Winter for the Adept

Well, that didn’t last long. After listening to The Land of the Dead a couple of months back I was incredibly excited about hearing more Doctor Who audio adventures. I discovered the Big Finish audios at just the right time, having viewed well over half of the 159 stories from the original television program that ran from 1963 to 1989. I was also thrilled that I enjoyed Peter Davison’s portrayal of the Fifth Doctor far more now than when he first took on the role back in 1981. When I looked at the stories I had to choose from I decided on one that immediately followed The Land of the Dead called Winter for the Adept. Unfortunately, it was quite a disappointment.




Every now and then in Doctor Who there appears a story that doesn’t play by the rules. Sometimes these stories are brilliant (Ghost Light, Blink) and sometimes they’re absolute rubbish (Underworld, Love & Monsters). Winter for the Adept doesn’t exactly play by the rules, either, but it in this case maybe it should have. It’s not that it has any glaring flaws, but it seems much closer to uninspiring fan fiction than the work of a serious author.

The story begins with a woman reading an old diary entry and the melodramatic way in which she does so immediately evokes the mood of Jane Austen and 19th century England. Unfortunately the story is set in Switzerland in the winter of late 1963, so we’re already off to a rocky start. At least the locale of a finishing school for young women has the air of Austen about it, if indeed that is a good thing. A couple of girls find themselves stuck in the aged academy for the Christmas holiday and decide to make a break for it…in the freezing cold.

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s companion, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), is all alone on a nearby mountainside…in the freezing cold. She’s left to carry the early part of the story on her own as the Doctor won’t arrive until the end of the first half-hour episode…when he explains why Nyssa ended up here in the first place. Nyssa isn’t very well written in this story and comes off sounding more like Tegan (the complainer) or Adric (the whiner) than her usual logical self. Of course, having nearly been frozen to death by the Doctor may certainly explain her behavior. A Lieutenant Sandoz discovers Nyssa and accompanies her to the academy where he’s surprised to hear the two girls have run off. He goes after them and it’s later revealed that Sandoz and one of the students, at least twenty years his junior, were planning on eloping.

And it just goes downhill from there. The story makes a surprising amount of left turns and none of them quite work. There’s a plotline about one of the characters being psychic, in the middle of the story we find out the school is haunted, and the final episode is inundated with aliens. The aliens, referred to as Spillagers (because they spill into different worlds and pillage them…get it?) would probably work better in a story that focused on them exclusively and not merely used them as bookends to a melodramatic ghost story.

I mentioned in my review of the previous Fifth Doctor audio story The Land of the Dead that I recognized none of the actors that were part of the supporting cast, but I was rather impressed with their work. In Winter for the Adept I found the opposite was true. I recognized many of the people involved, but I couldn’t say they were all that remarkable. The head of the school, Miss Tremayne, is played by Sally Faulkner who memorably appeared as the young photographer in the 1968 Second Doctor story The Invasion. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t looked it up, because Tremayne is a pretty forgettable caricature. Lt. Sandoz is played by Peter Jurasik, best known for the role of Londo Mollari in Babylon 5, but he really takes a back seat in the story and seems wasted in the part. Finally, India Fisher plays one of the school girls, but you probably know her as Charley Pollard, the Eighth Doctor’s companion in over two dozen audio stories.

Only Peter Davison remains on top of his game in Winter for the Adept, but as he’s almost entirely absent from the first episode it’s a long wait for not much of a pay off. I recommend skipping this story unless you’re a big fan of the Fifth Doctor as there are so many better audio stories available. Winter for the Adept was enough to put me off of the Peter Davison stories for a while and I decided to move on to his successor Colin Baker, but that…is another story for another time.


2 Daleks (out of 5)

Doctor Who: The Land of the Dead

The Land of the Dead (2000) is one of the first Doctor Who audio dramas from Big Finish Productions. This series, now counting well over a hundred stories, features Doctors Five through Eight in their ongoing adventures through time and space. This particular story involving the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his companion Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) is set in contemporary Alaska and takes place between seasons 19 and 20 of the original BBC television series.

I would be lying if I said I was a fan of Peter Davison’s Doctor. In fact, when asked to put the Doctors in order of preference (and, trust me, this is a challenge no hardcore Who fan can resist), I find that Davison is nearly always dead last on my list. That’s because he comes across as an ineffectual, namby-pamby, vanilla-flavored ninny who spends more time running about with his hands in his pockets and looking exasperated at his companions than he does in getting the job done. Say what you will about the Sixth Doctor’s garish costume, but at least when push comes to shove he’s…well, he’s willing to do either!

Nevertheless, I’m one of those Doctor Who fans who still enjoys watching all of the Doctors, if not all of their stories. I’m moderately fond of The Visitation, Mawdryn Undead, and The Caves of Androzani, but even these stories I feel I enjoy more for the sake of completion rather than true admiration. I tried to pretend it was the tacky 80s clothing or the annoying gaggle of companions that so turned me away from the Fifth Doctor’s era, but in the end I say the buck stops with the Doctor. If he doesn’t strike the right chord, then it’s all off.

Now, I’m not going to say it’s all Peter Davison’s fault. A lot of his Doctor’s laissez-faire approach is in the scripts themselves, but there is something so unassuming and apologetic in Davison’s very nature that he often comes across as dreadfully ordinary. He is strictly white-bread-with-the-crusts-cut-off Doctor material and doesn’t seem to have the gravitas for the role. His era, that of the early 80s, also sees some of the gaudiest costumes and unconvincing studio sets of the shows original run.

Thankfully, The Land of the Dead doesn’t have to deal with either of those problems. Davison has grown as an actor in the 20 years since his debut as the Doctor and a lack of visuals is vastly superior to conspicuously bad visuals. While it’s obvious that both he and Sutton (returning as my favorite Fifth Doctor companion, Nyssa) have aged, I think it actually benefits them both tremendously. They’re joined by a cast of five Brits I’ve never heard of, but most of them do a decent job. It’s always funny hearing the British do American accents, but everyone here is still more convincing than Nicola Bryant was at Peri’s American accent back in the original show…even the guy playing a Native American. Admittedly, he sometimes sounds like Tonto, but I guess some stereotyping is required considering we need to be able to tell everyone apart by voice alone.

The story here is really quite good, though to reveal too much would greatly reduce the mystique of the early episodes. It features an ancient life-form, older than the dinosaurs, awakened by an affluent eccentric through his macabre obsession of turning his home into a shrine to his dead father. The creatures themselves are really quite unique in that they do not speak and are more like a sort of supernatural raptor when we first come across them. They absorb the abilities and characteristics of whatever they eat and the Doctor and company are on the menu. It’s nice to see the Doctor (this one in particular) faced with an animalistic foe for a change. This is an adversary he can’t reason with or talk his way past. So, what does he do? Well, mostly he runs away. But it’s an understandable sort of running away that’s actually quite entertaining in a Jurassic Park sort of way.

I have to admit I was thrown off by listening to Doctor Who at first. I’m too young to remember when radio dramas were even available, let alone popular, and I found myself having to concentrate while the story played rather than let my eyes and mind wander. Towards the end I decided to listen to it in the dark and I have to say that it helped tremendously. Probably the best thing this story has going for it is its sense of atmosphere and the sound effects are fantastic; they're far more effective if you’re not trying to do too many things at once.

There’s also more to this story than just the central plot of the Doctor versus monsters. The mysterious tragedy that binds two key characters together is well explored and reaches a satisfactory conclusion. A healthy dose of Native American mythology and archaeology brings an added level of complexity to what could otherwise be a rather sterile setting. There’s even a hint of moral environmentalism thrown in for good measure. All things considered The Land of the Dead is a solid, straightforward Doctor Who story that feels far more fresh than nostalgic. More importantly, perhaps, it’s renewed my faith in the Fifth Doctor and gotten me excited about the dozens of other audio stories that remain ahead!


4 Daleks (out of 5)