MR 042: The Dark Flame

Damn, my mind is in the process of rejecting this thing so I'm going to try to write it down now before I forget it.

This one is bad. And not for the same reasons of Nekromanteia. This isn't written in a bad way. This is just bad for a standard sci fi reason: technobabble. The story is buried in the stuff and makes it completely incomprehensible. That's why I'm immediately forgetting it. If you need two thirds of your story to be technobabble, you've written a bad script and you need to try again.

So as far as I can tell, the story is that there's some sort of experiment going on on a station in orbit around a planet. The Doctor and Ace are going to pick up Bernice from said station. But then she gets attacked and sent down to the planet where there's a guy trying to resurrect a cult that worships this dark flame.

The guy puts the emissary of the dark flame inside of a recently deceased researcher. Ala Fenric. Who then resurrects a skeleton army. And then it gets a bit procedural. Running around and fighting the cultists and skeletons.

I'm not even sure how it gets resolved to be honest. The Doctor goads the emissary into trying to mind control him and it gets burnt in the process. Apparently the dark flame that everyone worships is the last gasp of life from the end of the universe? Something like that? I can't be bothered to be honest.

I'm not terribly invested in Bernice as a character at all either. I don't listen to her series and I don't read Doctor Who books at all, so she's just kind of a random character for me. She was fine here, I guess, but nothing special. Like in Shadow of the Scourge.

Ace gets to be an action hero so that's cool I guess. The Doctor said she fell in with the military which is... weird and extremely out of character for Ace. So definitely not a fan of that one. Seems as out of character as having her work for the Time Lord CIA. It's weird to have Rapture as the last story with her in it before this where she wanted to be called Dorothy and now she's getting on the Doctor for calling her that, insisting on Ace.

I dunno, I feel like the Seventh Doctor just can't catch a W. His comedy story was very fun, but he's not really gotten a decent serious story yet. Colditz is the closest that's managed to get into that A tier range rather than B-D

Yeah, just not a lot to say on this one. Excessive technobabble can absolutely kill a script as we see in this one. If it didn't have that problem, it could get close to feeling like Dark Souls with the dark flame, the cult, the emissary inhabiting a corpse, the mind control. But it's just not interested in being fantasy and insists on maintaining a sci fi aesthetic even though it's clearly not that.