FDA 1.1 Destination Nerva

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

Destination Nerva, the first of Big Finish's Fourth Doctor Adventures starring Tom Baker and Louise Jameson has now been released!



Discuss here!

[Nyder]

Listened to Episode 1 - a mighty fine romp! Great to hear Leela again - the interaction between her & The Doctor is priceless. Also love the fact that The Drudgers sound like the little Cadbury's Smash robots :-) Can't wait to hear part 2 - but it will have to be tmw. Such willpower!

[Anthony Williams]

Listened to it all - absolutely loved it. No time to post a full review at the moment, but will hopefully post some more substantial around Monday-time

[brandynigma]

I really enjoyed it. I did find it was structured oddly, however- Part One felt like a Part One of a traditional Hinchcliffe story, and the first ten minutes of Part Two really feels like it's screaming, "There was an awful lot of just running about in the old series, wasn't there?", with this running about being excised for obvious reasons on audio.

The result for me is a solid, lean story, but one that is perhaps cut TOO fine, and could have done with a bit of room to breathe. It's still an effortless 4/5 though, and a brilliant return for Tom and Louise.

[Nyder]

"Do It!!!!!!"

Leela can certainly be forceful when she wants to!

[Alex Me]

Been a while since I got any Big Finishes, but Tom being back seemed like too good an opportunity to be missed. An very enjoyable story, that felt very much like the era it was from. Though the ending seemed a bit too convenient, and two episodes seemed rather short 4/5. Looking forward to the rest of the series.

[Si Hunt]

It was glorious to hear Tom and Louise in action again, if the former seemed to have forgotton the Doctors solemn side, and played him getting "Panicked" a bit. On the whole it was a joyeously faithful performance though; Tom has never sounded exactly like his TV Doctor on audio, even at the time.

The story was a bit slight, and I wish they'd let Steve Lyons do the first one, but it did the job.

Kudos for the Ark in Space sound effects, points deducted for the absence of any jelly babies.

Si.

[Paul Monk]

and I wish they'd let Steve Lyons do the first one

Not heard this yet but I can imagine Nick Briggs having a little tantrum saying "No I'm going to write the first Tom one. I'm the boss and if anyone argues you are all fired!"

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

I dare say Steve Lyons could've done a good job if he'd been asked but I believe the stories all had to be written at quite short notice which is why the current core of regular BF writers were used for this series.

I'm with the 4/5 crowd as this was a promising start to what should hopefully be a very enjoyable series.

Hearing David Archer as a Space Commodore was a little surreal though. I kept expecting a reference to the slurry pool at Brookfield to creep in!

[SiHart]

We did part 1 last night. Quite good it was, quite good.

[Rob McCow]

Yes, part one of 'Destination Nerva'. Hmm.

Sorry, it was absolute shash! Terrible, terrible stuff. Let's have a look at it shall we?

There was absolutely no coherency. First there was the ranked soldiers firing at a terrible something, then the next moment they were answering a distress call, then they were exploring a country mansion (Keep your Victorian costume on Leela... this listener was appalled at the crassness of that line!), then they make a wrong turning and end up at Nerva Beacon, then they have to infiltrate a construction crew (did they SERIOUSLY put spacesuits OVER their Victorian clothes?!!) then they face the deadly Drudger, then there's the sly astronaut from the Aeolis, then somehow Leela and the Doctor end up on the bridge of Nerva Dock (Or is it Nerva Beacon? Where is this story even happening?!) and then it's all about micro bacteria that can infect people as well as non-organic objects.

So we've had about 10 different story premises in one episode, presented one after another with no rhyme or reason. You could argue that this constitutes a 'Romp' but to me it doesn't constitute anything at all, it came across as a few random articles of junk chucked into a void.

And I really, really couldn't work out whether they were supposed to be on Nerva Beacon, or if Nerva Dock was somewhere different.

Thank heavens Tom and Louise give such good performances because their characterisation was so generic. Aside from a few moments of violence from Leela, this could have been writen for the fifth Doctor and Nyssa. As for the rest of the characters... the guest star Raquel Cassidy is kind of OK, but the rest sound like your typical middle-England middle-class am-dram actors that BF always employ. There's nothing really wrong with ME-MC-AD actors, but they fill BF plays like air fills a balloon and it ends up being repetitive.

There was no sense of mystery, I didn't feel sympathetic or even interested in any of the characters, most of the jokes fell flat, the science was extremely silly and the story frequently left me as lost and bewildered as a draughts player at a cryptic crossword tournament.

And that's just part one!!!!!

[SiHart]

I think you may have missed the connection between the sly astronaut from the Aeolis and what was going on in Victorian England perhaps...

[Rob McCow]

Oh! That makes it all the clearer. The sly astronaut left Victorian England in a spaceship that vapourised the cliched old Victorian country house that he was living in. Just like the end of Pyramids of Mars!

[Nyder]

"Well I Nerva"

Come on Steve, that must have made you chortle ;-)

[Rob McCow]

A little.

It would have made me laugh more if the story had been called "Nerva Say Nerva Again".

[Si Hunt]

I have to agree with Steve, this story I found largely uninspired and generic. Typical Nick Briggs really. Let's set it on Nerva Beacon - why? Well, because we can.

Once again, the most important boy in the nursery demanded to play with the new toy first.

Si.

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

It's still a darn sight better than The Renaissance Man IMHO.

[Rob McCow]

We managed episode 2 on Sunday night. What an absolute mess.

So, there's this virus/infection that's never satisfactorily explained, that will make humanity into one joint-minded creature. It's transferred by touch. There's some aliens called the Drenalin with deep voices who got p*ssed off with the British Empire back in the 19th Century, so in revenge (or something? WTF) they put the virus onto a spaceship that docks with Nerva beacon. Then the Doctor visits them and Dr Foster persuades them to give her a sort-of cure and everything is fine.

The worst part of episode 2 was when the Doctor, Leela and Dr Woman arrive on the Drenalin spaceship, after being teleported in - and the Drenalin give them a massive info-dump history lesson including tape recordings of a speech!

The resolution to the story was absolute shash as well, one moment the deadly alien virus is unstoppable, the next they've got a cure and it's all fun and jolly tea and biscuits for all hurrah!

Now Nick Briggs is an enthusiastic supporter of Doctor Who and as far as I can make out, a lovely man. But it was very unappealing hearing the production team talk about how wonderful their work was. 'And that's where the suggestion came to set it on Nerva and I thought it was a brilliant idea!' But WHY? If you're not going to tie it in to Ark In Space or Revenge of The Cybermen in any way, why bother?!

I know it's an audio adventure, but if you're going to have the Doctor and Leela on the cover wearing their huge and cumbersome Victorian gear, why put them in a story where they're constantly having to put spacesuits on?!

Tom and Lousie were pretty damn good. But with scripts like these, how long will it be before Tom becomes bored?

Destination: Nerva left me confused, bored and irritated. It was over-complicated and uninvolving. The science was as ludicrous as the characterisation.

The music was great though.

[SiHart]

There really wasn't a need to set in on Nerva, except to appeal to the fans. It was just a setting to make people go Oooh! when it could have been set anywhere, aside from a chance to reuse a few sound effects I don't see what they got out of the setting... It's a shame because there could eb a good Nerva told, following on from the events of Ark/ Sontaran Experiment. Here it was just wasted.

Basically this seemed to me to be a typcial BF story- didn't go very far, wasn't particularly exciting or anything but was well made and well acted for the most part. Yes, you could argue that the joy is in hearing Tom and Louise reunited, but once the joy of that has passed, what else is there?

[Anthony Williams]

So, I've now listened to this story a few times, and feel able to post a more rational review than "absolutely loved it!".

There was a lot to look forward to with this story. Firstly, there was the final introduction of the Fourth Doctor into the Big Finish range. While new audio adventures were not a new thing for the Fourth Doctor after the BBC's range of Magrs-penned stories, I felt that this managed to capture the spirit of the era a lot better. Not only that, but Tom Baker actually sounds like he did in 1977, while in the BBC stories, he sounds noticeably older.

So, it was incredibly easy to get carried away by a wave of nostalgia. The Ark in Space was one of the first stories that I ever saw, when my father bought the VHS back in the early 1990s. So, my initial listens had me loving the fact that this play was set on Nerva, as it appealed to my inner child. With posessions, the return to Nerva, the Doc and Leela in their Victorian garb, and a base under siege, this is really the greatest hits of the Tom Baker era than anything else.

And so this ultimately disappoints. Big Finish should remember that their biggest hits - stories like The Holy Terror, the Chimes of Midnight and Spare Parts - are when they really innovate, not return to the tropes of the classic series. Unfortunately, like so many of Nick Briggs' efforts, this is just so damned pejorative. Shame, really. At the end of the day, I just think that Nick Briggs was the wrong person to start the range out.

However, there were some saving graces to this. It was lovely to hear Tom back in action, sounding relatively youthful, and acting like the Doctor from 1977, not as Tom Baker from 2009 (see: the Magrs BBC stories). While it was a shame that we couldn't have Elisabeth Sladen in these stories, Louise Jameson turned out to be just wonderful, effectively re-capturing Leela's sense of wonder at everything. Additionally, the transformation scenes were superbly done, and it was extremely easy to visualise this gruesome moment of the story, despite the format being audio, rather than visual. Finally, the soundscape here was superb - everything very well realised, from the correct sounds of the TARDIS console, through to the scanning noises from Nerva, the Sonic Screwdriver and everything. Superb!

All in all, this was a deeply flawed audio (although enjoyable enough if you don't try to pick it apart too much), and probably not the best story to start out the Fourth Doctor's range with.

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

This story does suffer from trying to be too many different things. Briggs admitted that the opening 10 minutes was written so that it could be pre-released as a sort of prequel but it does leave the rest of the story feeling slightly uneven.
However for all its problems which Anthony has neatly summarised I'd still choose it over stories 1.2 & 1.3 and so hoping for better from Leela's first encounter with the Daleks in 1.4!
The best from this pairing so far has definitely been in the two "Lost Stories" especially The Valley of Death

[Andrew Curnow]

I got given this for m' birthday, so a mere twenty-seven months later I'm able to say that after part 1 I'm more inclined to agree with Steve. I realise Tom's a lot older than he was, and he sounds like it (much as Pertwee did in his Barry Letts radio plays) - but more than that, to me some of the lines didn't really sound 'fourth Doctor-y' anyway. I chuckled at the 'Well I Nerva" line but I can't believe the Doctor would have said it!

The story is OK so far, although Leela's instincts seem to be getting much more of an outing than they did on TV, with the unfortunate effect that they make the Doctor appear a bit, sniff, dim. A battle inside; something wrong with Henry; etc. The Doctor could have deduced or spotted those himself, rather than disbelieve Leela's "feeling" and then appear stupid.

Ironically, for me, they've shot themselves in the foot by tying it in so specifically in the Tom years. If they'd left it a bit more open, the Doctor here (who is neither quite so grim & doomy as the Hinchcliffe model; but is also not so gung-ho and unstoppable as the Williams version) could well have been viewed as an inbetween version. As it is, the story, the cover art & even the "Teatimes in 1977" tagline, all work against a script & performance that don't really fit the bill.

All that said, nice to hear Tom & Louise again (and Louise at least sounds absolutely the same as she did at the time, so good for her) and I guess as the first one maybe I'm being a bit unfair to it. Presumably they get better as they go along...?

(Also, there is of course part 2 - maybe Briggsy will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat!)

[Nyder]

The stories do get better Andrew - most in Series 3 have been very good, apart from the Briggs finale :-/


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[Andrew Curnow]

And that's part 2 done. I'm glad to hear they improve Dave, this first one sadly was a bit of a letdown. I hate the stories where we get (as Steve says above) a massive infodump - there's a character in The Mutant Phase who seems to be there for just that reason, and here again halfway through part 2 up pops Exposition Drenalin to fill in the plot (what there is of it).

Worse for me, though, was that the Doctor just doesn't really do anything. The 'mystery' of what's going on isn't worked out he is just told it - and the 'problem' isn't actively solved by him, the Drenalin just change their minds. So it's an inactive Doctor, a victim of the situation - I can't off the top of my head think of ANY fourth Doctor story on TV where that's the case.

A shame, clearly the enthusiasm & excitement was there (based on the 'behind-the-scenes' bits) but the story itself just didn't seem to be written for the fourth Doctor at all.

And no, I can't see why they bothered with Nerva either!

[Dirk Gently]

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it Andrew, oh well, Nerva mind eh!



Sorry, I'll leave my anorak.