MR 085: Red

Red. Red. Red. Red. Red. RED. RED. RED. RED! RED! RED!!!!!!!!!! RRRRRRRREEEEEEDDDDDDD!!!!!!

Oh what did I just murder someone? Huh. That's strange. Ah well. That taste of violence is a work of art.

Welp. Another day another mediocre Seventh Doctor story. There's some interesting ideas here, but ultimately it kind of collapses under its own narrative, particularly at the end.

We start our story in a large living city called The Needle. It's very strange. It manipulates the structures around you to move you to where you're going. I'm not sure what that's about, but sure. It's a cool idea. The super computer that runs this place (because there's always a super computer right?) has chipped everybody in the city to suppress all violent urges. Only the chips are malfunctioning and occasionally having the opposite effect.

There is also an undercity filled with people who have left The Needle and deactivated their chips, wanting to experience what violence is like. And there's an intermediary in The Needle who works with the people from the Undercity and wants to experience violence, but doesn't actually want to deactivate the chip. That in itself is an interesting dichotomy. She wants to feel it when it's safe, but actually going down to the undercity would not be safe, not really.

The Doctor gets chipped and Mel falls out of the Needle into a waiting car. She's pretty appropriate for this story since she's called Red by the characters, being a red head and all. When the chip malfunctions, causing someone to kill someone else, they start shouting red over and over again. For some reason the Doctor is linked to it too.

Mel gets to experience the undercity and see first hand what being deprived of violence for so long has caused. There are people whose entire job it is to push the human body as far as it can and see how much it can endure. That is rather grim in and of itself. The people are fascinated by Mel, especially, because she's not chipped so she's capable of much more violence than any of them.

Meanwhile the Doctor investigates the killings. This is where the story starts to collapse in on itself. It turns out that it is sentient technology from the future or some such? And it was brought here by another time traveler. It is a sentient program that has infected the super computer and has thus infected all the chips. The Doctor is linked to it because he's also a time traveler. Again, it's a very strange explanation. I'm not sure what this writer was going for. I would have been perfectly happy to just say it was a manifestation of decades of repressed violence coming out as a glitch in the system. I would have loved to see an ending where all the chips malfunction and the entire city starts killing each other. That is not quite what happens, though that really would have committed.

Instead, the super computer starts killing people. It sees its responsibility to stop the violence and the only way to stop it is to kill the chips and thus kill the people with the chips. Which is certainly.... a choice. Mel uses her expert computer programming skills of... turning it off and on again to reset the computer and ultimately shut it down. Only The Needle is linked to the computer and collapses as well.

There's a lot of stuff that happened in the middle but I don't really remember it. I do think this one needed a couple more drafts before being put out there, though. The ending and explanation didn't need to be this overly complicated.

Oh and it does need to be said that McCoy's overacting is a bit much here. His performance in the show is very much physical and that physicality is obviously missing with just audio. A lot is lost hearing him dramatically shout "Red" over and over again. It's like Unregenerate. They just let him chew the scenery for an hour, but it's just not that interesting to listen to after awhile. I don't want to dislike McCoy's Doctor, but he really has gone down the rankings since I started main range, ah well. Maybe one day he'll have interesting audio stories.

MR 054: The Nowhere Place

This one certainly has a great atmosphere. A door appears in the middle of a military space station in the future. People hear a bell and get drawn into it. Only, there is nothing on the other side of it. They just vanish, gone forever into nothingness. The premise here is quite good, but the execution... well...

The Doctor initially hears this bell and is drawn to this space station. The first part is kind of superfluous. It takes awhile for the story to really get started. Like a lot of main range and classic serials with four parts, this one is a bit too long. There's a lot of fussing with the commander of the station over who the Doctor and Evelyn are and why they're there. It's all very standard overly long Doctor Who story stuff. When they finally do get to the story, though, it works quite well. The door is in the cargo hold and draws people in. Just a few at first, but then it draws in the executive officer. And then more and more people hear the bell and go into it. There's a sequence I liked where a space pilot heard the bell while piloting and crashed into that section of the ship to get to the door. The entire section got sucked into it and now the door is just standing in open space on its own.

On the other side of the door, the Doctor hears the sound a train and a ticket taker and they narrow down exactly which train it is. They leave the station with a promise to return, and the Doctor goes to that train. It turns out this was a trap, however. This is kind of where the story starts to fall apart, just a bit. Whatever is on the other side of the door possesses Evelyn and tries to take some sketches from one of the train passengers. It turns out these are sketches of that space station they were on, germs of an idea for space travel, like Leonardo Di Vinci's sketches of helicopters. It's a bit strange that this one random person is the only one with this idea and stealing it will shut down humanity's space ambitions, but sure. There's a lot of science fiction by this point in the 50s and certainly an explosion of it since then. We're literally talking about Doctor Who after all.

It's not entirely clear why whatever is beyond the door is trying to shut down humanity's space travel considering what it is eventually revealed to be. This part with the train is a much better idea and atmosphere than it is a realized story. For now, the Doctor sees what is happening and goes back to the space station, a month later after a lot more people have gone into the door. The Doctor goes and puts the TARDIS in front of the door and confronts what's inside.

Once again, with the rest of this story, the vibes are good, but the actual explanation is a bit off. These are beings from Earth's distant past, billions of years ago, and were the very first species to ever develop on that planet. They tried to go into space, but failed catastrophically. They made an error that resulted in not only their space ship getting blown up, but their entire species getting sucked into the collapse of time. The Doctor doesn't really know why this happened, just that they made the error that blew up their ship. Ever since they've been reaching out from their place where this is no time, putting up this doorway whenever a species on Earth gets space travel in an effort to destroy their species. It's just completely out of petty jealousy and for no other reason. I kind of like this, they're completely consumed by jealousy, there is nothing else. They're just a writhing mass of jealousy, in fact.

If this is the case, though, I don't really know what the point of that whole train sequence was. Why would they try to stop humanity from achieving space travel through time travel? They don't need the TARDIS, they can pop into any time. And they only really seem to be genociding species when they achieve space travel. So why bother to do all that?

The story seems to have been conceived with the imagery in mind first and then building the story around it. The image of the train and the sounds coming from within the door. The Doctor describes seeing a giant mass of faces inside of a gaping mouth. It feels like a metal album cover. The mass of faces are the countless trillions that have been slaughtered to prevent other species from achieving space travel. But the story doesn't quite coalesce around these images. They're good, haunting images, though, I'll give them that.

The commander of the space station sends a nuclear bomb through the door and that seems to wipe out the species that did this and all the species that they have sent through the door over billions of years. And that's that. There's a nice little outro where Evelyn asks what she really saw, having seen the writhing mass of faces inside of a mouth and the Doctor asks if she really wants to know. Because the truth is too horrific to contemplate.

It has lovecraftian vibes too, with its imagery and ideas. A horrible truth that drives you mad just to think of it. A bell that draws you in when you see what's beyond the door to nowhere. Ultimately, though, I think the story is a bit weak. It doesn't support the ideas it's trying to convey. Still, good vibes. Also why didn't they kill the Silurians? They clearly had space travel, smh.

MR 073: Something Inside

This is just the epitome of generic. Very tropey. Very Doctor Who. Nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing particularly good about it either. I listened to this over the course of several days, so you'll have to forgive me if I get some details wrong, but it just wasn't very memorable.

The tragedy is that this is a very interesting idea. We find ourselves in a prison for psychics. The government of an unknown country has experimented on people and given them psychic powers, creating super soldiers to help win a war. The only problem is that after the war they now have superheroes running around and that's not great. So they imprison them. There are a lot of interesting directions you could go with that idea. Creating weapons that you fear because they could destroy you, like nuclear weapons. Watchmen did a very good job of making that metaphor explicit with Doctor Manhattan. You could talk about how the superheroes feel about being betrayed by the very country they helped win their war, and it does do that to an extent.

The government went on to accidentally create a weapon that kills the psychic superheroes called a brainworm. It's not actually a worm, but it does infect psychic minds and use their powers for its own ends. That's the basic premise of the story. Unfortunately, it mostly just ends up with a lot of running around corridors, like Doctor Who does. There are some interesting scenes reminiscent of Among Us and other bluffing games where various characters are trying to figure out where the brain worm is hiding. It attacks anyone it sees as a threat, so someone working out who holds it or someone pointing a gun at the person who holds it gets killed instantly.

There is also a whole section with the Doctor having lost his memories which is just boring at this point. The Eighth Doctor losing his memories? AGAIN? We literally just did this in the last Eighth Doctor story, Other Lives. It was better there. Here it serves little purpose but to show that the brain worm has the ability to eat memories. But that doesn't really do anything for the story. There's a long extended section where he's being held captive and tortured by the warden of the prison. Which, again, is very tropey. It doesn't really serve the story that much.

The ending is a little strange too, in that the brain worm inhabits one person and the Doctor is happy to just leave said person in the prison alone. The brain worm kept shouting to show it the way out and the Doctor concluded that everyone would die if it got out. And then the Doctor, C'Rizz, and Charley are the only survivors.

I dunno, it's just not that interesting. I think I'm probably thinking in terms of what it could have been. But what's here is just pretty generic.

MR 082: The Settling

Interesting that we should do a pure historical immediately after the last one. There are no tedious speeches about changing history being bad, thankfully. That would have been hilariously tone deaf. It is, however, a rather dreary and pointless listen.

Despite this being, what, the fifth story with Hex, he's still not a particularly interesting or engaging character. It's a shame, because the other Big Finish original characters have already done a lot to stand out and make a name for themselves. Evelyn, Charley, and Erimem. But not Hex. He's a much more generic character. To be fair, the Seventh Doctor hasn't had very many good episodes so far in general, not just with Hex. His standouts were a satire of Star Trek and Eurovision in Bang-Bang-a-Boom! and LIVE 34 where he took down a fascist regime. Despite Hex being in that one as well, we didn't really get to know much about him either.

So far he doesn't have much of a unique character. He's just been here to suffer so far, I think. Hex has constantly been in horrific situations and he doesn't have that exploration bug like Ace has. He wants to help, as a nurse, but that's about it. Even in this story, which is supposed to be a Hex character development vehicle, he's still very lackluster, which makes the story a bit boring and pointless really.

I will say that I enjoyed the framing device. We see what's going on through the frame of Hex and Ace talking about it in the TARDIS after the fact so that we can see their feelings. But it's just what you'd expect. Oliver Cromwell's reign of terror was horrific. The story doesn't really add anything to that fact. It's just slaughter for the sake of it. I think the story is trying to humanize Cromwell, but it's pretty hard to do that considering the barbarity of his actions.

We see a horrific slaughter where Ace and Hex fight and the Doctor shelters a pregnant woman... and then we go to another town where there's another horrific slaughter where Ace and Hex fight and the Doctor delivers a baby. Hex falls in with Cromwell and tries to convince him to not be so evil, which fails spectacularly when Hex idly says "oh my god" several times in a row which pisses off Cromwell for Hex taking the lord's name in vein. And he gets whipped and runs away.

You'd think that you'd want to leave after something like this. There's no reason for Hex to stay. He's attracted to Ace, sure, but that's definitely going nowhere and it absolutely shouldn't be enough of a reason to stick around after witnessing thousands of people killed not to mention being tortured almost getting killed himself. Hex hasn't really had any good experiences so far at all. He's just been tortured every time he turns up.

And ultimately the conclusion of this story is that Hex is going to stay and do whatever the Doctor tells him. So what did we learn from this story at all? Cromwell is a monster and Ace and Hex were beaten into submission. Woooo. Just deeply unpleasant to listen to. The Seventh Doctor can't catch a W to save his life I swear. Ah well. At least his tv run was pretty decent.

MR 081: The Kingmaker

Fun fact, this story was made directly for me. It's true! If you look at the back of the CD it says "for Slytherin" on the back of it. I will accept this love letter directly from Nev Fountain and accept his proposal of marriage. Move over Nicola Bryant, he's my man now.

I couldn't have asked for a better satire of everything I hate about this franchise. Fixed points in time. Refusing to alter history. Killing people to make sure history stays on course as you remember it. It reminds me of when Klein called out the Seventh Doctor in Colditz. You don't have a principled opposition to Nazism. It's all hollow words. You only care about keeping the timeline the same as you remember it. If you came from the timeline where the Nazis won the war, you'd want to preserve that timeline and change it back if it changed to the timeline where they lost.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We start with the Doctor getting a robot appearing in his TARDIS. One which is demanding that he fulfill his authorial obligations. You see, the robot comes from a time where one publishing house has a monopoly on all written works and at one point, as the Third Doctor, he had signed a contract to write some children's books about his life. Of course he sure hasn't finished them. One only wonders how many robots have been sent to George R R Martin.

Thus he's going to write his book "Doctor Who Discovers Historical Mysteries." The series was originally called "The Doctor, Who Discovers...." but the publisher made a typo. He's going to investigate Richard III and see what happened to those princes who everyone assumes Richard had executed.

Only problem is that he's got himself separated from Peri and Erimem. They're two years in the past. There's a fun sequence where they're passing notes to each other. Peri leaves a note with an innkeeper and then the Doctor writes a note to Peri, making sure to remember to drop it off later (he doesn't remember until he's Christopher Eccleston, naturally).

In the meantime, Richard III, on his way to escort his nephew to be the new king after his brother died, encounters a rather strange man claiming to be from the future. He is dressed all in black, has a little pointed beard, and says his name is Mr. Satan who wants to be Richard's advisor. He has his traveling cabinet taken on a cart which reminds me of the First Doctor story Marco Polo.

Peri and Erimem are in that time as well and they get hired by the innkeeper. The very inn that Richard's entourage passes through. They see the princes and Peri is determined to save them, but Erimem says they must not interfere with history and have to let them die. It's the opposite of when we last had this discussion in Council of Nicaea. Erimem was the one who cared about what was happening while Peri had bought into the Doctor's propaganda. It's very curious to see Erimem be the one to buy into said Doctor's propaganda this time, considering every time we have this discussion it's always the future for her. Indeed, this is the DISTANT future for Erimem.

Peri pulls off a piece of metal and thinks they're robots. They end up getting caught up in the entourage when later they're talking about how the princes must be murdered. A conspirator hears that and agrees, wanting to strike up a rebellion against Richard. The princes dying in his care would hopefully get enough people to turn on him. And so he gets Peri and Erimem into the tower to poison the princes.

I love what we do with this next. Erimem argues that this is a "sacrifice." A human sacrifice to keep the gods appeased. The god of time in this case, presumably. It does a very good job of showing just how f**ked up the idea of killing someone to keep the timeline the same as you remember it really is. I see why the writer had Erimem parrot the changing time bad propaganda here, to show it for what it really is: barbaric.

Meanwhile the Doctor gets captured by Richard after this rebellion has already failed and has some fantastic conversations with him where Richard calls him the hell out. I'm just going to quote some of my favorite lines and dialogue here because it really does speak for itself. Bare with me here because this really is the heart of this story, so we're going to be here for a hot second:

RICHARD: You see, I know about you, Doctor. I might not know everything, but I now the type of person you are. The kind of preachy, namby-pamby, wishy-washy, holier than thou, lily-livered milksop you are. The kind who doesn’t make hard choices, the person who just waltzes into a King’s life to do research on him.

RICHARD: Well, I don’t do jokes. Just ask Bucko over there.

DOCTOR: A bit difficult, as you tortured him and left him to die.

RICHARD: Ah, I take it by your tone you don’t approve. I’m surprised.

DOCTOR: Surprised? That anyone can feel anything for the suffering of others? You call yourself a King? You should be ashamed of yourself. This man is dead due to your neglect.

RICHARD: And that’s a bad thing, is it?

DOCTOR: How can you even ask that?

RICHARD: But that’s my job, isn’t it? To kill him. He betrays me, I kill him. That’s the way the story goes.

DOCTOR: You can’t hide behind fate. You made the original decision, and Time holds you to it. There is such a thing as free will, you know.

RICHARD: Is there? Well, permit me to test a theory. Bucko? Bucko, me boy? Still alive? Wakey, wakey, rise and shine.

(Stafford groans.)

RICHARD: Well, who’d have thought it. He’s still kicking. Well, well. So here’s the thing. I’ve had an attack of conscience. I’ve decided to repent. I'll let him go. That all right? You just have to say the word. Would you like me to let him go? Go on, ask me. Ask me to let him go. Of course you can’t, because that’d be wrong, wouldn’t it? He’s meant to die, isn’t he? You wouldn’t permit me to do anything else, would you?

DOCTOR: I am not the architect of your life.

RICHARD: Oh no, I wouldn’t say architect. More like a god. You see past, present, and future, and make sure we all act according to the rules. In fact, you’re worse than a god. At least a god allows his subjects to repent.

I LOVE this conversation SO MUCH. Richard is 100% correct. The Doctor is a hypocrite for calling out Richard for killing this man, but absolutely would not lift a finger to save him. And the Doctor can't pretend like free will exists when he thinks someone is "meant to die" or is "fated to die." This person dies in the history you remember, so saving him would be a bad thing. It's f**ked up. And Richard knows it. You can't sit there and act like it's bad that I kill him when you want me to kill him too. He does this again a little later in the conversation as well.

RICHARD: Are these bits of pottery yours? Commemorating the happy coronation of Edward the Fifth, King of England, on this day the 24" of June 1483. Oh, that would have been a good bash. Shame how fate makes things turn out.

DOCTOR: Oh, it’s fate now. Is this another attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for your own actions?

RICHARD: We have exactly the same dilemma, you and me.

DOCTOR: I sincerely doubt that.

RICHARD: Oh yes. Civilization as we know it is hanging in the balance, and we have to sort it out. But sadly, there’s some as get killed along the way. But you can’t stop, you can’t worry about them. Who knows, perhaps their deaths might even be useful in the grand scheme of things.

DOCTOR: That is a ridiculous argument. You can’t equate your own petty political ambitions with events which threaten the nature of existence.

RICHARD: That’s exactly what I’m doing.

The Doctor is hypocritical as hell here to say that Richard is trying to use fate to wriggle out of responsibility for his own actions... BECAUSE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE DOES. It's not me, it's fate. These people are meant to die. This is a fixed point in time. I can't do anything to change it. I can't save these people's lives. We saw this in Medicinal Purposes where the Doctor killed a kid. And we saw this in Scaredy Cat where the Doctor committed genocide to keep history the way he remembered it. It's not my fault. It's fate. I am destined to cause this because that's what history says happened. And continuing with that theme:

RICHARD: For the moment we have two kids in the Tower, still alive. They shouldn’t be there by rights. If I am what my reputation says I am, i.e. a conniving black-hearted villain, I want them dead. And if you are what your reputation says you are, i.e. an heroic protector of the Web of Time, you want them dead too. Stop me if I’m going too fast.

DOCTOR: No, it’s all very clear.

RICHARD: You wrote, PS don’t try to find out who killed the Princes on your own. These are dangerous times. Do you really want to know who killed them? I'll let you into a little secret. You do. You kill ‘em.

DOCTOR: I think I know where this is leading.

RICHARD: Good. I like a quick learner. I’m making it your choice. I’m allowing you to do the right thing. I’m letting you win.

TYRELL: You sent for me, Sire?

RICHARD: Ah, Mister Tyrell. Glad you could join us.

DOCTOR: Wish I could say the same.

(Door closes.)

RICHARD: Oh hush. Now, Sir James, I’ve granted the Doctor leave to be our King for the day.

TYRELL: Our what?

DOCTOR: Your what?

RICHARD: He’s going to order you to execute our two young friends in the Tower.

TYRELL: Our two... what?

RICHARD: Yes, them.

TYRELL: Right. What?

RICHARD: If he doesn’t order you to execute them, then his silence will be your order to let them go.

TYRELL: To let them...?

RICHARD: Go. Yes. Did you get that?

RICHARD: Just do as the Doctor asks. He is Lord God Almighty and his word is law. All right? So, Doctor, the ball’s in your court.

DOCTOR: I can’t change anything.

RICHARD: Yes, you can.

RICHARD: Then your choice is simple, isn’t it?

DOCTOR: I will not be party to this.

RICHARD: Hedge and bluster, Doctor, you are party to this. Come on, time’s running out. Literally. There it goes. Tick tock, tick tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

RICHARD: Last chance, Doctor. He can’t be squeamish here. It’s for the greater good.

RICHARD: He can’t afford to be weak. He can’t have a picture in your head of those two poor defenseless brothers crying out for mercy.

This is so good. When your whole changing time propaganda is reduced to what it really is. Murder. Are you willing to commit murder for the sake of keeping the timeline the way you remember it? Really? I love that line. Don't think about the poor defenseless boys crying out for mercy as they're cut down because they're "fated to die" and thus you're making the right decision to kill them. It's especially effective considering the ending of Medicinal Purposes where the Doctor does indeed kill a kid to keep the timeline the way he remembers. Indeed, this story, this exact scene could be a direct response to that one.

During this conversation, as well, Richard reveals that he's been visited by time travelers all his life ever since he was a kid. Time tourists who want to see the notorious villain and have strong opinions on whether or not he should kill his nephews. It's a premise I've often thought about for a comedy skit. Hitler going about his day while assassins show up from the future to kill him, only they keep failing in humorous ways. The story uses it for humor and also takes it seriously, as good satire does. Richard has been told his history so often that he finds it all meaningless. He's been testing the Doctor here. The Doctor is continuously trying to take his hands off and pretend like he's not responsible. That he's above it all. But really and truly, if he really believes what he does about not changing history then he shouldn't have any problem getting his hands dirty to make it happen. Indeed, believing that history shouldn't ever be changed necessarily requires you to be on board with a lot of evil, you can't really be a good person, as a time traveler, and believe that. And Richard is perfectly fine with watching the Doctor fidget in discomfort at that confliction.

Unfortunately, the story takes the cop out way out of this. The Doctor doesn't need to order the death of the princes, because it's not really them. You see, Richard actually loved his brother and his brother's kids and didn't want to kill them. Nor did he ever really want power. It turned out that the princes were really girls the whole time, the previous king not wanting to stop the family lineage. So Richard declared them bastards and took power for himself, so that he didn't have to reveal that they were really girls the whole time and that the king was deceiving everyone.

The princesses were taken in by their other relative who was hiding out as an innkeeper this whole time. The two princes in the tower were Peri and Erimem who had been disguised as them. The metal part Peri pulled off at the beginning was a cod piece to make it look like they were boys.

I do have to mention, real quick, how Erimem suggests that she and Peri kill themselves to preserve the timeline. They're not supposed to be the princesses and they're interfering in time just by being here, which they can't take back. So if they kill themselves they are no longer changing the timeline as time travelers. I LOVE this so much as well. This is a natural conclusion to the changing time bad argument. You just shouldn't travel through time at all if you believe that, because just by existing in a place you are changing history. Nevermind interacting with it. Erimem is a great vessel in this story to talk about how bad that line of argumentation really is.

It's a bit of a cop out because it wraps this all up nice and neatly without the Doctor having to get his hands dirty. He even mentions the CIA slogan, "the story changes, but the ending stays the same." We then find out the ultimate reveal in the last episode here. Mr. Satan was actually William Shakespeare. Richard was just kind of stringing him along because he was well used to time travelers by now. Shakespeare ended up hitching a ride in the TARDIS. He wanted to convince Richard to actually kill the princes himself so that his play about Richard killing the princes wouldn't be seen as propaganda for the royal family.

The Doctor takes Shakespeare back to his time where Richard sees the play where he's the villain and depicted badly. And we're treated to a fun romp of Shakespeare being chased around by an angry Richard. And then finally Shakespeare and Richard switch places. Shakespeare dies in battle and Richard writes the rest of Shakespeare's plays. The end.

It's a very humorous story throughout with some real meat in the middle there. The humor is very well written and very well performed. Richard III is very deadpan in his delivery, which works very well. The Fifth Doctor's sarcasm is pretty well used here. He's usually quite boring, of course, but this story works very well for him and only really for him. As the Doctor most obsessed with not changing history and the most passive of the Doctors, being chained up to a wall and called out for that bs by Richard III himself works quite well. It wouldn't work as well with any other Doctor, I don't think. Those are the best stories with this Doctor, those where his passivity is key to the story working well.

One of the most interesting things here, to me, is that Richard III is played by someone with a northern English accent, the same accent as Christopher Eccleston. That feels extremely intentional. As if the future Doctor is calling out his past self for these bad beliefs. I love it.

I love this story. I love the comedy. I love the use of the Fifth Doctor here. Rare Fifth Doctor W. I love the sharp wit. I love the satire of the concepts of changing time bad and fixed points in time. I love all of it. This is easily one of the best, if not the best, of the MR so far for me. I'm giving it six out of a possible five slop buckets, and I whole heartly recommend it for everyone to listen to. Even if you don't like the Fifth Doctor. And it should be required listening for every writer the moment they even THINK about inserting the phrase "web of time" into their story.

MR 080: Time Works

Ah, now is this more like it. An actual good story that's not mean spirited and hateful towards time travel as a concept. And yet uses time travel as a key part of the story. It's just so refreshing to not hear the Doctor talk about how he has to kill everyone in this society to preserve the timeline. It's wild that I would even have to say that huh?

I will mention just real quick that I found the dialogue to be a bit hokey. I know that it's an audio drama, so it's necessary that you have to narrate what's happening so the audience knows, but it's kind of in your face in this one. There's a lot of physical movement that has to be explained. Charley in particular seems to be saddled with most of this dialogue for some reason.

Anyway, we do a bit of running around in a frozen world, ala Chimes of Midnight for an episode before the plot can really get going. I'm not a huge fan of this apparently trope at this point. It reminds me of the first episode of Mind Robber where they just run around for a bit before the TARDIS explodes. It doesn't really add a whole lot to the story in my mind. It does get the Doctor back a few minutes before Charley and C'Rizz which, again, doesn't really amount to a whole lot. The main thing is adds to the story is that the characters get to see... the clockwork men.

Mostly this is a classic Doctor Who overthrows a tyrannical government story. Most of the time is spent in the society just watching what's happening. It's a society entirely built on keeping the great "project" going. Everyone's time is catalogued. Anyone not working for a single second is considered a "time waster" and risks being "downsized," their euphemism for being killed. Nowadays, corporations use the phrases "time theft" and "quiet quitting" for things like this. You're standing there on the clock talking to your coworkers for five minutes? That time not working adds up, must be a "time thief."

We see a series of vignettes about what's happening. The Doctor encounters a bin man going about collecting the trash. Then he encounters someone working in a market stall. They don't seem keen on talking to him because he's wasting their time just by talking and asking them questions. I'm so curious why there are even market stalls at all in the first place. How do people have time to go and buy food? Or to eat? They work all day, sleep, and then come back to work some more. All they are is work and sleep, only because it's a biological necessity. If sleep was not biologically required, they would be required to work constantly until they collapse of exhaustion and die. We all know that's what would happen in our own world if that was the case.

The stall owner helps the Doctor who gets in to meet the king. The king is nervous about what is happening. His son is the "idle prince," he doesn't work like the others, but is not downsized. The king is not really in charge, you see. "In between the tik and the tok," as they say, anyone can be downsized at a moment's notice. One second someone is standing there and the next they are gone, disappeared from time entirely. And everyone carries on as if this was perfectly normal and right that they would disappear. They must have been a time waster. If they're not being efficient they deserved it. We need to replace them with someone who WILL BE efficient.

The Doctor already knows what is happening. The clockwork men exist in between the seconds of time. They walk through while everything is frozen and disappear whoever they like before going away and time restarting. Everyone lives in fear of being disappeared at any moment, driving them to work harder lest they too be downsized. The king fears this too. But his son does not work. He does not fear being disappeared because the king has no other children. If the clockwork men were to kill the prince, there would be nobody to take the king's place. Thus the prince is in a unique position to find out what is happening and try to stop it.

The stall owner's brother helps cover for her despite believing it is wrong. He's fully bought into the propaganda, yet he gets downsized for helping his sister who is now on the run. Meanwhile Charley and C'Rizz are brought in for their "job interviews" to see where they could best help advance "the project." C'Rizz gets to meet the source of all this. The "figurehead." It's just an AI, because of course it is. It's so prescient. This is always where corporate culture is going: an AI managing the numbers, making them as efficient as possible. It uses its "organic resources," i.e. the people, to maximize efficiency. All of life is efficiency. It then sends out the clockwork men to downsize anyone who isn't efficient enough.

The previous inhabitants of this planet created this AI to try to save their society when it was on the brink of collapse. It has been many things since. An architect. An innovator. Even a general. It makes me think about what a dystopian tyrannical society based around those traits would have been. Now it is an accountant, managing the spreadsheets to make sure everyone is working. Counting up all the time theft and cutting back on the least efficient resources. It gives C'Rizz a job in the office and downsizes someone else who it thinks won't be as efficient as him. Before Charley can go for an interview, though, it identifies the Doctor as a threat and turns the entirety of the world against him.

Not only can these clockwork men kill someone in between time, they can also implant ideas and suggestions in people's minds, propaganda, that it's up to them to accept or not. The Doctor responds by activating a device that stops all devices that interfere with time in the radius, something he says is mostly used for protection for people working in the time vortex. The result is that the clockwork men are now visible. Everyone sees them. Everyone sees the things that have been keeping them under thumb this whole time. And that's the source of the revolution.

Some people bow down to the clockwork men, seeing them as gods. While some attack them, having lived in fear all their lives. The Doctor gets to see Figurehead which tells the Doctor that it's just there to maximize efficiency. How long with it keep the people enslaved? Until they master space flight? Until they conquer the galaxy? What's the point? Why are we even doing this? To advance society, the Figurehead responds.

It's a meditation on this grand notion of civilization. Civilization exists to advance. There is a straight line from A to B where humanity gets better, technology gets better, we all evolve as a society. This grand myth of history. Civilization is just a game of tech trees. You advance along the tech trees and get a better society as a result. And eventually, one day, we'll reach the end of that tech tree, the end of society, where we've reached the pinnacle of humanity. A lot of video games use this notion. Games like Civilization or Grand Strategy games like those made by Paradox are all about this idea. Indeed, there was a lot of talk about "the end of history" when the Soviet Union fell. Yet history continues and there is no real point to it. It's a narrative of grand design. This is why we are on the Earth. An attempt to give meaning to the chaos.

Naturally, as the arbiter of chaos, the Doctor shuts it all down. He turns off the great clock that has been looming over their society for generations. It stops. Time stops. The work stops. The project stops. The grand game of civilization stops. And the clockwork men stop. They see no future in which they will be needed so they don't resist as they are taken apart. And finally, work without end comes to a close. There is finally time for other things in life besides work.

I quite enjoyed it. I usually like overthrowing totalitarian dictatorships like this, depending on what the dictatorship is about. And here it's about a corporate structure maximized towards the grand narrative of "progress" for the sake of it. That's all we are. Cogs in a machine of progress and efficiency. Shut down the machine. Break the wheel. While the narrative was a tad convoluted and at times it was a bit tricky to know what was happening, it was still good. It could have benefited from perhaps a couple more re-writes to tighten up the script and, as usual with these two hour stories, could have been cut down to an hour or hour and a half. Still, what is here is quite good.

MR 079: Night Thoughts

This is just the era of killing people to preserve history as we know it huh? Why was this plot point all the rage in the mid-00s? This is the third time it's happened now. But unlike the Sixth Doctor, who absolutely did commit murder against a friend; and the Eighth Doctor who went mega-Hitler and committed a mega-genocide; the Seventh Doctor doesn't actually go through with it. Though the episode absolutely says he should have.

There's an old creepy house on an old creepy island where a bunch of scientists are working on experiments together. Only people keep dying in a slasher horror kind of way. First a taxidermist and then a chaplain in the military. It's all very weirdly gory for Doctor Who and that was already kind of a turn off for me before we find out what's happening. I'm not at all a fan of slasher horror films. That's not my thing. If I do horror, I prefer something more cerebral or suspenseful. Not just gore or jump scares for the sake of it, like in this story.

There is very weirdly a kid in this house with these scientists and it turns out she is there because her and her mother and sister came to the house one night. I'm really not sure WHY they were there on the creepy island at all, but sure. The older sister had ravinax poisoning from the island which had been used as a military testing sight before being scrubbed clean. So the scientists euthanized her so she wouldn't suffer and then her mother jumped into a lake and killed herself, a gruesome sight that Ace sees when they first arrive because the body is still in the lake after ten years apparently. Nobody thought to burry it I guess?

Only it turns out that she didn't have ravinax poisoning. It was a misdiagnosis and the scientists are working on a time travel technology to send a message back through time to tell themselves not to kill her. BUT THEN that turns out to not be the case either because a military man amongst this group, Major Dickens, planned this whole thing ten years ago as an experiment to see if he could change the future by having them send a message back and killing her on purpose.

This is where the weird mechanics of time travel come in. Edith, the girl they killed, is now both alive and dead, a walking corpse, for some reason. Because sending the message back in time isn't enough to change the timeline or whatever, just make it confused. So the zombie Edith is maybe walking around and killing everyone.

There's also a weird horror thing going on with bear traps and with taxidermy and eyes. The body was preserved ala taxidermy like all the taxidermy animals. There's a giant bear taxidermy animal that presumably has Edith's preserved corpse inside of it that looks like it's been ripped open. It falls on the woman who came up with the time travel technology.

Before I get to the time travel stuff, I'll also just mention there's a weird sexist thing here that threw me out. The Doctor tells Ace to tend to the wounded person instead of Hex.... who is literally a nurse???? Because he says that Hex is better equipped to fight the military man. Which is very strange considering that's very clearly Ace's role. There was no reason why they did this either, this part could have been done by Hex easily.

Anyway, the time travel stuff very much so turns me off. The Doctor even goes back in time to try to make sure they do kill Edith instead of bring her back to life, which is gross and immoral as the scientists say in the scene. But then he can't go through with it, so zombie Edith is still walking around even with the Doctor going back in time to save her instead of kill her.

The implications of this are that any time we save anyone with time travel, it creates a shambling zombie person in the future where their corpse is buried. And this is... disgusting! Thanks I hate it. It's just very mean spirited and hateful. It goes against everything I like about this show and makes me think retroactively about all the people that Doctor Who has saved over the decades. Every time there's shambling corpses popping out of their graves. No thank you.

It has great atmosphere if you like horror and slasher movies. But I do not and the implications of its time travel mechanics are mean and hateful. So nope, massive turn off.

MR 078: Pier Pressure

I'm not mad, I'm disappointed. There's some interesting stuff going on here, but it's just way too long for what it is. It's not the worst thing I've ever heard like this author's previous story: Medicinal Purposes, but it's not really good either.

On the beach in the past, there was a pier. And on that pier there was a magician named Professor Talbot and his attraction. Only he'd been dead for a long time. But, of course, not really. He's been kept alive by this entity called Indo.

It's essentially a ghost story. The Indo kill and possess a girl named Emily just as they are trying to possess Professor Talbot, but it doesn't work out for them. That's all well and good. The problem is that the story is way too long.

Very little happens in this two hour drama, it definitely should have been an hour instead. There's a decent performance of the real life comedian Max Miller. But there is a funny section of the script where Evelyn and Max are just in the TARDIS playing I Spy, like the script has nothing to do with them. We spend like twenty minutes just sitting around with them. And while it's cute and all, it's time that could have been cut. This story is a great example of why the two hour classic format isn't necessarily a good thing.

The Doctor ultimately stops the Indo by blowing up the power source that keeps Talbot alive, thus dissipating the Indo into the pier where they will be until the pier collapses, apparently. But it's a long winding road to get there.

It's not offensive like Medicinal Purposes was, but there was some stuff that made me raise my eyebrows. The Doctor continually insists that there is some great "evil" under the pier over and over again, even before he knows what's actually happening. That is very odd to me. Doctor Who doesn't usually just assume something is evil out of pocket before knowing what it is. He tries to figure out what's happening and understand it first and then declares it to be malevolent if it turns out to be the case. Very strange. This writer, Robert Ross, has demonstrated a lack of understanding of Doctor Who already so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case here as well.

Honestly, its worst crime is that it's just boring. And that's the worst thing that a Doctor Who story can be other than fundamentally undermine the entire reason why I like this franchise, like this author's last story. Give it a miss.

MR 077: Other Lives

A comedy of errors (and fetishes) as the Doctor and friends get up to some hilarious hijinks! Well, more like get caught up pretending to be other people.

They go to the grand Crystal Palace exhibition, a huge international exhibition of technology in London in the mid 1800s. The three get separated through a series of hijinks. They told C'Rizz to stay in the TARDIS, but he didn't. Charley meets the Duke of Wellington. And The Doctor gets caught up in an assassination plot against the French ambassador. An assassin tries to shoot the French ambassador and his wife outside the TARDIS, the Doctor pulls them in then goes back out himself, and then the French ambassador and his wife accidentally take off in the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor there without his ship.

The story doesn't really go into detail about where they went. I think they were supposed to have just time traveled directly to the ending, but that's not as fun. Where's the French ambassador and his wife spin off series where they go to a pink planet or something?

C'Rizz naively follows a man named Mr. Crackles who... proceeds to kidnap him, turn him into a slave, put him in chains, forces him to strip naked, and then puts him in a thong. So, you know, super fetishy. He runs a freak show and C'Rizz will be the star attraction. No, not that kind of freak show! The kind where you put people who look weird in cages and point and laugh at them. What did you think I meant?

Meanwhile Charley wanders around on her own and gets mistaken for a prostitute. Yet again, another fetishy thing. The man who thinks she's a prostitute is named Rufus Dimplesqueeze. No I'm not making that up. She ends up sleeping on a doorstep at night and then goes to the Duke of Wellington's house after they shared a nice moment in the Crystal Palace exhibition the previous day.

Might as well do another fetishy thing with the Doctor, although this one isn't so much. The Doctor gets mistaken for another man named Edward who has been traveling for a year. His wife tries to get the Doctor to believe he is Edward right up until the point where she realizes that he couldn't be Edward. Her husband needs spectacles to read the newspaper whereas the Doctor does not.

All three of these characters just exist in these plot cul-de-sacs for awhile. There's not really much of a point to the story here, just allowing the characters to exist and see how they react to living these other lives, hence the name. It's nice. Charley hangs out with the high and mighty, the Doctor has a nice time in a high class house, and C'Rizz gets to see the worst of Victorian London. Seems like he got the short end of the stick here to be honest.

Their plots finally coincide when Charley notices C'Rizz on the freakshow advertisement posters and she has the Duke go rescue him. They then need to impersonate the French ambassador and his wife because everyone is going to think they've disappeared. Which will spark a French revolution in the UK maybe? Kind of a bad look for Charley to be fighting against democracy and upholding the monarchy, but sure. It's not really the main point. The main point is that we get more hijinks as Charley and C'Rizz try to impersonate the French couple, but don't do a very good job of it.

The Doctor then has to impersonate Edward to please his doppleganger's uncle who is none other than Rufus Dimplesqueeze???!!!?!?!?! Yes, we get a nice little "I'm actually him, trust me, lol" scene where they convince Dimplesqueeze that the Doctor is Edward because his wife will lose the house if Dimplesqueeze is not convinced. Yes, I just like typing the name Dimplesqueeze.

The Doctor then sees that the French ambassador and his wife are back in the newspaper, but it's actually Charley and C'Rizz impersonating them at the Crystal Palace. He thinks this means the TARDIS has come back, so he heads off. Only to find that coincidentally the TARDIS has just arrived here at this exact time, fast traveling to the finale with the French ambassador and his wife none the wiser. The end.

The interesting thing here is when C'Rizz is freed, he goes back and cripples and blinds his slave master. He could have killed him and the voices in his head told him to do it, but he didn't. I guess being unable to walk and blind in the Victorian era is punishment enough. Fate worse than death probably.

And that's about it. It's pretty much just fluff, but enjoyable fluff. Except for C'Rizz who has a horrible time. I just don't have that much to say about it. Very cute story.

MR 076: Singularity

I definitely did check out of this one pretty damn quick, but there are bits of it that are interesting. It's a shame about Turlough getting continuously shafted by the main range, though. His stories haven't been great so far.

They land in Russia where they come across a mysterious religious cult, the Somnus Foundation, colloquially called the Sleepers. The Sleepers were originally a research institute that studied sleep disorders, but now they're a full on cult, pulling people in by promising them that humanity will become the "Singularity," embracing their godhood and becoming as one.

It takes a painful amount of time to get there, but we do eventually arrive at what's happening. The Somnus are a species from the far future, specifically the end of the universe, who have figured out a way to displace the minds of people in this time and send their minds back to their bodies in the far future. They're going to try to force all of their minds into humanity and create one giant hive mind. Not quite sure why they want to create a hive mind, but sure.

The big twist here is that they are actually humanity at the end of the universe doing this to survive. Yes, that's right, this is the same idea as the series 3 finale, but way more overly complicated and less interesting. Humanity displacing its own ancestors for survival at the very end.

There is an angle here that the series 3 finale didn't really go for that I find interesting. Humanity has been saved by the Doctor time and time again. Over and over, humanity was propped up by the Doctor's time travel. Humans wouldn't exist without the Doctor constantly interfering in their history. So the humans at the end of the universe know all the Doctors, every incarnation, because he's constantly in human history everywhere. Indeed, they even have a line about how they don't really fear this one because the Fifth Doctor is his more passive persona. They know that he might not like what they're doing and absolutely do blame him for letting humanity die at the end of the universe. By preventing them from displacing their ancestor's minds, the Doctor is the cause of humanity's ultimate destruction, despite also being the cause of humanity's existence at all in the first place.

The series 3 finale doesn't really talk about this angle, but is otherwise a lot more interesting. It's not as complicated, there isn't as much technobabble, and it's easier to just zoom in on the characters at play. Singularity also doesn't use the Master. I also have no idea how the future humans were defeated either, I think my eyes might have glazed over during that part. There's even a whole part where the future humans have to use the TARDIS for some reason and I don't actually know why or how or anything because technobabble. As opposed to the series 3 finale where it's very straightforward why the Master is using the TARDIS.

Ultimately there are parts of this thing that were decent, but it could have benefited from a few more rewrites to make it more interesting and less dull. This is often a problem with the two hour format. Sometimes you can use it to your benefit to expand out the world and make it more interesting, but other times it just feels like padding for the sake of reaching the time limit.

MR 075: Scaredy Cat

Well I was going to make a joke about how this was the shortest main range, but f**k THAT. WHAT THE FUCKING f**k WAS THIS. Nope, absolutely not. I am not having the Doctor become a Nazi, thank you very much.

Most of what happens here does not matter. I mostly checked out through it. They land on a planet that is supposed to be uninhabited only to find scientists doing experiments or some such. There's native life on the planet that they're experimenting on and an evil psychopath mass murderer in the closet who they're also experimenting on. Whatever.

The main thing that pissed me off here was when the Doctor went back in time to find out what was happening. They had seen a ghost girl on the planet so The Doctor and C'Rizz went back four million years to find out what happened. There was a colony of millions of people on the planet that was wiped out by a disease. The Doctor could easily make an antidote to this disease and C'Rizz begs him to help these people, but HE FUCKING REFUSES??!?!?!?!? Nope. Nope nope nope. f**k this. I'm out. This is f**king disgusting.

Indeed, not only does he refuse to save millions of people from dying, because it would create a time loop where they don't come back in time to find out what happened in the first place, he actively PREVENTS C'RIZZ FROM HELPING. C'Rizz tries to save these people by giving them the antidote, but the Doctor MAKES SURE THAT WHAT HE GIVES THEM ISN'T ENOUGH!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! This is the Eighth Doctor. ACTIVELY trying to make sure a genocide happens. Yeah f**k you. Nope. This would be the Doctor who regularly tries to save as many people as possible. He would never, NEVER let millions of people die like this. He would fight to save them, no matter what it took. C'Rizz and Charley need to leave and run away as fast as possible after this. This is just like at the end of Medicinal Purposes when Evelyn should have left and never come back, but even worse. The Doctor didn't just kill one person here, he actively killed MILLIONS of people here.

He then goes forward and shows C'Rizz what he's done. The piles of dead bodies and the one little girl who was immune to the disease, now being forced to live on a pile of corpses. This is beyond evil. And then the story has the gall, the absolutely sheer FUCKING NERVE to do the "C'Rizz is a murderer/no he's not/yes he is" routine that we've done a thousand times already AFTER HE TRIES TO SAVE PEOPLE FROM THE DOCTOR'S GENOCIDE. The Doctor later says that these people dying was a bad thing. f**k the f**k off you EVIL EVIL piece of s**t. And then the Doctor says that C'Rizz isn't a murderer. Like he has any right to say that. He has no right to judge C'Rizz, nor the serial killer. He's done far, FAR worse than either of them in this story.

Nope. f**k this. f**k everything this stands for. This is, like Medicinal Purposes, the logical endpoint of the evil ideology that runs through Doctor Who like a cancer. I wish that I could operate on the whole franchise and remove it. This is the Doctor standing in the face of the holocaust, in the face of the Atlantic slave trade, in the face of every gruesome mass murder, extinction, and genocide in history and saying "No, all of you MUST suffer and die to preserve history as I remember it." It's the ultimate expression of this evil and it needs to end. I will never tolerate it and will always call it out whenever I see it. f**k this story and the person who wrote it.

Slytherindoctor Reviews is made possible by a generous donation from the Doctor Who Foundation and grants directly from the government. All hail Premier Tru-- Jaeger. Bringing you up to date coverage of the latest Doctor Who audio dramas. Truth. Facts. Integrity. That's Slytherindoctor Reviews.

Now the weather. It will be unseasonably warm today with highs in the 80s, make sure you wear that sunscreen. And turning now to traffic, the M9 has been closed down today due to a transport crash. Yes, government sources are confirming the death of Resident Doctor, the leader of the FDP, Freedom and Democracy Party. The government has ruled out any foul play and is blaming the crash on pilot error. The party is in shambles after its landslide election loss to Premier Jaeger yesterday and the tragic death of its leader leaves it with an uncertain future. The FDP have submitted complaints of widespread election fraud by the government, but no proof has been offered as yet and their complaints will likely go unheard. We go live now to Premier Jaeger's victory celebration on the steps of city hall.

This is more like it. So far the Seventh Doctor has had the most conservative stories of the main range. He always had the reputation as a rebel and it felt very unearned, but this is probably the story where he gets that reputation. I feel like most people forget what actually happens in Fearmonger, Flip-Flop, and Dreamtime, but they remember this one vividly. That's absolutely fair. This one is much better than those. No "both sides are bad." No "reject modernity and embrace tradition." No "immigrants want to enslave us actually." The Doctor roundly rejects all of those notions in this story and is the rebel against the fascist government. The story does not attempt to make the fascist look good in any way or say that those who oppose him are bad. The Doctor works to take down the fascist government and that's it. It's refreshingly leftist for a change and I'm so here for it.

Every episode is a different day's broadcast of a radio station: LIVE 34. This is yet another experimental format and it works quite well for this one. A lot of early main range have experimental formats. They don't always work out well. Like The Rapture, the Divergent Universe arc, or Flip-Flop (to be fair, Flip-Flop could have been remembered as a classic if it didn't have a bad moral). While others work out very well like Creatures of Beauty, Natural History of Fear, and Doctor Who and the Pirates.

The first episode has the radio announcer interviewing the Doctor from a transport on the way to the studio, but it was waylaid. He is the head of the FDP and is trying to force the government to have elections after the Premier has suspended them. Indeed, the Premier has suspended a lot of individual rights and freedoms and you can hear him give his reasons for all of it in this episode. It's good set up. It's the barely concealed face of respectability on fascism before we get to the ugly, hateful truth underneath. There's a hint of what's to come here. Blaming immigrants and trying to link the FDP with rebels. There's a couple of explosions, one at a government office and one at a factory with workers in it. The Doctor points out that the factory explosion doesn't make any sense for the rebels since they want to recruit those people, not kill them.

The second episode sees Ace as the media styled "Rebel Queen." There's an undercover reporter who sees the poverty stricken side of town and interviews Ace as she talks about the conspiracies that the government is covering up. They hide poverty from the main three cities on the colony and have travel restrictions so nobody can see the slums for themselves. Nor the death that occurs daily over food. The government comes and collects these dead bodies and nobody knows why.

It's astounding that the government even allows this story to be broadcast. It's also astounding that none of the higher ups at LIVE 34 pulled the plug on this story before it was aired, before the reporter even went to interview Ace in the first place. Normally in our world, a story like this would never be allowed to be played. The corporations that control the media wouldn't want people to see images of poverty in their own country on tv because then they might start asking questions.

Indeed, the next episode starts with the government censuring LIVE 34 and forcing them to pull the broadcast of that episode as well as the mysterious suicide of the reporter who did it.

It then leads into an apparently regular segment on the show where they follow around a working person on their shift to show what that's like. They're following around a paramedic tonight and naturally that is Hex, who I completely forgot existed until Thicker Than Water last story. This feels like how they used C'rizz for his second story in the highly experimental Natural History of Fear. We're using Hex for his second real story in the experimental LIVE 34 (Dreamtime doesn't exist, you can't convince me it does). So once again we can't really get to know him very well. To be fair, this one has Hex actually being himself rather than C'rizz being an aspect of a personality (It's complicated, go listen to it).

The reporter sees that there's ben excavation of dinosaur bones under the hospital. I'm not sure why this was here because it doesn't seem to mean anything to the rest of the story. She then goes to see Hex. They see a mysterious van coming to pick someone up from the hospital before they go off on their shift in the ambulance. Hex almost drives into a massive hole on a call to a lady who fell into a hole in her house. The hole extends out into the road. Hex goes down to investigate the hole which smells like sulfur while the reporter tells him to come back. But the hole is horrifying. It's a mass grave filled with dozens of skeletons, some even kids. They've all been shot and burned. But then before we can properly process it, Hex and the reporter are arrested by government security agents and the broadcast fails.

I'm less surprised that this broadcast happened. It was supposed to be live, after all, and the station wouldn't have had any idea of what Hex was going to find. The government takes over the station completely and the reporter gets fired while the segment gets heavily edited and censored, of course.

The next day we see the results of the election and Ace, the "Rebel Queen" getting arrested and tortured. Which definitely sucks. Ace goes through so much doesn't she? I'm surprised the FDP managed to force an election at all, but naturally the results show an overwhelming 80% victory for Jaeger. The FDP tries to submit claims of election fraud, but what with the communication lines being shut down to avoid outside interference, the Central Colony Commission is unlikely to hear their complaints.

Tragically it seems the Doctor has died in a crash as well, his transport crashing in the mountains between the cities. Oh dear oh dear. What will the FDP do now that their party leader has died. This is when the gloves come off. The fascists believe they are safe. They've won the mandate. And now they can reveal their true colors. They get a confession out of Ace threw torture, getting her to confess that she's linked to the FDP and that it was all a conspiracy by immigrants to strip mine Colony 34 of its resources. Sounds EXACTLY like what Flip-Flop said about immigrants. Except this time it's the bad guys saying it instead of the supposed "heroes." I was absolutely waiting for immigrants to get the blame. That is critical in fascist regimes. The outsiders are always to blame. They're always out to get you. Indeed, Jaeger says the "great replacement" white nationalist conspiracy. Immigrants want to replace the residents of Colony 34 and steal their jobs and lives. Flip-Flop, itself, also advocates for this conspiracy. This is good stuff. Putting this rhetoric in the mouths of the villains is all too prescient considering the fascist age we live in right now.

The Doctor is not dead though. He knew Jaeger would try to kill him and didn't board that transport. He's fifty steps ahead, naturally. They actually did get a communication out to the Central Colony Commission. It turns out that Jaeger isn't really who he appears to be. He's a security agent meant to look like Jaeger because the real Jaeger had a disease that got worse and worse and looked horrible. They needed someone to speak to the crowds. But the security agent Jaeger ended up taking over. They won elections since Jaeger was popular, but there was a sudden energy crisis as the energy resources dried up. Jaeger was going to lose as politicians always do when prices go up. So he came up with a plan. Humans made for a fantastic source of power. So the government dug up bodies from graves, but that wasn't enough. They needed more fuel. They actually invited immigrants in on the promise of good jobs and good lives and then exploited them, killing them for fuel.

It definitely does remind me of how undocumented immigrants come to the US looking for a better life and then they're exploited. They're not quite killed for fuel, but it's close. They're worked half to death in fields and factories and they can't complain. If they complain about work conditions, they'll get deported. Corporations will hold that over their head. If you form a union, we'll just call ICE. And then undocumented immigrants still get blamed for everyone's problems as they always are. Like I said, hatred of immigrants is a vital part of fascism. We get to see that play out quite strongly here in this story.

The Central Colony Commission thus declares the election null because the candidate running wasn't really the person he said he was and the Doctor was officially dead. I wish we had a strong central government that could come and save the US, but unfortunately the US is one of the strongest countries in the world. Nobody is going to stop it. The central government IS fascist.

I do like the reveal that Jaeger is not the real Jaeger, for this story, but it's not so realistic in real life. It's a neat wrap up to the story, of course. We get to see Jaeger dragged off by the crowd and killed, begging for his life. The same crowd that was cheering him on adoringly not five minutes ago. And then.... the story just ends. In real life, however, fascist dictators don't become such because they're impersonating a "real" political. They ARE real politicians. Trump didn't just get into office on a pretense. He ran and his ideas were popular and he won. Simple as that.

Still, despite that one bit, this story does a fantastic job of showing how fascism works. There's even a little bit of 1984 in here when Jaeger brings Ace on stage and the crowd gets the hour of hatred against her. It does a good job of showing the way fascist government suppress any and all dissent, mostly by going after media, and it does a good job of showing how fascists maintain power. By blaming immigrants and generally shifting the focus away from themselves and onto groups that are powerless. Right now, of course, that is undocumented immigrants and mostly trans people.

This is a stellar story, one that is intriguing to listen to from start to finish. It plays with its format and it pays off very well. Every bit and every clue and every scene work to make a cohesive, strong whole. And that ending is phenomenal. Very well done. Well acted, written, directed, and edited. Whoever worked on this should be proud.

Due to the disturbing nature of this week's review, the Central Review Authority, a new branch of the government, has redacted several sections of this text. Rest assured, we here at Slytherindoctor Reviews take this very seriously. We care first and foremost about our readers. So, the writer in question has been fired.

MR 073: Thicker Than Water

Well excuse me while I just start bawling. Excuse me what. This is a proper send off for Evelyn... before we're threw her stories. I'm curious as to why we did this at this point rather than as her last story. Perhaps Maggie Stables was in poor health or something. I remember when I heard that she died and I cried, but it was later than this point in time.

Anyway, the story is about the tension between Evelyn and her step daughter Sofia. Sofia and her friend Sebastian disagree with Evelyn's ongoing research on the Killoran technology after the invasion in Arrangements for War. Evelyn has left the Doctor presumably awhile after that story, coming back because she fell in love with Rossiter. Rossiter is now the most powerful person on the planet, in charge of all three countries which have since united after the invasion. So Evelyn and Sofia are both rather high profile individuals.

Evelyn wants to study the Killoran tech while Sofia and Sebastian want to destroy it. The intro is fun with a live tv debate between them and Evelyn storms out. It's good at setting the stage for the story. Sofia then makes an off hand comment about how she wishes Evelyn were out of the way and Sebastian takes it to heart.

Meanwhile the Doctor and Mel come to visit since Mel says she'd love to meet Evelyn. The Doctor always insists that Evelyn had a calming influence on him and that he's positively mellow compared to how he started and he's not wrong. Poor Peri had to deal with the brunt of it in the horrible season 22.

Only as soon as they show up, Evelyn gets kidnapped and Mel gets dragged along. It turns out the kidnapper is Sebastian who is doing this for Sofia since he loves her. Sofia comes to the rescue with the Doctor and Rossiter himself and Sebastian gets shot.

We then learn that something is not quite right here. This is only halfway through the story after all. Sebastian gets taken to the hospital where he dies after surgery. Evelyn has been in this hospital as well for treatment for her heart condition. But she's been very aggressively of late and had massive migraines which have knocked her unconscious a couple times, including during the kidnapping.

The Doctor and Rossiter uncover a hidden lab underneath the hospital where one of the doctors, Szabo, has been experimenting on Killorans. He's been working with Sebastian, taking the Killoran DNA and putting it into coma patients to see if they recover, which they do. Evelyn was one such patient. Which is why she's been very aggressive and irritable. I'm not a big fan of the biological essentialist thing here, that this species is aggressive because of their DNA, but it's not really the focus so I'll ignore it.

Szabo was trying to create a red herring by stirring up political debate about experimenting on the Killoran technology so nobody would think about the Killorans themselves. It's pretty f**ked. And then he kills himself so he won't be put on trial. It turns out Sebastian had just kidnapped Evelyn to help Sofia, Szabo did not direct him to do that. Indeed, it led to their undoing and Szabo killed Sebastian on the operating table because of it. He even shoved Mel down a shaft when she found out what was going on.

And then we get the really sentimental stuff. The Doctor never really properly said goodbye to Evelyn when she left. Because of course he didn't. He has a hard time saying goodbye at the best of times. But now he really does get to say it as he gives Evelyn away at her vow renewal and they dance together.

There is a special cameo here, as well, where McCoy shows up and Evelyn can tell he's the Doctor. He tells her that he's traveling with Hex who is Cassie's son and how much that means to the both of them. Excuse me while I start crying. I didn't care for the Project stories, of course, but I did like the character stuff that Arrangements for War and Doctor Who and the Pirates did with them. Of course we haven't really gotten to know Hex yet. He was just in two stories so far, his introductory story and a pretty terrible one, but it's not about him so much as who he's related to.

And that's that. This was a really special coda on top of Arrangements for War. The story was very fun and really served as a good reason to get the Doctor and Evelyn back together again. I love Mel's presence in the episode as well. She has good chemistry with Evelyn and does her investigation quite well as I'd expect.

It was really sentimental at the end there. Evelyn never told the Doctor about her heart condition while the Doctor just didn't ever really want to say goodbye. They were both sentimental towards each other, but couldn't really speak their feelings towards each other. Now here they can. Evelyn starts to say her feelings and the Doctor cuts her off, but Evelyn won't hear of it. She says it anyway. She says that the Doctor means a lot to her and that she loves him. Which is really special. She's now the second companion to say she loves the Doctor, after Charley, and she really means it. This relationship is special. Rest in peace Maggie Stables. I miss your voice and your character in these stories. This is such a moving tribute to her.

MR 072: Terror Firma

The Doctor is irresponsible with his companions, the story. I mean, that's not necessarily out of place for the Doctor. They do tend to wander off and get into danger all the time. It's a necessary part of telling a Doctor Who story. However, he's kind of grossly negligent in this one. And not towards Charley and C'rizz.

We last left off with a cliffhanger that as soon as they got back into their universe, the Doctor, Charley, and C'rizz all encounter Davros and the Daleks. That was honestly the most interesting part of that story and it's just kind of funny here. It turns out they're on Earth, naturally, at some unspecified point in time where the Daleks have taken over. Davros has turned everyone on Earth into a Dalek, with a few holdouts. It's kind of a big deal in Earth's history.

We meet a couple of other characters: Samson and Gemma who are kind of wandering around here. Gemma is part of the resistance and Samson is... just here? I guess? And their mother is throwing parties on the surface above the Dalek base. Samson is not doing well, he knows what the TARDIS key is and has memories of the Doctor while Gemma turns out to be a Dalek duplicate.

The two of them apparently used to be the Doctor's companions before Charley, but Davros erased his memory of them and captured them. This was the negligent bit that kick started the whole story. The Doctor let them go off and explore a spaceship while he sat there and read a book, without scanning it or anything. I'm not sure why he would do that. Normally he's a helicopter parent, hovering over them and telling them not to run off or they'll sprain their ankle. Naturally Davros is on board and he captures them all.

Davros wants to take revenge for the whole blowing up Skarro thing in Revelation of the Daleks. So he makes Gemma a puppet and somehow links Samson's mind with the TARDIS so he can keep tabs on the Doctor at all times. And then he erased the Doctor's memory of them entirely. He then goes to Earth to destroy the Doctor's home and convert all the humans to Daleks after the Doctor destroyed his planet. I do like the link here with the first Eighth Doctor audio story, Storm Warning. The end of this story leads directly into the opening scene of that one. Cute.

The problem is that Samson and Gemma are just very generic as far as companions go. Might as well be Ben and Polly. They used to be librarians and they follow the Doctor into his TARDIS. I do like the little montage where they have sentient guitars attacking them, though. That was funny.

C'rizz goes with Gemma and joins the resistance, which are all actually Daleks intent on resisting Davros. They want to make C'rizz their emperor because he kills to keep himself alive. Apparently that's enough to make someone a Dalek? Sure, I guess. I do like the teaser here that C'rizz could become the emperor. This was put out in 2005 and the emperor had just been introduced on tv. They used the same voice as the one used on the show. So what if C'rizz really does become the emperor Dalek? Of course he doesn't, but it's an effective tease.

Charley is hanging out with Samson the whole story and the Doctor breaks his link with the TARDIS. Samson's mother was secretly part of the resistance and is kind of a badass as well. That doesn't really go anywhere though. The Doctor makes a deal with the Daleks that they leave. Davros gave the Doctor poison that would kill everything on the planet (making him question whether it's better for everyone to live as Daleks/Dalek duplicates) and so the Doctor uses that as blackmail to get all the Daleks to leave. I feel like they'd call his bluff there. This is not the Doctor that will press the double genocide button and this story isn't serious enough to consider it anyway.

Anyway, the Daleks leave and make Davros their emperor and then the Doctor leaves without a goodbye to Samson, someone he used to travel with. I feel like that was underutilized here. There should have been a little more emotional impact, more scenes between them. It's kind of just a plot point and not used for character work at all really. And then we get a little teaser about C'rizz talking to people he's killed, hinting that he's a psycopath and that's it.

I know I'm just describing the mechanics of this plot, but that's because I didn't really feel much emotional or character weight here. The story doesn't have a lot to say, just Davros being bent on revenge and the Doctor being a little moody. Nothing unusual for either of them. Just a very standard Davros story. The twist about Samson and Gemma having traveled with the Doctor before doesn't really add that much to the story I think. It's just another mechanic in Davros's revenge plan. The idea of Davros specifically using the Doctor's companions as part of his revenge is interesting, for sure, but the weight of it is let down by wiping the Doctor's memory of them. What's the point of the revenge, then, if the Doctor doesn't know what he's lost? Also, the Earth is completely devastated. There's only a few people on it now after all the Daleks left. Not sure when this story is supposed to take place, but good luck rebuilding it last of the humans.

MR 071: The Council of Nicaea

We do love our historical settings with this group don't we? This is the fourth historical setting we've had with them. I was expecting more of the usual with it. Changing history is bad in and of itself. The usual nonsense. It is there but it does a little more than usual to try to justify it. And more besides. This one caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was.

Honestly I don't know why the Doctor keeps going to these major historical events if he's going to get all pissy about changing them. Especially this one who is especially touchy about it. He should just go back to Gallifrey and never time travel at all for risk of contaminating his precious history he cares so much about.

The actual Council of Nicaea was the settlement of a dispute about the divinity of Jesus. Arius is a priest who rejects the idea of the trinity and thus believes that Jesus is created by God and not actually God. This, naturally, is tearing the church apart. It's a precarious time for the church too, because Constantine, the emperor, has just adopted Christianity which in and of itself could tear the empire apart religiously. Never mind just the Christian church.

Erimem meets Arius who tells her and Peri about his beliefs. I really LOVE Peri's response to Arius here. She laughs and doesn't see how this is important in the slightest. How could people get so upset over little religious differences like this? I wish we lived in a world where people didn't care about religion, but here we are. Erimem sees Arius as a persecuted minority who will not be allowed to speak on his behalf and so takes up his cause.

This is where some of that changing history stuff comes in. At least the Doctor attempts to justify this a little. Changing the council of nicaea will have reverberations for thousands of years to come. However long Christianity lasts. Personally I don't really care if Christians believe in the divinity of Jesus or not. The church has done terrible things down through history. But there's no real getting rid of the church from this point. Either way it will continue from the council.

Erimem is determined to help Arius but the Doctor will throw her out and leave her here because he's an asshole I guess. Except not really because that was just a cliffhanger. I'm honestly just over the Fifth Doctor's attitudes towards time travel and history at this point.

It is interesting how this is Erimem's future. So of course she doesn't know or care about whatever bs history justification the Doctor is yapping about. It's not history for her. History doesn't exist when you're a time traveler. Every time is the past, present, and future because you can always go to it.

The Doctor manages to get an invitation to the council, bumping into the emperor by accident as he does with historical figures. And then they go, but Erimem stands up and yells for Arius which causes a whole scene and then she gets thrown out. This was pretty wild. She's doing what she believes is right and she continues to do so.

Erimem drives the plot here. She fights against Constantine and even starts to doubt that Peri and the Doctor are her friends. Since they're working with Constantine to try to find her. Peri accidentally leads the Emperor's centurians right to Arius. The twists and turns here are interesting to listen to. The bishops are also at play here as the chief opponent to Arius is doing his own the with his own spy/assassin. Erimem even manages to stir up enough support for Arius to make a public demonstration in front of the palace.

Constantine responds to this demonstration by actually going out himself and talking with the protestors, which was a pretty great climax. After the bishop wanted to send out the soldiers. Constantine essentially explains that he doesn't necessarily care which way the church rules, as long as it's unified. A fractured church will fracture the empire. As will eventually happen with Orthodox Christianity, but that's another story. The bishops will rule on it and seeing how much support Arius has might help to influence them.

That's enough for Erimem. Arius still loses the debate though and gets exiled, which is what happened in our own history. So once again we don't have to confront the implications of changing history. Still, it's a very well done story. Finally someone standing up against the Doctor’s whole changing history is bad shtick. And what better character to do it with than Erimem? She doesn't care about that, she has her morals and she'll stick to them. And she does. She doesn't back down at all and she ultimately does get Arius a fair hearing. He still loses, but at least he was heard out. I quite enjoy seeing Erimem butting up against this Doctor. She's like my advocate in these stories and I'm here for it.

MR 070: Unregenerate!

Or the one where Sylvester McCoy chews the scenery for an hour. There's definitely some interesting stuff going on, but this one is kind of hampered by its format. It could have benefited from being an hour long story instead of a two hour story.

There's a mysterious organization that is abducting people outside of time a day before their death. They make a faustian deal with them to make their lives better in exchange for grabbing them at the last minute.

The Doctor is in this facility having just recently regenerated. He lost his mind and is a gibberish wreck for some reason while Mel is off on a chase with a cabbie that the Doctor directed her towards.

This facility is abducting people to wipe their mind and put in an artificial mind for the purpose of controlling time travel. They can direct the course of time travel research by controlling the minds of those who are time sensitive.

I was thinking that this was something the time lords might do and it turns out they are indeed time lords. It's interesting how the episode tries to disguise them being time lords and use it as a cliffhanger for the last episode. It recontexualizes what's going on. It's very Rassilonian to interfere in the development of another species for your own benefit. They don't want a bunch of other species to have time travel and mess up their precious web of time. The thing that allows them to be dominant in the universe. They see it as a noble purpose but of course they do. They're brainwashed.

And hypocritical. When the show is not doing the changing history is bad/fixed points in time bit that I hate so much, the Doctor regularly changes history and interferes all the time. That's why the Time Lords put him on trial twice, as Mel helpfully points out.

Of course this is not new ground for the CIA. They're the ones who go against traditional time lord rules to preserve time lord supremacy. To actually maintain those rules they have to break them. Cause they're not good rules in the first place.

I like that they first tried this on Daleks and it didn't work. Kind of a precursor to the time War. They knew the Daleks were a threat, clearly with Genesis.

With the recontexualization that these are time lords, we also get that these are not just generic ai, they're mini-tardis intelligences. They're growing tardis intelligence on a computer essentially instead of however tardises are normally grown. The only problem is that a tardis intelligence is way more than a human or time lord brain can contain so it's not a very effective process.

The two newly born tardises commune with the Doctor's tardis to figure out how to make the facility into a tardis themselves and then leave while the Doctor dismantles the program. I do like that one of the characters is a CIA agent and calls them, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure why the human cabbie stays but sure I guess.

Like I said, a lot of interesting ideas, but they're mostly in the backhalf after a bloated first half. Condense it down to an hour and this could have been much better. Still it's decent for what it is. If you ignore McCoy's cheese.

MR 069: Three's a Crowd

Well I feel personally attacked. Living in isolation isn't natural my ass. What do you think a hikikomori is then? Hmm?????

We have a society of people living in isolated rooms on their own. They barely ever see each other and then only on video screen. Sometimes they get to see each other in person but only ever two at a time. There's talk of a rebellion against this by having EIGHT people in the same room at the same time. Crazy. Sounds like hell to me.

The colony is run by an older lady called "Auntie" on a space station overseeing the planet. Most of the story just involves characters examining what's going on in this society and how bad it is to live in isolation. Characters have panic attacks because other people are in their space. Indeed, they start getting panic attacks as Peri and Erimem pull them out of their rooms and into corridors or even, heaven forbid, outside.

The main core of what's going on here, as well, with the three main characters is Erimem's and the Doctor's seeming reluctance to want to travel together. Erimem is recovering from The Roof of the World where she's confronted by her father, or something. It's been awhile since I heard it, although I do remember liking it. I'm not sure where the Doctor's attitude is coming from. Perhaps he just wants one companion after going so long with having multiple at the same time. He says he's pretty ok with Erimem being there, but he's a little forgettful about her and even does the "hey do you want to stay here and rule" thing at the end of the story, like he does to Steven on the actual show. He's been with Peri and Erimem for some time now but he's only having these feelings now? Ok, I guess?

It's ironic that this is a Doctor Who story about isolation being bad when the Doctor usually just travels alone or with one other person. He's not one for settling down and forming a community. The Doctor himself is the ultimately example of an introverted shut in, seeking out just one person at a time or, in this Doctor's case, multiple people to share his life with.

The story just kind of turns into a generic alien invasion thing when it's revealed that there are lizard aliens eating the human colonists. Auntie knew all about it and made a deal with them because they were on their own, communication cut off from other humans with their terraformer not working. They've been periodically sending colonists "home" but they've just been going to become food for the lizards. There's a lot of running around and getting chased by lizards. Very fun. Until they kill the lizards and then kill the lizard babies with radiation poisioning and lack of oxygen.

It's not really that interesting. The concept itself is pretty ok, but hits too home for me. At least it's not too triggering in a way that makes me unable to listen like Vincent and the Doctor, but what's here is just not that engaging. Normal Doctor Who alien stuff. It's at least a step up from the norm for Peri and Erimem, who despite being a fun team consistently get middling to terrible stories. Ah well, hopefully they get a better one next time.

It's my, ehem, triumphant return to the Main Range after a month and a half of absence. And this is kind of a meh story. There's some interesting ideas here, but ultimately the ending was a pretty weak cop out to a rather interesting question that challenges the "can't change history" philosophy that I hate about this show.

There's a lot of technobabble nonsense to get the plot going. It doesn't really matter. The point here is that there's a reception for the anniversary of a scientific institute that Mel's uncle works and lives at. They're burying a time capsule to commemorate it, but uh oh, what's this? There's something already buried there? It turns out that the experimental metal they're working on was buried in the ground for hundreds of years in a box from the late 1700s. And then Mel gets yanked back in time through technobabble by the experimental metal. For reasons. Who knows. Doesn't matter.

Mel ends up showing up at this same mansion during the late 1700s, but it's inhabited by a distant ancestor of hers. She becomes confused and distraught because, again, technobabble nonsense. The point is that she's super unwell, has no idea what's happening, and is in an on again off again coma for six months. They treat her with laudanum, which is apparently an insanely powerful painkiller that makes her even more confused and tired.

And then the Doctor shows up six months later because more technobabble and it turns out that Mel is supposed to become Elanor, the second wife of Henry Hallam, a distant ancestor of hers. Henry is super infatuated with her and he thinks her name is Nel, short for Elanor. Naturally Mel doesn't get a say in this. Can you imagine women getting a say in who they marry? You know, in general? Wild.

This is where I said, lol f**k you Medicinal Purposes. Preserving history just for the sake of preserving history is a dangerous road to go down. In that story, the Doctor lures a boy who trusts him absolutely to his death for the sake of preserving history. That's evil enough, but what if it was supposed to be Evelyn who died according to the history he knew? What if, according to history the Doctor had read, there was an old woman who was a stranger who was killed, and that was supposed to be Evelyn? Would he have gone through with luring her to her death? Because, given how evil that story was, I can easily see him doing it.

There's a similar situation here. Would the Doctor willingly leave Mel here in this time period against her will and force her to marry this man she doesn't care for just to preserve history the way he remembers it? Absolutely he would as presented in the story. That's f**ked up. Mel is consistently NOT a character in this story. She is an object. A ball to be passed back and forth between the characters. She's going to be forced to marry Henry because it's the 1700s and what other choice does she have? No, she's going to be forced to marry Henry to preserve history the way everyone remembers it, because what other choice does she have?

There's something to be said for the grandfather paradox as well. If she doesn't marry this man, does that mean her family would never have existed? This is some Back to the Future stuff. If she doesn't have kids with him, then she doesn't exist. But does that matter? If you're faced with the choice of either you marry and have sex with a man you don't love and is kind of insane versus you don't exist, which would you chose? I would imagine a lot of people would choose the later. But, of course, that's not a discussion here. That could be an interesting discussion in this story, but like the rest of the story Mel has no agency here. She's not allowed to choose for herself or even think about the possibility of another option. She realizes that she has to marry Henry and that's that, it never even occurs to her to choose anything else.

Thus the ending itself is kind of a cop out. The housekeeper loves Henry and is the one who marries him. I don't know why considering he attacked her and is really violent and hateful towards her at the end, but sure. (I also can't help but hear Mrs Baddeley in her voice. "Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without my plum pudding!") It neatly solves the whole problem. It makes the story not have to confront the philosophical implications of how evil not changing history for the sake of it truly is. So with that ending in mind, it's just kind of fine. It's not nearly as interested in chewing on the ideas that it presents as it is knocking Mel out and having a bunch of men discuss her fate. Not the worst story, not nearly as bad as Medicinal Purposes which embraces the evil of that idea, but not that great either.

MR 067: Dreamtime

¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is the most incomprehensible garbage story I've ever heard. I still don't really know what happened in it, but I'll try to piece it together. Something something "reject modernity, embrace tradition."

This is the best I can piece together the plot:

There's a city floating through space where there are statues of nightmare people. Some aliens, the Galyari from Sandman, try to land on the city to trade. Which seems like a terrible idea. The statues are actually people trapped in some incomprehensible concept called the dreamtime. The Doctor gets pulled into it which sends him back in time while Ace and Hex wander around and try not to die.

The Doctor is in the distant past where he convinces the person organizing the city going up into space to allow an ethnic minority to live in the city when that guy just wanted to let them die on the surface. And then an hour of who the f**k knows what happens where the Doctor is possessed by evil spirits or whatever. And then he comes back and figures out that he caused the evil spirits to arrive because he pushed for progressivism.

You see, by getting the guy to accept an ethnic minority in their space city, the evil spirits are mad. They've embraced modernity and corrupted/forgotten their traditions. Like women inhabiting a traditional male space. Therefore the ancestoral spirits are angry and are trying to pull everyone into the dreamtime and destroy the city. So the Doctor SIDES WITH THE SPIRITS (LOL WTF) and helps reset the entire city back to a more traditional state and reject those evil modern concepts like gender equality and multiculturalism so that the spirits will be satisfied.

That's the best I can do, and I'm still not 100% sure that's accurate. Besides being incomprehensible, the parts that I could comprehend were still extremely bad. This is Hex's first trip in the TARDIS and we're doing whatever the f**k this is. This is like when C'Rizz's second story was Natural History of Fear, only in a bad direction. It doesn't really help us understand anymore about who he is as a person because we're struggling to comprehend what's happening.

It absolutely baffles me, as well, that this Doctor decides to side with the evil ancestoral spirits who hate progressive values. The Seventh Doctor often has a reputation for being a rebel and a revolutionary, but that reputation is entirely unearned. So far, he has had the MOST conservative stories and political views in the main range including Fearmonger, Flip-Flop, and now Dreamtime.

I remember that when I first heard this story over a decade ago, I had no idea what was happening in it either. It faded immediately from my head like a bad dream. Listening to it certainly feels like a dream. The things happening have a very dream like state to them. Fortunately, it's already fading from my mind a mere hour or two after listening to it. It's ok, it was all a bad dream....

MR: 066 The Game

Well I did enjoy this one quite a bit, although I feel like it kind of became a bit confused towards the end. Still, a lot of the ideas here are good ones.

A well distinguished and noted peace negotiater, Lord Carlisle, is going to the planet Cray to host a peace negotiation. The planet is in the middle of a civil war which is quite embarrassing for Earth because it was apparently just named Earth's twin planet. The Doctor is here, on vacation (!) to see Lord Carlisle in action, one of his biggest heroes. Definitely a weird taste in vacations, but sure. The Doctor is a weird guy. It's particularly interesting to me because this Doctor seems like he'd be rather averse to war. After all the losses he's suffered and the times when everyone has died. "There should have been another way," Indeed.

The civil war, however, is a sport. The sport of Naxy. Thousands of people go into the arena to "play" this sport that is literally just people killing each other with swords while an announcer cheerfully commentates on their deaths or "retirements." The "coach" is actually a general leading their troops into battle. Thousands of cheering fans watch the carnage. Indeed, Maxi started out as a more normal sport, but it evolved over time into an actual battle when fans started taking to slaughtering each other over their favorite teams. Fights in the streets turned lethal and the game adapted to suit the bloodthirsty desires of its fans.

This is hardly the first story to make the connection between sport and war. But Doctor Who itself has rarely tread this ground, if ever. Big multi-million dollar sports can certainly feel like a war with the fanaticism over your favorite team and the fights that can break out after a game. It often feels like two teams are two opposing armies going to war with things like playbooks, like tactics,, and star players, like generals. It's certainly a much more healthy place to channel that aggressive tribalism than outright war. But that desire to see blood ends up bleeding through into the sport.

There's also the obvious connection of the Roman Colliseums. That is pretty much the same thing. Hundreds of people gather to watch people get slaughtered for sport. The sport and the rules are just an excuse to see carnage. There's something about us as humans that is drawn to violence and danger. But perhaps not our own. We can watch a horror movie, but we would not be pleased to be in our own situation where we could very well die.

The Fifth Doctor is a great Doctor for this too, as the cricket Doctor. He has an affinity for the late 19th/early 20th British Empire. Another time of barely concealed barbarism disguised as civilization. We're confronting him with the awful truth of the carnage behind those cheerful/pleasant faces. This is when the story does well. When it sits on this metaphor and just explores it and the characters' reactions to it.

The Doctor gets press ganged into playing the game while Nyssa goes off and stumbles into the peace maker. The Doctor refuses to play, but ends up making a game winning "play" by trying to retreat but circling around and attacking the opposing team in the back. And so he becomes the new super star with the fans wanting his autograph. I'm sure the Doctor feels extremely ashamed that people want his autograph for getting people killed.

As the super star he gets to sit in on the peace conference where Lord Carlisle fails rather spectacularly leading to a one on one game of Naxy with the Doctor and the other team's champion. Naturally he can't refuse or thousands more people die. When he goes to fight the opposing fighter has a sudden change of heart and wants to end the game.

And this is where it gets a bit messy. This triggers a well known criminal and casino owner named Morian to try to shut down the games. He's been pulling the strings all along, you see. He's making a ton of money on selling tickets to Naxy to offworlders and didn't want to shut it down, but it was inevitable that one team would win and wipe out the others. His weird plan here was to lure the Doctor out to see Lord Carlisle, steal the Doctor's TARDIS, and then use it to bet on the outcomes of games, using time travel to know the results.

I guess there's something to be said for having a corporate overlord making money off war. War is certainly very profitable when you sell the weapons. But he comes in with an alien army and it gets a bit muddled and loses focus. Still, it's a good point to make. The Doctor defeats him by exposing his manipulation of the game to the teams who all gang up on him before he runs away.

Now, the reason why Lord Carlisle failed so spectacularly is because he is actually a fraud. The Doctor has been the one doing these peace conferences. He has been meeting the Doctor out of order, like River Song. This is now the first time the Doctor has met him, but the last time Lord Carlisle has met him. The Doctor is his best friend, but the Doctor doesn't even know him. He even berated him during the conference for failing so badly. Nyssa found out about this earlier on, but didn't tell the Doctor for... reasons. Still, it's cute that we have this idea a long time before River. It's definitely a good idea, of course. There's a reason why it works so well with River.

There's some other interesting stuff going on here. The marketing and profits of one team go towards the other. That's kind of f**ked. It means there's an incentive on the top for the team to do poorly so that the other team does well in marketing. That's why one of the coaches sides with Morian, for the money. It's also interesting that there used to be many teams, but they were all eliminated. Because of course they were. There's a "retirement facility" where hundreds of bodies get piled up as well.

I liked a lot of what this story was doing. It was really grim, but it suits this Doctor very well. The idea of a sport that is really a war is an effective one and hammers home the stark relationship between the two. An announcer cheerfully announcing tactics of war as if it's a game is a pretty stark image. Definitely a good one, though the ending is a bit muddled.

MR 065: The Juggernauts
Ironic that Next Life ended with a Davros cameo and here we are with a story about Davros. With a different Doctor.

The Doctor and Mel get seperated in the middle of an attack on a ship. I'm not sure why the Doctor thought it was a good idea to seperate them, but sure. It's arbitrary to start the story. The Doctor gets kidnapped by Daleks while Mel gets put into an escape pod and ends up on a colony working on a computer programming project until the Doctor rescuses her.

I do appreciate that we've really started using Mel's computer programming abilities, not that the show ever really used it. These audios have done a fairly decent attempt at making the companions from the tv show more distinct and giving them personality of their own. Hell, even Nyssa has gotten more of a personality through audio. This one does a decent job of doing that for Mel.

Mel's boss is a scientist named Professor Vaso. He's working on something called the Juggernauts, which are really just Mechanoids that he found somewhere. He also survived a crash landing that destroyed much of the facilities where he's working. Of course, Vaso is just Davros in disguise, but there's some interesting stuff for him here. I wonder how much of his personality as Vaso is genuine. There's a moment where he muses on the fact that he survived the crash while a lot of people died because of his crash.

Davros is on the outs with the Daleks and is now trying to use his new Juggernauts as Dalek killers. It's kind of funny to see Davros divorced from the Daleks. We see that in the audio "Davros," but now he's actively working against them. They are working for a corporation called Outreach which is investing in the Juggernaut project, but Outreach wants to shut them out and take over, which Davros can not allow.

Despite working against the Daleks, Davros has a few Daleks working with him which he uses to kill everyone in the corporate party that wants to take control of the project. This all makes sense. Of course he's willing to go to such lengths to protect his project. Especially since the Juggernauts are now dead humans inside of the mechanoid frame, which is bizzare. I'm not sure why Davros was doing this, other than to have an arbitrary reason to say that the Mechanoids were bad. It seems pointless to the story. It certainly tracks with the effort to demonize them broadly. The Mechanoids don't really do anything bad in their appearance on the show, just kill Daleks (and imprison Steven, but who's counting).

Regardless, the Daleks manage to beat Davros and blow up his base. There's a moment where Mel effectively kills Davros which was pretty intense. She tells the Doctor to stay out of it as she takes control of the Juggernauts she helped create and has them kill him. That was pretty wild. Otherwise the ending is just them escaping after Mel's friend Geoff sacrificies himself. I'm not a big fan of the sacrificing himself as a hero bit, mostly because Zagreus and Scherzo have conditioned me to dislike that trait, but it's all fine.

There's definitely some interesting stuff here, but it's mostly forgettable. Davros dies AGAIN for the fiftieth time so I'm sure he'll be back again later. It felt like someone wanted to use the mechanoids and just created a functional story with them. It doesn't have much to say, but it's not trying to be anything more than it is.

MR 064: The Next Life

Yay, I did it. I'm freeeee!!!!

No more Divergent Universe. Was it a fun time? Not really, but it sure was a time. This story in particular is basically just delaying for two hours and then a rushed one hour of exposition to explain everything that happened and that's it. I definitely feel like it was pushed out rather quickly to end this arc because it feels like a few stories worth of reveals jammed into one. Some of the exposition/reveals are interesting, sure, but for the most part it's just "ok let me rewind every five seconds to relisten to that thing because my eyes just glazed over and I completely forgot what they said."

The first couple parts are mostly nothing. Rassilon has infiltrated the Doctor's TARDIS along with Kro'ka who works for him apparently. They've made it look like the TARDIS has crashed and put Charley and C'Rizz into dream machines. There they wander around in a Zagreus dream like state for an hour and I'm already tuning out. Charley is with her mother and C'Rizz with Lyda. The idea is to tempt them with people they miss or something. It doesn't really matter. I listened to it awhile ago so I don't really remember it. Something about C'Rizz being pulled out of the Church of the Foundation by marrying Lyda. We also learn that C'Rizz has murdered quite a few people as part of his duties in the Church because this is a rather murderous Church apparently.

Meanwhile the Doctor is marooned on a planet where he hangs out with the most important people in this universe. A guy named Keep. Another guy named Guidance. And a woman named Perfection. All of them are super important, but we won't learn why for another two hours. First we go through the rather laborious plot where they're hanging out with the natives of this planet, Perfection lies and says the Doctor killed someone, Keep chases him down to kill him along with Perfection after she kills someone too, Guidance looks for C'Rizz, Charley falls in with Keep while he's chasing the Doctor, ect ect.

They all three tell their respective character the exposition. There are several galaxies in this universe and they all started dying because a planet came into their galaxy and everyone died. C'Rizz's species, the Eutermesans, founded the church of the foundation in response. They believed that everything dying was part of the natural order of life and all things must die. The planet is where all things originate and all things must return there.

The Doctor concludes that this planet was put there by Rassilon because after it kills everything, time resets and begins again, thus trapping the Divergence in a time loop. All of the characters converge at the foundation, but it turns out the foundation was really the "foundry." It was a corruption of the word. Yes, the planet contains Rassilon's foundry, where he plans to escape this universe.

We then learn more exposition that Keep is... an amalgamation of Charley and the Doctor from Scherzo. Presumably in a different loop, the Doctor and Charley decided to stay fused together at the end of Scherzo instead of seperating, resulting in Keep. He went to find the Divergence, but they were already dead from the constant time loop, so he absorbed them and took their power, becoming a shape shifter. He worked with Guidance, who is C'Rizz's father and a major priest in the church of the foundation, to find the original foundation. Keep's plan was to escape the universe and absorb all life in every universe everywhere. Which is... a little ambitious, but sure.

C'Rizz and Guidance both have the key to the foundry. Keep kills Guidance, C'Rizz is secretly working for Rassilon because he's super suggestible, and then Keep beats Rassilon and keeps him from leaving this universe. Rassilon and Kro'ka get sent back to the beginning of the loop with their memories intact this time. Perfection turns out to be Zagreus who stabs Keep. And then Keep turns into a TARDIS to trick Zagreus, holding her off until the Doctor can leave. Apparently going into this universe cast Zagreus off of the Doctor into a new form entirely.

And then there's a really weird part where Charley and C'Rizz argue like crazy and the Doctor gets mad that they're arguing. It was like when Charley just instantly started arguing with Perfection. She says she was jealous of Perfection, sure, but she's been with C'Rizz for a while. I don't know why her jealousy is only now showing itself. Not sure what C'Rizz has against Charley either. It was just a strange moment. Like C'Rizz said, now they're going to have to watch what they say around him. Or at least for a week. I did like the ending where Davros and the Daleks were waiting to welcome him back. That was cute.

And that's it! I didn't care all that much to be fair. It was just a laborous, tedious process to sit through all the exposition. Too much exposition can kill a story as we've seen before in the main range, but it absolutely does kill this story. The vibes of the first hour were fine with Charley and C'Rizz hanging out with their family, if forgettable, but then after that it was just too much. This needed to be cut down to two hours, or even less honestly. Three hours is just ridiculous for this story, although, not as ridiculous as Zagreus's four hours. I was a little more forgiving of Zagreus at the time, but not so much on the second go round. I do find it funny that Rassilon is trapped forever in the universe he's running on his desk. I also find it funny that he and Kro'ka are trapped in the Scherzo tunnel.

MR 063: Caerdroia

I wasn't the biggest fan of this one either, although it certainly has more to it than the previous story. There's definitely some interesting story, but it's mostly pretty vibes based. There's some good vibes though so that's kind of fine.

We've been seeing this border guard the whole time in the Divergent Universe, the Kro'ka. It has been directing them into the different zones of the universe, but now the Doctor has figured out how to get at it. The whole opening sequence involves the Doctor tricking it into trying to go into his mind and then the Doctor traps it there and figures out what's going on. This whole sequence was quite fun and allows Paul McGann to play, essentially. His mind is a twisted web of corridors and he doesn't quite know what all is in there. Indeed, the Kro'ka randomly finds a piece of cheese and the Doctor is like "whoops forgot about that."

The Doctor gets the Kro'ka to tell him about where the Divergence are and what they're doing. They're based in a castle on a planet called Caerdroia. So naturally they go there and somehow the Doctor gets split up into three. There's an irritable/mean Doctor, an easily excitable/giddy Doctor, and the normal Doctor who balances them. So it's just an exercise for Paul McGann to play three different Doctors. Which is quite cute.

So then we go into a bunch of vibes based scenarios. The irritable Doctor goes with Charley and the excitable Doctor goes with C'rizz while the normal Doctor goes by himself. Irritable Doctor and Charley go into a clock and try not to get crushed. C'rizz and excitable Doctor go into a zoo with animals trying to kill them. And normal Doctor goes into a big bureaucratic nightmare world. This is really the only one that's interesting to be fair because there's lots of "not my department" type jokes where he has to register to use a pen and has to travel down corridors to find the right departments. I particularly liked the sincere vs rhetorical questions department.

They all meet again in a labyrinth where they meet a random guy who tells them they need to break into the center. This is where the story kind of lost me because it's a weird idea that some civilization would build a labyrinth around their water and electricity maintenance systems. The Doctors think it's odd too and it's because it's all a construct. The Kro'ka built this world and had them wandering around a maze to try to break into the Doctor's TARDIS at the center of it. He wants to present the TARDIS to the Divergence in the hope that they'll forgive him for stealing a mind probe or whatever.

Then the last part has Charley and C'rizz wandering around the construct city for awhile and they eventually find the TARDIS and leave, the Doctors form back together, the end. Thank goodness.

This is the type of vibes based story that I generally dislike, but there was enough fun stuff here to make it at least an enjoyable listen while it was happening. The main draw is Paul McGann chewing the scenery, which I always enjoy, and the confrontations with the Kro'ka which were fun. Still better than the previous story, I'll grant it. Generally this is pretty forgettable though. Indeed, I'm already forgetting most of it.

MR 062: The Last

For the most part this is rather mediocre, but it does have some good ideas in it. It's an exploration of a society that has destroyed itself. How did this happen and why did this happen?

The problem is the explanations are rather mediocre. The leader is mad, power hungry, controlling. She's the very essence of a fascist. Power for its own sake and anyone who questions that power gets executed. She'll even kill people herself if it comes down to it. This character, Excelsior, will just do things and then act as if they were no big deal. She'll come up with excuses and pretend to ignore what's happened and pretend to be mad. The one thing she will never do is attempt to justify her actions because she doesn't feel like she needs to do so. She's the one in power and so everyone does what she commands, no justification necessary.

Her ministers are self-interested and intent on keeping themselves alive, navigating through Excelsior's mad mood swings. They're trying to escape this impossible situation after the people on the planet have all been killed. There's only a hundred or so people left alive on the planet in this underground bunker and somehow they're mostly all still loyal to Excelsior, who probably knows about everyone being dead, but pretends not to know and practices her victory speeches.

This is the situation as the Doctor, Charley, and C'rizz arrive in this nuclear irradiated hellhole. Everyone is destroyed. Charley is stunned at the idea that ONE SINGLE BOMB could do this much damage, kill millions of people. Of course, she doesn't know about the nukes in WW2. They take shelter in a house that collapses. The Doctor gets buried, Charley gets entirely paralyzed by a beam hitting her extremely hard and C'rizz goes for help. What help he thinks he's going to find, who knows. Charley and the Doctor get pulled into the bunker by Landscar, a mysterious figure in the government who claims to represent the planet, or some such. C'rizz finds a bunch of ghosts, though he thinks they're survivors.

Things in the bunker go immediately downhill as everyone has to tiptoe around Excelsior. Charley impresses her with fashion after she executed her make up artist and they all just mostly putter around for a bit, filling up the run time until there's a flood. An underground river bursts and they have to evacuate, but most everyone dies, leaving a few left. And Excelsior still talks about executing people for disagreeing with her when there are literally five or six people left. Indeed, she threatens the Doctor and Charley with execution just for them saying that everyone is dead on the surface.

Charley figures out that Excelsior is not quite so mad. She just pretends to be to hold on to power and so Excelsior kills her. She's entirely paralyzed and can't resist. There's what you'd expect here, with Charley, about leaving her behind because she can't walk but the Doctor and C'rizz wouldn't ever leave her behind of course. Excelsior also kills one of her ministers for attempting to tell her about everyone being dead.

The Doctor helps repair a rocket to get people off planet. It was originally built for space travel, but was repurposed for war. Now it's being repurposed againt for space travel, but Landscar scares the last minister to his death and/or kills him, doesn't matter. Landscar is going to stay behind. So the Doctor, C'rizz and Excelsior go up in the rocket. Excelsior kills C'rizz and the Doctor absolutely refuses to help her escape. He calls her the most amoral person he's ever known and that's pretty accurate. She just does whatever she wants, plays with the lives of her people, because they are her pawns to do with as she wishes. She doesn't need to justify herself to anyone.

The planet pulls the rocket back down and when Excelsior goes out of the ship, she gets eaten up in a forming volcano. Which just leaves the Doctor. The Last. Landscar says that when everyone dies, the cycle will begin again. Earlier in the episode, Excelsior didn't understand the concept of children. When people die, they just don't replenish their numbers. Because once everyone's dead, they all come back and begin this whole thing again. So Landscar tells the Doctor to kill himself. He says he never considered himself suicidal and does it anyway.

Which brings everyone back. Charley and C'rizz are watching a parade and Excelsior gives her victory speech as the war has finally ended. Charley calls her an inspiration, which is all ironic to us. I'm not sure if the Doctor is meant to remember everything that happened, but it certainly feels like he does.

And that's that. I suppose it is accurate that one power mad, insane despot can absolutely cause the destruction of the planet. Along with self serving ministers who will say anything she wishes to hear to keep themselves alive. It's wild, to me, that we're all still alive after the Cold War. At least for now. We shall see. The story itself, though, was pretty mediocre. I wasn't exactly thrilled by it, but it wasn't the worst story either. Mostly just inoffensive.

MR 061: Faith Stealer

So much lucidity.... So much lucidity.... Am I listening to Doctor Who or Discworld right now? This setting feels like a Discworld set up. It kind of goes in a Discworld direction as well, with a more incomprehensible Doctor Who style ending.

Like Discworld, we have a city where religions coexist in peace. The Doctor, Charley and C'Rizz need to declare a religion to get in. C'Rizz actually IS religious, but the Doctor and Charley are not. So the Doctor declares that they are of the "Tourist" faith. They worship C'Rizz. Naturally, that religion starts to spread throughout the interfaith center. They hear someone on the street preaching tourism and saying "C'Rizz be praised." And it only gets even more silly from there.

From the very beginning this was clearly a bad idea. The interfaith center seeks to promote interfaith dialogue or some such. But the nature of faith is belief without evidence. If you're a zealot and truly believe in your religion, why would you tolerate other faiths? The very idea doesn't make any sense. Your religion is right and everyone else is wrong. If you want them to follow the one true way, you shouldn't tolerate anyone else's beliefs.

The religions that we see are quite unique and interesting. We have a religion where they constantly sing a chant and that chant in and of itself IS their god. There is the Church of Kabari, which worships an extremely versitle household product that can be eaten or used as wallpaper or a hat. It was quite entertaining seeing the Bishop of this religion getting offended at seeing the kabari used as wallpaper in another church because he considers it sacred. There is the Shrine of Serendipity, which worships happy accidents. Anytime something accidental happens and they get hurt they are eccstatic. Indeed, when their shrine burns down they were overjoyed. "May obstacles cover your path."

There are a few other religions that are just mentioned by name for gags like the Microbaptists, the Divine Gas, and The Temple of the Ever Open Door (which has closed its doors for services). The main religion here, though, is the Church of Lucidity. It was a small cult when it entered the interfaith center and is growing rapidly. They dream the divine dream and create crystals in their dreams, the sacred objects of their faith. They recruit people who are depressed and looking for meaning, as all religions do. But then that small cult that recruited people who were depressed grew up and became the dominant religion.

The Church of Lucidity is spreading very rapidly. Indeed, it has become the most popular religion in the interfaith center very rapidly. There are regular sleep riots where people show their worship for Lucidity, sleep walking and talking. The director of the interfaith center has seen conversion swings before, but nothing like this. Banning the religion would go against everything the interfaith center is supposed to stand for. But the Church becoming the dominant and then sole religion in the interfaith center ALSO goes against everything the interfaith center is supposed to stand for. As I said, this was always a bad idea. Religions compete with each other for followers and if one grows to become dominant, it will have the power to take over all the others. This is not science. There is no agreed upon universal objective truth. For religion, truth is relative. Faith is based on nothing. So who's to say which religion is true?

C'Rizz gets pulled into the Church of Lucidity and tries to strangle Charley in his dream, remembering killing his girlfriend in Creed of the Kromon. So the Doctor takes him to the "de-faith center." The very idea is quite silly. They pull all your ideas out of your brain to get you to stop being religious. You've "believed too much." This, too, feels like a Discworld idea. The Doctor doesn't want him treated, but the de-faith center employee does so anyway. He tries to pull all of the Lucidity beliefs out of C'Rizz's mind, but they overwhelm him and take him over.

It turns out the Church of Lucidity is preying on people, stealing their minds and collecting them in crystal form to feed a weird crystalline entity from another dimension who eats thoughts dreamt during REM sleep, lucid dreaming. I know, it's an incomprehensible monster. The point is that people are getting pulled into this religion only to have their minds sucked out while they sleep. The director of the interfaith center tries to ban the Church of Lucidity, going against what she believes in, but she gets killed by the head of this church.

There's a part where the Doctor and Charley are lucid dreaming as well and they see what they want to see, the TARDIS so they can escape. Charley has the Doctor take off in the illusion and it disappears around them. I liked this little scene. I also liked the Doctor saying "oh ye of too much faith."

How else is faith defeated? With cold hard truth. The Doctor realizes that the leader of the religion isn't real. He was created by the weird crystalline entity to head the church. He disappears in a puff of logic and then the creature gets banished back to wherever it came from. The Doctor appoints a new head of the interfaith center and they get out of there.

This was a cute one. I enjoyed focusing on C'Rizz just a bit more. We know that he's susceptible to cults because he's already religious and we know he's haunted by his girlfriend's death. We could have guessed this already so we didn't learn THAT MUCH about C'Rizz to be fair. Still it's something. I liked the setting and the story. Despite the more incomprehensible ending, it didn't ruin it. I liked the meditation on faith itself. Faith is based on nothing but feelings and so it's inherently not going to get along with other faiths. It's very much a means of division between people, yet another way to pull people towards their own communities and away from other communities.

The religions themselves were quite fun and it was enjoyable to see C'Rizz pulled into a different faith than his own. His brain was taken from him and he just preached for Lucidity, helping to make it the dominant religion. The other religions can not exist in the might of Lucidity. I also liked what Charley said. This feels like a religious stock exchange. May the strongest faith win.