#11 Doctor Who: The Kingmaker

The Fourth Doctor Adventures and Destiny of the Doctor have each come up twice so far on my Randomoid Selectortron, while many other Big Finish ranges remain unselected as yet. Let's see what's next for me...

Doctor Who: The Kingmaker

Starring: Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor, Nicola Bryant as Peri, and Caroline Morris as Erimem
Format: two full-cast CDs (or download) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? Yes
Standalone? Yes. Erimem is an original-to-audio companion but her backstory isn't important to this story.
Recommended? If you are in the mood for an especially comedic Doctor Who built on a pile of increasingly ludicrous plot twists.

My reactions to this story include spoilers for it.

Before listening

This is the first time I've hit a story in Big Finish's "main range" or "monthly range", the flagship 2-disc full cast Doctor Who audio series they encourage people to subscribe to for 6 months or a year at a time. The Kingmaker is a somewhat atypical example of this range.
This is very much a story that, when I listened to it for the first time, I was expecting to be something else. I've already mentioned in my reaction to Trouble in Paradise that I expect good things from a Nev Fountain Peri story. When I heard funny lines that put 20th century phrases into the mouths of Elizabethans at a pub, I assumed there was going to be a thematically weighty time-travel reason for those lines and I kept listening with that expectation. In fact, the lines were just there as jokes. Quite a lot of what happens in The Kingmaker is just jokes, and you should not go into it expecting anything at all to be serious. It is, both in setting and tone, Big Finish's Doctor Who take on the first season of Blackadder, including an extremely silly temporally anomalous take on the historical matter of the Princes in the Tower.
I forget whether I've previously gone back for a second listen, but I am now looking forward to this relisten. I think it will be more fun now that I know where the twists are, and just as importantly where not to expect any sort of twist.

After listening to episode 1 of 4

The main impetus for the story is that the Doctor promised to write a series of children's books but never got around to writing Doctor Who Discovers Historical Mysteries, so now a killer robot (that thinks his name is Doctor Who) is enforcing the contract with threat of lethal force. The Doctor has taken Peri and Erimem to Shakespeare's time to research the mystery of the Princes in the Tower; after some action there, they travel back to Richard III's time to do more first-hand investigation. They get split up, with Peri and Erimem exiting the TARDIS two years earlier than the Doctor (for reasons not explained in this episode, but I roughly remember them from previous listening). Each character's scenes are presented in chronological order as seen by that character, and the cliffhanger moment is the point where Peri and Erimem realize the temporal party-splitting has happened.
This audio takes a very specific approach to the character of Richard III. It's not spelled out fully in the first episode, but he's been visited by so many time travelers with opinions about whether he should or shouldn't kill the Princes in the Tower that whatever natural timeline he would have had is entirely overwritten by him living with advance information about his future. In addition to the Princes in the Tower situation, he is also aware that a specific time traveler called the Doctor will be very significant in his life. This is, like everything in the audio, played mostly as comedy.
There is plenty of exposition about the historical mystery provided, for the benefit of listeners who know nothing about it or who only know the side of the story Shakespeare wrote. I imagine that a listener already well-acquainted with the historical period might find the exposition excessive.
I mentioned anachronistic lines used as jokes in the "before listening" section. They're present both in Shakespeare's time, with a work-of-fiction-characters-are-coincidental disclaimer in a playbill, and in Richard's, with a serving wench introducing herself and asking if the Doctor wants to be seated in carousing or non-carousing. With all the other time travel criss-crossing going on, I think I was basically justified in expecting these lines to be another facet of the mystery in need of explanation, and I'm actively reminding myself to overlook them.
I am having fun so far.

After listening to episode 2 of 4

Sillyness continues: the imprisoning of the princes is announced in a formal press conference with "the finest gossips in England" and the Doctor communicates with Peri and Erimem through a series of back-and-forth letters all left with the same person at different times. The chronological ordering of the story gets messier, with some flashing back to a part of Peri and Erimem's story that was skipped over in the first episode. Peri discovers something about one of the princes (which is not yet spelled out for the listener) and then Richard does too, sending him into the full depth of his madness. While still partially played as a comedy character, Richard also has an effectively frightening villainous side.
This episode is filled with swerves and misdirects. I remember what things Peri and Erimem are mistaken about, and they're being played fairly (subject to my previously-mentioned caveat that most of the apparent anachronisms in the story are just there as jokes.) I remember where everything ends up at the end, but not everything about the route the story takes to get there, and I'm looking forward to more listening.

After listening to episode 3 of 4 

While the story remains primarily silly, it does try to say something a bit weightier about the nature of the Doctor's adventures. Throughout the various media of the Doctor Who franchise, the Doctor is generally unwilling to actively cause anyone's death, but generally willing to stand by and let someone die if their death is important to the course of established history. Some writers treat this as a legitimate distinction within a coherent ethical code, and some point it out as potentially hypocritical. This is one of the latter stories, at least for some of this episode. In this story it's just an observation about Doctor Who and there's no particular attempt to make it analogous to anything that could happen in the real world.
Some tracks in this episode are just a few seconds long. Two different conversations are intercut, and there is a track break every time the microphone shifts focus. This is slightly annoying when listening in MP3 form since there is a split-second delay for each track change.
The cliffhanger at the end of this episode starts out by escalating the danger faced by the Doctor and his companions, but then derails itself and instead escalates the ludicrousness of the plot by adding a complication that isn't particularly dangerous at all but is extraordinary convoluted.
I am looking forward to the final episode, but I'm also glad there isn't much more of The Kingmaker left, as I am getting some plot twist fatigue.

After listening to episode 4 of 4

The first part of this episode is spent explaining all the details previous episodes omitted regarding the exact nature of the historical mess the plot is concerned with. The second part is spent making the mess far, far worse, as the real Richard III angrily stage-crashes a performance of Shakespeare's play, setting in motion a circuitous chain of events with eventually lethal consequence. It is pretty much wholly ridiculous, although there is also some more deliberation on the theme of the Doctor having easy decisions and keeping his hands clean while burdens are borne by the people who actually have to live in history.
The Kingmaker is, for the most part, a novelty story revolving entirely around an elaborate layer cake of paradoxes. If that's something you want to hear, then you should get it, as it is done very well and is frequently hilarious. If the coherence of your Doctor Who universe chronology is more important to you than the entertainment value of individual stories, you might want to actively avoid it, as it does not play nicely with continuity and it is contradicted by other Elizabethan-era Doctor Who stories, but to me these are not significant issues.