#35 Eighth Doctor Adventures: Hothouse

The Stylophone plays the Randomoid Selectortron out of the 70's and I again spin the giant virtual wheel, finding my next stop to be...

Eighth Doctor Adventures: Hothouse

Starring: Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor and Sheridan Smith as Lucie Miller
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) of two half-CD episodes
Silly? No.
Standalone? No. Plot points follow from the preceding Eighth Doctor Adventures release, Orbis, and there is no recapping.
Recommended? Yes if listening to Eighth Doctor Adventures as a series.


My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and for Orbis.

Before listening

I think I've only heard this one once before, in the course of a somewhat rapid-fire run through the third series of Eighth Doctor Adventures. I think I recall an interesting near-future setting with magnified versions of contemporary problems. I had not yet seen the TV story The Seeds of Doom and had no particular awareness of Krynoids, but I don't remember that stopping me in any way. Now that I have seen that TV story, I might get a little more out of Hothouse, although probably not since I found The Seeds of Doom a bit dull and wasn't paying full attention.
I think I remember Lucie getting some interesting things to do, and I think I remember the running time of this audio being jam-packed with eventfulness though not becoming actively confusing. I am looking forward to refreshing my memory about it.

After listening to part 1 of 2

I definitely remembered too little of The Seeds of Doom for the connections to be interesting to me; I had to look stuff up to tell what was original to Hothouse and what was present in The Seeds of Doom.
The story starts in a configuration I generally associate with the seventh Doctor and Ace: Lucie is already in position as an infiltrator against a target the Doctor is actively trying to take down. In this case, the target turns out to be far more aware of the Doctor's scheme than the Doctor expected, and in the cliffhanger this villain gains the upper hand very effectively.
The near-future setting is hinted at rather than fleshed out, but the hints suggest a broad world with multiple concerns, not a one-issue planet. The most pressing concern for many, including the villain and the Doctor, is global warming. The Doctor is just as disgusted at what humans have done to the planet as the villain, but doesn't think turning people into plant monsters is at all a reasonable solution to it. As of the end of this episode, it is entirely unclear why the villain does think this course of action will help; there may be a bit of a straw man involved.
The ploys and counterploys of part one of Hothouse are very engaging. I particularly liked one effective use of the audio medium, in which the Doctor, listening in on the villain's confrontation with Lucie but without visuals, didn't realize the villain had a gun until the villain went out of his way to tell the Doctor he had one.
The Doctor's relationship with Lucie is in an odd place; on the one hand he trusts her to infiltrate the evil compound, but on the other hand he only trusts her because he remembers formerly trusting her before the events of the previous Eighth Doctor Adventures CD, Orbis, left a mark on him. This only comes out in a couple lines and doesn't make Orbis mandatory pre-listening in my opinion.
I am looking forward to relearning how the cliffhanger resolves and hearing the rest of the story.

After listening to part 2 of 2

This is very much the next story after Orbis. The Krynoid plot doesn't essentially depend on that fact, but there are many character moments in the second half that do depend on it. The Doctor has spent a great deal of of time stranded on a single planet with a primitive jellyfish civilization, long enough that he no longer identifies much with Earth or humanity. Much less time has passed for Lucie, and the Doctor and Lucie's relationship is in an unusual state because of this. Within the main plot of the Krynoid infection, the fact that the Doctor's attitude towards humanity is in an unusual state becomes relevant, with the Doctor being more disgusted than usual by humanity's tendency to self-destruction and genuinely surprised that a human will can put up enough of a fight to delay Krynoid mental control. The Doctor is not entirely back to normal at the end of Hothouse.
The concept of "humanity" as something essential and identifiable is important to Doctor who, going back to at least the "human factor" in the second Doctor serial The Evil of the Daleks. It is a problematic concept: since all the aliens are fictional stand-ins for some aspect of humanity, making the Earth homo sapiens somehow unique and special is a statement that this particular kind of humanity is more important than other kinds. This problematicity is sometimes played with, as in the TV episode The End of the World in which the last human by a narrow genetic definition is much less human than other characters. This story doesn't seem to face the problematic element; the listener is possibly expected to agree with Lucie that the Doctor's time on the jellyfish world doesn't "count" and Earth is the important story, and at least expected not to consider her viewpoint very objectionable.
Placing humanity in contrast to the jellyfish of Orbis is problematic since the jellyfish are jellyfish-shaped people, but the Krynoids are not people. The Krynoids are a hive-mind incapable of personal emotion, and the fact that individual humans have individual motivations is a key part of stopping them. The desire for revenge is itself something about humanity, and in this story it ends up being a valuable part, in a well-played subversion of the usual scenario in which someone resists mind control by thinking about a loved one or a happy time in their life.
Some of the plant monster action is represented a little poorly, with vague sound effects and insufficient sense of physical location or distance. However, the key moments are done well enough, and there are many good pieces of dialogue, including a prolonged process of human to Krynoid transformation.
Overall, I enjoyed Hothouse and would recommended it, with the note that it is absolutely the second episode of a season and doesn't make sense to choose as an entry point.