Arrangements for War

Main Range #57

Released: May 2004

Listened: 7/2/20

Evelyn’s last appearance (for a while) in this project is a dark one, but also a love story. After the events of “Project: Lazarus,” Evelyn wants a break, but she also doesn’t want to mope around the Eye of Orion. She wants to go someplace that’s vibrant and full of things she can learn, but also doesn’t have to get involved and save the world. You’d think that wouldn’t be too hard to find, but the Doctor fails spectacularly. They arrive on the planet Vilag, which has three major nations. The first two are at war, but that’s about to be resolved by an arranged marriage of nobility, which is a good thing, because they’ll need to be united in the face of an alien invasion the Doctor knows is coming in about a month. (Why Evelyn thinks they’ll be gone by then, I don’t know.) Of course, the Doctor promptly screws up the arranged marriage (inadvertently, but still) and Evelyn falls for Rossiter, the leader of the third nation, and her feelings are reciprocated. There’s an awful lot of talk about what one is willing to do for love, and accepting of consequences. Oddly, the male half of the arranged marriage never appears, so we don’t know his opinion on the matter. Typically of early Big Finish, there’s more talk than action -- there’s a war and an alien invasion going on, but most of that is in the background. Evelyn does an awful lot of introspection, about the end of her teaching career, and facing mortality. This story and the previous are the only ones in which her heart condition really comes up, and she seems to be taking it quite seriously. The scenes between Evelyn and Gabriel Woolf as Rossiter are excellent, and it would make sense for Evelyn to stay behind here, although she doesn’t, as far as we know. There’s a lot of needless death, and the Doctor has a pretty powerful “Time Lord Victorious” moment, proving to Evelyn that he does care about events around him. The only serious flaws in the story are some political leaders who are way too idealistic and moral (even the bad guys), an alien threat that’s no more than a bogeyman, and rather unrealistic depictions of how simple it is to change the direction of a nation’s entire military. Emotionally, though, it’s a very strong story, and I agree with Craig Brawley that this is a very appropriate ending to Evelyn’s story (at least for the time being).