Doctor Who - Colditz

Review

The 7th Doctor and Ace are up to their necks in Nazis with the audio adventure Colditz! Guest starring David Tennant!

Colditz

Written by Steve Lyons

Directed by Gary Russell

Starring:

Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor

Sophie Aldred as Ace

Tracey Childs as Elizabeth Klein

David Tennant as Feldwebel Kurtz

                Nazis! Nazis everywhere! Well, maybe not everywhere, but they do have a tendency to be in some of my favorite Doctor Who material. While I feel the Nazis are handled differently each time they appear in the different mediums of Doctor Who, Big Finish audios tend to handle them best in my opinion. While in “Let’s Kill Hitler” I feel they were handled in too comical a fashion, Big Finish tends to treat them with a bit of seriousness. It’s not all stiff-upper-lip-Big-Finish in regards to the Nazis, though; they simply do their best to build upon the history and explore the minds of the people within its ranks. Big Finish doesn’t just point and go, “Ah! It’s a Nazi! No need to explain things or go into their character, a Nazi is nothing more than a racist, prejudiced stain on history!”  Big Finish introduces us to characters that are more than just villain fodder or backdrops for a “larger” story. We are able to truly grasp what it was like being part of the Nazi war machine, and, in this case, even learn what may have been if the war turned out differently. Colditz shows us the good, the bad, and the might-have-been.

                 Colditz—to be more precise, Colditz Castle—is located in the state of Saxony in Germany, which is where this audio is nearly entirely set. And Colditz is where our heroes—the Doctor and his companion, Ace—land in their TARDIS, during October 1944, near the end of the Second World War. At that time Colditz was being used by the Nazi party as a prisoner-of-war camp. Now, the Doctor and his companion don’t land right inside Colditz, but they land very close to it—close enough for the TARDIS to be spotted. They have no idea where they are, as once again the TARDIS is “acting up.” However, soon after they set foot outside, the Doctor realizes where they are and warns Ace to hurry back to the TARDIS in a terrified voice that could only mean they’ve landed in a horrible place. Pity for them that Nazis pounce upon them like wolves to the slaughter before they make it back inside. The Doctor is then shot—non-fatally, of course—and they are hauled off to Colditz Castle as prisoners.

An exciting and terrifying start to a unique adventure for the Doctor and Ace—and even more unfortunately, they’ll need to face their trials and tribulations without each other. Within Colditz we get to know a small host of Nazis and their Allied Force prisoners. These prisoners have all successfully escaped from other Nazi camps, have been recaptured, and were sent to Colditz, a high-security prison. All and all, though, this is still a prisoner-of-war jail, so the prisoners are treated a bit better than one might expect. As long as the rules are followed, little trouble arises. Pity the Doctor and Ace have arrived, because trouble follows them like a wardrobe change follows regeneration.

A large portion of this trouble comes to and from a Nazi officer by the name of Feldwebel Kurtz, played by none other than David Tennant. (Yes, the same David Tennant who would go on to play the tenth Doctor.) Kurtz isn’t the nicest Nazi you’ll come across, even for Colditz. He is a man who is utterly faithful to the Nazi party and has a mean streak that is not to be crossed. I can’t properly convey just how good a job Tennant did with Kurtz; he really made me hate him, but at the same time, I couldn’t get enough of him. You just really want to see him get what’s coming to him. While I found myself cheering Ace for playing jump rope with his patience, I also genuinely feared she would go too far and really incur his wrath.

Although Kurtz is a powerful character, you’re probably thinking that he doesn’t seem to fit my claims that Colditz manages to show us a different side to Nazis. What if I told you that one of my favorite characters in all of Doctor Who is a Nazi? No, it’s not Kurtz! It’s Elizabeth Klein, played by Tracey Childs, who comes in at the end of the first act of this audio. She isn’t just any Nazi, though, as you’ll discover. She is from a time when the Nazis won World War 2. Won the war? How can that be?! Well, if you must know, it is the Doctor’s fault. In her timeline the Doctor’s escape from Colditz didn’t go so smoothly and a valuable piece of technology from the future fell into Nazi hands, helping them win the war. Klein is a woman created and shaped from that timeline. And now she’s not only come back in time to see the Doctor, she’s come back in time asking about the Doctor’s TARDIS.

Right from the start, Klein is an enigmatic woman on a mission. Who she is, is as much a mystery to the Doctor as it is to the listener. In fact, the listener and the Doctor solve the mystery of Klein together, which really helps immerse you deeper into her character and the story surrounding her. Learning about her situation and her upbringing created this love I had for the character. Sure, she’s from a Nazi world, but that doesn’t make her any less a human being. In her world humanity is in a “Golden Age” of prosperity and development. She is a creation of her world, and she is doing what, in her mind, is the right thing to do. Klein isn’t so much the villain like Kurtz, but more of an anti-hero. Too bad for her that she’s now dealing with the Doctor.

Sadly, there are some drastic downfalls to Colditz, one being a very unfortunate audio decision.  A good amount of the scenes in Colditz are in cells or closed-off rooms, and because of this, there is this constant echo during the scenes that are in these rooms. While I understand that the echo is used to give the listener the impression the actors really are in these closed rooms, it makes the actors hard to hear at times and gets irritating rather quickly. I really feel that this hurts the drama terribly. Such an interesting setting such as Colditz shouldn’t be presented as a trial for my ears.

Another problem I have with the audio is that Ace’s character feels much more rash and irrational then she is normally prone to be. Throughout Colditz she makes constant mistakes and has a harder time than normal keeping her attitude in check. It gives the impression that if the Doctor isn’t there to keep her on a leash, she acts like a child, trying to push everyone’s buttons in a situation where the danger is obvious. Canonically, Ace was often a bit gung-ho and adventurous, but here she acts like a loose cannon trying to make trouble for herself. It’s as if she thinks she can get away with anything just because the Doctor will save her in the end. You simply don’t act like a total ass to Nazis in Nazi Germany during World War 2! It’s suicide! Having to put up with Ace like this gets boring fast. If it wasn’t for Kurtz constantly being in her face all the time, I’d have fallen asleep. At least by the end I feel like she has learned a valuable lesson; pity she had to learn it the hard way.

I enjoy Colditz, I really do! However, it has its faults. While Klein is written well and Kurtz is a great villain, the rest of it has a lot of errors and drawbacks. I get that they’re in a small room! No need for an echo that drives me mad! Then a lot of Ace’s parts just dragged on, which is a shame as I love Ace as a character. I feel like a lot of her pugnacity was just filler, used to stretch the drama out over four episodes. Colditz would have been perfection if they just fixed the echo issue and shortened it down to two—maybe three—episodes. Thank god, later on down the line, we’re treated to its continuation, A Tiny Thousand Wings, which is a real treat!

Rating: 3.5/5

Colditz can be purchased from Big Finish: http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/colditz-627