#69 Dark Shadows: The Voodoo Amulet

After eventually blogging about The Demons of Red Lodge, I am once again ready to board my Randomoid Selectortron, which brings me to...

Dark Shadows: The Voodoo Amulet

Starring: Jerry Lacy as Tony and Lara Parker as Cassandra
Format: One partially narrated full-cast CD-length episode.
Silly? I don't think it was intended to be, but some voice acting is too broad.
Standalone? Prior awareness of Tony & Cassandra is expected.
Recommended? Not independently, and it is a skippable part of its larger arc.

My reaction to this story contains spoilers for it and for other Tony & Cassandra audios.

Before listening

I've already covered The Devil Cat, the final story in the Tony & Cassandra arc. (Big Finish have produced further Tony & Cassandra audios, but they're set before The Devil Cat chronologically). The Devil Cat's setting works well because Big Finish are able to poke fun at the horror conventions of their own country. On the other hand, The Voodoo Amulet's position in the Tony & Cassandra arc might be reasonably summarized as "the racist one". The story uses unreconstructed outdated tropes about voodoo as a backdrop and plot device without addressing any of the problems this entails. I think I've listened to it twice, and from what I recall, it does nothing important to the arc and can be easily skipped. I will be relistening to it with some reticence, but there will probably be a couple good scenes of bantering protagonists in there somewhere.

After listening

I think I can see how this happened. Voodoo, in The Voodoo Amulet, is presented as a form of magical power. It is a power that happens to be used most prominently around New Orleans, and at one point loa are mentioned. There is virtually no cultural context for voodoo other than the New Orleans setting, and I could see writer Mark Thomas Passmore knowing voodoo from other fictional media and simply not realizing that it is a concept that comes from a real, living cultural and religious context. That, plus Big Finish's usual difficulty directing any accent other than a British one to sound natural, is sufficient to end up here. I believe that it is a problem and that it should not go unmentioned, and so I am mentioning it.
The noir elements of the story are well-executed, with Tony and Cassandra getting caught up in a situation they can escape from but ultimately not change much. Tony has some excellent narration, and the two have several scenes of good banter as I expected. There is a small amount of arc relevance: the idea of Cassandra being able to reclaim her humanity leads into what happens later in The Devil Cat, and the two briefly pretend to be a married couple, which is a pretext that becomes more important later in the arc.
If I mentally substitute some other culturally neutral magical power source instead of voodoo, the use of the undead is quite good, including a reasonably naturalistic and flavorful version of the requisite scene in which someone explains how these undead are different from undead in other stories.
I can't really recommend this story due to what seems to me to be incredibly casual cultural insensitivity, but I otherwise actually enjoyed it. It's included in the Tony & Cassandra Collection, and even if it weren't that collection would still be less expensive than getting the stories in it individually, so you might very well end up with The Voodoo Amulet in your Big Finish library incidentally and I wouldn't say to necessarily skip it.