Flip-Flop

All my life, I have fought against people who believed the ends justify the means.

The Seventh Doctor

Synopsis

Christmas Eve in the year 3060, and the planet Puxatornee is home to a prosperous human colony.

A space craft has arrived in orbit carrying the Slithergees, a race of obsequious alien slugs. Their home world has been destroyed and they are humbly requesting permission to settle on the first moon.

And if they don’t get permission, then they are humbly threatening to declare all-out war.

The future hangs in the balance. The decision rests with Bailey, the colony’ s president – but she has other things on her mind.

Christmas Eve in the year 3090, and the planet Puxatornee has changed beyond all recognition.

The Doctor and Mel arrive, on a completely unrelated mission to defeat a race of terrible monsters, and soon discover that something rather confusing has been happening to history.

Review

Big Finish certainly experimented with the licence in the early days of the monthly range as they found their feet. Flip-Flop sees a story broken into two halves, black and white, with alternative versions of the Doctor and Mel in each half.

How could things be worse?

Lieutenant Reed

I have written before about how much I enjoy Doctor Who featuring time travel in the course of an episode, and this story does on several occasions. As Stewart and Reed travel back in time to try and change their present, they end up causing unintentionally bad situations. Flip-Flop is quite a bleak story, with all of the guest cast being destined to die regardless of the reality they chose: either enslaved to the blind, sluglike Slithergee, or living on a planet ravaged by war. Morris is definitely cautionary of time travel being a solution to problems. Due to the nature of the story, Morris is relatively constrained as to what he can do – he has to get the Doctor and Mel to leave Puxatornee at the same time, 11:55pm on Christmas Eve, to ensure that they alone escape this time loop, for instance. As a result, despite it’s experimental nature, I found that listening to largely the same events play out twice did take something away from the story. The guest cast are solid here, and believably sell the characters as being desperate to get out of the hellscape their history has doomed them too. It is not too much of a stretch to believe that these people, given the chance for one-way time travel to fix their past would take it, as they are in the White Disc.

The Slithergee, the main foe in this story, pose a bit of a problem. They are masquerading in this story as helpless refugees, who ultimately invade a moon of, and ultimately, the planet of Puxatornee. I’m not sure how intentional this is, but the story does seem to depict them from a right wing perspective. The approach seems to echo a lot of right wing moral panic about the threats posed by refugees, like not being able to say Christmas, or claiming hate crimes committed by the humans. The story doesn’t make this into a parody, but endorses it by having the Slithergees invade first Puxatornee’s moon and then nine-tenths of the planet’s surface. At best it is unintentional, or at worst it is malicious.

What you’re asking me to do is wrong. It’s my duty to protect time, not to fiddle about with it like a broken spin dryer.

The Seventh Doctor

This is a really strong outing for Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. Whilst it may seem out of keeping for his television travels with Mel, this is a darker and much more serious version of this Doctor. Perhaps that’s because of the stakes involved and the damage of time, but he is much more concerned with trying to stop the Puxatornees from meddling with their past. McCoy does a really good job in this impassioned speech, and it may be the strongest performance from him in the Main Range so far. That’s probably due to his stories lurching around in tone and not really settling down; from the side-steps into the Virgin New Adventures novels, to more outright comedic affairs like Bang-Bang-a-Boom!, it’s hard to get a grip on Big Finish’s Seventh Doctor in these early days, unlike, say Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor. Mel continues to impress as Bonnie Langford shows what she can do with good writing and solid direction. The more I hear of Mel in Big Finish, the more I understand why the show has brought her back.

Verdict: Flip-Flop is an example of Big Finish at their most experiment and bold. It is certainly a good story, but does get bogged down in the repetitive nature of the story beats and a troubling depiction of the Slithergee. 6/10

Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Bonnie Langford (Melanie Bush), Richard Gibson (Mitchell), Pamela Miles (Bailey), Francis Magee (Stuart), Audrey Schoelhammer (Reed), Trevor Littledale (Potter), Trevor Martin (Professor Capra), Daniel Hogarth (Slithergee/Clarence) & David Darlington (Security Guard).

Writer: Jonathan Morris

Director: Gary Russell

Music & Sound Design: David Darlington

Monthly Range Release Number: 46

Original Release Date: 1 August 2003

Behind the Scenes

• This story was originally presented on white and black discs, with the story able to be listened to in any order
• The planet Puxatornee was named as a reference to Groundhog Day, whilst Professor Capra was named in reference to the director of It’s A Wonderful Life.

Cast Notes

• Richard Gibson would go on to appear in Warlock’s Cross, a Seventh Doctor audio drama.
• Trevor Littledale has appeared in a number of Big Finish productions, including The Living Darkness, Summer (part of Circular Time) and The Hollows of Time.
• Trevor Martin played Adelphi in The War Games and an alternate version of the Fourth Doctor in the stageplay Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday, reprising the role in the Big Finish adaptation.
• Daniel Hogarth appeared in numerous Big Finish plays, including The Holy Terror, The Creed of the Kromon and Three’s A Crowd.

Best Quote

No sooner had we stepped out of the TARDIS, they were pointing guns at us.

Yes, at least that’s normal.

Mel Bush and the Seventh Doctor

Previous Seventh Doctor review: Bang-Bang-A-Boom!

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