70. Unregenerate!

4 episodes. Approx. 110 minutes.  Written by: David McIntee. Directed by: John Ainsworth.  Produced by: Gary Russell.


THE PLOT

The Doctor has gone insane.

No, really. He's an inmate of the Klyst Institute, which appears to be a Victorian-era nursing home. The staff are running experiments on their inmates, each of whom has signed an agreement to come here on the day before their deaths. The Doctor apparently interfered with an experiment, resulting in his current condition... though the institute's security chief, Rigan (Gail Clayton) believes the Doctor is just faking it.

Back on Earth, Mel follows a message from the Doctor which leads her to the institute. She knows he must be inside. But when she climbs a tree for a better vantage point, she makes a shocking discovery.

The building is just an empty shell, with no rooms, no doors - not even a real roof!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Save for a single, brief scene, the first two episodes show us a Doctor who has lost his mind and his very identity. This might be interesting... but writer David McIntee has chosen to avoid dealing with the insane Doctor, who probably gets a total of 10 minutes' "screen time" across the entire first half of the serial. This is not entirely a bad thing, since "insane acting" not only doesn't play to Sylvester McCoy's strengths, it actually plays directly into his weaknesses! In fairness, McCoy occasionally pitches his voice just right and lets out a perfect line delivery. There's a conversation between the Doctor and Klyst in Part Two, where a few of McCoy's deliveries chill the spine. But most of the time, he's just overacting painfully, warbling his voice in a way that makes it all too easy to picture him pulling bizarre faces. Given that these moments are all we have of the Doctor until well into Part Three, it's... unfortunate, to say the least.

Fortunately, when we do get to see the Doctor being the Doctor, McCoy's performance is much better. When the story flashes back to the Doctor's original involvement with the institute, McCoy is enjoyably in charge. He also does fairly well with an overly-talky climax in Part Four. At least he doesn't mangle any sayings for "comedy" value.

Mel: One positive effect of a relatively "Doctor-lite" story is that Mel is brought front and center. And yes, that is a positive. Mel's character is far better served on audio that it was on television. She's allowed to be smart and proactive, without compromising her basic naivete. She effectively takes charge through most of the story, and she's entirely up to carrying the plot. Bonnie Langford, who really wasn't that bad on television (even in Time and the Rani, the writing was what was wrong with Mel, not the acting), is terrific on audio and obviously enjoys having an actual character to play.


THOUGHTS

I've been a fan of Big Finish's audio Who output for several years now. I think there are only a handful of times in the television run (new or old) in which the average episode quality has been higher than Big Finish's average quality. There are many stories in Big Finish's catalog that I sorely wish had been made for television.

Unregenerate! is not one of those stories.

The story is explicitly set shortly after the Doctor's regeneration, directly following Time and the Rani. If this had been a televised story, that means that McCoy's second serial would have been a story he barely appeared in, with material seemingly tailored to his worst acting traits. It would have been a disastrous follow-up to a disastrous debut, and I'm rather glad this story is effectively an ancillary product.

So, moving beyond the sidelining of the Doctor and McCoy's often-poor performance, the next question: Is the story any good? My answer, sadly, is no. The Doctor's insanity aside, it comes across as a rather generic runaround. Part One gets a lift from the in media res start.  It establishes mysteries that just about carry it through Part Two, though even in Part Two it is clear the story's initial momentum is flagging.

That momentum comes to a dead stop in the serial's second half.  There's some potential in the nature of Klyst's experiments. But that potential is largely unexplored, in favor of a subplot with the tediously one-dimensional Rigan. What little interest the story builds up is easily washed away by a climax in which the characters talk at each other endlessly before one commits a heroic self-sacrifice (TM), followed by more talking.

As a writer, David McIntee is strong on story structure. Unregenerate! is a competently-told story, and it does actually hang together when all is said and done. From a purely objective standpoint, it is definitely a better story than Time and the Rani.

But for all its faults, there was something vaguely charming about the 7th Doctor's television debut.  It was dreadful, but also bizarrely likable in spite of itself. If nothing else, it had a sense of energy and fun. Unregenerate! has very little energy, and is no fun at all. I know it's slightly the better of the two stories. But I also know that I will watch Time and the Rani again.  I doubt very much that I'll ever again listen to Unregenerate!

Rating: 4/10.


Search Amazon.com for Doctor Who



7th Doctor Audio Review Index

7th Doctor Television Review Index