The Monthly Adventures #008 - "Red Dawn" by Justin Richards

Sometimes you don’t have much to say on a story, and that’s fine. What you have to say is what you have to say but it can make writing a review rather hard. Is Red Dawn one of these stories? Yes, obviously. I wouldn’t be talking about this if it wasn’t. I can’t imagine this review will be too long so I might as well get started, we have our second legacy villain in a row with the Ice Warriors in a story about everything from the weapons trade to genetic cloning and hybridisation.

Finding themselves in an anomalous structure on the surface of Mars, the Doctor and Peri join forces with the first manned mission to the red planet after a tomb of frozen Ice Warriors awakens and threatens to destroy the peace aboard the space shuttle.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Red Dawn isn’t a boring story per say (though, following on from The Genocide Machine, watching paint dry would be a Michael Bay movie), it only clocks in at roughly 90 minutes after all, but it feels quite narratively bare. On one hand, you have some nice political messaging weaved in, most revolving around our antagonist: a villainous member of the NASA team, trying to extort weapon technology from the Ice Warriors and spark an intergalactic war to boost sales in his company. I like that there’s something being done with the story and I’ve certainly seen worse political messaging than here. Adding onto this, I like how we have a decidedly human enemy and the Ice Warriors are actually quite reasonable lifeforms and decide to join forces with the Doctor. I much prefer the Ice Warriors when they act as allies, it makes them feel a lot more developed as a species and I actually think Red Dawn’s greatest strength is the fleeting glimpses we see into Martian culture. Our side cast is one of my problems here, and I’ll get to that, but I did quite like Peri, especially in the first part, when we got her and the Doctor exploring the Martian catacombs. All her notes and observations really made her feel equal to the Doctor and Bryant gave a great performance, which was needed amongst the other American accents. Other than that, I noticed the music here was particularly good. I don’t usually talk about the music or sound design unless it’s especially great or especially terrible but I really jived with Red Dawn’s soundtrack, it gave some great atmosphere to the quieter moments.

Unfortunately, it’s in the plot where Red Dawn falls short. The whole story is pretty rushed and the narrative feels very underdeveloped, around halfway through part two the story halts and never really picks up again, the plot very quickly loses its fervour. On top of that, it’s very much small in scale; it’s a story you’d imagine would take place in a whole nation with diplomatic meetings and the such, but it really takes place over a couple of hours in one tomb, with a lot of characters standing around arguing. These characters are also just quite underdeveloped. Perfectly serviceable but if anyone lived or died I just felt nothing, nobody had particularly notable features (except for one character, who’s revealed to be a Martian-human hybrid, mostly for plot convenience - it doesn’t really work). All in all, everything actually on the page falls flat, not bad, just unimpressive.

Red Dawn is a weird little in-betweeny story. It definitely has some positives but it also has literally nothing that makes it stand out. It’s the first appearance of the Ice Warriors in the Main Range, but that doesn’t seem to help it. There’s just not a lot to talk about, it’ll go in one ear and out the other and I’m sure that by tomorrow, I will have forgotten most of it, even if I did enjoy it.

6/10

Pros:

+ Great glimpse into the culture and world of the Ice Warriors, and I love it when they’re not antagonists

+ Has a tightly written political backbone to support the story

+ Peri stands out amongst the cast and has a nice amount of agency

+ Really fantastic score that added some nice atmosphere where needed

Cons:

- Dull and underdeveloped sidecast

- Story that grows stagnant very quickly

- Feels too small, like it should be done on a grander scale but is confined to a single tomb complex

- Really weird twist that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the narrative