When the TARDIS lands in London, Ben and Polly are initially delighted to be back home… until they realise that they’re a hundred years too early. But this is nothing next to how the Doctor and Jamie feel when the TARDIS itself vanishes!
Their attempts to locate their ship lead them to an antiquarian, Josiah Morton, possessed of a most unusual collection that is currently subjected to a legal dispute. But they’re not the only people interested in him. Dangerous criminals watch from the shadows, waiting for a moment to strike. And the police are calling too – accusing him of murder.
An unusual series of deaths have been occurring across the capital, and all signs point to Morton as the culprit. But is he really a killer? Or is there something else at large in the city? Something… alien?
THE EARLY ADVENTURES: THE MORTON LEGACY
The third release in the fourth series of Early Adventures is “The Morton Legacy” by Justin Richards, and like every other Justin Richards script in history, you should already know what to expect. There’s a workmanlike, competently structured plot, an accurate yet shallow capturing of the regular characters, and some sort of superficial revelation intended to make the story seem more surprising than it is. Hooray?
Perhaps most surprising about “The Morton Legacy” is just how threadbare the plot is. The Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie land in 1860s London, but their explanations are quickly soured when the TARDIS is stolen. They track it back to the estate of antiquarian Josiah Morton (David Sibley) where they are promptly embroiled in a murder mystery which they must solve to reclaim the TARDIS. We’ll start with the absolutely contrived way in which Richards keeps the crew stranded: though they know Morton just picked the TARDIS up off the street that same day, they decide not to tell him it’s theirs because, if they do, he’ll realize it has value and refuse to give it back. As the story progresses, we learn that Morton is an eminently reasonable and fair-minded person who almost certainly would have given the TARDIS back had they asked. But they didn’t, so the story lasts four episodes instead of four minutes.
This would be acceptable if the plot was interesting, but it isn’t. Morton is embroiled in a legal dispute over his collection of rare artifacts, but the litigants are being murdered one by one. The police accuse Morton of murder, leading to an awful “if he’s arrested, we’ll never get the TARDIS back!” cliffhanger that depends on the TARDIS crew being unable to breach a locked door – but the cliffhanger is easily resolved when the Doctor asks the police if they have any evidence whatsoever and they say no and leave. This is followed by some excruciatingly slow investigations involving a large gemstone that appears to have supernatural powers. The twist is a good one in theory: this is actually a pure historical! The Doctor’s suspicions are proven utterly wrong when it turns out the killer is a human being using human methods. This would be great if it was used to make a point about how the Doctor sometimes misses the obvious by immediately looking for alien involvement in even the simplest situations, but there’s no point here, it’s just a simple plot device. As a result, it makes the characters look stupid – not a single one of them even considered any other possibilities.
The characters are what you’d expect. Polly gets kidnapped, Ben gets in fights, Jamie falls in unrequited love with Morton’s daughter. The Doctor is oddly helpless – he doesn’t figure anything out until the end, when almost everyone is dead. The supporting characters are thinly sketched, engagingly performed but utterly predictable. The production is fine – Lisa Bowerman directs an engaging historical setting, while Toby Hrycek-Robinson’s sound design is effective in spite of a somewhat intrusive score. Overall, there’s not much more to say about “The Morton Legacy.” It’s bland, inoffensive Doctor Who that’s more entertaining than watching paint dry for 2 hours. If that’s all you need, have at it, I guess.
Snore.
5/10