This one’s fine, but not anything to write home about.

The Doctor, Steven and Vicki land in the fields of Revolutionary France. Soon, they meet with the army, who are wiping out anything that even looks at them funny. However, what will happen when they come across a real threat?

As you can tell from the army description, this story tries to go for a pretty dark tone. Within 5 minutes, an injured soldier is shot through the head. Yet while it tackles a gruesome historical period, it never succeeds at engrossing the listener in its audioscape.

This is caused by a few things. First off, we’re missing in context. Yes, a sense of dread can be created by leaving your audience in the dark. However, most of the time, this is done by first establishing the surroundings and then introducing the threat. In this historical story, nobody takes the time to explain why this period of history is so grim. Who are the soldiers hunting for? What causes this kind of attitude within people? Hell, where exactly are we and where are we going? The story is never really clear about that. Which turns these soldiers into stereotypical “bad people”, who are just evil for evil’s sake. No reason needed.

The second reason this story fails to establish its tone, is our main cast. The Doctor, Steven and Vicki are never really engrossed in the history or the lives of the people they’re involved with. They act like observers, rather than being involved. This makes it hard to relate to the events the story presents. Why should I care about how scary the soldiers are if Vicki isn’t?

Compare this to a story like “Flames of Cadiz”, where Susan and Barbara are screaming and pleading in jail, while the Doctor and Ian are about to be executed. That’s involvement! That’s presenting an intimidating setting. The most we get here is short gasps from Vicki at her surroundings.

And since the scare factor in the story doesn’t really come across, the whole thing falls flat. It has very little outside of it. There is a second threat, but that one never really comes across as unique, interesting or scary. It has no big actions that shock, scare or intimidate. So that one becomes unremarkable as well, which is a shame, because the idea is solid.

And honestly, that last statement goes for the entire story. The ideas behind it are solid. Travelling with a group of soldiers doing nothing but evil deeds sounds like it could be really interesting, but the story makes no effort to really make that kind of setting land. It relies on its tone to carry it through, but there’s no tone to be found. Which makes for a really flat story.