Rock Star

Rock Star is a decent Doctor Who story. Wonderfully unique and vaguely music-themed, a fun adventure that feels right out of the Second Doctor era, and entirely alien. Though a little more grounded than Peaceable Kingdom, these two short stories work well as a change of pace for the more historical stories we had gotten in Quality of Leadership up until now.

Rock Star takes place on the planet Rishik, a very Star Trek kind of world that is entirely governed by music. This is not surprising as Rock Star is written by Robert T. Jeschonek, a Star Trek writer (like many of the writers of Short Trips 24). He is incredibly creative in building this world's aliens, who are disembodied beings with corkscrew bodies and body parts floating all around them. With other aliens on the world for a major festival called Beatfest, Rishik is a pretty fun place and it is an exciting destination for a visit by the Doctor and Jo. However, it does suffer from the "Planet of the Hats" phenomenon, where alien worlds are a little too simplified and structured around a single theme to feel all that realistic.

Rishik is like this, with most aspects of their lives apparently governed by music and only two governing bodies mentioned to us (an Eastern and Western one in opposition to each other). The problem is, Rishik doesn't feel like that. It feels like an alien world not to different from our own (with concerts, cities, and weapons of mass destruction) that isn't built around music at all. Also, there are apparently rock people that protect this world, but that idea (like many here) feels underdeveloped.

It's a real shame because there is a ton of creativity to Rishik and some good characters, like the Minister of Music Anderian Gosha who serves as a one-off companion for the Doctor in this story, and our initial, action-packed opening at Beatfest is a lot of fun and full of great details. There's quite a bit of thought to the story itself even if the pacing is a little off and disjointed at times. I think, on the whole, while Rock Star is a little flawed, I loved some of the ideas here and think they should be fleshed out more in the future.