The Queen of Time

As part of their Lost Stories range, Big Finish released a story written by Brian Hayles which serves as a sequel to The Celestial Toymaker.

I’m a champion of The Celestial Toymaker; I enjoy what my imagination extrapolates from what is on screen.  Much has been written about Brian Hayles’s original intentions for the story involving the characters of George and Margaret.  The final version of The Celestial Toymaker was, apparently, quite different from his original plans.

However, on the basis of The Queen of Time, he can’t have been too unenamoured with the final version.   The Queen of Time is an almost beat for beat retread of The Celestial Toymaker, but this time with a female villain who is obsessed with time rather than toys.  There’s also a generous dollop of The War Games with smatterings of The Mind Robber.

To be honest, I’m not sure how much of this was in Hayles’s original outline and how much has been added by the adapter/writer Catherine Harvey or whoever script-edited the range at this time (I think it was John Dorney).  Whichever way, it ends up being a story which feels too familiar to be thrilling and ends up committing the same sins that people dislike about The Celestial Toymaker – sins I cannot defend a second time around.

Let’s start with the positives, though.  Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury are great narrators and performers.  Occasionally I find Frazer’s Patrick Troughton impersonation to be a bit distracting – more focussed on the verbal tics than an actual performance.  In this audio, though, he pitches it just right and there were quite a few occasions where I forgot it was Frazer and not Patrick.  Wendy Padbury too seems better at pitching her voice for the younger Zoe, sounding less squeaky than she has done in other releases.

The games that Jamie and Zoe are forced to play have some fun elements and there is much more for the Doctor to do in this story than the first Doctor had to do in The Celestial Toymaker.  The disgusting three course meal he is forced to endure is gloriously described in the narration and there is a fun sequence (highly reminiscent of The War Games) where he is engaged in a battle of oneupmanship against Hecuba – the eponymous Queen of Time – pitting ever increasingly destructive forms of weaponry against each other.  His solution for ending the conflict is very Doctorish.

Catherine Faber, as Hecuba, isn’t given a huge amount to do but she takes what she has a gives it a glossy sheen of female villainy.  Hecuba is good enough as a villain to rub shoulders with Lady Adrasta, Vivien Fay and even the Rani.  I like the idea of her movie star-like appearance and attitude.  It might have even been better for her to have an American accent as she is described in the narration as being like a glamorous Hollywood star from the Golden Age – a Lauren Bacall style figure.

But, three performances of four characters isn’t enough to save this from being too similar in structure to The Celestial Toymaker and therefore falling into the same pitfalls without the saving graces I find in the previous story.  Principal among these is that Jamie and Zoe’s tasks are not against anyone.  There is some interaction with Hecuba’s ‘guard dogs’ Snap and Dragon but as they are non-speaking it doesn’t amount to much.  There are some fun ideas in the games, such as Zoe being aged forwards and backwards, but as the solution relies on Jamie whacking different buttons it isn’t very thrilling – it smacked, almost, of a subpar Crystal Maze game; as did the labyrinth they find themselves stuck in and the first game where they have to identify a particular clock among thousands of others.  However, without having opponents – as Steven and Dodo do in The Celestial Toymaker – the games are less engaging.  The Toymaker’s playthings are a huge factor as to why I enjoy that story.  The untold story of the Heart family, Cyril, Rugg and Wigg and Clara and Joey intrigues me.  Are they alive?  Were they people who lost games to the Toymaker?  Are they self-aware?  What would happen if they won?  The Queen of Time has none of this intriguing back story.

The link with Celestial Toymaker is also kept vague throughout the story with Hecuba almost revealing who she is a couple of times, only for the script to divert elsewhere before the revelation.  What we get is a half-hearted – oh, yes, she must be the Toymaker’s sister – tagged on the end of the story.  More could have been made of this pantheon of manipulative super beings, either by Hayles originally, or by Big Finish in expanding the limited outline they started from.

The Doctor’s final defeat of Hecuba does mirror his defeat of the Toymaker but is satisfying in its own way.  However, after four episodes of fairly repetitive story (I hesistate to use the word, plot, because there is very little of that) it almost serves as more of a merciful release than a successful denouement.

I don’t hate this story, but for people who don’t like The Celestial Toymaker, this story is not going to appeal as it is – to all intents and purposes – the same story with a slightly different theme.