The Stealers of Dreams

🙏🏼(6.7) = OKAY!

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

I like the idea of an Earth colony in the far future that has squashed all technological progress and forbidden every form of dreaming or creative thinking. It’s an apt idea, right in line with the Ninth Doctor era and episodes like The Long Game or Bad Wolf.

We focus a lot on seeing normal people and how they are affected by this false utopia. This is a bit of a Nu Who take on The Macra Terror or The Happiness Patrol, and I'm all for it, and it also feels like Dot and Bubble.

The Doctor, Rose, and Jack are separated at the start, and we follow three separate plotlines that eventually converge, therefore getting a richer look at the world and the story.

It also manages to create a mysterious, creepy air around the monsters, which, funnily enough, seems to work similarly to the one in Fear Her. The resistance program on TV makes people's fantasies come alive and hunt them.

Steve Lyons makes a terrifyingly convincing case for the possible dangers of dreams and fantasies when they are expressed in the wrong way.

While the setting and themes are fascinating and the characters are well written, there is something here that makes it less engaging to read. Perhaps it's the lack of a distinct villain or monster or the fact that the story itself remains pretty repetitive.

The last few chapters amp up the tension before Steve Lyons delivers a disappointingly small-scale conclusion.

Waller and Dominic are the most prominent supporting characters. Waller is an effective police officer, determined to follow the laws and rules of her society (funnily enough, I imagined her being black before Lyons revealed her to be so, mostly because I was thinking of Amanda Waller from the DC Universe). Dominic is a pretty standard ally torn between two realities but ending up decent.