Review: Great Eighth Doctor Story..........
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 26, 2013
Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor was the one incarnation of the character to have only one television appearance. That would be the BBC/Universal/Fox co-production that aired in 1996, a projected "back door" pilot that it was said, could have led to a full scale series. It didn't. Viewing figures of almost 10 million in the UK proved that its homeland was still hungry for Doctor Who. Substandard viewing figures in the US didn't reflect this stateside. The Eighth Doctor did go on, first in a BBC Books range of adventures and then in the form of audioplays from a remarkable company called Big Finish (check them out if you haven't already), with McGann himself reprising the role in all new full cast stories. Which brings us to "Spore", by Alex Scarrow, a part of an ongoing series of short stories commemorating Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary. The Doctor arrives without companion here, but soon finds one in Captain Evelyn Chan. A spore has landed on Earth, and released a pathogen that will soon assimilate and eradicate all organic life on Earth. if a particular question is not answered. The Doctor knows who the enemy is; His own planet, Gallifrey had encountered it a thousand years before he was born, and found a way to answer its question and immunize itself from the pathogen's lethal infection. It will be about 50 years before the people of Earth will have advanced to the extent that they can do the same. But the threat is here, and very real, NOW. Scarrow captures Paul McGann's Doctor much more efficiently than many of the aforementioned BBC Books did. You can hear his voice here in everything the Doctor says. The setting, a small town in the middle of a desert in Nevada, provides an eerie, creepy atmosphere for a threat that brings to mind the invaders from "The Thing", and the story is crisp, well paced, and consistently engaging. I think I'm going to be taking a look at the rest of this series, as the entries for both the Ninth and Eighth Doctors have been superb.