Writer: Craig Hinton
Director: Gary Russell
Music: David Darlington
Release Date: June 2002
Running Time: 1 hour 13 minutes
Number of Episodes: 1
Set Between: Last of the Titans and The TV Movie
.
Cast:
The Doctor: Sylvester McCoy
With: Anthony Stewart Head (Lord Vaughan Sutton); Patricia Leventon (Mother Superior); Ian Collier (Commissar Sallis); Mark Gatiss (Deputy Warden Baris); Alistair Lock (Reeve Cless); Penelope McDonald (Jancis); Stuart Piper (Mattias); Yee Jee Tso (Major Brant).
Plot Synopsis:
When the Doctor last visited the city of Excelis, its citizens were about to enter an age of enlightenment and reason. But returning two centuries later, he discovers a vicious totalitarian regime at war with the rest of Artaris, living off the efforts of a drugged and broken underclass.
Who is the mysterious Lord Sutton, and what hold does he have over the ruling classes? What are the Meat Puppets, and what role do they play in the eternal war? And why is the Doctor’s arrival the final piece in a plan that has been centuries in the making?
Throughout his lives, the Doctor has fought many legends. But some legends refuse to die.
Continuity/Tie-in:
- I think it’s quite interesting that, so far, Big Finish haven’t been too concerned about placing their adventures between specific stories, just in general gaps. But each of the Excelis stories is clearly stating where they are. Excelis Dawns is set during Frontios Part Four, Excelis Rising is quite soon after The Trial of a Time Lord (The Doctor says he recently got into trouble for interfering) and the opening scene of Excelis Decays sees the Doctor reconfiguring the TARDIS interior to resemble the one we see in the TV Movie (Craig Hinton has said that this is the Seventh Doctor near the end of his ‘life’ when all the ‘Time’s Champion’ activities are far behind him). I’m not sure if this was a deliberate choice by Big Finish or merely a coincidence that all three writers chose to do it but I’ll be interested to see how often it occurs from now on in the main range of past Doctor adventures.
Review:
“Oh I believe in the honour of war, Doctor; only the war I envisage, the war I’ve been designing for centuries, will be an eternal one!”
And so ends the Excelis trilogy. Excelis Decays is a bit different. All three of these stories have been a bit different, in different ways, but this one is quite surprising.
It’s weird because 50 minutes into a 73 minute story and nothing’s actually happened; we’ve had a number of scenes, most of them quite lengthy, which consist of two characters in a room talking but nothing is actually taking place. Essentially, all this time is spent explaining the character’s back-stories and motivations and filling in the history of Excelis since the last adventure.
Boring as hell……under normal circumstances. But strangely, this is quite gripping. Even though half of the characters aren’t satisfying (which I’ll come to in a moment) and we have almost an hour of exposition, I was riveted by it. My attention didn’t wander at all.
As the title suggests, everything is coming to an end, collapsing and falling apart. As a result this is quite a bleak story, again, taking place several centuries after the previous instalment when technology has progressed and now Excelis is at war with the whole of the planet Arteris.
Where Craig Hinton has been clever is in his positioning of Grayvorn/Sutton’s scenes. This is a bleak story, quite downbeat with a feeling of impending doom about it, the characters are all quiet serious; Sallis has had a life of secrecy and regret, Jancis has had a life of betrayal and heartbreak, while the Doctor is nearing the end of his ‘life’ and is quite contemplative and doubtful of himself (especially at the very end). So to have nothing but long conversations with all of these characters would be a struggle, which is where Anthony Head comes into it…every now and then all this will be broken up by scenes with Lord Sutton and while these are really just conversations like all the others, Sutton is much more animated than everyone else. He’s not feeling sorry for himself or regretful or depressed about anything, he’s excited and nervous and angry and sarcastic because he’s almost reached the end of his millennia old plan, and so when you get the long conversations about the misery and tragedy of life in Excelis, you know that Sutton and his borderline insanity is there, in the background, working away towards something and that gives you a feeling of anticipation.
The music helps this atmosphere a lot, occasionally it’s not so good but most of the time it’s a low ominous score that adds to the feeling of something building up, that everything’s coming to a head – excuse the pun.
Sylvester McCoy gives a very nice performance as a Seventh Doctor in the later part of his life. Occasionally in the TV series, when he was required to be really angry or light-hearted, McCoy would go a little bit too far; here, he’s much more controlled and gives us a much tighter, more restrained performance, which gives it much more intensity. There’s also no sign of the scheming, manipulative Doctor that we got in Series 25 and 26 or in the New Adventures, and yet this does feel more like the character from the New Adventures (some of the good ones anyway), he’s more serious, contemplative and introspective than we’re used to seeing from McCoy. And that’s perfectly appropriate given the overall tone of the piece.
Ian Collier has appeared in TV Doctor Who twice before. Once as Stuart Hyde in 1972’s The Time Monster and again as Omega in 1983’s Arc of Infinity. He will go on to reprise the role of Omega for Big Finish in 2003’s Omega. Here he plays Commissar Sallis and he isn’t bad, but he’s not great either. Sallis is an old war hero who is the main critic of Lord Sutton and of the way the war is going. He’s not against war but he prefers an honourable war rather than the deliberately prolonged slaughter that Sutton’s meat puppets deliver. It also doesn’t help that Sutton outed him about his mistress (a commoner) and the son they had together, whom he had to disown in order to keep his position and title. His nephew, Major Brant, is also an irritation to him as he’s never fought a day in his life, yet is very high up in the military and clearly considers him out of date. On the whole, Ian Collier plays him well, he’s got a good voice for it, and his motivations definitely come across but there’s not enough emotion in his performance. Yes, he’s old, bitter, weary and has regrets about some of the decisions in his life but in the moments where he expresses those regrets or when he decides to take a stand, there isn’t really any passion in his voice. It’s like he’s saying the lines without any feeling to them.
Yee Jee Tso (he previously played Chang Lee in the TV Movie) doesn’t have that problem. His problem isn’t one of performance, it’s one of character; He hasn’t got one. His back story is limited to one sentence in the first five minutes. Tso does the best he can with what he’s been given but it’s a nothing part and both the characters – and the listeners – forget he’s even there until the end when it’s a case of ‘oh look, remember him? He’s still here”. It’s a shame because he’s not bad, he’s just got nothing to work with.
Jancis is a lot better than either of them. Penelope McDonald certainly puts the right amount of feeling into her performance, and makes the character quite believable. The heartbreak of being abandoned by her lover, the anger and resentment over the fate of her son and the eventual reconciliation with both. It’s a shame about Ian Collier because it makes the chemistry between her and Sallis disappointingly one-sided.
Mattias, or the reincarnation of Jancis and Sallis’s son, is one of those improbably convenient plot devices. Not only is he the reason for Jancis and Sallis to hate Sutton, but he’s also the consequence of their previous actions who just happens to be the first person the Doctor meets and just happens to be captured by Sutton and used for exactly the same purpose. A commoner and a member of the resistance, he seems totally ineffectual. He reminds me of those placard waving protesters you see interviewed on the news who isn’t a real protester but just chants the chant and thinks he’s far more of a threat than he actually he is. Fortunately he isn’t in it much.
Anthony Head is superb as Grayvorn/Maupassant/Sutton, his character has reached the end of his journey and is now allowed free reign to be villainous, evil, darkly humourous and teeter ever so precariously on the edge of total insanity before finally plunging over it. He steals the show, and you just can’t wait for him to finally meet the Doctor. He lifts every scene he’s in and makes the other characters seem better than they are just by being in the same scene as him. He sparks off of McCoy in the same brilliant way that he did with Colin Baker in Excelis Rising – I particularly like the way the Doctor deliberately calls him Grayvorn at every oppotunity – and it just makes you wish that his character was less of a buffoon in Excelis Dawns so that he could have been the perfect villain. There is an explanation of how the disembodied Grayvorn/Maupassaunt manages to acquire a body which looks exactly like the one that he lost in Excelis Rising but I won’t go into it here, rest-assured that, given the nature of the Relic, it’s perfectly believable.
And the ending is brilliant, especially coming after the discussion about souls and nobody ever really dying on Arteris.
All in all I think this is a fitting end to the Excelis trilogy.
Yes, two of the main characters are disappointing and yes, there are some unanswered questions from both this and Excelis Dawns, but I believe they get answered in the epilogue adventure The Plague Herds of Excelis (I’ve got all of the first 11 series of Bernice Summerfield adventures but haven’t got round to listening to any of them yet) but the Doctor’s part in this story is over and I think the trilogy as a whole has worked well. The quality of the second and third instalments have managed to make up for a lot – but not all – of the bloody awfulness of the first, but then I do think that it’s better to have the weak link at the beginning rather than in the middle or at the end, get it out of the way early on and then the only way is up. I would have liked to have seen the meat puppets used as more of a threat or an obstacle but this isn’t a story about slimy monsters and so it wouldn’t have gelled with the overall tone.
Verdict:
It works. It shouldn’t do, but it works. Definitely a case of the whole being greater than the sum of it’s parts. 3.5/5
