MR 085: Red

Red. Red. Red. Red. Red. RED. RED. RED. RED! RED! RED!!!!!!!!!! RRRRRRRREEEEEEDDDDDDD!!!!!!

Oh what did I just murder someone? Huh. That's strange. Ah well. That taste of violence is a work of art.

Welp. Another day another mediocre Seventh Doctor story. There's some interesting ideas here, but ultimately it kind of collapses under its own narrative, particularly at the end.

We start our story in a large living city called The Needle. It's very strange. It manipulates the structures around you to move you to where you're going. I'm not sure what that's about, but sure. It's a cool idea. The super computer that runs this place (because there's always a super computer right?) has chipped everybody in the city to suppress all violent urges. Only the chips are malfunctioning and occasionally having the opposite effect.

There is also an undercity filled with people who have left The Needle and deactivated their chips, wanting to experience what violence is like. And there's an intermediary in The Needle who works with the people from the Undercity and wants to experience violence, but doesn't actually want to deactivate the chip. That in itself is an interesting dichotomy. She wants to feel it when it's safe, but actually going down to the undercity would not be safe, not really.

The Doctor gets chipped and Mel falls out of the Needle into a waiting car. She's pretty appropriate for this story since she's called Red by the characters, being a red head and all. When the chip malfunctions, causing someone to kill someone else, they start shouting red over and over again. For some reason the Doctor is linked to it too.

Mel gets to experience the undercity and see first hand what being deprived of violence for so long has caused. There are people whose entire job it is to push the human body as far as it can and see how much it can endure. That is rather grim in and of itself. The people are fascinated by Mel, especially, because she's not chipped so she's capable of much more violence than any of them.

Meanwhile the Doctor investigates the killings. This is where the story starts to collapse in on itself. It turns out that it is sentient technology from the future or some such? And it was brought here by another time traveler. It is a sentient program that has infected the super computer and has thus infected all the chips. The Doctor is linked to it because he's also a time traveler. Again, it's a very strange explanation. I'm not sure what this writer was going for. I would have been perfectly happy to just say it was a manifestation of decades of repressed violence coming out as a glitch in the system. I would have loved to see an ending where all the chips malfunction and the entire city starts killing each other. That is not quite what happens, though that really would have committed.

Instead, the super computer starts killing people. It sees its responsibility to stop the violence and the only way to stop it is to kill the chips and thus kill the people with the chips. Which is certainly.... a choice. Mel uses her expert computer programming skills of... turning it off and on again to reset the computer and ultimately shut it down. Only The Needle is linked to the computer and collapses as well.

There's a lot of stuff that happened in the middle but I don't really remember it. I do think this one needed a couple more drafts before being put out there, though. The ending and explanation didn't need to be this overly complicated.

Oh and it does need to be said that McCoy's overacting is a bit much here. His performance in the show is very much physical and that physicality is obviously missing with just audio. A lot is lost hearing him dramatically shout "Red" over and over again. It's like Unregenerate. They just let him chew the scenery for an hour, but it's just not that interesting to listen to after awhile. I don't want to dislike McCoy's Doctor, but he really has gone down the rankings since I started main range, ah well. Maybe one day he'll have interesting audio stories.