The Age of Endurance

Very, very dull. This story tries to tell an interesting story about survival and maternity, but does absolutely 0 work to make it land.

It’s a story that’s very reliant on your investment in the characters that it presents, but these are nothing but uninspired footsoldiers. They never show any deep thoughts or reflection. No interesting dynamic between them. No lookback on the horrors it presents.

There’s something valuable in the original premise: Immortal humans, who are also infertile, have experimented on lizards to stop their extinction. But nothing gets shown, nothing gets learned besides “wow, it sucked we did that”. This would have been a good story to time travel in. If the people were given the same choice again, but with the wisdom of what would happen. Would they do it again? Really push up the moral quandry.

Instead it’s a base-under-siege runaround with no reason to care for the base and its inhabitants. Even the main cast has zero character to show. They run, get lost, attacked, but it is nothing they haven’t seen before. Or will see again.

It also has the problem that the Companion Chronicles of has: Shoving aside members of the team they don’t have a voice for. Both Barbara and the doctor go missing in this tale and are gone for a long while. It feels so unnecessary to keep doing this. William Russell has shown to do a really good first doctor, and if the first doctor adventures can recast Barbara, so can this range. It is an arbitrary limiter on stories that just doesn’t always work. Even the characters notice this. The doctor dies, but Ian doesn’t even flinch or stop to believe this. We just move on. We know he’ll be back.

That leaves the story with 0 stakes. I’m not invested in this one-off cast, and the main cast is basically jovial towards the entire situation. That leaves this story with absolutely nothing, except a good premise. It feels like it should be reworked from the ground up.