This is a story that
people often have two vastly different reactions to. One they ignore that it ever happened or two
they loathe it for being the collected tropes of the Eighth Doctor, especially
with the Doctor becoming an amnesiac yet again and companions that really don’t
do much. Yet Trevor Baxendale is still
great at putting in some great ideas that actually improve above the rather
traditional and clichéd manner of telling the story, but what is that story? Well
it revolves around a high security medical prison called the Cube where
psychics, made to fight in an intergalactic war, are being imprisoned because
they are not thought of as human beings anymore. This is Baxendale’s first of two strokes of
genius as if we ever had actual psychics on this level of automatically knowing
everything in others’ minds at a glance, something like this facility to experiment
on them in the attempt to understand them and revert them to non-psychics would
probably occur in the world. This is
mainly down to the theme of fear of the unknown as we don’t understand the psychics. The second stroke of genius was explained by
Stubagful in his He Who Moans Guide to the Eighth Doctor Audios Part 4, where
he points out a lot of the references that on their own are good ideas. I like the idea of the Brain Worm, which is
the classic The Thing alien that
inhabits minds and is chasing down the inhabitants of the Cube and killing
people. The thing is we know what the
worm wants, it wants to get out which may be noble but as it is a creation of
several humans, it suffers from extreme greed that isn’t happy when it gets out
near the end.
The characters however
aren’t nearly as impressive with the Doctor played by Paul McGann, while not
having his memories sounds quite bored at times. It isn’t nearly his worst performance as
whenever Charley and C’rizz are in danger McGann is giving effort to sound
distressed, but I think unlike Minuet in
Hell McGann has difficulty being an amnesiac here as he is still forced to
be the Doctor and not a madman. He is
still obviously giving his best efforts here and likes the scripts but doesn’t
have the ability to pull off a good performance. This cannot be said for India Fisher as
Charley who although I love her character, Charley is really there to try and
lead a group of characters through the Cube in a sequence which is just
forgettable. She eventually leads to the
reveal of who the Brain Worm is hiding in, but of course the character really
just appears and there is no way to discern them from the others. It’s really Conrad Westmass as C’rizz who is
the shining one in this story as he is tortured, again why is C’rizz getting
tortured so entertaining, and has to guide the Doctor. Westmass actually gets to get some of his
murdering things off his chest which allows a slight bit of closure for his character
as time approaches his departure. The
villains of the story, at least the human villains, Twyst and Rawden, are
completely mad and I find them to be hilarious and almost threatening which is
great.
I also have to say just
how the direction and music stand out.
Now Nicholas Briggs directed this story and his style is again
completely different from Gary Russell’s and it makes the audio seamlessly flow
from scene to scene that are just works.
The music done by Joseph Fox also is really good as it feels a lot like
something from a setting like this which really helps me to picture the setting
in my head as the cover art only gives you some vague covers of a bed that is
all we get from the Cube.
To summarize, Something Inside is nowhere near perfect
and hey it really isn’t that good but there is enough here to like from C’rizz,
to the ideas and to the direction and music which is a breath of fresh
air. 58/100
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