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TARDIS Guide

Review of The Living Darkness by thedefinitearticle63

15 February 2025

This review contains spoilers!

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Fugitive of the Daleks


Not quite as good as Fugitive of the Daleks in my opinion but still really solid and an excellent character piece for Steven. As far as 6-parters go, it's not exactly breezy but it's a lot better paced than most of them. It mainly suffers in the middle. I think it could have done with being 2 parts shorter.

The start is very good, we have a brilliant mystery being set up and it's reminiscent of The Great Beyond - another 6-parter that released fairly recently that also has the Doctor trapped in a prison-like place (although the similarities disappear very quickly).

Dodo is barely in this one... again. This time it's a Dodo from after she's left the Doctor (I think. That whole thing was fairly confusing to be honest). Admittedly she does get some nice character stuff but it feels like they don't know what to do with her.

Peter Purves and Stephen Noonan have great chemistry, both putting in excellent performances. Noonan's impression is really good now. Perhaps it's because I'm just used to it but I can picture him as 1 perfectly.

I think this story is a bit too heavily tied to The Daleks' Master Plan. It's been a while since I did that so a lot of the emotional beats and general elements of the story didn't mean much to me and it took me a bit to remember what they actually were.

I did enjoy it, mainly for the performances, but it's definitely not doing anything to win me over on the 6-parter format.


Next Story: The War Machines


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