“Missy... alone, unleashed and unfettered. What does she get up to when the Doctor isn’t around?
“Well, Missy has a plan. And to carry it out, she’s going to have to break some rules. And people. And planets. Look out universe, Missy is on a mission. And nobody is going to stop her…”
1.1 A Spoonful of Mayhem -p1
1.2 Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated -p1
1.3 The Broken Clock - p1
1.4 The Belly of the Beast -p1
2.1 The Lumiat - p1
2.2 Brimstone and Terror - p1
2.3 Treason and Plot - p1
2.4 Too Many Masters -p1
MISSY AND THE MONK
3.1 Body and Soulless
3.2 War Seed
3.3 Two Monks, One Mistress
Replies
A SPOONFUL OF MAYHEM by Roy Gill:
“In a spot of bother in Victorian London, Missy is forced to take on governess duties.
“But she has another scheme in mind, and her charges are simply in the way. She’s going to have to teach the children some rather harsh lessons about getting what you want.
“And there will be tears before bedtime.”
COMMENTARY: “A Spoonful of Mayhem” addresses the similarity between “Mary Poppins” and “Scary Poppins” directly. I wish I could find Missy’s brand-spankin’ new theme music online, because it evokes “Chim Chiminey” played in a minor key with an undertone of percussion. When I first heard about this new Missy set, I wasn’t sure I’d buy it (I don’t buy all the spin-offs, after all), but after listening to the second set of The War Master followed by the fifth set of The Diary of River Song (in which she meets four incarnations of the Master) I felt as if I were on something of a role. Michelle Gomez plays Missy on audio exactly the way she plays her on TV. Good stuff.
Added this to the list.
Thanks, Bob!
DIVORCED, BEHEADED, REGENERATED by John Dorney:
“Missy arrives in Tudor England, throwing the plans of another renegade Time Lord into chaos.
“King Henry VIII is on the throne, and aliens are stomping through the countryside. Missy just wants to be Queen.
“And the Monk? Once he knows who else is on the scene, he’ll be glad just to stay alive…”
COMMENTARY: The story opens with King Henry VIII about to meet his sixth wife. The bride turns out to be Missy, and the “king” turns out to be the “Meddling Monk” in disguise. The Monk fled the Time War and disabled his TARDIS in such a way that it could not be traced (or re-used). His plan was to keep a low profile, but when the Time War ended he set out to make himself conspicuous, thereby bringing himself to the attention of his fellow Timelords. Missy finds herself stuck in Earth’s past as well, but for reasons that aren’t, at first, revealed. She wants parts from the Monk’s TARDIS but he doesn’t trust her.
Missy and the Monk play off each other as well as did Missy and River Song. She continually refers to him as the Meddling Monk, and he insists that he’s obviously not a Monk, and can’t understand why that nomenclature has stuck with him. “Alliteration trumps historical accuracy,” Missy quips. When he asks her how she comes to be stuck on earth in the past, she says that, if this were a drama, now would be the time for a flashback. A musical cue indicating “flashback” begins to build until she cuts it off saying, “…but this isn’t a drama.”
Finally, if you were to assume that John Dorney couldn’t figure out a reason for the Monk to sing “I Am Henry the 8th I Am” you would be mistaken.
THE BROKEN CLOCK by Nev Fountain:
“Tonight, on Dick Zodiac’s America’s Most Impossible Killers, Detective Joe Lynwood hunts the most impossible killer of his career.
“There’s a trail of bodies. Impossible bodies. And Joe has one long night to solve the case.
“Luckily, DI Missy Masters from Scotland Yard in England, London, England is here to help…”
COMMENTARY:
On one level, this is a spoof of those “real crime” TV shows which feature “dramatic recreations” of the crimes interspersed with interviews, but it’s more reality-bending than that. The crime in question took place decades ago and was committed by “a man with a pointy beard.” The first indication that all is not as it seems is when one of the principals being interviewed equates the non-linear storytelling of the show itself to time travel. When the host points out that those are just actors playing scenes, the man being interviewed insists that, no, those are scenes of what actually happened all those years ago.
The “actors” seem to realize that they’re in a drama, yet they also believe they are real. The dialogue simply drips with purple prose. One of the witnesses is a Mexican maid who speaks with the worst accent I have ever heard. It almost pulled me out of the story, until there was the sound of a record being scratched and we learn the “maid” is Missy herself. She stopped the reenactment (“Nothing stops a scene like the sound of obsolete equipment malfunctioning”) to protest the Scottish accent of the person “DI Missy Masters.” She goes on to use her “flawless Mexican accent” as the way it should be done. Then she takes over the role of herself, herself.
This is a pretty complicated (i.e., “convoluted”) plot, but we do find out what has happened to Missy’s TARDIS. I didn’t mention it, but in episode one, after the governess had left, her employer found that his grandfather clock was missing. That would seem to have indicated the Master’s TARDIS, but there would have had to have been a clock in the first place, wouldn’t there? Anyway, that’s the thread that’s running through the first three parts of this set. There are multiple levels of meaning to this episodes title, and that’s all I’ll say about it.
THE LUMIAT:
The story begins with Missy running amok hoping that a certain someone might show up. She attracts the attention of a female Time Lord wielding a sonic screwdriver, but it's not the Doctor as Missy suspects. she turns out to be the Lumiat, who is to Missy as the Valeyard is to the Doctor. But whereas the Valeyard is everything dark and evil from the Doctor distilled into his own opposite, the Lumiat is everything light and good from the Master/Missy. There's a lot of continuity with the classic and the new shows, and listening to Missy and the Lumiat interact is great fun. Apparently, the process to create a being such as the Valeyard or the Lumiat is quite similar to the one to get a new cycle of regenerations. I'm not quite sure what happens at the end, but someone appears to regenerate. I'll have to listen to it again, but this one was quite good.
BRIMSTONE & TERROR:
Tbhis one finds Missy as the headmistress of a remote Scottish boarding school. (She married the previous headmaster who came to an untimely end.) Her goal is to assemble an army of willing youngsters trained to serve only her. But one of the students at the school is Oliver Davis, one of her former charges when she was his governess. (See "A Spoonful of Mayhem," above.) He was a right rapscallion then, but he's older now and perhaps a bit wiser as well. Missy keeps him over for the Christmas holidays and forces him to write a cheery letter home, but his sister, Lucy, isn't fooled. (He describes Missy in glowing terms, but Lucy knows better.) another teacher at the school is Strax, or "Mr. Strackie," wearing a holographic cloak to disguise the fact that he's a Sontaran. He is the geography teacher and PE instructor, and is as literal-minded as ever.
Oliver and Lucy aside. the scenes between Strax and Missy are hilarious!
TREASON & PLOT:
Rita Cooper is a rookie Time Agent. Rookies are generally assigned particular historical events for training purposes... for observation purposes only. These are generally considered rather boring, by-the-book assignments. Rita's is "The Gunpowder Plot" and this starts out as a fairly straight historical... until Missy interferes with a plan to make it succeed. Rita sudden;y finds herself over her head in an attempt to assure history unfolds as it's supposed to.
One thing about these Big Finish productions (not just "Missy" but all of them), I'm always impressed by how many different spins they are able to put on the old "it's bigger on the inside" cliche. I keep waiting for them to run dry but they never do. In this case, when Rita first sees the inside of Missy's TARDIS, Missy says, "If you state the obvious I'll have to kill you."
After everything has been set right, Rita is expecting a plum assignment. It ends with her supervisor asking, "Have you ever heard of the R.M.S Titanic?"
Maybe she'll run into Doug and Tony.
Jeff of Earth-J said:
"Maybe she'll run into Doug and Tony."
...and get the chance to punch a ghost?
"I wish I could find Missy’s brand-spankin’ new theme music online, because it evokes “Chim Chim-Cheree” played in a minor key with an undertone of percussion."
It's available now.
"Missy" Theme
TOO MANY MASTERS: This is the sequel to "Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated (see above) in which the Monk seeks revenge on Missy. They are both caught by the Ogrons who are seeking revenge on the Master for... oh, I don't know. something from the original TV series I think...? We get out first "look" at an Ogron female, and the script slyly references Monty Python's "Mr. Gumby": "You hurt my brain!" When one of the characters enters the TARDIS for the first time, both the Monk and Missy say, simultaneously, "It's bigger on the inside! Yes, I know!" The end of this story (and this set) leaves Missy and the Monk travelling together. This paiting is even more interesting than the "Angelique and Tony" sub-series from the Dark Shadows range.
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