After The Nightmare Fair Big Finish had the
initial plan of adapting Waly K. Daly’s The
Ultimate Evil in the second slot for the Lost Stories. It was an obvious choice as like The Nightmare Fair it was novelized and
the original scripts exist and Big Finish did hold one of their copies. Sadly negotiations with Daly fell through so
the adaptation of The Ultimate Evil
fell through as he asked far too much money for the rights to use the one
story. So the original plans of doing
the original Season 23 with of course the exception of Yellow Fever and How to Cure It as Holmes never got far enough to
create even a storyline before his death as a seven story season had to be
changed. They would of course rely on Point of Entry and The Macros to fill in the gaps left, but they decided to then move Mission to Magnus up in the release
schedule. This is really where the Lost
Stories hype lost momentum for a bit as it was the only other story to be
novelized.
Mission to Magnus’s
plot sees the Doctor and Peri trapped by a bully of the Doctor’s, Anzor played
by Malcolm Rennie, in the orbit of the planet Magnus. On Magnus there are five real plots going on. Yes Philip Martin writes in five plots into
his story. First, Anzor is on the
titular mission for the Time Lords to try and investigate if the inhabitants of
Magnus are getting out of hand. Second,
Sil, again played by the brilliant Nabil Shaban, is trying to establish trade
relations which is wrong, because greed is evil you guys. Third, the young males who are treated as sex
slaves for the female population of Magnus are trying to start a revolution,
even though they are just children as they fear the sun. Fourth, the female inhabitants led by the
Rana played by Maggie Steed, are trying their hardest to discover the secrets
of time travel because men are pigs and women deserve to rule, or so they
believe. Fifth and finally, the Ice
Warriors who now in the fortieth century, are dying out from the collapsing
Federation and are on Magnus trying to find a new home. Martin fails to flesh out any of these plots
except for two. The third plot about the
young boys trying to have the revolution is fleshed out as it is the one that
the Doctor and Peri follow for the first part of the story and the final plot
about the Ice Warriors as that was the gimmick of the story, the returning of
the Ice Warriors.
The three other plots
while full of quite a few good things especially the Doctor and Anzor’s banter
and the Doctor cowering in fear from Anzor, as well as Sil as Nabil Shaban as
Sil is always great, but it really fails in about everything else. A big complaint about the plot is how sexist
it is and well it is sexist, but that is balanced out as everyone is
discriminated against at one point.
Anzor represents the old order of men being dominant while women are
submissive while the Rana has that statistic flipped. Everyone discriminates and it really feels
that Martin is trying to say that sexism is actually dead and is slowly
flipping against men, but it really doesn’t come through in the story.
Colin Baker as the
Doctor, Nicola Bryant as Peri and Nabil Shaban as Sil are all great here. Sil especially considering after Part One he
has extremely little to do. The Ice
Warriors also get to have a good presence in Part Two which is great as the Ice
Warriors until this point were still very underrated and not seen since The Monster of Peladon when the story
was going to be in production. Nicholas
Briggs is great in the story doing the Ice Warrior voices as he always does a
good job with the voices. People often
complain about the child actors in this story and to be honest yes they are
both really awkward and I am taking points off for that problem, but they aren’t
the worst actors in Doctor Who. Maggie Steed
is also great as the Rana. Really the
acting in this story is top notch, it’s just the overstuffing of the story that
really lets it down.
To summarize, Mission to Magnus has a lot going for
it, but it is a definite step down from Vengeance
on Varos and Mindwarp. It isn’t a bad story, but as the plot is
extremely overstuffed completely and totally so that any message it was trying
to convey is completely mixed up in the five total plots. Anzor is at least an interesting idea as it
sees Colin Baker cowering in fear which is just entertaining. 65/100
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