A fine story, that could play with its setting a little more.

The party lands in 1930’s Cambridge, on university grounds. When they step out of the tardis, they find two boys fighting on the roof. After putting a stop to it, it turns out to be no ordinary scuffle….

First of all, the setting. Although be bureaucracy is shimmering through, I love a good college tale. There’s a lot of room for interesting interactions here. Think of later Doctors, who have disguised themselves as teachers before (10 and 12 come to mind). Combine that with our 2 companions from the future, and we could have an interesting look at how learning should work and knowledge should be spread.

Sadly, the actual academic nature of the location is nothing more than very faint set dressing. The Doctor does go undercover as a teacher, but it leads to nothing. I was really hyped and curious about this too. What would a lecture from the Hartnell Doctor look like?  But instead, it is a bit more setup for the main plot, by making the class act aggressive. No interesting new dynamic.

The same goes for Vicki and Steven. They barely interact with the setting at all, save for 2 students. Instead, the focus is on these sudden outbursts of anger. Those don’t feel all that threatening, though. Aside from some rudeness and a bit of rough behavior, we see very little indication of this being an actual danger. The only really strange part is that the students and teachers often seem lose their short term memory. But it never feels immediate or dire. Just…. soft. I think that’s the word. It’s a soft threat.

It gets shoved aside pretty quickly too. Turns out its all the work of 3 head teachers. Each of them part of an alien observation group, looking into human behavior. So….. they’re scholars. In an earth school. There has to be something there, but this story never decides to make a real connection between these two paths.

The alien professors are kind of fed up with humans, which leads to a lot of infighting in the last act. Which is kind of hard to follow. Imagine 3 old men yelling the opinions of others in quick succession, and you get the gist. It’s a viewpoint drop for 3 character within as few sentences as possible. The gist is that they’re angry because humans will ruin stuff. You’ve heard this before. The only logical solution is to blow them all up, so they won’t ever be a threat.

The way they want to blow everyone up deserves some attention too. The 3 professors make use of robot scholars called “Bulldogs”, that seemingly just roam the halls at random. They’re kind of an odd element, and just like last time, seem to only exist to add something to the cover. They are robots in academic garb, but somehow no one ever questions their existence and they only serve as a bomb at the end. They’re there for the aesthetic.

Anyway, the doctor stops the blow up plan and locks the 3 professors up in a machine. Forever. This feels like a weird place to not have a moral discussion. Especially since the last 2 stories were pretty insistent on those. But no, we move on. The end.

And to me it feels like a waste of our surroundings. We have alien scholars in the most famous university worldwide. This could be a great foundation of some deeper storytelling. What about a reflection on the academic method of research?

Research, in case you’re unfamiliar, is usually done by asking a question, giving a possible answer (hypothesis) and then doing an experiment to check if your answer was right. It’s a very strict and narrow guideline that’s still upheld after generations. Otherwise, misinformation would spread (or spread faster, depending on your perspective).

These aliens do not follow this guideline and just decide to use their hypothesis on human behavior as the truth. One experiments for a little bit beforehand, but this ruins the human timeline, so he’s stopped. Why does this way of working not get any attention? How should knowledge be gained instead? That would be a way to link the location and opponent closer together, while also having a more central theme, instead of just “Students are acting improper. What’s up?”

And that makes this another flat story in the early adventures range. I am noticing that this range seem to be very flat. The connections between theme, location and opponent all seem very minimal. Which is odd, considering that they also have a tendency to end on a moral point (and failing miserably).

Another point is that these stories often don’t have great character beats. I always make sure to write down any character moments I enjoyed in a story, whether that is growth, an interaction or just something funny. But these stories give me very little to write about. There are basically no character dynamics.

We have one more early adventure to go in this ‘alternative season’, and it seems to be a story that will need a lot of character. So let’s see what we’re signing off with, but after 3 “passable” stories in a row, I am not very hopeful.

For now however, we have one of those “passable” tales. Structurally, it is sound. There’s no gaping holes or flaws. But it’s also not really exciting, challenging or new. It’s cookie cutter Doctor Who, and I wish we had a bit more to chew on.