MR 059: The Roof of the World

Well I certainly didn't expect to like this one as much as I did. The Doctor takes Peri and Erimem to a big cricket game that's supposed to take place in Tibet at the height of the British Empire. Seems like a silly premise yes? It actually gets to be more interesting than that.

Starting with how Peri goes after the Doctor for liking British Empire sensibilities. He likes the types of guys who sit around and tell slaves what to do while writing a chronicle about how amazing they are. Which is wild. Why is this Doctor like this? Why does he like these people? The British Empire is exactly the type of evil empire that he regularly takes down everywhere else but on Earth. Yet for some reason he not only lets it continue to exist and doesn't try to fight it, he revels in it. It's kind of horrifying to be honest. Peri is absolutely right here, as she usually is.

Regardless, Erimem is the focus here, which is very fun. They meet up with one of the participants in the game, a general who is obsessed with his own image and literally has a chronicler who is fluffing him up as braver and more important than he really is. Erimem gets captured by a scary death cloud and this is where the story really comes to life. Up until this point I thought it was fairly average, but here we start getting character examinations.

The scary death cloud plays into Erimem's fears and insecurities. It shows her father ordering her death because she is a woman and women can't rule. It shows her Peri dying and scolding Erimem for making the TARDIS worse. She accidentally caused an explosion that killed them both. It even shows her the Doctor saying that he never wanted Erimem in the TARDIS in the first place and that neither the Doctor nor Peri ever trusted her.

It's so effective because we really get to deep dive into Erimem for once. We see who she is as a person and what she cares about. She loves her father deeply, seeing him as one of the most important people in her life. She sees him as proping her up, supporting her no matter what. So the cloud destroys that love. She says that she will always have Peri no matter what, but here is Peri hating her and she doesn't want to be there anymore. She trusts the Doctor completely, but here is the Doctor letting her down, hating her, joining with the scary black cloud to release it. The cloud feeds on her fear and insecurity. It needs her to release itself back into the world. And ultimately she agrees to help it so that it will stop tormenting her.

These scenes are absolutely fantastic for all three of our leads. Nicola Bryant and Peter Davison go from being sympathetic to being menacing and hateful in a heartbeat. They're so good and you really feel for Erimem as Caroline Morris shows such a fantastic range of emotion here.

Meanwhile back in reality, the Doctor and Peri try to figure out what this evil cloud is and how to stop it. They figure out how to get into the cloud, but it turns out that Erimem has already been captured. She is the key to allowing it into the world. The cloud is "The Great Old Ones." The "old gods" if you will, in the lovcraftian sense of the phrase. They bring fear, chaos, division, hatred, all the negative emotions as they destroy worlds one at a time. They embody all of humanity's shadows and boogiemen that go bump in the night. A memory of the evil that was once released but was held back by Erimem's father.

Erimem's father captured them inside of Everest, which is, you know, wild, building a pyramid inside of it. Not sure how he accomplished that, but sure. They want to use Erimem to escape because they can play on her fears and insecurities, which they do. Peri and the General manage to freeze the cloud with liquid nitrogen which is enough to help the Doctor and Erimem escape. I like when they allude to this early on when Peri uses liquid nitrogen to freeze the swimming pool in the TARDIS and make a skating rink. ("Just apologize and nod, he likes that sort of thing.")

Freeing Erimem prevents the old gods from coming out and they are trapped in their pyramid once more. She goes through quite a lot of trauma here, being tormented by the old ones, but she still believes in adventure and exploration. She's strong and she wants to keep going despite it all.

While not the best story ever made, it was a decent exploration of Erimem's character. All three of our leads did fantastic jobs of jumping between different emotions and character states. Peri and the Doctor's harshness in the nightmare realm were particularly impactful as was their compassion and desperation to save their friend back in reality. I usually feel like Peri and Erimem are a great TARDIS team, but their potential is squandered. This time, I felt like they were used very well.

17.10.2023

Great in concept, painfully mid in execution. Mind f**kery where you can't trust what you see, put through the lens of a naïve and trusting character — pure gold when I describe it. Unfortunately, apart from a couple of moments, it falls flat.

Same with the concept of ancient evil and another one of the Doctor's iconic "yelling at ancient evil" speeches. Great in theory, lacking in execution.
I'm surprised this is the one people are remembering when they're choosing from literally hundreds of Five/Peri/?Erimem audio plays. As 2.5/5 as it gets.

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

Previous Story: The Axis of Insanity

This story is an exploration of Erimem's character. While I like the idea of that, it proves to be fairly shallow. It doesn't really tackle anything unique to her royal background and serves mostly to put her through more trauma with the veil of "character development". Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good and worthwhile moments. There's an especially good exploration into her dynamic with Peri and the Doctor but it doesn't do anything I haven't really heard before.

The setting is quite nice and the way Erimem interacts with it is fairly unique. The soundtrack is also fantastic, it's not too noticeable to be distracting but it perfectly accentuates the emotions in every scene and generally captures the mystery and wonder of the mountains throughout.

The performances here are on top form, the highlight is absolutely Caroline Morris as Erimem who goes through such a range of emotions here but both of her co-stars are equally as fantastic. The scenes where Erimem believes her friends have turned on her in the afterlife is an especially great showing of both Peter Davison and Nicola Bryant. The way they switch from kind and trustworthy to almost vicious was exceptional and so was Erimem's reaction to it.

I think had I been exposed to this earlier I would have heralded it as some marvelous character-piece but when you take a step back and look at what actually happens, Erimem goes through a lot of trauma and remains mostly the same character by the end.

Next Story: Three's A Crowd