Starring: David Warner as the doctor and Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Format: One CD-length full cast episode.
Silly? There are numerous jokes but they are not the focus of the story.
Standalone? This is the first story in the David Warner timeline. Substantial knowledge of the Jon Pertwee TV era is expected.
Recommended? Yes.
My reaction to this story contains spoilers for it, subsequent David Warner Doctor stories, and the first series of Big Finish UNIT.
After listening
I wasn't at my laptop when I started listening to this one, so I didn't do pre-listen blogging.
This is a story that is defined by other stories not having happened. Many of the alien invasions of the UNIT era happened, but the Doctor wasn't there for them and Earth fared much worse. The Doctor, the Master, and the Brigadier all seem to have an implicit idea that the Doctor should have been there; the story doesn't explore where this idea comes from, and it doesn't seem to have an explanation within its own timeline. The Doctor instead arrives just before Hong Kong is about to revert to China, near a pub the Brigadier has been running since being unable to show his face in England. UNIT had done its best, but without the Doctor its best involved many casualties, and the Brigadier was scapegoated. UNIT still exists, and a Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood is in command. The Colonel is played by David Tennant, who at this time wasn't yet a Doctor Who (nor a Scrooge McDuck). This is not the same timeline as the UNIT audio series in which Tennant plays Brimmicombe-Wood in another context, and the two versions of the character differ somewhat.
Racial tensions are a major element of the Hong Kong setting. I wouldn't describe Sympathy for the Devil's handling of them as entirely unproblematic, but I would say writer Jonathan Clements's heart seems to have been in the right place and the missteps are brief. There is some possibly mishandling of Buddhism, but in a similar way to other appearances of religion in Doctor Who, not an Orientalist way. Planet of the Spiders is among the many UNIT-era serials the listener's expected to remember, and the monastery here is partially a riff on that one.
The title of the story doesn't have a clear referent until fairly late in the story. The Master has been stranded on Earth and has been amassing power using a variant of the Keller Machine from The Mind of Evil. The Doctor has barely been on Earth at all and already despises being stranded, and he exhibits some sympathy to the Master's plight. However, the Master is still the Master, and the Doctor is not at all surprised when the Master attempts a betrayal; indeed, the Doctor had made subsequent plans under the assumption the Master was going to do so.
This Doctor does not like Earth. From the beginning he is less fond of it than Jon Pertwee's Doctor, and he makes his way off the planet at the end of this adventure, rather than staying there for years and growing accustomed to it. He leaves very quickly, assuming incorrectly that there are no loose ends from the adventure that need tying up. The Brigadier comes with him. A few years later, Big Finish would return to the duo with another story, Masters of War, and then years after that (after Nicholas Courtney's death) David Warner's Doctor would encounter Bernice Summerfield. The whole David Warner branch of the Doctor Who multiverse is something worthwhile, and this is a great starting point well worth hearing.
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