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 | Reviews for The Lost Stories: Mission to Magnus |
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There are 5 reviews so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
This is just poor, the Ice warriors up to their same old tricks, changing the atmosphere. The locals and Sil are unfortunately just thin plot devices. Dialog is week and sexist, I know its suppost to be funny but at the end makes you gringe. Peri just seems to wonder about and Sil a lost opportunity, he just sits about.
| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Tuesday 12 January 2010 |
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| Rating: |   9 |
Well, lets take a look at the positive points:
A: The return of Nabil Shaban as Sil. Just as if he never went away from the part. He clearly relishes this part, bringing wit and laughs to the tale on various occasions. The notion of him being marooned on a planet full of beautiful women is quite amusing. And to me this set piece does work well.
B: The time lord bully Anzor. Not sure the Doctor would be quite as cringy over a daft time lord. But hey, bullies are a bad and universal breed. A good and new fresh idea. Colin Baker's final scene with Anzor though is highly memorable and brilliant. I never thought Id ever hear any Doctor say Get lost!!!
c: The return of the Ice Warriors. In the Ice Warriors they tried to free their ship from the ice, in Seeds of Death they tried to change the earths weather. In Curse of Peladon they were a good and nobel race again, and in Monster just a band of thugs. What I like about the Ice warriors is you never quite know if theyll be good or bad. And so here they are trying to change climate again, but in a totally new way. And this idea isnt bad. In terms of plot, this isnt badly done here at all. This would have been a good piece of Doctor Who for the TV.
D: The decidedly sexist talk, and final mutual coming together of the male and female races. Some amusing and witty scenes.
E: What is a really good bunch of kid actors, if it is kids. Ive only heard the download, so im just guessing. Good whoever they are anyway!
And now the bad things:
1: What happened to the ice warrior ship after the Doc sorts everything out? They disappear from the scene. Maybe there should or could be a sequel whiich sees the revenge of the Ice warriors on the planet Magnus.
And yet I cant think of another bad point. (Apart from the God in her wisdom line, Im not sexist, just a Christian. ) This is a very good Doctor Who story though. The final scenes of men and women coming together is a good point for the conclusion of this story. Just clearly classic Doctor Who.
| By: | Doug, Pocono Summit, PA, USA |
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| Date: | Saturday 25 September 2010 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
In terms of the revival of the original Season 23 "lost stories," Mission to Magnus achieved the desired effect even better than The Nightmare Fair. My rating of 7 on this is not for the story, which isn't actually that great, but for the overall production. The entire cast, most notably Colin Baker and Nabil Shaban, really threw themselves into this fully, and the result sounds quite competently like an audio soundtrack from a TV story made in 1985. Colin Baker really recaptured the sound of a younger Sixth Doctor here. And in this story, Sil actually provides some genuine humor on the whole, rather than being mostly nasty, as he was in the televised stories featuring him.
So far, these alternative Season 23 stories look like a kinder, gentler route, which unfortunately probably would have also produced a rather lackluster season. The Trial of a Timelord, while offering the very intriguing ideas of the evil half-Doctor as it were, and the Time Lord cover up of the Ravalox/Matrix situation, just didn't work well in its final form. Mindwarp was the most troublesome story in that season, with its very dark tone and the confusion around the falsifying of the Matrix record of what actually happened. I actually would have much rather seen Mission to Magnus instead. And speaking of that story, it is now difficult to know how to look at Mission to Magnus if you're talking about what is canon and what isn't. Mission to Magnus clearly would've taken place after Mindwarp, and this is a fairly unsolvable problem. So it's probably best to look at Mission to Magnus as a standalone, or an alternate universe story, or something...
Part 2 of the CD extras includes some of the funniest banter I've yet heard on these. However, I would have liked to have heard something from William Townsend who was notably absent in the extras. He is the child actor who plays Vion in the story, and does it fairly well, I'd say.
| By: | Jeremy Matthews, Brisbane, Australia |
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| Date: | Sunday 29 January 2012 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
Anyone who thinks this is an accurate representation of 'Who' in the 80s can sod off; it was never this moronic or offensive. Philip Martin's best talent as a writer is for coming up with gruesome and horrific settings for his stories ('Vengeance on Varos' and 'Mindwarp' both have almost no plot, but are carried fantastically by their grim, horrific settings) and with Magnus being presented as a stereotypical 'planet of women', Martin is left with a fairly dull plot, and some horribly sexist bits towards the end, where the men of a neighbouring planet essentially walk in and take over from the women of Magnus. As always, the production is excellent, but, barring some really funny scenes featuring Sil, this is not a good story. Avoid.
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 25 February 2017 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
One of the unproduced scripts from 1985, one could be thankful that this was not actually done for television. It's a bizarre concoction of half-baked ideas, some truly dreadful science, and much sexism. It also seems a precursor to the style of 1987, when the producers could not seemingly decide whether to be serious or silly and opted for half of each. Magnus is a planet run by women because the men all die in their early 20s from a strange virus that affects them only in sunlight. The Rana of Magnus has contacted the Time Lords for permission to wage war retrospectively against the neighboring planet of men, or at least male-ruled, before they wage war on Magnus. The Time Lord sent to negotiate is a bullying oaf of whom the Doctor is scared because of what happened between them in their school days. The simpering Sil is there, too, trying to make some kind of deal to restore himself in the company's good graces. As this situation does not really provide much for a full 90 minutes, the plot includes some Ice Warriors who have no interest at all in what is going on with Magnus, but instead simply want to use nuclear weapons to shift the orbit of Magnus and thus make it their new home. There are some dreadful child actors as well, playing the oppressed boys of Magnus. It all just does not hang together, and much of it is overtly sexist in a way that would have seemed old-fashioned even for 1985.
