Interstitial/Feast of Fear



hahahahah, what a story nyssa 

oh, hai marc

this joke was stolen, now to the review

Interstitial by Carl Rowens

 Let's start with a direct quote that summarizes everything wrong with this tale: "You are caught in a small fracture of interstitial time that touches every other aspect of interstitial time."

Oh no, it's one of those. Interstitial is a mess, quite simply because it's time nonsense without a point to it. Time nonsense is really great, but the thing about Interstitial is the time nonsense isn't used to do anything fun, like loops, or anachronic order or different eras in a story overlapping, or literally anything fun with time. It literally uses it only to split the characters up. A sliding door could be as effective. And all the while, the story blabbers on on technobabble on Interstitial Time - a concept it's not fully willing to define, and the nature of Evolution - a concept that it doesn't even understand, it's essentially a POKEMON kind of evolution. For a story that's so clearly trying to do hard sci-fi, it misses it at every level. For Marc's first journey in the TARDIS, I'm surprised he can understand any of this at frickin all, he's a Roman Slave and even I can hardly understand this one. Not that there's much to understand. Thin, and dull, an hour long and still devoid of anything, these one hour stories haven't really impressed me in the Main Range so far. 3/10

Feast of Fear by Martyn Waites

Feast of Fear has an excellent hook, and is a lot better than Interstitial, but it does sort of lose me the more it goes on. I got real sleepy near the end. Still, it's probably one of the better ones so far, although with three episodes that's not saying much and it's proper mad, so I appreciate that. The plot starts around halfway through a usual Doctor Who adventure, and Nyssa is suddenly a psychopathic circus master in a wondrously deranged, hammy and theatrical performance from Sarah Sutton. Meanwhile, Five has been blindfolded inside a circus cage, murmuring about seeing the future in a sort of mad fashion, and Tegan and Marc have to figure out what the heck is going on. As the story goes on we get context and an explanation, and yes, this is the normal way a story should go. But the story opens in such a bold and fantastical way that I wish it managed to keep it up as it went on rather than calm down and explain things. I'm a person who loves the weird and inexplicable, and I wish they managed to keep up the madcap energy and explain as little as possible of this gorgeous insanity, which is the exact path it does not go on. This is probably a just me thing, but I'd really love a Doctor Who story where the villain is crazy like this but also kept ambiguous. Would be a blast. Anyway, Feast of Fear is worth it for Nyssa, but you can do better: 5/10

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