Bernice Summerfield

#5.03. The Relics of Jegg-sau ~ 8/10

◆ An Introduction

Season 12 gets nowhere near as much attention as the rest of the Tom Baker era… though that didn’t stop someone giving the go-ahead for two of the worst ‘Lost Stories’ ever conceived.

I doubt you’ll find many people that would call ‘Robot’ their favourite adventure from that season, and you’d probably be shocked to learn that it got a sequel in the short-lived ‘Sarah Jane Smith’ audio series. But that focused on Hilda Winters and her Scientific Reform Society.

Two years after those stories, and BigFinish were about to tackle their second ‘Robot’ sequel…

◆ Publisher’s Summary

The colonists knew the risks of Jegg-Sau. With a flimsy atmosphere, no mineral wealth and exhausted soil, only the strongest and most determined could hope to make a home there. But with nowhere else to go, they went ahead, allegedly funded by a stock of valuable relics and art treasures stolen from Earth.

But the colony failed. Jegg-Sau was deserted once more, home only to carrion and rusted dreams. But Bernice Summerfield believes the relics remained, and she's come a long, long way in search of them. What she'll find is that others have reached Jegg-Sau before her. She'll find herself cat's-paw in a dark outpost of frailty and obsession.

And she'll find the robots.

◆ Prof. Bernice Summerfield

Lisa Bowerman’s performance in this episode was pretty good.

Benny has the kind of headache you can only swear about, so decides to do it in Martian to spare the ears of young Elise. She was just passing the planet and certainly didn’t expect to drop in like this. One minute she’s in the shuttle, and everything is fine. The next thing she knows, something hits without warning, and the ship drops like a stone. Benny is far from amused that Elise mistook the distress rocket for a pigging RPG launcher, and claims that wars have been started over less. She has been in so many scrapes that Brax had an extra power pack installed into her shuttle. Benny, rather shockingly, decides to slice Ethan in half with a samurai sword… which leads to his daughter attempting to return the favour.

◆ Story Recap

While running a low-level sweep of the abandoned colony of Jegg-Sau, Benny suddenly found her shuttle hit without warning, and dropping like a stone to the planet below. It turns out this was caused by a sixteen year old mistaking an RPG launcher for a distress flair!

Jegg-Sau may be an abandoned human colony world, but two people remain – a mineralogist, Ethan Kalwell, and his daughter Elise. They’ve been on this world for over a year now, with only a retro-style robot for company… which confuses Benny. The Kalwells have food rations that could last them years, but it’s all long out of date. They chew but never appear to swallow the food they eat.

There’s something very wrong with the Kalwells… and that name is remarkably similar to Kettlewell.

◆ Jigsaw / Jegg-Sau

‘The Relics of Jegg-Sau’ is actually inspired by a Doctor Who jigsaw that Stephen Cole owned as a child, which portrayed two K-series robots marching across an alien world with energy weapons. The actual jigsaw is shown on the TardisWiki page for this release, and it looks like it would be really exciting.

What we actually got was very different – a bunch of K-Series robots that have been abandoned on a colony world, left to go insane, and build their own humans based upon archetypes from some “erotic VR simulation”!

◆ Sound Design

Having spent several releases in absentia, David Darlington finds himself back in the post-production hot seat. Jegg-Sau is given a decent soundscape, showcasing the pure desolation of this abandoned colony.

The world swirling and warbling around an unconscious Benny. The voice of K103 sounds exactly like his progenitor; that booming voice of Michael Kilgarriff, with an electronic effect layered over the top. The robot moves with a great deal of force too, and you can really imagine just how heavy the big fella is. Red cross jets fly through the skies of Jegg-Sau… ready to rescue Benny, and eliminate the K-Series robots.

◆ Music

David Darlington unfortunately stumbled with his score: I managed to make zero notes on it, and I’ve listened to this episode twice now.

◆ Conclusion

“They were quite the most civilised lunatics I’d ever met.”

A bunch of robots built to Professor Kettlewell’s original design, used as servitors on an Earth colony world. The world was soon abandoned, and the robots left sad, confused and lonely. The K3 series robots soon found themselves going mad, and attempting to “correct” any human beings who came across them.

‘The Relics of Jegg-Sau’ had lots of potential, but ultimately boiled down to a tale of robots turning against their creators. Stephen Cole has done an excellent job here, don’t get me wrong, but the standard has been set incredibly high throughout Series Five.

This was a pretty fun story, drawing from the TV episode of Doctor Who called Robot. It doesn't feel like it particularly relies on that though, as it is the sort of backstory that could have just as easily been entirely original to this particular audio.

Lisa Bowerman is great as always, and I found the story pretty well done as a whole, with Elise being particularly compelling, too. While I wasn't the most engaged, there were some pretty good twists along the way and it wasn't a bad listen by any means.