Hogan Reviews

It’s time for a one-off return to the Novel Adaptations range as for some reason the Paul Cornell “Missing Adventures” book Goth Opera has been turned into an audio drama, but not the Fourth Doctor novel that leads into it, so it’s all a bit odd. Still, I’m not going to turn down a three-hour Fifth Doctor story with a larger cast one way or another, so let’s take a look!

As the name (and cover!) might tell you the story is about Vampires, specifically the “descendants of the Great Vampire from ancient Gallifrey lore” kind (in fact Richard Armatage’s Rassilon tells us the story in a prologue to kick the audio drama off) The Doctor (Peter Davison), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and Tegan (Janet Fielding) are spending time in Manchester coincidentally while a Time Lady called Ruath (Natalie Gumede) has gathered some local Vampires to resurrect a direct descendant of the Great Vampire called Yarven (Micah Balfour), hoping to capture The Doctor to use his blood to revive him. She sends two Vampires called Jake (Nathan Jonathan) and Maddy (Lydia Wilson) to convert the alien but they come across Nyssa and given she didn’t smell of Earthling they bite her instead. While this is obviously an issue for our protagonists (especially as Nyssa can’t tell her companions about it due to mental influence) it straight up ruins Ruath’s plan, to the point where she ends up having to give up a regeneration to resurrect the Vampire with her own blood.

Yarven is grateful and soon gathers all the vampires in the local area to begin his great plan as the “Vampire Saviour”, a mythical one of their kind that will lead them to victory over their old foes. As this is happening Nyssa tries to create a cure but after nearly biting Tegan’s neck she flees to Yarven out of desperation and is told that if she cooperates he’ll cure her (um, yeah… not sure Nyssa should be stupid enough to fall for that, but I guess she’s not in the right frame of mind…) and The Doctor and Tegan run into Jake and Maddy and are saved when a classic American evangelic preacher called Victor Lang (John Schwab) and his followers arrive. This leads to an attack on one of Yarven’s outposts that Victor leads but that goes wrong when a gas is released that seemingly burns all the attackers alive save for Victor, who is kidnapped and taken to Yarven’s castle. The Doctor investigates a glob of flesh that was around the scene of battle and finds out that the gas is actually full of microscopic organisms that turn cells into Vampire ones, and the only reason the attackers burned is because their faith resisted the Vampirism.

Lots of fun photo editing going on here, though why The Doctor looks so uninterested I’m not sure…

While Victor befriends Nyssa and then is mysteriously set free The Doctor and Tegan notice the blob reacting oddly and take it outside to get destroyed by the sun, but Ruath puts her part of the plan in action and takes away the sun briefly, briefly enough that the blob comes alive and attaches itself to The Doctor’s face…

The story is fine, but I’ll admit it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. The Vampires wanting to plunge the Earth into eternal night is as cliché a Vampire plot at they come and Yarven and co. were far more generic vampires than anything sci-fi, which is fine (and in-keeping with the ones from the TV series) but it made for pretty dull group of villains. There were some highlights though, I just think it’s one of those things where it went on just a little too long.

The Continuity:

The original book cover, with a bit more of a gory look at Vampire Nyssa (and an equally uninterested looking Doctor, for some reason…)

The big two are the Fourth Doctor book “Blood Harvest”, which is a direct prequel to this story (though the audio drama version removes all connections, unsurprisingly) and the Fourth Doctor TV classic “State of Decay”, right down to The Doctor being the one who killed the Great Vampire being referenced several times.

Beyond that (and ignoring all the other times Vampires have popped up in Who, which to be fair is a lot!) there isn’t much else. Yarven is shown a potential future Earth that resembles the one mentioned in “The Curse of Fenric” and Ruath calls Earth “Ravolox” which is a reference to the Sixth Doctor Trial of a Time Lord story “The Mysterious Planet”, where the Time Lords refer to our planet by that name (purely so the planet The Doctor is on being Earth could be a surprise revelation, to be fair)

Overall Thoughts:

“Goth Opera” had a strong fanbase, so much so that it was on my mental list to get around to reading sooner rather than later, but if this no-doubt-abridged version is anything to go by it has dropped down the list quite a bit. There were some fun characters and moments but a lot of a plot and Vampires themselves felt very basic and not all that interesting. Given it’s a novel adaptation I assume a lot was cut out as well, which is weird, because really it feels like this Audio Drama would’ve been better being cut down! Far from bad (mostly thanks to great performances from the regulars) but I doubt I’ll be putting this three-hour story on again.

The sun returns, saving The Doctor from the glob but obviously worried at the tech being used he and Tegan head to Yarven’s castle. While this is going on Victor gathers as many followers as he can to a massive stadium because as it turns out he was infected with Vampirism after all and only set free to gather victims in a confined space to release the gas as Ruath turns her machine on again, trapping Earth in a tiny pocket of time with the sun forever set (on this side of the planet, anyway) The Doctor is confronted by Ruath, who tries to recruit him to her cause because she plans to use Yarven’s life to power her machine forever and so together they could go back in time and “fix” the Time Lords and their history. The Doctor pretends to go along with this idea, even allowing himself to be bit by the now part-Vampire Ruath, but in the end he sabotages the Castle (which was Ruath’s TARDIS) causing it to land on a planet with two suns so once the machine stopped working Yarven, who was outside at the time, is swiftly killed.

Thanks to the machine shutting off Victor is killed by the sunlight’s sudden arrival (also in the book he was sexually abusing his own daughter, because the 90s Virgin books had to be as adult and edgy as possible… thankfully that unnecessary plot point is absent in this version!) Ruath remained in the TARDIS and continued to cause trouble until Nyssa (who was now cured thanks to Yarven’s death) opened the doors of the TARDIS mid-flight, sucking Ruath into the Time Vortex itself. All’s well that ends well, I guess!