#20 Destiny of the Doctor: Night of the Whisper

Bernice Summerfield has cracked yet another xenoarcheological mystery, and so I reactivate the Randomoid Selectortron...

Destiny of the Doctor: Night of the Whisper

Starring: the ninth Doctor (narrated), Rose Tyler (narrated), Jack Harkness (narrated), Nicholas Briggs as narrator
Format: one narrated two-actor CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? The story is not narratively silly, but many of Nicholas Briggs's voice characterization choices are silly in performance.
Standalone? Yes; connectivity to other Destiny of the Doctor episodes is virtually nonexistent.
Recommended? No.

My reactions to this story include spoilers for itself and for the overall arc of Destiny of the Doctor.

Before listening

I'm not completely sure I've heard this one before. The description on the Big Finish website sounds familiar, but I might be remembering Paradise 5, which I've definitely heard and which also has a companion going undercover to investigate a resort. The part about a vigilante is ringing a faint bell; I think I remember the nature of the connection between the vigilante and the chief of police. That memory, too, could be something from some other story.
If my vague memories of what I think was this story are correct, I think I remember forming a somewhat positive opinion of it and finding Nicholas Briggs in good form as narrator.
If I have heard Night of the Whisper before, I will probably realize it very early into the story. I am looking forward to finding out.

After listening

I had indeed heard this one before, but it left so little impression on me that I wasn't sure until halfway in. It had trouble leaving much impression on me this time around, as well. I wasn't in a very receptive listening mood today, so I might be being unfair, but I really wasn't hooked at any point, and I stopped entirely at one point to start over from the beginning later in the day because I'd pretty much failed to take in what I was hearing.
Narration is third-person, mostly external with the narrator occasionally mentioning things internal to the minds of Rose, Jack, and the Doctor. Narrator Nicholas Briggs tried to give every character a distinct voice, but most of the voices were forced and awful-sounding. His ninth Doctor sounds vaguely Doctorish in the abstract but not like the ninth in particular, his Jack Harkness has an accent well outside that of any Earthly region I know of, and I don't even know what he was going for at all with Rose. Maybe he was having an off day, and maybe director John Ainsworth bears part of the responsibility, but this audio performance leaves me with the impression that Briggs should never voice more than one character in anything unless they are all Daleks and/or Cybermen, and it is a rare case of a performance taking me out of a Big Finish audio.
The thing I thought I'd remembered was roughly correct, but I'd forgotten how directly responsible the chief of police was for the situation. The plot probably wasn't bad overall, but Jack Harkness had a subplot that ultimately had no need to have happened and cutting to that subplot got in the way of pacing. The prose writing had problems, particularly towards the end, in which a climactic scene seems to me to depend on the listener understanding the relative positions of characters in it but doesn't describe the geometry enough for it to work.
Each Destiny of the Doctor episode involves a message from the eleventh Doctor asking for his past self to do some minor detour for the sake of the future timeline; in this one, he asks the ninth Doctor to ensure that a certain character lives. This seems unusual, since one might expect the Doctor to always be trying as hard as possible to make sure everyone lives, but in practice there are some cases in which the Doctor might hesitate a bit and let events take their course, and this character could easily have fallen into this category. This could be interpreted as self-awareness on the part of writers Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, perhaps. Scott and Wright have also been responsible for writing some very good Big Finish audios and I am sorry that this one wasn't one of them.
The ninth Doctor was far too willing to put Rose into a situation where she was obviously going to be sexually harassed.
I do not recommend Night of the Whisper for anyone. I don't know how Destiny of the Doctor comes together as a whole, if at all, so it is possible Night of the Whisper could be worth not skipping in the course of a larger Destiny of the Doctor listen.