Everything Appears Beautiful to Me

At a base level, I like the idea of the Timelords persecuting the Doctor for interventionism. Obviously, Charley not dying has caused a lot of time breaches, so it makes sense that they would step in.

But it’s odd that that doesn’t turn out to be the Timelords’ core motivation — instead they’re using Charley to pursue Zagreus?? Weird. Also, not sure I understand how Charley can act as a gateway to the Anti-time dimension and also appear in the Anti-time dimension.

Okay, but, I love the revelation of who the Never-people are! The idea that the Timelords essentially used a crueler form of the death penalty, and all the supposedly-erased ghosts have come back to haunt them? That’s interesting. And it doesn’t make much sense time-travel-wise, but I loved that Centriss erased herself after checking the tapes and seeing just how many people she’d forgotten she erased. To me, it’s like a literalization of the way that institutions use distance and bureaucracy to blind perpetrators to their own violence.

However, the story doesn’t make “unpacking all that” the goal. Instead, the myth of Zagreus turns out to simply be a trap laid by the Never-people to lure the Timelords into a terrorist attack. And they don’t care about the casualties across time and space because they’re fucked up and evil and that’s it…. :/ ok

It’s kinda like the Interstellar Song Contest where a real offence is handwaved by making the backlash to the offence so ridiculously outsized.

Anyway, The Doctor defeats them by materializing his TARDIS around theirs (clever). But this infects him with anti-time, and this new (fucked up and evil) Doctor adopts the name Zagreus to be scary.

…I’ve heard people talk about Zagreus but I actually had no idea who he was! I assumed he was the deep voice heard in previous audio dramas, but I guess that turned out to be Rassilon’s consciousness in the Timelord matrix.

I don’t know what Zagreus’s motivation could possibly be. Is it the same as Centriss’s? To get revenge on Galifrey’s bigoted institutions? If so, that’s cool in theory; though, he doesn’t have the personal connection to it that Centriss did.

Is he just the Evil Eight? Probably. We’ll see.

This one is interesting. It seems like it's going to be a horror story about people's eyes being stolen, but -- through a series of left-turns -- actually arrives at being a very neutral story with no bad guys.

Basically, The Doctor and Charley arrive on a base under siege by aliens (Cimmerians) who hate light; in fact, the base's residents have had their eyes burned out by painful light-destroying particles. The Doctor uses the base's equipment to generate a ring of artificial suns to fend off the Cimmerians!

BUT. It turns out the Cimmerians burned out people's eyes on accident, and they're actually healers who desire to heal everyone's eyes (so badly that they will compulsively kill themselves to do so), and they only hate light because it attracts their enemies -- and sure enough, their enemies (the Solarians), arrive. Facing down this new threat, the Doctor surrenders.

BUT. It turns out their ancient enemies are just... plague victims? Cimmerian plague victims who've evolved into a separate race? Apparently they were forced off the planet because the healers couldn't handle the strain.

...So, like, the Cimmerians are the bad guys then? But... but not really, because they would have compulsively killed themselves. So they had no choice. One Cimmerian does express guilt for turning away their compatriots thousands of years ago -- not knowing that the Solarians are the same compatriots -- but that is just about the only thing of consequence in this story, other than the noble Cimmerian who kills themself to save Ferras.

The moral of the story is practically stated outright by a Cimmerian:

"It is the tragedy of misunderstanding between cultures."

The Doctor meets an immortal man -- Sebastian Grail -- who claims to have already won against him and conquered this timeline, in a battle the Doctor has yet to experience. So the Doctor traces Grail's timeline back to 305 AD, to the Roman occupation. What follows is a convincing rivalry over 1500 years!

The Doctor and Grail clash at first because Grail is merely greedy, and easily manipulated by extraterrestrial invaders. However, the Doctor starts to resent Grail as they reunite over the centuries and the man grows crueler and more detached. I particularly liked the scene when the Doctor talked about how important decay and change are -- that even he does it -- but not Grail, he's stagnant, so time piles up on him and steals everything good.

I also LOVED the resolution. Grail finally succeeds in summoning his extraterrestrial masters, but the Doctor changes the timeline this time by simply hitting the fast return switch three times (I_understood_that_reference.gif) and arriving back in Ancient Rome, and taking a different tack with Grail this time. He uses everything he's learned about Grail to convince the younger version of the man to give up his ways.

But then the older Grail arrives, and the younger Grail is so horrified by this dark version of himself that he kills him. Surprisingly, this all tracks perfectly. There's so much setup and payoff that makes this whole thing work and that finale is the cherry on top.

My man Paul Cornell.

10/10

This story is brilliant. It’s thematically rich, moving, gripping from start to finish, and super original. And [spoilers] it manages to do a lot with Charley’s backstory — unexpectedly wringing so much meaning out of The Doctor’s simple choice to let her live in Storm Warning.

I have so much respect for the kind of writer who can thread together all of these narrative strands into a tapestry this coherent — seamless, even!

10/10

This one is super interesting, lots going on.

The tone is a little darker than typical Doctor Who — it opens with nearly two minutes of frightening noise and frantic mumbling before chants of “HELLFIRE.” And the subject matter is obviously not the type of thing mainstream Doctor Who would touch: corrupt evangelicals, abuse of the mentally ill… uh, human trafficking?? Bold choices. Surprisingly, I think it all works, though it doesn’t get past surface-level criticism of these topics.

It does however, manage to balance the tone with some great comic relief, in the forms of:

A hilariously cavalier, wise-cracking demon from Hell

The aging Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

Listening to the Brigadier use a dial-up modem to slowly type emails one letter at a time like an old man was a particularly inspired choice. LOVE it.

I also loved the inclusion of Gideon Crane, a man who believes himself to be The Doctor (a whole 7 years before The Next Doctor Christmas Special) and who repeatedly gaslights the Eighth Doctor into believing he’s schizophrenic. The only part of his character I found skeptical was the idea that Gideon got his Doctory memories from the TARDIS, but then, conveniently, gets his original memories back from the PSI brain machine. Seems like quite a coincidence. And, as is mentioned, the Brigadier being here at all is also a massive coincidence.

The only other things I didn’t like were:

The way Dr. Dayle was tormented by her fear of younger, sexier women. Really? :/

Becky Lee being a demon hunter descended from Saint Peter?? There’s nothing INHERENTLY wrong with this, it’s just a BIG pill to swallow for something that never really pays off?

Otherwise I loved it!

The Stones of Venice is the inverse of Sword of Orion: Starts messy buts ends strong.

The premise is surreal and confusing right away. Venice is sinking into the ocean but there are thousands of people here to party? Weird. Venice is now populated in part by a underclass of fish people? Wh- where did they come from?? When? A cult is worshipping a duchess who died 100 years ago? …Why? Charley takes a drug that makes her act like the duchess even though she doesn’t know anything about the duchess? ???

You just have to accept these oddities because they are not satisfactorily explained.

This story also takes the prize for most predictable twist. The Law of Economy of Characters clearly states that the Mysterious Old Woman who keeps appearing but has no apparent plot involvement must be the legendary duchess.

I also think the moral about how we shouldn’t turn real events into myths is pretty asinine, since I was thinking the whole time “what a weird thing to mythologize.” I feel like, either I’m missing some crucial context — like perhaps a real-world parallel — or the person who wrote this story just didn’t understand myths or cults but wanted to criticize them nonetheless.

All that being said, things wrap up nicely. The duchess proves an interesting, bitter character. And while I did not find the duke’s sudden change-of-heart-sacrifice emotionally convincing, it was plot-ly convincing thanks to all the setup!

This one wasn’t very good! Fortunately, I’d been warned of that.

The introduction was promising and the setting was interesting. I liked the grimy side of humanity’s future. The scrappers were fun characters for the most part and I liked the idea of an android uprising happening in the background — though more detail would have been nice.

The pacing unfortunately, gets extremely muddy and confusing very quickly once the cybermen appear, and never recovers. There’s not even much of a satisfying ending either. The twist at the end was particularly predictable — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but there was actually a bit of a disconnect when the Doctor assumed the Captain’s secret identity was that of a soldier fighting the androids. I had already long since deduced she was an android by that point, so it was strange for the Doctor to not even consider it.

4/10

Some slightly clumsy stuff but fuck me if that's not par for the course with this franchise — on the whole I thought it was super gripping! It was kind of electrifying to hear Paul McGann (the guy from the shitty Doctor Who TV movie) getting a chance to crush it with some good long-form material for a change.

The R-101 dirigible was a pitch perfect Dr Who setting — I’d never heard of the thing prior but I loved learning about it — and I loved the finale where Rathbone attacked the Doctor with an axe because neither of them could fire the tresquillion(?) gun near the ship’s hydrogen gas bags. The part where the Doctor went into detail about the R-101’s crash was pretty chilling. And the very last beat, where the Doctor realized he shouldn’t have saved Charley, but then quietly decided to let her live, was really sweet and rather… cinematic? Atm I’ve no idea if that ever comes up again.

Anyway, it was so refreshing to experience a straightforward, solid Doctor Who story with no gimmicks, just competent setup and payoff.

Solid 8/10!