Doctor Who: Voyage to the New World
Starring: Colin Baker as the Doctor, Christopher Benjamin as Jago, and Trevor Baxter as Litefoot
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Part of the science fiction premise is rather over-the-top.
Standalone? Yes for the main plot. Connections to other Jago & Litefoot stories are isolated.
Recommended? Yes.
My reaction to this release contains spoilers for it and for other Jago & Litefoot content.
Before listening
This story takes place at a very specific point in Big Finish's continuity for Jago & Litefoot, and I considered manually reselecting its predecessor Voyage to Venus instead for continuity reasons. I decided not to because the bulk of what happens here is just an adventure in which Jago & Litefoot are somehow companions to the sixth Doctor, and the reason why doesn't affect the adventure.
This is really as much a Jago & Litefoot release as a Doctor Who one, and it is of continuity significance for the former rather than the latter. It takes place between Jago & Lightfoot's fourth and fifth boxset and leaves them to start the fifth in a position very different from where they were at the end of the fourth.
Voyage to the New World is, to put it simply, the one where Big Finish does the mystery of the Roanoke colony as a pseudohistorical with aliens in it. I think I've heard it twice before. I remember a rgood twist about the aliens' motivations, and I also remember the story not really putting any effort into precisely aligning its observable events with real-world recorded history. I think there might have been a timeline-altering handwave at the end to help smooth over the gaps.
I am looking forward to listening to this story. I hope the beginning makes sense without having recently heard Voyage to Venus.
After listening
Jago & Litefoot get many of the good lines in this story, but the main plot of the story is a Doctor Who story in which the Doctor does the problem-solving and Jago and Litefoot could be functionally interchanged with most other companions. The main exception to this is at the end: after resolving the whole Roanoke situation, the Doctor drops Jago and Litefoot off at their favorite tavern with a reasonably long goodbye, and then a Doctorless scene establishes the premise for the following Jago & Litefoot boxset. This is quite separable from the Roanoke events, to such a degree that it wouldn't be hard to make room for additional adventures between Roanoke and there if a writer wanted to.The story seems like it is going in an uncomfortable direction at first: the peaceful life of the native Americans only exists because of a pact they've made with aliens that involves sacrificing some of their own. This would be questionable even in a space colony story, and applying it to a real human culture would clearly be a problem, if all was as it seemed. However, there is a twist with some metafictional resonance: this acting-out of a tired colonialist trope happens only because a time-travelling Walter Raleigh met a psychic hive-mind at a moment when it was very suggestible and he made colonialist assumptions about it. The full plot of the story is slightly weirder than that sentence.
One moment near the end represents a temporal event by a long, vague, annoying series of sound effects, a trait I associate most with Nicholas Briggs but which in this case doesn't seem to have been his fault. The result of the temporal event is a big reset button that removes the events of the story from the timeline; we don't find out what the aliens are like in the new timeline without Raleigh's influence, and it's unclear whether the events of Roanoke do or don't still have a paranormal element
I enjoyed this story, both for the performances and for the rather over-the-top science-fiction weirdness.
No comments:
Post a Comment