Hogan Reviews

The first half (I guess?) of the latest chunk of “Fourth Doctor Adventures” comprises of two two-part stories that feel completely different. The Wizard of Time tried something new with the story structure (or at least “rarely used”) where as The Friendly Invasion is a little more “safe” though has some good ideas in. The thing is neither story particularly worked for me, which is a shame because I do obviously prefer when they do try and step out of the standard box so I’m kind of annoyed I much preferred the next story, which is basically your bog-standard base under siege… oh well! Let’s take a look as this double bill first.

“The Wizard of Time” is told with a framing story of an old author called Jacob Harmer (Ronald Pickup) being interviewed by a lady called Moira (Sara Powell) who is there on behalf of his estate to check up on him and his house, which acts as something of a museum to his apparently famous childrens’ books. Jacob reveals that his book about the Wizard of Time was based on an incident from his childhood and narrates the first part of the story, with The Doctor (Tom Baker), Leela (Louise Jameson) and Margaret (Nerys Hughes) speaking their roles. This avoids the nine-times-out-of-ten problem of poor child actors at least! They encounter a terrible beast before Jacob wakes up suddenly without any person or beast around him.

A cover with both The Doctor and Leela smiling?! Odd how it’s actually not that light-hearted a story…

We then zip forward to when he was a teen, and then again to a 20 something, then as a full time adult, each time he keeps encountering The Doctor and co. or the creatures that are stalking them and specifically the TARDIS, which ends up shrank down to the size of a regular box. Eventually Jacob is given the box by The Doctor pretending to be an old tramp (for some reason) in order to protect it until its healed. It all leads to an interesting finale at least, but I’ll get to that in the Spoilers section, but overall I found it very talky and I just didn’t connect with Jacob Harmer, which given he’s the central focus is a bit of an issue…

“The Friendly Invasion” had me rolling my eyes at the synopsis as it spoke of being set during World War II and featured Margaret working as a barmaid and I thought “didn’t we just do this with Tegan working as a barmaid in World War II France?” but much like that story the focus is less on WWII and more away from front lines. It’s set in the village of Westbourne during a time an American platoon was stationed there en route to the D Day landings, and Sergeant Ray Hunter (Chase Brown) is due to play a major role in the conflict. The Doctor has detected odd time energy around the pub and it seems like some aliens are after a young Private called Joe Powell (Jackson Milner) rather than the Sgt. and soon make their move by possessing the otherwise friendly bar owner and attacking the soldier with hands of fire.

Once again The Doctor looks like he’s having a whale of a time, when the story isn’t that fun… (Both nice covers though, for the record!)

He’s beaten back but soon The Doctor, Leela, Margaret, the platoon of US troops and Joe Powell’s fling Edie (Evie Killip) are all trapped in the pub as half the village become possessed and start attacking with fire-hands. It’s during this time that we get an interesting little twist to the tale, but again, I’ll wait for the spoiler section. The story was fine but I never found myself super-invested. I also have to mention how little Margaret stood out in both stories again, she really is the least interesting companion they’ve had in some time, seemingly just thrown into these stories for the hell of it rather than having an actual idea as to why this new companion was inserted into the lore.

The Continuity:

Once again the overall cover despite it not being created to be a box. I think next year is when the Fourth Doctor adventures actually joins the titled box set era…

Not really any continuity to speak of, which is always nice to see really, though without being too spoilery “The Friendly Invasion” connects pretty strongly with the last story in this set, “The Ghosts of Margaret”…

Overall Thoughts:

“The Wizard of Time” and “The Friendly Invasion” don’t have much in common in terms of story content but in terms of holding my interest for most of their runtime they sadly both failed on that account. Despite this they both pulled off some pretty satisfying endings as well, so I can’t rag on them too much, but I can’t see myself listening to them again…

“The Wizard of Time” reveals that the Jacob Harmer that Moira was talking to was an A.I. projection and she was there to assess whether it had broken down or not, but the crazy stories where the A.I. “incorrectly” mixed fiction with reality turns out to be true as its revealed that the TARDIS was hidden behind the walls of the house all these years, long after the actual Jacob’s death, regaining its energy and soon The Doctor, Leela and Margaret arrive and use the house’s super-realistic projector to trick their foes into chasing the A.I. Jacob into a fake forest and trap them forever (it’s a very realistic projection, you see…) The twist was good fun but the 50 minutes leading up to it weren’t, so… I still stand by my score.

“The Friendly Invasion” reveals that in the future “tourists” use special tech to “ride” in the bodies of famous historical figures and experience major moments in history and one such tourist was “riding” in Sgt. Hunter. To make matters worse a group of rich snobby elitists put wagers on whether one of them was brave enough to change history in a major way even though they might wipe themselves from existence as the “ultimate gamble”, and one such crazy man had hitched a ride with the one who possessed Hunter and is trying to kill Private Powell because he heroically sacrifices himself on a grenade to save everyone in his platoon, including Hunter, who goes on to help take Berlin.

As everyone fights off the fire, um, firing people The Doctor, “Hunter” and the future gambler face-off and eventually the tourist within Hunter breaks the device tethering himself and the crazy rich man to the time period, even though it will most likely kill the actual him on the other end. During the course of the finale Powell finds out he doesn’t survive the war but says he’ll visit Edie afterwards anyway to not upset her (well, not upset her earlier than when it’ll happen anyway…) and presses on despite knowing his fate. Much like “Wizard” I liked a lot of the ending but the build up to it was pretty lacklustre.