The Monthly Adventures #85 - "Red" by Stewart Sheargold

The EU is a strange place. It’s a messy, extravagant, imaginative playground with just the slightest hint of depravity and every so often, it forgets where it came from. A common topic discussed within Doctor Who fandom is how dark can the show go? When do disturbing themes turn to pointless cruelty? Already, some of my favourite stories are criticised for this; Project: Twilight I loved for its well realised grittiness whilst some others loathe it for the same reason. So, what am I meant to do with Red? Headed by a pair I’d dare to call the goofiest TARDIS team, Red is a story that truly shook me to my core, and I’m not certain if I loved it.

The Needle: a symbiotic apartment complex that changes with its inhabitants, who have all lost the need for violence thanks to the ruling supercomputer. But the loss of primal instinct has made the residents bloodthirsty, and something’s letting the rage out.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I guess the first thing I have to say about Red is jesus christ, this thing is f**ked up. Genuinely, I think this is the darkest Doctor Who story I’ve seen by a mile. In a futuristic society where violence has been eradicated, a mysterious, sentient virus is causing people to go on violent killing sprees. It’s a really dark, miserable time with some absolutely horrific stuff in it. Combined with some brilliant world building and you have a deeply unsettling story about a society obsessed with feeling pain. If you ever wanted to hear Sandi Toksvig calmly talk about her obsession with having violence inflicted upon her, then boy do I have the story for you! The world of Red is some truly incredible stuff, the little details we get about how the society functions, how the Needle works, how the lack of any kind of violence has affected the population, it’s really immersive and endlessly fascinating.

And that’s where Red’s greatest strength lies: its immersion. The atmosphere is on point all the way through - there’s a real grim oppression to everything with some neat cyberpunk leanings. The sound design is a tricky one for me because it’s sometimes incredible and sometimes noticeably awful. I love the rain sodden sounds of the undercity and the mechanical glitch noises used for the absolutely terrifying Red Virus but then sometimes things will just be completely silent when they really shouldn’t be and break the immersion the story’s built up so well. Also, I am a hundred percent sure they use that shitty violin sound effect those “GHOST FOUND AT 3AM!!!” videos use at least a few times. For the most part though, it’s great and at its absolute best when realising the villain.

Our main antagonist - the mysterious Red Virus - is an absolutely terrifying entity. Randomly infecting the chips that suppress violence in the Needle, they cause those infected to become deranged, chanting “red” and releasing corrupted, static sounds. Genuinely frightening stuff that really unnerved me when I listened to it (I love creepy motifs). McCoy is also doing some weird s**t with his voice in a performance that just teeters on being silly but manages to land on the side of utterly bone chilling. Langford’s also putting in a good - if more restrained - performance.

However, Red is a very style over substance story for me. I loved the aspects of the world and the ideas and the atmosphere but I really did not take to the plot of this thing. There are a lot of things going on in Red, Sheargold throws around a lot of ideas but he really struggles to make a lot of them clear. A lot of the story feels like it would be better with visuals and because of that it’s really hard to follow. I struggled listening to this one because I kept getting lost - so much happens and so much feels like it's lacking the image that should be going with it. This would never get made on TV, which is a shame, because that feels like the only place that could properly house it. And even looking past the convoluted elements, Red just hasn’t got a whole lot of substance past its ideas. The story is very slow and consists mostly of watching things on a monitor, the rest delegated to running around empty corridors and needlessly extending the story with extra plot beats. Also, as much as I love the creativity on display here, you have to know when to cut your losses. Sheargold had way more than one story’s worth of ideas bouncing around here, with stuff like the time-altering drug Slow and the supercomputer Whitenoise having temporal energy in it from time travellers. Yeah, that was the bit that really lost me, I still don’t know what the whole “Celia was a time traveller” reveal meant or why it created the Red Virus.

Red is a masterclass in atmosphere, disturbing themes and detailed world building but as an actual story, I wasn’t too into it. I loved just existing in this world and getting creeped out by the absolutely horrific things happening in it but I couldn’t really have cared less what happened to the characters.

7/10

Pros:

+ Great performance from McCoy and Langford

+ Atmospheric and disturbing

+ Brilliant central concept and antagonist

+ Oppressive and unnerving sound design

Cons:

- The script struggles to make things clear to the listener

- Story is pretty uneventful and poorly paced