Classic Doctors, New Monsters: Faithful Friends comes to a close with the Eighth Doctor encountering the otherwise nameless Monks that the Twelfth Doctor faced off with in a rather disappointing three parter during what was otherwise his finest season. When one of these stories comes around you know it will be taking a “new monster” and either doing a retread of their TV appearance or doing something interesting with the species, and given I didn’t massively like their TV appearance I was hoping for the latter, but instead I got the former. Still, does the addition of the Eighth Doctor in a romantic relationship make it better? Let’s find out!
The story is focused on a man called Chris (Charlie Condou) who is at a restaurant with his boyfriend and wants to break up with him, with the immediate twist coming that his boyfriend is The Doctor (Paul McGann) but his attempt to break up with him goes awry when he spots a strange Monk and then finds himself in a spa, where he’s planning to break up with his boyfriend, The Doctor. This loop goes on a while, sometimes with The Monks talking (voiced by Tim Bentinck) other times they’re just watching from afar, until eventually The Doctor has to take more drastic action and it turns into a chase over various alien landscapes and locations popping back and forth, Chris in a constant state of confusion. Things only get more confusing though when he meets Mark (Andrew Hayden-Smith) who claims to be his actual boyfriend and that they’re planning to get married soon, only The Doctor is trying to stop them…
It’s a quick recap of most of the story, but there isn’t a lot of depth. The fact it’s clearly a simulation given the scene swapping and Chris mentioning her works in a spa with a state-of-the-art simulation suite, plus the first episode of The Monks one and only prior appearance means you know where it’s all going. The Monks are trying to get Chris to agree to a takeover but as seen in the show he must give his legit, whole-hearted consent or he’ll be killed, not that he really has any idea what’s going on. Don’t get me wrong, it has its moments, Paul McGann is having a blast playing a devoted boyfriend alongside his usual role and Charlie Condou is a good constantly-confused companion-for-the-day, it’s just the story is full of callbacks and repeated moments from a TV story I didn’t really like the first time…
The Continuity:
Third and final time seeing this cover….
The only thing is obviously The Monks, who first and so far only appeared in the Twelfth Doctor three-parter “Extremis/The Pyramid at the End of the World/The Lie of the Land”.
Overall Thoughts:
“Five Hundred Ways to Leave Your Lover” is a perfectly fine slightly modified re-run for the Monks, but I can’t say I’m really ever going to feel like popping it on again, much like I never really feeling like popping their TV episodes on either, so I guess they’ve at least successfully brought them back, if nothing else.
Not actually a lot to say here, The Doctor manages to get through to Chris and he denies his “boyfriend” who is actually a perfect husband conjured by the simulation the Monks were using to get him to agree to their terms, so they stop their attempted invasion. The Doctor is then revealed to also be apart of the simulation, just like The Twelfth in the first TV episode, so he vanishes as well, leaving Chris on the verge of waking in the real world, knowing he helped save the planet he was on and nobody will know it.
Hogan Reviews 