The Doctor suspects the hand of his oldest enemy behind a spate of mysterious disappearances… but will he even recognise the ‘new’ Master, when he arrives at the scene of one of their earlier encounters?
The Doctor suspects the hand of his oldest enemy behind a spate of mysterious disappearances… but will he even recognise the ‘new’ Master, when he arrives at the scene of one of their earlier encounters?
VAMPIRE OF THE MIND
While I don’t think that “And You Will Obey Me” worked particularly well, I admired its ambition, at the very least, to tell a Master story that wasn’t like most of the other ones we’ve heard over the years. So I was curious to see what would happen in Justin Richards’ “Vampire of the Mind,” which pairs up Colin Baker with Alex Macqueen’s Master – and I was disappointed, because it’s little more than an elaborate exercise in box-ticking.
You really couldn’t design a more generic Doctor Who story than this if you tried. We’ve got an isolated community, a mysterious haunted castle, a generic female character paired up with the Doctor, the Master running around doing dastardly things and laughing, scientists conducting experiments, an alien threat – and absolutely none of it does anything interesting or unique. Every plot twist is predictable; every story beat is obviously signposted; every character is generic and unmemorable. It’s one of those stories that’s hard to write about because there’s nothing to say: if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’ve heard this before, so what am I going to tell you about it?
Let’s start with Alex Macqueen’s Master, who has been wasted in a surprising number of Big Finish stories. For the most part, I enjoy his performance: I like his jovial, flippant attitude and I think he’s actually capable of conveying how threatening the Master can be at his worst. But he’s almost never used properly: “UNIT Dominion” was a dull, generic story, and “Dark Eyes” 2 and 3 were confusing at best and boring at worst. I commented before that there’s a scene in “Dark Eyes 3” where the eighth Doctor and the Master are imprisoned together, and the generic dialogue they’re given is a crushing letdown when they could be sparking off one another. Well, the same is true for “Vampire of the Mind.” Evidently the only point of this story was to pair up Colin Baker with this Master, so why on earth aren’t we given more scenes of the two of them together? And when they are together, why is the conversation limited to the Master’s evil plan and how the Doctor plans to stop it? You could put Pertwee and Delgado into this story and barely change a thing about it – and I’m sure to some fans that’s high praise but to me it just underscores how boring the whole thing is.
Some quick Google research shows Kate Kennedy to be funny and engaging, so why does she underplay the role of Heather Threadstone to the point of lethargy? I did enjoy some of her first episode banter with Colin Baker, but she rapidly falls in line as a generic stand-in companion despite her potentially interesting background and education. And then there’s John Standing as the elder Dr. Threadstone, who is so unmemorable I already can’t think of anything to say about him other than “he sounded gruff.” Colin Baker is reliable as ever, though the generic dialogue even makes him sound like he’s going through the motions.
A few other points – the Doctor goes out of his way to try to call in UNIT to save the day, which is one of those things that always makes me wonder why he doesn’t do that every time he’s faced with a difficult problem on present-day Earth. There are references to other Macqueen stories, and of course we had to have the scene at the end where the Doctor loses his memory so he won’t remember what this Master looks like when “UNIT Dominion” rolls around. (Though to be fair, it fits the plot surprisingly well.) We even get a flashback to the Master’s first moments in this body, but you weren’t expecting that to actually tell us anything about the character, were you? Maybe it’ll be picked up on next month in “The Two Masters” but that won’t make this story any better.
The production is fine, as one would expect, from director Jamie Anderson and sound designer Andy Hardwick. But ultimately “Vampire of the Mind” just isn’t engaging. There’s nothing intriguing about the plot, nothing imaginative about the characterization, and virtually nothing surprising happens throughout its two-hour length. The recent Peter Davison trilogy gave me some confidence about the monthly range; these two stories have forfeited it.
Oh well.
4/10