having to do some macguffiny TARDIS stuff to ‘adjust’ people as they travel between the two worlds which seems to solely be to provide a cliffhanger to Episode 1. It isn’t even used as a way of incapacitating Osloo when she travels to the Eldridge. The Doctor has the prime opportunity to not adjust her body to the new universe which would have stopped her right in her mad, generic tracks. But he doesn’t and she just goes outside to rant and rave a bit before they all have to return to the TARDIS because the Eldridge is disintegrating.

There’s also a little side trip to Washington in 1943 which ends up being a dead end, plotwise, which again could have been quite interesting. The inability of the Doctor to return the Professor and Bosun to their own time does add some tension but the ultimate solutions for them didn’t really work for me. The Professor is betrayed by Osloo after she promises him sanctuary and dominion if he helps her invasion attempt. Unsurprisingly she reneges on her word and he ends up dead. The Bosun, bizarrely, ends up in a retread of the conclusion to The Leisure Hive, alongside Osloo herself.

There are many parts of The Macros that could make an interesting and absorbing Doctor Who adventure but in this script none of them gel and the most interesting parts end up treading water on the sidelines until the characters briefly spend some time in them. Historically, the details are thin on the ground and beyond being told this is 1943 and the brief visit to Washington there isn’t really a great sense of time and space.

Frustrating.