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 | Reviews for 1963: Space Race |
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There are 2 reviews so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
| By: | Clive T Wright, St Lawrence, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Monday 23 December 2013 |
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| Rating: |   8 |
An enjoyable if a little unbelievable at times. Space races takes us to the political heart of the sixties with mother Russia's space race against capitalist America. Throw in most of the key news worthy items, Kennedy, Dogs in Space and a strange alien race equals classic Who.
Space race is solid story including the augmented Dogs and Monkeys with Ak47's
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 13 January 2017 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
What is it about Big Finish and the Doctor 6/Peri stories? They've already had a talking pig, the little mermaid, and some other really stupid story elements to work with. Now, it's a talking dog. This thing just ruins what could have been a very intriguing Cold War drama. The Doctor and Peri arrive in Kazakhstan because the TARDIS is on the blink again, and fairly quickly run across some dead bodies in a booby-trapped car. They are mistaken for the people supposedly in the car, scientists going to observe the Soviet space program, and get taken away to the main base of operations. There, they discover that the people whose identities they stole were not scientists, but KGB interrogators. For their own safety, though, our intrepid heroes have to keep up the pretense. All of this is just fine. Had the story stayed there and worked through that problem, we would have been alright. The added fold is the existence of a secret Soviet moon launch to get the first cosmonaut to orbit the moon. However, this capsule has gone missing after passing the dark side of the moon. Intriguing. Then, the capsule reappears, but the cosmonaut seems to have had a memory wipe of some kind. Intriguing. I was thinking that maybe we were going to get reintroduced to the unnamed aliens from "Ambassadors of Death." That would have been an interesting story. However, instead we get the talking dog, and our alien turns out to be a mini black hole turned into a computer. The rationale for performing surgery on a dog to give it a human larynx and brain matter makes no sense. Additionally, that would not create a talking dog, let alone an intelligent talking dog that can lead hundreds of other animals in an animal revolt. At this point, the preposterous just heaps on higher and higher. Can a monkey, not matter how intelligent, actually manipulate a gun? How can an augmented dog suddenly know how to start the launch of an ICBM? How did the black hole perform this surgery on the dog? How did the dog perform the surgery on the monkey? Why didn't the script editor have the good sense to tell the writer to cut out the taking dog?
