A heatwave in July and a tube train is discovered buried in twenty inches of snow. A Saturday afternoon in Hyde Park and scores of people are instantly frozen to death where they stand while the sun beats down from the sky. Freak weather conditions in London, and the Doctor and UNIT are called in to find the cause. A new adventure for the Third Doctor as told by his friend, Mike Yates.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE MAGICIAN’S OATH
For the tenth Companion Chronicle of the third series, Scott Handcock’s “The Magician’s Oath” returns to the UNIT era, this time selecting Richard Franklin’s Mike Yates as the character to follow. While the story is entertaining enough, and features a fantastic set piece, it attempts to claim more significance than it deserves and, as a result, crumbles badly at the conclusion.
Two releases after “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” it might be a bit much to describe another mass slaughter in a park, but Handcock’s opening scenes are eerily haunting. A massive ice storm freezes a major park on a weekend day, killing everyone it touches, and the UNIT investigative team walks through the fields of frozen corpses, pondering their fates in the unnatural silence. This is a great way to open a story, almost demanding that the listener persist to find out what happened. I like the natural unfolding of the plot from there, too: Yates and Jo conducting an investigation parallel to the Doctor and the Brigadier, and the two dovetailing at the conclusion, though things get sloppy when Jack turns up. Don’t think too hard or ask too many questions about the villain or his nature or you’ll get into unanswerable questions. It moves at a brisk pace and never gets boring, a credit to the writing and the production.
Unfortunately, Handcock goes completely off the rails near the end. The relationship between Jo and Yates has always been something of an open question – references are made to a date or two in the TV series but nothing more concrete is ever stated, and Jo’s departure passes basically without comment or reaction. Yet we learn here that Yates was apparently deeply in love with Jo, and has held onto those feelings in the years separating the story from the narration. This sort of thing would just about work if the entire story was about it: if the themes paralleled their relationship, if the plot approximated their ups and downs. But it doesn’t, and this revelation comes almost out of nowhere. Handcock isn’t done there, though: as the conclusion unfolds, Yates casually reveals that he is lonely and miserable, and that he long ago made the choice of duty over life and is now living with the consequences of that decision. Eh? Where did this come from? Is this related to his acrimonious departure from UNIT? Hard to say, since Handcock doesn’t even pretend to offer an explanation. I don’t have a problem with dark revelations about departed companions, but I do expect those revelations to be related in some way to the story they arise from. It’s clumsy, it’s awkward, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Which is a shame, because Franklin’s central performance is quite good. He has a natural voice for narrative, and his impressions of his costars are convincing – even his Pertwee is believable enough. The narrative itself is pitched as Yates reliving his memories to an unheard listener, likely another UNIT soldier. The production is solid, with Nigel Fairs’ direction and Jamie Robertson’s score impressing – Rob Thrush’s sound design is a bit too familiar, though. Overall, “The Magician’s Oath” is a solid if unimpressive Companion Chronicle, but it overeggs the pudding at the end and falls quite a distance as a result.
Completists only.
5/10