The Harvest

 


The Harvest by Dan Abnett

I completely adore the Harvest, and I think in part that is because it is essentially An Unearthly Child 2. In 25 minutes, it has a completely astonishingly good opening episode, it endears us to Hex viscerally, and really gets us to love his character nigh immediately, and in the vein of Rose or The Eleventh Hour, you could pick up the Harvest having no knowledge of the program. Granted there are references to "Just McShane," a thread that started in Colditz and pooped about rather egregiously for a bit before being unceremoniously dropped in LIVE 34 - but even so, it's completely irrelevant to the tale. For the record, I'm no fan of the Hex arc, (I dropped it when the stories quadrupled in price, to be honest), so that may color me, but The Harvest has a perfect tone to it - dark, yet not emotionally taxing to the point it's defeating it's own purpose like some of the later Hex stories could get, and purposefully remembering when to have a sense of humor to it. To complete the An Unearthly Child 2 reference, it has a nigh perfect, 10+/10 opening episode, and then three more episodes of fine (though to be fair, the Cavemen episodes in Unearthly Child are far worse than the Harvest's latter three episodes.) What Big Finish created here was a marvelous season premiere beyond comprehension, to be true, but what about those latter three episodes? Well, they're still a Cyberman story that understands them far better than the majority of Cyber tales. I especially love their insidious presence, and the medical setting lends to their nature all the better... (funny that Hex is a Nurse in 2020 - he's a first responder! Not only that, China evidently owns the Moon, so we should look out for that.) The Harvest is a story that really works for me, in an arc that doesn't work for me. An oddity, but for a season 28 premiere that never was, it's absolutely stellar. 8.5/10


Comments

  1. Gemjax MajoranSeptember 25, 2021 at 7:16 PM

    Is it possible to not like the harvest? Scientists still ponder this question

    ReplyDelete

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