Doctor Who: Loups-Garoux
Starring: Peter Davison as the Doctor and Mark Strickson as Turlough
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? In the ways that a soap opera tends to be.
Standalone? Yes.
Recommended? Yes.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and the Doctor Who audio Dreamtime.
Before listening
This is an interesting juxtaposition in my random listening order: the Dracula story is immediately followed by a werewolf story. Werewolves, like vampires, are generally real in Doctor Who though also a subject of legends. The only werewolf in the TV series was from space, but in Loups-Garoux the Doctor encounters members of an Earthling werewolf culture, in a near-future Brazil. As I recall, the werewolves have a close connection to the Earth and its ecology, and deforestation has weakened them. I seem to remember a werewolf wanting to mate with the Doctor, and I also seem to recall another werewolf sensing Turlough's darker nature and seeing it as analogous to lycanthropy. I remember the politics of the werewolf culture being interesting, and overall I remember really liking this story, more so than most early Fifth Doctor audios. I think I've listened to it either once or twice, and I look forward to relistening.After listening to part 1 of 4
I think I hadn't heard nearly as much of Big Finish's Dark Shadows the first time I heard Loups-Garoux. Much of the running time of this first episode is essentially a Gothic soap opera, in which a child suffers a mysterious disease and an old lover returns to rekindle an unwanted relationship. I don't know whether Dark Shadows was necessarily a direct influence on Loups-Garoux; the tabletop RPGs of White Wolf are at least as likely a direct influence. Werewolves are a society powerful enough to stay hidden from humans while exploiting them, and they see internal strife among themselves as threatening in a way that the possibility of detection by humans is not.The Doctor and Turlough only barely intersect the werewolf family drama; in that time, werewolves sense that the Doctor is unusual and ancient, describing this sense in scent metaphors. There is a brief unexplained section, not connecting to any other part of the episode, in which a native of the dead Amazon rainforest records herself setting forth on a quest; obviously this is going to tie in somehow later. This is an episode of putting pieces on the board, not of demonstrating their interaction. It's an atmospheric build. The episode cliffhanger is more quirky than dangerous, but it portends the start of more sustained interaction between the Doctor, Turlough, and the werewolves.
After listening to part 2 of 4
The werewolf interactions are a bit goofier than I remembered. They use dog-related metaphors a bit too much, and the pair of werewolves who decide to toy with Turlough banter in a manner that reminds me of Saturday Night Live sketches. However, if one accepts this goofiness (as one occasionally must with Dark Shadows) the story is developing nicely, with betrayals and rivalries and family secrets. The Doctor's agenda is slightly unclear at this point but seems to mostly be curiosity. He's possibly never encountered werewolves from Earth in particular before?The subplot of the rainforest native is still only loosely connected to anything else, but she is very aware of werewolves, seems resistant to their mental trickery, and carries a silver knife, so when she does intersect the main plot she's likely to have an impact.
I am looking forward to continuing the story, but I suspect I won't find it as gripping as I did the first time around, since the werewolf characterization is breaking immersion for me now and wasn't then.
After listening to part 3 of 4
Loups-Garoux was written by Marc Platt, who has a great track record of writing Doctor Who audios with strong human elements, and directed by Nicholas Pegg, who has a great track record of directing Doctor Who audios with broad farcical elements. In this case, it was not a good match. Much of the dialogue is in veiled half-explanations, meaning it is up to the director to have the actors convey subtext correctly, and Pegg just did not particularly do that. Line reads do not have the implications that they should have, making the story actively harder to follow. Perhaps Platt could have annotated his script with clearer explanations of subtext, but I think it's at least equally on Pegg for not asking for clarification. I do admit that it's possible the reality of the writing and directing situation is different from what I am imagining.I do think I'm generally following the story, although I might have some character motivations wrong. This is an eventful episode. The rainforest native's plot finally crashes into the other plots, quite effectively with a chance encounter with Turlough, some stabbing, and Turlough getting swallowed whole by a giant werewolf who is apparently the historical Big Bad Wolf. The cliffhanger includes the Doctor accidentally proposing marriage to a werewolf matriarch.
There is a resemblance to the later audio Dreamtime: natives of a non-European country have a spiritual belief system that is real enough to interact with the story's science fiction elements. I feel that this mechanistic fitting to the Eurocentric framework of Doctor Who cheapens the traditions that are represented, but it is nonetheless better representation than one would find in a lot of other performed science fiction. (I am not sure how much of what is presented as traditional in Loups-Garoux is invented for the story, but I think my opinion is applicable in any case.)
Despite the flaws in its dialogue delivery, I am generally enjoying Loups-Garoux and I do look forward to hearing the conclusion.
After listening to part 4 of 4
There is a fairy-taleness to Loups-Garoux which takes over from the soap opera elements. At the same time as the mysticism of Rosa, the rainforest native, comes to the front, the established specific details of the werewolf politics and relationship drama become less important and the conflict among the werewolves becomes larger-scale and more iconic in its presentation.The story ends on a very different tone from which it started. This seems deliberate; the Doctor and Turlough have had their horizons expanded by an experience very different from the typical TARDIS trip, and the story itself is very different from a typical Doctor Who. Events toward the end bear a very strong resemblance to parts of Dreamtime.
The dialogue goes out of its way to situate the story into continuity, but as far as I know no subsequent stories, not even Dreamtime, point back to anything established in Loups-Garoux, neither the werewolf culture nor the future history. This is perhaps necessary, as the near-future Earth of Loups-Garoux is incompatible with a lot of other possible near-future Earth stories, but also perhaps regrettable, as it lays what could have been interesting groundwork.
Overall, while Loups-Garoux is more uneven than I remembered it from my previous listen, it is an interesting tale with unique elements and well worth hearing at its low download price.
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