MR 088: Memory Lane

Ok, I like this one, it's cute. This story starts out in one very specific way, making you think that it's going to be about one thing and then it turns into something else halfway through in a way that you don't expect. It's definitely one that would work well on screen and I could easily see actually having been done in 70s Who.

The Doctor, Charley, and C'Rizz land in the middle of an older lady's living room in suburbia. Which is weird enough. But when they go out to get some ice cream, they can't find the house in which they parked the TARDIS. All the houses look exactly the same. Even the Doctor says "Hah hah welcome to suburbia" like of course that's what you're thinking. But no, the houses ARE EXACTLY the same. Not just on the outside either, they're exactly the same on the inside as well. They all have the same older lady inside of them talking about the same things as the Doctor, Charley, and C'Rizz go door to door trying to find the TARDIS.

Only they're not all exactly the same. One of the houses has a man in it in addition to the older woman. Although he's acting like a little kid, which is strange. And there's a strange broadcast on tv. And then the ice cream van drives by again only the TARDIS is strapped to the top of it. The TARDIS has been stolen... by an ice cream man???????

The Doctor tries to go after it and Charley stays with the older lady and the man who's acting like a kid. C'Rizz meanwhile gets kidnapped by a strange lady, Kim, who's been here for awhile. It turns out this is a prison and the man, Tom, is her friend. This is where it stops being a pastiche of suburbia, and it turns into more of a standard sci fi story. She and Tom were astronauts on a mission together. Kim recovered the ship while Tom was put into prison, but Kim has been trying to pull him out of it. She can't. No matter what she does he's been stuck here. He's been living the life of himself as a kid, trapped in his old memories.

It turns out that is happening to Charley as well. The longer you're out in the cell instead of in Kim's ship, the more it affects your mind. Charley starts to see her mother too and regresses to being a kid. There's a line that I liked where C'Rizz says that Charley's mother is a hallucination and Charley says well yeah of course, she always is. That's so interesting to me, because I hadn't noticed it. It's true. Every time Charley's mother turns up in a story, she's always a hallucination.

Meanwhile the jailors realize what's going on, that there are intruders in the cell, and so panic and pull Tom out of it. The Doctor, Charley, C'Rizz, and Kim manage to get out as well and rescue Tom, who the Doctor has wait in his ship. Only the captors are not happy about this and torture the Doctor until he'll give up Tom. They have him go into a cell himself where he plays a role of having just defeated an evil dictator only for that dictator to suddenly get the upper hand and beat him at the last second. They have him repeat it over and over again until he tells them how to open the TARDIS.

Charley gets put in a cell of her own where she gets to go through the motions of being a little girl with her mom again. I notice this is a thing that these audios like to do with Charley. Have her mother show up and then have Charley regress to being a kid with her. C'Rizz pulls her out of it by overloading the system as one does in Doctor Who. Usually it's the Doctor doing it, but not this time. The system can't focus on C'Rizz's memories because he has too many voices in his head to focus on, so it ends up trying to form like twenty worlds at once and it doesn't work. This is definitely foreshadowing for the next story, obviously I just don't find C'Rizz very interesting, unfortunately, even now. I'm not sure why his character was added to the show, honestly.

It turns out the resolution was actually pretty hilariously simple and it ties nicely into the central theme of the story. The people on this planet have been charging for reenactments of the first contact: Tom's crashlanding on the planet. They pull him out of the cell, force him to crash land again with commentary, and then put him back. The reason they're doing this is because they don't really have memory. They don't know how to record something and then preserve it. Digital data gets created and then immediately destroyed because there's no such thing as storage. So the Doctor helps them invent the concept of storing data and gives them a copy of the flight logs from the ship's crashed escape pod. So now they can watch the crash on... tv or something? Who knows if they'll invent that.

This was definitely a fun one. I liked the side characters involved and the main characters, although C'Rizz is as usually a little less than interesting. He's gotten a bit more interesting in this one, but mostly he's still kind of just there. Still a solid story. The next Eighth Doctor story in the main range is C'Rizz's last, but he's not really well developed so that's fine. Much like Hex with the Seventh Doctor and Ace.