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 | Reviews for Decalog 2: Lost Property |
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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: | Mrs Stott, Cedric House |
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| Date: | Wednesday 27 October 2004 |
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| Rating: |   1 |
Utter Crap the stories were all samey same
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 4 July 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The second collection of Doctor Who short stories discards the story arc as connecting link, and uses instead a common idea - various "homes" The Doctor has had through his travels. All seven Doctors up to that point get represented in ten stories of varying style. Decalog 1 had an array of quality, from the quite good to the very bad. Decalog 2 settles for mid level through the entire collection. No story is outstanding, but no story is truly terrible, either. By my standards, the worst in this collection is the second story, "Crimson Dawn" by Tim Robbins. This is a mess of story involving Doctor 4 and Leela on Mars in the future. Robbins tries too hard to please fans, making his future Mars just a version of 1920s British Empire Egypt, with much of the same politics. The story includes just about every reference Robbins could think of to some other Doctor Who story. The main problem is that Robbins, like so many others, appears incapable of writing Doctor 4 correctly. A couple of the stories are basically farces, including Paul Cornell's "The Trials of Tara," written as a pastiche of Shakespeare plays, and "Question Mark Pyjamas" by Perry and Tucker, an attempted satire of historical recreation theme parks. If there is a best story in the collection, to me that would be "The Nine-Day Queen" by Matthew Jones, a Doctor 1 historical about the events leading to the brief reign of Jane Grey as Queen of England. In total, this collection is mildly entertaining, but not worth going out of one's way to get.
