Neon Reign

Jenny #1.3

Released: 5 June 2018

Listened: 5/18/23

This one is written by Christian Brassington, who’s new to writing for Big Finish, but he’s a friend of both David and Georgia Tennant. Unfortunately, this one is kind of a miss. Jenny and Noah end up on the planet Kamshassa, a colony of a sect of the Kamishi, introduced in the UNIT series. The Kamishi are unfortunate Japanese stereotypes to start with, and it doesn’t get much better here. The colony is an autocracy, where the men are both coddled and drug-addicted, and the women do all the work. It’s all ruled over by a Dragon Lord who wants things this way. That leads to a whole bunch of hackneyed gender politics, which could be a decent theme for a Jenny story, but it’s done in the most obvious way possible. About the only interesting thing here is that we get some more clues to Noah’s identity, although why we should find them here is anybody’s guess. The baddy has a whole pile of exposition leading into the twist, which honestly isn’t hard to see coming. It’s a nice try at being atmospheric, but it doesn’t come off.