Red

Main Range #85

Released: 28 August 2006

Listened: 11/2/20

This is another quite dark story, which doesn’t seem appropriate for Season 24, but here it is. The Doctor and Mel land on a planet where most of the population has voluntarily given control of their minds to a computer, which stifles their violent urges. The people are aware that they’ve done this, and as a result, fetishize violence to an unhealthy degree. But there’s a psychic entity running around killing people, which is a problem. There’s an element of mystery, but the primary point of the story seems to be a meditation on violence and humanity’s obsession with it. Which kind of makes sense for Doctor Who, as the show has drawn accusations of excessive violence in the past, but what’s on display here isn’t particularly subtle, although the fetishizing is quite disturbing. The story is also one that tries to take advantage of the audio medium, not as blatantly as some early recordings did, but you can tell the engineers were putting their best effort in. Vocally, you’ll need to get used to hearing the word “red,” as it gets chanted quite a lot, and Sylvester McCoy rolls the R’s quite generously. The goal was to be disturbing, so mission accomplished, but I didn’t enjoy this one at all. And for the moment, that’s the end of Mel’s tenure in this project, but she’ll be back in a while.