9. The Beast of Babylon.

1 episode. Approx. 67 minutes. Written by: Charlie Higson. Performed by: Charlie Higson.


THE PLOT

Ali is a typical teenage girl, living with her family on the planet Karkinos. They are all enjoying a relaxing picnic one day... And that's when the Doctor enters Ali's life, rushing up to the family and warning them to run. Ali's father dismisses him as the lunatic he appears... Until a Starman appears, a giant monster created by the collapse of a star. The Doctor uses a silver orb to banish the creature to another dimension where it can do no harm - but he loses the orb in the process, and it is Ali who picks up the strange object.

The Doctor visits Ali that night to recover the orb. There is another Starman, he explains, whose trajectory he has traced to ancient Babylon. He must use the orb to stop that starman before it destroys the whole of human history. Ali agrees to give him the orb, but on one condition: That he take her along.

The Doctor reluctantly agrees, but insists that Ali wait in the TARDIS until he is sure all is safe. When he materializes inside a temple, however, he is quickly mistaken for a foreign spy. And in Babylon, there is only one punishment for spies: Execution!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: This story is set at the very end of Rose, in the "gap" between the Doctor's dematerialization without Rose and his rematerialization, when she finally joins him. This solo Ninth Doctor knows he needs a companion to keep him grounded and connected, and worries that he may have come on too strong when trying to enlist Rose. When he rematerializes to offer his nonchalant follow-up ("Did I mention it travels in time?"), he is very nervous before doing so, practicing his approach multiple times before actually going through with it - Almost like a teen suitor practicing before asking a girl out on a date.

Ali: This story's one-shot companion. As the story opens, she appears to be an ordinary girl, albeit a very intelligent one. Higson drops hints from early on that there is more to her. First we see her hesitation about going into the water on her home planet, and her nervousness with the Doctor's apparent desire to dangle his feet in it. Later, we see that she is apparently armed with some kind of weapon that can stun enemies, and that the Doctor is nervous about her leaving the TARDIS while in ancient Babylon. A little after the midpoint, a major revelation is made, one that makes you want to go back and re-listen to the first half to catch all the little clues that paved the way for the twist.


THOUGHTS

Charlie Higson is a noted author of books aimed at juvenile and young adult readers, most of them with an action and/or science fiction bent. This background makes him a good match for Puffin's anniversary series of Doctor Who ebooks. He also has an acting background; and though his voice isn't even a little bit like Christopher Eccleston's, he proves surprisingly adept at reading his own story for this audio production.

I previously reviewed Spore, Puffin's 8th Doctor story. That was a very competent story, the audio version well read by Nicholas Pegg, but it suffered from a sense of the generic: A generic Doctor who could easily have been any incarnation, with a generic one-shot companion, in a generic narrative. It was fine... just not particularly memorable.

The Beast of Babylon is much better, in no small part because Higson makes sure that his Doctor is very specifically the Ninth. He works in aspects of Eccleston's screen performance, most particularly that grin his Doctor would put on - The one that never quite reached his eyes, made him seem just a little crazy, and that would drop away in the space of a second when no one was watching. Higson returns to the grin several times in his writing, starting with the lunatic quality, then mentioning its lopsidedness. Ali is inititally put off by it, but by the end of the story has come to love it.

Ali is herself a strong character, one I would love to see revisited. She is smart, and from a civilization sufficiently advanced that she actually looks on the TARDIS as being a bit quaint and primitive. Lest she be reduced to an annoying know-it-all, ala Adric, she also has a fierce temper that she is constantly trying to control. That trait makes her a potential danger as well as an ally, and is why the Doctor cannot continue traveling with her.

Higson also takes time to slow down and establish Babylon as a distinct setting. An early chapter moves away from the Doctor and Ali, focusing on a conversation between Hammurabi, the Babylonian King, and Gurguram, the captain of the Royal Guard. This does much to establish the values of this society. We learn about the Babylonians' readiness to go to war, and that they have destroyed their past enemies and made slaves of the survivors. Gurguram talks about executing all non-Babylonians in the city, making it clear that the rights of the citizens are limited by how pure their bloodlines are. By the time the Doctor arrives, a clear stranger in this strange land, we already have a sense of how poor a welcome he is likely to receive.

The story itself is stock stuff, with the Doctor saving a historical society from an attack by an interdimensional monster, but all that work on character and setting pays off. Because the Doctor and Ali feel distinct and well-rounded, because Babylon feels like a unique place of its own, and because of the very shrewd job Higson has done of springing Ali's full nature on us, the narrative grips even when the threat itself is very standard. The results are a pleasure to listen to.


Overall Rating: 8/10.


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