📝5/10 = MIXED!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time! This time: they took a pill in Ibiza.

With The Rapture, Big Finish goes for another experimental approach for a Doctor Who story, as evidenced by the opening scene pretending to be a radio program and the setting being the ultimate party island of Ibiza, complete with clubbing, drugs, alcohol, and the like. This memorable setting and the constant flow of club music we hear in the background instantly help The Rapture stand out.

This story also mixes in God’s heralds, or his angels, who are on the island to judge everyone’s souls. This brings a strange quasi-religious element to this but also adds effective tension. The overall atmosphere in this audio makes me suspect that Big Finish tried to go for a Virgin New Adventures approach with this story by going a bit experimental and a bit mature with it.

Sadly, this story turns very messy and overly ambitious partway through Part 2, mostly down to the sound design. It’s difficult to follow, but also oddly eerie and bizarre. Things improve slightly in the last part, though, and The Rapture certainly makes for a different experience that stays with you for a while after listening.

The Doctor feels somewhat forgotten here, but Sylvester McCoy is in great form. Sophie Aldred is also great, but Ace is unusually angry and annoyed throughout this. All this nonsense of her wanting to call herself McShane now just feels stupid.

A big part of Ace's story sees her come face to face with her younger brother, who’s revealed in a nice twist in Part 2. I look forward to hearing where this development is taken in future audios.

The supporting cast’s performances (mostly the ones voicing the partygoers) frequently sound unnatural and wooden, and that’s distracting.

The Monthly Adventures #036 - “The Rapture" by Joseph Lidster

There are a few Who writers who stand above all others, a few Who writers who pretty much always deliver quality stories, a few Who writers whose presence in a range will cause buyers to throw any amount of money at a release to get it. One of those few writers is Joseph Lidster. Renowned and revered in equal measure, Lidster is an immensely popular author still writing for Doctor Who to this day who has had his name attached to just about every range you could think of, from The Monthly Adventures, to Torchwood, to Bernice Summerfield, and it all began here, in a blistering rave of odd ideals and a fundamentally messy story.

Ace wants a break. Using her old name and determined to live a normal life, just for a day, she’s been taken to Ibiza by the Doctor, to take part in the new, hit rave everybody’s talking about: The Rapture. But not everything’s right at the Rapture; for the owners are planning something big and deadly, and vacationing college student Liam just so happens to have Ace’s picture in his coat pocket.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Lidster is a writer who is near unrivalled when it comes to one thing: character work. We’ll hit some of his best stories as we progress through the Main Range, which boast some of Doctor Who’s greatest character pieces, but The Rapture itself is nothing to sneer at. It has a whole lot of problems, which I will get on to, but I have to come out and praise Lidster’s greatest qualities, which all shine here. Front and centre is Ace (or McShane for a few audios but I sure as hell won’t be calling her by that misguided choice), who, on a break from travelling with the Doctor, meets none other than her estranged brother. Such a big introduction to canon feels like it shouldn’t work, but Lidster manages to mould the situation enough so that it feels natural and allows this to become a very touching reunion for these two characters. I’m actually quite sad we never got to see Liam again after this because he was a genuinely very sweet character and that paired well with Ace and felt like a really good way to see more intricacies of her personality. As for the audio’s other defining factor - the music - I really dig it. Jim Mortimore is once again leading the soundtrack and has, this time around, given us a score of house music and dance pieces that not only really help to build the setting but also double as actually pretty good bits of music, especially the remixed intro theme that sadly seems to cut off early at the beginning of each part. Another thing I felt was significantly special about this story was the editing, something I haven’t really touched on as of yet in these reviews. The Rapture takes a very unique approach to intercut scenes and has lines flow into one another, a character will say something that’ll be relevant in the scene it cuts to, or a line will be finished by another person in another place and with this technique, Lidster at one point manages to interlock three scenes in what I consider the highlight moment of the audio, especially with Caitriona having the world’s jazziest drug trip, flying through the sky as Sylvester McCoy growls into a microphone about being the “sandman”.

However, for as much nuanced character building and psychedelic wonders there are, I can’t deny that The Rapture isn’t very good. Lidster’s strengths clearly lie in character and, because of that, he can often really struggle with the story. This whole script is messy, and that’s the only word I can think of to adequately describe it; it’s littered with problems that all just pile on top of each other to make for a somewhat disheartening time. Our antagonists, Gabriel and Jude, aren’t particularly threatening or empathetic, simply just there to create the story, I wasn’t too interested in their pasts and both turned out to have very little to them conceptually, just escapees from a dimensional war who are using religious imagery to trick one of them into forgetting his PTSD (that actually sounds a lot more interesting than it is on paper). They’re not terrible, they’re just not enough to hold up a story. Also, I think that acting in this audio is, on the whole, pretty bad. Chief among them is Caitriona ; Anne Bird really can’t do drunk acting well. However, pretty much everybody phones in their performance at points, in particular during rave scenes. I don’t doubt that it’s hard to recreate the passion of a nightclub in a silent audio booth but the undeniably forced performances make all the moments set in The Rapture near impossible to sit through. And then there’s the whole thing about depression. See, the character of Caitriona is described as being a “manic depressive”, and mental health struggles are pretty much central to the plot, but it’s handled incredibly poorly. We see no stance taken on issues surrounding mental health except for those of our villains and, whilst I don’t think Lidster himself believes that “being depressed is selfish because our ancestors had to fight in wars”, he never really presents a counter argument so all we’re left with is a ridiculously harmful and ignorant viewpoint that really just rubs me the wrong way. And it’s here where Lidster fails in character writing because there’s no point to any of this focus on manic depression as none of our characters have really grown at the end, they just seem to be how they were at the start with Liam and Caitriona still in a weird, toxic friendship where they each ignore their own problems by helping the other with theirs. I think it’s just a well-meaning allegory that was poorly executed (or at least I hope it is) but the way it’s written feels somewhat scummy. As for the plot itself, it’s just pretty badly written. It has one too many plot holes for me, there’s a part three twist where the Doctor’s old friend, Gustavo, turns out to be working with Gabriel and Jude, but that whole subplot is dropped five minutes later. Why Gabriel’s music can hypnotise and even kill people isn’t ever really explained besides “his music’s really good” and the use of PCP (though I think it’s funny that the “angel dust” Gabriel uses to help people ascend was fully just the drug angel dust, no subtlety whatsoever). The whole thing feels underbaked and is really a B-tier Doctor Who episode with nothing wholly special or unique about it, which is a shame because there were some good ideas knocking around in here, Lidster was just clearly having an off day.

The Rapture is a really poor debut for one of my favourite audio writers. The 17 blistering tracks advertised on the front cover make for a dizzying sensory experience with some absolutely wonderful character work thrown in, but it all feels surface level. Kind of like a rave in that respect, so maybe this whole thing is genius and I’m just missing the point. But the mishandling of mental health and a somewhat uninspired story make The Rapture overall a disappointment. There are things to admire here, but nothing that makes the story worth it.

5/10

Pros:

+ The material with Ace and Liam works surprisingly well and is genuinely quite sweet

+ The rave-fuelled soundtrack is incredibly fun

+ Really interesting editing style that makes for some very fun sequences

Cons:

- Gabriel and Jude make for underwhelming antagonists

- Littered with some pretty bad performances

- Has some weird, shaky morals surrounding mental health and depression

- Messy plot that feels very underdeveloped

06.08.2022

I enjoyed it immensely. Though the story loses itself in a few places, the setting makes up for it. I love DW at the rave party. Ace's brother arc is mirroring the villains which is always nice.
I have a problem with usual clichés made a little too cartoony here, but it's not enough to give it anything lower than 3/5.

MR 036: The Rapture

Oh we're getting religious in here now are we? Between that and hearing everyone call Ace "McShane" or "Dorothy" this was a really odd one, but a good one.

Ace is depressed after seeing David Tennant split in two in the TARDIS, understandably so, and insists that everyone call her McShane. And the Doctor wants to take her on a holiday. Enter the Rapture dance club, run by two literal angels where people go to have a religious experience.

Relating dance clubs to religion is interesting. You can get the same feeling from everyone moving and dancing to the music as you can from religious music in a church. Which definitely makes sense.

The club's angels play music that literally puts everyone into a trance so that they don't know what's happening.

The second episode is the best part I think. The entire episode bounces back and forth between three conversations, not cutting between them. One character ends off on a line that another character is saying in their conversation. It's well written, edited, and acted. Ace finds out that she has a long lost brother separated as a toddler. One of the angel DJs gives a drug to someone suffering from bi polar. And the Doctor works out what's happening with an old friend of his.

And can we stop to take a moment and say how bizarre it is that the Doctor has a friend he made fighting in the Spanish civil war? I thought that was changing Earth history. I thought you hated doing that. We learned that in Colditz. Yet for some reason you deemed it acceptable to fight in the Spanish Civil War just as you deemed it acceptable to undo the Nazi timeline in Colditz. Very hypocritical.

That's not important to this story. It's just odd, I'm not used to the Doctor outright fighting fascists on Earth, he always makes some lame excuse not to. Like in Fearmonger.

We find out that the angel DJs are refugees from a war where their peaceful people were attacked. One of them got PTSD from fighting and ended up having his mind scrambled and his brother has somehow convinced him that they're actual, real angels. They plan to conscript all the people in the club with their trance music to fight in their war. Which is a pretty wild plan.

Only the plan goes awry when the brother who genuinely believes he's an angel dies along with the Doctor's friend, who initially sponsored this, but wasn't keen on the conscription part.

There's some arguments here that without a grand enemy to fight or something greater to belong to or believe in, people just slip into depression and "battling themselves" as the Doctor's friend and the one angel argue. Which definitely is slipping into fascist territory, ironically considering they've both fought fascists. That's the exact rhetoric that fascists use to lure people in: the need to belong to something greater than oneself alone.

As revenge, the other angel seeks to take revenge for his brother's death by killing everyone. Which is, uh, a choice. But the Doctor stops him by talking him down and relating his brother relationship with Ace and her long lost brother.

There's definitely some really good character work for Ace here as she struggles to cope with the idea of a long lost brother and a long lost father who left a long time ago. Ace has a tendency to lash out when things get too real for her and she does it here. She yells at him and runs away. It's definitely reminiscent of Fenric when she realizes that the baby she's protecting is her mom and how upset that makes her feel. They do end on good terms with Ace promising to return. She thought about leaving, but she can't. Understandably so.

Overall it's pretty ok. A story with a lot of pathos, especially with sibling relationships. I liked a lot of the editing here as well as the music. They made a cute dance music intro for this story only and it's a nice change of pace.

I literally just finished this about five minutes ago and I'm kind of awe-struck so I apologise if this is incoherent and sweary - I'll censor the swears for the sake of the censorship bot's delicate sensibilities. Spoilers, beware! (4.5/5)

HOLY F*CK HOLY F*CK WHY DO I NEVER HEAR THIS AUDIO TALKED ABOUT IT WAS SO GOOD WHAT THE F*CK

*breathes* okay, it's okay, I'm good. As was that audio! The use of the radio broadcasts as a framing device and a way to do things like allow the theme music to play in a way that made sense in-story was lovely, it's absolutely my favourite thing when an audio does that, refuses to draw a clean line between the story and the real world. Gorgeous. The focus on music in the audio format was an interesting one too, and definitely a cool avenue to explore.

The anti-fascism was well-done and pronounced, though I thought they could have made it even more explicit how turning people into mindless drones with the escapist music and drugs could lead to susceptibility to fascist thinking. They did this a little with the way the Doctor and Gustavo discussed religion, and the focus on religion's relationship with fascism was chilling even to a non-religious person (me), but I just think an even stronger link could have been made with the music and the fascism. What I'm saying is, what we got was good, but I would have loved even more. What can I say? I like my political themes heavy-handed and explicit.

Often, the "long lost family member I never knew about" trope becomes too cliché and so becomes annoying, but I feel like the Rapture really pulled this off. It tied in well to the storyline, so was used as a plot device rather than a surprise twist ending type of thing.

The exploration of Cat's disability and Liam's need to take care of her was really interesting, and very well done, with the parallels between Cat's addiction to drugs, Liam's addiction to Cat, and Jude's addiction to Gabriel (And the unspoken McShane addition to the Doctor, of course) making the story feel both relatable to real-world problems, and also exploring issues unique to the premise of Who. It's rare to find stories that successfully balance the two, and the Rapture did this very well. One minor annoyance though is that I felt Brian wasn't really brought into it enough - he was their friend, he was killed, and they barely mentioned him, even though he was missing? I just would have expected a couple more references to my boy Brian.

There were times when I thought McCoy and Aldred's acting was slightly over-the-top in the fourth part, which took me away from the story a little, but it wasn't so needlessly melodramatic as to actually change how I feel about the audio. I liked the resolution, and 7 finally calling her McShane at the end really hit hard in a trans-and-trying-out-a-new-name way. That post-credits scene left me with a lot of questions, though - it was trying to scare the listener and I think it did that well, but I don't really understand why. We'd had a good resolution with everything neatly tied up - the scene didn't really tie into anything, and left me with a lot of questions. I think I would have preferred the audio without it.

The few criticisms I have are very minor and honestly more personal preference (and quite possibly driven by the fact that due to my schedule, I had to listen to the story in roughtly 20-minute-chunks over several sessions, which really is not how it is meant to be listened to and was definitely detrimental to my enjoyment of the story). As I said before, liked the music-focus, liked the antifascism, the religious themes hit hard, and it was overall a very cohesive and well-made story. I therefore pronounce this another absolute banger from Lidster!

Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#036. The Rapture ~ 9/10

◆ An Introduction

Oh boy, I cannot wait to lose all the credibility I have as a reviewer… assuming I had any credibility to begin with. Described by many as one of the worst things BigFinish have ever released, I genuinely adore this adventure, and I hope to change your mind on it too by the end of this review. Rave culture isn’t my sort of thing, though I do like the great clubbing tunes Dead or Alive put out in the late 1990s. Put on your dancing shoes, grab the cocktails, because we’re heading to Ibiza!

◆ Publisher’s Summary

Ibiza, 1997, and thousands of young people are acting like mindless zombies.

Which is to be expected. Ibiza, the island of dance music, sex, drugs and alcohol, is the ultimate hedonistic paradise.

God has sent help from on high to save the sinners of Ibiza. He has sent His angels to save their souls.

Which would be simple enough if these souls didn't include an alien time-traveller working in a bar, a woman who disappeared in 1987, a young man carrying a photograph of a girl he's never met and an Irish girl who doesn't even know who she is anymore.

◆ The Seventh Doctor

Sylvester McCoy delivers quite a calming, yet fantastic, performance in ‘The Rapture’.

The Doctor makes a habit of saving people’s lives more than once. He apparently fought alongside Gustavo’s father in the Spanish Civil War. He goes on to mention Franco, Mussolini and then Hitler, and the rise of fascism… but soon remembers the hell his companion has just been through at Colditz and decides to shut up! In his many, many years of experience, people claiming to be angels tend to be the opposite.

◆ “Just McShane”

‘The Rapture’ sees Sophie Aldred deliver a brilliant performance, and there is a moment with her that genuinely made me teary-eyed.

“McShane” asks for one normal night back in London; one night without monsters or evils from the dawn of time, one night without the Professor and Ace, and she can’t even have that. Kurtz’s death was one of the worst things she’s ever seen, and she’s sick of all the fighting and dying (she even recalls seeing the Krill devouring Madame Salvadori above Duchamp 331). She’s not a superhero, and she needs some time off to relax. “McShane” never mentioned the name Ace to Liam because it’s in the past, so she’s understandably rattled when he uses it. When she read the letter from her father and began sobbing, it was genuinely so heart-breaking – realising how different her life could have been if she knew she had a brother; Colditz, Fenric, none of it had to happen.

◆ Story Recap

Following the horrors she witnessed at Colditz Castle, “McShane” has decided that she wants to go somewhere normal for a bit of downtime, a holiday where she wont be running from power-mad fascists, angry Krill or Daleks.

The TARDIS arrives at the party capital of the world in the late 1990s, and she is quickly drawn to the famed Rapture night-club. Unfortunately, this is going to be anything but a holiday.

The brothers in charge of the Rapture claim to be angels, but they’re really trying to drug their punters, in the hopes that they can be sent to fight in a war on their home planet. In other words, this is a militaristic recruitment drive. If that wasn’t enough, “McShane” is about to discover a brother she never knew existed!

◆ Clubbing Conscription

I think it’s fair to say that ‘The Rapture’ has a pretty bad reputation amongst fans – he inspired me to write these reviews, but you need only read Doc Oho’s review to see just how much people do not like this adventure. I’ve honestly never gotten the hate for it, though I am incredibly biased towards anything written by Joe Lidster.

Gabriel and Jude are literally conscripting people through the power of rave culture. It’s such a ridiculously barmy and fun idea, and it’s balanced out quite nicely by the more emotionally traumatic B Plot involving “McShane”.

You can actually draw a lot of parallels between this adventure and the ‘Warriors of Kudlak’, the way that Gabriel and Jude turn their night-club punters into unwilling soldiers is not that different to what the Uvodni were doing with Combat 3000!

◆ The Sibling She Never Knew…

Joseph Lidster also decides to drop a bombshell on us in ‘The Rapture’, so let’s talk a little bit about Liam. Born to Audrey Dudman and Harry McShane sometime in 1974, Liam was four years younger than his sister. Not long after his birth, Audrey was found having an affair, so Harry took him and fled Perivale… leading to Dorothy McShane being raised as an only child (she was only a toddler at the time, so had barely any recollection of being anything but an only child).

In 1993, Harry had a heart attack and told his son everything. Liam went looking for his sister but found out she’d vanished years earlier, and returned to the hospital only to find that his father had passed away.

Four years later, and he’s finally reunited with his sister. The meeting between “McShane” and Liam is definitely a bit soap-opera, but the moment “McShane” read the letter from her long-dead father broke my heart. Not only is it massively traumatising to realise that she has a long-lost younger brother, but it just gives her even more reason to despise her vile mother. If it wasn’t for Audrey’s lies, her life could have turned out so differently. It’s really sad that this story is the only time Liam appeared, because he could have been a great anchor for “McShane”; a reason to stay alive, and a reason to come home.

◆ Sound Design

The dance capital of the world, where you’re never far from the music or the Mediterranean waves. Mortimore’s sound design here is utterly immaculate!

Static from a radio being tuned into DJ Tony Blackburn’s Ibiza broadcast. Trance music playing on the radio station merges into a groovy club-mix of the Doctor Who theme tune. The party island is filled with cheering revellers; rave music spilling out from the nearby clubs whilst the waves lap gently against the shore. Listen to all the partying punters go eerily silent, as the angel dust works its magic… leaving just the hypnotic beat of the music in the air. The second part ends in a really memorable way, with Kat out of her mind on angel dust, hallucinating that she is flying with Gabriel. The rumbling of an old fishing boat. As Gabriel goes completely mad, he makes a dance track out of someone’s dying screams! The glass DJ booth shatters… causing Gabriel and Gustavo to fall to their deaths. The post-credits sequence made me chuckle; as two office temps receive an email containing one of Gabriel’s hypnotic tunes… an email that the entire office block soon receives!

◆ Music

The score for ‘The Rapture’ is being handled by Jim Mortimore, Jane Elphinstone, Simon Robinson & Feel. I don’t care if you vehemently despise Lidster’s writing for this adventure, you cannot deny that the music absolutely slaps! It perfectly captures the rave culture of the late 1990s that dominated night-clubs around the world, and nowhere more than Ibiza.

◆ Conclusion

“Spread the truth and love of the lord, and play those kicking tunes!”

A night club ran by aliens, where the punters are drugged with “angel dust” each time they step onto the dance-floor. Gabriel and Jude’s people are fighting a war, and the unlucky hedonists vibing to Livin’ Joy and Robert Miles are being hypnotised to become the perfect soldiers!

‘The Rapture’ was the first time Joseph Lidster had written anything for this franchise, and it’s very different from the rest of his catalogue (said catalogue consisting mainly of stories that will make you sob like a baby, or genuinely so frightened that you have to sleep with the lights on)!

The twist involving “McShane’s” brother is probably the only thing I’m unsure of. He is introduced in this adventure and essentially serves to make “McShane’s” backstory seem even more tragic than it already was! He definitely would’ve had more impact had he appeared in more adventures, possibly even become a regular companion alongside his sister… but then again, Philip Olivier’s introduction is right on the horizon.

The music is, of course, the highlight of this entire release. For what it’s worth, ‘The Rapture’ is my guilty pleasure adventure. The twist is the kind of thing you’d expect from a soap opera, but the main idea surrounding the titular night-club is excellent. I highly recommend you give this one another chance if you’re one of the people that vehemently dislikes it.