The second Big Finish Doctor Who Christmas Episode Panto, continuing the tradition that started with "The One Doctor".
The Seventh Doctor and Mel land on a spaceship... which promptly blows up. They're transported to Dark Space Eight, the space station where the Intergalactic Song Contest is being held. After being mistaken for the commander of the blown-up spaceship and a pilot, the Doctor and Mel decide to play along and help keep the station running (and hopefully retrieve the TARDIS). Unfortunately, one of the contestants is killed — murdered by an unknown assailant. More unfortunately, a magnificently Large Ham named Queen Angvia (played by Patricia Quinn) falls madly in love with the Doctor. He realises that the feeling is starting to become rather mutual, which would subvert the series' long-standing No Hugging, No Kissing policy, which is of course downright impossible.
Mel, meanwhile, has accidentally seduced a Teen Idol named Nicky Newman, simply by having no clue who he is. He follows her around like a lost puppy. Things get a little bit complicated when about half the cast gets murdered, and the potential political fallout is starting to look disastrous — especially once it's revealed that there's a bomb on board. Mel and the Doctor convince Nicky to duck out of his performance while the Doctor distracts the audience.
With the space station saved, the political tension resolved and Queen Angvia revealed to be a hypnotic cheater, the Doctor and Mel head back to the TARDIS. The winner of the Intergalactic Song Contest is... the Doctor, on the spoons!
Tropes:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Queen Angvia and Eleanor to the Doctor, and Nicky to Mel.
- The Alcoholic: Professor Fassbender.
- Amateur Sleuth: The Doctor and Mel are thrown into this after being mistaken for Commander Ballard and his pilot. Why nobody bats an eye at a pilot investigating a crime scene is never mentioned.
- Bilingual Bonus: In Russian and Ukranian, "Golos" means "voice." Given that he (they? It?) is going to sing (of sorts) at the Intergalactic Song Competition, and needs a translator to communicate, it seems funnily appropriate.
- Blatant Lies: The Doctor trying to convince Mel they're in France when they get out of the TARDIS.
- Boomerang Bigot: Loosely applies to the killer.
- Brawn Hilda: HOO BOY, this is Angvia.
- Call-Forward: Geri tells the Doctor how peaceful and relaxing the Pakhar homeworld is, and the Doctor says he must visit some day. This is an ironic nod to the fact that when he does visit in the New Adventures, it's the site of a bloody civil war caused by a mind-controlling artifact.
- The Cameo: Some Ice Warriors show up for a single sentence.
- Camp: It's an Agatha Christie plot at the Space Eurovision on a space station that's Definitely Not Deep Space Nine. It stars Pat Quinn and features a Space Terry Wogan. It's possibly the campiest Doctor Who ever.
- Captain Ersatz: Dark Space 8 is supposed to be Deep Space Nine, continuing the Star Trek theme. The nearby station that's "the last, best hope for peace" is clearly Babylon 5. And, just to mix things up, Ivor Fassbinder and Eleanor Hardcourt are blatantly Victor Bergman and Helena Russell.
- Captain's Log: Eleanor makes Star Trek style "captain's logs" a few times every episode.
- Captain Obvious: *Alarm goes off*The Doctor: What's that!?
Cadet: An alarm. - Catchphrase:
- Eleanor's "I feel so... helpless." Said practically every five minutes.
- Fassbinder has "I don't know ... I just don't know."
- Character Development: Mel finally gets sick of the Doctor mangling his proverbs and tells him to stop it, and he does. Chronologically, this is the last story in which he does it regularly (though he still gets one or two in occasionally).
- Continuity Nod: Mel is very gung-ho in her investigating and gets a little too preoccupied with the whodunit aspects of the mystery, echoing the same tendency she had in her introductory episode "Terror of the Vervoids".
- Credits Gag: The final credits come on while there's still a chunk of the mystery to be solved. Mel cuts them short.
-
Crosses the Line Twice: The Breebles are caught on camera in front of billions of viewers rhythmically squeaking and grunting with each other. The replacement announcer is embarrassed, and changes the camera with another green room. - Deadpan Snarker: Logan (the presenter) wants to be one, Mel is one.
- Dead Person Impersonation: The Doctor assumes the role of Commander after he arrives on the Commander's shuttle after the man has been killed and is retrieved before it is blown up.
- The Denouement: Lampshaded. The Doctor tells everyone to shut up because he's busy doing the grand denouement.
- Everybody Calls Him "Barkeep": The Doctor says he's the Commander, and is only referred to as such (although Eleanor tries to call him John).
- Expy / No Celebrities Were Harmed:
- Commentator Logan's accent and commentary style are clearly based on Sir Terry Wogan, former commentator on the Eurovision Song Contest for The BBC.
- The recurring Dark Space 8 officer in the latter two episodes is, for no reason at all, an impression of Michael Caine.
- Feigning Intelligence: Eleanor.
- Gratuitous French
- Ham-to-Ham Combat: Whenever the Doctor and Queen Angvia — played by the legendary Pat Quinn — are in a room together.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: When Nicky Newman meets Mel, she has no idea who he is. He loves this.
- I Love You Because I Can't Control You: This seems to be Angvia's reaction to the Doctor resisting her pheremones.
- Indy Ploy: The Doctor is cheerfully operating on this, starting with allowing everyone to think he was the commander because "it seemed like a good idea at the time". At one point he claims that he finally has conclusive evidence of a theory he's never mentioned before, until Mel gets him to admit he didn't have a theory until the evidence turned up.
- Intelligent Gerbil: The Pakhar are nearly a literal example, although they're more often compared to hamsters.
- Karma Houdini: The Doctor briefly considers just letting Eleanor go, but Mel is vehemently opposed to this, since her lying and negligence endangered countless people and directly resulted in many deaths. They turn her over to the police, but after three years she's out and in medical school, already making moves on her advisor.
- Large Ham: Pat Quinn, one of the few people in the universe who could give Sylvester McCoy a true run for his money.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: All over the episode.
- Mel and the Doctor both instantly know something's very wrong once they realise the Doctor's about to shatter the series' No Hugging, No Kissing policy.
- Mel cuts the ending credits short when she realises there's still a few chunks of plot left to be resolved.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: The theme music starts up when we think the mystery is solved and everything is done! It isn't. However, Mel realizes that the mystery isn't quite solved and the music quickly fizzles out.
- Earlier, the Doctor gives a Rousing Speech about how the show must go on. As his speech reaches its climax, and Sylvester McCoy waxes Churchillian, the music swells triumphantly — until Mel punctures it all like a balloon.
- Lighter and Softer: Since the episode takes place early on in Seven's story arc, he's much closer to his goofy first appearance in "Time And The Rani" than to his later status of The Chessmaster during Ace's storyline. This includes him making things up as he goes along and a constant use of Malapropers (although Mel tells him to cut that out). Interestingly, it's chronologically the last appearance of the "silly" Seventh Doctor, sending that era out on a high note. From here on, it's increasingly serious episodes - chronologically, "The Fires of Vulcan" comes next, then "Dragonfire", Mel's last episode.
- Marshmallow Hell: Queen Angvia wastes no time in seducing the Doctor and rather unceremoniously shoves his face into her chest. He protests. A bit. At first.
- Mistaken for Special Guest
- Mundane Made Awesome: The Doctor plays spoons and WOWS the crowd.
- Named After Somebody Famous: Fassbinder's name is a reference to the German cinematic auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, since he's a parody of a character called Bergman.
- Never Bareheaded: It's easy to miss, but the Doctor is apparently still wearing his hat even after he changes into a Dark Space Eight uniform.
- Never One Murder: The killer began killing to try and derail the Song Competition/ peace conference, but soon had to start killing others to cover his tracks. The first indication that it could be Loozely is that Logan is killed soon after he boasts of actually building a translator that can decipher Golosian language.
- No Hugging, No Kissing: Lampshaded all over the place.
- Oblivious to Love: Mel takes a while to understand that Nicky has taken a bit of a shine to her, and once she does she can't quite believe it, since all she'd done was speak to him normally and then give him a bit of a dressing down.
- Out-of-Character Alert: The fact that the Doctor even considers a romantic encounter worries him and Mel once he has a chance to think about it.
- Peace Conference: The plot of the story takes place away from one. Subverted when it turns out the Song Contest is the Peace Conference.
- Performance Anxiety: Nicky has a bad case of this. The bomb in his stomach certainly isn't helping.
- Poor Communication Kills: Lampshaded. Mel tells the Doctor that if he just told her what his plan was, this mystery would be solved a lot faster. He reveals that he didn't really have much of a plan.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "This is Logan, signing off. *drops dead*"
- Pun: One of the Pakhar is named Geri. Pakhar are a species of rodent-like aliens. (Although this is also consistent with previous Pakhar naming; the first one to appear in the Doctor Who New Adventures was called Keri - which was also a pun, on Australian media mogul Kerry Packer.)
- Red Alert: There's a Big Red Button that's easily pressed that causes this to go off.
- Red Herring: Multiple ones as to the identity of the murderer.
- Professor Fassbinder's scientific results don't add up and he thinks Mel is snooping around too much because he's worried people will realise he's an incompetent drunk.
- Dr Harcourt conveniently fails to cure anyone and might be smarter than she looks - on the contrary, she's actually not a qualified doctor at all.
- Logan is building something in secret - it's a translator for Gholos.
- Gholos or Angvia might be using the Song Contest as a cover to sabotage the peace treaty - no, they're both on the level.
- Serious Business: The Song contest.
- Shout-Out:
- The title is one to 1969 Eurovision winner "Boom Bang-a-Bang", performed by Lulu.
- The favor
◊ to Power Rangers Lost Galaxy is paid back in the form of a location named the "Zordon Nebula". - "He's dead, John!"
- The Doctor actually calls out for phasers to be set on stun. He gets corrected. It is laser after all.
- Mel calls the Doctor out for playing Poirot.
- The Doctor, at one point, says nonchalantly "Crisis? What crisis?" This is a reference to a particularly infamous headline mocking the aparent indifference of British Prime Minister James Callaghan to an economic meltdown in the '70s.
- The Doctor rattles off all the possible suspects, ending up with "Old Mr Jenkins, the janitor."
- Angvia, besides being a Significant Anagram, may be named after the planet of origin of a similarly well-endowed race of alien women from Cult Classic British sci-fi comedy Zeta One.
- When Mel rattles off her list of 'things the Doctor will never do', they're a mixture of Terrence Dicks's novelisation series bible and the things that Tom Baker listed off as things the Doctor would never do in the famous interview where he explained on television why he didn't feel the Doctor was an 'acting role'.
- Sssssnake Talk: See The Cameo.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The solemn anthem of future Planet Earth is... "I Will Survive".
- Which is also a Call-Back to a throwaway line in the Improv Credits Gag of "The One Doctor".
- Deliberately averted elsewhere. This was the first Big Finish Doctor Who story to use the era-appropriate theme tune; all previous stories had used the seventies version of the theme associated with Jon Pertwee's stories due to concerns it would be too expensive to clear the "correct" versions, but the writers felt the 70s theme would not be appropriate with the comedic nature of this story. The use of the "correct" theme went down well, leading all future releases to have era-appropriate themes.
- Sting: An electronic organ chord plays whenever a character is declared dead, or something similarly dramatic is announced, whether they are actually dead or not. Played for straight melodrama to begin with, but by the end is a fully-fledged gag.The Doctor: Someone in this room... is a murderer.*dun DUUUNN*Mel: We know. Just tell us who it is, will you?
- The Stinger: One final log entry from Eleanor; now a med student working to actually become a doctor.
- Strongly Worded Letter: Golos is - according to his translator - constantly threatening to write one.
- Summation Gathering: The Doctor arranges one. And blatantly stretches it out in the best Poirot tradition.Doctor: Well, now. I suppose you're all wondering why I called you all here.
Mel: To unmask the murderer, surely.
Doctor: Well ... yes. Yes, right then. Well, I've pressure-locked the doors and there are guards posted outside, so nobody can leave this drawing room.
Mel: Ready room. - Take Our Word for It: The Miss Pangent commentator says this.
- Techno Babble: Subverted to hell and straight back.
- Teen Idol: Nicky Newman is the universe's most famous one.
- Time Bomb: One in Nicky Newman's stomach which will go off when his anxiety gets to be to much.
- Title Drop: The Doctor shouts out the title when explaining what will happen if they can't deactivate the bomb.
- Translation with an Agenda: Loozly stays at Gholos' side at every moment, translating his extremely alien language. The problem is he's heavily against the peace treaty Gholos has been sent to negotiate, and he's actually been torturing the diplomat at every point and translating his pleas for help as bravado and threats, in an effort to sink it.
- Translator Buddy: Though it's not a buddy role, the entity Gholos needs an interpreter.
- Trilling Rs: Pat Quinn's admirable effort to out-ham Sylvester McCoy.
- Two Guys and a Girl: The deceased captain, Fassbender and Eleanor have shades of this, as well as the Power Trio. Too bad that two of the three are almost completely incompetent and the third is dead.
- The Unintelligible: The entity Golos.
- And the Cephalopod singers.
- Verbal Tic: Gerri tut tut tut tuts like a mouse.
- Why Am I Ticking?: Essentially applies, save that the subject didn't know there was a bomb inside him.
- World of Ham
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: The Doctor acts as though everything is resolved now that the killer has been caught and they just need to find the TARDIS... and then Mel insists that they find the bomb that could be used to blow up the station.
