Big Finish Audio Drama #35, 2002
The words we speak make us who we are. It’s got an amazing concept, this audio drama. I really like the first half but when it gets to ish, it all goes out the window as the ideas and concepts and what exactly is going on slips right through my fingers. It’s like studying Russian—I can’t picture the environment, the words, so I have difficulty understanding the whole. And I’m a look at the whole first then get to the pieces pulled in to make sense of everything. And since I can’t grasp exactly what ish exactly is or how it’s really a threat. It’s a more complex version of the villain in Whispers of Terror, more academic instead of political and more of an alien environment, a conference on words for linguiphiles.
<spoiler section>
Ahhh. Patterns of energy left over from the creation of the galaxy—that is the enemy in this one! The mythology of a people on a planet is that we’re part of that first word. The ish. It collected Book. So why is Osefa dead? Why did she commit suicide? She realized the ish would destroy Book? The threat of ish is that it’s too powerful and it’s alive, bending others to its will. Lexisphere. The inexplicability is in the lexicon and trying to get out. The ish is taking over. I think the purpose of the ish is to do what? That would make the story’s direction clearer perhaps. And Warren’s attempt to help the ish take over is part of his attempts to add chaos to the system.
<spoilers done!>
The atmosphere of the story is interesting. Lexical transcendence is a theory in linguistics? Lexical transcendentalism is the search for the longest word in the cosmos. The longer the word, the fewer meanings because its not used at often. The longest word, the omniverbum, exists as a singularity of existence. No one who’s found it has survived to tell about it because reality warps around it.
Osefa is trying to find the omniverbum, in the quest to put all words into her dictionary. Thus all the trouble mounts. And just why does Peri go into the Lexisphere? To investigate the noise inside but it never seems safe to do things she does. hehehe. The life of the companion… The ish is looking for something larger on the inside than the outside. This whole story is larger on the inside! Maybe that’s why it can be difficult to understand the purpose and direction of the story. For me, anyway. Getting tangled up in the details!
Transgalactic babelmasters! Hehehe. Douglas Adams would be proud. Uncovered the hollowness behind language? I write as I listen and I would say it gets confusing but that’s an understatement, I’m certain of that. Rather than face utter meaninglessness, Osefa commits suicide. There is always hope, isn’t there? Warren wants words to play with us. Released on the universe by Cawdry. Heck, the story is a mish-mash so why can’t I write as such? Language gone mad! The poetry of the moment released into the universe as a black hole of language, warping the universe around it with meanings and language of the universe. Architecture of the language.
I did vacillate between 3 and 4 jelloids for this tale. I settled on four despite my reservations about the pieces of the threat not really jelling as a whole. The story overall is just too good.
Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant
writer: Phil Pascoe
director: Nicholas Briggs