Review by Cavan Gilbey
The Eric Roberts incarnation of the Master has entered his renaissance period; a new series of solo stories, reunions with the Eighth Doctor and other Masters, and even a face off against River Song. Seeing this particular portrayal of the Master become so quickly beloved and reappraised is a real joy for me as I’ve always loved the deep levels of camp, pomp and Vincent Price energy that Roberts brought to the role back in 1996. A couple of years ago he got a chance to shine in his own solo set where he was pitted against Big Finish original creation Vienna Salvatori as well as a brief face-off with the Daleks, and that set is genuinely a stoke of genuine in reinventing just how the Master can be characterised and how he works as a villain. So I was eager to listen to Nemesis Express; another three hours with a personal favourite Master.
That eagerness slowly faded into disappointment…..This was for many reasons, chiefly that we finally have given The ‘Bruce’ Master a generic template Master story. It was bound to happen eventually, as once you’ve done so many stories with a character the tropes will naturally congeal together to form a standardised story structure; happened with the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels so the Master was due to follow suit. But this is an incarnation of the Master who you can probably do something far more experimental with; take his first audio appearance The Lifeboat and The Deathboat from Eddie Robson. This is a story where the Master uses interesting psychological tactics and is much more reliant on a salesman like sliminess, it allows him to come across as far more intelligent and patient than any other Master. His characterisation in the previous set shows just how willing this Master is to play the long game and use that persuasiveness to integrated himself into integral parts of Earth society.
Nemesis Express however, which bearing in mind does feature an absolutely stellar performance from Roberts, feels like any Master could have worked here because it isn’t necessarily tailored to this specific incarnation. He doesn’t really appear across the three hour run time all that much, keeping very much in the background for the first two hours and only really having a felt presence in Passion the story’s finale episode.
The story is a single three hour story with each episode covered by a different writer, Robert Whitelock, Lizbeth Myles and Robert Valentine respectively, but this brings its own set of problems with it. Firstly the individual episodes tend to tread much of the same ground in terms of narrative, the worst offenders being Nemesis Express (the eponymous first episode) and its follow up Capture the Chronovore!. Both episodes are mostly mindless, filled with sequences of Vienna and her companion darting around exploring a hedonistic society while the Master does a vague and poorly defined evil thing somewhere in the background. Neither episode feels particularly tailored to the Master as a character, and it is at great detriment to the boxset as a whole as it leaves it feeling like there isn’t much of a driving force. I’m not saying this boxset structure can’t work in theory in fact Torchwood Outbreak from 2016 is one of the best entries in Big Finish’s Torchwood range and has the same structure.
The first episode, penned by Whitelock, actually has some interesting world building to begin with. It establishes the Kairos as something akin to Satellite Five from The Long Game, a place where lawlessness always seems about a minute away from bursting to life and the upper-classes secure themselves away at the front of the cruiser while allowing the lower class segments to descend into anarchy. The Master’s stuck in the Vortex and trying to find a new body, his psychic presence bending the whims of the Kairos itself. I really liked the pairing of Vienna and warrior monk Urmah, there’s a great juxtaposition to how they work and it makes for a couple of nice moments of comedy. But the issues is that all of this just stops at the surface level, this would be relatively forgiven if the characters then got more time to be fleshed out but that isn’t the case really. Passion doesn’t make much of an impression, Urmah is one note despite good chemistry with Vienna and even the Master and Vienna feel like stereotyped versions of themselves.
Capture the Chronovore! by Myles is pretty much more of the same unfortunately. I think Myles was trying to build on the complexity of the high classes aboard the Kairos and making some social commentary regarding hunting culture but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done better elsewhere is Big Finish’s library. I couldn’t actually tell you whether a Chronovore makes an appearance in the story, it probably does but the monster is far too reliant on its superb visual design to really make an impact on audio. The idea of people hunting more conceptually abstract creatures, such as those who dwell in the Vortex, is a brilliant idea but maybe one that needs a more well defined stand-alone episode to be particularly fleshed out.
Finally we have Passion by Valentine to wrap up the narrative arc of the set. And I can only describe this story as ‘feeling cheap’. The Master suddenly wants to destroy the Earth, so the stakes get artificially raised to make us care about what thin narrative thread has been woven. The Master isn’t really defeated because he has other boxsets and stories to appear in so we’ve just got slap him on the wrists and plop him back in the Vortex again. It’s traditional in the weakest possible ways.
The silver lining in all this are the performances from Roberts and Masterson as The Master and Vienna respectively. These are actors who have refined these characters down to a tee and they effortlessly play off each other so well. Roberts always brings this gleeful sarcasm to his dialogue with Vienna, which clashes nicely with Masterson’s heroism and stubbornness. They’re a great pair and much of the dynamic from the first set is thankfully carried over, keeping the stories at least ticking along nicely when the pair get a chance to bounce off each other. The rest of the cast are given the short straw somewhat as they have to try and give good performances despite very lacklustre scripts. Teri Ann Bobb-Baxter gets the worst of this as she is never given much of a chance to allow Passion to make an impression on the listener, what I think was an attempt to play the curious outsider comes across as far too literal and deadpan. The script tends to make Passion just a vessel for questions to be asked about the current situation and surrounding, and when you essentially become a walking equivalent of a post-it-note with ‘exposition aid’ written on it I can only imagine your performance becomes hampered.
At the end of the day this set is a huge disappoint for me. With nothing new or particularly interesting brough to the table its hard to actually find the effort for vitriol or impassioned emotion. Think of the most basic Master story possible and have it be three hours long; that imaginary story is probably more interesting than Nemesis Express. Hopefully they can get back on the rails with a third boxset with a more unified vision.
4/10
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