MR 067: Dreamtime

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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.

MR 060: Medicinal Purposes

This one legitimately pissed me off. I almost turned it off after the first episode and it was a struggle to get through. It took me several days. And it's for all the usual reasons that I get pissed off at Doctor Who. Excuses like "we can't interfere with history" and "the web of time" and "fixed points in time" ect ect. This kind of thing is cowardly, feckless writing that has all the moral weight of a Star Trek episode where we let millions of people die because "prime directive." It's this sort of callous disregard for life that upsets me about these kinds of sci fi writers. They think they're so intellectual, thinking about the moral ramifications of letting people get murdered or die of disease for the greater good, but really their ideology leads to pretty evil places like malthusianism. It's the kind of ideology that falls apart, as it does in this story, the moment you consider the people being killed your friends. When it's your family member or lover or friend being murdered for the greater good or to preserve the time line or to prevent you from contacting a pre-warp civilization, well suddenly it's not so great is it? I'm glad to see that at least some people got to see why I get pissed off at this kind of thinking in sci fi. From what I can tell, this one isn't very well regarded. It's mostly just forgotten.

It's absolutely character assassination as well. The Sixth Doctor was not well regarded before Big Finish came along, obviously. They massaged his character, gently sanded down the rough edges but still kept the core character underneath. This is a return to the type of thing that made people dislike him in the first place. This is not a story I know well, as I'm not British, but from my understanding of this story: a medical doctor named Robert Knox paid two men, William Burke and William Hare, to kill people and to grave rob bodies so that he could experiment on them. The Doctor seems to think this is justified because of advancements in medical science that might save people in the future. That's one thing. It's another thing to go up to Burke and Hare and want to shake their hand and tell them "well done, you're doing great, keep it up."

That's what really pissed me off at the beginning. The Doctor HERO WORSHIPS THEM!!?????!!!!??!! Ok, let's take a step back and think about this for a few moments. There was a good Star Trek episode about this very concept: Nothing Human. It's the Nazi Doctor argument, like Mengele. We have medical research that was obtained through extremely immoral, illegal, and unethical means. Should we use that research? Yes, of course. If it exists, we should use it. Does that make that research justified? Absolutely not. That is an ends justify the means argument. It's not even a utilitarian argument. We can't normalize letting people conduct such immoral experiments because maybe in the future people will be saved by that research. That's abhorrent. It's quite another step to CONGRATULATE not only the people doing that research, but also the people digging up bodies and killing people for that research. That's quite frankly obscene. I don't know what this author was thinking. It feels like he doesn't understand Doctor Who at all.

He certainly doesn't understand these characters at all. He doesn't understand this Doctor and he certainly doesn't understand Evelyn. The writer fails even the most basic characterization of Evelyn. She's a HISTORY PROFESSOR and yet knows nothing of Robert Knox, a very popular urban scandal in the UK if I understand it correctly here. Sure, it's not her period, but a history professor would probably know some basic history about something that happened just a century and a half ago. Yet here she acts as if she has no idea what's going on at any given moment. That's step one. Step two, the writer has Evelyn act less like the oldest, most mature Doctor Who companion who gently tempers the Doctor's worst impulses and more like a typical 16-20 year old girl companion both in the way she talks to the other characters and to the Doctor. She's constantly rude to everyone, including an autistic boy (we'll get to it later), and makes sassy comments to the Doctor, but doesn't ever meaningfully challenge him on what he's saying or doing. "Oh he just has weird taste in hero worship," when he's congratulating a murderer. That's just the Doctor being the Doctor. You know him, always justifying murder for the greater good. Excuse me what.

The very last story we heard was Arrangements for War in which Evelyn had to have some time away from the Doctor because of his CALLOUS DISREGARD FOR DEATH. Two young people had died in previous stories and it deeply affected Evelyn to the point where she didn't know if she wanted to continue in the TARDIS. And it's at this point that I just throw up my hands in frustration. That story ended with the Doctor getting extremely upset at the deaths of two young people and trying to go back in time and change it followed by the Doctor saying that he doesn't just turn his emotions on and off, it affects him even when it doesn't seem like it. And Evelyn accepted him for who he is and seeing that to be the case. He isn't just an inhuman monster. Ehem. THIS FUCKING STORY ends with the Doctor taking the autistic boy to the exact place and time where he dies in the history he knows, exploiting and abusing said autistic boy's trust and friendship in him, in order to get him killed so that history will remain the same as he remembers it. And now that I type it, I hate it even more. Talk about stories with bad politics and morals. THIS IS IT! And after he does this, Evelyn doesn't immediately go back to her time and shut the Doctor out of her life completely. In fact she says she UNDERSTANDS WHY the boy had to die. I just... no words. No words at all. I can understand if the writer hasn't listened to the past few stories with Six and Evelyn, but did the producers not give him at least a summary of what just happened? I doubt it would have made any difference even if they did.

And the Doctor hypocritically suddenly starts thinking these murders are bad when he learns that Robert Knox is not actually the real historical Robert Knox after all. He is a human from the future. Or something. So now that it's not the history that you remember, it's suddenly bad to murder these people. I hate this. I hate it so much. So once you take the abstract preservation of history angle off, now it suddenly matters that people are dying? Indeed, the story has to go out of its way to make this Robert Knox seem so horrible to make the murders seem less justified. He's doing it to save an alien race on another planet. Except not really because he's just created a time loop and having people play Burke and Hare in an obscene play for entertainment over and over again to make money. None of this changes the fact that an hour ago this story wanted to justify and congratulate the real Knox for his work. Indeed, it even says that the real Robert Knox was probably a good man. The primary point is not changed. This is just an out that the story tries and utterly fails to take to escape its abhorrent morals.

Oh and yes, as I mentioned earlier, there is an autistic boy named "daft Jamie" played by David Tennant. It's treated with exactly the kind of delicacy you'd expect from the mid-2000s. Evelyn initially and especially the Doctor throughout the story are extremely condescending towards him. To the point of luring him to his death at the end of the story. The Doctor even uses him to infect Knox with the virus he is trying to kill (Jamie is infected because he doesn't drink and drinking prevents the virus from taking hold). The Doctor eulogizes that Jamie had to die, but he was such an honorable and brave boy as the Doctor is luring him to his death. As I said, this ideology falls apart the moment the people dying "for the greater good" are your friends. Now suddenly you're not so happy, not so ready to shake Burke and Hare's hands and congratulate them on a job well done huh? As I said as well, seeing the Doctor lure this boy to his death should have been the catalyst to piss Evelyn off and get her to leave permanently as well, given her entire character arc up until now. She certainly shouldn't be agreeing with it. Imagine having David Tennant and then wasting his talent so thoroughly like this.

Indeed, there's a great character here: Mary, who is historically one of the people who dies. The Doctor keeps telling her that she's supposed to die, that she's supposed to be dead and she doesn't like the way the Doctor keeps looking at her. Understandably when the Doctor offers to protect her she says "and who's going to protect me from you." So when she goes off on her own she dies. I can't blame her for thinking the Doctor wanted to kill her because he certainly acted like it.

This is abhorrent. Easily the worst morals in a Doctor Who story I've heard so far both because it doesn't understand Doctor Who at all and also because it understands Doctor Who only too well. Normally Doctor Who is not about the ends justifying the means. Normally the Doctor doesn't congratulate murders. But all too often, unfortunately, the Doctor does let people die to preserve history as he sees it or the "web of time" or "fixed points in time" or other such excuses and nonsense. That is all too evident here. Even though it pissed me off, I'm glad it exists because it exposes the rotten underbelly of stories like that in Doctor Who. And I'm glad that at least some people saw the evil of that kind of ideology here when we pair it with "ends justify the means" morality. Preserving history the way you remember it was always an "ends justify the means" argument, but it's all the more pronounced here.

MR 059: The Roof of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MR 058: The Harvest

"Oh my god.... oh my god...."
"No, just the Doctor. But hello all the same!"

"Am I going to have to suffer through another bout of you saying 'oh my god'?"
"Very probably."

It's about time that the Seventh Doctor got an original companion. All of the other three Doctors have gotten one already and are on solid trajectories with them. Indeed, the Eighth Doctor now has TWO unique companions, although we still don't know that much about C'Rizz. The Seventh has been lagging behind. He was the true loser of the first fifty main range stories, even. There were only a handfull that of Seventh Doctor stories that I really liked and most of them were mediocre at best. It felt like they didn't really know what to do with this Doctor at the beginning. Now, perhaps, we can get a solid arc going.

We begin in the near future... 2022. The world seems to be divided between three superpowers: Europe, the Americas, and China. Funny how the UK is still in Europe. Hex, our new character, is a nurse in a hospital. One of his friends has just turned up in the ER and a doctor from upstairs has come to work on him. Only Hex hasn't heard what happened since then.

He goes upstairs to try to find out what happened. The computer system doesn't have his friend's name in its file, and so he asks about him. The doctor is rude to him at first, only to be nice and tell him that his friend died whenever he realizes that Hex knew him.

Not only that, but it's his birthday. He goes to his birthday party, but it's understandably ruined by his friend being in surgery and then dying. The mysterious McShane accompanies him as he leaves, only for them to get chased by some rather large men. McShane has Hex drop her off in an industrial area, which is strange. Naturally Hex follows her... into the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Ace are investigating this hospital because they have some sort of non-terrestrial technology that they're using. The Doctor says there's a space race going on between the super powers and Europe is trying to get a leg up with this technology. I like how he says "The Chinese pretty much run the moon." Kind of wild that we thought we'd have a bunch of bases on the moon in the 2020s, but nobody really cares about it in reality.

They go into full on infiltration mode. The Doctor giving instructions to Hex and McShane in an earpiece. But it goes wrong. McShane and another doctor friend of Hex's get caught. They find out what's happening. There are cybermen here and the cybermen are trying to go back to being human. Which is very strange. There's some gore and such as we see dead bodies cut up and vivisected to get at their organs. The hospital has been covering up deaths so as to use people's bodies as organ factories. It's all very gruesome and horrific as you'd expect from the cybermen. I'm not a big fan of scenes like this, obviously, from my reviews of the Projects, Nekromanteia, and Creed of the Kromon. It definitely drags the story down, for sure, but this one is not as insufferably gorey/dark/edgy for the sake of it as those stories.

It gets to the point where the head of security wants the doctor involved in all of this to kill McShane and Hex's doctor friend. He's about to do it, willing to do it to save himself ultimately, when they're saved by Hex who kills the cyberman watching over him.

The Cyberleader who is being converted back to human wants the Doctor's help to finish the process. The Doctor is sympathetic, but then the cybermen start killing all the humans and the Doctor is like lol nope. They see humans as a threat to the process since Hex killed one of them. If one human can kill one of them, all humans are a threat. Sure. Kind of extreme logic there Cybermen. They're not exactly known for being subtle. The Doctor then learns the truth. They're not actually trying to change back to being human for the sake of it. They've learned how to adapt and not be so logical all the time and are now using this hospital as a base to conquer the Earth. ect ect

The doctor who was working with them manages to get the password to shut down all the cybermen, the cyber leader begs for the Doctor's help as he and all the other human cybermen die of organ failure, and the Doctor gets a snappy one liner: "The flesh is weak."

And then the Doctor and McShane leave while Hex runs off to join them:
"Do you know what you're getting into?"
"No even slightly. Isn't that the point?"
"Quite possibly."
Welcome to the TARDIS Mr. Hex! He is definitely charming right from the start. You get the feeling that he will do well carrying stories as a series regular. Yeah, there's a reason why I didn't say too much about this story. There's not a lot to it. It's fun when you're listening to it, but it doesn't really have much to say on its own. Just a proceedural spy thriller, which is fine. It's entertaining in the moment, but ultimately forgettable. It probably would have been more interesting if the cybermen REALLY WERE trying to change back into humans and not just immediately turning it around as invasion #45210452221. That said, I definitely hope this leads to an improvement in the Seventh Doctor's stories with a new companion because he has been STRUGGLING so far.