#41 Doctor Who: The Marian Conspiracy

The werewolves are tied to the Earth, but my Randomoid Selectortron goes where it will, departing from the pack to take me to...

Doctor Who: The Marian Conspiracy

Starring: Colin Baker as the Doctor and Maggie Stables as Evelyn Smythe
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? There are farcical elements; compared to TV Doctor Who, there are more than The Aztecs but fewer than The Romans.
Standalone? Yes. Evelyn is introduced and joins the Doctor, but no specific plot arcs for her begin here.
Recommended? Yes.

My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, and mild spoilers for subsequent Evelyn Smythe audios.

Before listening

The Marian Conspiracy is Colin Baker's second appearance as the Doctor for Big Finish and the first Big Finish audio to introduce a new companion. Colin Baker wanted to take the role in a different direction than the way it had been written during his TV era, and thanks to Melanie Bush's confusing timeline there was considered to be a gap of indeterminate length in which entirely new companions could be easily inserted, after the Doctor drops off future Mel and before he picks up past Mel. Big Finish has decided that this is a very long gap indeed, and Evelyn is now just one of several companions to have joined and left the Doctor in that period.
Evelyn was very deliberately written to break the mold of the sixth Doctor's TV companions, resembling Barbara Wright or Bernice Summerfield more than she does the default female companion. She is a strong-willed university-level history professor who is willing to stand up to the Doctor, but not quippy about it. She essentially invites herself onto the TARDIS in order to see history first-hand, and the Doctor, who Colin Baker is playing as nicer than he was for most of Baker's TV run, gives in.
I think I've only listened to The Marian Conspiracy once before. I recall that it is a historical adventure regarding British royal succession. I recall that it started with the detection of a temporal paradox, but no origin for the paradox was established other than the possibility of it having been created by the Doctor and Evelyn going back in time to investigate it, which is a somewhat unsatisfying reason to have a paradox in a non-comedy story. It is possible that I just didn't notice the root cause, though. I remember it establishing it as important to Evelyn that she had her medication available, but not establishing details about what it was for; her condition is a slow-burning plot thread and I'm not sure exactly when it comes to fruition.
I am looking forward to relistening to The Marian Conspiracy. I remember the main plot being somewhat scant and I forget what the running time was spent on, but I don't remember feeling like it was stretched out so there must be some interesting action going on. Given its low price point and its introduction of an important character, I'll probably end up recommending it even if it's a little weak as a story.

After listening to episode 1 of 4

This has a nice slow start for the sake of introducing the new companion: almost all of the episode is taking place in the present day over a series of interactions between the Doctor and Evelyn. In a piece of schtick almost definitely taken from Back to the Future, Evelyn's printed family records are visibly fading away as a change in the timeline erases her ancestry, but her memories of what she knows of her family records are unchanged. (The story doesn't point out the oddness of memories persisting when physical records fade; in The Marian Conspiracy as elsewhere, an unstated default in most of Doctor Who that time-travel causality works differently for sapient minds.)
The Doctor lets Evelyn come along to the adventure just because Evelyn is insisting hard enough; the Doctor is not as strong-willed with her as he usually is. Possibly, this is because he is between companions and secretly glad to have acquired one; that explanation definitely works but I'm not sure whether it's authorial intent.
Once they do get to the past, near the end of the episode, they get into a cliffhanger situation very easily: both the Doctor and Evelyn make the same potentially lethal mistake in different locations, having thought they were arriving in a different year.
The Marian Conspiracy, at least in this initial episode, is much more about time travel as an activity than is the typical Doctor Who, but this fits in well since it is a companion's first introduction to time travel. The characterization of Evelyn and of the Doctor's relationship with her are well-drawn, and the cliffhanger is very effective. I look forward to hearing more.

After listening to episode 2 of 4

Evelyn and the Doctor's cliffhangers resolve in quite different directions, putting the two on opposite sides of the historical conflict. The Doctor is only pretending to take a side and sees it as irrelevant since the historical conflict will inevitably resolve as history has recorded it, while Evelyn somewhat believes in her side but has some reservations. There is a very good passage of dialogue in which some Protestants are against being burned at the stake as heretics, but are entirely in favor of "actual" heretics being burned at the stake.
Evelyn leaks far too much information about the future to some people who are in no position to understand, remember, or use the information. From what I recall, they will attempt to use some of it in a later episode, but to more comical than practical net effect. The cliffhanger is a bit of a sidetrack: Evelyn forgot a warning the Doctor gave her, entirely separately from her talking about the future, and scary time things happen as a result.
Not much has happened yet in The Marian Conspiracy in terms of adventure melodrama, and yet it is sustaining itself very well with few events and much dialogue, and I look forward to hearing more. I notice that this one was written by Jacqueline Rayner, who I consider to be one of Big Finish's great luminaries and the person from Big Finish I'd most want to be the script editor for TV Doctor Who if they were going to promote someone in that direction. I am eagerly anticipating the escalation of the story, in the hope that the actual resolution of the paradox might be a little more fleshed-out than what I remembered.

After listening to episode 3 of 4

The Marian Conspiracy has a fair amount in common with the TV Doctor Who serial The Romans, tonally. Serious plots with lethal consequences are afoot, but the Doctor and companion interact with them in a farcical or soap-opera fashion, with elements such as an unwanted arranged marriage and the possibility that historical weirdness is the Doctor's own fault. It is not a parody of Doctor Who or of the era in which it's set, but it more light entertainment than historical drama. Characters are given ample time to develop and it is a fun listen.
The cliffhanger of this episode depends on the fact that, at this time, no one knew which aspects of the Doctor Who status quo Big Finish might upend. Injecting a new companion into the chronology of the TV series was a daring move, and so the suggestion that the Doctor might end up married in the past and having descendants on Earth was funny but not an entirely empty threat.
I'm looking forward to the conclusion, though I'm now pretty sure the actual paradox driving the science-fiction plot won't make any more sense than I remember. The story is so much more about characters and incidents than it is about a main plot that this isn't a big problem.

After listening to episode 4 of 4

The paradox indeed doesn't really work in a logical fashion, unless we assume a situation in which history can start to unravel just sort randomly (there was a cartoon called Time Squad where it worked that way). I am fine with Doctor Who not having coherent rules of time travel, and indeed appreciate its not having them, but in this story it feels like there's a missing element or lazy writing, since the mystery of the paradox is the driving force and one expects a mystery to have an internally consistent solution. This is only a small mark against the story, since the paradox is ultimately only a small plot element and the bulk of the story could have happened with any other reason for the Doctor and Evelyn to visit the place and year they visit.
The plot is, in places, written like a farce. The Doctor is weirdly lackadaisical about trying to escape from a cell at one point, which allows Evelyn to show initiative as a proactive companion but also feels like it's failing to sell the tension of the plot. The Doctor and Evelyn have a good deal of interesting banter, some of it expressly contrasting Evelyn's proactiveness and life experience with the sixth Doctor's TV companions. I may have misremembered the matter of Evelyn's medication; the particular medication she is carrying in this story is used in a way that isn't what I remember from the later arc involving her health, and certainly isn't presented as though it has any sort of mystery to it.
The Marian Conspiracy is good. It presents a characterization for the sixth Doctor that draws from his TV persona but adds self-reflection and restraint, and it introduces Evelyn effectively and establishes the ways in which she is different from other companions. It is an essential Big Finish audio for sixth Doctor fans in particular and is available for download at a budget price, so I recommend it heartily.