Doctor Who: Dust Breeding
Starring: Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? One element of the premise is silly but it's not an important element and isn't dwelled on extensively.
Standalone? This is an indirect sequel to events in the novel Storm Harvest. The aliens from that novel appear here without being given a detailed description.
Recommended? Yes due to its low price and the Big Finish debut of a significant actor.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, other Big Finish releases featuring the same villain, other Big Finish releases featuring the character of Bev Terrant, and The Fearmonger.
Before listening
I think I heard this once and didn't realize its significance to Big Finish's history at the time. On TV, Geoffrey Beevers only played the Master briefly, in a decaying body before taking over a new body played by Anthony Ainley. Big Finish decided that, since Beevers was available to do audio, they'd add new stories set during that decayed period of the Master's existence, and Dust Breeding is the beginning of Beevers's still-ongoing career as the main audio Master.I remember Edvard Munch's The Scream being an important element of this story. I think Munch had put a psychic-energy-being alien into the painting, or something similar happened that could be mistaken for that. I think a typical Master story arc happens in which the Master tries to take advantage of the powerful alien but finds it too powerful for him to control and ends up needing the Doctor's help; for Big Finish's first Master plot, it certainly would make sense for them to have used that familiar staple. I don't remember much else, and I can't recall anything at all about Ace being in this one but she's definitely in the credits.
I look forward to relistening to Dust Breeding with more awareness of its relevance to what Big Finish has done with Doctor Who continuity and casting.
November 23
I'm with family for Thanksgiving weekend. Blogging will probably resume on the 26th with a binge-listen of all four parts.After listening to part 1 of 4
It's now November 27. I haven't been putting this off specifically because it's Dust Breeding, I've just been generally putting things off.A character introduced herself as "Bev Tarrant" and the name seemed very familiar so I looked it up. This is only her second appearance, but she later went on to become an important character in Bernice Summerfield's continuity. So far in this story, she is just someone who has met the Doctor and Ace before and can vouch for them as friendly, not that they really need vouching for.
The extravagantly masked "Mr. Seta" is a very standard disguised Master, traveling with a mysterious cargo for reasons not yet disclosed. In this episode, he tips his hand slightly by killing a crew member who's checking the cargo bay, but his plan is entirely unclear. The more immediate threat is the ambiguously maybe-sentient dust of a planet where The Scream happens to be. The painting might have animated the dust, or the dust might be communicating psychically through the painting, or the painful psychic attempts to communicate with Ace might be entirely unrelated to the dust. It's quite unclear, but in a way that is inviting the listener to continue, rather than in a way that implies the director or editor made a mistake in failing to give an explanation. I am going to roll right on to the next part tonight.
After listening to part 2 of 4
The plot thickens: the Master is transporting artificially created eggs containing some sort of alien living weapon to the planet where the Doctor and Ace are investigating the mystery of The Scream. On that planet, the director of an artist colony seems to be under the psychic control of whatever is inside the painting, and extending that control to manipulate the planet's dust. That's Ace's impression, at least, but the Doctor seems to be considering the possibility that the being in the painting is actually the victim in this. There is, as yet, no indication of the reason for the Master's interest in the planet, and indeed the planet might just be a stopover for him as opposed to his intended destination.At this point in Dust Breeding a lot of balls are being juggled and it is still unclear how they are going to interact, but the setup is interesting and there are enough immediate dangers to keep the action moving. I'm going to keep going to episode 3 tonight.
After listening to part 3 of 4
The threads converge in this episode: the Master's living superweapons are left over from the same ancient war as the psychic entity in The Scream, and the Master is using the former to provoke the latter into unleashing its power. Possibly the Master is just doing this because he is currently very insane, or possibly he thinks he has some way of actually harnessing that power.The "warp core" trapped in The Scream seems to resemble the titular alien from The Fearmonger to enough of a degree that I find myself wondering if it was the same entity in an earlier version of Dust Breeding's concept. They do differ substantially: the "Fearmongoid" was mostly a scavenger feeding on pre-existing human fear, while the "warp core" is actively terrifying and doesn't seem to require fear as a nutritional need. Also, the "warp core" is more ambitious and clever, able to convince humans to network their brains together so it can have a more powerful psychic host.
The Master gets a long speech in which he expresses disdain for the wealthy and powerful who refuse to own up to their own evil, more or less considering himself better than them for his willingness to be an outright unambiguous villain. It's a key moment for introducing Beevers's audio role and well-executed both in script and in delivery. It is not necessarily a speech a real person would ever say, but the Master is totally like that.
Since the audience already officially found out Mr. Seta was the Master at the end of the previous episode, the moment in this episode when the Master reveals himself to the Doctor isn't particularly climactic. The final line of the episode is the Master saying "I've already won, Doctor," which doesn't work well as a cliffhanger moment since he hasn't explained anything of how he's allegedly already won and is probably just wrong about it.
It is nearly 3AM right now and I've decided not to move forward to the final episode tonight. This isn't because of the weak cliffhanger moment. Plot threads have advanced to a point where there is a lot of tension in the story despite the lack of tension in the Master's taunt to the Doctor. I want to be awake enough to appreciate the final episode of Dust Breeding.
After listening to part 4 of 4
The Master's alien pets, the Krill, are something the Doctor and Ace have encountered before. The script seemed to expect the listener to be aware of them, so I looked it up, and it turns out Dust Breeding is a sequel to the novel Storm Harvest. The Krill don't get descriptions in Dust Breeding beyond phrases like "ugly great frog", so reading Storm Harvest first might be essential for visualizing the story.It is revealed that for the Master as well as the Doctor, these events are happening after the period when Anthony Ainley played the Master on television. The Master had made an earlier attempt at controlling the "warp core" and it had destroyed the body he stole on Tremas, reverting him to the decaying Geoffrey Beevers form. This zigzagging of actors is strange, and apparently it might have been a last-minute addition when Big Finish couldn't hire Ainley and settled for Beevers.
The climax of the story seems like it is leading to a very boring conflict in which the Doctor and Master think at the alien very hard through telepathic circuits, but then other threads which have been running through the story come to fruition and makes it interesting.
I found Ace and Bev's voices a little hard to tell apart in some scenes with the two of them, but this might be just my personal problem and not the direction's problem.
Dust Breeding isn't one of Big Finish's greatest releases, but the Beevers debut is well-done and it's overall a solid Seventh Doctor adventure. Since it's one of the early ones that's permanently at a very low download price, it's worth checking out.
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