More Twelfth Doctor audio action now as both The Doctor and Ash have somewhat come to terms with their grief it’s time for a good old fashioned TARDIS trip to a should-be nice location that has turned sinister since The Doctor’s last visit! It’s also a rather on-the-nose look at current social issues, which your mileage may vary on. Either way, let’s take a look…
The Doctor (Jon Culshaw) and Ash (Gwithian Evans) arrive at Mentior City expecting everyone to be excited about the upcoming meteor shower but instead the city is domed off, nobody knows what they’re talking about and everyone is using the “in” social media app of the time, “Best Life” to score some views. Turns out that Mentior City isn’t just an artificially beautiful place but all guests have to be Best Life content creators and upon arrival they’re injected with a special drug called Refiner that changes them to look like “the best version of themselves”. Understandably horrified The Doctor goes looking for clues and soon finds Sky (Raffiella Chapman) who is looking for her lost sister, a problem soon dealt with when the owner of Best Life, Monty (Malcolm Sinclair) and his head of security Georgia (Ella Dale) when they send her on her way to her sister’s last known location.
As you might imagine, all isn’t actually as nice as it seems. Monty is holding a rather exclusive auction and Sky wasn’t sent to another planet where her sister was but instead sent to the waiting arms of Monty’s security, who lock her up where she is soon visited by the Best Life CEO who is looking forward to making her “beautiful” like her sister. I’ll leave the rest to the Spoilers but while I found the actual villain in Monty and his plans and motivations a little too cartoony for what was supposed to be a satirical look at a real life problem, I did once again really enjoy The Doctor and Ash throughout the story, especially as this is Ash’s first experience with rich powerful people, given his world was one on the brink of total collapse with just survivors for company, and it’s safe to say he isn’t a fan.
The Continuity:
Alright, I get making it look like a phone app icon, but it really makes this cover look crap…
Not much to say here. There have been a few jabs at social media in recent Doctor Who TV series and audio, being one of the hot button issues of our time and all. Perhaps none more than Fifteenth Doctor TV story “Dot and Bubble”, which also includes an artificial city as part of its plot.
Overall Thoughts:
“The Beautiful and the Damned” is a good hour’s worth of Who with once again a great duo of The Doctor and Ash at the heart of it. I will say the main plot went in an unnecessarily cartoonish direction which hurt it a bit, but then the final scene was a proper shocker and knocked things back up! It’s another easy 4 that’s close to 5 for the Twelfth Doctor adventures!
So it turns out that Refiner doesn’t just make people beautiful it can also solidify them and turn them into statues, statues that Monty happily sells at his auctions to his fellow evil sniggering rich friends, with the exception of his “disappointingly ugly” daughter who he turned into a beautiful statue that he now proudly displays it as a public exhibition. Could’ve really just stuck to the evil social media company, no need to go that far! The other big revelation is that Georgia turns out to be Sky’s sister who had used Refiner to change her appearance and is actually the mastermind behind it all. She hated how she was poorly treated by their parents for not being good enough so used her scientific knowledge to literally change herself with Refiner and then sold it to Monty, happily going along with his evil schemes because she was secretly selling it to other places and had other plans as well.
With her cover blown she moves the planet off of its axis so it will fall in the path of the meteor shower instead of it harmlessly flying overhead and therefore all evidence will be destroyed. Monty activates her Refiner and turns her into a statue for it, and while Ash would rather leave all the rich arseholes to die The Doctor convinces his new companion to allow him to arrest them and have them taken to the prisons belonging to the Shadow Proclamation, which he does. Sky happily hops on board the TARDIS looking forward to working through her grief the way Ash and The Doctor had, but the TARDIS dematerialising activates the Refiner in her system and she’s killed and turned to a statue. It’s a hell of a cliffhanger as Ash shouts at the Doctor for what he admits he’d just done: accidentally killed her. Damn!