MR 045: Project Lazarus

I did it. I made it through the story. I'm free. I did not care for Project: Twilight. It was very emo, very Hot Topic, very violent and gorey for no real reason and had no real point to make at all. Kind of like a bad B horror movie in that way. It was the last story I would have wanted to get a sequel and yet here we are.

This one is slightly better. But only slightly. It's still violent and gorey for no reason and still has no point to it, but at least the story is slightly more interesting. When the Doctor finds the cure for vampirism, he goes back to Cassie, but because he's an idiot he lets the TARDIS land years after leaving her in Scandinavia. Evelyn even says that they should go back to the moment when they first found her. It's just an excuse to have them be late and it doesn't work particularly well when you have a time machine and can not do that before you even set out the door. But it's fine to kick start the story.

They meet Cassie and a researcher who is researching a myth in the area. And then Cassie brutally murders him and calls herself Artemis working for the Forge. And none of that matters at all in the slightest nor do we really get any reason why she does it. The Forge is investigating weird slime and they want to see the effect of the weird slime on humans. Whatever, it's irrelevant to the story. We're basically just wasting time before revealing that Cassie is evil and edgy now. She does the thing that the original story did as well, trying to act all jaded and sarcastic while she kills him. It's just immature, poorly written dialogue. There's a lot of that in this story, particularly from Cassie, now Artemis, and Nimrod himself.

They take the Doctor and Evelyn to the Forge where Nimrod proceeds to take the Doctor's DNA by trying to induce regeneration. He's trying to capture the power of regeneration to use it in an army, which is definitely pretty horrifying. Evelyn tries to talk to Cassie and gets her to remember her son and turn her against Nimrod after all her programming. And then she rescues the Doctor and gets killed. Leading to Evelyn crying and being rather depressed about her death. Probably viewing her as a daughter figure.

It's just... not very good and extremely blunt. We can compare it to a much better story just a couple stories back, Doctor Who and the Pirates in which a similar thing happens. Someone who Evelyn sees as a surrogate child figure dies and she gets depressed. But that story is much stronger with its nuances and intricacies. Her trying to cover up her grief with comedy, but ultimately finding it useless. Here it's just very in your face showing a pretty great contrast between the writers. I don't trust the writers of this story to be able to handle grief and they don't, really. I'm wondering if and how the next story with Evelyn will address it. This could make a very strong jumping off point for a better writer in Evelyn's relationship with the Doctor.

The second half is also not great. The Seventh Doctor arrives at the Forge as they're investigating a portal in which aliens comes through. This is also completely irrelevant to the story. The main thing going on here is that Nimrod has cloned the Doctor and we get to have Colin and Sylvester play off each other. That is fun, for sure, just because the actors are so strong. But the dialogue still isn't that great. This is probably the only real redeeming feature.

The Seventh Doctor opens up the portal and lets the aliens in who attack the clone Doctor in retaliation for whatever horrific thing Nimrod has done and the clone Doctor loses an arm. Which makes the Doctor believe that he's not actually him. And then we find out there are a lot more clones constantly being killed to try to induce regeneration and the clone Doctor initiates the big red self-destruct button.

It's just all very pointless and dark and edgy for the sake of it, just like its predecessor. I'm not a fan really. If they had scaled back and controlled themselves a little, they could have ended up with their own version of Torchwood controlled by an especially evil man, Nimrod. But it's just too unpleasant and not at all fun to listen to. Not to mention all the completely irrelevant plot lines like the professor at the beginning and the aliens coming through the portal. There's a very good reason only three of these things were in the main range and the third isn't for a long time from now, thank goodness. Get me out of these terrible scripts.