The latter two thirds of “Into the Stars” are on opposite ends of the fun scale, though neither are terrible or amazing, more “poor and good”, the contrast is rather stark. “Last of the Zetacene” is far too blunt with its message and has no interesting characters where as “Break The Ice” felt like a script right out of Russell T. Davies’ playbook complete with likable cast being hounded by a fairy-tale like monster on a space station. Want to know more? Click onwards!
Let’s start with the good: “Break The Ice”. The Doctor arrives on a space station that is experimenting with cryogenics and the idea of using suspended animation via deep freezing people, which alerted our lead Time Lord because when their latest experiment goes wrong it exposes a crew member to absolute zero and unbeknownst to them allowed an other-dimensional force nicknamed Jack Frost to take over his body. This leads to your classic base under siege story as The Doctor, temporary companion Dr. Lenni Fisk (Thalissa Teixeira) and greedy businessman Pal Andrews (Simon Shepherd) have to try and survive the wintery powers of Frost (Pip Torrens) as he takes over the station. This works out great as Jack Frost is a great cheesy villain with some top-notch taunting-over-the-speaker-system lines while Lenni has a wife and child at home that she wants desperately to get back home to. It may not have anything that hasn’t been done before but it does everything really well, and sometimes that’s perfectly fine.
Lenni seems very happy… which is odd given what happens in the story…
As for Last of the Zetacene? Well, it starts off with The Doctor encountering some extremely rich aliens who are playing a card game to see who wins the titular last of a rare breed of aggressive animal and The Doctor joins in and plays them for it by helping new one-off companion Nel (Alice Feetham) at the table. Nel wins it but goes further to take a large chunk of the eclectic characters fortunes as well. So far so… meh, and the ending doesn’t really inspire anything either. It’s message about greedy rich people and endangered species is so heavy-handed and obvious that I’d swear it came from Chris Chibnall’s crew, there are ways to tell these messages without turning everything into expressly obvious caricatures and have them say what the message is!
The Continuity:
Generic Orc-looking guy was my favourite character!
Not much! I guess “Break the Ice”, while similar to countless other base under siege stories, is most like the Tenth Doctor TV story “42” which has a grew member get possessed by a fiery entity on the space station rather than a wintery one, but that’s about it.
Although funnily enough retroactively this story is referenced in the great story “Auld Lang Syne” from the previous boxset; given this was set at Christmas (don’t know if I mentioned that yet…) and that was set at New Years I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise to find out author Tim Foley wrote them to be released the other way round…
Overall Thoughts:
Oh go on then, another look at the overall cover!
As mentioned at the very start of the review the two stores were worlds apart. “Last of the Zetacene” tried to teach a good message very poorly while “Break The Ice” told a simple Doctor Who story and told it extremely well. Definitely in need of the split score here!
Last of the Zetacene:
Break The Ice:
Not much to say here that will surprise anyone! In “Break The Ice” the greedy guy tries to do some good in the end and dies for it while companion puts her life on the line to save The Doctor despite having a family to go home to but is saved in the nick of time by our hero, who banishes the evil and brings her back to see her family for Christmas. Like I said, standard Who but done really well. I did like a moment where Frost is looking forward to finding the rest of his people only to be told that they were wiped out during the Time War and that, like The Doctor himself, Frost is the last of his kind. The Time War and its effects doesn’t get brought up that often on audio, so it was a nice little touch.
In Last of the Zetacene the Zetacene is let loose and kills all the greedy rich people in ironic ways to do with their illicit businesses and then gets looked after by Nel. *shrugs*.
Hogan Reviews 