Big Finish: Zoe Trilogy

[john_amend_all]

When Big Finish were having their sale of Zoe-centric Companion Chronicles (Echoes of Grey, The Memory Cheats and The Uncertainty Principle) a few weeks ago, I bought them, and I've been listening to them driving to and from work.

After listening to Fear of the Daleks and the soundtracks of The Wheel in Space and The Dominators, I recall saying that I'd happily listen to a CD of Wendy Padbury reading the telephone directory. These three Companion Chronicles have done nothing to modify that opinion.

Compared to the earlier CCs I'd listened to, these CCs make much better use of the medium. There's none of the awkwardness where the narrator tries to describe something that really needs to be visualised on TV, for instance. Also, I can't be sure without relistening to Fear of the Daleks, but it seems to me that Wendy Padbury's "Doctor" and "Jamie" voices have improved — though in one of the CD extras she says she's still not satisfied with them.

It's fairly obvious that the authors of these CDs are all fully signed up to the make-Zoe-miserable agenda. Echoes of Grey helpfully opens with the revelation that having her memory wiped ruined the next forty years of her life, leaving her as a broken shell of a woman with no friends or family. The Memory Cheats follows that up by doing a number on her childhood, too. There isn't much left to trample on by the time The Uncertainty Principle rolls around, but it makes a spirited attempt nevertheless.

For the second and third stories, Big Finish conceived the bright idea of having Wendy Padbury's real-life daughter, Charlie Hayes, play the interrogator, Jen. (What with Zoe, Ali and Jen, it seems that all women in the framing stories are required to have three-letter names.) There is, of course, one pitfall here: the two have quite similar voices, and now and again it can be difficult to work out who delivered a given line. But it's very rewarding in terms of subtext, particularly in The Memory Cheats, which is centred on parent/child relationships.

Below this point, spoilers for each CC.

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The arc kicks off with a young woman by the name of Ali approaching Zoe (by now in her late fifties), claiming that a few years ago she met the teenage version travelling with the Doctor. Zoe is skeptical at first, but is persuaded to cooperate, and together the two reconstruct what happened when the TARDIS materialised at the Whitaker Institute in Australia.

I think I must have had some previous notion of the main twist in the framing story, perhaps from reading reviews; certainly, as the story went on, it became increasingly obvious that the bits Ali was narrating consisted almost entirely of variants on "Bob Ali was there too." (She wasn't).

As the title suggests, and as Zoe muses in the epilogue, the story attempts to set up an ethical dilemma. The technology being developed at the Institute undoubtedly had the potential to be a great medical advance, but was it at too high a cost in suffering? And what other, less savoury applications, might it have had? The medical benefits were potential and theoretical; the only immediate applications were a rather slow and inefficient way to kill people. The dilemma is slightly undercut by (a) the Doctor's instant decision that this technology is something Man Was Not Meant To Know, and (b) what the following two stories reveal about the people who want it. Zoe's suspicions of them are, it seems, entirely justified.

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The Company who were investigating Zoe in the previous story have now proceeded to more drastic measures: framing her on charges that carry the death penalty, unless she can prove that she travelled in time. Zoe, firm in her conviction that she never travelled with the Doctor, believes that they're doing this to make out that she's insane. Time travel, after all, is impossible.

Being put on trial for her life seems to have cured Zoe of the apathy she was suffering from at the beginning of Echoes of Grey; in the framing story, her mind's firing on all thrusters. Not only does she deploy her eidetic memory to devastating effect, she displays hitherto-unseen skills of manipulation, revealing at the end that she played her interrogator like a fiddle.

It's not easy to discuss the plot of the story-within-a-story, because for a lot of it, particularly in the second half, we only have Zoe's word to go on — and she's relating it with a very particular purpose in mind. At some points, she almost seems to be trolling her interrogator and/or us the listeners. If her account was 100% accurate, I'd expect her to have been thrown out of the TARDIS for unacceptable behaviour like Adam Mitchell.

But then, Zoe isn't the only unreliable source of evidence here. At the beginning, we're told her colleagues think of her as cold and ruthless, and she plays up the image all the way through — then, at the end, advances the theory that her colleagues, like her, were telling the investigators only what they wanted to hear. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if her persistent claim to have no friends or family turned out to be false, too: Given she's in the clutches of a ruthless organisation, she'd want to keep any allies secret from it at all costs.

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As the CD notes make clear, The Uncertainty Principle is, to an extent, filler until John Dorney gets round to writing the finale of the arc. The writers seem to have decided that there's a limit to how unreliable they can let the narrator be; Zoe's narration is far more straightforward, with no asides pointing out the less believable bits. There's one moment when she makes a slip and says 'Jamie' when from context she means 'Archie', but since no-one picks up on it that's probably a flubbed line rather than a Clue.

This time round, Jen is more sympathetic to Zoe's cause; the Company, it seems, has not been kind to her either. She's also wise to the tricks Zoe used last time, presumably to settle any doubt in her employers' minds (and ours) that this adventure actually did happen as it was related.

The story-within-a-story opens with Zoe crying her eyes out at a funeral, just in case the listener was getting any ideas about this adventure bucking the trend and being in any way cheerful. (To be fair, she puts the tears down to hayfever, since she never knew the deceased). With the aid of Archie, a Cute Clumsy Boy who'd been the dead woman's childhood friend, they set out to investigate what happened to her.

The problem at hand turns out to be one of those unfortunate misunderstandings, where the aliens' attempts to communicate turn out to be lethal to those not prepared for them, and painful even for those who are. There are some nice moments, such as the electric fields continually making the Doctor's hair stand on end, and Zoe's disdain for sensible shoes. The misery quota is kept up by Zoe having feelings for Archie, which she hopes he might reciprocate. (Or perhaps she just reminds him of his dead friend, which could have led to all sorts of trouble down the line). In the end, she doesn't get the boy, but consoles herself that at least he married his true love. Jen promptly tells her that they divorced after six years.

I found the story had a pretty sharp sting in its tail. It's revealed about halfway through that the machine Jen is using to explore Zoe's memory is normally used to treat dementia. The parallel is drawn extremely sharply at the end, when Jen shuts the machine down, and we get to hear the effects on Zoe as her conditioning reasserts itself.

By the end of the trilogy, Zoe seems to have escaped execution, but she's still in a pretty tight Morton's Fork. As long as the Company think the information in her head is of value to them, they won't let her go; but if they conclude there's nothing more to learn, they have excellent reasons to execute her. Either way, they aren't going to let her go. I can think of a number of ways this could be resolved, but I wouldn't bet on a happy ending.