jivjov fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Nov 11, 2016

• Amy and Zara. Oddly enough since a lot of this story was recorded FIRST in the Key 2 Time Saga before they'd really established Amy and Zara's characters, this actually feels like the best use of the characters so far AND a natural progression of the stories that preceded it (which wouldn't be recorded until after this one!). In particular it is Zara who gets the most growth, she was missing from the last story but plays a large part in this one, though not always by the same actor. She and Amy began "life" as Tracers, sentient beings capable of finding and holding the segments to the Key to Time. But the passage of time and their interactions with others has made them develop as people, and it is the failure of the antagonists to recognize this (and of course, the Doctor's ability to see it) that plays a large part in ultimately saving the day. Both were quite deliberately one-dimensional at first, but deliberate or not it didn't make them particularly engaging characters. It paid off here though, as Zara develops feelings and begins second-guessing her own often cavalier and superior attitude. Meanwhile, Amy continues along the path of the previous stories, as she gradually grows as a person in her own right and learns to start making her own decisions instead of just echoing off the personality of whoever happens to be the dominant person in the room. Having the ending in mind before writing the preceding stories probably helped, but Amy and Zara both weren't anywhere near as interesting as characters as they are in this story.
  
  
• The identity fake-outs. This story is filled with a large number of surprise reveals regarding characters. Some are good, some are bad, but one in particular is phenomenally well-handled, as the Doctor hears a voice, makes an assumption, gets proven wrong but in the process ends up turning out to be right! The casting of Lalla Ward is great if only for the fact that they're playing somebody that makes perfect sense in regards to the setting, and then even that gets turned on its head. Meanwhile, other characters turn out not to be who they were thought to be, not even who they thought themselves to be! All of these fake-outs are smoothly handled however, there is nothing confusing about it at all.
  
  
• The final segment. After the first four segments were so easily found, the fifth and sixth proved more elusive. The eventual discovery of the 5th was very well handled in The Destroyer of Delights, and even though it doesn't quite get the elaboration it needs the same can be said of the sixth and final segment. When finally revealed it makes for a great cliffhanger, as well as a neat subversion of the discovery of the 6th segment in the original Tom Baker Key to Time season. Exactly why the Guardians or the Tracers couldn't find it earlier doesn't really get explained but I get the impression from spoken lines that Romana's lengthy stay in E-Space helped mask the Segment from discovery. There is a bit of a cop-out to get Big Finish out of the situation they just created, of course, and the identity of the person kind of nullified any tension about what the eventual resolution would be.... but you could make the same argument about a story about the end of the Universe featuring the 5th Doctor when we know he's still going 8 regenerations later (9 if you count Dildo-Doctor which apparently we're supposed to) and in the end it was worth it just for,"That's right Doctor, I and the 6th Segment!" and then the end theme kicking in.
  

• The slugs. There is a vaguely interesting idea about an army being drawn from across time, including a fleet of aliens from one of the earliest space-faring races going to battle with a space-faring race from the end of time. But it basically gets ruined by the all-too familiar bubbling, gurgling voices of a corpulent, malicious and viciously stupid race of ugly, slimy aliens that British sci-fi seems to find so endlessly fascinating/hilarious. I'm not sure if they're meant to be something akin to the creatures from The Twin Dilemma or not but that's what they reminded me of. They're shallow and make no sense, the Commander straight up eats any of his crew who questions an order, which can't exactly be conducive to the productive running of a starship. They seem to be there mostly for comic relief, are largely written out after the first episode only to make an unwelcome return before promptly disappearing again because they really have no place within this story outside of a delivery mechanism for getting the Doctor, Amy and Zara down to the planet. It is however a neat touch that this planet ends up being where the Doctor first meet Amy, and the crashed spaceship he was investigating ended up being the one he would later be on as it crashed. The slugs, like the dog-alien they run into on the planet, just seem to be filler, and not particularly good filler at that.
  
  
• The Powers That Be/Were. Several major powers show up in this story and largely end up doing nothing and mostly proving a distraction or a less than engaging ultimate foe for the Doctor and Amy at the end of this "saga". Two in particular are very annoying because the previous story was very much about removing the Guardians from the board, ending with the two powerless and useless and realizing they had no choice but to sit around and wait for the Doctor to fix everything to restore them to their prior powerful states. To have them both show back up cranked up in power again was annoying even if some of the reveals were cleverly done, because just as Big Finish acknowledged in the behind-the-scenes of the previous story, characters like this can't help but utterly dominate a story due to their power levels. The Doctor's big indictment of them as incapable of thinking creatively and being utterly dependent on agents to do their work for them would be a great moment... if he hadn't already done just that in the previous story. Then there is the new "power", the "Grace", which gets namedropped throughout the saga and then finally shows up and feels completely unremarkable and fails to distinguish herself in any way from the likes of the Guardians/Eternals/Time Lords etc. She is also dealt with rather abruptly, despite being talked up for her massive power the ease with which the Doctor overcomes her makes her feel rather useless.
  
  
• The "saga". This story finishes up the Key 2 Time "saga" and once again I have to ask... why? In the end the use of the old Key to Time from the Tom Baker years may have allowed some level of familiarity, but it does so little different and ultimately makes so little difference (time itself is supposed to be unraveling, the worst we see is a frozen rain storm on a planet and some deteriorating handbags) that they might as well have made up something completely new on a similar power level. That at least would have freed them up to do their three-parter without having to cram finding the first four segments into the opening story - they could have had Amy and Zara both find one each across the three stories, but then they couldn't have done the scene where Zara tries to steal Amy's right at the start and gets blasted for her troubles. Similarly when the story finishes up it feels like mostly a waste of time. It kinda worked in the Tom Baker season because there was something lovely and anarchic about the 4th Doctor spending all that time assembling the key and then scattering the pieces all over again to save Astrid and thumb his nose at the Black Guardian. The much calmer and friendly 5th Doctor couldn't do the same, and the self-sacrificing nature of his attempt to end the danger of the Key is fitting, but it also makes the previous 3 stories feel like they accomplished nothing. They never really sold the supposed danger the Universe was in as a result of the Doctor's earlier actions, the whole thing largely felt like a waste of time.