Flywheel Revolution

"Who would believe it in that very moment the only witness had fled..."

Writer: Dale Smith

Format: Audio

Released: January 2015

Series: Short Trips 5.01

Featuring: First Doctor

Synopsis 

On a planet in the far future, Frankie and his fellow robots have been consigned to the Scrapheap, doomed to explore no further than the limits of the artificial Wall. Life goes on, day after day - until a monster appears in their midst. It lives alone in a small hut on the edge of Scrapyard, and scours at night for the remains of dead robots. Frankie sets out to confront the monster in its lair. It's name? The Doctor!

Verdict 

Flywheel Revolution was a very good story to open the fifth series of Short Trips audios from Big Finish. I do like the Short Trips range and I'm really glad they've been revived in a similar way the Companion Chronicles have. I found this story most intriguing and after a shaky start in the first 8 minutes or so, it grew into quite the little gem. I don't recall giving too many terrible marks to Short Trips stories but usually some of my criticism comes at the length of the story. Now believe me, I do understand the irony and I am fully aware of what the range title is and what that means, but I've also given big criticism at Doctor Who Annual short stories based on the length when I know full well how long they're going to be and the difficulty that comes with it in providing a good story. Here however I thought the length of the story wasn't too short at all! At 32 minutes it was a more than sufficient length and not too dissimilar to some Main Range extras such as Last of the Titans and Urgent Calls. It's really not that far off the Torchwood audio The House of the Dead that I recently blogged. That was only 11 minutes longer than this. Half an hour is a good length and despite Steven not appearing in the story, I thought Peter Purves read the story very well. In audios like this, I think it's important to have a good narrator and that's what we had here. It was never really in doubt with the great actor that is Peter Purves! After recently reading the two part interview with him in the latest issues of Doctor Who Magazine, it was nice to see how he prided himself on his Big Finish work. I found it quite funny how he didn't think his work on Mother Russia was much good but I can't recall that being a bad performance in the slightest! It's nice to see an actor be so determined to do well in his roles and I liked how he acknowledged how it wasn't too difficult to bring Steven back to life after such a lengthy absence. I'm not sure if the planet basically being a junkyard, or at least the location on there that this story was set, was a notion to An Unearthly Child or not but I do like to think so. Frankie was a great character and I loved the references to the Doctor being a monster prior to him first speaking. I enjoyed the references to him having fabric skin and shiny feet which were obviously clever references to his clothing. The terminology in this was superb I thought and I really liked some of the dialogue. They'd dawned the nane of 'the monster' for the Doctor because of the way he used components on this planet he was trapped. To him, it was mere rubble and with Frankie acknowledging the fact that they were in a junkyard I thought he'd have accepted that. Instead, he was horrified and disgusted at the Doctor for doing what he was with the rubble components. He was merely plotting his escape whilst to Frankie, he was desecrating the corpses of the dead and connecting them unnaturally. It really was an intriguing storyline but one I really liked. I wasn't too struck on the impression of the First Doctor. In fact, I thought it was very poor considering what Peter Purves has done in the past when playing the First Doctor in the Companion Chronicles. I'd have liked the robotic society explored a bit more with some emphasis on the trapping but despite not knowing all the details, I liked how the Doctor wanted to put a stop to it and set Frankie and co free. And of course he succeeded in doing so. I might also have liked to know how the Doctor got separated from Susan, Ian and Barbara but it wasn't exactly essential. Overall, a very good little audio to kick off this brand new series of Short Trip audio adventures! 

Rating: 8/10