• The Doctor knows what he's doing. Every so often whether televised or audio (or book) you get a story where the Doctor or some other character ends up having been imprisoned/held hostage etc for an unreasonable space of time. These stories usually involve some form of deception (a key theme of this fourth season of the EDAs) where it turns out it wasn't really the Doctor, or he negates the time for the other character somehow. But every so often you get a writer who likes to play it at face value - Peri and Erimem spending two years as prisoners in the Tower of London for instance (!), the Doctor spending centuries on Orbis. So it is here, with writer Eddie Robson (one of my favorite audio authors) having the Doctor - recently parted from two companions - spending six years as the prisoner of a group called The Consensus. And yet it doesn't feel forced or over the top, in fact it makes a huge amount of sense. The Doctor is a prisoner in name only, completely dismissive of his so-called captors, bemused at their efforts to keep him contained or order him around as he willingly remains in place working to keep the super-weapon he discovered the Consensus was using from blowing up. Time and again throughout the story the Doctor reveals that he isn't full of hot air, casually locking his captors out or bypassing their security systems when it suits his purposes, reminding them over and over again that he's been completely open all along that the "prison" and the "guards" are completely irrelevant and merely an attempt to maintain face for the Consensus so they feel like they're in control. The Doctor just potters away, keeping the sun's stability in check while trying to figure out a way to fix the damage the Consensus did when they tried to weaponize it, keeping himself cheerful by programming his android assistants to bear a passing similarity to Lucie Miller's personality.
  
  
• The Doctor doesn't know what he's doing. And what Robson does so well is establish so strongly that the Doctor is completely in control of the situation only to upset the apple cart by finally injecting some doubt into the Doctor's supreme confidence. When two rebels board the station they both have ulterior motives. One wants to kill the Doctor so the rebel cause maintains a martyr without risking that the real deal might disappoint the troops who have built him up so largely in their head. The other wants to get the Doctor out... but also to destroy the station keeping the sun stable in order to prove a point - the sun is NOT unstable, there never was a super-weapon, it was all a ruse to convince the Doctor to imprison himself in a way that they could never match, a prison not of bars and guards but responsibility. The Doctor is quick to dismiss this of course and point out all the ways he has considered and rejected this possibility.... but the evidence keeps on adding up. More and more it seems like the Doctor HAS been fooled, that he's spent all this time and effort for nothing trying to solve a false problem with no possible solution. The problem is the only way to find out for sure is to let the instabilities go unchecked, with being proven right meaning the deaths of billions.
  
  
• The Doctor IS way smarter than everybody else. And then we come to the conclusion and it's just masterfully done. Because despite being put between a rock and a hard place the Doctor does what the Doctor does so well and manages to walk a third path between two unacceptable and seemingly inevitable destinations and solve everything. The way the Doctor's plans all come together in the resolution, revealing that not only is he on top of the situation but that he has ALWAYS been on top of the situation like he always claimed... it's masterfully done. It's easy to make this kind of thing arrogant or unearned, but Robson's writing and McGann's performance make it work - it feels earned, the Doctor is far too earnest and pleasant to feel arrogant, and his intentions were always so altruistic that you (well, I) can't help but just smile to see him come out on top.
  
  
• The Consensus and the Rebels. Deftly avoiding being too blatantly anti-communist, the concept of the Consensus is a pretty neat idea - a well-intentioned rebellion against a feudal system that attempted to stamp an unbending social framework and accepted zero deviation from their idea of the norm. The Consensus' actions are not cartoonishly evil but simply ill-advisedly unbending, to the point that they end up becoming monsters without even realizing it. And they're mirrored by the rebels to prevent a basic good/evil dichotomy, just like the side they're fighting, the rebels are just as capable of losing sight of the details in their big-picture mindsets - they end up advocating the exact same policies as their enemies.
  
  
• The Mercurials. Similarly, the Mercurials are a neat idea - able to exist in extraordinarily hostile environments, they use their physical skills to sell themselves as mercenaries/guards/workers in areas that others not only won't but CAN'T go - they're completely immoral, they serve the highest bidder, are more than willing to change employers when the tide is turning, and bear no personal stake in the situations they find themselves in.
  

• One character gets unceremoniously killed off and promptly forgotten, the Mercurials are basically written out once their part is done, and the Doctor kinda lets all this slide by. That's essentially the only problems I can really think of, and I'm stretching to even include those.
  

Chairman Mao fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jun 9, 2016