Red Planets

Main Range #241

Released: 14 August 2018

Listened: 2/6/21

This next Ace & Mel trilogy is from 2018, and thus has the Jodie Whitaker logo on it, and there’s a certain modern-series feeling to the storytelling. It starts after the story has already kicked off, with Ace investigating a time distortion in East Berlin, 1961, and the Doctor and Mel doing the same in London, 2017, except it’s a 2017 that never happened, with all of Europe under Communist control. Worse, Mel remembers the “wrong” history, although it eventually fades to where she remembers both, and that’s never explained. The Doctor is very unhappy about this change, and as a result he’s more cantankerous than usual with the secondary characters. They’re arrested, of course, meet up with some resistance, and have to dodge a KGB officer. All of this ends up with a Mars mission, and a message from even further in the future. (You might expect Ice Warriors, but not this time.) Ace, meanwhile, is trying to help a western agent get over the Berlin Wall with some intel, but he doesn’t trust her. Worse, the time distortion is quite bad in 1961, with whole chunks of Berlin just vanishing without trace. It does all come together, although perhaps not quite as neatly as you might like. It’s not ever entirely clear what caused the distortion in the first place, but maybe that doesn’t matter. There’s always a strange sense to the stories that take place in an alternate timeline that gets wiped out. Author Una McCormack tries to offset that by making the minor characters feel real, but it’s only a partial success. At the very end, Mel gets a hint that ties into her larger story. It’s a decent story, but not superlative.