📝5/10

Counting down to Whomas 2024, one adventure at a time!

Day Six and Seven: Escaping the Space Cuckoos!

MY SCATTERED AND TOTALLY IRRELEVANT NOTES:

Joseph Lidster delivers a four-part short story from the Doctor Who Adventure Calendar, originally published in 2012.

The story features the Eleventh Doctor teaming up with Harry Houdini to face a horde of mindless, possessed people and horses controlled by alien cuckoos with glowing eyes. As absurd as it sounds, the execution doesn’t elevate the premise. The writing is simplistic, the plot feels overly childish, and the Eleventh Doctor is reduced to a caricature of his most exaggerated traits. Houdini, meanwhile, is unremarkable, contributing little beyond some escapology tricks in the second half. Lidster fails to breathe life into the setting or the plot, and the brevity of each part—less than ten pages—only adds to the story's shortcomings.

While the story is action-packed, it lacks depth. The change of setting to a spaceship in Part 3 adds a slight visual twist, but it does little to enhance the overall narrative. The short format attempts to cram in too much content, resulting in rushed and underdeveloped plot points. The cliffhangers, instead of adding tension, feel contrived and ineffective