MR 051: The Wormery

In the middle of 1930s Berlin sits a little club called Bianca's and in that club sits a leading lady, staring every night in her own show. No, this is not the beginning of the 1970s Broadway musical Cabaret. This is the beginning of the first post-Zagreus main range story: The Wormery. This is the first of two appearances in the main range for that trans-temporal adventurous Iris Wildthyme.

Iris is a bit of a meme character, created in the first place to make fun of Doctor Who in general and she certainly does that in this story. Her TARDIS is a large double decker bus that is actually SMALLER on the inside. Her best friend is a sentient talking stuffed panda bear plush, although he doesn't like you to mention it. She's usually drinking at any given point, a fact that will come in handy in this story.

Most of this story is just vibes, like the musical Cabaret. We're just kind of vibing in the club with the Doctor, Iris, Bianca, Mickey the bar waitress, Henry, the manager, and Allis and Ballis, the strange double act dimensional physicists who are holding this place together somehow. The story is revealed to us in bits and bobs. It's mostly pretty meandering. Mickey is telling the story in the far future through recordings of what happened. Bianca loves singing and pleasing her clientelle. Henry is often put upon. Allis and Ballis are weird. Iris shows up at the beginning already drunk and falls off her stool dead drunk, passed out. Apparently she's maybe stolen some of the house special? Or it's her own? Either way Bianca is not impressed.

The Doctor has come here just to relax and for entertainment after his trial, most unlike him. He is also quite surprised to see Iris, someone who has been dogging his steps for centuries. She's in love with the Doctor, you see, but he's not really capable of love. In fact, he even talks about how, when he was a kid, he broke down the exact physical process that creates love in a paper so it doesn't really hold much mystique for him.

It's at the end of the first episode that we learn Bianca's is actually in deep space, not in 1930s Berlin at all. Or rather it is in 1930s Berlin, but it's also on numerous other planets. There are portals that connect it to many different planets. This is where it starts to go a bit technobabbly unfortunately and it starts to kill the vibe a little bit. Not too much though.

Iris learns that there are worms in the alcohol and in the makeup. When she drank Bianca's alcohol she started hearing voices and so she drank some more and kept hearing the voices. She at first thought it was because she was drunk, of course, but it's actually because that's where the worms live and they were talking to her. Naturally. That's what we should all blame when we're drunk. It's the worms talking to us.

It turns out the worms have two different factions. The pros want to freeze time at a very specific moment using Bianca's singing voice so as to make sure nothing ever changes or evolves and they retain their perfect worm forms. While the antis want to use Iris's singing voice to cause mass chaos everywhere in the universe. Neither of which are very good. Iris thinks these worms are quite mad.

We then later learn that Bianca is... duh duh duh.... Iris herself. Naturally. She is trying to steal all of Iris's remaining regenerations.... wait... where have I heard this one before? She sees Iris as the ugly shell and she's the beautiful butterfly waiting to emerge. As if her lack of originality wasn't enough, she even steals the Doctor's lines directly from Trial and then tries to assassinate Iris by having her driver start to drive into a brick wall.

Bianca has some sort of mysterious hold on the Doctor as well, getting him to feel something for her. Very odd. Iris even has a tearful love confession where she's been hoping for years that the Doctor would notice her, but no such luck.

The finale comes when shadows start to emerge, taking people over just as the worms are taking people over through the alcohol. The shadows are the forms of what the worms would have evolved into if this freezing time moment didn't end up working. It's really sad. Wandering as a shadow, knowing that you could have had a form and knowing what it would have taken, but you are stuck in limbo forever. No wonder they're angry.

The Doctor realises that Bianca's is the remains of Iris's TARDIS and so uses his TARDIS to land inside it, causing a time ram, destroying it, sending everyone back to their own time, and stopping all of this nonsense for good. And then at the end it turns out that Mickey has been telling the story to the Seventh Doctor, who promises to take care of the tapes. Cute.

Iris is very fun, played masterfully by Katy Manning. It's no wonder that Big Finish decided to make Iris into a series in her own right. Katy Manning is charming, as always, and she plays Iris very differently to Jo. Where Jo is naive, Iris has seen it all and then some, drinking constantly for fun and to forget her troubles. She has amazing chemistry with Colin right off the bat, as if they've been playing off each other for years. The Doctor even mentions that he met Iris one time when Jo first left him.

I'm surprised that this exists at all to be honest. It's a brief little sidestep away from all the drama of Zagreus before we get back to it in the next story. It can be quite nonsensical at times, but that's the writers: Paul Magrs and Stephen Cole. They've both written other stories that are filled with technobabble or don't quite make sense. I'm surprised they were able to hold it together enough to make something halfway coherent here that works. It was a nice little diversion. It's a fun little story with a fun little character. Nothing special, but not bad either.