Quite a change here from the previous Christmas tale. The Second Doctor and the Fifth! Alas, they never meet and the Doctor's later incarnation (and Turlough) are mainly seen in flashback.
The Doctor and Jamie are in the middle of the Yelyahj Peace Festival which celebrates the survivors of a plague that killed most of the Atkyans nearly a thousand years ago. Before we ever saw Jenny Flint strutting around London with her Silurian wife, Madam Vastra, Jamie had the hots for a Soji, "a lass with scales on her face". Soji's family agrees to put the time travelers up for the night.
The next morning Jamie wakes up to discover that there's not a snowball's chance in Hades he's going to get into Soji's pants. She hates him. In fact, all Atkyans have taken on a more Spartan countenance with the society now rife with aggression and ill-will.
A clue as to what happened comes in a flashback to the Fifth Doctor working on a cure for the plague that afflicts the Atkyans. He eventually does find a cure but a side effect is discovered as well: it makes the patients very belligerent. A little more elbow grease and he comes up with a cure for this too.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Jamie mysteriously find themselves in an old, decaying museum. The Doctor manages to get one of the displays working with his sonic screwdriver and it tells the story of how the (Fifth) Doctor's cure cut the life expectancy of the Atkyans dramatically with each successive generation and that they're now gone.
The Doctor deduces that there's some timey wimey stuff going on with his future self and Turlough in an alternative time line. In the end, time corrects itself and the Doctors all get the same memories.
A bit of a downer considering the more cheerful Christmas tale that preceded this one and the fact that Jamie never got a little Soji nookie. Oh, and that the Atkyans died off. Still, I enjoyed having two doctors in this story and how his imperfection was shown to have consequences. No easy fix. The Fifth Doctor seemed spot on to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment