Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Colin Baker, Lisa Greenwood, Tariq Bhatti, Kate McEwen, Anjli Mohindra, Tania Rodrigues, John Banks.
Space, perhaps the most dangerous place that Humanity’s eyes can ever see and yet the peril, the threat of the black canvas is one in which at some point surely anybody who has ever lived has dreamed about seeing. To take in the whole majesty of the speck of rock we cling to, to dare to take a chance on seeing for ourselves the neglected sphere for all its beauty and destruction, surely that makes space worthwhile.
Humanity though is a mucky pup and for each mission we undertake in the starry canvas, each satellite we place up in the Heavens to spy on our neighbour or watch our team beat another in an important match, things get left behind and spiral round the planet causing untold harm. Such is the premise in which William Gallagher places Flip Jackson and The Doctor into in the latest Big Finish release, Scavenger.
The joint Anglo-Indian effort in which sees the two countries send a machine into space to clear up over a centuries worth of space junk is on the face of it an excellent space yarn, the chance to give The Doctor an Earthbound story with being completely being forced remain gravity’s unwilling victim.
William Gallagher’s script is one of those that you know whilst the layered story on top is asking you to believe in one thing, the allusions to the past, to the way that the complex relationship between India and Britain, at times beneficial and at others down right harmful and negative, has shaped both countries in the last 200 years. If America and the U.K. are two common entities divided by a common language then what Scavenger shows is these two countries are two sides of a rope but in essence always pulling in the same direction…with a little friction caused in the main by old claims, squabbles and of course the odd British lie.
This is typified in the relationship between Jessica Allaway and Salim, played by Kate McEwen and Tariq Bhatti. One the hero of Wimbledon and Britain who now is in overall charge of the mission to clean up space and the other the long lived Indian Prince. The allegory to the days of the British Raj are all too clear, the lack of understanding in which the British ruled over the Indian people, the ignorance in what the so called elite felt was right for another country and to take all the credit for anything that happened there are astonishing. In the right hands a story can bring the attention of more than one story to mind in the reader’s eye or listener’s attention and William Gallagher does it superbly.
The Doctor shows that he genuinely enjoyed Flip Jackson being around. The girl who flew so high, who took on the evil genius Davros in one of her first adventures, falls to Earth, but unlike Icarus this was done out of arrogance but out of love. It is such a powerful moment, a flash of the virtuosity that Doctor Who and Big Finish insist upon that makes it so very fresh and exciting each time you open up a new story.
Scavenger is available to purchase The masterpiece is the final act in which Colin Baker’s Doctor is taken to the very edge of grief once more from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall