Gallifrey stops.
Romana has been assassinated…
The Time Lords have never existed…
Gallifrey’s secrets are lost.
On a world they barely recognise, Narvin and Leela find themselves fighting to stay alive. Against all their expectations, brutality and barbarism reign. And Gallifrey’s slaves are rising up to face their masters.
Before this day is out, their lives will change forever. And the world they know might end before it has even begun…
GALLIFREY: FOREVER
And so we come to “Forever,” by David Wise, the final episode of the fourth Gallifrey series. We’ve seen our heroes running from parallel universe to parallel universe, from alternate Gallifrey to alternate Gallifrey, but the series has ignored an important question: what’s the point of this, exactly? Certainly there’s been some terribly clumsy character development for Romana, who now views herself as the “destroyer of worlds” because things tend to go wrong when she’s around. Most of this happens off-screen, between Lord Prydon’s accusations in “Annihilation” and this – it’s little more than self-pity, as it’s rather obvious to the listener that Romana is hardly responsible for the consequences of the last few plays. We do get a moment of choice for her in “Forever,” though, and it seems as though she is ready to doom this Gallifrey to destruction in order to engineer her own journey home… but don’t worry, something happens to change her mind back to the heroic path. Either have the courage of your convictions or don’t bring it up.
And where have we ended up? Okay, so Brax is gone, they’re cut off from K9, and Leela hates Romana, but the characters are still on the run from the end of Gallifrey III – we’re still in the same place, just with slightly different characterizations. That wouldn’t be so bad as part of an ongoing series, but it took five years to create this! Fortunately I know that there will be a Gallifrey V and VI, but at the time, how unrewarding must this have been? Ultimately, I’m grateful that the series embraced a brand new direction after its unfortunate descent into turgid nonsense about Gallifreyan politics, but this new direction isn’t interesting either! If the best reason you can come up with to restart a series after five years is “Let’s wander around some parallel universes,” maybe you shouldn’t be bothering. Still, I didn’t hate it quite as much as I hated Gallifrey III. Yay?
Woof.
4/10