The Whispering Forest

 

The Whispering Forest by Stephen Cole

Painfully Traditional, for all good and ill (and mostly ill), The Whispering Forest is a story that only has half of an idea to it. So, you know, like, Faces of Evil where a crashed spaceship ends up forming a society? Okay so like hang on here - what if it was a HOSPITAL ship that ended up forming a society and everyone LOVES WASHING THEIR HANDS!?!?? Also that's a twist early on in episode two but it is clear from the first thirty seconds. The Whispering Forest is almost parodic in it's simplicity, there's absolutely no ideas here. At all. There aren't ideas. It's downright depressing. People accuse certain series of Doctor Who on autopilot, but quite frankly, they don't understand what that is, because this is it. This feels like an Artificial Intelligence made this, compiled out of a bunch of random stories from classic who. There's a lot of dull strangely political drama to do with this medical colony and how some of them think they are MORE CLEAN than the others, PURITY BE PRAISED and meanwhile people are being stolen away by the creepy robotic TAKERS and when you are TAKEN you do not return! 

Go on. Guess. Guess the twist. 

I have given you literally all the information. 

Yeah, the TAKERS are the robots from the crashed medical ship trying to help the Colonists. This plot is predicated on both the TAKERS and colonists being FUCKING IDIOTS. Because the Takers take the Colonists to a healthy clean colony literally less than a mile away which the Colonists do not discover because "THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS A DANGEROUS PLACE, A DANGEROUS PLACE OF DISEASE!" and the Takers do not inform the Colonists that they want to help them because , , haha there is no reason. 

This isn't a plot for a one-part story, and it plods on for two bloody hours. I would ordinarily warn you that I'm spoiling an audio but honestly? You should KNOW how dumb this plot is before you listen to it. You should BE AWARE what you're getting into. Especially since you'd figure out these twists faster than anyone in the cast anyway. Yep! This is essentially a worse Curse of the Black Spot, because it doesn't even have fun pirate stuff. What do the companions do during this time? Nothing! The Doctor and Tegan discover things in episode one, but it takes until episode THREE for Nyssa and Turlough to figure this stuff out separately. Also? Halfway through I legitimately forgot Turlough was in this story his presence is so scant. Why he is here for this trilogy is beyond me? Also PURITY BE PRAISED! Because PURITY IS PURE! That's all you're gonna hear for the two hours you listen to this fucker so I may as well help inform you that PURITY IS GOOD!! The dialogue is frankly unbelievable. The whole thing is frankly unbelievable. The only benefit of the story, is oddly, the amazing soundtrack which is frankly very beautiful and well directed, so yeah, feel free to listen to the music suite, it's really nice. But give the rest of the two hours a skip. New least favorite Doctor Who story, it does everything wrong, and even though it's so absurd, it's also just so incredibly boring. The cliffhanger will try to pretend you just listened to a story, but trust me, you didn't: 0/10