Doctor Who: The Dark Flame (2003)
Trevor Baxendale
Big Finish #42
Starring: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Lisa Bowerman
Four acolytes of Evil. Three mad scientists. Two companions. One Doctor.
The Cult of the Dark Flame has long been dead, or so the universe thought. The Doctor, and Ace, receiving a distress call through the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits, from an old friend, completing research on Marran Alpha. Soon their old friend is dead, stabbed through the eye, and the Cult of the Dark Flame are threatening to tear the very universe apart. So just another day for The Doctor then.
That last glib line sums up The Dark Flame: while its story is fun – walking skeletons, crystal skulls, Hamlet jokes – and all is played well (Michael Praed as guest star! Bernice Summerfield returns!) it does all feel a bit, well, blah. We’ve been here before. As either Ace or Benny comments somewhere in the middle of this adventure, cults like The Dark Flame are a dime a dozen, and they all end unsuccessfully, as we know this one will. The tension is missing: for example, at the end of the first episode, when Benny is supposedly dead on the planet’s surface, we know she won’t be and can work out well ahead of time what has happened. We’ve been here before, many times. When Doctor Who works well, it does because the writer has subverted or inverted the form, denied expectations, taken a risk, and in this, his debut script, Trevor Baxendale simply takes no risks. This is Doctor Who played safe. Not his fault – Big Finish would never allow a newcomer to take risks with the property (even if the newcomer is known in Doctor Who circles for other things).
The Dark Flame then rises and falls on its characters: Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor is absent for a large part of the story in the middle, as is Ace, and so it falls to Bernice Summerfield – I’ve only come across her a few times in the Big Finish range (there is apparently a lot more of her in other Doctor Who ranges), and I think she’s mean to be some wise-cracking Lara Croft-esque character – and she does get some good one liners here and there, but after awhile her glib attitude began to wear: somehow it dissipates the tension, that she is so jovial in the face of imminent death. It makes her one-dimensional.
I wish there were some kinder comments I could make about this story, but I must damn it so: it is not a great story, nor is it a particularly bad one, it is simply dull. I heard the first part and could not listen to the next three for a number of days: I was not excited about the return. I may have even been subconsciously delaying it. A shame, then, as I like McCoy and I like Aldred – and would like to have known more about Ace during this time, when she becomes action-Ace, rather than the haunted Ace we have had of late.
Next up in Doctor Who though: pirates! Gilbert and Sullivan puns! And Evelyn’s back!
