Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#224a. Alien Heart ~ 7/10

◆ An Introduction

Nicholas Briggs rightly pointed out that TV narratives have changed a lot over the years, and that we’re used to stories being a lot quicker nowadays. The double-bill format worked so well throughout the final days of the ‘Monthly Range’ because it forced writers to tighten their narratives and cut out all the unnecessary padding.

The TARDIS crew are about to materialise inside of an abandoned space-station, infested with mutant spider-like creatures. But arachnophobia will be the least of their worries when the Daleks come out to play!

◆ Publisher’s Summary

In the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa stumble across a trail of ten destroyed worlds, all of them obliterated by means of some utterly monstrous but utterly unknown device. The planet Traxana would seem to be next in line to suffer the same fate. But when the TARDIS lands on an outpost on Traxana's moon, Nyssa is carried away by a tide of giant green arachnoids, leaving the Doctor behind…

And the coming menace is closer than he thinks.

◆ The Fifth Doctor

Steve Cole spends so much time having the characters spewing tech jargon that any notion of characterisation goes straight out the window. That’s one major disadvantage with these bite-size adventures.

Davison delivers a great performance, in spite of the bare bones material he’s been given.

The Doctor is on the moonbase because he is a concerned citizen of the universe. He doesn’t work for anybody.

◆ Nyssa

Character development clearly wasn’t high on the priorities list. Nyssa spends most of the runtime plodding about in some pretty unremarkable caves.

Kudos to Sarah Sutton for not just phoning in her performance. Luckily, the next episode will give her some more meaty material.

Nyssa is described as having dark, curly hair and being terribly nice.

◆ Story Recap

The Doctor and Nyssa are appalled to discover that the planet Fel Canto has been totally eradicated from the temporal fabric of the universe: it never existed. Ten other worlds in the same constellation have suffered a similar fate. All of them erased from the timelines, with unstable matter being all that remains.

This trail of devastation leads them to Traxana, where an Earth Empire outpost on the planet’s moon appears to have been infested by mutant spider-like creatures that can naturally generate time spillages.

The Daleks are responsible for the decimated planets, for wiping out untold numbers of living creatures, but what is their endgame here?

◆ Much Ado About Nothing

Shall we discuss the elephant in the room? Nothing actually happens in this episode, and it only exists to establish the second and far superior half of this release.

◆ Sound Design

I’ve adored almost every production that Fox and Yason have worked on, which is why my expectations were high going into ‘Alien Heart’. Unfortunately, their sound design here seems rather basic: the story jumps between an uninspiring space-station and some endless caves.

The TARDIS shudders, colliding with a spatio-temporal anomaly: circuitry sparking as it attempts to avoid an onslaught of trans-dimensional shockwaves. Hundreds of “Cell Spiders” scuttle along the flooring of the outpost, dragging Nyssa along with them. Water drips from stalactites inside of the cavernous mines on Traxana. The heartbeat of a Dalek.

◆ Music

The score is my favourite part of this entire episode. Twinkling synthesisers paired with a stunningly dramatic piano track. This is the kind of quality I expect from Fox and Yason.

Interestingly, it reminded me of the music CnC Labs used in the Tiberium Wars mod, The Forgotten.

◆ Conclusion

“Greetings from planet Earth. My gun’s bigger than yours.”

The Daleks want to stop Traxana spinning on its axis by freezing the planet’s core in time, thus causing thousand mile an hour winds to scour the world down to its bedrock. Everyone would be wiped out instantly, and they intend to make this plan happen by using genetically engineered “Cell Spiders”.

‘Alien Heart’ is the second time Steve Cole has written for the Daleks and it was perfectly fine. I can see the makings of a really good story here, buried underneath stacks of technobabble. Had this been a full four part adventure, one which allowed us to see more of Traxana than its endless network of mining tunnels, then this could have been great.

This story is average, and gets completely forgotten about when you realise how good the other half of this double-bill is.