The Monthly Adventures #83 - "Something Inside" by Trevor Baxendale

f**k Trevor Baxendale.

Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Something Inside. There’s a recurring theme with Eight and I won’t be the first to admit, it’s a strange one. The poor guy can’t seem to keep his memory. Already, we’ve seen this in the Main Range, when he went full crazy during the events of Minuet in Hell but it’s been a prominent thing since his very first appearance, collapsing in an abandoned hospital wing and screaming “Who am I!” like some kind of artificial intelligence with a split personality. And there’s a point where every trope starts to become a cliché, and I think Something Inside solidifies that. What we have here is a pretty run of the mill story that uses the familiar amnesia trope in a way that ends up really boring me.

Separated and trapped inside a prison for psychics, the TARDIS crew find themselves up against a brutal warden and a ravenous creature of mental energy feasting on the inmates’ minds. 

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Something Inside seemed promising on the outside. The cover was intriguing, the synopsis was vague but drip fed me some interesting information and putting aside everything wrong with him as a person, Trevor Baxendale can be a really compelling writer from time to time. However, it was upon learning that this was another Eight story where he magically contracts amnesia that I began to doubt it. First of all, I really like the premise of psychic-proof prison meant to house telepaths; I like psychic stuff and that was a fun concept to play around in, especially when you learn who the psychics are and how they came to be. However, the material we’re given inside this premise is thoroughly average.

Eight’s amnesia, advertised in the DWM teaser, is completely incidental and contained mostly within a couple drawn out scenes in the first half, confusingly and unnecessarily being in non chronological order. If it had used the reveal of the Doctor’s amnesia as the Part One cliffhanger rather than a muddled flash forward, it could’ve derived some decent tension but as it stands it just feels a little pointless. It isn’t utilised well at all, he still acts exactly like the Doctor - the amnesia not hindering him one bit - and then he magically gets his memories back for the final act. This might sound like a big, noticeable blemish on this story but really, it’s just another symptom of a tired plot. Something Inside is a lot of running backwards and forwards, with little in the way of structure or pay off. By the time it had ended, it didn’t feel like a victory, it just felt like the last thing that happened. It’s a real shame the story feels so rehashed to me because there were some good ideas in there that could’ve used a little more dynamic exploration than this.

For one, we have two decent antagonists. The Brain Worm, as it’s somewhat stupidly called, is the sentient psychic powers of one of the inmates and it’s started hunting down the other prisoners. It’s a decent monster that can even be quite creepy, hiding inside an unknown character’s head. I also like how the characters can’t see it either, as it puts us in the same position as them. However, I do think it would work better in a different story. This is two for two with Baxendale scripts that feel like they should be horror stories but instead feel tonally lifeless, both this and The Dark Flame would have benefitted from a little more personality. Something Inside, as it stands, is a generic action flick desperately wanting to be something different. The worst offender of this tonal disparity is the score, which is overall quite bland but the sound mixing tends to make it egregiously loud, turning into an obtrusive, overdramatic mess.

I mentioned earlier that there were two excellent villains and I wasn’t lying when I said that. Also playing antagonist is cruel prison warden Rowden, who created the inmates as psychic soldiers but was unable to remove their powers. He’s a truly slimy piece of s**t with a really great performance from Steven Elder backing him up, I love his smug personality immediately crumbling at the first sign of danger. However, this is the only member of the sidecast I like, everybody else is entirely one-dimensional to me and when they start getting picked off I really struggle to care. I will say though that there isn’t a bad performance here and even a couple I really liked, especially John Killoran as Latch, a character I couldn’t care less about but had some really great lines in the final part, read brilliantly by Killoran.

Something Inside is a very thin story with some great ideas and some real talent making it bearable. It’s not exactly a boring listen but leaves very little impact and doesn't live up to many of its ideas. If it had leant more into its horror undertones rather than going for a bland thriller, it could’ve been a lot better but as it stands, it’s an incredibly skippable script that doesn’t make any kind of impact on me.

6/10

Pros:

+ Both antagonists are pretty compelling

+ The cast is incredibly strong

+ Interesting and original setting

Cons:

- Obtrusive score

- Whilst well acted, the characters are bland

- Uneventful and formulaic plot

MR 073: Something Inside

This is just the epitome of generic. Very tropey. Very Doctor Who. Nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing particularly good about it either. I listened to this over the course of several days, so you'll have to forgive me if I get some details wrong, but it just wasn't very memorable.

The tragedy is that this is a very interesting idea. We find ourselves in a prison for psychics. The government of an unknown country has experimented on people and given them psychic powers, creating super soldiers to help win a war. The only problem is that after the war they now have superheroes running around and that's not great. So they imprison them. There are a lot of interesting directions you could go with that idea. Creating weapons that you fear because they could destroy you, like nuclear weapons. Watchmen did a very good job of making that metaphor explicit with Doctor Manhattan. You could talk about how the superheroes feel about being betrayed by the very country they helped win their war, and it does do that to an extent.

The government went on to accidentally create a weapon that kills the psychic superheroes called a brainworm. It's not actually a worm, but it does infect psychic minds and use their powers for its own ends. That's the basic premise of the story. Unfortunately, it mostly just ends up with a lot of running around corridors, like Doctor Who does. There are some interesting scenes reminiscent of Among Us and other bluffing games where various characters are trying to figure out where the brain worm is hiding. It attacks anyone it sees as a threat, so someone working out who holds it or someone pointing a gun at the person who holds it gets killed instantly.

There is also a whole section with the Doctor having lost his memories which is just boring at this point. The Eighth Doctor losing his memories? AGAIN? We literally just did this in the last Eighth Doctor story, Other Lives. It was better there. Here it serves little purpose but to show that the brain worm has the ability to eat memories. But that doesn't really do anything for the story. There's a long extended section where he's being held captive and tortured by the warden of the prison. Which, again, is very tropey. It doesn't really serve the story that much.

The ending is a little strange too, in that the brain worm inhabits one person and the Doctor is happy to just leave said person in the prison alone. The brain worm kept shouting to show it the way out and the Doctor concluded that everyone would die if it got out. And then the Doctor, C'Rizz, and Charley are the only survivors.

I dunno, it's just not that interesting. I think I'm probably thinking in terms of what it could have been. But what's here is just pretty generic.

groovy music. grim atmosphere. fantastic stuff

T'was pretty darn good. The atmosphere was real nice.

This story makes me feel a unique way. Parody level generic dialogue with weird casio keyboard preset feeling midi music with horns plastered on top that don't fit together at all. Terrible stuff by a terrible guy.