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

Previous Story: The Curse of Davros

This is easily one of the funnest stories I've done in ages. I love the ideas in this story, playing with the concepts of fiction and reality while making fun of all sorts of cheesy television tropes. This story is absolutely a comedy but it's not without it's genuinely heartfelt and even chilling moments. There's a lot of technobabble at the start which made it a bit difficult to understand but I figured it out eventually.

I found it a bit of an odd choice to "kill off" Flip halfway into the story after she had been seperated from the Doctor for so long already. This resulted in them not really getting any time together beyond the opening and ending scenes. Still, from what we did get of Flip she's a very interesting character, she's not afraid to call others out and she has a strong sense of doing the right thing.

I found the most compelling character here to be the cartoonishly evil Lord Krarn. It's funny how a character designed to be one-dimensional within the actual narrative has so much depth. He has a chilling scene where he gets revenge on his "creator", the sleazy businessman Augustus Scullop. Both actors here are fantastic and this scene alone makes the whole story for me.

The ending was quite clever in my opinion, using the reality-altering machine to create a handy little machine that "destroys all fictional beings". It reminded me of those play-fights you have as a kid where you keep coming up with loopholes to avoid or survive blows. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of having Flip dead for half the story it did admittedly lead to a really cool scene.

Overall, a very competently written, decently funny story. My only complaint is that I still don't know as much about Flip as I'd like to.

Next Story: Wirrn Isle