The 2022 “companionless” run of Fourth Doctor stories comes to a close with this bonus two-part story that was stuck on the end of “The Nine” boxset for reasons to do with the price change or boxet format change… something like that. Anyway, what’s it like? Well, that will depend on how familiar you are with Mervyn Peake and his works. I, for one, wasn’t familiar with him at all. Oh well! Thankfully the story is still a fun way to spend an hour, I just felt like there were probably a lot of references that went over my head…
The story opens up with Mervyn Peake (David Hoult) returning home to find The Doctor in his house, soon proclaiming he’s a huge fan of his Lord of the Rings books before realising his mistake. Still a fan of Peake’s work The Doctor decides to “make good” on the mistake and take him on a TARDIS trip but a random explosion ends with a flashforward where The Doctor and Peake have been living in a nameless city for weeks, with Peake earning money as an illustrator. The only issue is that the people of the city are so lacking in imagination that even when buildings randomly explode they’re decidedly non-plussed about the whole experience. Meanwhile Queen Alexandrina (the 77th apparently) (Ava Merson-O’Brien) has mysteriously vanished… not that anyone particularly cares, or at the very least can imagine a particularly exciting reason for it.
So there is plenty of mystery to unwrap, especially as the random explosions are being caused by a “member of the nobility” called Valspierre (Jules de Jongh) who is after the Queen’s head. Thankfully The Doctor and Peake bounce off each other brilliantly, especially given the absurd things going on around them. Although I never really felt engaged by the story it did at least make me laugh several times thanks to our key pair’s back and forth banter.
The Continuity:
Technically this was part of “The Nine” boxset as well but I couldn’t be bothered to post the cover for it again, so here’s the lovely cover for this story by itself!
Not really anything, to be honest. I guess an episode based around a famous author pulling on strings from their body of work was done during the Tenth Doctor’s era in “The Unicorn and The Wasp”, though it’s fair to say Agatha Christie is a bit of a bigger name, no offence to Peake…
Overall Thoughts:
Peake Season is very imaginative and made me laugh on more than one occasion but I can’t say the actual story was that engaging or memorable. As I said at the start maybe if I was aware of Peake and his writing style the story would take on a whole new meaning but for me it was just a surreal one hour “romp” with The Doctor and Peake making a good double act, so at least it wasn’t actually bad or anything…
Not much to add here, the twist is that Queen Alexandrina was a child when her regents nearly starved her people to death until a revolution kicked off, but she escaped into a pocket dimension that allowed her to “draw” her own reality. Given she a child her imagination was limited to the city she could see outside her window and that was it, hence the city full of people with no imagination. Meanwhile Valspierre is actually a member of the Revolution from the real world who despite it being the past couldn’t let the “Queen responsible” get away with it so found the dimension and was destroying it until she showed herself. A fun twist, especially as you couldn’t really blame the Queen for her regents actions. It ends with your standard lessons being learnt and things being put right and all that, but the twist was at least fun…
Hogan Reviews 