Thursday 30 November 2017

30 Discs Hath November #30: The Tub Full Of Cats


Bernice Summerfield 8.1:
The Tub Full of Cats
written by Daniel O'Mahony

Okay, I'm bored of GW stuff, so let's end this catch-up series by resolving something from earlier: did the cliffhanger from The Empire State lead to a good season opener in this or is it going to be completely incomprehensible because the resolution was in a random novel I don't own?

Surprisingly between series four and this one Big Finish seem to have learnt their lesson. This story picks up pretty directly from The Empire State with Bernice and and Braxiatel's cloned daughter Maggie dragging Brax back to the collection. For various reasons, including being a cheap bastard and only wanting to pay for two full price tickets, Brax has put himself into suspended animation in a coffin and is getting himself shipped home as cargo. Brax picked the ship and so, naturally, we're in one of those stories where he's got himself a deal with a hell of a downside. If nothing else its a good nostalgia trip for those who missed the character,me included.

Its a trippy sort of story with regular cutaways to an old time American astronaut called Anthony Rogers, cutaways in which Brax is a waiter, Bernice is the former First Lady and Maggie Matsumoto is the personification of death that Rogers keeps being racist about.

Its a race against time for everyone to get back to the Collection where the Draconians and the Mim (the latter who I vaguely remember from a Companion Chronicle) are blockading the place and getting ready to shoot at each other. The ship has a secret, of course, a particularly nice science-fiction-y secret that involves the ship being absolutely infested with cats. I finally looked up what happened to Wolsey and its nice to hear Benny doting over a cat again, even if I seem to remember references to Wolsey still being alive when she's moaning about the people she doesn't know the fate of in Legion.

For my money, the most interesting parts of the story are the interactions between Brax and Maggie. Brax is still being charming and urbane, or trying to, but Benny is having none of it after the things he did to Jason and Maggie is just angry with him for a whole host of reasons starting with being an absent father and moving up from there. Its certainly more interesting than the fictional history of late twenty-first century space travel. That whole thread comes to an interesting and tragic conclusion but the reason I'm going back to listen to the stories from the single release era is I miss the Collection cast.

Speaking of which, now that Brax is back on the Collection I'm looking forward to hearing the fireworks fly when he gets the necessary confrontations with Bev and Jason.

But that's not for tomorrow, maybe not even for the day after, I'll get to it I'm sure but that's the last of my thirty discs in thirty days. Its been fun, apart from I Scream

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