Recap / Big Finish Doctor Who 256 Tartarus

63BC. Following the overthrow of Catiline, Cicero and his wife retire to the coastal town of Cumae, safe from the threats of Rome.

But when a stranger and his companions arrive at Cicero’s villa, new dangers lie in wait and Cicero finds himself plunged into a realm of gods and monsters.

His only hope of returning home lies with a man known as the Doctor. But can Cicero trust him?

Tartarus contains examples of:

• The Ace: Marc is hugely competent despite being an uneducated slave, being an excellent fighter and tactician, extremely intelligent and intuitive, and having a perfect memory. It all serves to make him the perfect target for the Tartarus ship.
• Anachronism Stew: Tartarus is one giant land of anachronisms, cobbling together various myths and legends from across Earth history, as well as films and video games.
• Artistic License – History: Tegan makes a comment about Caesar from her perspective of knowing Caesar as the dictator of Rome and first Emperor in all but name. Cicero seems a little befuddled, not quite knowing who Caesar is, until he finally says, "oh, he's in the military". In reality, while not yet all-powerful (it wouldn't be until 60 BC that the First Triumvirate was formed, and not until the '50s that his conquest of Gaul put him on a track to dictatorship), he was very well known to Cicero. Caesar was Pontifex Maximus (chief priest) at the time, and was enrolled in the Senate because of it, and so was a key member of the debates over what to do with the Catilinarian conspirators ^note Caesar advocated keeping them in perpetual imprisonment, a solution that was impractical in Republican Rome, and was even targeted with rumors that he was a conspirator himself.
  • Also Marc states that slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write. This is not true, given that many slaves were employed as scribes, including Cicero's secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro, who was very likely born into slavery. It's probably more accurate to say that the Romans didn't see any point to teaching slaves literacy unless their duties required it.
  • The Doctor is wearing a toga throughout the drama, and he has also gotten Tegan and Nyssa to wear them too, on the grounds that their usual MO of just wearing their usual clothes and hoping for the Weirdness Censor to kick in wasn't going to work with Cicero's attention to detail and his compulsive habit of writing down anything out of the ordinary. Except Nyssa and Tegan should NOT be wearing togas. That was restricted to male Roman citizens. They'd be wearing a somewhat similar garment called a stola. The only women who would be wearing togas in ancient Rome would be prostitutes... and woe betide the first man to mistake Tegan Jovanka for one. Not to mention, Cicero wouldn't likely be wearing one either. That'd be like wearing a very formal three-piece business suit to what appears to be a casual dinner party. ^note In Real Life, the Romans actually hated the things as they were hot, itchy and mobility-restricting in the way a large woolen shawl wrapped around the body with no fasteners has a tendency to be. They were mandatory in the Forum and the Senate, but otherwise, any Roman with common sense would try to avoid wearing them as much as possible.^note The Doctor gets a pass because, well, he's The Doctor and he's worn worse...
• Been There, Shaped History: Well, film history, at least... The Doctor admits he actually served as an extra in Jason and the Argonauts.
• Broken Pedestal: Cicero, for the Doctor, though by the end they have found a mutual respect for each other.
• Call-Back:
  • The Doctor has met a Roman Emperor before.
  • Nyssa mentions that the Doctor has barely mentioned Adric since he died.
    • For that matter, while not explicitly named, it is made clear that the ghost that The Doctor saw during his Secret Test of Character was that of Adric.
  • The Doctor remembers having once been a dab hand on the recorder.
• Call-Forward:
  • Tegan says "veni, vidi, vici" to Cicero, who can't understand the language. Something similar would later happen to Donna.
• Changed My Jumper: For once this is averted, as the Doctor is well aware of Cicero's habit of documenting everything even mildly curious that happens to him, and doesn't want to leave anything to chance in case they end up messing with the timelines. To avoid arousing any undue suspicion, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan all wear appropriate togas throughout this story.
• Comically Missing the Point: At one point, gripped by paranoia, Cicero accuses The Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa of being part of the Catilinarian Conspiracy. Tegan retorts that she's not, because she's not even from "Catilinaria" ^note For those who don't understand the joke, the conspiracy was named after its prime figure, Lucius Sergius Catilina, whose name is often Anglicized to "Catiline".
• Continuity Nod: Tegan still gets very upset whenever she suspects that a group of people are being oppressed or mistreated, as she does here with the slaves.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Justified through some handy technobabble from the Doctor, though Tegan remains dubious.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Exposing Tegan, from (almost) contemporary Earth, to the slave-heavy 63BC.
• Downer Ending: While visiting Cicero to urge him not to send his letter about his adventure, Cicero asks about Marc. The Doctor tries to be evasive and lies to Cicero, something the former Consul sees through immediately. He asks again if Marc is safe. The Doctor has to admit that, no, Marc's story did not end well.
• Deus ex Machina: Lampshaded by name when Tartarus sends the Harpies to carry everyone back to safety out of nowhere.
  The Doctor: Very convenient, really, having the gods provide the solution right at the last minute!
• Easy Amnesia: Cicero gets knocked on the head by a convenient chunk of rock in the end, completely wiping his memory of all the fantastical events of the story.
• Fan Boy: The Doctor practically vibrates with excitement upon meeting Cicero.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The keys for Tartarus' temple.
• Hard Light: The projections of the fantastical world the crew finds themselves in are this, being described as "holograms, only real".
• Humongous Mecha: Talos, giant bronze statue.
• Intercontinuity Crossover: Cicero and Terentia are reprised by Samuel Barnett and Laura Riseborough, who played the roles in Big Finish's purely historical Cicero series.
• Ironic Echo: Cicero's Badass Boast of facing down most of his enemies "with only a sharp turn of phrase" comes back to bite him.
• I Was Never Here: The Doctor returns to Cicero's villa at the tail end of the drama, realizing that if there was even a chance that Cicero regained his memory, he'd write a letter about the experience. The Doctor sternly advises Cicero to not send the letter to Atticus, to which Cicero replies he had written the letter simply to get the memories out on paper to release them, and that after reading it once, he was going to destroy it.
• Jumped at the Call: Marc is thrilled to join the TARDIS crew, even though the Doctor didn't exactly invite him.
• Lampshade Hanging: Upon learning they are near Mount Vesuvius, Tegan is shocked to discover that they're not there on "Volcano Day", noting that whenever they land somewhere of historical significance, it's usually on the day in history that made it significant. Of course, the Doctor does end up visiting Pompeii eventually. Twice.
• Layman's Terms: Tegan gets to be the one who does the explaining instead of getting explained to, for once.
  Cicero: What is that?
  The Doctor: The maintenance panel for a battle droid.
  Cicero: Come again?
  Nyssa: The on/off switch for a giant robot.
  Cicero: Nope, you've still lost me.
  Tegan: It's where the magic happens. Muck around with that, and Bronze Chops here falls flat on his back.
  Cicero: Finally! Someone talking sense.
• Obligatory Joke: Tegan decides to get it out of the way early.
  Marc: Wine, mistresses?
  Tegan: I'll have some. You know what they say, when in Rome!
  Nyssa: We're in Cumae.
  Tegan: Are you gonna be like this all night?
• Odd Friendship: One develops between Tegan and Cicero, who is very unused to women being anything but demure, and Tegan is anything but demure.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted by Nyssa and Tegan who pretend to both be called Claudia, names being fairly scarce in Roman times, and women rarely having them at all. Tegan is, naturally, less than amused by this.
  • Crosses over with Shown Their Work, as while Roman men got the full set of praenomen ^note Marcus, for instance, nomen ^note Tullius and optional cognomen ^note Cicero, women indeed only got a feminine version of the nomen, no matter how many daughters were born to the same family ^note It's fortunate for history that Cicero had only one daughter, so that historians, who have been baffled and annoyed by this practice for centuries, don't have to guess out which "Tullia" did what.
• Only the Pure of Heart: Marc is unaffected by the "shades of the dead" because he doesn't have any blood on his hands, while Cicero has executed many people in his time and the Doctor is confronted by the ghost of Adric. Tegan and Nyssa also qualify for opening one of the temples.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Who else but the Mouth on Legs would find a way to get kicked out of a party after being left alone for ten minutes?
• Real-Life Relative: Marc is played by George Watkins, Peter Davison's nephew.
• Sapient Ship: Tartarus herself, one of the biggest Warp Ships in existence.
• Secret Test of Character: The entire realm that Tartarus has created is one of these, meant to find suitable humans with initiative, drive and character that could serve as leaders for an alien race.
  • The "shades" are explicitly called out as one within the larger test. Tartarus says that because Cicero and The Doctor saw shades of those they had killed or allowed to die when they could have saved them ^note In Cicero's case, the ghosts of Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura and the other Catilinarian conspirators whom Cicero had executed in an act that was noted to be controversial at the time, for The Doctor, it was Adric, they were both disqualified to be potential leaders of the Zolf, as they had unjust blood on their hands.
• Shout-Out: Tegan points out many similarities between the events of the story and Jason and the Argonauts.
• Squee: Tegan gushes over the tiny dragons, cooing at them like they were birds... at least until one breathes fire at her.
• Stepford Smiler: Nyssa suspects the Doctor might have a bit of this going on, noting that meeting Cicero is one of the few times she's seen him genuinely excited since Adric died, though he always maintains his amiable persona.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Cicero is deployed to do this. And succeeds brilliantly.
• Techno Babble:
  The Doctor: Unless I'm mistaken, it's a geo-synthesizing, hyper-dimensional metasphere.
  Tegan: Oh, right.
• Understatement: Nyssa says that Tegan has known the Doctor for as long as she has, "more or less". Given the amount of audio adventures Nyssa had with the Doctor in the ten real world years before Janet Fielding signed on with Big Finish, the reality is definitely on the "lesser" end of the scale.
• Video Game Geography: The Doctor notices that all the trees are laid out in a grid, one of many clues that Tartarus is not what it appears.
• Voiceover Letter: The Framing Device is Cicero writing a letter to Atticus about his adventures.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Tegan assumes at first that they've come to Cumae to free all the slaves. The Doctor and Nyssa point out that slaves are an everyday part of Roman life at this point in history, and they can't do much to change it, much as they might wish to.
• You Sound Familiar: Cicero's actor, Samuel Barnett, also plays Norton Folgate in the Torchwood audio series. Tracy-Ann Oberman is also known for playing Yvonne Hartman in both the Torchwood audios and on television in "Army of Ghosts".