Vortex Ice/Cortex Fire

 



Vortex Ice by Jonathan Morris

Neither of these stories are very good. But Vortex Ice takes the cake for being genuinely impossible to understand, and that’s coming from someone who didn’t have much trouble with NATURAL HISTORY OF FEAR. Vortex Ice is just, so, so difficult to understand, having a confusing concept of the Doctor encountering his past self in ice but he can’t remember it so it’s his future self but it’s actually his past or what the frick is going on and for some reason Flip knows what’s going on the whole time and it’s a time loop or it actually isn’t and guess what I HAVE NO IDEA. I should have SOME idea of what happens in a story when I’m done with it, I mean, if you have to have a 2nd listen to really get it, okay, but like, it’s still impossibly confusing. It’s so confusing, I almost want to give it a 0 out of spite, but well, that wouldn’t be fair, as even though it’s a confusing mess it has Colin Baker and Lisa Greenwood both being iconic. So... 5/10? 


Cortex Fire by Ian Potter

I have come to the conclusion I hate Ian Potter. The only other story I’ve heard from him was An Ideal World which was a glacially bad First Doctor story that wasted my time at every turn, and well, Cortex Fire basically feels the same way, just...less bad because it’s half the runtime. So the pain thankfully ends quickly. The plot is incredibly boring, about a species controlled by a computer, and for some reason the people blow up into fire monsters? Once again, if this plot was done by anyone other than 6/Flip it would be far lower, and Cortex Fire is by far the better script than Vortex Ice, yet it leaves me disappointed. I do like the idea of double bills, quite a lot. The 4DAS show that a 2 part classic story can be pretty damn great, but well, if these are the results, I’m feeling dubious: 7/10

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