MR 067: Dreamtime

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This is the most incomprehensible garbage story I've ever heard. I still don't really know what happened in it, but I'll try to piece it together. Something something "reject modernity, embrace tradition."

This is the best I can piece together the plot:

There's a city floating through space where there are statues of nightmare people. Some aliens, the Galyari from Sandman, try to land on the city to trade. Which seems like a terrible idea. The statues are actually people trapped in some incomprehensible concept called the dreamtime. The Doctor gets pulled into it which sends him back in time while Ace and Hex wander around and try not to die.

The Doctor is in the distant past where he convinces the person organizing the city going up into space to allow an ethnic minority to live in the city when that guy just wanted to let them die on the surface. And then an hour of who the f**k knows what happens where the Doctor is possessed by evil spirits or whatever. And then he comes back and figures out that he caused the evil spirits to arrive because he pushed for progressivism.

You see, by getting the guy to accept an ethnic minority in their space city, the evil spirits are mad. They've embraced modernity and corrupted/forgotten their traditions. Like women inhabiting a traditional male space. Therefore the ancestoral spirits are angry and are trying to pull everyone into the dreamtime and destroy the city. So the Doctor SIDES WITH THE SPIRITS (LOL WTF) and helps reset the entire city back to a more traditional state and reject those evil modern concepts like gender equality and multiculturalism so that the spirits will be satisfied.

That's the best I can do, and I'm still not 100% sure that's accurate. Besides being incomprehensible, the parts that I could comprehend were still extremely bad. This is Hex's first trip in the TARDIS and we're doing whatever the f**k this is. This is like when C'Rizz's second story was Natural History of Fear, only in a bad direction. It doesn't really help us understand anymore about who he is as a person because we're struggling to comprehend what's happening.

It absolutely baffles me, as well, that this Doctor decides to side with the evil ancestoral spirits who hate progressive values. The Seventh Doctor often has a reputation for being a rebel and a revolutionary, but that reputation is entirely unearned. So far, he has had the MOST conservative stories and political views in the main range including Fearmonger, Flip-Flop, and now Dreamtime.

I remember that when I first heard this story over a decade ago, I had no idea what was happening in it either. It faded immediately from my head like a bad dream. Listening to it certainly feels like a dream. The things happening have a very dream like state to them. Fortunately, it's already fading from my mind a mere hour or two after listening to it. It's ok, it was all a bad dream....