Saturday 18 November 2017

30 Discs Hath November #18: The Green Man


Audio Adventures in Time and Space #33:
The Green Man
written by Zoltán Déry

Its back to the world of semi-legal spin-offs for one of those later run BBV audios where they licensed the rights to monsters and wrote stories about them. In this case its the Krynoids, a vegetable creature that takes over humans and turns them into Krynoids.

In this case the Krynoid has landed in darkest Mummerset sometimes in medieval times. In theory I see the thinking. Medieval times and an alien that possesses people and takes them over. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work out like that. As with in the original story there are two Krynoid pods, the first one takes over a herbalist called Osbert but he's dispatched in pretty short order leaving us with Pod #2 which has possessed a wolf and therefore isn't much conversation. This being an audio drama, an enemy that isn't much conversation is a pretty bad thing to have.

Zoltán Déry tries, bless him, to deliver on impressive visuals but, again, this is an audio and so having people telling me that the Krynoid has got bigger again is just a little underwhelming.

There is some investment to be had with the human cast even if the local (and non-speaking) lady's fever is a pretty bad attempt at raising tension seeing as we never get to meet her and her illness is never really defined. The character of Moses, a Jewish doctor and scientist brought in by the earl to heal his lady, is interesting though his allusions to losing his family during the crusades (and at European hands) serves as little more than a reason for the earl to feel uncomfortable and stop calling him “Jew” to his face.

All in all, I'd say this was a better story in concept than execution. There are some neat ideas like Moses trying to reverse engineer Greek fire using limited resources and a templar knight scientifically proving the Krynoid isn't a demon by dipping his sword in holy water and discovering it does nothing to make the sword more effective.

Oh well, they can't all be winners. 

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