My Brother’s Keeper

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

Previous Story: Special Features

This story suffers from the fact that it's nested within the main framing device of 1001 Nights, since this takes place in part one of the story, its shortened by the fact that most of the part is set up for the rest of the stories. Still, the actual story here was pretty good and a very unique concept.

I'm not entirely sure whether I fully understood what was going on but from what I understand the two characters are actually two aspects of one entity. I found that fairly interesting, it's something that only a short story like this one could pull off.

Next Story: 1001 Nights (The Interplanetarian)

This story was, by and large, enjoyable enough. These anthology-type MR boxsets mean, by nature, the individual episodes have to be bitesized, and I thought that, though the story wasn't terribly complicated, it was complete. Which is often an issue the 20min episodes struggle with - they try to pack too much in.

We're introduced to the throughline of the whole boxset, which is Nyssa telling stories to entertain and amuse the Doctor's captor. He promises to release the Doctor if she tells him of the stars, and so she does. Again, it's simple, but it doesn't fail because of that.

Where it got a little shaky, for me, was the 'villain'. Nyssa tells the story of her and the Doctor showing up on a desolate world where one man is keeping another captive and torturing him for crimes he can't remember. And it turns out, that this man is actually one and the same, and that his split personality has turned him insane and evil. Sigh. As with the Eleven, I find this trope to be distasteful at best, and actively unpleasant and almost harmful at worst. It seems a common - albeit, I imagine, unintentional - theme of Big Finish stories that someone's 'insanity' often comes from mental health issues. Fortunately, the resolve of this one is not that the villain is irredemably evil, but that that Doctor believes that, by recombining him into one entity and releasing him after a set, yet secret, amount of time, he can trick the man into believing he is 'good' again.

Could be worse, I suppse. Still, it was entertaining enough. We will see how the rest of this set goes.