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

Previous Story: Doctor Who and the Pirates

Better than Project: Twilight, but that's not saying much. It certainly has a lot less of the things I despised about it's predecessor but it's not without flaws. I'll start by talking about the first two parts. It picks up where we left off in Project: Twilight with the Doctor going back to meet up with Cassie only he overshot it so that this story could have a reason to exist. Long story short Cassie's evil now and it turns out everyone's favourite edgelord Nimrod is back. He's somehow an expert on Time Lords now. I get that there's an explanation for it, but it feels like a cheap attempt to artificially increase how much of a threat the Forge actually are. It was my main issue in the last story, that this new villain who's come out of nowhere is suddenly one of the Doctor's greatest enemies and is hyper-competent. To make this work though, they also had to make the Doctor rather incompetent.

There's a gratuitous torture scene for the Doctor (because why not) and then Cassie dies and everyone escapes. Now I will say something positive, Maggie Stables' performance here is fantastic, maybe one of her best ones and she really sells just how utterly distraught Evelyn is at knowing Cassie is dead. The way she responds to 6's callousness is also fantastic and I'm glad to hear it gets picked up on in the next story.

Now we get to the Seventh Doctor. Because I'm doing this in timeline order, this is my first ever experience of 7. Ever. From this, I really like Sylvester Mccoy, his performance is great here and I'm glad that he isn't portrayed as absolutely useless like 6 was earlier. He meets up with what is presumably the Sixth Doctor, I quite like their chemistry and it's fun to have that classic multi-doc banter.

7 uncovers the mystery behind 6's appearance here and it turns out he's a disposable clone. Previous 6 clones have died of a heart attack, had their throat slit and now had their arm ripped off (I'm beginning to think the writers don't like 6). 7 gets out of there but not before shutting them down and saving some aliens who feel rather out of place. And then we get a teaser that the Forge have survived because the writers just can't kill off their little pet organisation.

All in all, the gore is toned down, which might seem ridiculous considering some of the things I described are already fairly rough. I think it could have done with just being a 7 story, the prequel stuff with 6 feels really tacked on and means we have two under-baked stories when we could have had one really solid complete one. Colin Baker, Maggie Stables and Sylvester Mccoy are giving this story everything they've got which is way more than this story deserves but at the very least it helps to make it a lot less dull.

Next Story: Arrangements for War