no where near as bad as people have said it is, but it’s within true doctor who fashion that a weak, weird story, should came straight after a veritable masterpiece

The beginning with Kro’ka was interesting. Everything afterward was disappointing or unpleasant.

Well it’s been quite a while since I listen to this, that said I still remember it well enough and well I don’t hate it, neither do I like it. I think in many ways at best it’s a bit unremarkable, at worst it’s a letdown in its Series, as well as in the MR after such a stellar Run (Omega - Scherzo) and then this!
Following such a good Run will always be hard and well Kromon does not live up to it. If it wasn’t for its Writer and for being the Introduction Story of C’rizz, it would have be forgotten, I’d reckon.

After doing some Work with Six, Martin returns to pen his first Big Finish Play and his first Adventure with a new Doctor. It’s not good. Not to say I am too thrilled about Martins work from what I heard and seen, but this one falls into the Trap of his previous Work but without the Substance. It’s offputting but lacks a Commentary that made Varos such a good Story.

Gone is an interesting, unique World, replaced for a Society that on Paper could be interesting but offers mostly nothing. Of course following up Scherzo would have been hard anyway and if this Story delivers in being enjoyable I would have been very satisfied. Sadly it simply isn’t, if we don’t have some gross Imagery we kinda have a very Standard and very boring Who Adventures.

That said, not all of it is bad, C’rizz is introduced fairly well here, and you get the Gist of his Character. Some of its Cliffhangers are intriguing, but really what does it offer?
Of course, it’s fine if a Writer decides to go with a style, has a pattern, it can work very well, sadly Martin’s later Work (from the very little I know) doesn’t reach the Highs of his first one.
Despite all I wouldn’t say it’s truly “bad”, it isn’t “good” either and not really “middling” either, I am unsure how I would rate this Story. There are Things which work, but they get overshadowed by some of its worst Parts, a mess of a Story really, and I am not necessarily sure if I make sense, but I tried my best .

Have you seen Mindwarp? OK, you can skip this one, just know that this is where C'Rizz comes from and you're set to continue the Divergent Universe arc.

Philip has some trappings in his stories, and they can be pretty off-putting. He likes writing over-the-top violence, especially against women, and specifically body horror is almost certainly a fetish of his, given it pops up in BOTH of his TV stories and again here, more violent and horrifying than ever.

I will give him props that none of the women in Mission to Magnus have their bodies taken away from them. No, instead they're all belittled for being misandrists and the big strong men come along to force them to be their wives, which the Doctor approves of. What's the moral here?
But you know what else is in both of his TV stories AND Mission to Magnus? Sil. Big corporate interest, doesn't care about lives if they can't profit him? Yeah, Martin's most well-known villain is a businessman.
He recycles that, here, too.
The Kromon are all bland and uninteresting. They probably had names but I can't tell you any of them. They all blur into one big "what if businessmen were slightly more evil", with a twist of the story being that their slave encampments are built off literal company directives.
I will say that it's a slightly interesting idea. They're based on insects, many of whom have one queen and a bunch of worker drones, so depicting them all as almost mindless drones following the corporate directives could work... if it didn't feel like such a retread.

Had this been Philip's ONLY contribution to Who I'd probably view it more favorably, but every piece of context I glean from his other works just makes it worse and worse.
But don't worry: there is a new and exciting way he found to fumble something interesting.
C'Rizz is the newest companion, and for a lot of the story he's kind of fleshed out. Guy with a heart of gold, wants to help his people, horrified by evil monsters, friend to the Oroog, can't leave anyone in danger... We've seen it before, but it's a good start. What fumbles it for me is the end of the story. C'Rizz talks about having been selected, but neglects to mention anything before that. At the end of the story the Kro'Ka shows up and says "yeah he was a pacifist monk". Why wasn't that IN the story? Have him grapple with it!
The Kro'Ka then starts going off on the Doctor saying that he's the one who weaponised C'Rizz and that he should think on that... So essentially, Philip seems to have been given a character brief and an emotional arc, then pawned it off on the next write because he didn't want it

Speaking of emotional arcs, remember Scherzo? It ends 30 seconds before this one starts? Well, let's just ignore it. No mention of the big revelation of the Doctor and Charley openly admitting they're in love, no, time for a standard Doctor-companion pair. If it weren't for the Kromon going "time travel? What is 'time'?" (and a companion introduction), you'd be forgiven for thinking this was a random extra story set between, say, Minuet in Hell and Invaders from Mars.

In a point in time where Doctor Who is trying to be more experimental and focus on arcs and character more than ever before, Philip Martin paints a dreadfully by-the-numbers story with little memorable about it other than slurping noises.

The Monthly Adventures #053 - “The Creed of the Kromon" by Philip Martin

The Divergence Arc was an opportunity for Big Finish to push their experimentalism even further than before, which seemed impossible with unique genres, story structures and unusual quirks already getting used up in the latter half of releases 1-50. However, this arc opens with Scherzo, which is undeniably a unique and altogether strange story, promising the Divergence would continue the trend of new and innovative ideas. The Creed of the Kromon is not that. In fact, The Creed of the Kromon might just be the biggest downgrade in Doctor Who’s history.

Escaping from the perilous interzone, the Doctor and Charley find themselves on the oppressed desert world of Eutermes, where, allied with local inhabitant C’rizz, they find themselves at the whim of the tyrannical, insectoid Kromon.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

There was this old trope in Doctor Who I found to be most prevalent way back in the First Doctor era: the underdog story. Basically, the formula this trope posited was that A: the Doctor and co show up somewhere oppressed and B: the Doctor and co help kickstart a revolution amongst the oppressed. Examples of this include: The Daleks, The Space Museum, The Savages and The Web Planet. And that last one is especially important because The Creed of the Kromon is effectively a cross between Phillip Martin’s breakout TV episode Vengeance on Varos and The Web Planet. And just like The Web Planet, this is an embarrassing mess of a story. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is worse than the infamous vaseline smeared dumpster fire (this is just about the most 5/10 story I’ve ever seen) and I’d even say there was a lot to like. First of all, this is the introduction to new companion C’rizz, who I’ve personally always found incredibly underrated, and who gets a pretty decent introduction here. Instantly his dynamic with Eight and Charley is established nicely, we get a few hints as to the darker leanings of his character, a non-human companion is always fun and he gets a good few moments of development, like when he’s forced to mercy kill his wife or is left behind to do nothing whilst others risk their lives for him. All in all, this ticks all the boxes in introducing him, it just unfortunately fails in nearly every other department. However, what I don’t see commented on often enough is the world building. Eutermes is a pretty well built up place and the distinctly alien Eutermesans and Kromon are both given some wonderful speculative biology, like how the Kromon need a constant supply of water or the fact that Eutermesans change skin colour to camouflage with the environment. It really does make the setting feel alive and it’s surprisingly rare to get an alien location that isn’t just Earth 2.0. As for our returning cast, I like them here. Especially in the early parts, the interactions between the Doctor and Charley were noticeably well written and entertaining. It wasn’t much but after seeing them so at odds the last few stories it was nice to see them so comfortably friends again with such good dialogue shared between them.

So, we’ve established that character is not at fault here, the cast is enjoyable, no doubt, so what makes The Creed of the Kromon so overwhelmingly mediocre? Well for one, the story is utter dross. Like I said earlier, this script easily fits into a decades old trope for Who that I think almost always spawned a dull story and doesn’t change up now. It’s a lot of pointless back and forth between one note villains and our protagonists before the inevitable downfall later on. And, you know what, let me just talk about the Kromon, since they’re the title bad guys and all. They’re dull. That’s it, that’s all, all she wrote, they are as bland as a tyrannical species can be. I like how distinctly alien they are but that doesn’t change the fact they don’t feel threatening, lack distinct or interesting personalities and have little to no depth. And it’s them that cause so much of this story to drag, because we’re stuck with their endless taunting that only causes mundanity. Something I also think impacts the grand revolution plot is that we get to see so little of this world. The Kromon apparently have hundreds of Eutermasens and Oroog (other alien species, kind of like giant moles) enslaved but we never see a single one of them. And since, in the climax, the Kromon all die in sync because their queen got removed, we don’t really see the revolution, only the slow and tedious build up. Plus, we see the return of Philip Martin’s recurring issue of violence against women in his scripts. Or rather, body horror directed specifically at women in his scripts. Much like Peri getting transformed into a bird in Vengeance on Varos, Charley here goes under a rather uncomfortable metamorphosis into a Kromon queen that just rubs me the wrong way. It’s cruel and disgusting in an unfun way that only serves to leave a bad taste in your mouth and the story would be a lot better off without its addition.

The Creed of the Kromon had potential, at least, I feel it did. There are a number of great ideas here, most of them coming from the excellent world building, but it’s all stuck in a large scale story that’s been shrunk to a relatively small scale for little reason. And since I should mention it somewhere and The Creed of the Kromon is already wasting good ideas, the whole point of the Divergence Arc, taking place in a universe without time, is thrown away immediately. It would be more accurate to say it takes place in a universe without the word “time”, as that seems to be all that’s missing; there are still days, hours and every other measurement of time that would surely be impossible. Misuse of its central conceit or not, there’s no denying that The Creed of the Kromon is nothing special at heart, consisting of an uninventive trek across an arid landscape with only a few hidden gems.

5/10

Pros:

+ C’rizz gets a really effective introduction

+ The world of Eutermes is wonderfully alien and strange

+ The interactions between characters are surprisingly endearing

Cons:

- A derivative bore of a plot

- The Kromon are entirely underwhelming antagonists

- We get to see an unfortunately small amount of a nicely developed world

- Really nasty to Charley in a supremely uncomfortable way

MR 053: The Creed of the Kromon

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That's it. End review. No, but really, fess up. Who let Philip Martin have a pen?

I just... I'm speechless. I thought we were done with the dark and edgy torture porn for the sake of it stories after Nekromanteia and the two Project stories. And yet here I am. Suffering. I hope you're happy. We went from an absolutely breathtaking meditation on the nature of Doctor Who in Scherzo to... whatever the hell was going on in Philip Martin's mind.

I don't even want to summarize the plot so I'll just gloss over it. After exiting their glass tube, the Doctor come across... immigration and border customs? Or some such. An angry disembodied entity that decides whether people get to cross over into the zones on this planet. Because there are zones on this planet. This whole section was bizare.

And then we go to the zone with the Kromon and we all go wtf. We start off relatively harmlessly by meeting C'rizz, our designated new companion. He's escaped from the Kromon after he and his girlfriend L'da were taken. They infiltrate the Kromon and we get to see their operation. They're a termite like species that exists in a hive. Brainwashing, making all aliens slave workers. They're now a corporate structure because they themselves were destroyed by a corporation but adapted the corporation's methods. Their "creed." It so feels like the director is supposed to be Sil. He sounds like Sil and acts like Sil. I was half expecting him to make the annoying purring sound that Sil makes.

C'rizz discovers that L'da has been made into a queen to birth kromon offspring forever. Which, you know, is horrifying. It reminds me immediately of Dragon Age because that game series has the same sort of monster. It's body horror, but particularly horrifying for women. Women being reduced to baby incubators is certainly what a lot of conservative policy is all about so it has a real world horror to it.

L'da begs for C'rizz to kill him, which he does and then they get put on trial. The story then drags on and gets super boring. The trial goes on forever and nobody cares. The Doctor works on space travel, but tricks them into causing an explosion. C'rizz gets tied to a water wheel and tortured, but is rescued by a friend from the beginning of the story. And Charley gets made into the new queen. This is the horrifying bit. We get to see every bit of the process of Charley being transformed into a birthing queen, as if it's a fetish for the writer. Who knows, maybe it is, he did have Peri transformed in both his two stories.

They eventually escape and I'm mercifully saved from having to hear more of Charley birthing and controlling Kromon offspring. One thing that did strike me as incredibly pretentious was how the Divirgent Universe is not supposed to have a sense of time and yet it absolutely does have time. There are events that occur in chronological order, something that would not happen without time. Regardless, why did anyone think this story was a good idea? And why did anyone think it would be a good introduction to a new companion? This Divergent Universe arc is not off to a great start. Let's hope the rest of it isn't like this.

01.04.2023

It's just torture porn. No narrative substance in here, I'll tell you that.

Also an award for the most unimaginative implementation of a great concept. In Scherzo the world with no time felt distinctly alien and incomprehensible, almost lovecraftian. Here it's "What is this time you mention? I don't know this word. Anyway, see you in two days".

Filler after filler after filler, the only scenes of any character substance are downright pornographic in their depiction of suffering. The writer gets off on this, I can grant you this.

Another award for the blandest secondary cast of all time. There's no distinct features for any other character. One of them becomes the companion by the end 🤮...

This ain't it, chief. 0/5

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“THE CREED OF THE KROMON: A SLOW AND UNINSPIRED DETOUR INTO ANT SPACE”

Following the surreal brilliance of Scherzo, The Creed of the Kromon drops the Doctor and Charley into a desolate world of towering anthills and the insectoid Kromon. With echoes of The Web Planet (1965), this story leans into bleak, unsettling sci-fi horror. But unlike Scherzo, which thrived on psychological tension and emotional weight, The Creed of the Kromon struggles to make its oppressive atmosphere engaging.

The story revolves around the Doctor and Charley’s search for the TARDIS, only for them to be captured and used by the Kromon to unlock its secrets. While the Kromon themselves are grotesque and creepy in concept, their slow, droning presence saps the energy from the story. Philip Martin’s script, much like Vengeance on Varos, aims for a dark and unnerving tone, but here it feels stretched too thin. The plot meanders, often relying on sluggish dialogue and repetitive sequences that fail to build momentum.

A LACKLUSTRE SHOWING FROM THE DOCTOR AND CHARLEY

Paul McGann and India Fisher, usually a reliable duo, feel surprisingly subdued. Charley, in particular, goes through another ordeal—this time involving experimentation and body horror—but rather than deepening her character, it just feels like another round of suffering without much emotional payoff. The Doctor, meanwhile, spends too much time trapped in exposition-heavy conversations, lacking his usual spark of energy.

C’RIZZ JOINS THE TEAM, BUT IT’S A MIXED INTRODUCTION

This story marks the debut of Conrad Westmaas as C’rizz, an enigmatic alien with the ability to shift his skin tone for camouflage. His character is presented as passionate and decisive, yet his motivations and background remain somewhat murky. While C’rizz is given plenty of audio time, his introduction lacks the punch needed to make him feel like an essential addition to the TARDIS team.

OVERBEARING ALIEN VOICES AND STRONG SOUND DESIGN

The sound design does a great job in setting up the barren, dusty atmosphere of the Kromon’s world, with eerie music that reinforces the desolation. However, the alien voices go completely overboard, making many of the side characters indistinguishable from each other. The result is a soundscape that’s effective in some ways but frustrating in others, as dialogue becomes grating rather than immersive.

EFFECTIVE BODY HORROR, BUT A LACK OF EXCITEMENT

One of the few areas where The Creed of the Kromon succeeds is in its unsettling body horror. The scientific experiments, mind control, and poison-induced transformations give it a disturbing edge, even if the overall plot fails to excite. There’s a dark, twisted undertone to many of the Kromon’s actions, but without strong character work or narrative drive, these moments feel hollow rather than impactful.

VERDICT: A MAJOR STEP DOWN FROM SCHERZO

After the mind-bending brilliance of Scherzo, this feels like an unfocused and uninspired misstep. While it introduces C’rizz and explores some unsettling sci-fi themes, its sluggish pacing, lack of energy from the leads, and overuse of grating alien voices make it more of a chore than an engaging listen. The body horror elements add some intrigue, but they’re not enough to save what is ultimately a dull and bizarrely lifeless story.

📝4/10