Audio Drama: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield

Briarheart Reviews: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield

So if you know me or you've seen a lot of my videos on the Briarheart02 YouTube channel, you probably will have guessed that I'm not into the the Doctor Who novels as much as some of my friends are, so I only really get to experience the characters that appear in those books when they make an appearance in an audio drama. Same goes for comic book characters.

Bernice Summerfield is one of those characters, but it should come as no surprise that as I'm a seasoned Big Finish listener at this point that I've had a few run-ins with her, I mean just look at her massive library of stories. No Spin-Off is more popular than Benny.

So, if you're a beginner at Big Finish, it might be difficult to know where to start for Benny. If you're interested in her and want to get into her stuff I'd highly recommend you start with The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield Volume 2: The Triumph of Sutekh as it's an amazing set of stories that you won't regret buying.

This is not one of those sets, however. This is the first set in the new adventures range, simply titled The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield. It could potentially work as a jumping on point, but I still wouldn't recommend to either beginners or seasoned listeners, and I'll get into why as the video goes on.

The first story in the set is written by Nev Fountain, who is one of my favorite Big Finish writers somewhere after Rob Shearman, and while it's not his best story, it's still pretty good because he wrote it. It manages to set up the box set nicely but is one of the few Doctor Who stories to tackle the (sometimes) controversial topic of Science VS Religion while also trying to be a comedy, because if you haven't listened to any of his work, that's sort of his thing, you know dealing with heavy topics but writing it so that it's still fun and somewhat tongue in cheek. This was a bit of a risky move on Fountain's part because you actually have Benny and the Doctor defending people's rights to believe in whatever the Hell they want over believing in science. I think Fountain manages to get his point across pretty well during the amount of time he was given, even as a someone who firmly believe science trumps religion, but as I said, it's a controversial topic and handling it in a somewhat comedic fashion may not have been the right way to go about doing this type of story. I can definitely see why some people might not like it, but I think it's another pretty solid entry from Fountain. Oh and the event that connects this story to the next is Ace went missing and Benny goes off on a quest for her.

The next story in the set is called Goodnight, Sweet Ladies and it's nowhere near as entertaining as the first story. Basically, it's this entire hour of Benny wandering around a temple on an alien moon that has a Dalek saucer inside it with this dumbass who's literally the most annoying character in the set looking for Ace. I mean don't get me wrong, I love a good story set in a temple especially when it happens in Doctor Who. What I don't like is when the story goes nowhere. Seriously, most of this story is just a whole bunch of nothing save for a plot twist at the end that leaves the listener going, "Really Benny? You couldn't figure that shit out sooner?" The problem with this story is it draws out a segment of the overarching plot that should really only be twenty minutes long into an hour. It just doesn't have enough to do in that time span and as a result, it's boring.

Random Ghosts comes next and it's once again written by one of my personal favorite writers. However, unlike Fountain or Shearman, Guy Adams can definitely do some wrong, but when he's good he is really, really good. Sadly this is one of his weaker entries into the Big Finish catalog, not because of the story itself, but because of the way it happens to be structured. Random Ghosts takes two structures and meshes them together, the first being found footage. Yeah, if Sleep No More popped into your head and you were filled with an immediate sense of dread, that's normal. But it's not the found footage aspect that kills it, it's the other story structure. This is another one of the experimental audios that attempt to tell the story out of order like Creatures of Beauty. Unlike Creatures of Beauty, however, it doesn't succeed in doing this and makes the story damn near incomprehensible. I actually had to listen to this one a few times and take a look at anything I could find explaining it on the internet until I could finally listen to it and understand it. It's a shame really because the plot's pretty solid and if it weren't for the out of order story structure, which I forgot to mention is explained away by a time anomaly, it has the potential to be really good, but it just isn't.

The Lights of Skaro is the final story in this set and it is possibly the most fanwanky Dalek story ever written, and I think in a good way. After it's revealed that the planet from the last story is Skaro... oh yeah, SPOILERZZZZ AHEAD. The time anomaly is basically corrected and now the planet has to catch back up to where Benny and her friends are living in time. At least that's how I interpreted it. Anyway, this leads to a lot of freaky shit happening around Benny as she wonders around the Dalek City and ghosts of Daleks from previous stories appear. Basically what I'm saying here is we get to see events from The Daleks, The Power of the Daleks, The Evil of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks, and Destiny of the Daleks happen again and Benny interacting with some of the ghosts of those events. We also get to see every character you ever loved from the previous story die in gruesome, terrible ways. Fun, right? But yeah, I like this story despite it being one of the biggest pieces of fanwank next to Zagreus that Big Finish has churned out. There is one huge gaping problem with it though. Ace is completely out of character for this entire story. After all she and the Doctor have been through, it was her plan to commit total genocide of the Daleks that caused all the shit that went down in this story. That's right, Ace is the evil mastermind here. And the Doctor doesn't even lift a finger after he stops Ace, he doesn't scold her or tell her what she did was stupid and wrong, he's just like "Whatevs!" Like what the absolute fuck? I mean even Benny's like "You are going to give her a long talk, aren't you? AREN'T YOU?!?!"

Anyway, that was The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield Volume 1. A very mixed bag of stories that don't form as tight a story as the following box sets do, but there are some things to like about it. Mainly The Revolution and most of The Lights of Skaro. Would I recommend it? No, because there's a good chance people who aren't as nice as I am to Big Finish won't find it worth their money. I'd say just start with the next set if you're going to start anywhere.