x_losfic | audio review: BFA: "Shada"

Shada: Eight BFA version

Romana’s back, without the bitchiness of Zagreus or the batshit insanity of the Gallifrey series, and if you didn’t know coming in, from that alone you could tell this was initially supposed to be a Four serial. But overall I think the transition between mediums and Doctors is made surprisingly gracefully: baring a few lines that sound strikingly ‘Four as written by Douglas Adams’-y, the re-write is a thorough one. Eight sounds like Eight, and where he doesn’t quite it’s very clever and I don’t much mind.

President Romana running off with Eight on holiday is weird in the context of how seriously the presidency is taken in the Gallifrey series, but who cares? Romana being president in this version allows Eight to shift the responsibility for deciding how to punish his old friend Professor Chronotis onto her. I like that as a characterization move for him—also, isn’t the Doctor really done by now with all of his male Time Lord friends turning out to be master criminals, guilty of mind-crime, and Shada-escapees? Isn’t this getting old for him?

Skagra is a good one-off villain, and I did actually lol at the end. To be trapped forever in a ship cooing about the Doctor’s delicate touch and scintillating engine modifications is hilariously painful. Unfortunately I think this giggle fit coincided with a public hush as people without earphones on listened to some Gaza News coming over the radio: Pretty Awkward Timing for Erin.

I’m not sure why Skagra keeps Romana running around with him, other than that ‘some randomer killing off President Romana’ is not quite what we want in our BFA romp. The Think Tank/Universal Consciousness menace is a slight twist on the typical ‘rule the universe, muahaha’ trope, and while it could have been pushed a bit (Did the Krargs get /any/ brighter with these pooled intellectual resources? The didn’t seem to.) to explore just why it was so wrongcreepy in a cool way, that’s kind of not what Adams does best, or indeed likes to do ever, so fine.

I was so pleased to have figured out Professor Chronotis was Salyavin before the revelation came along in-script with its own little musical swell. Normally I get annoyed with friends who play the ‘well I knew all along, of course’ game with shows, as if watching were a race to this one pre-determined plot point, and the end arriving there as quickly as possible rather than enjoyment of the developing story. But there is a certain non-boasty satisfaction in that harmony between one and the story’s writer, the ‘I thought he should be that guy all along too!’ moments where you just want to find Douglas Adams and high-five him.

I lovelovelove the idea of a Gallifreyan prison-planet, and I think the execution is a bit creepy. The foreboding warning system, the cryogenic cells—all good. I’m glad I didn’t see it filmed, because apparently there are supposed to be randomer Daleks and Cybermen in some of the cells, which seems awfully blasé. The Time Lords would and do just kill those, and the idea of periods of political liberalism resulting in a cross-temporal prison crammed with their own forgotten as a balance to the disintegration-happy Five-era Time Lords is so much more interesting. The line about ‘forgetting very thoroughly’ on Gallifrey is eerily correct (and might go some ways towards explaining their weird cultural-amnesia re: the Master in Trial of a Time Lord). The explanation for Skagra’s knowledge of the Time Lords is so very academic and bitchy and parallels splits like the Avignon anti-Pope: the history nerd in me was amused by it.

The pouty-sulky note Lalla Ward’s voice sometimes gets (where is seems as if she steeped it in syrup for a while before taking it still dripping out of the vat and flinging it at the master tape), which was notably absent for all of Gallifrey, creeps back in at points here. Do not want.

The whole ‘Five Doctors wiped Four’s having done this from the time stream and so Eight must go back and do it’ thing is a bit poorly conveyed, though a really cool idea. Perhaps I’m just being a poor reader here, but it wasn’t clear to me that that’s what was going on until I was skimming an online summary afterwards.