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beccaelizabeth ([personal profile] beccaelizabeth) wrote2025-07-20 06:25 pm
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Relistened some 7th Doctor Big Finish today.
7 & Ace in Assassination Game I realised I had put on my relist because it mentions The Light, who also turn up in a Torchwood audio and arguably are referenced in a Torchwood book. Except in Torchwood they are not much like this. So probably it's more like when you get two secret societies called Watchers, because no one is trademarking their secret society. Someone wants to claim to be a major concept like Light, that's up to them.
In this story the Light are a conspiracy that works by running a very expensive private hospital and then when rich powerful people turn up there they alter their babies to secretly be The Light. Which is a kind of creepy conspiracy theory that is actually very uncomfortable in difficult to articulate ways, but also in the straightforward way that
there is an evil race, born evil, doing evil, allied because they are born that way.
The bit where they are cuckoos in rich families is a cunning plan if and only if they will grow up thinking Light thoughts.
I do not think it's a good idea for a story to say anything works that way.
It did the sci fi thing where they're all connected to a telepathic network so sure, it gave story reasons, but.
Nobody is born evil.
Nobody is born part of a secret conspiracy.
It does not work that way.

But there are people who certainly seem to think it do, and I do not want to align with them
even for the length of a story.

Other than that it was a lot of politics and mind control and running around. Didn't hate it. Didn't like its ideas though.

In Torchwood it's simpler, the Light introduces itself as Hell. Extradimensional conspiracy to get in. Still creepy infiltration and mind control stuff but without the mind controlled babies.


Actually all three of today's listens involved mind control stuff, which always seems to me a lazy shortcut. Persuade us someone could be persuaded or go home. But they did okay on that in the Dalek one.

7 and Mel in
We Are the Daleks
and
The Warehouse.

We Are The Daleks was released in 2015 and set in the 80s. It's about Daleks inviting Britain to join a galactic trade block and get full employment ie become Dalek slaves. Dalek deception isn't new but I wasn't quite sold on the details on this one. I did like the bit where they were using kids playing games to actually do wars with real Dalek drones, though I've liked it more in other stories. The mind control bits seemed like an excuse to have people switch sides a bunch really fast. But the story relies on every human changing sides the first time after they see a ship in what they think is a computer game and it surrenders. I just feel like that's not a fully likely turn there.

Also the Dalek mind control kept making people think more like Daleks, which explained police brutality apparently.

When the sci fi elements defamiliarise a behaviour so instead of just kind of sinking into the background you are now thinking about it, that's grand. When they pull up a metaphor and make you take a good look at an idea that's nifty. But when they plug in an excuse, like Mind Control Made Them Do It, then it's on thin ice at the very best.

I liked the bits in this story where a regular human MP just signed up with the Daleks because advantage and then kept saying the most unhinged things you've ever seen in a headline to justify their behaviour and her deal. That's shining a light on a comparison.

I did not like when the make you think like a dalek machine made everyone change sides. Boring.

The computer game where you get to train how to be an efficient Dalek and end up saying Exterminate a lot just from the practice was a lot better of a show don't tell of how Daleks could lead humans down the Dalek path.

But I did like the ending where the Be More Dalek machine actually made Daleks start trying to kill each other because they had even more hate than usual.


So there were good bits and not so good bits. Reacting to the Daleks as if they're just another trading block and deciding to oppose them on the same grounds they decided to oppose the EU is funny and an interesting angle. But mind control takes the pressure off the problem from the story title. It makes it a dumb sci fi problem solved by moving the transmitter, instead of a lot of moral choices.
But that does make it solvable in the space of one adventure, so, can see what they were going for there.



The Warehouse was one of those that takes ordinary words like Delivery and respins the story around them not meaning quite the same thing there as here. Deliverance and religion get attached to a big warehouse for fulfilling online orders. I was quite in the mood for that, like a story built of puns.
There was lots of running around the warehouse being chased by rat vermin and nearly getting snap traps or fumigated. Also meeting oppressed warehouuse worker families, one family cloned repeatedly, and programmes to be really into stock checks. Did an interesting thing where both veneration and being treated as lowest bit of automation were dehumanising. But if you are going to argue that clones are people too (as they should) then the bit where they always follow orders and are as it turned out mind controlled is pulling the story in tbe other direction. People need reasonable reasons, and There Was A Fungus is only a reasonable sci fi inciting incident. I did like how the solution was that the 'vermin' were people too and the fungus could think and a diplomatic solution was attempted, though not achieved because more drama that way, but I'm not quite sold on the motivation of the fungus.
... for such sentences I keep watch listening Doctor Who.
The use of the cloning idea to keep the number of necessary voice actors down while conveying the scale of the warehouse was clever.
And the characters were vivid.

After relistening this one I went back to my existing listing in my catalog and gave it an extra star. It's still not maximum stars but I think I must have been in a bad mood listening the first time. Liked it.



Liked today pretty well.
Sunday tasks achieved. Lots of nice foods to choose between. Plenty of quiet time to listen.
Pretty good day.

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