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Forget all about the war and death and boring stuff like
that with another exciting trip to the Braxiatel Collection!
Joined by friends old and new, Jason Kane returns for his
15th series! Adventure is his game, and he wants to play it
with you! Will Benny find out about him and Bev? Or about
him and Adrian? What is the mysterious connection between
Joseph and Doggles? Will Brax ever reveal his sinister plans?
And just who the hell is Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart...?
Though
originally scheduled to be released ahead of The
End of the World (that’s the audio drama
The End of the World, naturally, not the actual end
of the world!), The Final Amendment has finally come
out afterwards. The release order doesn’t actually matter
all that much, though, because the events of this audio drama
are concurrent with those of The End. While Jason Kane
(Stephen Fewell) is off having his own adventure, Bernice
(Lisa Bowerman) visits Earth. Along the way, we discover just
why she was so angry when we heard her on the other end of
Jason’s communicator.
I
dare say Big Finish decided to change the running order because,
had listeners heard this story before The End, they
might have been led to believe that Jason’s adventure
wasn’t really happening. This is because, in The Final
Amendment, Benny discovers that the fictionalised and
televised exploits of Jason Kane (and his sidekick, Bernice
Summerfield) are all the rage at the heart of the Earth Empire.
These exploits are performed by clones (leading to some unfortunate
thematic repetition of The
Two Jasons).
Writer
Joseph Lidster doesn’t spend much of his story having
frivolous fun with this fictionalised environment, which is
a good thing, since listeners are still reeling from the very
serious conclusion of The End. (Instead, the creation
of the clones proves to have a major impact on life in the
Empire.) However, there is plenty of opportunity for nostalgia,
as various Bernice titles are dropped into dialogue and director
Gary Russell provides an uncredited cameo performance as a
barman. New Adventures fans will also relish mentions
of former fellow TARDIS travellers Roz Forrester and Chris
Cwej, and the return of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, played
here by Sara Carver.
However,
as the blurb so eloquently puts it, just who the hell is
Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart? That’s a good question. The
adopted daughter of one of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart’s
descendants, she appeared in several New Adventures
novels, not all of which I have read. Therefore, I did feel
a little confusion as Kadiatu and Benny discuss their past
experiences together. Fortunately, all you really need to
know about Kadiatu is that she is an old friend of Benny and
“him” (strangely, Big Finish remains reluctant to
use the D-word in its Bernice Summerfield stories,
despite having the rights to publish Doctor Who fiction)
and that she once went a little crazy. On the strength of
Carver’s performance, I hope that we won’t have
to wait another ten years to hear from Kadiatu again.
My
final assessment is that, though I would have preferred the
series to press right on with the consequences of The End
of the World, The Final Amendment is an entertaining
way to keep us listeners dangling on the edges of our seats
for another couple of months.
Richard
McGinlay
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