It’s 2002. We’re a long way from Christopher Eccleston and the leather jacket, and Doctor Who is still a niche interest science-fiction property consigned to novels and audiobooks. The TV Movie has happened, and everyone who saw it is desperately hoping it won’t Happen Again. It’s a dark time to be a Doctor Who fan. Perhaps. I’m not sure, I was only nine years old. Nobody in my life was a huge fan of the show, and so whatever was going on in that wide weird universe, it all went unnoticed by me, including the release of The Maltese Penguin.

Being nine years old at the time, I would only have been seven when the precursor to this story, Robert Shearman’s sublimely warped The Holy Terror shipped to an unsuspecting listening public and (I can only imagine) left everyone staring at their early 2000s combination sound systems agog, trying to wrap their heads around what they’d just heard. Seven is far too young to have money for CDs and fancy combination sound systems, you see. For that, I can only be grateful; I was a somewhat sensitive child, and I’m sure that story would have left me with anxious nightmares of floating murderer babies and cultish hierarchies for weeks.

The Maltese Penguin, though, released two years later and also by Shearman, would have been far more suited to my seven-to-nine-year-old tastes. I don’t mean this in any way as a flat criticism; I thoroughly enjoyed The Maltese Penguin, but it has to be acknowledged that this is a radical departure from Frobisher’s previous appearance and might have confused listeners coming in for more of the same. This is a straightforward send-up of pulp and noir fiction, exactly the sort of thing you imagine early-90s Patrick Stewart would absolutely have a blast in until the holodeck malfunctioned and tried to kill him.

There’s a corrupt cop, a mysterious beautiful woman that the script gets to luxuriate (read; perv) over and an indiscriminately violent crime boss, complete with slow talking lumbering sidekick. Anyone who has read a pulp noir novel, heck, anyone who’s ever seen any television show that ever ran long enough to parody the genre (and trust me, there’s a lot) will know what’s going on here. The only real diversions we take from the form are, of course, the elements that tie this into the Doctor Who universe.

So, what do we have to tie it in? Arguably, this could be taken as one of the first ever “Doctor-lite” episodes, that modern money-saving venture that’s given us such classics as Blink, 73 Yards, Dot And Bubble, and of course, Cyberwoman. Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor is barely in this, having but a few cameos at the beginning, midpoint, and end. His sheepish desire to have his friend Frobisher back is underplayed well by Colin, but it’s difficult to buy Frobisher’s desire not to come back, especially when we’re not really provided much context for why Frobisher would leave in the first place. There’s an argument to be made that this story slots into canon after The Holy Terror, but it appears that the two larger timelines, Rassilon bless their lunatic endeavors, are a little at odds over which one comes first. For my money, the story makes a lot more sense if you position it there, but not a lot in the story explicitly says so. It’s far more interested in hitting all the correct genre beats; the clifftop execution, forcing our hero to rapidly shape-change as he plunges towards the ocean, is heart-pounding stuff, but it’s balanced against an awful lot of standing around expositing. It’s audio, of course, so there are some concessions to be made, but when at least some of the expositing is coming in Robert Jezek’s Frobisher voice, an acquired taste to say the least, and then yet more of it is coming in Colin Baker’s pretty wobbly approximation of Robert Jezek, an impression OF a dodgy accent, it’s easy to lose what’s actually happening in the swirl of dubious space Brooklynites.

While I am on the subject of vocal work though, I have to pay a lot of credit to Toby Longworth, who here plays Dogbolter with a sly relish. Considering Dogbolter is a frog person, there was always going to be a risk that they played his character with some sort of voice altering synthesizer module, Nicholas Briggs giving him a sonorous croak that made him impossible to understand. Toby Longworth, by this point a Big Finish veteran appearing in many Main Range stories, is allowed to just let his voice and performance do the work, and as a result his villainy is far more grounded and, frankly, comprehensible.

Robert Shearman is a writer who I think works best when he’s allowed leeway to write a twisty-turny script full of unexpected revelations and diversions; I think perhaps that as well as Frobisher’s built-in backstory as a private investigator led him in this direction. Sadly, I don’t necessarily think it suits him. The most interesting part of this story is the big reveal; that Dogbolter has the planet rigged, its economy never creates anything, it just keeps generating him a steady profit by existing, doing absolutely nothing. The “Something” they are all looking for is literally just that, something somebody made, and it has the capacity to crash their entire economy. That’s a far more interesting idea space to play in, one that almost feels wasted as the big reveal at the end of a fairly pedestrian genre pastiche. Almost as if he can’t help himself, Robert ups the complexity by having Alicia Mulholland, the spicy femme-fatale, reveal herself to be Frobisher’s Whifferdill ex-wife in disguise, allowing them to have a tearful reunion before an even more tearful departure.

This is seeded early in the story – Frobisher is clearly mourning somebody, but when he chooses to go with The Doctor anyway, and when the emotional beat is two penguins hugging their love out in a rain-soaked space mystery, it’s hard to take it all seriously. And truly, I don’t think we’re supposed to. That’s why I’ll happily loop it around and say that at nine years old, I would have loved this. It’s fast-paced, it’s fun, it has exactly enough edge to make it feel mature, but none of the real inherent darkness that the Big Finish Main Range was doing at the time.

Am I one of the people who wants Frobisher back? Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I think, actually, in this big year 2024, post Space Babies and in the Disney era, it would be an incredibly dangerous idea to introduce Frobisher to the wider fandom. Imagine the uproar – “DISNEY FORCES WOKE SHAPESHIFTING PENGUIN INTO TARDIS, AND HE’S AMERICAN?”.

I’ve put on my Stetson, I’ve made up a song,
People think this one’s a stinker but they’re all damn wrong!
So open your earholes, I’ll soon change your tune,
Let’s talk about the masterpiece…

At the Last Chance Saloon.

While watching THE GUNFIGHTERS (1966, Donald Cotton) I think it’s natural for a lot of questions to spring into one’s mind. Questions like “How long did it take them to come up with this many verses?” and “What exactly was the sweet that The Doctor was eating?”. Questions like “How on Earth did they afford to fly out all these genuine Americans to play cowboys on the meagre budgets of 1966?”, and “Did William Hartnell stand in any horse poo, and if so, how did he react?” So many important questions, most of them with answers you could at least guess at (in order, 1. Either far too long or far too fast, 2. Fisherman’s Friend, 3. OK I had a hard time writing that one with a straight face, and 4. Almost certainly, and what he said can’t be reprinted on a family friendly blog) but going into this serial having read a fair few reviews and with an understanding of larger fandom opinions, I had one very big question, nagging at me like a broken tooth that needed pulling, one that did not seem to have an answer.

“How did this get its reputation as one of the worst Hartnell stories, nay, one of the worst Doctor Who stories of all time?”

So, like Gandalf riding his horse to Minas Tirith while the Hobbits dodge murder in the woodlands, I went digging through my references and with embarrassment realized that that “unanswerable” question actually seems to have been answered; we think it’s bad because most of the 80s reference works told us so. Even more embarrassing was discovering that my enjoyment of this story was no longer that transgressive; on the contrary, El Sandifer tells me that because I like this story I’m engaging in something called “Reconstructionist criticism”, which sounds lovely and fantastic and certainly makes me feel warm and special, but also means that coming into this review hoping to break ground by calling it a masterpiece just isn’t going to turn heads.

Yes, I did use the word “masterpiece.” Maybe that alone will still bend some necks, because on paper, it isn’t. “Masterpiece” is a word I use a lot more subjectively than many. There are things in this world that have objectively been considered failures that I would look at and call a masterpiece. I think that’s part and parcel of being a Doctor Who fan, or at least one obsessive enough to write reviews; we all have our own personal masterpieces, each with its own defining features, and frankly, objective quality rarely factors into those equations. I call this a masterpiece because I think it not only sets out what it wants to do with style and aplomb, but also because it lays down groundwork for one of the things most celebrated about Doctor Who, and one that’s most special to me - the fact that it can do anything. Nowhere is this clearer than in the much maligned song.

Sandifer talks about the song, saying:

“…it is a line in the sand that declares that the world of the Western is different from everything else. [It is] clear that the TARDIS is visiting an existing landscape.”

I agree with this wholeheartedly and would even take it a step further; the distinction between the “accurate” historicals and the “fun” historicals is already well defined at this point so I won’t harp on it too much. The short version is that some historicals are concerned with evoking a period accurately and some of them are concerned with making sure all the correct historical genre tropes get hit.

The Gunfighters falls squarely into the latter camp; we are presented with this simulacra of the Old West, so clearly not real that Steven and Dodo’s costumes are almost picture-perfect recreations of Woody and Jessie from Toy Story, but no one really pays attention to the anachronisms. Their actions and backstory are narrated by a song at every turn. They haven’t landed in Tombstone; they’ve landed inside The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon, something I think has been overlooked by other readings. This story isn’t best read as a funny historical, this is a story best read as a precursor to The Mind Robber, but also to so many genre and format-bending stories in the EU and, yes, begrudgingly so, I will admit that it’s this story that extends out into The Church on Ruby Road and The Devil’s Chord. Because to talk about the legacy of The Gunfighters, you have to talk about music in Doctor Who.

Neither of those two latterly mentioned contemporary episodes are my favorites. In fact, I don’t much like CoRR and The Devil’s Chord is mostly saved for me by the performances, and not the music. But those songs aren’t any more artfully written than The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon, which was apparently being constantly re-written and updated with more and more specific lyrics about the plot. So why do I have such a problem with The Goblin Song and “There’s Always a Twist at The End” when, apart from a couple of gripes about words that could scan better, I find the Ballad not only charming, but one of the vitally important muscles flexing in this episode’s circulatory system?

I think the answer stems from that first, important question I asked, the one I thought I had no answer to. Why did people react poorly to this when it originally aired? The answer may be that they didn’t, who knows? It turns out that question only mattered for as long as Jeremy Bentham told us it did. But there’s an inverse to that question, perhaps one that’s more vital. Why have people suddenly decided that it’s good again? In what way were we able to reevaluate and unlearn our preconceptions? I think the Ballad is the key factor in both of these questions.

I don’t have a hard time believing that when Lynda Baron croons her way into the opening seconds of this episode, people were confused. I can imagine a world where, as the episode progresses, despite the solid performances from the central cast, the reoccurrence of the song would begin to grate on the parents watching. Hell, even some of the smaller children, far more used to space adventure, might well have given a curious turn and asked, “Mummy, will she be singing through all of Doctor Who?”

The viewing figures bear this out. 6.5m the first week, followed by a slight up-tick to 6.6 in the one to follow. Attributed perhaps, to people tuning in to see if it was going to be another week with “that bloody song”. And then a steep fall-off for the remaining two weeks of the serial. Not, as the rumors go, the lowest ever recorded, especially if you’re like me and think AI figures are mostly garbage anyway, but still enough of a reaction to draw evidence from. Whether this was wildly hated at the time, who can say. But something made people stop watching, and given that the acting, production, direction and design are all, to my eyes, at least as good as anything else the show was doing at the time (they had real horses! Imagine the paperwork.), I can come to maybe three conclusions:

1. The song, as discussed.
2. The accents, which are admittedly all over the place, and do occasionally hamper the acting. I find this hard to buy though, as apart from Charlie the Barman no one is absolutely dismal, just ropey, and it’s difficult to know how critical of accent work the families of 1966 would have been.
3. A general dismay of the Western, and America in general leading to a feeling that the genre had somehow sullied Doctor Who.

3 is an entirely different review and 2 is trite and easy, so I’m gonna say that at the time, the song might have just been too much to bear. Too different. Too much of a big swing. And now, here’s where I tie it back to The Goblin Song and The Devil’s Chord. I’ll quote one of the commenters from the Eruditorum review of The Gunfighters:

“…my parents finally got a colour television set and suddenly it made sense to watch Doctor Who out in the lounge rather than on a 5" black and white fire hazard. What a mistake to make, it seemed as all the family could chortle at my favourite programme.”

There are points in my life where I have been embarrassed to be a Doctor Who fan. I still have them now honestly. The small nerd who loves to play pretend, maybe plays pretend longer than most kids, that child lives inside every Doctor Who fan, and the world is often not kind to that sort of soul. Even though Russell T Davies made it event television in the 2000s, it’s still the sort of niche that you don’t necessarily reveal on a first date. In America, even more so. But time, and therefore distance, allows us a little more safety when it comes to liking things that don’t fit the framework of what we’re used to. It’s easy for us to like The Gunfighters now, because we’re far enough away that we can have a sort of detached irony. It doesn’t have the immediacy of watching an episode of television with a family member, or a partner perhaps, and having to sit as The Goblin Song extends for its full 3 and a half agonizing minutes (sorry, I’m trying to be neutral) while you stew in anxiety over sidelong glances, the phantoms of stifled giggles. “This is the thing you spend all your time obsessing over?”

One of the biggest sources of cognitive dissonance any obsessive will experience is knowing full well that they’re watching a children’s television program whilst also dedicating thousands of words and hours of brainpower applying theory and analysis to it. I haven’t the word-count to go into it in this review, which is still ostensibly about the one with the cowboys and not analytical criticism and fandom at large, but it’s safe to say that this tension exists in every Doctor Who fan who owns at least one reference book. Those of us who do are also often likely to be the most dedicated evangelists for the show, trying at any opportunity to hook our claws (OF AXOS snarf snarf) into anybody unfortunate enough to give us five spare minutes of silence to fill. Taken any way, a weird, badly written song that elbows its way into the piece and loudly declaims “THIS THING YOU LIKE IS OFTEN RATHER SILLY” can rather take the wind out of the sails of anyone desperately wanting their friends to think the thing they like is cool. It’s very difficult to keep up that pretense of cool when even you can’t buy into the CGI goblins badly crooning their autotune, telling you quite firmly “This is where you are and this is what we’re doing.”

So back to my question – why are the modern songs so divisive, whereas The Ballad, despite what the chaff of many an online forum would have you believe, gets a pass? I think, quite simply and altogether too neatly, the answer mostly comes down to time. We have, now, sixty years of history between us and The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon. Doctor Who has gone on to do many other strange things in the interim and has taken heat for quite a lot of these changes. A lot of the black and white era now gets a pass because redemptive (or should that be reconstructionist) readings tend to come from a place of wonder, marveling at what they were able to achieve in the 1960s, things that seem so quaint to us now but were groundbreaking then. This is mostly done for effects, or to turn a blind eye to obvious faults in the scripting or casting process, but I think today, one of the kindest and most important places to turn that eye is at The Gunfighters, and the song. Because I think the big secret is that they knew there was a chance people were going to hate it, and they did it anyway.

The song was being developed separately from the script, although I’m not sure how much conversation was going back and forth between the musical director and the writer (and probably won’t until 2036 when Toby Hadoke finally gets around to doing a Too Much Information on this one) and I have to think that in the second episode, when Steven Regret asks quite meekly whether they might not sing a different song, if he wasn’t speaking for some members of the production.

The point is, it got made – the quality of it is irrelevant, whether or not people liked it is also actually irrelevant. The point is that Doctor Who was then, and has been since, a show run and created by the sort of people who are willing to take an awkward swing, willing to ruffle feathers not just with concept or casting, but with the technique and artistry of making the show itself. The Gunfighters was, of course, never the template for what Doctor Who was supposed to be; perhaps had the viewing figures doubled week on week we would have been treated to Lynda Baron gaily singing us the Ballad of Vengeance On Varos in the mid 80s and the world would look very different. Alas, she doesn’t and it didn’t, but we do have, from The Gunfighters, a much more subtle model for what Doctor Who should be; a show never afraid to alienate by taking silly risks, and a show that always benefits from the gentle varnishing of time.

All of this is basically to say that if you catch me in a nursing home in 50 years calling The Church On Ruby Road a masterpiece, don’t call me a hypocrite.

We're back with Marc Platt in the 19th century, and despite a strong start, this one made almost little to no impact. Admittedly, I did listen to it as background noise while I fiddled around in a video-game about space-ships, so maybe a tale of Russian serfs and the Napoleonic Wars was never going to grip my attention. Except of course that for the first fifteen or so minutes, it really did. It sets itself up as a pure historical in the vein of The Romans; following on from the events of The Gunfighters, Doctor 1, Steven and Vicki land in rural Russia, where they are rapidly taken in by the locals, fed a lot of borscht, and given jobs in the community, something that seems to happen to them basically wherever they go. I'm a freak for a pure historical, even more so when it gives us a bit of insight into the characters of these original, black and white TARDIS teams (it's why I have such a fondness for Farewell, Great Macedon and even The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance; while that one isn't a pure historical, it's much more about who Barbara is as a person than the weird space stuff going on). Off the back of Frostfire, where Marc Platt was able to explore a little of the trauma that comes from being left behind by The Doctor, even if it's by your own choice, we don't really get the same exploration of Steven here.

Some of that (OK, I'll be charitable, almost all of it) is down to the framing device, in my opinion. We're once again having the companion explain the story to another, unseen listener, and again, the unseen listener bootstraps back into the story at the end to tie it all up into a neat bow. Frostfire made this work, even if I acknowledge it begrudgingly, because Vicki was telling a story about something that happened a long time ago. From what I gathered from the ending of Mother Russia, which was rushed, messy, and overly expository, Steven is retelling the events of about twenty minutes ago to the creature that was directly involved in the event? The final ten minutes feels almost entirely like Steven describing the things that happened and the Shape Thief agreeing.

Basically, much like The Witchfinders, this starts as a good historical story with nice bits of flavor and texture (The Russian setting is lovingly evoked, as is the passing of seasons as Team TARDIS spend the better part of half a year living in the village) that is thrown way off balance by the arrival of an obligatory alien. There's a moment where we're treated to what we think might be a bit of Seventh Doctor-esque deception, the closest we get to some good character work for Steven as once again his faith in who The Doctor is becomes shaken and challenged. But instead, it was a shapeshifting alien (about as innovative as the Frost Fair) and by the time we're closing out, the whole thing collapses into a dense sort of mess that left me cold.

It's not all bad - Steven fights a bear, and I think we can all agree that were The Revenant made in 1965, Peter Purves would have been a solid casting. He gives a good strong performance here - his Steven voice has always sort of been his Steven voice, but even he really can't put a lot of enthusiasm into the dreary exposition that makes up the final third of this story. Not a highlight.

FIVE MINUTE REVIEW

I'm trundling through the First Doctor's era right now in a foolhardy attempt to comprise a timeline, and that trundle led me straight to Frostfire, released in 2007 for the Big Finish Companion Chronicles range. A couple of pleasant firsts here; the first audio set in the First Doctor era, the first Companion Chronicle in the series, and the first time we get the wonderful Maureen O'Brien back as Vicki Pallister.

She's the strongest thing in this audio, for my money. She has a great lilting voice and she's able to convey the pretty broad range of emotions that the script calls from her, as well as managing to give subtle differences to the Vicki of the past and the Lady Cressida of the present. Speaking of that script, Marc Platt of Lungbarrow fame puts in a decently respectable piece of work here. The Frost Fair isn't exactly breaking the mould in terms of locations, but it's an evocative setting that you could easily imagine 1st/Vicki/Steven finding themselves in, and he nicely ties the weather into the story itself. The chilly atmosphere is palpable. The Doctor, Steven and Vicki end up at the Frost Fair, where tucked away in a stall full of curios from far-off lands is a strange alien egg, the chick growing within slowly sapping all of the heat from the city of London so that it can hatch.

Jane Austen is there too, but she's a little bit too much of an historical stunt-cast for me to care that much; despite Vicki's assertions that she's full of surprises, she's really sort of just there as "formidable older woman" and apart from a couple of jokes at the expense of Vicki and Steven (who we are briefly made to think might end up having a dalliance) there's not much you could pin down about her that makes her Jane Austen specifically. While a fun diversion, it felt superfluous.

Unsurprisingly in a series called The Companion Chronicles, Bashin' Billy Hartnell takes a bit of a back seat in this one - Maureen's rendition of him is good enough, but he's not really the central point of the story. When he is spotlighted though, the script captures the compassionate and grandfatherly attitude that started to emerge from One at this point in his life, and there's a lovely high point where he takes to the dance floor with Miss Austen that you can absolutely imagine happening on-screen.

The framing structure is weird to start with, although once you realize that we've been building up to a clever little bootstrap paradox at the end, you can't help but give Marc Platt the sort of nod you give a bloke in a pub who's just bamboozled you with a magic trick that you didn't necessarily want to see in the first place. Tangentially, this also clearly starts the tradition of Companion Chronicles stories giving us some quite bleak insight into what happens to The Doctor's companions when he leaves them. Here, it's clear that there is damage and trauma that Vicki, now Lady Cressida, is having to work through, being left behind in a world that was so far away from her own, and now only with the tiny embers of an alien phoenix who hates her to keep her company. In this way, Companion Chronicles expands on the world of Doctor Who in a way that a lot of main-line stories simply cannot. Whilst also telling a short story, we often get very realistic looks into what happens after.

I wasn't blown away. It's a sort of humdrum story, told well in two parts. It isn't making any fundamental changes, and it also isn't technically knocking anything out of the park, but for what it represents? A willingness to look past The Doctor, especially in the Classic Era where 1 and 2 would so often turn up, break things, and piss off, Frostfire is a worthwhile character piece that gives us a glimpse into Vicki's life past the TARDIS, and in doing so gives Maureen O'Brien a chance to really let her vocal performance shine. The moments of yearning, regret, and fondness that she can convey with quite simple lines, changes of tone, and inflection connect you to the story in a way that it's material parts can't. It's a great opening to the range, and an even better return for (for my money, anyway), one of the First Doctor era's best, and perhaps most under-served companions.

OK so bear with me here - there's an episode of Black Mirror that this is kind of ripping off, but it isn't the one you think it is.

In Shut Up And Dance, a young man is blackmailed into performing a series of dangerous things like robbing a bank with one of the good actors from Game of Thrones. Through very effective, claustrophobic storytelling, we are forced to rapidly empathize and sympathize with our young protagonist - as far as we know, he's being blackmailed with a video of him jerkin' it taken through his webcam. Bronn from Game of Thrones is being blackmailed about gambling debts? An affair? I don't remember, it's not important.

What is important is that the Jonathan Frakes twist in this particular Twilight Zone is our likeable if strange protagonist, thrust into a f**king awful situation that hey, any of us could reasonably be put into, right? Yeah, the twist is that he's been whacking it to HIGHLY illegal material and we've been sympathizing and empathizing with him the entire while. And then at the end, the videos are released anyway, he's been forced to beat another equally horrible person to death with his bare hands, and nobody has really gained anything. We never even find out what the hackers wanted in the first place.

That's the episode that this is ripping off, and it does it to ASTONISHING effect. This is the bleakest Doctor Who has been since Children of Earth. This is the Russell T Davies who wrote Damaged Goods. Combine that with Disney money production value, one of the best needle-drops (honestly, it totally justifies however much they spent on it), rug-pull after rug-pull. Is it "What if Black Mirror but Doctor Who?" ? Yes, but Doctor Who has been crashing into genre television for decades now, and if this is what it looks like in 2024, then I am entirely for it. I was and am continue to be gobsmacked. I'll be thinking about it for weeks.

What if Charlie's Angels, but Torchwood? Except what if it was also trying to impart important messages about femininity, the role of women in the world and the way they are exploited and commodificated? Except what if it it was also a Stealth Pilot for a 1970s LA Torchwood series? Except what if it was also a star-making vehicle for a new writer and a new set of voice actors?

You'd probably say that it was trying to do far too much with not a lot of resource, and that historically the accent work on Big Finish hasn't been great so...oh, you want one of them to be from the Bible Belt, one of them to be a hip-talking Black woman (it's audio, obviously, but you can see the comedy Afro from a mile away) and one of them to be a...a yes, a Hispanic woman who can't go three seconds without mentioning her abuelita or using the word "chica"? That's fine, won't get in the way of your story at all, I'm sure.

I didn't think this was as much of a stinker as the generally low rating on the site would give it. Just chock-full of BF Bad Habits, with a central story that's really rather dull and played out. The little sparks of interaction between the core three are some of the stronger parts, but we're given no reason to invest in any of these characters. As a matter of fact, the little potted history we get of each of them at the start had the opposite effect, if anything. But of course, why bother actually letting your actors and dialog tell us the story of who these people are when you can just explain in a very clunky manner who they are up-front and then have basically none of it feed into any choices their characters make throughout. I was trying to say this one isn't a stinker, but apart from the accents I think you could probably have switched any of the three main leads in this story around and it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference.