House of Cards (Big Finish)Bookmark and Share

Wednesday, 3 April 2013 - Reviewed by Andrew Batty

House of Cards
Big Finish Productions
Written by Steve Lyons
Directed by: Lisa Bowerman
Released February 2013
Polly finds herself in a literal race against time after the TARDIS brings her, Jamie, the Doctor and Ben to a futuristic casino with a strict ‘no time travellers’ policy.

In the CD extras which accompany House of Cards, writer Steve Lyons and producer David Richardson discuss how they were “channelling” Season Four of Doctor Who in this release. While this may have been their intention, the finished product is reminiscent of a more recent sub-genre of Doctor Who. With its simple storyline, cartoonish villains and broadly drawn supporting characters the adventure feels closest in style to the BBC books/audios produced for younger audiences since 2005 (notably The Stone Rose with which it shares a similar structure). It’s an odd approach for a Companion Chronicle, given that they are geared to a more sophisticated, adult fan audience.

Once you accept that House of Cards is a more straightforward adventure than a typical Companion Chronicle there is much to enjoy here. Anneke Wills gives a typically spirited performance as Polly, with able support from Frazer Hines as the story’s secondary voice. A highlight comes in the first episode when Polly is confronted by Fortune, the mastermind behind the casino. Here Lyons capitalises on Polly’s strong sense of morality, calling to mind similar scenes with the Cybermen in The Tenth Planet.

While the first half of the play is a fairly standard set up, manoeuvring the regulars into varying degrees of peril, things get more complicated as we move into episode two. Here, Polly travels in time back to an earlier point in the narrative, and Lyons has a few clever tricks up his sleeve to stop things getting predictable. The identity of the lady in the china mask, who appears at key points in episode one, is central to this. Lyons deliberately wrong-foots the listener a number of times, making what first appears an obvious ruse a lot more fun than you’d expect. It’s in episode two that Jamie’s role as secondary narrator clicks into place. His present is Polly’s past, allowing us to see the impact her journey in time has had.

You would think that a casino would be a perfect setting for the mischievous Second Doctor but he takes a surprisingly small role in House of Cards. When he resurfaces towards the end of the story he is given a wonderfully ‘Doctorish’ moment (which I won’t spoil here, but concerns the game he picks to play to decide his fate) and it’s a shame there couldn’t have been more of these throughout the play. With Polly’s story neatly wrapped up, it falls to the Doctor to defeat Fortune. However, after being built up as a sinister, formidable foe her swift dispatch is something of a disappointment.

Overall House of Cards is one of the weaker instalments of the Companion Chronicles, but if you’re a fan of Polly and Jamie there are plenty of moments to enjoy. The disc’s extras confirm that Lyon’s will be penning a further adventure for this TARDIS team in the near future. This is welcome news as he captures them all very well, but it would be nice to see him return to the more nuanced, complex storytelling he is widely praised for (stories like Resistance, Colditz and The Crooked World).It would also be good to see more experimentation with the ‘second voice’ in Polly’s Companion Chronicles, as this is the third release in a row that has seen her paired with Frazer Hines as Jamie. One of the most successful aspects of the range as been the pairing of companion actors with co-performers/characters who bring out new and interesting sides of them, and it would be good to see Wills benefit from this, especially as it worked very well in her first Companion Chronicle (the previously mentioned Resistance).






FILTER: - Big Finish - Audio - Companion - 1781780633