Kicking off a Halloween-themed boxset of stories (in January, if you needed a tip off as to how behind on Big Finish audio reviews I am…) is “Sea Smoke”, my first full experience of the recast First Doctor / Dodo combination, and I have to say… it didn’t do much to convince me to jump in. I mean, at the best of times I’m not all that interested in Hartnell era audios as I’m not all that interested in a fair few of the Hartnell era TV stories, but having some of the poorer recasts at the centre doesn’t help much. Anyway, let’s take a look at “Sea Smoke” on its own merits…
The Doctor (Stephen Noonan) and Dodo (Lauren Cornelius) arrive on the Scottish Isle of Ulfsay sometime in the 1800s, where Pagen rituals and kelp burning were all the rage. The two get mistaken for a couple of Swedish sea traders and run with it, with Dodo befriending local “smart girl in the wrong time period” Flora (Kiran Sonia Sawar) while The Doctor meets the Laird of the land William (Michael Abubakar), where the topic of both conversations turns to the combination of kelp burning (which is creating the titular “sea smoke”) and a worrying cult that has been spreading across the island led by Reverend Robert Drummond (Jeff Rawle) who the Laird reveals was an old friend who hasn’t been acting himself recently. The slow pace continues for some time until the introduction of some people mutating into creatures made from kelp and the good Reverend clearly being the one responsible…
It’s got a few fun moments of Wickerman-style Pagen horror tropes but really it’s just a pretty dull story that ends up more cliché Doctor Who sci-fi story than the Halloween horror the boxset promised. Noonan’s Doctor isn’t very Hartnell-y but does the job well enough for the story, but Lauren Cornelius’s Dodo doesn’t mentally bring to mind the original character, possibly because she was around for so little a time anyway…
The Continuity:
A simple but effective cover… doesn’t make for great review thumbnails though…
Not much to say here. There’s an off-hand mention of First Doctor TV story “The Gunfighters” and people being possessed by evil sea weed off the coast of the UK is the set up of Second Doctor classic “Fury From the Deep”.
Overall Thoughts:
“Sea Smoke” gets the Halloween set off to a pretty standard and quite dull start. The setting is good but the actual story is more talky than scary, and it ends up recycling a few classic Who sci-fi clichés instead of leaning on any horror aspect. Not bad, but not all that great either…
As the story progresses we find out that a crashed spaceship in the nearby sea contained a creature that managed to narrowly avoid death by attaching itself to the local kelp and through that begin to take over the minds, and eventually the bodies, of the locals, starting with the Reverend. Eventually The Doctor, Dodo, Flora and Laird William are trapped in a cabin surrounded by the kelp zombies (?) but thanks to a bit of quick thinking from The Doctor and the sacrifice of William the creature responsible is soon outwitted and destroyed, leaving Flora the only one left alive of her village. She decides not to go travelling with The Doctor and Dodo though, instead … I don’t know, heading back to the mainland I guess? May have stopped caring by the end…
Hogan Reviews 