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 | Reviews for The Macra Terror |
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There are 3 reviews so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
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| Tight plot, good soundtrack |
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| By: | Cam Cobb, Canada |
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| Date: | Monday 7 October 2002 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
THE GOOD: Tight plot, good soundtrack, and well-played by the cast all around. Colin Baker does a good job with the linking bits.
THE BAD: Being audio, we don't actually get to see those nasty lobster-shaped Macra creatures ... but then again I heard the costumes didn't work anyway.
THE UGLY: Beware of Ben!
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| Keep The Happy Pills, Lose The Crabs |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 22 June 2006 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The Macra Terror is by turns intriguing and cliched. On the one hand, the society that is just too happy to be true is interesting in itself. Clearly, brainwashing of some sort has to happen, and that Ben gets brainwashed into it provides some good drama. The bad part is that all of this is down to some paranoid crabs. Pushing off the responsibility for faults in human society by saying it is caused by an outside influence simply ducks the writer's responsibility to investigate the main idea. While it might not be "Doctor Who" enough without a demonstrable baddy, in this case the story probably would have improved without one.
| By: | Doug, Pocono Summit, PA, USA |
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| Date: | Friday 14 September 2007 |
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| Rating: | 9 |
The Macra Terror features Troughton at his best, good scripting, and good acting on the part of both the regular cast and guest cast. There's a bold Orwellian style to the writing, which includes an ever-present voice and largescreen face of "Control" that issues frequent orders and attempts to dominate the thoughts of the colony dwellers. An interesting side note: The Macra Terror seems to share some elements of style with George Lucas' 1971 film, THX 1138, a shorter version of which was created by him as a student project in the same year that The Macra Terror was produced.
While there is much about the Macra that is left obscured and unexplained, such as how they took over control of the colony to begin with, and while there is the big question of what happened to the guards at the end, as Ben works toward the destruction of the Macra, the bold, trippy direction and writing have a tendency to minimize the importance of these questions, and serve to draw the listener/viewer into a kind of fascinating, immersive experience. The available telesnaps and photos of this production add much to the perception of high quality, the quality being evident enough even just in the audio. But I realize that the 9 out of 10 I'm giving this story could be artificially inflated due to the unavailability of the video here. The video could reveal some large flaws, but these existing remnants of this story give me a high appreciation of it, and make me wish very much that the video of it was still available. There are still more Troughton stories I haven't heard/seen yet, but I would say that The Macra Terror is the best Troughton material I have heard or seen so far, even including the complete, better-known stories from Season 6.
