Scaredy Cat [AUDIO/2005.10.?]

 

★★☆☆☆

  Scaredy Cat has the unfavorable reputation among many Big Finish fans as one of the worst stories ever produced. My two cents on the notion is that it's... well, it's not one of the worst things they've done, surely. In fact, I wouldn't even say this is as terrible as many people say. It's just a total mess, that's all.

  Paul McGann is an actor that usually performs as strong as the script is, which means that he sounds positively bored off his wits in this one. India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas try to bring life into it, and I'm not saying McGann doesn't do exactly that — I'm just saying that he sounds uninterested while doing it, almost as if he can barely contain his annoyance but goes along with the production anyway. It's not exactly the best impression to get from a story, and unfortunately for Scaredy Cat, that aspect is not the worst. See, Scaredy Cat feels like a 180-degree inverse of The Twilight Kingdom (also written by Will Shindler) in that while The Twilight Kingdom is a story with one central idea stretched to irritable lengths, while Scaredy Cat has enough ideas — creative ones at that — for a three-hour epic crammed into a single hour. As you can imagine, the result is an incredible mess that feels as if every single character was created for exposition. The fact that even these expositions are written in such a way that for the entirety of episode 4, the Doctor has to become Shindler's loudspeaker and tell everyone the entire plot from the ground up! 

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  I don't need to go on, Scaredy Cat is bad, plain and simple. Is it one of the worst things Big Finish has done, however? I still hesitate to concur with that statement, purely on the fact that I enjoy these individual ideas too much to outright hate the end result. Sure, this feels more like a scrapbook of shower thoughts than anything, but those shower thoughts show genuine creativity and ambition. I can't fault Will Shindler for trying something different and bold in a range that was beginning to lose a bit of steam at this stage... but I can fault Scaredy Cat's rushed nature. In the way that it takes away coherence but adds very little artistic merit in its place (for a good example of an inverse of this situation, check out the masterful film Inland Empire by David Lynch), I'd say this most resembles a well-meaning and slightly insufferable student film.