The Resurrection of Mars is sold separately, but it is the second half of a two-disc story. For that reason, I am activating a manual override on the Selectortron and selecting the entire story:
Eighth Doctor Adventures: Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars
Starring: Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor and Niky Wardley as Tamsin Drew
Format: two full-cast CDs (or downloads) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? No.
Standalone? This is part of the arc of the fourth series of Eighth Doctor Adventures and includes moments that are important to that arc and depend on previous events in it. Also, it expects you to be aware of the events of the fifth Doctor audio story Red Dawn and to recognize references to the second Doctor TV story The Seeds of Death. Phobos is mentioned but not in an important way.
Recommended? Yes, as part of the Eighth Doctor Adventures season four arc.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, Full Fathom Five, and the general arc of the fourth series of Eighth Doctor Adventures.
Before listening
I'm pretty sure I've listened to this story once before, in the same run as my initial listen of Situation Vacant. I remember that this story hinges significantly on the way that the Doctor's attitude to injustices that are part of "established history" differs from his attitude to injustices in any other context. From what I recall, Tamsin Drew stands apart from other companions in standing by her own conscience and refusing to trust the Doctor's moral judgment on the subject, even as the climax of the story takes place. The established history in this case, unusually, is in our future and involves Ice Warriors. (This was about a year after the TV story The Waters of Mars presented a very different situation regarding the Doctor, established future history, and Mars; there are enough dissimilarities that I do not think there was necessarily an intended connection.)I was hoping for more of a lighthearted romp at this point in my listening, having just gone through the very dark Bernice Summerfield audio Just War. I might not be in an especially receptive mood for this story, but I am looking forward to hearing the Eighth Doctor/Tamsin Drew relationship elements of the story at least.
After listening to episode 1 of 4
This is the story I was remembering, and events coming up in a later episode are pivotal to Tamsin's character arc. This episode cold-opens with Ice Warriors discussing the impending destruction of the Martian ecosystem, underscored by martial music. The dialogue gets increasingly clumsy and didactic and the music gets increasingly over the top, then the audio quality changes and the opening is revealed as part of an audio program guiding tourists through the tunnels of the Martian moon Deimos. The Ice Warriors are believed extinct, but this is a Doctor Who opening, so of course some non-extinct ones show up and kill a tourist just before the theme music. This production is well aware of the audio medium and of Doctor Who's history. The audio tourist guide includes the line "For more information on the Red Dawn, press 8", helpfully hinting to listeners that Red Dawn, Big Finish's eighth Doctor Who release, has more information about the historical events that inform the backstory of Deimos. I do recommend listening to that before this.I hadn't read the credits closely, and so I was pleasantly surprised to discover the tourist information was narrated by David Warner as Boston Schooner, a rather improbably-named scientist in charge of excavating the Deimos tunnels. I probably wasn't as aware of David Warner when I heard Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars the first time around. Professor Schooner seems to have some other agenda beyond simple archeology, contributing to the mystery of this episode's cliffhanger.
The theme of which deaths the Doctor will or won't prevent comes into play early on, with Tamsin and the Doctor bluffing during a hostage negotiation and the Ice Warriors calling that bluff. At this point there's no indication of the Doctor seriously considering letting any of the tourists die, although the grim possibility he won't be able to save them is on the table.
This is a good opening episode for a meaty four-part Ice Warrior story. The last Doctor Who I heard with David Warner, The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase, let me down in the last part, but from what I remember of past listening I expect this one to have a strong ending. I am looking forward to hearing more.
After listening to episode 2 of 4
Much of this episode is a straightforward base-under-siege story, with David Warner's character's secret agenda making everything worse for the humans under attack. In the end, human survivors are escaping from the Deimos base in a rocket and Tamsin Drew is carrying the detonator to a bomb that will destroy the base, killing the Ice Warriors and stopping their plan to kill all the human colonists on Mars. In many eras of Doctor Who, someone would push that button, the Doctor would wish there had been another way, and that would be the end of the story. However, in this case, the Doctor actively refuses to let anyone detonate the bomb. From what I recall, he turns out later to have a specific reason he isn't now saying, but what it looks like to Tamsin as of the end of this episode is just inconsistent or self-serving ethics on the Doctor's part (and that's arguably what it actually is). Then, another cliffhanger gets thrown in, advancing the Eighth Doctor Adventures season arc and altering the stakes. This twist makes more sense after The Book of Kells than it would make if listening out of order.Mars's other moon, Phobos, also lent its name to the title of an Eighth Doctor Adventures story. That story is referred to briefly both in this episode and the previous, but not in any important way.
Parts of the story seem a bit contrived to force the moral conflict between the Doctor and Tamsin, but there are enough moments of grounded characterization that I didn't find the contrivances intolerable.
Deimos is definitely not a complete story in itself, and I am looking forward to the continuation in The Resurrection of Mars.
After listening to episode 3 of 4
It's worth bearing in mind that, at the time this story was released, the War Doctor wasn't yet part of Doctor Who and the general narrative assumption was that the eighth Doctor did something terrible to end the Time War before regenerating into the ninth. This story is very much about the morality, at this time, of a character who would later do that.The eighth Doctor here is sort of a straw man, refusing to do anything to "cause" a death by his own concept of causality but setting the goalposts of that causality in a way that lets him stay blameless as people die anyway. Starting with this episode, he is contrasted against the Monk, who claims to believe that "the ends justify the means" and sets the goalposts of those ends in such a way that Lucie Miller is horrified at his decisions. From what I recall, the details of what Lucie's seen him do aren't dramatized in any releases, but he at least caused an ice avalanche that wiped out a village, for either no apparent end or for an end Lucie considers inadequate. The Resurrection of Mars is about contrasting these two Time Lords' moral claims, both of which seem inhumanly cold to the various human observers.
From what I recall, the Monk's assertions about his own objectives are outright deceptive. That said, his stated goal here is to allow the Ice Warriors to reclaim their homeworld of Mars, killing 300,000 humans in the process but preventing a future in which they take over a different planet with billions of inhabitants. Meanwhile, while the Doctor wants to stop the Ice Warriors from attacking Mars, he's unwilling to cause any individual human to die in the course of saving those 300,000 (within his personal concept of what constitutes "causing" such a death). The moral quandaries of the story are essentially an interlocking network of "trolley problems". I have heard the end of the Eighth Doctor Adventures arc, and this is definitely laying groundwork for that end.
The contrived straw-man nature of the moral quandaries would be a major problem for me, except that they seem to be written in a way that makes that straw man aspect part of the actual point of the story. The Doctor and the Monk both have pretensions of being outside the scope of human moral decisions, and this story is what happens when these pretensions become obvious to the human observers actually affected by their choices. There are some similarities between this story's intent and that of Full Fathom Five. The Full Fathom Five Doctor holds a morality similar to that which the Monk claims to hold here.
This is not a typical Doctor Who story. Generally, the Doctor's sense of doing the right thing is compatible with the situations in which he finds himself, and when significant moral questions are in play, the local inhabitants of the times and places he visits are the ones who grapple with them. It is good for stories like this to exist, but if the average Doctor Who story were like this, Doctor Who would stop working as a science-fiction adventure franchise.
I am looking forward to hearing the conclusion of The Resurrection of Mars. After that, I am hoping my Randomoid Selectortron chooses much lighter fare, as this story immediately after Just War is a lot of consecutive days of heaviness.
After listening to episode 4 of 4
The story eases up on undermining the Doctor's moral viewpoint: the Monk had set up this whole situation in the first place, and had been planning to do something like this to prove his superiority over the Doctor since before The Book of Kells. The Doctor essentially blames everything that's gone wrong on the Monk's meddling and his moral code remains unaltered for now. However, themes have been set up that will show up again just a couple releases later in Lucie Miller/To the Death.The Doctor's current moral code in this story is not the code he's always had. He remembers his previous incarnation as "a man with a master plan" who "did the maths" balancing who would live against who would die, and knowing he is capable of that, he wants to make sure he never becomes that way again. As in several other Doctor Who stories, he mentions that he needs companions around to keep him grounded and remind him of the value of individual lives. In To the Death, the trajectory established in this episode leads to a change of priorities for the Doctor, putting him in a mindset that could easily have been the one he had moments before the ninth Doctor's first episode (as events had been established on TV up to this point, well before the War Doctor). I'll have more to say about that when I randomly select either Lucie Miller/To the Death or Dark Eyes; it's hard to talk about some of what goes on in Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars on its own.
At the end of this story, the Monk is determined that he'll defeat the Doctor next time, as he villainously monologues while being humorously overheard. Lucie (who I left out of my top-of-the-post cast list for spoiler purposes) and the Doctor are reunited, and they are heading to a Christmas dinner at a place and time the Doctor is keeping secret. The status quo of the science fiction adventure serial is seemingly restored, but of course I wouldn't be saying so much about the subject if the rug weren't going to be pulled out from under it.
The Resurrection of Mars is a good part of a good arc. It depends so much on previous installments that I can't recommend it individually, but the fourth series of Eighth Doctor Adventures is worth getting as a bundle. (The Zygon Who Fell to Earth from the second series might or might not be required pre-listening for the full arc.)
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