Doctor Who: Storm Warning
Starring: Paul McGann as the Doctor and India Fisher as Charley Pollard
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) as four half-CD episodes.
Silly? Briefly and to its detriment near the start of the fourth episode, but generally no.
Standalone? Yes. This is the starting point for the Eighth Doctor with Big Finish and requires no prior Eighth Doctor awareness.
Recommended? Yes.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, and possibly for later Eighth Doctor developments.
Before listening
Apparently, Big Finish were unable to cast Paul McGann when they first started making Doctor Who audios because Paul McGann's agent assumed he wouldn't be interested and never told him about the job. They cleared this up before long, cast India Fisher as his first companion, and began his audio adventures with Storm Warning.
The details of McGann's televised adventure needed to be kept vague due to its copyright being jointly held in a very difficult-to-license fashion, so we meet an eighth Doctor who has been adventuring for some indeterminate length of time and is currently companionless. This begins a brief period during which Big Finish got to move the Doctor Who timeline forward by giving the most recent Doctor new adventures set after his last television appearance. Meanwhile, novels were also moving him forward; the relationship between Big Finish's timeline and the timeline of those novels is something that depends very much on the writer.
My understanding is that, during the Charley Pollard era, the intention of director and executive producer Gary Russell was that the novels and audios were taking place in different timelines, capable of observing each other and interacting as parallel timelines do in science fiction, but not taking place "before" or "after" each other. I understand that events in Russell's novel Spiral Scratch (which I haven't read) point at this on the novel side, while a scene in Zagreus (which I have heard) points at it on the audio side. As far as Storm Warning is concerned, the point is moot; this is an eighth Doctor we are expected to receive as a blank slate not connected to any metaplot.
Big Finish would continue to advance the eighth Doctor's timeline forward, but it would not be long before the television revival jumped ahead to the ninth one, leaving Big Finish once again with only "past" adventures. Television has acknowledged Big Finish's version of the eighth Doctor more than the version from the novels, and people who believe it is important to have a singular canon routinely arguments about the degree to which audios such as Storm Warning are in it.
Storm Warning is an important release in the history of Big Finish, and fortunately it is also a good one. I've heard it at least twice and probably three or four times, and I am looking forward to another pass through it.
After listening to episode 1 of 4
The opening has the eighth Doctor alone in the TARDIS dealing with a space anomaly and talking to himself. The manner in which he deals with the anomaly is more Star Trek than Doctor Who, with made-up technologies interacting with each other. The Doctor also reminisces about an encounter with Mary Shelley. It's not stated whether that encounter happened during his current incarnation or a previous one, so there is no indication whether much time has passed for the Doctor since Paul McGann's debut on television.The TARDIS arrives on an airship, the R101. This is a historical airship that crashed on its maiden voyage, but my understanding is that deliberate license has been taken with the historical events even before the science-fiction elements begin. Charley Pollard has stowed away on the ship in the guise of a crew member, for no better reason than a generic desire to have an adventure, and she bonds with the Doctor over the shared experienced of being chased by people who realize she's not supposed to be on board. This is as good as basis for a companion/Doctor relationship as any.
The airship is secretly carrying someone in an oxygen mask, presumably an alien, and is en route to a secret rendezvous most of the crew are unaware of. Time vortex dwelling dinosaurs called "vortisaurs" show up, possibly in connection with the anomaly the Doctor was dealing with, and wreak a small amount of havoc to enable an episode cliffhanger.
Dialogue in this episode is highly character-focused, and while numerous events happen, none of them are explained in detail beyond what the characters are immediately reacting to. There is less story progression so far than typical for a first part; from what I recall, the degree of story progression ramps up massively later, after we find out more about the secret rendezvous. I'm enjoying my listen so far.
After listening to episode 2 of 4
The Doctor is pretty sure the vortisaurs showing up are his fault, and they don't seem particularly connected to the airship's alien passenger. In an amusing turn, the Doctor pretends to be a German spy since that's something the airship crew will believe and have a protocol for dealing with, and he gets Charley to play along as his co-conspirator. Gareth Thomas is very entertaining in the role of the chummy British official who believes him.The flying saucer at the end of the episode initiates what I am remembering as the main plot of Storm Warning; there is a reason a British prototype airship is taking an alien to a secret meeting, and that reason is going to get interesting. I'm looking forward to it.
After listening to episode 3 of 4
Plot sure has happened! A hive-mindy alien race had repented of a destructive past and split itself into creative part, a destructive part, and a "Lawgiver" functioning as the executive branch. The Lawgiver is dying and the aliens wanted to bring in someone from Earth to replace it. The aliens haven't told the Earthlings this, and meanwhile the British government's interest is in stealing the flying saucer so they can use it to win the upcoming world war, not in legitimate diplomatic contact.The ethos of Storm Warning seems to be that some bad humans are bad only because they don't know any better, and other humans are bad by choice. Gareth Thomas's character is in the former category, and while his blindness is presented as willful it is not represented as irredeemable. Barnaby Edwards's character is the representative of humanity's outright monstrousness. In some Doctor Who stories the human monster takes priority over the alien one, but in this case they seem equally important.
A lot more plot needs to happen to get from here to the end of the story, making the second CD of Storm Warning much faster paced than the first CD. I am going to enjoy the last leg of the ride.
After listening to episode 4 of 4
The resolution to the battle on the flying saucer was underwhelming; the aliens that had been set up as an unbridled force of destruction turned out to basically just not be that. The thematic reasons for their weakness make sense, but the confrontation promised by the cliffhanger is very, very anticlimactic. Gareth Thomas's character gets some good last moments of dialogue before a fateful decision, and then the action returns to the airship. While the British representatives didn't get the flying saucer, they did steal a terribly anachronistic ray gun. The Doctor is gravely concerned with the integrity of the "Web of Time" and turns his attention to making sure the gun doesn't reach England. Since the airship was historically going to crash anyway, he is more reckless than he might normally be; on the other hand, at this point we don't know how reckless this particular Doctor "normally" is.Finally, the Doctor and Charley escape from the airship. While Charley is out of earshot, the Doctor darkly monologues about the possibility that he will have to take her back in time to the airship and let her die on it in order to undo damage to the Web of Time caused by saving her. He seems, at this point, fully willing to do it. When Charley asks to join, he seems relieved that this gives him something he can do with her outside of Earth's timestream. This question of Charley's effect on the Web of Time continues in one way or another through subsequent eighth Doctor audios, until Neverland and Zagreus give it some resolution and start a different metaplot.
I had forgotten how easily defeated the scary aliens were, but Storm Warning otherwise lives up to my memories and is worth a listen for anyone with any interest in Big Finish Doctor Who.
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