MR 082: The Settling

Interesting that we should do a pure historical immediately after the last one. There are no tedious speeches about changing history being bad, thankfully. That would have been hilariously tone deaf. It is, however, a rather dreary and pointless listen.

Despite this being, what, the fifth story with Hex, he's still not a particularly interesting or engaging character. It's a shame, because the other Big Finish original characters have already done a lot to stand out and make a name for themselves. Evelyn, Charley, and Erimem. But not Hex. He's a much more generic character. To be fair, the Seventh Doctor hasn't had very many good episodes so far in general, not just with Hex. His standouts were a satire of Star Trek and Eurovision in Bang-Bang-a-Boom! and LIVE 34 where he took down a fascist regime. Despite Hex being in that one as well, we didn't really get to know much about him either.

So far he doesn't have much of a unique character. He's just been here to suffer so far, I think. Hex has constantly been in horrific situations and he doesn't have that exploration bug like Ace has. He wants to help, as a nurse, but that's about it. Even in this story, which is supposed to be a Hex character development vehicle, he's still very lackluster, which makes the story a bit boring and pointless really.

I will say that I enjoyed the framing device. We see what's going on through the frame of Hex and Ace talking about it in the TARDIS after the fact so that we can see their feelings. But it's just what you'd expect. Oliver Cromwell's reign of terror was horrific. The story doesn't really add anything to that fact. It's just slaughter for the sake of it. I think the story is trying to humanize Cromwell, but it's pretty hard to do that considering the barbarity of his actions.

We see a horrific slaughter where Ace and Hex fight and the Doctor shelters a pregnant woman... and then we go to another town where there's another horrific slaughter where Ace and Hex fight and the Doctor delivers a baby. Hex falls in with Cromwell and tries to convince him to not be so evil, which fails spectacularly when Hex idly says "oh my god" several times in a row which pisses off Cromwell for Hex taking the lord's name in vein. And he gets whipped and runs away.

You'd think that you'd want to leave after something like this. There's no reason for Hex to stay. He's attracted to Ace, sure, but that's definitely going nowhere and it absolutely shouldn't be enough of a reason to stick around after witnessing thousands of people killed not to mention being tortured almost getting killed himself. Hex hasn't really had any good experiences so far at all. He's just been tortured every time he turns up.

And ultimately the conclusion of this story is that Hex is going to stay and do whatever the Doctor tells him. So what did we learn from this story at all? Cromwell is a monster and Ace and Hex were beaten into submission. Woooo. Just deeply unpleasant to listen to. The Seventh Doctor can't catch a W to save his life I swear. Ah well. At least his tv run was pretty decent.