Grown men wet themselves as the Doctor summons the Time Lord Victorious and introduces the concept of fixed points in time
Doc and Lucie are locked in a service station with Bernard Cribbins, Lucie’s aunt and an actual member of Boyzone while monsters roam the parking lot.
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Paul McGann’s Doctor and Lucie decide to break for lunch at a shabby service station outside Bramlington in 1974, but promptly lose their appetite when they stumble upon a dead glam rocker just outside. And this is pretty much where the logic of this story begins to crumble. The Doctor alludes to a greater knowledge of what’s going on at this point in space-time, and even hints at perhaps having brought them there deliberately, but then has to figure out the rest of the action/plot/mystery as they go along. Strange.
Tommy Tomorrow is an über Emo and it turns out he’s been contacting some pretty heinous alien beings, aka ‘The Only Ones’, by means of playing his incredibly annoying stylophone. Bad idea spandex, Tommy… Now the aliens have come to town.
The Ratings-and-Reviews Section of the this podcast episode kicks off at:
1 Hour 6 Minutes 15 Seconds
I feel like this was an amazing series of missed opportunities. First of all, by name alone I thought it was going to be some sort of sequel to Tom Baker’s, “Horror of Fang Rock”. Which would have been an amazing idea. What the actual story is also had amazing potential. An assault on a backwater diner by lizard-bear-people is an amazing idea. An exploration of the glam rock bands being manipulated by beings of sound is also an amazing idea. Paying tribute to Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and a whole bunch of others with the music cues is an amazing idea. Lucie meeting her aunt and they both find out who the other is…still amazing. Bernard Cribbins in an antagonistic role, amazing. Playing something backwards to defeat the evil, amazing. Put it all together though and what do you get? Well, let’s just say it’s something less than amazing and leave it at that.
There are several issues with the story. First, one of the characters is so dazed and confused for so much of his performance that we never learn their true personality and thus never really care. The aliens exist as both sound and lizard-bear. Thus they are already “there” when all they say is, “we’re coming”. As bear-Lizards, they don’t do much but hang in the parking lot, and as beings of sound they don’t do anything but project an annoying voice through the 3rd most annoying instrument ever created. Of course I was very young in the 70’s but I seem to remember that the glam rock movement had little to do with the age of Aquarius. That was 60’s early 70’s, and more hippie than rock, but I could be mistaken on that. Next we have the siege part of the story, which involves people stupidly running out to their certain deaths, space dino’s tapping on the glass, and creatures who can rip apart cars being stopped by some furniture piled in front of a door (presumably also made of glass). The story is very talk intensive and the dialog rarely gets deep enough to explore the characters’ emotions. Additionally so e characters have some weird n and out of character moments. Finally, the end didn’t make sense. The lizards disappeared when the music was played backwards…but they were corporeal and the music isn’t what made them appear in the first place. They were at the establishment even before Tommy showed up. So why should it effect them the same way as those aliens in sound form?
It sounds like I really hated this episode. I didn’t, but I wasn’t impressed with it either. Again, I kept saying to myself that it had so many great ideas that just didn’t add up to anything. About the only things that really worked were the Doctor and Lucie’s relationship and the backwards record idea. I wish the diner and rock ideas were explored as separate stories and given the glory they deserved. We wanted to rock and roll all nite, but instead ended up saying, “hello darkness my old friend”. So for that reason this earns a 1.9