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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

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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.