The Colour of Terror

The Ninth Doctor Adventures Series 2 #4.1

Released: 8 February 2023

Listened: 3/11/23

This boxed set is called “Shades of Fear,” and the stories fit the title a bit better than usual. This one takes place in a charity shop in a small town, where aliens called the Vermine are invading through the color red. Which sounds silly, so really they’re invading along the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically the wavelengths that humans see as the color red. But that’s not as much of the point as the secondary characters, including a young man who works at the shop as part of his recovery program for petty thievery, a retired widower played by Frank Skinner, and the shop owner, Mrs. Bevell, played by Susan Penhaligon, a well-known actress who had a minor role in “The Time Monster” decades ago. But the point is that Lizzie Hopley has created in Mrs. Bevell a truly reprehensible human being, who spins every event the way she wants it to be, and nothing is ever her fault. You wouldn’t think a shop owner could do much to affect an alien menace, but you’d be wrong. What goes down is less important than the relationships among the humans, and how this Doctor handles them, which is a bit better than you might expect, but he’s starting to heal.