MR 041: Nekromanteia

Is this a joke? Am I a joke to you? Am I being punked? What is this? Why is this? This is an absolute MASTERCLASS in what to do wrong in a Doctor Who story. Everything about this is terrible. It's boring. It's overly complicated for no reason. It's violent, dark and edgy just for the sake of it. It's overly sexualized just for the sake of it. The story is amateurish and basic. The dialogue is badly written and immature. The only thing it needed was a surprise conservative moral like Kerblam to complete the bad Doctor Who tropes list. All this immediately after the excellent Jubilee and the fun Bang-Bang-a-Boom! This felt more like a badly written Ao3 fanfic than an actual professionally produced audio drama with the original cast.

All that to mention that there is a pointless first part as well. The Doctor visits a space station with a friend who helps get him black market parts for the TARDIS, but that is completely irrelevant to the story. They're just suddenly transported into another world out of nowhere. And that's where the story really begins.

There's a large cult of evil witches who most of this story's pointlessly gratuitous content comes from. They're guarding a relic that contains their god. A corporation is after that relic. Ok cool. The corporation sends a ship that gets destroyed by the technologically superior witches who then kill everyone in it and stack up the corpses in a room where the TARDIS lands. There's a scene where the witches are "crawling on the outside of the ship" like they're insects. They of course eat the people they kill, obviously they're cannibals.

The only corporate survivors find the Doctor, mistake Erimem and Peri for witches (knowing this story probably JUST because they're women) and shoot them. Peri gets captured by the witches and then she gets taken to be stripped naked and bathed in oils. Again with the gratuitous sexualization. And then one of the survivors attempts to sexually assault Erimem. Why though? Why is this here? I don't care if you're sexualizing for the sake of it in fanfiction, but the main range is one of the most prominent non-tv Doctor Who spin offs. You NEED to have a reason for doing stuff like this and the story offers no excuse. It just does it just because it can.

Not only that, but the second episode ends with the Doctor GETTING HIS HEAD CUT OFF by the witches. Of all the Doctors, of course it happens to this one. The Fifth Doctor is true to form in this story: getting led around by the plot and taking a passive role. But this takes that character trait to the extreme. I always talk about how easy this Doctor is to bully, but even I feel a little bad for him. Just a tad.

When he dies, he goes into the relic which is one random guy's version of heaven, a cricket game in the Olympics, for some reason. And here we learn that he's been maintaining his afterlife for thousands of years with the witches watching over him, but the corporation is after him. The survivors of the attack steal the relic and then the corporation CEO destroys the ship with the relic on it, all of which potentially is going to cause the system to be destroyed because of the power it takes to maintain it.

The Doctor gets put back into his body by the guy in the relic and now it needs a new person to sustain it so it doesn't get destroyed. The Doctor offers himself, then Erimem, then the cat just randomly jumps up and gets taken as the new god. Huh. Sure, I guess. Poor Andronak.

The only interesting thing here, to me, is when an archeologist gets his tongue and heart cut out by the witches for desecrating the temple (more gratuitous violence), Erimem says that he deserved it for violating a temple. Which makes sense for her as she believes that violating a temple is one of the worst acts you can do. It just hit me when she said it that she is from a VERY different culture and time and it plays into that.

Otherwise, this is just terrible. I don't know why this was commissioned as a script in the first place. Nevermind acted out and edited. Oh yeah and the sound mixing is terrible too, like Loups Garoux. Just talking about the summary, you can tell how awful this was to listen to from start to finish. This one goes into the F tier bin and good riddance. Legend has it that Peter Davison asked that this writer never write for Big Finish again and good thing too.