The Hollows of Time
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Big Finish Productions The Hollows of Time |
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| Written by | Christopher H. Bidmead |  |
| Format | Compact Disc | |
| Released | 2010 |
| Starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant |
| Synopsis: The Doctor and Peri have been on holiday, visiting old friend Reverend Foxwell in the sleepy English village of Hollowdean. But why are their memories so hazy? Piecing together events they recall a mysterious chauffeur, who is not what he seems, and Foxwell's experiments that could alter the nature of reality. Huge sand creatures have been sighted on the dunes, and many of the locals are devoted to a leader known as 'Professor Stream'. But who is Stream? And what lies within the Hollows of Time? The Doctor will discover that not every question has a definitive answer... |
A Review by Jean-Marcel Casey
10/6/10
I must confess to having been swept up in some of the excitement
surrounding Big Finish's "lost stories" season. "Great," I thought, "I
always wanted to know about scripts that didn't make it to television in
the old days!" A treacherous little voice in my head kept whispering
doubts, though, insisting that announcing a host of ideas from the aborted
season 23 wasn't exactly an auspicious beginning. You see, I remember the
target novelisations; or, more specifically, I remember glancing at them
and thinking with more than a hint of disbelief, "well, thank the gods we
got Trial of a Time Lord" (!?!).
My fears seemed justified when I bought a subscription to the season
and listened to Mission to Magnus. I may yet try writing a review
of that monstrosity, but the truth is that after having it for months I
haven't had the tenacity to finish it. Leviathan was full of
interesting ideas but the execution felt so off and ill-conceived in a
number of ways that I have to wonder what the production team was really
thinking.
Nevertheless, I was very interested in The Hollows of Time for a
couple of reasons. I think Chris Bidmead writes fascinating stories, even
if they don't always seem to come off right, and not only is this piece
written by the man himself, it purported to be a sequel of sorts to the
season 21 highlight Frontios.
Well, The Hollows of Time is not well and truly a sequel to Frontios, but it does happen to be the best of the
Lost Stories range thus far. Lest it seem that this be faint praise given
some of my criticisms, which I'll get to in a few paragraphs, I'll explain
what the story does right, and how original it actually is in a couple of
ways.
I actually had to sit in silence after the story was over for a minute,
not because, as is often the case with heavy drama, I was emotionally
taxed and utterly bowled over by an ingenious script, but because I simply
couldn't believe the boldness of what Big Finish had done here, and I
wasn't even sure how much I approved of it. While the commentary tracks on
the discs indicate that this was originally to be a rather visual story,
and though there are many bits of expository dialogue shoehorned into the
script that occasionally feel a little contrived and unfortunate, I think
that were this story produced for television it would have been rather
conventional and not worthy of a great deal of comment. Because of the
audio format, and because of apparent "rights issues", there were certain
things that Big Finish simply could not get away with without making
serious alterations to the script, and thus a couple of new things are
tried that the original TV series would probably never have attempted, at
least, not in 1985/86.
In the first place, the Doctor and Peri are actually in the TARDIS for
the entire duration of the play, recounting hazily remembered bits of an
adventure that took place in their recent past. Why are their memories so
foggy? They don't know, and in fact, though there are a couple of hints
(bit of a spoiler here, I suppose), neither do we ever find out for
certain! This makes the exposition actually seem more natural than usual,
since one character always has to jog the memory of the other as to what
really went on, and it also makes the verisimilitude of certain reported
events somewhat questionable. Whenever something happens that obviously
shouldn't be heavy on dialogue, we go back to the TARDIS and have it
explained for us, more or less. Most of the time, this works pretty well,
and you have to admit it's a hell of a lot better than people yelling
"AAAAAH! I?M BEING DRAGGED UNDERGROUND!! I'M DROPPING THE TEA KETTLE! I'M
IN SPACE AND HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE!"
The other area in which The Hollows of Time proves rather unique
is in its handling of the villain, and this is definitely linked to the
strange memory loss and necessity for flashbacks I mentioned in the
previous paragraph. I must admit that when the play ended on its
particular note my jaw was on the floor. The Doctor and Peri leave the
village of Hollowdean, she believing that they've "saved the day" while
the Doctor seems to have his doubts, neither of them actually being aware
of the nature of the force responsible for their travails! Certainly, part
of the reason the Doctor is so utterly maddened by the gaps in his memory
(you can practically feel the frustration pouring out of Colin Baker's
voice over this... very well done) is because he knows, and we know, that
he ought to know what all this is really about.
The clues are all over the place, but I must confess that the most
obvious calling card is something I didn't even pick up on until listening
to the commentary track, at which point I shook my head and thought to
myself that if, knowing what I know and having no imposed memory blocks, I
didn't shout an instant "aha! so that's who is responsible!", I can't
exactly blame the Doctor for being "too dense" to figure it out. Anyway,
after much reflection, I have decided that I really like this mystery, and
I wish Doctor Who did this sort of thing more often. There's an old
story by Mark Platt from, I believe, one of the Virgin decalogs, in which
the Master concocts a scheme of dominance over time and space or some such
thing, and gets foiled by the Doctor without even realising that he's
crossed paths with his nemesis in a roundabout way, the beauty of the
story being that most of it is from the Master's point of view. Stories
that involve Daleks are often most insidious and creepy when we're shown
what effects the creatures have on the world around them but see little of
them in action. Enigma is a powerful draw and, while it's easy to plunge
over the edge from imbuing a powerful sense of mystery into sloppy "I
can't be bothered" sort of writing, for the most part The Hollows of
Time avoids simply being clumsily frustrating.
I'm afraid, though, that it's not entirely excused. Some more answers,
or maybe background, would have been nice and would have helped the story
a good deal. I'm still not sure what it is that the villain was actually
trying to do... build a big gravity engine that could crush whole planets?
What is all the business with time corridors really about? Why does the
villain need a village full of followers, setting up some kind of
religious cult of which the audience never learns much of anything? At a
guess, the villagers pour money into the cult's coffers, allowing the
purchase of much advanced scientific equipment for the Reverend
FoxFoxwell's experiments... but really, the villain should be more
resourceful than that and it's hard to believe that such a grand setup is
really about money. Perhaps he just finds it amusing. Still, I would have
liked to have seen more of the cult in action, and less of Simon and the
shrill housekeeper or whatever she is, Mrs. Streeter, a truly unnecessary
character if there ever was one. More of Professor Stream would have been
ok, too. I mean, he's so mysterious and introduced early on, and then
fades away so completely into the background that everybody seems to
literally forget about him. That is clearly a signpost that he must be up
to something suspicious, right?
And really, the misappropriation of time is actually my biggest beef
with the story. What the author, or production team, chooses to focus on
to tell their tale is not necessarily what I'd focus on if the story were
in my hands, and of course that's how a lot of fanfiction and other
atrocities happen, isn't it? Seriously though, the biggest cop-out
concerns the Gravis, which, as this is nominally supposed to be a sequel
to Frontios, I should be able to mention here
without breaking the spoiler-killing convention. To say that this sly and
manipulatively selfish creature is underused in The Hollows of Time
is an understatement the size of a quantum gravity engine. The villain's
henchman picks the Gravis up from the uninhabited planet on which the
Doctor dropped him on Frontios, presumably takes
him far back in time to twentieth-century Earth, and drops him at the
centre of the gravity wave generators he's so carefully set up. The Doctor
decides he needs to converse with the big caterpillar thing, and we think,
"Ah boy, this might be dangerous; I bet the Gravis is pretty angry about
having been left on that desolate planet for
who-the-hell-knows-how-many-centuries. He probably wants to destroy the
Doctor more than ever!" Only, we then fade to the TARDIS and the Doctor
simply tells Peri how the conversation went! No antagonism, no atmosphere,
no mystery... frankly, it sucks, so forget all about this being a sequel
to Frontios, really. That was certainly a major
waste of opportunity and, in my mind, a large let-down, considering that
much squandered time actually seems to exist in the play.
Things move so slowly in the opening half, too, that when they really
pick up in a mad rush toward the end it all gets totally jumbled and,
again, it feels as though the wrong things are emphasised. I do have a
theory about the time corridor and the villain's need for the Doctor's
TARDIS; it suggests that more was going on here than is immediately
obvious and that the Doctor, far from being a man on a holiday who
happened to stumble upon a nefarious plot and stop it in the nick of time,
was actually very much at the centre of the villain's plan. How else to
explain the memory blocks? I will stick by this assertion, because I
prefer not to believe that Big Finish once again dropped the ball on a
fairly intelligent script by leaving too many loose ends around and coming
up with sloppy explanations for events that make no sense on reflection or
are just poorly paced in general.
But really, the leisurely pace of the early sections of the tale in
particular are perhaps to blame for things feeling rather awry later on.
There's not really a sense of danger at all until near the very end of
episode one, though there's certainly some mystery and a rather ominous
feeling that never quite results in the revelation it perhaps should
presage. Indeed, there's even a rather annoying false scare here, when the
housekeeper comes in to remove the tea things and accidentally loses
Foxworth's Tractator shell. The gravitas with which Foxworth insists that
they mustn't touch it, and how carefully he tries to pick it up... well, I
was expecting something along the lines of the Yeti stories, with the
spheres rolling across the floor in preparation for something really
nasty, but nope... all that happens is that the Reverend's machine starts
going crazy in some obscure way. This scene is so deliberated, so
long-winded that it seems it must surely mean something, but the payoff
is, sad to say, rather inconsequential. We also get some confusing stuff
with the Doctor floating around in space in the early moments of episode
two, which feels like padding and is too talky by far; that's something a
story with this much enigma and underplayed mystery can't seem to afford.
Why not just have the Doctor explain in the TARDIS what happened, so we
can get some more varied flashback scenes?
It's interesting to me that most of these stories were in fact intended
to fit into TV season 23, because they actually make Doctor Who
seem more like a children's programme than ever in some ways; it feels as
though these stories were in part written as a reaction to complaints
about season 22 becoming too violent. Every story thus far has included
children in the cast. The bloodshed seems a bit toned down and although
Leviathan could be considered an exception to this I suppose, it
still has a kid and was actually intended to be a part of season 22. The
regulars in particular seem to be spending a little more time than usual
pontificating to the audience about something or other. It doesn't quite
feel like the Doctor Who I love, or maybe it's just that it doesn't
entirely feel like the sixth Doctor era and so I'm having a little trouble
coming to terms with it. The Hollows of Time even includes a pet
robot turtle! Thankfully, the little thing wasn't overused, but it must be
sacrificed in the end, and both Peri and Simon seem rather attached to it!
This reminds me of Clash of the Titans and that ridiculously cute owl,
which seems as though it was put into the script just to make kids go
"aww, cute, mummy I want one!!!"
But hey, back to the good points I think, or at least unambivalent
ones. The characters and acting on display here are fantastic. Susan
Sheridan plays both the housekeeper and Simon and I've never heard a woman
do a better impression of a ten-or-so-year-old boy. It helps that Simon's
part is actually decently written. The Reverend Foxwell is another old
friend of the Doctor's, and seems a likeable elder fellow; he doesn't
really get many great lines or character moments but somehow he's a
pleasure to have around. It's also pretty cool, I must admit, to find a
member of the clergy who also happens to be a scientific genius and spends
his nights in a workshop doing research into artificial intelligence, and
nobody even says "blasphemy!" once; pretty refreshing, even for an atheist
like me. The chauffeur is very mysterious and, as it turns out, mean and
nasty in the extreme, and he is played with a great deal of relish. We
don't see much of Jane, but she has a sexy voice, and her fate is actually
the one shocking moment of the play as we're led to believe that she's not
really the innocent that she appears to be; the way the villain plays with
her and the Doctor and company, and then subverts our expectations is
positively sadistic and in keeping with the bastard's character. I am
heavily reminded of a certain other tale by the same author.
Unsurprisingly, though, the regulars are the highlight performances
here. Peri is not quite what she is in the normal Big Finish range, but is
closer to her wide-eyed, rather-out-of-her-depth television persona. She
gets some great scenes with Simon where she shows her resourcefulness and
courage, though, and it seems that she has more than a hint of practical
maternalism, judging by this story and the two preceding ones (I still
haven't listened to The Nightmare Fair; considering Magnus,
d'you think I dare?). The sixth Doctor is great, as usual, but he is
positively electrifying in his addled scenes in the TARDIS. You can
practically sense his pacing around, trying to figure out what was going
on and what was done to him and why. He keeps focussing on the time rotor
for some reason and chanting "up and down, up... and down", unnerving
Peri, and you can just about see him frowning ferociously or maybe chewing
on his lip in a childish but somehow intense manner. At any moment I
expected him to leap up and trumpet wildly, "Of course! That's it! Oh
no!!! It's worse than I thought!" and, at that point, I might just have
jumped and shouted along with him.
There it is then: the first story I can recommend with only a few
reservations from the Lost Stories range, even without having actually
listened to that first play (I know what it's about and I frankly can't
expect much). The most appealing stuff is the sense of mystery involved,
and the possibility for fans to theorise and even leave the way open for
future stories developing on the ideas set forth here. I think that the
best Doctor Who stories are the ones that leave you thinking
ferociously about what just happened and what could happen given a few
alternative angles. This certainly isn't top-grade Who, but the
uniquely daring nature of the story means that it definitely leaves an
impression and you'll be thinking afterwards, "Wow, what was all that
about, really?" Doctor Who certainly needed more of this kind of
enigma in the 80s (well, before stuff like Ghost
Light came about, anyway), and I think it still needs it today, both
in the television series and in the Big Finish productions. This sort of
science fiction really should attempt to convey a strong sense of wonder
and it's nice to see that, despite the fact that Bidmead's scripts are
often overloaded with incomprehensible technobabble, he really hasn't
forgotten this notion at all. About that technobabble, though, I'm afraid
it's pretty heavy here. I can make a lot more sense out of Logopolis, let's put it that way. Ah well... definitely
worth a listen or two or three even, given its obfuscative nature, and a
story that I'd play for my Who-loving friends just to observe their
bewildered reactions.
Fluidity of a Dream by Jacob Licklider
13/7/22
Colin Baker described The Hollows of Time as a labyrinthine story that he couldn't get his head around, and let's be honest, it really is one of those. Written and adapted by Christopher H. Bidmead, a writer famous for the science-fiction heavy stories of Logopolis, Castrovalva and Frontios, The Hollows of Time is a story that couldn't be adapted in a straightforward manner, as it was originally going to be revealed that the villain of the story was the Master, but as The End of Time was going to be aired when this was being made, this had to be changed and the identity of the villain was left ambiguous. This isn't a problem, which I will get into a little later, but Bidmead also added this framing story told by the Doctor and Peri after the fact, which makes you feel this air of uncertainty of just how exactly the events took place. It almost becomes a dreamlike state, which others will say makes the story fail, but I have to disagree. Much like Blink where the audience played into the story, here the audience is put into the dreamlike state of Hollowdean.
The plot sees the Doctor and Peri take a vacation to Hollowdean to meet up with the Reverend Foxwell, an old friend of the Doctor, but not is all well. There is a massive yard sale going on in honor of Professor Stream while Foxwell, or Foxy, is creating time experiments, and Simon is seeing sand creatures. Everything is connected in that dreamlike way, as Stream is attracting the sand creatures, which are actually Tractators, to create time corridors, the titular hollows of time. It is up to the Doctor to stop Stream and close the hollows before they cause trouble for the Web of Time. Now the plot has an extreme flaw and that is the ending, which just sort of happens without any sort of real resolution except some narration. While it is very similar to how many dreams can tend to end like that, it really doesn't work well for a story, although it really should have.
Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant both work off each other in the framing story, as they both remember how the events happened differently in only slight ways. The Doctor even after the events cannot shake the feeling his mind is still being addled from the effects of the Hollows of Time, while Peri just wants to get out, and it is really interesting. Reverend Foxwell, played by Trevor Littledale, is an extremely interesting character, as he is an old man who still loves to get wrapped up into science. He is the standard absent-minded professor, and you can really imagine him and the First or Sixth Doctors getting along quite well. He likes to be called Foxy and actually wants to be the one to close the hollows, as the majority of the blame can be put down to his meddling. The other protagonist is Simon, played by Susan Sheridan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame, and here the biggest distraction is that I just hear Trillian every time Simon has a line. Whenever I didn't hear Trillian, I heard a shrill little girl; still, she is a great actress. Bidmead, however, writes Simon as an actual child, and Peri is the only one to get through to him in the end of the story. Simon runs away from the adults for not believing him about the sand creatures.
Professor Stream is played by David Garfield, and let's be honest he is playing the Master. Garfield is putting on a slight imitation of Anthony Ainley and is just as nasty as the Master is in the show. He has a robot under his control and a human hypnotized who gets killed just to show how ruthless Stream is. This murder, however, just brings the audience into enjoying him as a character, as his voice just creates the dreamlike atmosphere where everything starts to blend together, which is a really interesting idea.
To summarize, The Hollows of Time is a highly underrated Lost Story, as the story actually manages to lose the audience in what can only be described from a dream. It is obvious that the villain of the story is meant to be the Master, and Professor Stream is a character who keeps you on your toes. Susan Sheridan is the weak link of the story, however. Foxy, Peri and the Doctor are all great, while the main problems come from Bidmead's style, causing the ending to be truly awful and an insult to what the story accomplished. 70/100