Episode CC6.02b: The Fall

There is more in the way of spoilers in this review; I would recommend listening before reading on, if you have the opportunity.

So what we have in the most advanced timeline for the early part of this episode is, quite literally, a fall. You can plummet a long way through the atmosphere of a gas giant and it could get quite boring to listen to; so most of the action is in the other timeline, but with frequent switches to short snippets of the drop. This makes sense, but unfortunately John Dorney's way of marking the changeover - the repeating word structure trick, which worked so well last time - starts to feel a bit artificial with overuse.

It's all building up, though, to a great reveal that could never be achieved on TV. There's an "eh? What have I missed here?" moment in the falling timeline, which is soon explained in the other; and it completely changes how we imagine the events of the first episode. I like this sort of thing, and it makes me look forward to listening to the story all over again with the new image in my mind. A Sixth Sense moment, if you will. It really makes me glad I decided to review this fresh, too, as this is one I will definitely react to differently on subsequent listenings.

Dorney's not finished with authorial tricks though. Steven Moffat's Who is famed for the amount of timeline-crossing which goes on, but here it happens literally. The strand which has been explaining what our heroes have done since the TARDIS arrived in the Jobis system reaches the beginning of the first episode - and then jumps ahead into the 'future'! We get to see some of the wrap-up while Iananbarbara are still in peril. It's a brave move, but he gets the timing right - any sooner and I would have felt cheated out of the excitement that would have lost its edge, any later and it wouldn't have been worth it.

As for the resolution of Iananbarbara's crisis, it was one of those moments that I really should have seen coming. There's a 'smoking gun' in the first episode that I picked up on at the time, thinking that it would become important later; but by the time we got there I'd forgotten about it again. Would I have done so if I wasn't treating this like a TV serial, if I had listened to both episodes in one sitting? I'll never know.

Hm, have I even mentioned Vicki yet? This is the only audio play with this TARDIS team (so far), and our youngest star is very much in the background. With a crowded TARDIS and a two-parter there isn't really enough space for everyone; on TV it was, unusually, Ian who had the least to do in both Inside the Spaceship and The Rescue, but here he and Barbara had to take centre stage. Ah, well; I've got a couple of Maureen O'Brien Companion Chronicles coming up early next year.

I've said a lot about the script and little about the production. Since that applies equally to both episodes you'll have to wait until the next time...

Rating:
7/10.

Next Time:
Companion Chronicle 6.02 as a whole.