Out of the Darkness: Moon Graffiti

1 episode.  Approx. 60 minutes. Written by: Dave Stone. Directed by: John Taylor.  Performed by: Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant.


THE PLOT

The Doctor and Peri have gotten the Zeiton-7 needed to fuel the TARDIS. But their problems are not over. The Doctor has discovered that the tinkering he did during his unstable, post-regenerative state actually did a substantial amount of damage to the ship's systems. Every repair he makes now creates a new problem, and the only permanent solution is to track down an elusive particle, left over from the Big Bang.

He tracks this element to Earth in the distant future, a future in which the human race has been driven underground by an invasion by an insectoid race of Pararachnids, intergalactic vandals who destroy worlds before moving on. But not all of the Pararachnids have left - and soon, the Doctor finds himself caught in a struggle for survival between the remnants of the human race and their insect-like oppressors.


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Now that his regeneration has stabilized, he seems to have developed into a spiky, yet highly protective, avuncular figure to Peri. He takes pains to see to her safety before dealing with the larger problems before him.  Just as he would not talk to Varos' governor about the true value of the Zeiton 7 until Quillam's experiment was halted, so he insists on Peri getting back to the safety of the TARDIS before he deals with the Pararachnids here.

He hasn't fully adapted to the limitations of his new body. His plan for escaping from the Pararachnids using a trick he learned from Houdini fails, because his newest body cannot accomodate some of the physical feats he's used to being able to perform. He remains quick-witted, however, and improvises ably.

Peri: Now that the Sixth Doctor is no longer behaving like a maniac, she is demonstrating an innate trust in him. Veneance on Varos showed her far more at ease with the new Doctor than previous stories, and showed a softer and more companionable relationship between them - well, except for the poor (and almost certainly Saward-penned) TARDIS padding scenes. Their relationship in this story is more or less identical to their relationship in that one, and follows on from it quite well.


THOUGHTS

Moon Graffiti was the main feature of the 2 CD audio short story anthology, Out of the Darkness, first released on disc in 1998, later re-released in the Tales of the TARDIS collection. This story took up the entirety of the first CD, and was the only one of the three tales to feature fully-dramatized scenes acted out by Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, as well as full sound effects.

As such, this is almost a pre-Companion Chronicle, a halfway house between an audio play and a talking book. Throw in one more actor (for the role of Keno Arne) and this could probably pass muster as a radio play. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant do the various voices justice. Baker is particularly adept as switching from a neutral narrator's voice to the Doctor's voice and back again, in such a way that one never is confused as to which bits are narration and which bits are dialogue.

Other than a single, misconceived moment in which Bryant delivers one or two of Baker's lines simply because they fall within a paragraph she is reading (the only occurrence of such in the story), the production is quite good, and there are no issues with visualizing the action. Writer Dave Stone clearly understands the vaguely OCD fan tendency to want to be able to precisely slot a story into the chronology. As such, he not only takes care to identify this story as taking place shortly after Vengeance on Varos, but takes care to make the characterization of the Doctor and Peri fit into this position.

The story itself is rather slight, stock stuff. The villains are two-dimensional, giant insect creatures who want nothing more than to destroy and to eat people, with nothing more to them. They are also played strictly for laughs, which is effective when the Doctor is escaping from them, but less effective at the climax. Comedic descriptions of how, presented with a human buffet, the rules of Pararachnid society could "go stuff it," may amuse... but they also obliterate the horror inherent in a scene in which the Pararachnids gorge themselves on semi-frozen humans, and continue to do so once the humans begin to be revived. The climax would have been better-served had Stone dropped the comedy at this point, and instead shifted gears to all-out horror.

Still, while Stone is no Douglas Adams, his attempts to emulate the Adams comedy style amuse more often than not. The climax may be misjudged, but for the most part the comedy actually helps to elevate a stock story, making things much more entertaining than might have been. Benefiting from a good pace, a strong production, and an excellent reading/performance by Baker and Bryant, this is too slight to give a truly strong rating. But it does what it needs to, so gets off with a solid:


Rating: 6/10.

Previous Televised Story: Vengeance on Varos
Next Televised Story: The Mark of the Rani


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