February 2010 gave a double-CD release in the Companion Chronicles range entitled The Suffering. Written by Jacqualine Rayner this is a First Doctor story featuring Peter Purves as Steven Taylor and Maureen o’Brien as Vicki.
How well does this work over two discs and is it any good?
The Story
Synopsis first (from the Big Finish product page):
The TARDIS materializes in England in the year 1912, a time of great social change. The Suffragette movement is lobbying for votes for women, and the skull of the so-called ‘missing link’ has been discovered in Piltdown.
While Vicki falls victim to a strange influence, the Doctor and Steven investigate the fossilized remains. The Suffering has been unleashed. Can the travellers survive its rage?
The story starts with the two companions, Steven and Vicki, working out how to best record events for posterity as Vicki is worried that in the future The Suffering may return. The TARDIS is somewhat adrift in has arrived in Sussex. Exploring a quarry Vicki touches a bone fragment that connects first her then Steven to the voice of a powerful psychic alien entity - a female determined to wreak revenge on all males. She had been mistreated in the past and is now mad with the desire for revenge.
The Suffragette movement is very active and Vicki gets mixed up with them as she travels to London to meet the Doctor and Steven who are trying to remove all traces of the alien skull and in so-doing instigate the Piltdown hoax. Of course the Suffragettes are tailor made for this story which draws some heavy parallels between our world and that of the alien.
The Storytelling
I found a great BBC piece on this which refreshes this story somewhat and is worth reading.
There is lots of atmosphere at the story manages to cover two discs through the device of changing narrator part-way through. You get to the end and haven’t really focussed on the fact that this was all delivered by only two actors. Both Peter and Maureen have credible versions of the Doctor and Steven in particular has great fun in London travelling on buses with a skeleton he has just bought.
The Piltdown man story gets overshadowed by the Suffragette theme. At times the treatment felt heavy-handed and two discs focussing on the brutality of the treatment of women did need the light relief of aliens and archaeological hoaxes to bring it into the fold as a Doctor Who story.
The plot device of two narrators swapping over each disc was fun though probably not repeatable. Jacqueline Raynor has another Companion Chronicle out later in 2014 entitled Starborn - her work is always of interest and both The Suffering and the earlier Transit of Venus set a high standard for period feel.
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