Doctor Who: The Lost Stories: Leviathan
Doctor Who: The Lost Stories: Leviathan – Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Jamie Parker, Howard Gossington – Written By Brian Finch & Paul Finch 2xCD / Download (Big Finish) (www.bigfinish.com)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if Michael Grade hadn’t stomped all over Doctor Who in his jackboots in the mid eighties, the series that was due to go into production could very well have been one of it’s later day highpoints. How do I know this? Well, because Big Finish acquired the rights to the scripts for the unmade season, and have been producing them as audio dramas that’s how, and so far they’ve done an incredible job. Both ‘The Nightmare Fair’ and ‘Mission To Magus’ felt like new productions, like new stories, yet at the same time had a quality, or a feeling, that inexplicably linked them to the era in which they wee originally born, which brings us to ‘Leviathan’, the third of the ‘Lost Stories’. I can’t imagine how it could have been originally filmed, the special effects budget alone would have financially crippled the BBC, the sheer scale and scope of the story would have pushed the film crew to their limits and beyond and that’s before we even get to the sets, the story or the actors. ‘Leviathan’ was, and is, simply too big, in every aspect, a story for television. Thanks all the gods them for audio, a medium which faces none of those problems and can deliver scale and size like no other format. Here, ‘Leviathan’ can finally be brought to grand, glorious life, and believe me it is grand, especially in terms of size. Landing in what they first take to be Medieval England, The Doctor and Peri find themselves in a society governed by fear, whose men and women are hunted by Herne (yes, that’s right, THE Herne – horns, the forest, hunting, god, the full package) when it’s their “time”, where everything seems a little too clean, a little too ordered, and before long are plunged into a universe of secret societies, abandoned technologies and good old fashioned capitalist greed. As ever, the cast and production are spot on, creating a very real sense of the vast landscape in which the story takes place, and the story itself is pure Science Fiction gold, combining Heinlein (namely ‘Orphans Of The Sky’), Niven and Pournelle (‘Ringworld’) and Illuminati theory and legend. Okay, so you can see a lot of the twists and turns before they appear, but that just adds to the sense of fun and adventure as you’re swept along by the tale, once again losing yourself in the story, finally emerging with a huge grin plastered all over your face, eager to repeat the experience. I don’t know how they do it, but they just keep on getting better and better… Tim Mass Movement
