Line #57 Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho052Scherzo


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/71f5d81dd49b8281f4731a4c35a34e78.png]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:[[ShipSinking Every good story has to come to an end...]]]]
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4	A PsychologicalHorror BottleEpisode by Creator/RobertShearman. This story marks the beginning of the Divergent Universe arc that continues up to "The Next Life". It is also one of the rare main range stories that have no other characters other than The Doctor, his companion, a dead thing and the MonsterOfTheWeek. Even the TARDIS is missing after the characters leave it.
5
6	It also contains one of the most [[ShipTease emotional exchanges]] between The Doctor and his companion in any ''Doctor Who'' medium.
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8	------
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10	[[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho054TheNaturalHistoryOfFear Once upon a time]], there was a king who forbade all that offended him. First dissidence, then the rise of the waves, the wind, and finally music. But life without music is torture, so he sent messengers to the land of the dead -- by hanging, by knife, by slow poison -- to retrieve music back. When that failed, he bled himself empty to go fetch music by himself. But upon returning, music had seen too much of the other side, and destroyed the kingdom in anger.
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12	-------
13
14	In the aftermath of [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho033Neverland "Neverland"]] and [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho050Zagreus "Zagreus"]], the Eighth Doctor finds himself in an unknown part of the Divergent universe. His time senses are painfully rendered useless, his memory is still recovering from Zagreus, and worst of all, Charley is in the TARDIS with him, making his attempted HeroicSacrifice for her in "Neverland" completely pointless. Shadows have infected the console room. The outside is searing, blinding light, a piercing screech, a dulling of the senses. The Doctor forces Charley to make the choice for both of them, and they head outside, into the unknown. The TARDIS vanishes. Charley's senses are numbed; she's blinded, overcome by the piercing light, and more scared than she's ever been. The Doctor experiences the same thing, with many more senses than the regular human ones suddenly being dulled or cut off completely. Blind and terrified, they walk along, hand in hand.
15
16	Charley feels it's been over half an hour since the Doctor spoke to her. He tells her it's been over 38 hours of continuous silent walking. To stave off madness, and with his time senses removed, he'd been keeping silent to count his number of heart beats relative to his footsteps and deduce the passing of time. Charley can feel a glass wall on either side of them, but the feeling is uncertain and dulled, and there is no smell, no taste, no hunger, no exhaustion, no pain. Just the walking. They stumble over an amorphous mess of flesh and bared organs: something dead. The Doctor uses Charley's brooch -- which she once got from her mother as a family heirloom -- to dissect it. A voice cries "Help me". They walk on.
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18	There is still the giant elephant in the room: [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho033Neverland the Doctor told Charley that he loved her]]. He clarifies that he meant the kind of love that comes with a HeroicSacrifice. The kind of love that would have allowed him to die so she could live, not the kind of love that would require difficult conversations on the topic. He mocks her desire to talk about love as though it would be more important than their impending death. And he tells her he would never love her the way she wants him to. The strange voice repeats their words back to them, picking fragments of the most heartfelt anger and fear from their conversation. It strings their words together into hollow phrases.
19
20	They stumble on another dead creature, slightly less amorphous. The Doctor realises that, with their hunger dulled, they'll need to remember to eat. Using the brooch, he cuts the creature into chunks of food -- and as they eat with absolute horror, their sight returns just slightly, and their senses are briefly returned to them. With the blinding light coming back as soon as they're done eating, they walk on in the glass corridor again. The Doctor still doesn't want to talk about love. But he's angry. Because his big HeroicSacrifice was all for nothing, now that Charley has refused to live a normal life without him. And Charley has burdened him with her own presence.
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22	The Doctor is starting to believe that the Time Lords may have been right all along. They always told him that his companions weren't really his friends: they were just reminders of his own mortality.
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24	Weeks, or possibly months later. The dead food has become fish-like, then reptilian, and finally mammalian. The two feed, and each time they do, the disembodied voice around them attacks their throats. It nibbles on their flesh and blood and feeds on their sounds. They let it. All they can do is live on, find meaning, imagine some grand scheme or evil villain that's toying with them, a puzzle to be solved. They struggle to avoid feeling HappinessInSlavery. The voice imitates them and the sounds of the TARDIS, but still can't convey meaning.
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26	One day, walking hand in hand, they realise that they too have evolved. Their hands have become fused together. Their blood vessels have connected, their feelings transfer freely through both of their bodies. The food is humanoid now, delicate, and when their sight briefly returns a little so they can eat, they see that it has Charley's face. The Doctor begins to eat regardless. But Charley can't bear the thought, because it reminds her of what her brooch symbolises: one day, she was to give it to her own daughter, who would in turn pass it on to ''her'' daughter. And that can never happen now. She and the Doctor have become a single organism, forced to walk and feed and be fed on forever. Until they realise that the glass corridor is circular. The dead thing was always the same dead thing.
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28	The Doctor agrees that things have to come to an end now, and he decides to overfeed the sound creature on what it wants: the centre of their sound, their throats. Charley uses the brooch to slit the Doctor's throat, and the sound creature attacks it eagerly. But he can still speak, and although his vocal cords are bared and dangling out of his neck, they're protected from harm. The creature wants something else still. The Doctor tells Charley that he ''does'' love her, and that they can be together -- in fact, that they could become a perfect single being. They push their hands together, into each other's arms. They push their bodies together and feel their skins melt into each other. They push their mouths together and silence themselves, becoming one person.
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30	Neither can bear it well, but their hallucinations and memories allow the sound creature to finally express itself. It considers itself their daughter, created when the TARDIS first vworped in and caused the very first sound waves to enter the environment. The creation of sound caused the dead organism to become out-evolved, replaced instantly by the superior sound creature. In order for the sound to survive, its parents must now also die, so it politely asks the Doctor and Charley to kill themselves. The Doctor refuses at first, but he can't explain why he'd make a HeroicSacrifice for Charley, but not for his own offspring. So he relents, seeing no way out -- but in the end, it's Charley who refuses life to her own daughter. Being a mother is all she ever wanted, but not like this, not if she could one day have another, better existence. The sound creature, hearbroken, falls silent.
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32	The glass wall is easily broken with their combined strength. The Doctor toys with the idea of evolving further, becoming ''everything'' they want, but they can't bear to be live like this any longer. The Doctor and Charley are able to push away from each other and become two persons again. Hand in hand, they step out into the new world.
33	----
34	!!Tropes:
35	* {{Absurdism}}: This episode would fit the genre to a T if it weren't so utterly depressing. It takes every single trope of {{Absurdism}}, but plays them all entirely straight.
36	* AGodAmI: The Doctor, near the end.
37	%%* AnguishedDeclarationOfLove
38	* AnotherDimension: The Doctor has gone into the Divergent universe, where time doesn't pass at all.
39	* ArcWords: For the entire Divergent arc: revolution, reincarnation, evolution, death and rebirth, becoming food for other lifeforms, reptilian into mammalian, fluid consciousness between multiple beings, mother, spinning in a circle, breaking free of the cycle, the next life and the beyond.
40	* AuthorAppeal: Robert Shearman once again uses the themes he wrote about in "The Holy Terror" and [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho029TheChimesOfMidnight "The Chimes Of Midnight"]].
41	* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: This episode, and the two next episodes, give Charley exactly what she wants in a few very different ways: to be a mother. She'll live to regret that wish.
42	* BigDamnKiss: The single most horrifying use of the trope in all of ''Series/DoctorWho''.
43	* BizarreAlienSenses: Timelords can sense, hear and taste time in all forms.
44	%%* BodyHorror:
45	* BottleEpisode: The story features a MinimalistCast (the Doctor, Charley, and the Sound Creature (which is voiced by the Doctor and Charley's voice actors to boot)), takes place almost entirely in a single location (the experimentation chamber), is a slow, characterization-filled episode (the Doctor and Charley spend a lot of time discussing their relationship and how they respectively understand what "love" means), and even uses minimal effects for an audio play (the soundscape for most of the story is just a low-key DroneOfDread). "Bottle" can also be said to be quite literally in play, seeing how the experimentation chamber Doctor and Charley are trapped inside is essentially a huge, circular test-tube made of a glass-like material.
46	%%* BrightIsNotGood
47	* BrokenBridge: The TARDIS vanishes after the Doctor and Charley depart.
48	* CaptainObvious:
49	-->'''The Doctor''': [[BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind How did you get inside my head]]?\
50	''' The Sound Creature''': Through your ear, obviously.
51	* CreepyChild: The Sound Creature, oddly enough. It regards The Doctor and Charley as its parents.
52	* DarkerAndEdgier: One of the very, ''very'' few episodes of ''Series/DoctorWho'' that are almost entirely devoid of comedy. Compared to "Scherzo", even [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E10Midnight "Midnight"]] has more light-hearted moments. It doesn't even have Shearman's usual BlackComedy absurdity like "Chimes..." or "The Holy Terror".
53	* DeterminedDefeatist: The Doctor has shades of this in this episode.
54	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: In order to protect themselves against the Sound Creature, the Doctor and Charley has to increasingly fuse their bodies together, until they essentially become one creature for a brief time. After the defeat of the Sound Creature, the two of them are now able to separate and escape from the experiment chamber, having obtained a greater understanding and acceptance of each other in the process. All the BodyHorror aside and with how integral the Doctor and Charley's discussions of love and relationships are to the story, the joining of their bodies can easily be seen as a metaphor for the more, well, ''physical'' aspects of being in love, and it is perhaps the closest the Doctor has ever gotten to having such a relationship with a companion.
55	%%* EldritchAbomination: The Sound Creature.
56	* EnergyBeings: One made of sound.
57	* EvolutionaryLevels: The Doctor's and Charley's [[ItMakesSenseInContext food]] goes through this. And the Sound Creature, in its own way.
58	* FateWorseThanDeath: The Doctor considers being stuck in a ClosedCircle with no escape as this.
59	* ForeShadowing: The Doctor mentions the [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho053TheCreedOfTheKromon Kromon]], [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho054TheNaturalHistoryOfFear the Censor]] and [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho055TheTwilightKingdom Major Koth]], probably due to the fact the concept of time doesn't exist in the Divergent universe.
60	** The fairy tale that the Doctor tells is only tangentially related to the episode. Things start falling into place when it's repeated [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho054TheNaturalHistoryOfFear later]].
61	** As will eventually be revealed in "The Next Life", the creature that the Doctor and Charley feed on will become sentient, follow them out, become a vessel for all of the Divergence and will cooperate with Zagreus.
62	* FusionDance: Of the Doctor and Charlie.
63	* HoldingHands: The CD cover image. Played for horror.
64	* IgnoredEpiphany / CassandraTruth: As the next episode reveals, there's indeed someone toying with them.
65	* InternalHomage: Much like in [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho029TheChimesOfMidnight The Chimes of Midnight]], written by the same author, The Doctor and Charley find themselves in a place where they can't see anything, and Charley can again smell - although erroneously, this time - a musty smell, and the smell of oranges and cake. Both Edward Grove and the Sound Creature say that they view the Doctor and Charley as its parents.
66	%%* IronicEcho
67	* JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind: The Doctor and Charley after [[TwoBeingsOneBody they merge.]] Later, the Sound Creature enters their minds through the [[OrificeInvasion ear.]]
68	* JumpScare: With most of the story's soundscape being a constant droning hum and conversations between Charley and the Doctor, the Sound Creature's sudden and massive outbursts of loud noise becomes this.
69	* KissOfDeath: A truly horrifying one.
70	* LightIsNotGood: Light is blinding, searing, horrible, and [[PaintingTheMedium represented by a sound]] that will ''hurt'' your ears.
71	* MedicalHorror: The Doctor thinks that slitting his throat will help them contact the Sound Creature. Charley slits it for him with her bloodied brooch. His vocal cords are laid bare, but he's still able to talk due to the creature's influence.
72	* MegaMicrobes: The first stage of the food creature.
73	%%* {{Narrator}}
74	* NestedStory: The narration at the start of the segments about the bad King.
75	%%* NothingIsScarier
76	* ObliviousToLove: The Doctor makes a good show of pretending not to understand why Charley wants to talk about it. He's terrified of the topic and just a bit disgusted by the idea.
77	* PaintingTheMedium: The blinding light is represented as a searing, high-pitched, constantly changing background screech for the better part of two episodes. It's direct psychological warfare on the audience.
78	* PeopleFarms: The Doctor and Charley.
79	%%* PsychologicalHorror
80	* SelfMadeOrphan: The Sound Creature tries to become one by convincing the Doctor and Charley to die for evolutionary purposes. It almost succeeds.
81	* SkewedPriorities: Poor, poor Charley.
82	* {{Squick}}: The only food source is a strange creature that keeps coming back, evolving each time it returns. Charley is less than thrilled to be eating raw alien meat, but adapts. It's when the creature returns the final time that The Doctor and Charley notice it has Charley's face. Charley is naturally freaked out by it.
83	* TimeDissonance: Sensory deprivation does that.
84	%%* TorturePorn
85	* TwoBeingsOneBody: The Doctor and Charlie after their FusionDance.
86	* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: What happened to the food? [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho064TheNextLife "The Next Life"]] reveals that ''it followed them out''.
87	* WhyWontYouDie: The Sound Creature asks why Charley and the Doctor won't die, so it can live.
88	* YouAreWorthHell: The reason Charley follows the Doctor to the Divergent Universe. The Doctor is less than thrilled by the gesture. At first, he flat-out refuses to believe that Charley is who she says she is, because he thinks Charley would never be cruel enough to inflict that sort of unwanted loyalty on him.

Context Recap / BigFinishDoctorWho052Scherzo