Bernice
Summerfield 7.5:
The Oracle of
Delphi
written by
Scott Handcock
Well, I
wanted more Jason Kane before he was gone and I'm getting it. Not
un-coincidentally, the line “What's a nice girl like you doing in a
place like this with no clothes on.” is about the most Jason line
ever written.
So, as this
season of Benny audios becomes more and more serialised we have
Bernice and Jason using their time rings to travel back to 430BCE
Greece to asks the Delphic Oracle some questions. Naturally, Jason
decides to have a bit of skinny dip in a sacred pool while Bernice
goes to ask the questions (and find an empty cave for her troubles)
and ends up getting hypnotised and kidnapped by some random woman.
That's just how he rolls, go with it.
Incidentally,
I have to wonder how much I'm screwing myself over by not reading the
books because I was bloody sure the Oracle of Delphi or somesuch
other future telling sort was actually present on the Collection. I
thought she was why the Collection was where it was. Ho hum...
Anyway, the
meat of the episode is Benny having a good old celebrity historical
team-up with Socrates, a team-up started by her trying to tell him in
broken Ancient Greek that she's looking for her husband and giving
him the impression she's just looking for a man and wants to sleep
with him. She later signs a note to him “Lots of sex, Benny.” I
rather like this version of Socrates who gets annoyed at the very
idea that Plato felt the need to write an apology for him and ends up
putting Jason in a headlock.
I said I
liked Jason, not that I didn't want him to get a sound beating every
now and again. In that sense I feel a certain kinship with Benny
herself.
There's the
usual historical ticking time bomb in the form of the plague that's
going to imminently sweep across Greece which means Benny really,
really has to find Jason quickly. In this search she is helped by
correctly identifying that where there;s an all-female cult with
booze Jason Kane won't be far behind. Both characters get a chance to
stand in the Athenian Assembly, a scene that Benny makes a
magnificent hash up of whilst wearing a disguise the effectiveness of
which is left as an exercise for the listener (personally I choose to
imagine a fake beard augmenting her stolen robe).
As fun as it
is, there is the feeling that at this stage the idea of writing for
the arc is still a little new and fiddly for the series as the asking
of the questions Bev wants answered (well, some of them) form a coda
at the end of the story in which literally
Benny and Jason have to backtrack from where they came in order to
fulfill what was meant to be the whole point of the story. A minor
issue in an otherwise enjoyable tale.
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