Audio review: The Mouthless Dead ( Companion Chronicles 10.1)
I adored this one, I had to review it immediately
Written by John Pritchard and available as part of The Second Doctor Volume 1 boxset here.
Summary: On a railway line waiting for a very special train, the Doctor enthuses about trains, Polly adopts a grieving woman, and Ben and Jamie bond and/or suffer emotionally manipulative war flashbacks together.
Good points:
For a story that is so centrally about war, writer John Pritchard has a magnificently unusual angle, setting it two years after the end of the first world war in the days leading up to the burial of the Unknown Soldier.  A less inventive writer  would understandably have had  the TARDIS land in the middle of a war-zone and used that as a springboard for a discussion on morality and mortality. Yet rather than planting them on a battlefield, Pritchard (who surprisingly doesn't have a lot of Who writing credits, with this audio being his first outing with the Second Doctor) lands the team on a  dark and dimly illuminated train-line and its attached signal box.
The setting is reminiscent of Dicken's The Signalman, and with the narration shared between Jamie and Polly, Jamie takes upon the bulk of explaining the surroundings. Clearly set early in his TARDIS career, Jamie's bewilderment and ignorance of technological advancements since his time lends a fantasy to his descriptions, the red signal light like a demon's eye and the 'breathing' of the stationary train like a sleeping giant, really lifting the audio from what could have been dull scene-setting.
While the main plot deals with a spooky and unsettling ghost story of sorts, with the theme at its heart revolving around the experience of loss and grief that follows war, there is a strong sense, particularly for the first half, that the story is quietly about Ben and Jamie and their own experiences of war. In Big Finish at least, there's been subtle references to Ben (and Polly's) childhood growing up in the shadow of WWII, and when the 'ghosts' appear to Ben manifested as the ghoulishly burnt dead from his father's own memories of conflict, there's the subtextual implication delivered pitch-perfect by Eliot Chapman of Ben's unspoken dread that, should another war happen in his lifetime, his role in the Navy means he'll suffer the same violent fate. On the other side of the coin, Jamie's visions aren't of panic and fear, but of a form of survivor's guilt, fleshed out with the accusing voices of the dead he left behind rotting on Culloden. Polly's off-hand comment that Jamie 'doesn't talk about the war' that implies more than it says. These moments lend a weight to both their characters, and after a quiet scene where Ben explains WWI and the symbolic significance to Jamie, a heavy discussion of war which is broken by Ben's teasing, there's a satisfying sense that even if they'd never say it aloud, they  understand each other better, finding themselves not too different after all.
The Doctor doesn't have a lot to do in this audio, giving poor Frazer Hines a likely welcome break from his double-act, but there's a sweet exchange between him and the Signalman where the Doctor enthuses about trains and signalman etiquette like the nerd he is, a gentle break from the heavier topics.
Anneke Wills  holds up the other end of the plot's focus, playing the empathetic Polly, sitting with and comforting a grieving woman on the tracks, convinced her lost fiancee is the unknown solider. She's always fantastic so I'm struggling to add anything else to her gentle and respectful performance.
Not so sure:
I'm not certain what to think about the eventual reveal that the TARDIS, damaged earlier from a collision with a train, is the cause of the ghostly figures, amplifying the grief of a nation focused on a single train into a manifestation of the memories associated with war and giving them substance. It's a thought out reason, and there are hints throughout the audio on a second listen that the TARDIS is an unknown quantity whose capacities aren't fully understood, operating on its own alien consciousness that even the Doctor can't always predict. The ease with which the Doctor arrives at, and the rest of them accept this explanation however, seemed a little rushed.
Until the final reveal of Michael's identity, I was unconvinced at his late-in-the-day introduction, given he seemed usefully impervious to the ghost's mental hold. It doesn't help that Wills, Chapman and Hines all take turns in delivering his lines, which means it was hard to get a clear idea of the character. His final role as part of what is quite a fairytale conclusion, with a 'power of love solves all', resolution was tearily sentimental without being overboard, and there wouldn't have been a better way to end an already dark story without a bit of brightness.
Other notes:
Jamie and the Doctor have another one of this story's emotional character moments at the story's end. It's a rather subdued conclusion, and oddly sad, with Jamie asking the Doctor whether the world is at peace following the world war he's just heard about, and the Doctor admitting that it is for the moment, but that this won't last for long, saying that 'only the dead have seen the end of war'. It's an honest but gloomy reflection from a time traveller who has seen so much conflict, and it  leaves the listener thinking even if it doesn't paint the most optimistic of pictures.
Conclusion:  Ben and Jamie's experiences of war, and the reunion of a couple torn apart by conflict, provide an emotional heart to this story of  grief and loss. 8/10