This story doesn’t do much for me. There’s no real passion in it.

We meet with Vicki in 1164 BC. After her separation from the Doctor and Steven. She’s going into a cellar and talks to a mysterious creature. She describes a story from her travels.

It’s a story about how she went to a frost fair and discovered a mysterious egg. It turns out to be the egg of a Phoenix, drawing in all the heat around it so it can hatch. So they have to stop it from freezing the earth. Jane Austen is also there, and she’s just as tacked on as this sentence.

After finding the egg. Everyone urges it to stop freezing the world, but it doesn’t listen. When it hatches, Jane Austen cuts off its heat source and it dies. Committing genocide on the last of the Phoenixes (phoeni?).

Except for one little cinder, which was left behind and stuck to Vicki. She keeps it alive, as she can relate to it. Both being lonely after they’ve left behind something grand. And there’s the start of something poigniant here, but the story doesn’t spend any time on it. After this, it’s over.

The biggest problem here is the writing. Sentences are very “curved”, that is to say, they never really quite know where the actual destination of the words actually lies, choosing instead to prolong and prolong until finding what they’re looking for.

See. Like that. The story has trouble getting to the point.

And it does that a lot, which detracts from what it’s trying to say. Especially when combined with the switches between time periods. I’m all for being challenged, but this is just obtuse without reason.

I’m also sad at missing out on an ending that could genuinely be something special, but it just isn’t there yet. It just adds to the aimlessness the story already suffered from.

So that leaves very little. Just some wandering through frozen England, which is fine, but not memorable in the least. Could have been much more. For now, it’s just the second time Vicki’s farewell has failed.