After a few strong stories, we're back to formula, bland Main Range quality. It reminded me quite a bit of Ghost Light, but it's not as experimental, more quite boring. I was disappointed, considering that it's written by Mark Morris, who wrote the strongest Tenth Doctor novel I've read so far.

Even in the darkest of times, the Doctor tries to be optimistic and reassuring - it's a bit of fun to hear him be light-hearted about the fact that Phoebe's been possessed, claiming he's been possessed lots of times before and he's been fine! Davison does fine, but there's never a moment that actively stands out as keeping me engaged with the character. I feel like I'm saying that over and over again, but the problem is that, with the incarnation being rather bland, there's never going to be anything that can fix him without massively retconning his characterisation. Same for Nyssa, nothing interesting that really makes her standout as a companion fit for this story. She's serviceable enough, just incredibly boring.

Vaatus is a very generic stock villain. There's an interesting concept to be built upon, with a creature being awoken by mankind's predatorial habits, and then turning the tables so the humans become the prey, but the way the Moonflesh is handled just is standard territory.

It's been a while since the Doctor and Nyssa have strayed away from Earth, and I'm starting to get a little bored. The Edwardian landscape suits the Fifth Doctor well, and it shows off the supporting characters well, but it's just uninteresting honestly. Nothing happens with the setting that keeps me engaged.

The supporting actors never really show off, they, too, seem very bored by the script and try their best to carry out such dull material, but nothing seems to really work, unfortunately.

The music for this episode was rather bland - no standout tracks, plodded along nicely - much like the rest of the story.

Favourite Line: "Oh, I'm sure he'll be fine. Especially once I explain that Vatuus is just using Phoebe to communicate with us. But perhaps I should tell him that I've been possessed by dozens of aliens and it's never done me any harm!"

This is probably the worst story for a while, and when you're producing so many audios at once, you're bound to start releasing bog-standard boring episodes like these eventually.

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

Previous Story: Fanfare for the Common Men

Such a dull story that I considered not even writing a review for it, simply because there is nothing to review. Since I've reviewed every story prior to this though I'm not gonna skip one now. To put it simply, this story really has nothing of substance going on in it whatsoever.

5 and Nyssa are interesting because on one hand they can be an incredibly entertaining team but on the other hand they're so generic that without an good writer they can be infuriatingly dull. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases. Other than that this is a story I strongly recommend skipping, it'll save you 1 hour, 40 minutes of your life that can be better spent doing anything else.

Next Story: Tomb Ship

A base under siege story featuring 5 and Nyssa, with an unremarkable alien threat and pacing. Nothing particularly surprising happens. However, the characterisation was pleasant; 4 out of the 5 human side characters had more than one dimension and the one who didn't was at least fun to hate. The sound design was also pretty vivid. I also enjoyed the inclusion of Silver Crow and how his Sioux background is important to the plot. Other stories would have villified the Whitlocks for bringing Silver Crow to England, but I thought it refreshing that in this story Silver Crow seems to have chosen to come himself and that he and the Whitlocks are on good terms.

A perfectly pleasant way to spend two hours, but not much more than that.