Doctor Who: Winter for the Adept
Starring: Peter Davison as the Doctor and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? More so than the average Doctor Who, but not quite to the point of being primarily a comedy release.
Standalone? Yes.
Recommended? Yes due to having a low price point, but Winter for the Adept is not quite top-shelf Doctor Who.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it.
Before listening
Doctor Who has an odd relationship with the supernatural, particularly relating to ghosts. Werewolves and vampires are real things, generally originating from space. Psychic powers exist, though less commonly in humans than in aliens. Ghosts, on the other hand, are consistently not quite a real thing in Doctor Who. There can be such things as psychic impressions of the past that get animated into spectral activity by a psychic living mind, energy-being aliens that functionally work like ghosts, virtual avatars of the dead living on electronically, audio waves engineered to contain the consciousness of the dying as sentient echoes, and spirits taken from a living body and put into another physical vessel, but there aren't just "ghosts" as a concept that exists in itself, and anything that appears to be a ghost is generally bound to get an elaborate speech explaining why it doesn't count as one. Winter for the Adept is an odd case, in which the Doctor's handwave of the ghost is perfunctory and unconvincing and the Doctor himself holds a literal séance and uses the word "séance" in doing so.I have heard Winter for the Adept once. I remember having previously read that it had a poor reputation and I went into it with low expectations, but I ended up liking it a lot. The pacing was good, the acting was at least okay for early Big Finish, the use of supernatural elements was interesting and coherent, and the mood-setting was effectively executed. I am looking forward to relistening.
After listening to parts 1 and 2 of 4
I've been falling behind in my listening schedule so I batched together the two episodes of disc 1. There are some odd formal choices as the story starts. For example, a substantial portion is narrated via a diary, but the diary entries are not written in the way anyone would write a real diary, at one point using the present tense to say that the diarist is holding a rope while a friend rappels down a wall. These lessen as it goes on, or maybe I get used to them.Relistening with half-memories of the story was perhaps more exciting than first listen, as I remembered certain things were going to happen for certain reasons but wasn't sure about which characters did them. There is a definite drawing-room mystery element, with a boarding school in a blizzard and a finite cast, though it is more of a ghost story than it is a fair-play mystery. The headmistress, who is obsessed with the spiritual purifying power of cold, is a very entertaining human villain character remniscent of those of Kinda or The Happiness Patrol.
India Fisher plays a character in this, a few months before playing the Eighth Doctor's first audio companion, Charley Pollard. The characters are similar overadventurous tomboys, and I briefly fannishly wondered if some elaborate metaplot weave could make them the same character, soon determining it couldn't.
The Doctor describes the situation a "genuine haunting" and considers a violent death in the school's past to be relevant, but he also considers the situation to be caused by electromagnetic radiation. "Spillagers" or "spillages" are mentioned as something the Doctor is looking for but not elaborated on. It sounds like "spillages" to my ears in Davison's accent, but I think I remember it turning out to be "Spillagers" later in the story. The science-fiction and supernatural elements are not yet tying together, but something is doing classical poltergeist activity and the Doctor is snooping around trying to find out what. I remember from my past listen that the explanation for this is quite bizarre and manages to only barely, or perhaps not at all, involve the ghost who shows up later in the story.
After listening to part 3 of 4
This episode is twisty; as I mentioned earlier, there is more ghost story than fair-play mystery. The character who seemed to be the main human villain dies in this episode slightly unceremoniously. The poltergeist activity gets a ridiculous scientific explanation involving a telepath and a telekinetic, but then there is also other unaccounted-for ghost activity. The Doctor's decision to hold a séance is the cliffhanger line; clearly, writer Andrew Cartmel understood this is not normal behavior for the Doctor. The Doctor also drugs people and hypnotizes them rather casually, but it seems that to Cartmel this is normal behavior for him; this normality seems odd to me for Cartmel's take on the fifth, rather than seventh, Doctor. (Cartmel is responsible for some major points of the seventh Doctor's TV and novel metaplot.)At this point, the harmful poltergeist-like activity has been explained and stopped, the wicked headmistress is dead, and nothing dangerous seems to be happening, but there is still an episode left. The Doctor's talk of "Spillagers" has not been explained yet, and whatever they are they are something dangerous, so I guess that's going to come up along with the remaining ghost. I don't see how the last episode is going to work pacing-wise, but I don't remember finding its pacing bad on my first listen-through so maybe it pulls it off somehow, and I look forward to finding out.
After listening to part 4 of 4
Things get silly. The Doctor initially insists that the ghost isn't actually a ghost but rather a cloud of energy with the memories of a dead man. Later, the Doctor casually calls him a ghost, which the ghost takes offense at. A séance is used ridiculously to solve a problem in space. The hidden villains are revealed and the phrase "ventral slaying claws" comes up at least twice. The final lines of the story return to the diary narration from the opening and seem entirely tonally disconnected from the chain of screwball science-fiction ghost story events that lead to them. I was highly entertained by all this but it was a whiplash-inducing final ride after a more sedate first three episodes.The actual title of the story has no good reason to exist in the story as a phrase and gets shoehorned in; I suspect it was locked in at an earlier draft. It is winter, and the term "adept" gets worked into it, but connecting them with the preposition "for" makes no sense at all.
Since Winter for the Adept is one of the early Big Finish audios available for download at a very low price, I can recommend it comfortably. There are better early ones, but this one has some unique goofy charms that make it a worthwhile experience.
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