Vienna: The Memory Box
Starring: Chase Masterson as Vienna Salvatori
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Possibly not intended as silly, but sci-fi twists pile up to a degree that I could not take seriously as actual storytelling.
Standalone? Yes.
Recommended? No.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it.
Before listening
Looking at my purchase history, I bought this during a sale when it was presumably marked down quite a lot. When Big Finish decided to clear out inventory of CDs they weren't going to do more pressings of, they put that inventory on sale, and during that sale when a CD sold out they put the download version on sale. I wouldn't have considered The Memory Box otherwise.Chase Masterson played a fairly minor but recurring role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and is, or was, popular on the sci-fi convention circuit. Big Finish backdoor-piloted the character of Vienna in a Doctor Who audio, followed up almost immediately by this one-CD premiere of her own series. Since then, there have been several boxset seasons of Vienna audio. All I've heard of the character is in The Worlds of Big Finish, in which Vienna crosses over with Bernice Summerfield. From what I've heard, Vienna is much more willing to kill than the average Doctor Who adventurer and seems comfortable taking money to look the other way for somewhat shady employers, though there seem to be some lines she won't cross.
I'm aware there is some controversy or confusion over whether Vienna's own series takes place "in the universe" of Doctor Who, with The Worlds of Big Finish being inadmissable as evidence because it also includes Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Grey; I honestly don't care much one way or the other about this question. My understanding is that it is a spacefaring future compatible with the way spacefaring futures work in Doctor Who, and that's sufficient for my listening purposes.
While I wouldn't have gotten this at anything other than a sale price, I am curious about it! I'm looking forward to finding out what it's like, and it's quite possible I'll be interested enough to consider getting more Vienna in the future, though probably likewise only on sale.
After listening
Pakhars and Slithergee show up; I heard no references to anything that originated in televised Doctor Who, but The Memory Box is definitely situated within Big Finish's Doctor Who setting, or at a bare minimum situated within an alternate timeline thereof.Four actors are credited in major parts; I don't know if other characters were played by the same actors using electronic voice filters or if there were other actors involved. It is structurally a full-cast drama rather than a narration, although Vienna talks to herself expositionally at a couple points in the story.
The title refers to a plot device by which characters seal away parts of their memory, or other mental content, to be "opened" upon experiencing a trigger condition. By the end of the story, it turns out every credited character had at least one plot-relevant memory box implanted prior to the beginning of the CD, and multiple characters end up with multiples. This does not result in a good story; by the end, I was just waiting for it to end as the twists increasingly defied probability.
If they thought this was a good way to launch a series that listeners were supposed to care about and take seriously, then I do not want to hear the rest. The script seems to be a miss by the prolific Jonathan Morris. Just of audio releases I've blogged about, he also wrote the rather good Hothouse, Deimos, and The Resurrection of Mars, the serviceable Phantoms of the Deep, and the subpar Babblesphere. My conclusion here is that Jonathan Morris isn't very reliable and maybe should have written fewer Big Finish audios than he did.
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