Hello and welcome back to the Big Who Listen! We’re here to listen to and talk about the Doctor Who audio dramas produced by Big Finish, and have some fun along the way.
It’s on to 2009, as the 5th Doctor kicks off the year with a new companion and a new quest, as once again the universe hangs on the fate of the Key to Time…
The Judgement of Isskar is available to download for £7.99 here.
A new adventure in time and space for the Fifth Doctor and his companion, Amy as they search for the Key to Time.
On a planet where Time stands still, the Doctor meets a woman who is just a few minutes old. She is a Tracer, sent into our Universe by her makers to locate the six segments of the Key to Time. This being without a name wants the Doctor to be her assistant, but she doesn’t tell him the whole truth. Not at first.
Their first port of call is Mars, where a society that one day will become Ice Warriors lives in peace and civility. But the Doctor’s arrival will change all that. The universe is dying, a choice must be made, and the Judgement of Isskar will be declared. The price must be paid – even if it takes centuries…
Adam Kendrick
January 2009 marks a significant change in how audios were scheduled in the Monthly Range. From The Judgement of Isskar onwards, rather than swapping between the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors with every release, each Doctor has their audios grouped together over consecutive months, along with the occasional anthology. I assume that Big Finish made this change for production reasons because I’m unsure why they would want to make the Monthly Range feel less varied. Regardless of why, Big Finish kicked off the year with The Key 2 Time, a trilogy of Fifth Doctor audios in which the Doctor must once again search for the Key to Time and save the universe. Considering how previous Big Finish story arcs involving the Divergent Universe and Thomas Brewster turned out, will The Key to Time 2: Electric Boogaloo consist of three deeply interconnected stories with a satisfying payoff – or more likely, will they be a handful of standalone audios with some connective tissue plonked into the opening and closing scenes?
For those unfamiliar with Classic Who, The Key to Time was a six-serial series arc that ran for the entirety of Season 16, where the Fourth Doctor, Romana I, and K9 searched for the six segments that made up the Key to Time while keeping an eye out for the Black Guardian. By comparison, 2 Key 2 Time feels like a speedrun: there’s only three serials and four of the now-degrading segments are recovered during The Judgement of Isskar. The Doctor unintentionally finds the first segment during the first few minutes, while another is disguised as the capstone of a pyramid on Mars – sadly not the one imprisoning Sutekh, but a different pyramid built by the Ice Warriors. Crucially, Part One portrays their early history, back when they were peaceful artisans who operated a gift economy and never experienced conflict for twelve millennia. Alas, this ancient civilisation has been suffering from earthquakes caused by the nearby segment, and removing it initiates a Fires of Pompeii-style catastrophe that ultimately turns these cultured Martians into the warmongering Ice Warriors. One of these, the titular Isskar, dedicates his life to hunting down the Doctor so that he can punish him for the destruction of his people’s way of life – even though the Fifth Doctor, as is often the case, is blameless. Played by Nicholas Briggs (who else?), we see his attitude towards the Doctor change from cordial to vengeful, and his deep voice makes him a menacing presence.
Much like the Fourth Doctor, the Fifth Doctor needs a new companion to assist him with finding the segments – or more accurately, he’s been assigned as the companion for a sentient tracer that had literally just been created for this specific purpose (Peri has apparently wandered off on a rainy planet and doesn’t appear in this trilogy). This tracer takes the form of a woman voiced by Ciara Janson (best known for playing Nicole Owen in Hollyoaks) and whom the Doctor decides to nickname Amy (not to be confused with Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond, who wasn’t revealed as a companion until four months after this audio’s release). We see her mature over the course of this audio: at first, she speaks robotically and has a childlike naivety, but after becoming exposed to new experiences under the Doctor’s guidance, she quickly develops her own personality, begins speaking more naturally, and starts pushing the action forward herself. She also has a “sister” nicknamed Zara who’s searching for the other three segments, except she’s slowly becoming corrupted by their power and represents everything that Amy isn’t – selfish, manipulative, and willing to doom an entire civilisation for her own benefit. Hence, she becomes Amy’s rival, and the two sisters have plenty of scenes where they can play off each other.
Leaving Mars in chaos, the Doctor and Amy travel thousands of years into the future and search for the third segment inside a castle filled with insect-like aliens called Valdigians. This is where, much like the segments themselves, The Judgement of Isskar starts collapsing in on itself as Big Finish indulge in two of their perennial vices: giant overacting bugs with silly voices, and chaotic space battles full of yelling and laser blasts. The intrusion of the Valdigians detracts from the Ice Warriors’ origin story, which is significantly more interesting than the tedious battles of Part Three, and they also cause tonal problems: as The Dark Husband painfully demonstrated, it’s harder to take any conflict seriously when everyone is hamming up their performances or when a scene of attempted torture is immediately followed by a satirical discussion of an elective monarchy where every candidate abdicates before they come of age. Thankfully, these ridiculous creatures disappear during Part Four, allowing the story to refocus on Amy, Zara, and Isskar before concluding with a decent cliffhanger where the Doctor and Amy are trapped on a crashing spaceship, with the former calmly accepting his fate – only for a mysterious figure to intervene…
Despite leaving me cold halfway, The Judgement of Isskar still manages to be the best Ice Warrior audio I’ve listened to so far – although considering that their previous appearances (Red Dawn, Frozen Time) weren’t very memorable, perhaps this isn’t saying much. Simon Guerrier manages to present a new angle to these recurring aliens which makes them more sympathetic now that we know they’re victims of a cataclysm; I just wish that he had dropped the Valdigian nonsense and stuck with the Mars setting for the whole audio. The dynamic between Amy and Zara is a highlight, as they become Yin and Yang respectively and take over the narrative while the Fifth Doctor adopts a more passive role. The soundtrack, while nowhere near as impressive as Red Dawn’s, has some good moments, such as the warm flute-based melody that plays when the Doctor and Amy first arrive at the Martian Market or the mournful piece that accompanies Peter Davison as he narrates the tragedy that befell the Ice Warriors. In the end, this is a messy start to The Key to Time Reloaded, but there’s every possibility that the next two audios will be more satisfying.
John Ashway
We’re out of the starting gates for 2009, and Big Finish have decided to try an entirely new form of scheduling. Rather than randomly dotting each Doctor’s stories throughout the year, instead we’re moving to a (mainly) trilogy focused layout, with each Doctor getting three stories in a row before we move on to the next. Perhaps the Thomas Brewster stories last year were an experiment before deciding to go full steam ahead with this format for everyone? If so, it would appear to have been judged a success (though I’m not sure I would agree).
The 5th Doctor is here to pave the new way, with the Key 2 Time trilogy, a sequel to the 16th season of Doctor Who on TV. There, each of the season’s stories saw the Doctor, with his new companion lacking in practical experience, on the trail of a segment of the Key to Time, scattered across time and space. While the segments were important, collecting them was rarely the main focus of each story, instead providing a nice excuse for our heroes to be proactive about going forward into potential danger and poking their noses about before the main plot kicks off. Well, the Key 2 Time starts off with the same general format, but is going about things very, very differently indeed – and I’m not sure for the better.
Here, it’s all about the segments. Segments, segments, segments. The segments are decaying, with disastrous effects, the segments have powerful abilities, our two new characters Abby and Zara are changing as they get hold of more segments, and we rattle through collecting them like nobody’s business. It’s like we’re doing the season on a speedrun, and I think they just need to calm down and take a breath.
At the start, the story seems to be about Mars, where a segment of the Key to Time is causing disastrous earthquakes, and the Doctor and new companion Amy draw the ire of titular Martian magistrate Isskar. The worldbuilding here is quite good, presenting a peaceful early Martian culture before the “Ice Warriors” were born. But don’t get too comfortable, because we’re then whisked off to the next location, thousands of years later; a far less compelling insect kingdom of silly voices. At this point the listener is probably thinking, have Big Finish really named the story after a character who’s been left behind by Part Two? Are they trying to keep us on our toes and keep some secrets back? Err, no, as very quickly Isskar is (somehow) back and the story becomes about trying to quell his rage and convince him that the Doctor and Amy aren’t responsible for Mars’ problems (which they sort of are).
What the story should probably actually be about is Amy and Zara, sentient beings created to find the pieces of the Key to Time, who consider themselves “sisters”, and each have a quota of three segments to collect. While Amy decides to recruit the Doctor to help, Zara makes the acquaintance of the untrustworthy Zinc. Their true nature is unclear and a bit fudged. On the one hand, the story presents the idea that Amy and Zara are supposed to be a balance to each other, opposite but equal, so as Amy is nice and naïve, so Zara is more villainous and manipulative. But the story also plays with the notion that their personalities are forming based on the people they keep around them (yes, a bit like C’rizz!) so Amy is becoming more virtuous as a result of the Doctor’s influence, while Zara has picked up Zinc’s selfishness and tendency to choose the easiest option. Either of these ideas would be interesting to explore, but by doing both at the same time, it all feels a bit confused and arbitrary. Ultimately, Zara is nasty because the story needs an antagonist, and as she keeps jumping around through time, she’s simply not around enough for the sisters’ relationship to be a focus point.
In the end, while there’s certainly a lot of plot and lore here, the whole is completely unfocused and trying to tackle far too much, much too quickly. I think the most successful element is Amy; her naivete could be very annoying but is used for some quite humorous moments, and you do get the sense she’s learned a lot by the end of the story. But the quest for the segments adds too many people and places that distract, when I think they should have focused on first simply telling one good story.
James Ashway
After a decade of monthly adventures, Big Finish have decided to mix things up in 2009 with the beginning of trilogy season. After the very mixed Thomas Brewster trilogy, the firm have seemingly decided to press ahead with the format, with each incarnation now getting a set of three back to back stories before handing on. In homage to Doctor Who’s original ongoing storyline, the Key to Time, Big Finish have decided to start with a sequel, the imaginatively named Key 2 Time. And after a somewhat dire 2008, it’s a rocky start to 2009.
The Judgement of Isskar gets off to a decent start, with the Doctor approached by a mysterious stranger as time freezes around him. Plucked from an ongoing adventure with Peri, the pair depart on a new quest to retrieve the segments of the Key to Time and end up on Mars. At this point, the story rattles along quite nicely, with the new companion revealing that she is an artificial construct, a being created to act as a living tracer for the segments. While she may be a blank slate to begin with, to the extent that the Doctor has to give her the name Amy, this servant of the mysterious Grace is well-performed and provides a good foil for the Fifth Doctor as she develops. The second part of the episode is equally good, as the mystery deepens and the stakes are raised. But then, as we move into part three, all hell breaks loose – both inside and outside the world of the story.
The main issue is that The Judgement of Isskar makes an ill-advised jump in time and space to a new location, releasing any sense of tension that it had built up. While the scenes on Mars had continued to escalate, providing a lot of potential sources of dramatic tension, the story of Safeplace is really quite dull. It’s not helped by some quite annoying ‘alien’ voices that start to grate quite quickly, and something that’s only compounded by a plot that rapidly falls apart. Characters continue to trust the villain when they have been given multiple good reasons not to, and the cycle of trust, betrayal and renewed trust cycles a few times before the story is over. It’s possible this relates to the seemingly tortured development process of the story, with author Simon Guerrier detailing various editorial changes in his blog about writing The Judgement of Isskar. One of the many edits to the story was a change of title, and in some ways it’s perhaps the most damning – once the story is over, you’re not really sure what the title is actually referring to. To paraphrase Lisa Simpson, “there is no judgement of Isskar in The Judgement of Isskar.”
As with many stories in the past couple of years, The Judgement of Isskar is an adventure that has plenty of ideas that should have made it work, but doesn’t. It’s a real shame that this is Simon Guerrier’s last contribution to the main range, save for a one-parter many years down the line, as both The Judgement of Isskar and The Settling show promise even if they don’t succeed overall. The adventures of the Doctor and Amy continue next month, and it can only be hoped things will pick up for them.
Giles Allen-Bowden
I’m going to begin our look back at 2009 with a question … why?
Why are we doing this Big Finish? Why are we doing a sequel to The Key to Time? Why for that matter are we calling it The Key 2 Time? Sequel titles that are up to par with The Fast and Furious aside, the decision to go back to the Key to Time is definitely … a decision on the part of Big Finish, and not necessarily one for the best.
In my experience, people tend to like or love certain stories in the original Key to Time series but almost never praise the overarching plot or the series as a whole. In fairness, it’s not difficult to see why. It’s a macguffin plot where the macguffin/s are the least interesting part of the experience. Ask anyone what they remember from The Pirate Planet (which I’ll state now is the only Key story I’ve seen all the way through) and it’s not the actual “key” part, or the story’s conclusion anyone remembers, it’s MOONS OF MADNESS and K9 facing off against a robot parrot. This is compounded somewhat by the lacklustre, often apathetic reception to the Key to Time’s conclusion, which is a bad sign when you plan to write a sequel that follows on from that conclusion.
The Judgement of Isskar is meant to sell us on this trilogy of stories where the Fifth Doctor deals with the consequences of the Fourth Doctor’s actions in the original series. Does it succeed? To put it bluntly, no. This is an absolute slog of a story to get through. It gets off to a bad start where a new character explains in painfully expositional detail what’s going on and what’s at stake and Five’s reaction is mild indifference. He’s done this key-hunting thing before and will only do it again if the universe is at stake. Which, lucky for him, it turns out to be. What a way to establish tension! And it only gets more tedious as we go through this tale of Martian historical lore, unmemorable characters and a complete lack of tension despite the threat of a universe being destroyed.
There’s a few reasons why none of this works that well. Amy is a new companion who knows what the deal is with The Key to Time, which means the Doctor doesn’t have to catch her up on it, but the story still has to explain what the key is to the listener. She therefore spends a lot of time vocally making it clear how little she knows, which can often be tedious. It’s also perhaps a bad sign that the most interesting scene with her is when she undergoes physical torture. Now normally this is an overplayed trope I hate with Big Finish but it works here because Amy’s pain receptors aren’t normal and so she finds the process more ticklish than painful, much to the bafflement of her hamming-it-up torturer. We also have Zara who’s written as the ying to Amy’s yang and while she certainly is that and therefore distinctive, she’s no more intriguing than her very trusting counterpart and seems to be there to create some needed character conflict.
Meanwhile we also have the Ice Warriors and here they illustrate the issue with an alien race who are more interesting to look at then they are to listen to. As Ice Warrior stories go this is at about the same quality as Red Dawn and Frozen Time and even if you’re a fan of the Martians I would recommend revisiting any of their TV adventures over this. The story takes a lot of time to go over Martian history and politics, and like the quest to find the mystery macguffin it’s presented in such a dull, relentlessly expository manner that I can’t engage with it. I don’t care about the characters, and you have to when your stakes are the end of the universe because otherwise you have an intangible blob of a story that is difficult to get invested in on a personal level.
Overall, Judgement left me thoroughly cold. It just feels like an inane exercise for Big Finish to revisit this story. The ending of The Armageddon Factor wasn’t crying out for a sequel where the Doctor fixes his prior mistake, it was a nothing ending and we were happy enough to move on. But no, Big Finish wanted a sequel and specifically one with 2 in the middle of it so here we are. Big Finish is entering something of a new era with its trilogy format, experimenting with more intensified serialised storytelling that will in time evolve into the box set era over the next few years. If Key 2 Time is the proper flagship of this format then it’s a tragically bland because while it is happy to resurrect past ideas and characters, it doesn’t seem to know how to tell good stories with them.
Sam Sheppard
Ring ring…
“So Simon, let me get down to brass tacks. We’re doing a sequel to The Key to Time.”
“Why?”
“Do you really expect us to come up with something original? There’s no money in that. Anyway, we’d like you to contribute a story or two.”
“Great! So I actually had this idea about the Ice Warriors, and then another one about insect people-”
“Oh, sorry. You’re going to have to combine those two ideas into one story, I think.”
“Why?”
“We’re only doing three stories instead of six. Got to speed things up, you know.”
“OK… And which Doctor do you want me to put in it?”
“Well, let’s see now. The Sixth Doctor is still travelling with Charley for the time being, the Seventh Doctor should be doing something with the Forge, if we can figure out how to tackle that whole storyline, and the Fourth Doctor isn’t an option because we haven’t dragged Tom Baker into the Big Finish treadmill… YET. So let’s give it to the Fifth, he’s not doing anything since we introduced Thomas Brewster and promptly got rid of him.”
“Makes sense. And which companion should I include?”
“Hmm? Oh, just make one up. They won’t be sticking around for long, so no need to put that much effort into it. Well, if that all works for you, I want the script on my desk by Monday.”
Maybe that was an overly harsh way to begin my review, but then again, The Judgement of Isskar didn’t exactly impress me. When I listened to the first episode, for one thing, I had an unpleasant feeling that Big Finish was essentially repeating some of the big mistakes they made with the underwhelming finale to Series 2 of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Once again, Big Finish seems to have brought back another concept from Classic Who, without bothering to think of anything really interesting or original to do with that concept beyond “hey, remember that thing?” In this particular case, it’s the Key to Time, with the incredibly exposition-heavy opening scenes revealing that the Fifth Doctor needs to help new companion Amy (no, not that one) to find three of the six segments. To make matters worse, it’s eventually revealed that the segments are decaying, and Episode 1 ends with the Doctor declaring “If the Key to Time collapses, the universe is finished!” Unfortunately, simply having characters announce that the fate of the whole universe is at stake isn’t really any more dramatic or effective than it was in Sisters of the Flame.
Things don’t really get much better after the first episode, and I think the biggest problem with The Judgement of Isskar is its lack of focus. At first, the episode presents a potentially interesting scenario, as the Doctor and Amy’s quest for the segments takes them to the planet Mars; we soon learn that they’ve arrived during an early period in the planet’s history, when it was populated by a race of peaceful traders. In attempting to retrieve the segment, the Doctor and Amy end up becoming part of the cataclysm that caused the peaceful Martians to become the militaristic Ice Warriors. However, the story doesn’t really dwell upon this; instead, the Doctor and Amy go rushing off in search of the next segment, and the next two episodes throw us into a cliched storyline of courtly politics, with poisonings, betrayals, and rival factions who inevitably end up joining forces to fight a common enemy. I found this whole part of the story to be pretty interminable, and it definitely doesn’t help that the actors playing the insect-like Valdigians all give hammy, over-the-top performances, which makes it virtually impossible to take any of their characters seriously. The fact that The Judgement of Isskar tries to tackle both the origin story of the Ice Warriors, and this sub-plot about bug aliens squabbling over a throne, just leaves the entire story feeling overstuffed and poorly paced.
In the midst of all this, we have the two sentient tracers that were created to find the segments: the nice, if overly naïve Amy, who essentially becomes the Doctor’s companion for this trilogy of stories, and the callous, self-centred Zara, who competes with the Doctor and Amy as they search for the segments. I have mixed feelings about these characters: Amy is nice enough, and I did appreciate how she gradually becomes more human over the course of the audio, but I feel that she hasn’t been sufficiently well developed for me to really care about her character just yet. The biggest problem I have, however, is that the dynamic between Amy and Zara is simplistic and not overly interesting: one is the “good” character who we know we can trust, and the other is the “bad” one we’re not supposed to like, and the story struggles to achieve anything more nuanced than that. On top of that, it’s explained that one reason why Zara becomes a worse person over the course of the story is that the power of the segments is corrupting her mind; in my opinion, the fact that a lot of her personality and motivation effectively boils down to “the McGuffin made her become bad” makes Zara feel a lot less interesting than she could otherwise have been.
On the whole, Judgement is a deeply flawed story that tries to tackle too many different things at once; while there’s some potentially interesting material here, it simply isn’t given enough room to breathe. If The Judgement of Isskar is the beginning of a new direction for Big Finish, then it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence for the Main Range’s future.
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