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Big Finish The End of the World A Benny Audio Adventure |
Author | Dave Stone | |
Released | 2007 | |
Cover | Adrian Salmon |
Starring: Stephen Fewell as Jason Kane
Synopsis: Jason Kane: author, adventurer, hero and inveterately polysyllabic hyperbolist. Now join him on his most exciting adventure yet! He's going to Hell and back on an impossible quest to stop a man with the powers of a god. Along the way there's monsters and explosions and unseemly contretemps in the odd posh restaurant. The battle will be hard and require every last iota of Jason's famous cunning. What can possibly go wrong? |
A Review by Thomas Tiley 3/12/24
Outside of a few brief lines, Bernice sits out this adventure as Jason takes the lead (rather similar to the Doctor-lite episodes on TV). Investigating Braxiatel leads Jason to discover some startling truths about himself and leads to a conclusion that ends up changing the entire line of Bernice Summerfield adventures.
Stephen Fewell gives a fantastic performance as Jason, coming to grips with Braxiatel's interference in his life/timeline and that of his friends, being at times funny and having to endure some emotional scenes. I must say that I have always had ambivalent feelings toward Jason's character throughout Bernice's series, but this story really made me appreciate both the character and the actor portraying him. It helped that I had also read Jason's debut in the NAs at around the same time as listening to this (the audio even recreates a scene from the book), so I sort of got the character for the first time at this point, and it's sort of a shame that this is the story that ends up being his last.
The story features cameos, mentions and reappearances of several characters/places from previous Bernice's stories including the NA books and her own series. I wasn't familiar with all of them but could still get the basic gist of the story, so it's not a negative, but it would obviously help if I was more familiar with the Bernice Summerfield universe.
I rather enjoyed this story, but I must say I found the ending rather full-on and not in a good way. After stupidly confronting Braxiatel about what he has discovered (already an idiot move considering he has just discovered Brax has been using time travel to change events in the range), Braxiatel manipulates Peter into murdering Jason. Now, the Bernice series in general has tended to be somewhat more light-hearted on average compared to the main Doctor Who range and while it occasionally dipped into some darker corners before, I don't think a child murdering an adult is something I particularly care to hear about in the Doctor Who universe, especially as the scene is so drawn out. It would have more tolerable had it been over quicker. The only reason to draw it out is to have Jason deliver some last words and forgive Peter for killing him. While there has been foreshadowing that Peter had a dark destiny before him in several earlier plays, I wish they had found another way to conclude his arc in a more pleasant way. The only positive for this scene is the (an overused word but in this case justified) chilling performance of Miles Richardson (another fantastic actor) as Braxiatel as he delivers the line "Oh Peter, what have you done." Richardson is terrific throughout.
Without the final scene (both the horrible violence and the stupid plot logic), I would easily give this story an eight or nine out of ten in terms of the final grade. However, with the darker events at the story's end and the events it sets into motion for the rest of the range sending it into a direction that I didn't really care for, I would have to give the story a one out of ten. Bumping it up to a three out of ten with the fantastic performances from Fewell and Richardson.