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 | Reviews for Destiny of the Doctor: Trouble in Paradise |
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| The worst Nev Fountain story... |
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| By: | Jared Star, Portsmouth, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 27 October 2021 |
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| Rating: |   2 |
Did you like The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit? Clearly, Nev Fountain didn't and decided to spit in the face of it.
To be honest, most of the runtime is okay. The plot felt a little slow to me, but it doesn't get truly dreadful until later on. Nicola Bryant did a fine job narrating, though doing so many characters at once alongside the job of actually narrating had its toll on her. It's one of those "good in multiple things, but not stellar in one" type of situations. The characters were also enjoyable with the plot having some good comedic elements to it. Plus, the references to Classic and Nu Who were subtle, but great.
However, the ending undoes a lot of good in the Doctor Who universe. This episode explains the literal devil as a kind of misunderstood alien for no actual reason. The way this is set up is that this "devil" travels in a box made of human bones, but since he looks scary, humans just immediately called him the devil and that's what he's been ever since.
Nev Fountain usually makes good scripts, specifically for the monthly range. He's responsible for such greats as "The Kingmaker," "The Curious Incident of the Doctor in the Night-Time" (Breaking Bubbles Anthology CD), and "The Widow's Assassin," but this one is completely unfounded. The box of bones is not connected to religion at all and is just there just because it's scary. The Satan Pit two-parter (which was released about seven years prior to this one) carefully took into account every religion and came up with an idea that wouldn't prove nor disprove anything. It was spectacularly done and well-crafted. Unlike this dismissive piece of garbage.
Fortunately, this CD isn't consequential anymore as Audio GO is now defunct and the majority of Doctor Who fans have completely missed this release. However, that doesn't excuse it from being bad in the first place. It's an unresearched mess that screws with cannon.
Side note: I'm not actually making the claim that Nev Fountain hated the Satan Pit two-parter from series 2 of Nu Who. I don't know what his preferences are.
