The “Wicked!” boxset’s second and third story sadly aren’t much better than the first one, which given the interesting premise of the boxset is a bit of a downer. Each story looks at the young Ace from a different perspective, which is a good thing to do with the box’s premise, but they don’t offer any interesting plot on top of it which makes them just dull stories that happen to feature a young Ace in them. Oh well, let’s take a look!
“The Price of Snow” sees The Doctor (Syvester McCoy) and Ace (Sophie Aldred) arrive in a ski resort in the 2070s famed for being one of the only places on Earth that has snow left on it. Ace takes snowboarding lessons by the cool local teacher Mhairi (Sophie Kennedy Clark) but soon spots some customers literally vanishing into thin air while out skiing, all the while The Doctor walks around and meets local student Teddy Watson-Smythe (Tom Alexander) who is your classic stuck up rich boy with low intelligence stereotype. When the two groups get together naturally Ace is hostile to the posh rich boy while being all about her cool new friend, but as the investigation into the resort’s owner, Fergus Campbell (also Tom Alexander) pushes forward there is more than one surprise in store for the fresh time traveller…
The story’s look at Ace’s one-track-mind at this point in time is good, but everything else around it is rather dull, or extremely one-note.
“The Ingenious Gentleman” sees The Doctor and Ace arrive in 15th Century Spain and running into the famous Don Quixote (Simon Callow) and his lacky Sancho (Ekow Quartey), fresh from Quixote having been locked away in his manor due to being crazy and obsessing over “those books”, meaning this is probably someone who has convinced himself he’s the fictional character, though its never really stated by anyone one way or another. As the two double acts travel we find out that The Doctor was a big fan of the Don Quixote stories when he was young and is enjoying the chance to travel with one of his idols, real or otherwise, while Ace begins to resent Sancho’s unwavering loyalty to his master as her role with The Doctor can easily be seen as the same thing and she wants to make sure everyone knows she’s here by her own free will and is nobody’s assistant. As the investigation continues (including windmills that come to life, oddly…) the threat at the centre of things turns out to also be something long believed myth, but in this case by the Time Lords…
Again, the story and its main villain here are paper thin and not all that interesting, but Ace fighting with her own role as companion and how people might see it is a great idea for this younger and less mature Ace. So a good use of younger Ace but the story around it wasn’t all that good, though for the record Simon Callow was great in the role so that helped the story a bit more than “Price of Snow”, but there isn’t much in it.
The Continuity:
Another look at the cover, including the Don Quixote… a.k.a. “Charles Dickens on a Horse”.
Nothing to add here, really. I guess I could add that (outside stories set in the Land of Fiction, which doesn’t really count) The Doctor has met other fictional characters in the real world, like the future Seventh Doctor meeting Sherlock Holmes in the novel/audio drama “All-Consuming Fire” and the Twelfth Doctor meeting Robin Hood in the TV story “Robot of Sherwood”.
Overall Thoughts:
Both “The Price of Snow” and “The Ingenious Gentleman” match up to the first story in this boxset by being decidedly average, the young Ace part is often there to look at but everything else around it just isn’t all that interesting. Feels like the concept was a good one but nobody knew how to write a one hour story based on it, sadly.
In “The Price of Snow” it turns out that Teddy is actually a commoner who is earning his keep cleaning up after the actual posh boys and that Mhairi is actually Mhairi Campbell, daughter of the resort’s evil and super-rich owner, throwing Ace’s viewpoints upside down. That being said, Mhairi is against her father and he only created this resort, complete with its rare snow, just to please her and bring her back to his side, even though the snow is sentient alien life called “The Slips” that has agreed to become snow for the resort so long as it can devour 10% of the visiting customers. Blimey. Together they all take Fergus down (with the entirely predictable end result of him being eaten by his own clients) and stop The Slips, leaving Mhairi and Teddy in a new snow-less ski resort before The Doctor and Ace head back to the TARDIS.
The latter part of “The Ingenious Gentleman” sees the quartet of adventurers find the lair of the “demon” at the heart of all the disappearances and it turns out to be a monster from Time Lord myth called “The Antiquity”, something that drains its victims down to the bone. Thanks to the brave actions of Sancho and the quick thinking of The Doctor the creature is defeated in the end, and Sancho survives his attempted brave sacrifice to boot. The Doctor leaves the unusual duo to their apparent adventures, while Ace is now a little more comfortable with her role as The Doctor’s companion, even if she still insists she’s far more independent than that…
Hogan Reviews 