“Enemy Mine” is the last War Doctor Begins box set (although there is already a stand-alone release featuring Jonathan Carley’s great early War Doctor announced so thankfully it’s not the last in general) so it’s time to tie up the one dangling loose end that is Case. At the end of the previous box set she had merged with a Berserker Dalek and then was recruited by the enemy side, so does the story come to a happy end? … Well, you’ll have to wait for the final story in the set to be reviewed in a couple of days, but as for the first two stories? Let’s take a look!
“The Hybrid’s Choice” is split into two stories that then intersect at the end. One half focuses on The War Doctor (Jonathan Carley) still sulking at his inability to save Case (having assumed she’s dead) and being forced to go on a mission with Veklin (Beth Chalmers), who acts like a friend who can’t be arsed to pull her mate out of his funk because she’s too busy. The double act works well, though my idea of the War Doctor is that he wouldn’t let a single loss affect him for that long, otherwise his incarnation would be in mourning pretty damn often. The other side of the story focuses on Case (Ajjaz Awad) as she adjusts to life in the Dalek army, including dealing with a Dalek Psychiatrist (?) under the orders of the Dalek Time Strategist., which leads to some funny dialogue from this new Dalek type. She is dropped into a Time Lord outpost and taps into her Berserker self, feeling extasy as she slaughters everyone but then suffers from a serious low after the high, and despite its extra programming the Dalek Psych doesn’t really know how to draw her out of it. Eventually the Time Strategist tells Case she can go into a time machine and visit her younger self, the self she could never remember, but The Doctor follows her destructive trail and instead sees that Case, the Time Strategist and the Councillor in actually in a VR suite, clearly planning to manipulate her further…
It’s a fine little exploration of both the War Doctor and Case as they both suffer from some mental fallout.
Episode 2 “Fear Nothing” has The Doctor pulled to an old TARDIS drydock by Tamasan (Adele Anderson) as she and her team have created a massive, monstrous TARDIS battleship called the “Dreadnaught” (hence the title of the story!) that is mentally linked to a young Time Lord (Lady? … Time Girl?) called Jodall (Becky Wright) While Tamasan is admittedly pointlessly giving The Doctor a tour of the ship hoping he’d Captain it Case is teleported down to the location and begins taking out Time Lords and capturing Jodall as she herself enters the Dreadnaught in search of her target: Tamasan. This leads to a game of cat and mouse as The Doctor and Tamasan run from Case, with the former trying to think of ways to kill her and the latter still trying to save what little humanity may still remain…
This is a more straight forward story with a rather predictable end, but there were some good moments.
The Continuity:
The final (possibly) great War Doctor painted cover…. with a guest star that won’t appear until the next review!
Not much to say, beyond following on from the end of the previous story, “Memnos”. Obviously there are characters like Veklin, Tamasan and the Dalek Time Strategist, but they’ve all made many appearances in other Eighth Doctor / War Doctor stories by now so no need to go into specifics.
Overall Thoughts:
“The Hybrid’s Choice” had some fun dialogue and good moments spread about, but “Fear Nothing” was just okay, by no means bad but just doesn’t stick in the memory, just didn’t really stand out. A mixed start, and honestly “how the Case story ends” feels like its being stretched a little too thin here, but I guess it will all come down to the final story…
Episode 1 “The Hybrid’s Choice”:
Episode 2 “Fear Nothing”:
In “The Hybrid’s Choice” The Doctor plugs himself into the VR world while Veklin keeps guard and manages to convince Case that this isn’t real and that the girl she thinks is her child self probably isn’t even that. The Dalek Psych ejects himself from the simulation only to be killed by Veklin, who soon pulls The Doctor out and sets the base to explode. The Doctor tries to plead with Case one more time but she’s had enough of trusting anyone other than the Daleks, because “at least she knows where they stand”, which is insane but obviously part of her conditioning and general mental trauma kicking in.
“Fear Nothing” on the other hand has Tamasan about to be killed by Case only for Jodall to take the blast for her and dying in the process, causing the Dreadnaught to stop functioning as well thanks to their symbiotic relationship. Even though she could still shoot Tamasan Case is “emergency temporal shifted” out of there for failing her mission (that was some poor writing right there…) while The Doctor and Tamasan soon escape, leaving Jodall’s body with her “other half”, so to speak.
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