Eighth Doctor Adventures: Horror of Glam Rock
Starring: Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor and Sheridan Smith as Lucie Miller
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Somewhat, mostly in musical references and whimsically improvised science-fiction gizmos.
Standalone? Yes; future episodes build on it, but not in a way that leaves it anything but self-contained.
Recommended? Yes.
My reactions to this episode contain spoilers for it, and possibly mild spoilers for later Eighth Doctor Adventures installments revisiting a character from it.
Before listening
I have heard this one three or four times and remember it fairly well. It takes place in the 70s and hinges on a stylophone that aliens are using to make contact with a pair of Earth musicians. The alien messages resemble the communications from aliens popular among New Age pop-culture mysticism of the time, such as reflected in David Bowie's work. The titular pun hints at the episode's frequent tongue-in-cheek invocation of this era in music history, an era beloved by writer Paul Magrs. Unlike many Paul Magrs works, Horror of Glam Rock has a coherent ending.This is the first story after the Doctor and Lucie Miller have started properly traveling together, after the two-CD series premiere. They encounter Lucie's aunt, a character who recurs later and whose life story ends up being pivotal to events in the final season of Eighth Doctor Adventures audios. I recall dialogue being witty, but at points perhaps a bit too witty with characters quipping in situations where they should have been more serious, such as finding a dead body. I remember a twist about the aliens' motives. I also recall that a song was composed for this release, appearing in-story as a plot point and also present as a bonus track, and that I personally liked that song quite a bit, though I don't seem to be in a majority there. The song's a blatant pastiche of the era, but I don't necessarily have a problem with blatant pastiches.
I am looking forward to giving Horror of Glam Rock another listen.
After listening
This was even better than I remembered. The one flaw I remembered is real, but only in literally one scene: Lucie is way too quippy around a dead body, including joking use of a slur. It's a slur that arguably could make sense in-character for Lucie to say in ignorance, but she's not being presented as ignorant when she says it and it adds nothing to the story, so steering around it would have been a better choice.Lucie's Auntie Pat has a bit of character arc; Lucie reveals something about her future by mistake, and Pat's reaction to the revelation evolves over several scenes. This is extremely well-written and well-performed, and it makes sense they decided to bring Auntie Pat back later.
There is a theme carried through Lucie's own growing relationship with the Doctor, Pat's realization about her future, and a musician's entrapment in the aliens' deceptive scheme. The Earthling characters of this story all want lives of adventure away from the mundanity of their existence up to this point. Lucie gets to have one, Pat only gets to have a mundane existence but reaches some amount of acceptance of it, and Tommy is last seen betrayed and traumatized, though not utterly alone or doomed. These semi-parallel character arcs give the story an emotional backbone that the basic motorway-diner-under-siege plot would otherwise lack, elevating it from a standard Doctor Who adventure in a cute setting to a high point of its series.
There is whimsy, both in the way the setting uses the culture of 70's pop music and in the Doctor's technological wizardry, which is very much in the timey-wimey goes ding when there's stuff variety. Aliens communicating specifically though a Stylophone is already whimsical but the Doctor's reaction ups the ante on the whimsy. I liked this.
There is a very brief moment at the end that ties into an ongoing arc, but it is adequately self-contained; it just establishes that someone is traveling around searching for the Doctor, which is a pretty common state of affairs, and it is presented in a way that ties into Horror of Glam Rock's themes instead of teasing for another story.
Listening to the bonus track of the song at the center of the story, I find it's a little more repetitive than I remember it, but still a very good pastiche. Its in-story appearance is mostly in the background and enjoyment of the episode doesn't depend at all on liking the song.
Horror of Glam Rock is a very good Doctor Who audio. If I were going to recommend just one story from the first series of Eighth Doctor Adventures, it would be No More Lies, but I wouldn't argue against someone else recommending Horror of Glam Rock, and No More Lies doesn't have any later arc significance like Auntie Pat's role in Horror of Glam Rock does. If you're a completist who cares about arcs, then Horror of Glam Rock is likely to be a high point of it for you (although in that case you'd logically be getting the entire series).
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