Doctor Who: The Word Lord
Starring: Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, Sophie Aldred as Ace, and Philip Olivier as Hes
Format: One full-cast half-CD-length download (also available as part of a 2-CD anthology)
Silly? Yes, in a somewhat horror-story way
Standalone? The Word Lord has loose links to other stories preceding it in the anthology Forty-Five. The fact that The Word Lord was released as its own separate download is because of its importance to the later audio A Death in the Family.
Recommended? If you are listening to the groundwork for A Death in the Family, then The Word Lord is essential. Otherwise, it might make more sense not to purchase it separately from Forty-Five.
My reaction to this audio contains spoilers for it and mild spoilers for Bernice Summerfield and the Criminal Code and A Death in the Family.
Before listening
Forty-Five was an anthology release in which four half-CD episodes each had something to do with the titular number. The Word Lord gives the number's recurringness in the adventures of the Doctor, Ace, and Hex some justification, using a kind of alternate-universe technology that is strange even by Doctor Who standards. The titular Word Lord comes from a dimension in which words are real and tangible reality is as mutable as words are here; in our dimension this makes him a sort of genie-like figure. Using words in certain ways gives him power, and his TARDIS analog's engine emissions manifest as people mentioning the number forty-five.
Writer Steven Hall only wrote one other Big Finish audio, A Death in the Family. At the time of A Death in the Family, Big Finish's monthly range was more arc-oriented than it is now, and A Death in the Family had an important role to play presenting the aftermath of the "Forge" arc, which had involved both the sixth and seventh Doctors and was of special concern to Hex. Instead of just narrowly following up on its immediate context, A Death in the Family also brought in other past continuity elements, including a look at a sixth Doctor companion's post-TARDIS future and the return of the Word Lord.
I've heard A Death in the Family more than once but I don't remember how many times I've heard The Word Lord. It is colored for me so much by the later story that I'm not really sure how I'll react to it on its own, but I think I remember it being an amusing short and I'm happy to give it another listen.
After listening
The character of the Word Lord is unusual for a Doctor Who villain. He is so supremely convinced of his own invincibility that he treats other peoples' life-or-death situations like a casual game and has fun with them. Other similarly arrogant villains usually don't actively have fun. Paul Reynolds doesn't seem to have many voice acting credits but he is great in this role.The story starts in medias res: the Doctor is being interrogated about how he got into an underground bunker, right after a man has been found shot alone in a locked room. Ace suggests that the TARDIS
might be programmed to home in on trouble, a suggestion the Doctor very quickly shoots down. The Doctor's UNIT credentials get him out of trouble, but the solution to the locked room mystery is even more otherworldly than the TARDIS: the CORDIS, a "conveyance of repeating dialogue in space-time", used its chameleon meme to take the shape of a joke one of one of the room guards was telling, and the Word Lord Nobody No-One emerged to do some killing. The motive for the specific murder is unexplained, but Nobody is bounty-hunting for the fun of it and has taken contracts out on the Doctor.
It is unclear what the exact rules are for how the Word Lord operates, but people saying "nobody" can do something enables him to do it. At one point he seems unable to kill anyone until someone begs him not to kill the specific person, but doing it that way might just be his idea of fun and not an actual constraint on him.
A story focused on words in this way seems like a natural fit for the audio medium, but there is an odd piece of medium mismatch: the Doctor's plan involves throwing the TARDIS's translation circuit into reverse so everyone is speaking gibberish. We only hear a little bit of the gibberish, then cut ahead to the translation circuit back to normal and the Doctor explaining what he did. In a visual medium we'd have probably been able to see the Doctor carrying out his plan, but in audio there was no way to convey it directly while it was happening. However, for a half-CD-length story, a certain economy of storytelling is necessary and the pacing was good.
The ending is quite unusual, particularly given that this was the final story of an anthology and involved wrapping up a thread that ran through it. There is much less resolution than is typical of a Doctor Who story, both mechanically and emotionally, and they want us to notice this. I don't know what function this served in Forty-Five, but it works well to set up The Word Lord.
This story is very inexpensive a la carte, and I recommend it easily, but if you buy it alone and then buy Forty-Five you'll be paying twice. Unless you want to set up A Death in the Family and aren't interested in the rest of Forty-Five, it might make sense to buy Forty-Five as a whole and not separately buy The Word Lord.
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