It’s four months after the Doctor and Susan have arrived in Coal Hill, and Susan is trying to convince her grandfather to buy the parts to repair the Tardis rather than stealing them. She’s fitting in pretty well thanks to Cedric (Williams speaks all of this character’s dialogue), who she crushes on and who seems to like her as well. However, during these last four months, there’s been a rash of youth gang violence directed at people like Rosa, the German immigrant who runs the local coffee house. And Susan keeps getting these headaches at roughly the same time her classmates get super-hostile towards her....and one of her teachers, the former military man Mr. Rook, is asking some really uncomfortable questions....
Ford seems a lot more confident in her reading here than in The Beginning and she proves herself to be quite a mimic given the number of characters she has to portray. The thing that makes it kinda wonky to me is that the transitions between the reading itself and the dialogue scenes. I never quite settled into the flow when Williams’ Cedric would show up to converse with Susan. This is something that improves with later ‘dramatised readings’ but here it doesn’t mesh for me.
The entropic element in this story involves a Nazi ‘miracle weapon’ and a villain-but-not-really who has sussed out the Doctor and Susan’s secret. The thing I like about the latter aspect is that it does attempt to fill in a blank--you can see the seeds in Rook’s operation blossoming into first the Countermeasures crew, then UNIT--without being overt about it. It’s an element of the larger story, not the reason for the story. And even though there is a coda that reminds you that this is part of a larger tale, it can be easily ignored and treated as a stand-alone.
I’m still not a fan of the ‘dramatised reading’ format, but this one--being literally a done-in-one story--is a lot more satisfying, even if it’s not great.
No comments:
Post a Comment