MR 053: The Creed of the Kromon

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That's it. End review. No, but really, fess up. Who let Philip Martin have a pen?

I just... I'm speechless. I thought we were done with the dark and edgy torture porn for the sake of it stories after Nekromanteia and the two Project stories. And yet here I am. Suffering. I hope you're happy. We went from an absolutely breathtaking meditation on the nature of Doctor Who in Scherzo to... whatever the hell was going on in Philip Martin's mind.

I don't even want to summarize the plot so I'll just gloss over it. After exiting their glass tube, the Doctor come across... immigration and border customs? Or some such. An angry disembodied entity that decides whether people get to cross over into the zones on this planet. Because there are zones on this planet. This whole section was bizare.

And then we go to the zone with the Kromon and we all go wtf. We start off relatively harmlessly by meeting C'rizz, our designated new companion. He's escaped from the Kromon after he and his girlfriend L'da were taken. They infiltrate the Kromon and we get to see their operation. They're a termite like species that exists in a hive. Brainwashing, making all aliens slave workers. They're now a corporate structure because they themselves were destroyed by a corporation but adapted the corporation's methods. Their "creed." It so feels like the director is supposed to be Sil. He sounds like Sil and acts like Sil. I was half expecting him to make the annoying purring sound that Sil makes.

C'rizz discovers that L'da has been made into a queen to birth kromon offspring forever. Which, you know, is horrifying. It reminds me immediately of Dragon Age because that game series has the same sort of monster. It's body horror, but particularly horrifying for women. Women being reduced to baby incubators is certainly what a lot of conservative policy is all about so it has a real world horror to it.

L'da begs for C'rizz to kill him, which he does and then they get put on trial. The story then drags on and gets super boring. The trial goes on forever and nobody cares. The Doctor works on space travel, but tricks them into causing an explosion. C'rizz gets tied to a water wheel and tortured, but is rescued by a friend from the beginning of the story. And Charley gets made into the new queen. This is the horrifying bit. We get to see every bit of the process of Charley being transformed into a birthing queen, as if it's a fetish for the writer. Who knows, maybe it is, he did have Peri transformed in both his two stories.

They eventually escape and I'm mercifully saved from having to hear more of Charley birthing and controlling Kromon offspring. One thing that did strike me as incredibly pretentious was how the Divirgent Universe is not supposed to have a sense of time and yet it absolutely does have time. There are events that occur in chronological order, something that would not happen without time. Regardless, why did anyone think this story was a good idea? And why did anyone think it would be a good introduction to a new companion? This Divergent Universe arc is not off to a great start. Let's hope the rest of it isn't like this.