This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Arrangements for War

This is awful, like downright awful. And not even in a funny way. The writer of this story fundamentally misunderstands the Doctor, Evelyn and frankly all of Doctor Who as a franchise. It starts off with an interesting moral question about the use of research obtained through unethical means. The Doctor takes the stance that this is perfectly ethical, which is not an inherently wrong one. I'm a bit iffy on how often the phrase "for the greater good" gets repeated by the Doctor though, as that's usually being said by the villains.

The real issue is that, for some reason, it portrays the Doctor as wanting to meet and congratulate Burke and Hare for their contributions to modern science. Now I understand maybe at a stretch Robert Knox, the man who dissected and experimented on the bodies and actually made those contribution to science but Burke and Hare? The body-snatchers? The ones who didn't do anything particularly remarkable? Who just killed for money? Ridiculous.

That's one of many issues, though. You may recognise a certain actor here, David Tennant. He appears surprisingly frequently in various bits of EU content around the time. He seemed to be really desperate to get on Doctor Who in some capacity. Here he's playing Daft Jamie, a young boy with low intelligence. There's a lot to say about this character, certainly Tennant's performance is interesting. Mostly it just feels offensive and it's not pleasant to hear basically all the characters around him (even the Doctor at some points) treat him like shit.

He's also involved in the very questionable ending in which the Doctor drops him off right in front of Burke and Hare so he can be killed because "fixed points" and "some things just have to happen". I don't normally mind this trope but it's used here in such a way that it makes the Doctor and Evelyn seem like awful people. Not to mention the fact that it completely undermines what the entire 6 and Evelyn arc was building to. This comes literally right after the story in which Evelyn falls out with the Doctor because she can't stand how he disregards death to the point that the Doctor himself tries to go out of his way to break all the rules of "the web of time" and whatever just to save two people. And now here he is letting an innocent young boy walk away to his brutal death with Evelyn sat complacent right next to him.

An abhorrent excuse of a story, I can't even be bothered to talk about the plot (not that it was memorable enough to even be able to talk about it)

Next Story: The Nowhere Place