THE PLOT
Sherman Pegg is an unwilling participant in a school science fair, having agreed to enter to avoid his mother entering him in dance lessons. His project is a theory of time travel, a formula which he has dubbed "A Way Forward." The judges don't appear to take him seriously at all... But one stranger does, a peculiar and disheveled little man accompanied by a very pretty young girl.
The Doctor scrutinizes Sherman's formula, then makes a single correction to it. Sherman studies the correction, has a realization - And then vanishes, right in front of the Doctor's and Victoria's astonished eyes. As the Doctor realizes that Sherman has gone back in time to avoid entering this hated science fair, the landscape begins shifting around them. Their surroundings become a field, a parking lot, a forest on fire, and even underwater!
The Doctor realizes that Sherman is trying to fix his changes to history, and in so doing is making things exponentially worse. He bundles Victoria back to the TARDIS and goes in search of the boy, determined to find him so that he can set things right - And maybe even win Sherman first prize at the Science Fair!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: David Troughton has a voice that's quite similar to his father's, which makes it no feat at all to picture Patrick Troughton's Doctor throughout this story. The 2nd Doctor is well-captured, as well. What other Doctor would impishly fix a boy's time-travel formula to make it correct, just on a whim? Certainly, his immediate predecessor and successor would find such behavior shockingly irresponsible. He realizes his mistake instantly, and apologizes to Sherman for underestimating the boy, for assuming that a mere child could not possibly understand his correction even though his formula was otherwise correct.
Victoria: Jamie must be taking a power nap in another part of the TARDIS, because Victoria is the Doctor's sole companion for this story. She's still relatively new to traveling with the Doctor, but is adjusting fast to his breathless lifestyle. She is instantly, instinctively kind to Sherman, particularly when they find him at the end.
THOUGHTS
The Way Forwards plays like a very good first episode of a two-parter that I'd very much like to hear the rest of. Steve Case's script is well-written, the prose breezing by, descriptive enough to encourage a mental image without becoming tedious. The way Sherman's discovery of his time-travel formula is intercut with his sitting, bored, at the science fair is well-handled, amusing and intriguing in equal parts even before the Doctor shows up. The shifting present, as Sherman tries to fix his time meddling only to make matters ever worse, is partially reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, and highly reminiscent of the Simpsons Halloween episode that so amusingly riffed on that - And it borrows while still feeling entirely like a Doctor Who story.
So we have a 16-minute piece that's charming, fun, and funny... But a piece that just stops, with the sense that there's still a fair bit of story to be told. Sure, the ending's not badly-judged. We get the sense that once the Doctor tracks down Sherman, he's all set to put things right again. But it still feels like more could be done here. We're told Sherman's time travel ideas came to him unbidden, something that I personally took as a hint that some outside influence was at work. That never comes to anything, leaving us with an average boy who pulls the answer to time travel out of thin air.
It's a light-hearted romp, so it's easy enough to overlook this. Still, I can't help but feel that this enjoyable 16-minute bit of fluff could have been a quite good single-disc story. As with too many of Big Finish's short-lived CD range of Short Trips compilations, I like what's there well enough - It just feels as though the need to fit eight stories on two CDs results in stories that are less than they might have been.
Overall Rating: 5/10.
Previous Television Story: The Tomb of the Cybermen
Next Story: The Abominable Snowmen
Search Amazon.com for Doctor Who
2nd Doctor Audio Review Index
2nd Doctor Television Review Index
To receive new review updates, follow me:
On Twitter:
On Threads:
No comments:
Post a Comment