A004 Phobos

It is clear to me that I liked this story a decent amount more than WBW. I didn’t love it, but it wasn’t THAT awful. It was just a bit of fluffy fun. Fun setting, fun characters, fun story, fun [non]monsters. There certainly were logic issues and character problems with the ultimate bad guy (and penultimate for that matter), it also had a total pants climax, but until that moment I was never bored and never dis-interested. That to me is worth something.
I liked the incredibly varied themes it explored. The little threads that get played out as each group interacts with all the others give us just a taste of the diversity of this place. Then you take the same group and place them in different company and it feels altogether different. Personally, I never felt the main group were hippies, just squatters. They were colony builders who just never bothered to leave when the contract dried up.
There are little moments that just shine scattered throughout the story. The doctor lassoing the monster, the exploration of incited bigotry, the amusement park moments, the description of the locations, Lucie taking on the monster, the intimate discussions, the screwdriver moment, all of these things are such fun little scenes, all enjoyable in their own little way. The problem is that they are indeed little moments, and never culminate to make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Most of them are meaningless to the story as a whole.
To break from the review for a moment, I have to take issue with the WBW bungie cord discussion. The science is wrong, but not because of what was discussed. Terminal velocity would limit the top speed of the person jumping. The person wouldn’t be going any faster at 3Km than they would be at, say, 1/2Km, and bungie cords can be made to safely stretch and slow people down even at such speeds. Where I believe it would fall apart is that the weight of a 3Km rope would be too much compared to the person jumping that it would screw up the entire physics of their momentum. . It must be some really light futuristic rope. Carbon nano-rope perhaps? Additionally, the bounceback from any bungie jump would only return the jumper to less than ¾ of their height. That said, the person jumping would still be at least ¾ of a kilometer away when shouting “okay pull me back”. I doubt they’d be heard. This wormhole indeed must have some really crazy physics going on inside it.
The only other thing I can say about the story is that if the character behind the service robots that insensitive to the killings he himself caused, he wouldn’t be the kind of person to give two horse puckies about some alien killing people either, and just wouldn’t make the effort to stop it to begin with. This interpretation of “the needs of the many…” logic would make Mr. Spock vomit. His logic, the fear monster logic, the cramming of previously un-hinted exposition into the climax and the defeat of the monster does indeed constitute an ending that is so Scooby-Doo it must be quoted as such by the characters. No, scratch that, Scooby-Doo had better written endings. Oh and I despise the way they shoe-horned the headhunter into the story. That’s just lazy un-planned for writing garbage.
All that said, I still maintain it’s a story that is worth a listen. The soundscape is truly a driving force for the imagination, the location is fully realized, and the individual scenes are very nice as standalone themes. I would however recommend stopping the story after the Doctor rescues Lucie and making up your own ending without the inclusion of any fear monster. Whatever you can think of would be so much better. For this reason, Phobos gets a dramatis interruptus rating of 2.3