Three’s a Crowd is another entry in the Big Finish “Main Range” of Doctor Who stories, released all the way back in May 2005, shortly after the modern series had gone onto the air. It was the 69th entry into the series, and starred Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, travelling at the time with Nicola Bryant as Peri and Caroline Morris as audio-only companion Erimem. It was written by Colin Brake who is someone I’m unfamiliar with, although he’s been around the block a few times with Doctor Who novels, short stories and comics.
Three’s a Crowd has got something interesting going on that we wouldn’t have been able to see in 2005, in that it is a story which deals with the consequences of social distancing has been carried out to the nth degree. The justification for this is not a potential sickness, but rather the rather vague circumstances of a bunch of people on a failed earth colony, which means that all the guest characters in this story spend all their time alone in their little living pods, only occasionally communicating with anyone else and only seeing other people in extremely rare circumstances. The upshot of this is that they are all extremely agoraphobic–being with more than one other person, or being outside, or even being in a large room or a corridor is enough to send some of them into complete panic.
Why is all this going on? I actually can’t remember. I mean, I do remember that their colony is made up of a bunch of domes that are full of people in suspended animation, waiting for an automated terraforming process to be completed. Unfortunately, it got delayed, and then the colony (or its attached space station) is invaded by human-eating alien lizards. It’s also cut off from all outside communication. The colony leader and one of the few who is awake is a woman just known as “Auntie”, who appeases the aliens by giving them members of the colony to eat. In exchange for this, the colony itself gets to survive, and periodically members of Auntie’s family get to go home via some sort of long-range transmat system. Of course, it turns out that nobody is going home, those people are just getting eaten as well.
Somehow, because of all of this, the few people in the colony who are awake (the people in Auntie’s particular dome) are kept in isolation, which leads to the whole “social isolation / spend all of life in a small room” scenario outlined above. I guess it’s just to keep them from knowing that they are more-or-less doomed and that many of their acquaintances are being sent off to be lizard food. It probably makes sense if you pay a bit more attention than I did.
What makes it hard to pay closer attention is that the story is just not told or executed well. Things move at a very slow pace with much of it made up of the Doctor and his companions arriving, being contrived apart into various groupings so they wander through hallways (or from one transmat station to the next) and meet the story’s guest characters and slowly get a handle on what is going on. Those guest characters are mostly useless and annoying, with their terror of being with anyone else or going through a door being told via ages of fake-sounding dialogue punctuated with a lot of hand-wringing and nervous giggling. The Doctor and his companions themselves are never that interesting either, and nobody ever feels genuinely invested in the drama. Things play out with no real surprises or twists, and nothing that is emotionally compelling beyond the most obvious, surface levels.
There is some effort to make the story meaningful for the regulars, as there is time spent lightly addressing Erimem’s trauma from a previous story, and dealing with the general dynamic of these three characters travelling together. Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since I listened to any of the previous Fifth Doctor-Peri-Erimem dramas–the last one was The Roof of the World, which came out ten months earlier and which I blogged about two and a half years ago. You may say that’s my problem and not the producers that I don’t remember it well, but it was released a good ten months before Three’s a Crowd originally. And either way I’d argue that it’s the job of the current story to convey everything that’s important to appreciate and enjoy the current story in some fashion or another, and Three’s a Crowd just does not achieve that.
By the way, Auntie is played by Deborah Watling, who was the TV companion Victoria back in the 1960s. She’s fine here, though no more memorable than anyone else. Her appearance was presumably a result of what used to be the Big Finish policy of not recasting any of the television characters, which meant there was no way to do an actual Second Doctor story (Patrick Troughton having died years earlier), so they’d occasionally bring actors from that era of the TV series in to play different characters.
