MR 073: Something Inside

This is just the epitome of generic. Very tropey. Very Doctor Who. Nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing particularly good about it either. I listened to this over the course of several days, so you'll have to forgive me if I get some details wrong, but it just wasn't very memorable.

The tragedy is that this is a very interesting idea. We find ourselves in a prison for psychics. The government of an unknown country has experimented on people and given them psychic powers, creating super soldiers to help win a war. The only problem is that after the war they now have superheroes running around and that's not great. So they imprison them. There are a lot of interesting directions you could go with that idea. Creating weapons that you fear because they could destroy you, like nuclear weapons. Watchmen did a very good job of making that metaphor explicit with Doctor Manhattan. You could talk about how the superheroes feel about being betrayed by the very country they helped win their war, and it does do that to an extent.

The government went on to accidentally create a weapon that kills the psychic superheroes called a brainworm. It's not actually a worm, but it does infect psychic minds and use their powers for its own ends. That's the basic premise of the story. Unfortunately, it mostly just ends up with a lot of running around corridors, like Doctor Who does. There are some interesting scenes reminiscent of Among Us and other bluffing games where various characters are trying to figure out where the brain worm is hiding. It attacks anyone it sees as a threat, so someone working out who holds it or someone pointing a gun at the person who holds it gets killed instantly.

There is also a whole section with the Doctor having lost his memories which is just boring at this point. The Eighth Doctor losing his memories? AGAIN? We literally just did this in the last Eighth Doctor story, Other Lives. It was better there. Here it serves little purpose but to show that the brain worm has the ability to eat memories. But that doesn't really do anything for the story. There's a long extended section where he's being held captive and tortured by the warden of the prison. Which, again, is very tropey. It doesn't really serve the story that much.

The ending is a little strange too, in that the brain worm inhabits one person and the Doctor is happy to just leave said person in the prison alone. The brain worm kept shouting to show it the way out and the Doctor concluded that everyone would die if it got out. And then the Doctor, C'Rizz, and Charley are the only survivors.

I dunno, it's just not that interesting. I think I'm probably thinking in terms of what it could have been. But what's here is just pretty generic.