The Boy That Time Forgot

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

Previous Story: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster

That was genuinely awful and I can't believe the Paul Magrs wrote that considering how much I enjoy his other stuff. The worst part is this would have been a fantastic story if it was a Big Finish original companion and not Adric.

None of the characterisations of any of the characters work. Adric especially is absolutely ruined in this story. For some reason he hates the Doctor for a decision he himself made and now desperately wants to get revenge. That's not even the worst part, for some reason Adric is desperate to "mate" with Nyssa and it's fairly self-explanatory why that's awful.

The Doctor is arguably just as bad, calling Adric an "abomination" just because he survived the crash. This is a major plothole because his death was never fixed seeing as nobody directly saw him die, so how the Doctor is able to decide that he shouldn't exist makes no sense.

I'm not sure if it's because I already despise this story, but the two side-characters were annoying and painfully dull, I literally couldn't have cared less about them. The only neat detail about this story was Adric's servants being named after people he'd knew, (Teegarna, named after Tegan. Kranlee, after Cranleigh) This was actually quite a clever way to foreshadow the fact that Adric was here but it changes nothing about my opinion.

The most tragic thing about this story is that it genuinely could have been a favourite if, instead of Adric, it was a Big Finish-original companion that had been travelling with 5 and Nyssa, only to die in a previous story and then "come back" in this one. A companion turned evil would have worked extremely well if it wasn't Adric.

It also just feels disrespectful to make this story without Matthew Waterhouse, I know he wasn't working with Big Finish at the time but it would have been better not to make this at all especially considering you have to recast arguably the main character.

If you're going to dredge up the past, atleast make it tasteful.

Next Story: Time Reef