The Baby Awakes [AUDIO/2019.12.10]

★★★☆☆

  The Baby Awakes is a much colder beast than Blood on Santa's Claw is. It's a deeper look into Peri and Joe's relationship (a deeply dysfunctional one if you ask me) and a scary look at how babies are "tailor made" for customers in the future. For the first half or so (which isn't long, considering this is a one-parter), it has a breezy pace as well as an intriguing synopsis that managed to catch my attention... and then comes the other half and -- I don't know -- I almost lost interest in it. Maybe it's something to do with the execution. The actors' sound mixing was off, something about it I can't quite place, and the way it ended up as this rather generic gun-blazing runaround seemed counterproductive. It's the thirty-minute time limit that makes for some rather stinted stories, I expect, but I've seen Nev Fountain write better. This entire release is him writing under different pseudonyms -- I would've expected him to write something much more fascinating and/or intellectualy stimulating with such a juicy premise as "babies customised for parents"!

  Nevertheless, there's a reason my overall impression on The Baby Awakes is more positive than negative (though not by a large amount). Colin Baker is always solid in these Big Finish releases, but Nicola Bryant really impressed as her emotional turn on Peri. To see her grow emotional about children she agreed to customise as part of the Doctor's plan, and refuse to let them go because having children was a lifelong dream of hers (consistent to Fountain's Peri and the Piscon Paradox -- even the kids' names match) is beautiful, and also heartbreaking in equal measure. There's a hint of shifting tides as Peri expresses her frustration at the Doctor and Joe for being less than supportive when she wanted to check to see if her "children" (scattered across the galaxy) were alright. Her comment on the Doctor sometimes being a collection of emotionless words is a scathing remark, one to last.