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 | Reviews for The Lost Stories: The Ultimate Evil |
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| As Dreadful in Drama as in Print |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 30 September 2024 |
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| Rating: |   2 |
This is one of the scripts commissioned for the second Colin Baker series that got scrapped. Original scriptwriter Wally K. Daly has adapted it for audio format, and plays the part of the alien parrot bird thing. This is a script that I think should have remained scrapped, and probably should never have been done at all, unless they really were that desperate for scripts in 1985. It is even worse than The Twin Dilemma in terms of plotting, pacing, rationale, plausibility, and clunky dialogue. The whole thing is at the level of the 1930s Buck Rogers serials. The Doctor and Peri decide to take a holiday, and The Doctor finds a hightech bowling ball shaped device that acts as a tourist agency. It suggests the planet Tranquila (how's that for obvious naming), where The Doctor has been before. So, off they go. However, things on Tranquila are not so tranquil (now where did I come up with that?). Tranquila is in a state of permanent truce with their rivals on the other half of the planet, the Ameliorans (who of course are entirely the opposite of ameliorative). This state of affairs has existed for a long time, but one ambitious minor noble doesn't like the status quo. He would like to be in charge, and so he has made a deal with a slimy arms dealer named Mordant, who, it just so happens, sold the bowling-ball travel agency to The Doctor hoping to use it as a device to monitor The Doctor. Mordant has a "hate ray" that he secretly turns on the Tranquilans to make them act like monsters temporarily, so that they would blame the Ameliorans, restart the war, and keep Mordant in the arms business for a very long time. This magic ray gun can be as broad or narrow as he likes, and has multiple settings, such as fear and peace. Oh, and the Tranquilans can transport themselves to anywhere just by thinking about it. I cannot stress enough how preposterously bad this all is. Daly is an old hand at plot by convenience, and doesn't really care all that much if character actions make no sense, or that magic "rays" went out of fashion in science fiction forty years before his first draft. The one redeeming feature is that the actors do their damnedest to make the best of it.
