The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: Mission To Magnus

Mission To Magnus: Part One (01/02/26)

Wow. That was... something. Philip Martin is back with a sequel to last year's Vengeance On Varos; sort of. It has Sil in it, anyway. Things got off to a start, however, with the TARDIS being called into the future to aid another TARDIS which was being held in a forcefield by a spaceship orbiting the planet Magnus. Unfortunately (for everyone, including the viewers), it was being piloted by Anzor, a Time Lord who used to bully the Doctor as school, and we subsequently had to endure some very cringy scenes where the two interacted. Witnessing the Sixth Doctor cower and be dominated by a rather camp and pompous Time Lord apparently dressed like an undertaker resurrected the ghost of The Twin Dilemma again. It really does seem that the worst elements of that story are set to haunt this incarnation and I really wish such scenes were struck from the scripts before recording occurred.

Anyway, Anzor was on his way to Magnus to liaise with Sil. Basically, Magnus is an Earth colony established centuries ago and ruled by women. Upon arrival, they found that Magnus' atmosphere was poisonous to Human males and, rather than go somewhere else, they developed a society which keeps men underground and terminates them when they're 20. The boys are kept in dorms and strictly monitored, but not so strictly that a couple couldn't sneak out and meet the Doctor and Peri when they escaped the spaceship's forcefield and landed on the planet themselves.

Ironically, Magnus is located near Salvak, Planet Of The Men, and Magnus's leader, Madame Rana Zandusia, has learnt of a Salvakian plan to invade Magnus with a cure for the atmospheric virus which kills them. Since men are unwelcome, she's made a deal with Sil (sent to Magnus to broker trade as punishment for his failure on Varos) to get hold of a Time Lord's TARDIS so they can travel back a year in time, go to Salvak, and prevent the cure from being made. I never said the plot for this made any sense. 

Fortunately, Anzor is as thick as a plank and the Magnusian mind reader, Ulema, couldn't get the information required to pilot his TARDIS. Unfortunately, the Doctor turned up and she tried to get it out of him. Fortunately, she was unable to find it in his clever and cluttered mind. Unfortunately, having allowed him to believe this, she then revealed she had managed to access the information. Fortunately, the Doctor had double-bluffed her so that, when they had programmed Anzor's TARDIS and he chose to make a run for it, it took him on a one way trip to the dawn of time. As you can tell, all this ended up being (so far) rather meaningless.

There's a secondary plot about Sil trying to sell knitwear and, 4/5 of the way through the episode the Ice Warriors turned up, that being their spaceship in orbit. Peri teamed up with one of the Magnusian boys and reunited with the Doctor and the three of them decided to take a walk to the Magnusian North Pole, which seems oddly close for a planet where Zandusia's palace and environs were incredibly warm. This brisk walk to the North Pole resulted in them finding a detonator for a huge atomic bomb big enough to blow the planet apart, then an Ice Warrior turned up, knocked out the Doctor, set the countdown, and kidnapped Peri.

One thing you can't accuse this story of is not having enough going on. It's just a pity it's so bad! Anzor's overt sexism ("Urgh! Women!") and the whole Planet Of The Women thing is so archaic that it was rejected in the Troughton era and was lampooned by The Two Ronnies back in 1980! Much of the dialogue is laughable with Peri seemingly having a moment where she describes her fairytale setting as if she was on LSD, and then there's the Magnusian weaponry aka Force Sticks. Philip Martin must be taking the piss! I nearly wet myself early on when one of the women referenced twisting her Force Band, but later we had the child actor playing Vion telling Peri to grab a Force Stick and brandish the Force Stick as a weapon of defence! The Force Stick was then with her for the rest of the episode and are you actually kidding me???

It feels like it's meant to be intentional comedy - the whole set up should be - but it also feels like nobody's been told. Nobody's actually in on the joke. And that, sadly, means that this episode, at least, was just incredibly bad. Whether it becomes more obviously farce next week is yet to be seen, but this week was mostly cringe broken up by me occasionally wetting myself at the mention of the Force Sticks. I hope things improve, but I can't see it happening.

Mission To Magnus: Part Two (08/02/26)

Kill me. 

To be fair, the majority of that wasn't awful, but it was really let down by the last five minutes. When I say it wasn't awful, by the way, I don't mean that it was good. But it was okay. Colin was brilliant, and I really mean brilliant. Sod the cringy bollocks from last week where we had to suffer his interactions with the utterly pointless character of Anzor (who turned up a minute before the credits rolled solely so that the Doctor could tell him to "Get stuffed") - Colin literally carried this episode and that's honestly no mean feat! 

The Ice Warriors had a plan to relocate Magnus so it was more inhabitable for the Martian race by detonating atomic weapons at a specific Magnusian Solstice so that it shifted the planet to a distance twice its original distance from the sun. This, incidentally, actually happened. I'll just leave that there to sink in. Rana Zandusia, meanwhile, commandeered the Doctor's TARDIS which took her, her posse and Sil to Magnus after the destruction caused by this happening. Elsewhere, Peri was imprisoned by the Ice Warriors with the remnants of the Salvakian invaders who had been co-opted to build the atomic weapons for the Martians. They teamed up with the Doctor and Vion and there was a fair amount of action as they tried to thwart the Ice Warriors until time caught up with Zandusia, Sil and the rest in the TARDIS, after which the Doctor detonated a second set of bombs which had been set by the Martians for... reasons... which returned it to its original orbit and the Martians, now on the surface and not at the North Pole, died.

I'm not going to go into how fucking stupid that was as I don't really think I need to! Oh, and it turned out that Sil had been helping the Ice Warriors so that he could make a killing selling knitwear to the surviving Magnusian slaves - HOW WAS THAT EVEN A PLOT POINT??? But then he switched sides when the Martians decided he was irrelevant.

Writing about this is actually exhausting! This story was BAD. It ended with the Salvakian leader, Ishka, who had come to Magnus to liberate the subjugated male population by providing an antidote to the atmospheric virus that killed them, telling Zandusia that he'd stick around, marry her and they'd rule the planet together and repopulate it! I mean, What. The. Fuck??? Words fail! I just can't! Seriously? I'm utterly fucking gobsmacked that Big Finish actually recorded this shit and kept all that in! It was even presented as "You're gonna be my wife and you're gonna LOVE me being inside you LOL!" (not in those words, obviously)! Are you fucking kidding me? I've not sworn writing these journals for quite a while now, but I'm really glad that this pile of shite was never filmed!