The Chaos Pool

Main Range #119

Released: March 2009

Listened: 12/26/19

The final part of the Key 2 Time goes out with a bang. It’s not quite as silly as the previous episode, if you discount intelligent, militant slugs and a certain amount of soap-opera antics. At its heart, it’s a story about identity, and making choices about who you are. It rejiggers the Guardians a bit to suggest that they’re equally undesirable extremes of order and chaos, not the previous assumption that the White Guardian is “good” and the Black Guardian is “evil.” (Spoiler) There’s also an impressive turn by Lalla Ward, playing both Romana and Princess Astra in a nice fake-out that I don’t want to spoil, which turns into a plot twist a couple of episodes later. It’s clever plotting, although there seems to be a bit of Romana Ex Machina. There’s a nice, but probably unnecessary note about why Romana regenerated the way she did. With the Guardians and the Key to Time off the table, later authors don’t have to worry about them appearing again. Amy and Zara go on to star in the Graceless series, but honestly, I don’t find them interesting enough to care about, so I’m not going to bother with that.