Review: Doctor Who: Leviathan
- cepmurphywrites
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
The Colin Baker era of Doctor Who, filled as it was with various trials and tribulations, left behind a plethora of unmade serials. Some were scripted for the originally planned season 23 before the series went on hiatus, only to be replaced by Trial of a Time Lord. Others were serials grandfathered into the era (such as The Space Whale aka The Song of Megaptera) or commissioned but never produced (such as The First Sontarans from Andrew Smith). Among the latter category lies Leviathan, a perspective serial that was all but unknown until it received an audio adaptation release in 2010.
Leviathan came from the pen of Brian Finch, a stalwart writer of British TV whose career stretched across 40 years. A career which took in everything from The Wednesday Play to episodes of The Tomorrow People, All Creatures Great & Small, and more than 150 episodes of Coronation Street. As his son Paul would reminiscence on the eventual CD extras, Finch had a special place in his heart for Doctor Who and when All Creatures former Production Unit Manager John Nathan-Turner became Doctor Who’s producer, Finch began working on ideas.
He eventually settled on the storyline what would become Leviathan (initially submitted under the misspelling Livanthian), which was eventually commissioned as scripts for Colin Baker’s first season on the 14th of August 1983. The scripts were delivered in November and progressed far enough under the eye of script editor Eric Saward and Nathan-Turner that rehearsal scripts were prepared. Yet, for reasons lost to time (but which would subsequently appear to be budgetary), Leviathan was not produced for that season. Later in 1985, as work got underway for what would become Trial of a Time Lord, Finch was paid for his work as the proposed serial was abandoned. He would continue to write for British television in the 1990s and early 2000s, working on series such as Hetty Wainthropp Investigates and Heartbeat before passing away in 2007, aged 70. By which time, Leviathan was little more than a footnote with almost nothing known about it to the wider Doctor Who fandom.
Then in 2008, Big Finish Productions began a new range of releases known as Doctor Who – The Lost Stories. With Colin Baker’s era featuring at least a season’s worth of unproduced scripts, it was a natural enough place for Big Finish to start. It was a piece announcing the range in Doctor Who Magazine that caught the eye of Brian’s son Paul, himself a writer and contributor to Big Finish’s Short Trips range of anthologized Doctor Who short fiction. Realizing what Big Finish was doing and being in possession of his late father’s unfilmed script, Paul worked through a series of connections before getting an email from initial Lost Stories range producer David Richardson. Though the initial season had already been planned and budgeted, Richard and Big Finish worked to accommodate the new script as part of the range, with the younger Finch adapting his father’s 1980s script for audio in a matter of months. Recorded by Big Finish with a full cast in late April 2009, Leviathan made its way to listeners the following January on CD and download.
Written (and eventually produced for audio) as two 45 (ish) minute episodes, Leviathan is a serial of two halves. The first, in the tradition of 1980s Who serials such as The Visitation and The Mark of the Rani, opens in what seems to be a historical setting. In Leviathan’s case, this is Dark Ages Britain, complete with a baron, a castle, and the mythic Herne (complete with antlers and skull face) stalking the forest as it goes about culling villagers when “their time” arrives. Into this enters Baker’s Doctor and Nicola Bryant’s Peri as the TARDIS develops yet another fault and they become involved with escaping villager Gurth and eventually a group of rebels on the outskirts of the village.
In true Doctor Who fashion, however, not all is what it seems as the first episode progresses to reveal how little the villagers know of their world and that the Baron is taking orders from a disembodied voice known as Zeron. Clues that, along with another listing for the Herne in the TARDIS data banks, build up to a cliffhanger that turns the entire premise of the serial on its head: the village is actually inside the massive space ship Leviathan, launched by the shadowy group of 22nd century known as the Sentinels of the New Dawn. A ship now under threat from a group of would-be salvage claimants manipulating events for their own ends.
In the CD extras, Richardson and Paul Finch speculate that the scope of the scripts might have been why they were ultimately unmade on television. There are a fairly large number of sets ranging from the inside of medieval castles to futuristic spaceship control rooms. Beyond that are multiple scenes that would have been needed to have been recorded on location, including sequences involving a fair number of horseback riders and action set pieces including chases and pitched battles. Lastly, there were costume and visual effects such as the Herne, various androids, and the reveal of the titular Leviathan as a spaceship. All of which Doctor Who had done in various guises in the 1980s (not to mention both before and since) but rarely all in the same serial at the same time.
Yet, as in keeping with a number of Lost Stories releases, the “unlimited potential” of the audio format, as Paul Finish termed it, made Leviathan more than suitable for the treatment Big Finish could bring to it.
And well brought to life it is, too. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant were old hands at their roles by the time of recording, having reprised them from the earliest days of Big Finish’s Doctor Who output, and that sense of familiarity underpins their work here. Indeed, as Baker spoke to in the extras for the first Lost Stories release, the challenge for him especially was returning to the more abrasive performances of his TV serials instead of the Doctor he’d played on audio. Here, though, he and the script seemed to have found a middle ground between the two, giving him the odd abrasive moment towards the beginning when the Doctor is more interested in repairing the TARDIS over what might be happening to Gurth outside. Once pulled into the action, Baker’s Doctor is very much on fine form, taking on something of an action hero mantle closer to Jon Pertwee or modern Doctors while also presenting a harder edge when events call for it, yet also having humour and friendlier interactions with Peri.
Peri is also well served by the Finch’s script, with nice interactions with various supporting characters and very much taking the inexperienced would-be rebels under her wings in places, though the script does fall prey to locking Peri up for a time mid-serial to shift the focus more onto the Doctor. Even so, what the Leviathan script offers is not only plenty for the pair to work from but more often than not material a higher quality of script to what they had to work with during their TV tenure.
Beyond them, Leviathan as a whole is well-served by the production. Owing to the large cast of characters, a cast of five actors performs some sixteen roles between them, featuring Jamie Parker alongside Big Finish regulars such as John Banks and Beth Chalmers. This is not something that you’re likely to notice straight away, thanks to the variety and range of voices on hand, though there are the odd instances where more attuned listeners might realise that Banks and Chalmers are talking to themselves during some scenes.
Bringing the wider world of the serial to life is the sound design and music from Simon Robinson, with his working aiding the script in subtly misdirecting the listener as to what’s going on during the first half before going into full 1980s Radiophonic Workshop style after the reveal. Brought together under director Ken Bentley who, still early on his time with Big Finish, came in with a superb production.
All of which makes Leviathan something of a revelation to listen to among the Lost Stories releases, even after fifteen years, and all the more of a shame that circumstances led to its being abandoned in the mid-1980s. Because, as the quality of characterisation given to the Doctor and Peri attests to, it’s a far better script than the pair had broadcast during their tenure. In the hands of the right director on television, such as Graeme Harper or Matthew Robinson, Leviathan could have been a perfect answer to BBC executives who charged that Doctor Who had become stale and tired in the 1980s. Instead, we have one of the best audios from The Lost Stories range and a sense of what could have been on TV in another time and place.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.