Doctor Who: The Suffering

The Companion Chronicles #4.07

by Jacqueline Rayner, Peter Purves (Narrator), Maureen O'Brien (Narrator)

The TARDIS materialises in England in the year 1912, a time of great social change. The Suffragette movement is lobbying for votes for women, and the skull of the so-called ‘missing link’ has been discovered in Piltdown.

While Vicki falls victim to a strange influence, the Doctor and Steven investigate the fossilised remains. The Suffering has been unleashed. Can the travellers survive its rage?

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Audiobook, Historical Fiction, Fiction

Audio CD

First published February 1, 2010

About the author

Jacqueline Rayner is a best selling British author, best known for her work with the licensed fiction based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.

Her first professional writing credit came when she adapted Paul Cornell's Virgin New Adventure novel Oh No It Isn't! for the audio format, the first release by Big Finish. (The novel featured the character of Bernice Summerfield and was part of a spin-off series from Doctor Who.) She went on to do five of the six Bernice Summerfield audio adaptations and further work for Big Finish before going to work for BBC Books on their Doctor Who lines.

Her first novels came in 2001, with the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel EarthWorld for BBC Books and the Bernice Summerfield novel The Squire's Crystal for Big Finish. Rayner has written several other Doctor Who spin-offs and was also for a period the executive producer for the BBC on the Big Finish range of Doctor Who audio dramas. She has also contributed to the audio range as a writer. In all, her Doctor Who and related work (Bernice Summerfield stories), consists of five novels, a number of short stories and four original audio plays.

Rayner has edited several anthologies of Doctor Who short stories, mainly for Big Finish, and done work for Doctor Who Magazine. Beyond Doctor Who, her work includes the children's television tie-in book Horses Like Blaze.

With the start of the new television series of Doctor Who in 2005 and a shift in the BBC's Doctor Who related book output, Rayner has become, along with Justin Richards and Stephen Cole, one of the regular authors of the BBC's New Series Adventures. She has also abridged several of the books to be made into audiobooks.

She was also a member of Doctor Who Magazine's original Time Team.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting historical adventure where Vicky joins the Suffragette movement.

[Paulo "paper books only" · Rating 2 out of 5]

This tale is told in an interesting way. Steven & Vicki are recording their stories to posterity. The first part is told by Steven and the rest is told by Vicki. It was very interesting.

Well the Tardis arrive at 1912 a time of great social change. Women didn't want to be slaves to men and so they took the streets - these women were called The Suffragettes. The Tardis arrive in a digging place. They discover some bones and soon afterwards Vicki falls unconscious. They take her to a house where leaves a man and her daughter (Constance). He is a motor car enthusiast and she is a suffragette (without her father knowing, of course). Later on Steven and the Doctor went to London because they realize that the bones / skull were not of humankind. They later understand that the skull is just a vessel for a being - a woman being that hates men. Constance is taken by this being called and makes a speech to other women full of hate. What the women wanted was a peaceful manifestation against man and their rulling but this being turn it into a frenzy mass murdereress...

This being, tells to Steven and the Doctor of who she is. In her world, akin to earth, men dominated women on point of submission or slave - and all men live in a of collective/hive mind. Women on other hand don't have that capability. But a women is smarter and makes men collective mind suffer but they punish her making her part of a colective as well. Instead of sharing thoughts and ideas they brought ALL woman on the planet connected to her - so she would feel everything from every woma until the day she died. But something happened because she didn't died. She lived in every woman and turn that to her advantage. She make women revolution by killing men. Men understood and cut off her head but still she lived on. After the war, in the end, men put her head and bones and throw it off her planet until she arrive on earth. With hate and disdain she wanted to kill all men and could give an area of control on every woman.

As it seems nothing can be done but the doctor try to communicate with her and asks her, if the men were so depleted of resources and many were killed why should they send her away? More probable was that it was the woman who did it because first they were enslaved by men but now they were controlled by a women.

She feels a little doubt and it's banished. The Doctor then vows to throw her skull away from earth.

Really interesting story with a great of information about england 1910's.

[Daniel Cork · Rating 5 out of 5]

The companion chronicles range is one I immensely love for it both being creative, experimental, and very character-driven. It helps to develop companions from the classic series who didn't get much focus on them, whilst also adding new sides to those who did. Most of the stories in this range are simply 2-part, 1-hour adventures, but then you have stories like this one where it's double the length. I haven't listened to a lot of the 4 parters in this range but I do enjoy them when I do eventually give them a go.

The Tardis arrives in the year of our lord 1912, a time of huge social change. The suffragette movement is on the rise but with a skull being discovered in Piltdown, it would seem that an alien force may have well be a threat not only to the future of women's rights but also to human history. Vicki falls victim to the otherworldly force. The Doctor and Steven investigate the remains, but an ancient force is about to be unleashed and it's angry, heartbroken, enraged and it wants to kill all men on sight.

Jacqueline Rayner has written an incredible script that is beautifully well-pieced together and hauntingly tragic. It's a story that tackles the harsh and brutal reality of misogyny inflicted upon men and how even the most subtle of comments up to the most brutal acts of violence hurt not only a lot of women of the time but very much nowadays as well. It's a story that whilst being a pseudo-historical on The Suffragettes still feels relevant and that to me is upsetting. Sexism and bigotry in general generally get me riled up. So hearing the very haunting and brutal scenes that play throughout the second half of this story broke my heart.

I love how Rayner gives each disc a different narrator between Peter and Maurren as it gives the listener the awareness of how bigotry toward women, might be seen somewhat differently when it comes to men as we don't face the same far-wide extent of brutal sexism that unfortunately has hurt countless lives and is still tearing people apart today. Steven's side of the story is occasionally tense and creepy, but it also has a sense of humor whilst tackling sexism from a male feminist's point of view. But Vicki's side of the story very much shows the very grotesque reality that unfortunately a lot of men either didn't see at the time or simply ignored. The imagery thrown at us with the police being incredibly violent to the suffragettes was horrifying.

I like how this story has a connection to Galaxy 4 and the implications of it. I've never been a fan of that story but Jacqueline Rayner has made me slightly appreciate that story more with the context she establishes with this story.

Overall: An incredible audio that is terrifically well-written. Peter Purves and Maureen O'Brien are amazing together, their banter and wit is hilarious and charming. But it's also a very haunting, heartbreaking, and moving story that will give you a lot to think about. 10/10

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writer of this story contrives for it to be narrated, with interruptions, by the two actors. Thus, there is a bit of dramatic dialogue, but mostly it is storytelling. The story itself is like the transitional historicals of Doctor Who, set in an important historical era, but with a science-fiction component. In this case, writer Jacqueline Rayner has decided to take up feminism as the cause. Thus, the story takes place in the suffragette era, and revolves around the controversies of female emancipation in 1912, with some playing around about the origin of the Piltdown Man hoax thrown in. The villain of the piece fits into the theme by being a powerful alien female with a vendetta against all males. Thus, Rayner tries to cut a middle path, that feminism is just dandy, but it should not be about hating men. It's the kind of simple approach that would have fit well with 1965 Doctor Who and the concept of a "family show" of the period. It just makes the villain rather uninteresting. There are some cute moments of temporally displaced Vickie and Steven making false assumptions and social errors due to unfamiliarity with the time period. It's all entertaining, if rather simplistic.

[Steven Shinder · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting women’s suffrage story.

[Jamieson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Suffering is the seventh release of the fourth season of the Companion Chronicles and is a First Doctor, Steven and Vicki story set immediately after The Time Meddler (as evidenced by Steven's reply of 1066 when asked the last time the TARDIS Crew ate). It's a rare two-disc Companion Chronicle (they're normally a single disc). Narrated by Peter Purves and Maureen O'Brien, the story starts with Steven and Vicki briefly arguing about how to tell the story before agreeing to tell the parts they were involved in.

When the TARDIS lands in a quarry which the Doctor says is an alien world, the crew soons finds an alien jawbone that causes Vicki to fall unconscious. It soon becomes apparent that they're actually on Earth in 1912. While the Doctor and Steven attempt to dispose of the skull which seems to only affect women and turn them into violent man-haters, a recovered Vicki goes to a Suffragette rally. As the rally descends into violence under the skull's influence, the Doctor, Steven and Vicki manage to save the day.

This was a good story. The way it's told and the banter between Steven and Vicki is a lot of fun. Peter Purves does an excellent Hartnell and Maureen O'Brien does a good Hartnell as well. This story seems to tell the origins of the Drahvins from "Galaxy 4" with the alien mind in the skull mentioning originating in "the fourth galaxy". The story also gives a Whoniverse explanation for the Piltdown Man hoax. In any case, this does lead into "Galaxy 4" with Vicki giving Steven a haircut. There's also a slight reference to Steven getting Barbara's lines in the next story. An enjoyable story that's worth the listen.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacqueline Rayner has always demonstrated notable skills at both historicals and writing for the Hartnell era, and those are displayed beautifully in this story.

This is double-length Companion Chronicle, featuring the voices of two companions: Steven and Vicki. The framing device of this story is that Steven and Vicki are making a record of events in case the villain of the piece ever returns. There's some fun banter between the two of them as they try to decide how to best tell the story - like "Ringpullworld", this is a Companion Chronicle that is really having fun with its nature as a narrated story, though it's done in a bit less metafictional way than in "Ringpullworld".

The story features the TARDIS crew arriving on early twentieth century earth. Steven discovers an unusual fragment of skull that the Doctor identifies as non-human, and which seems to have a strange influence on any women nearby. Steven and the Doctor go off to track the rest of the skull, while Vicki gets involved in a suffragette protest. The two plotlines end up converging - the skull is that of an alien woman, who led a rebellion on a male-dominated planet, and created a female-dominated society. She was betrayed and killed, but her skull retained a psychic power to influence women. And when she arrives on Earth, and sees the state of women in society in the early 1900s, she's ready to lead a revolution all over again.

This is Doctor Who taking on "the battle between the sexes" in a more sophisticated way than it usually does. (Rayner points this up by including several references to "Galaxy 4", Doctor Who's first real "planet-of-the-women" story - in fact, unless we're meant to believe that the 4th Galaxy is full of bizarre sex-segregated societies, I believe that the villain's backstory is also the origin story of the Drahvin society we see in "Galaxy 4".) The story offers a genuinely affecting portrayal of the sufferings of the women involved in the suffragette movement, and while the resolution of the conflict gets a bit sentimental, it basically works.

[osoi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Компаньонские хроники обнадеживают все больше, каждая новая аудиокнига не похожа на предыдущую, в каждой можно найти свою прелесть. Если так дело и дальше пойдет, то эта бигфинишная серия вполне может стать достойной заменой для неровной, но от этого еще больше любимой New Series Audio Exclusives. Правда, в компаньонах я ограничена – до эры Второго при моем темпе доползу только лет через пять, а читать о тех, с кем я еще не знакома в оригинале, мне моя религия не позволяет %)

Вселенная Доктора никогда не пренебрегала введением в сюжет угнетения разного порядка (от легкой ксенофобии до рабства), но The Suffering возводит это понятие в абсолют. Неизвестная планета, на которой женщины не имеют права даже голову поднять на сво��х хозяев; только у одной находятся силы противостоять этому укладу, однако последствия стремительно оборачиваются против нее. А на планете Земля троица Доктор+Стивен+Вики ненароком пробуждает силы, способные свести с ума и даже убить.
На удивление жестокий и бескомпромиссный выпуск, здесь не гнушаются проливать кровь и калечить; вся книга, кажется, пропитана аурой беспощадного насилия. Подключение к сознанию страдающих от боли, несправедливости и угнетения – трип не для слабонервных. Я, во всяком случае, растеряла весь сон, пока слушала эту безнадегу. История безымянной рабыни, поставившей на колени своих мучителей, переплетается с суфражистскими акциями и выстреливает так хлестко, что только успевай прятаться от огня. Неожиданная для whoniverse глубина.
Рассказывают историю попеременно Вики и Стивен, и их препирания в промежутках доставляют, особенно когда второй жалуется на то, что его ошибочно причислили к женщинам. Учитывая его экранный персонаж (сорри, совершенно не мужественный), данное замечание немало улыбнуло))) В целом доставила как история, так и оформление. Биг Финиш продолжает меня радовать ;)

annikeh.net

[Jamie Revell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A First Doctor story from the perspective of Steven and Vicki, this was the first of what became an annual tradition of double-length (2 hour) Companion Chronicle releases. Here, the format is that Steven narrates the first half of the tale, while Vicki does the remainder, with some chit chat and interaction between the narrators at points along the way.

Indeed, there is a distinct change in tone at the half-way point, as the story alters direction. Steven's half of the tale is largely played for laughs, and based loosely around the Piltdown Man hoax of 1908. In the second half, Vicki heads off to London and becomes involved with the suffragettes, in a story that highlights social injustice. Some of this is perhaps a little heavy-handed, given that there can't be many listeners who wouldn't think that the suffragettes were in the right anyway.

Having said that, the story works well, with the darker and more political elements of the second half offsetting the lighter ones of the beginning, without making the story feel disjointed. Purves and O'Brien do a good job of re-capturing their characters of days gone by, helped by a well-written script that has more room to breathe than the shorter, standard, format allows. The feel of Edwardian London comes across, too, and there's an implied link to one of the televised Hartnell stories for continuity fans.

[Anne Barwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the banter between Steven and Vicki as they're trying to work out who should tell the story. The story itself was enjoyable too and well told. Great to 'see' a story with aliens set against a historical background especially from the perspective of two characters from the future.

[Debra Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story involving a woman spirit wanting to punish all men because she was oppressed on her planet. A little long but good.

[Luiz Santiago · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5