The First Wave

And then an amazing end to the trilogy Oliver is one of my fav additions to the first doctor era and adding the vardins into it add a whole new layer to those villians

The last part of the Oliver Harper trilogy. Sadly, it seems the story now finally has found what it wants to talk about.

 

The party lands on the spaceship “Grace Alone”, which the previous story hinted at. They find the crew of the spaceship electrocuted and discover that Vardans, aliens consisting purely of energy, have infiltrated the ship and are planning an invasion. Can they stop these radiowave rascals?

 

What’s noticeable at the start of this story is the incredible amount of similarity to the last story, The Cold Equations. The setup is the exact same. Oliver and Steven are separated from the Doctor with not chance of rescue and discuss their plan of action while also looking back. I know it’s not an unheard of presentation, but two stories in one trilogy do the exact same thing in a row. It almost feels like self-plagiarism.

 

Besides that little oddity, this feels like the story that finally knows what it wanted to do with it’s character and setting. Just in time for the trilogy to end. This is the story that finally talks about that awkward moment at the end of Daleks’ Master Plan. This is the story where the grief of Steven and the Doctor is the most pronounced. This story finally decides what role Oliver takes in this new dynamic.

 

And sure, I’m glad this storyline finally found it’s footing, but it’s just too late to be satisfying. All this stuff should’ve been established in part 1. Because right now, it has to do so much setup and course correction that it barely has any room to resolve it all.

 

We start off with the Party registering themselves as criminals in the computer system. A detail that is necessary to make the last story happen. Time travel. After this, we quickly meet with the Vardans, a noncorporeal species feeding on any kind of energy wave, like radiowaves or brainwaves. They quickly capture the Doctor and read his mind before killing him. Steven and Oliver escape.

 

The death of the Doctor allows Steven to confide in Oliver about how it all feels meaningless sometimes. He repeats the statement from last time, where he mentions that “every time they get out of the Tardis, the odds of them coming back becomes slimmer”. They also finally talk about the Doctor’s embrace of victory in Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s well written, but as mentioned, we’re in part 3/3. This all comes too late for us to really explore.

 

At the tail end of the story, it turns out the Doctor is still alive and the Vardans are defeated. But there’s some bad news. The Report stated that the Doctor, Steven and Oliver died in this location. Steven and the Doctor accept this as their fate, while Oliver objects.

 

This is where that lack of time for resolution comes into play. A few things hold this scene back. First off, why would a sentence in a report be objectively true? Could it not be a mistake? Yes, the screen in the future mentioned they were dead, but they were alive in the future to read that screen. There’s really no reason to make the report come true.

Second is the overall approach of the Doctor. It has always been the case that this Doctor is against changing history. That is believable. But we’ve only seen this happen in the past. It has never translated to the future. The Doctor has interfered with Daleks on 3 occasions. The Doctor has saved Marinus, the Rills and countless other planets and people. The general rule has always been that it’s fair game, as long as it happens in the future. So why is that rule out of the window now?

 

In Steven’s case it is understandable. He has a huge amount of survivor’s guilt and has condemned himself to death for a while. I believe he would be willing to sacrifice himself.  But we have not had the same insight in the doctor and the excuse of not changing time is incredibly flimsy when compared to the entire approach the story has had until now.

 

The story should have centered around this moment. This self-sacrifice out of sheer depression. But it didn’t have the time to do it right, because it had to patch up the holes the last 2 stories left. So this decision is left to 5 minutes in the stories hour long runtime.

 

Because of it’s short length, this now feels like nothing except a quick way to get rid of Oliver. His sacrifice is reduced from a heroic moment of salvation to a random act that seemingly happened in a minute. Oliver didn’t want all of them to die, so just died himself on a whim.

 

In my eyes, it’s a weak conclusion to a weak trilogy. It ends now that it has finally found its footing. We finally get to a point where we could go somewhere with the premise of exploring the party’s grief. The bridge to deeper character exploration is built. Only to immediately explode, having served no purpose.

 

The Oliver Harper trilogy could have been something truly special, but it spent so much time dawdling and skirting around it’s subject that it has no time left to meaningfully explore this. It has given us some insight in Steven, but has no time to look at that insight on a deeper level.