The Natural History of Fear

🙏🏼52% = Average! = Not recommended! 

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

WHEN CONFUSING YOU SIMPLY ISN’T ENOUGH!

Within the opening moments of The Natural History of Fear, I know this entire story will be a momentous struggle to get through. I don't know who is who or what is what here, and I’ve never been as effectively lost when listening to a Big Finish audio.

It’s very difficult to review a story that you cannot get a hold of; the characters are so strange and distant, the story is all over the place, and the atmosphere is unfathomable most of the time, with glimpses of reason appearing now and then.

The story gradually reveals that it takes place in a tightly controlled state, altering everyone's memories and perceptions and effectively dealing with non-conformity. The Doctor assumes the role of the Editor, exercising strict control; Charley serves as his faithful ally; and C'rizz, the Conscience, starts to question everything. But even after this, the story seems to go off on a tangent every so often, to maintain your confusion and prevent it from making you too comfortable.

The tension grows throughout this adventure and is palpable towards the end, even if you don't grasp the narrative itself. The strakes make themselves felt and keep you on edge, which helps you get to the end of the story. The last part does tie the loose ends together just enough to help you get an overall grasp of what it’s trying to achieve.

The performances are good, even if it's difficult to get a hold of the characters and who they represent.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

The biggest takeaway from this story is the interesting parallels drawn between the Buddhist view on reincarnation and the Doctor’s cycle of regeneration.

Genuinely one of the best stories in Doctor Who history, it is intriguing, surprising, well-written and acted throughout, with a gripping story and a whole new, beautifully established world that is fully explored.
The idea of showing a story is set in a surveillance state by having literally every scene take place on a monitor, is completely genius.
It is a master class in world-building and exposition writing, it never, and I mean never, spoon-feeds you exposition by having someone explain something to a fish-out-of-water character, every piece of exposition is something that that character would say in the scenario, and yet still it manages to fully build-up a completely new world with a bucket-load of new concepts and ideas that are completely foreign to us, explained most of the time to us eventually, but most of the time you have to think about the implications to truly understand what is going on, it is begging you, demanding of you that you engage with it to understand the world it is building up, and it deserves that of us.
And to top it all off, the sound design and mixing are truly beautiful, it reminds me of certain experimental arthouse movies that utilize sound as a non-verbal story-telling medium and it just works so incredibly well.
I hope someday this gets adapted into either a standalone or a Doctor Who movie or 2-parter, it works perfectly in audio, but I also wanna see it in visual.
I will be listening to this story for the rest of my life.
10/10