The Comrade-in-Arms set concludes with a perfectly fine story in Memnos, though I’ll admit the concept in the synopsis was far more interesting than the rather basic story we got. Plus coming off the heels of such an amazing story as Berserker didn’t help! Well, let’s take a look…
We actually start the story off on Memnos itself and are soon introduced to the concept of the place: it’s a secret Time Lord facility where people’s memories of worlds lost in the Time War are stored in a special vault that won’t be effected by timeline re-writes and such, literally the only way certain planets and people will “survive” the paradoxical war. While The Doctor (Jonathon Carley as John Hurt!) is recording his memories of a lost world Case (Ajjaz Awad) is searching desperately through the memories of what she thinks / hopes was her home world to recover her lost self. While she does this the Dalek Time Strategist (Nicholas Briggs, naturally!) and his army of Daleks close in on the facility, wanting to recruit the now perfected Dalek cyborg for their army.
It’s here where the story drops in my estimation as we hear the friendly Time Lord scientists try and defend the facility as The Doctor and Case escape deeper into the vaults to try and escape, and all the interesting ideas are dropped in favour of generic Dalek invasion stuff. It’s not bad, just… plain and that’s disappointing compared to the interesting premise.
The Continuity:
Another look at the fun cover. Good thing about making your own images of young John Hurt is that it’s hard to “run out”!
Apart from following on from the previous story in the set, nothing stands out.
Overall Thoughts:
Memnos has a really interesting concept at its core and starts off really well because of it, but sadly it descends into a basic Dalek run-around. Could be worse obviously, it is the Time War after all, but the fun concept did make the plain-ness more annoying.
The Doctor and Case escape into a large spaceship that’s kept in a vault whole and when cornered try to detonate its core, wiping out the Daleks while they do it. At the critical moment the Time Strategist gets in Case’s head trying to use her upgraded Dalek tech to mentally control her, and while it doesn’t work to start with The Doctor is teleported off-site but Case is left behind, doing the whole self-sacrifice thing but it doesn’t work, and she seemingly feels abandoned by The Doctor, whereas the Daleks themselves are the ones who have “saved her”…
Hogan Reviews 