Hogan Reviews

The Time War strand of Eighth Doctor adventure’s Uncharted strand (yes, that’s a strand of a strand!) continues with “Pursuit” and I’m sad to say that despite a really fun cliffhanger last time this set is rather bland, and steadfastly refuses to having any forward momentum until the last moment, and that’s only barely different to how Set 1 ended. If this were an adaptation of something I’d label these stories “filler”, clearly existing to stretch the story out longer without adding anything significant. I will say that the final story, “The First Forest”, was good fun at least, it’s just the three leading up to it that lets the side down… which is a lot given that’s three-thirds of the set! Let’s take a look…

The main point of the first three stories is this: Alex (Sonny McGann) and Cass (Emma Campbell-Jones) are travelling by themselves after the former, infected by a mind-altering fruit that upped his feelings of abandonment and resentment towards his great-grandfather, left in the TARDIS with the latter, leaving The Doctor (Paul McGann) and his face-changing enemy/friend, um,  Hieronyma Friend (in this boxset played by Niky Wardley, who had played Tamsin Drew in the past, continuing the “Friend looks like one of the Eighth Doctor’s past companions and he doesn’t notice” thing) trying to catch up with them in an old Time Lord escape pod. It sounds good, and I will say that Alex and Cass have a good bratty younger brother and more serious older sister vibe that works well, but after three different stories of “they nearly meet but don’t!” and “Alex nearly learns that being The Doctor isn’t as easy as he thought it was but doesn’t” it gets a bit old…

The first story, “Spoil of War”, sees Alex and Cass arrive at a spooky stately home where they’re confusingly expected and soon find other races attending, including this muddled timeline’s Sontarans who are also Time Lords (played by Dan Starkey, naturally) but when the item in question isn’t won by them the Sontaran Time Lords start to shoot up the place, leaving Alex and Cass to run and The Doctor and Friend to arrive and have to clean up the after-effects. It takes a long time to get going, and then just sort of fizzles out. The second story, “The Tale of Alex”, is sort of the same thing in that Alex and Cass arrive and The Doctor and Friend have to clean up his mess, but in this case Alex tries to cure a starving world from famine, motivated even more so when he hears The Doctor is the one responsible for the famine in the first place, but his solution ends up getting the people of the planet addicted to a deadly fruit that causes them to eat until they die anyway, a problem that The Doctor later fixes (by destroying the crops and therefore being the cause of the famine, it’s a sort of loop thing…) Again it’s a good idea but it just kind of … dull, and heavily featured side character Tarsin The Bard (Sam Stafford) just ended up being annoying.

Episode 3 “See-Saw” is… once again pretty similar, though in this case a monster has vanished a good chunk of this timeline’s London and Alex along with Cass and The Doctor still paired with Friend are on sort of side-by-side “time tracks” where they can influence what the other pair experience by finishing the nursery rhymes the monster is singing, and through this inactions they manage to convey to each other how to stop it. Now I’ve never really found the whole “children singing nursery rhymes with an echo effect on” to be scary so I can’t say this story hit home for me, and after the two previous stories not moving anything forward by the end of this one I was at my wits end waiting for something interesting to happen!

Thankfully the fourth and final part does that, which I’ll get to in the spoiler section. Still, this boxset took WAY too much time to get going…

The Continuity:

McGann vs. McGann: Fight!

Beyond following on from the first Uncharted boxset, nothing really to connect with. Well, unless you want to find out more about Tamsin Drew, who debuted in “Situation Vacant”, not that her existence is ever actually addressed in the story…

Overall Thoughts:

*deep breath* “Doctor Who: The Time War – Uncharted 2: Pursuit” is three thirds not very interesting tire-spinning stories and one fourth fun but not super engaging story. That makes for a set I can’t honestly recommend, sadly. With the exception of one companion’s fate you could pick up whatever Uncharted 3 ends up being called and not have to really worry about what you missed out in this set…

So the final episode, “The First Forest”, at least has some fun world building and plays about with time in an interesting way. Alex and Cass crash the TARDIS in a mysterious forest that’s growing in the middle of the weird dimension / timeline they’re in and Cass is seemingly killed in the process while Alex is taken in by a kind old man called Abidus (John Ramm) The Doctor and Friend also crash into the mysterious forest and end up saved from a mysterious smoke-like creatures by Abidus but Alex is nowhere to be seen until a short while later. Basically the sum of it is that Abidus’s shack exists in several places and times all at once so characters running across the forest keep running into later or earlier versions of Abidus and his home. Also Abidus is apparently a Time Lord legend who crafted the very first time ships and the forest is the titular “First Forest”, a location in Time Lord myth where all life sprang from, or something like that anyway. As the story continues The Doctor and Alex find out about Cass seemingly being dead (but we the listener hear her talking to a mysterious voice) which leads to talks about coping with loss which leads to the two sort-of reconnecting, Abidus creates a new TARDIS out of his shed and seemingly cures Alex of his fruit-induced infection.

We find out that Friend is actually part of a group called The Codicil that want the Time War to go on for as long as possible and foresee The Doctor as a means of its future end so hired her to get rid of him, which she does by calling in the Time Lord Sontarans to the Forest, who then start burning it down. The mysterious voice in the forest ends up being the psychic ship-running person Sinsa from Friend’s ship and Cass is very much alive but on the “opposite pole” of Uncharted space. The Doctor and Alex notice that the trees in parts of the Forest have the same doors as the one on Friend’s ship that started this whole thing and that its connected to the TARDIS exterior after it crashed into the Forest…I think. It got quite wordy and overly world-buildy towards the end… Anyway, Abidus dies (and it turns out that he was actually a “folk of the forest” who based himself on the original who visited long ago) and with the TARDIS finished and hints that Cass is still alive The Doctor and Alex head off to find her, again knowing they’ll have to cross the whole of the infamously dangerous “Uncharted space” to find her at the opposite end of the dimension/timeline whatever it is. So it didn’t set the world on fire, but it at least had a fun setting and some good ideas at its core, plus it actually moved the plot forward, even if it’s only barely…