Tartarus
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Big Finish Productions Tartarus |
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| Written by | David Llewellyn |  |
| Format | Compact Disc | |
| Released | 2019 |
| Starring Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding |
| Synopsis: 63BC. Following the overthrow of Catiline, Cicero and his wife retire to the coastal town of Cumae, safe from the threats of Rome. But when a stranger and his companions arrive at Cicero's villa, new dangers lie in wait and Cicero finds himself plunged into a realm of gods and monsters. His only hope of returning home lies with a man known as the Doctor. But can Cicero trust him? |
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods by Thomas Tiley 18/2/25
In a crossover with another Big Finish series Cicero, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa journey to Vesuvius for the Doctor to meet one of his heroes, the roman writer Cicero, while at the party strange lights appear in the sky and the Doctor, his companions, Cicero and his slaves find themselves transported into a strange land filled with creatures from Roman myths, and they have to perform tasks/puzzles/quest like in a game.
Samuel Barnett as Cicero was rather good, capturing the various qualities of the man: as an orator as Consul of Rome, his weakness and foibles, his guilt at having men killed without a trial. Its a very good performance. He gets a great scene where he has to Captain Kirk the computer to death using his skill as an orator.
Joe Shire and Laura Riseborough are both okay as a bodyguard Septus and Cicero's wife Terenita, respectively, but neither get much to do other than being the token first victim and being the important man's wife. Tracy Ann Oberman is fantastic as the baddy, another alien computer on a single-minded task, but she plays it wonderfully. Her death scene/self destruct scene is surprisingly moving.
George Watkin, related to Peter Davison --- his nephew --- as Marc the slave is fine. He has enough personality and things to do to move the plot along. I liked the reveal that it was Marc that the computer selected for its subject over the Doctor and Cicero.
Tegan gets to do the usual Tegan things, at one point getting into an amusing double act with Cicero that sadly doesn't last very long. She also gets most of the best/funniest lines (I suspect Janet Fielding must have it written into her contract), while Nyssa just about gets enough to do with figuring out the various puzzles they face and some sci-fi/technical explanations. Peter Davison is good and reliable as usual, although I am not sure of his fanboy-style crushing and gushing over Cicero at the start, as it seems more of a later Doctor thing rather than something his Doctor would do. Then again, he does dress like someone who went to public school, and they are big on the classics, so maybe it does sort of fit, but I still think it's more of a Matt Smith or David Tennant type of thing.
The music is rather good, as is most of the sound design and creature effects (Minotaur, Dog-Men, Harpeis, etc), except for the first monster attack by the Giant Talos. The background music is suitably ominous, but the creature sound effects are lacking. They mention Jason and the Argonauts film at this point, and the way he sounds in that film is fantastic, with heavy footsteps and grinding, but this story's Talos is just lackluster, which is a shame as the other monsters sound fine.
Some issues: the plot is super stereotypical --- it starts out seeming like they are in some sort of alien video game or television show, then it turns out it's a super alien computer testing people in an artificial environment with robot duplicates of mythological creatures to recruit a leader to break the stalemate in a alien war, but the computers that keep running centuries after the war is over, etc, etc. It's like the story fell out of the stereotype tree and hit every branch on the way down (then got beaten some more with a stick from the tree). It's well-performed and fun but very cliched. The baddy is said to have studied humanity for centuries in order to build its test environment, then is later said to have scanned all human history - if it has time travel technology in that case why pick this period, why not try to to alter the outcome of the war, etc?
The cover is lovely, but the minotaur on the cover only appears for about five minutes in Disc 2 and is overcome very easily (which is a shame as you've got a minotaur in a maze, you could easily have it chase them around and get lost for a bit and build up the tension). At the start, the sound quality with Tegan is terrible --- I am not sure if its an equipment issue, was just warming up, a bad take or time issue or if she had a bad throat, but it sounds very off. She is better later, so it might have been an issue on just that part. There are no cliffhangers until the end of the disc (I can guess where they might have gone: the first monster attack and the minotaur attack, but it is rather odd to have a two-disc story not be split into four episodes), Talos kills by stomping/crushing people but the baddy said all the monsters were based on myths, and the mythological Talos heated up his body in a fire to burn people as he embraced them. (It seems he is more based on the film version than the mythological version, a niggle but I am a fan of myths, and it wouldn't hurt anyone to be accurate; it would even make for an nastier death scene for Septus.) Cicero is writing a letter recounting the story throughout the first disc, which is used for good effect and scene setting/narration, but the second disc forgets about this conceit until the last few minutes, which seems like an oversight. This story also has Marc join the TARDIS as a new crewmember, which is something I am not a fan of. Not that I mind new companions, just the story makes more sense if he is left behind. (It's already hinted in the final scene that his outlook isn't very good and how many more travelers can they squeeze into the gaps between stories?)
I really enjoyed this stor; it was fun. Stereotypes abound, but that doesn't lessen my enjoyment of a good story. Not very original, but certainly very entertaining. It's one of those rare stories when you can picture not only what it would look like in your head but also what it would have looked like on screen (greenscreens, matte painting, rubbish costumes, monsters and all). The story's climax is fantastic in composition, music, sound effects of the harpies, the script, Oberman's reading of the poem Ulysses by Tennyson. It's all brilliant and worth getting the story just for this sequence (Disc two, track ten, if you're wondering).
For the brilliant ending, a ten out of ten but taken in consideration with everything else (especially adding another companion into the mix), I would give it an eight out of ten.