Doctor Who: The Fearmonger
Starring: Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) containing four half-CD episodes
Silly? Satirical, but less silly about it than satirical seventh Doctor TV episodes were.
Standalone? Yes.
Recommended? Yes as a Doctor Who adventure with some verisimilitudinous political flavor, but not for any coherent political message.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it.
Before listening
The Fearmonger is the first Big Finish audio release with the seventh Doctor, and it is a good one. I have listened to it several times. I remember it well. Since I have four episodes to react to, I don't feel a need to write much about it in advance.
This story definitely takes place after Ace's TV appearances, and probably after some novels. As depicted here, the Doctor and Ace have a strong working bond as saviors of planets and are not above enacting elaborate subterfuges for the purpose. The Doctor trusts Ace to work independently, and there is an understanding that Ace won't necessarily follow the letter of the Doctor's instructions.
I am very much looking forward to listening to The Fearmonger again, although I'm afraid some of the satirical content might hit very close to home for me in the present-day United States.
After listening to episode 1 of 4
The racist dogwhistles of the politician at the center of the story are painfully true-to-life, but fortunately for my mood her speeches only take up a small amount of story time. The smugness of a talk radio host is also quite true to life. The radio host in this story is of the sort that mocks both "sides" equally, thus implicitly favoring the reinforcement of the status quo versus progress, more like something along the lines of South Park than like the role specifically of talk radio in present-day US politics.The Doctor gets to puncture the talk radio host to some degree. He is not interested in the political situation in itself, only in an alien element feeding on the emotion of fear. This is absolutely a case in which the Doctor's behavior on Earth is different than it would be anywhere else; toppling xenophobic would-be dictators is absolutely within his general remit, but here he expects the British electoral system to be self-correcting, and he complains that no one talks things over sensibly over tea.
The Doctor is openly teaching Ace, quizzing Ace about how to handle situations and framing things as "initiative tests". At the start of the story the Doctor and Ace have already been busy; Ace is connecting with a friend she knew in the 80s (around 15 years ago for Earth, less for Ace) who knows how to hack phone systems, and the Doctor has been tracking a potential assassin who is aware of the alien parasite and wants to kill the politician to eliminate it. The Doctor argues against this assassination pragmatically on the grounds that the parasite would just move to another host, this pragmatic point saving the Doctor the trouble of arguing a moral stance on assassination.
Discussing this audio a bit with friends, I was surprised to realize in the course of conversation that the audio says very little about the election itself as a process. It's unclear how many candidates are running, and at least in this episode I don't think any rival candidates are named or given platforms. The election is treated as simply a referendum on whether this one xenophobic politician will or won't lead, without explicit description of alternatives. The story is complicated enough without bringing more detailed political systems into it, though.
I am interested in continuing to listen to The Fearmonger, although with it coming up at the particular point on the calendar that it has, I am also finding it a bit stressful.
After listening to episode 2 of 4
The point I made above about there being no rival candidate in the story can be elaborated on... all the opposition that we hear to Harper's xenophobic campaign comes from people who are under alien influence or have been duped into being a false-flag operation to support the campaign's propaganda. (The false-flag operation is hinted at in this episode but not yet revealed as such.) This makes the axes of the story quite inapplicable to the real world. Another point of inapplicability is the Doctor's continued personal unwillingness to alter Earth politics: he says things like "I refuse to be responsible for the fall of every sparrow" and this sort of platitude is treated as sufficient for story purposes. This is in Ace's future, but the Doctor treats it as history that should not (but not necessarily cannot) be altered.While the Doctor's explanations for not interfering more directly in politics are half-assed handwaves, other dialogue in the episode is quite good, particularly the scene in which the Doctor and Ace speculate about the alien's origin (it's probably not a "Fearmongoid from the planet Fearmongus"). The action is well-paced, and Ace's old friend (a character original to this audio) gets good character moments in which he makes some bad decisions.
The cliffhanger is a callback to The Happiness Patrol, but this time it is Ace trying to convince someone not to shoot her, and then they shoot her. This strikes me as a statement by writer Jonathan Blum about what level of realism to expect from the still freshly-launched Big Finish audio line, although it's not a statement subsequent audios are particularly bound by.
On November 6
Today, despite the fanciful elements, this story is still a bit too close to home; I'll pick it up later.After listening to episode 3 of 4
I took one day off and am back in. This episode has more alien-chasing and less politics than the previous, after a timeskip during which Ace mostly heals from her gunshot wound. One of two major twists happens: the alien's activities have been in an entirely different direction from what the Doctor and Ace had been assuming. The other twist I remember must be in the final episode.While there was less politics plot than in the previous episode, there was still enough to make it a tense listen, so I'm not going to double-listen today to make up for yesterday.
The cliffhanger moment at the end of this episode is extremely well-executed, just a few seconds of audio at the very tail end that recontextualizes events. There is deception involved in the cliffhanger, but having listened to the story before, the deception is played very fairly and the actual nature of events is adequately hinted at.
I am looking forward to finishing this story, and I still think it is a good one worth listening to; just right now, listening to it in a time frame across an American election day, is not the best time to be enjoying it as an adventure story.
On November 8
I had a bad day today and listening to the rest of The Fearmonger just didn't appeal. I remember liking the story in the past, and I don't think I was necessarily wrong to, but just right now it's tough.After listening to episode 4 of 4
I listened to the last episode while doing other things to get it out of the way, and now it's over with. The last episode has some fun fanservicey lines, like "Now it's your own base that's under siege." There is a good science fiction twist at the end when Ace tries to finally confront the monster, having tracked it down to its final host.The politics of this story are, in light of the current climate, irresponsible; we never hear any reasonable grassroots opposition to xenophobia, only terrorists who the story sets up to be just as bad as the xenophobes. The assumption at the end is that once a few bad apples are removed, the existing legal system will bring a just resolution to everything else. This was probably already irresponsible in 2000 when it was released, just not as obviously so. However, the depiction of xenophobia as political tool is otherwise well-done, the seventh Doctor is well-written within the unfortunate limitation of the Doctor not being able to enact real change on Earth, and the science fiction cat-and-mouse games are well paced and cleverly constructed. I do recommend The Fearmonger despite my own negative reactions to the conditions under which I've been listening to it.
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