An Autist Reviews: Thin Time (Doctor Who - The Monthly Adventures 267.1)

*All Reviews Are Spoiler-Free Aside From Any Spoiler Sections*

It’s October 31st, 1892, and John Hobshaw has been invited over by his friend, the extremely talented and famous writer Charles Crookshap, who, it seems, has gone mad. But when a blue box appears out of the aether carrying a mysterious passenger and creatures start knocking on the doors, all questions of sanity get thrown out of the window. Something is trying to cross over, some entity from another dimension, and by dawn, the universe will be ready for it.

What words best describe this story? Eerie, thrilling, Twist-filled, and sad. The story itself is absolutely amazing, though it does get hampered by some over-exposition and, for the first part at least, Mr. Stubbs’ annoying stupidity. Also, in part two, as the Doctor tries to stop the entity from coming into the world, he rediscovers something he already knew and gets surprised for no good reason, also the Doctor just realizes that dawn is when everything will go down out of nowhere, so that’s rather weird since it’s the only thing NOT explained multiple times in different ways. The dialogue is also brilliant in this story, although characters often unnaturally change between subjects and emotions, especially John and Polly. The resolution in and of itself is mostly well written, but the effects and acting make it less than satisfactory, and the acting and ease to which the Fifth Doctor realizes that he should go back to get his friends. The twists in this story are so freaking good, they’re flaunted in front of you multiple times but you never realize it until it’s brought up, the hints just sit in your head and you don’t realize what they mean until the Doctor makes the connections. I will say, I have one major complaint about this story, and that is that John and Charles talk about, at one point, how the Doctor could be the bad guy, and then the bad guy, instead of using this for their benefit, knocks John out and leaves the front door open. The monsters outside of the house are also somewhat unnecessary and the descriptions are often very flowery. All of that aside, the emotional core that is Polly and all the scariness going on make up for the issues of the story so much so that all of those issues are easy to ignore.

John, man, you are dragging the acting rating down. John is basically solely responsible for the main character acting rating being a 9, since I count him, Charles, and Polly as main characters alongside the Doctor. He has a lot of ups and downs, and admittedly Polly and Charles make the occasional mistake, but John is the only one who doesn’t make up for it. As for the only side characters, you have a server, a special guest at the end, and Mr. Stubbs. Mr. Stubbs is pretty good, but he does have a lot of less than great moments. The special guest is very good sounding, but their speech feels too fast and sort of wrong for the conversation he has with the Fifth Doctor. The server is the best actor in the entire thing, no joke. Finally, we have the bad guy, whose name I can’t say, but suffice it to say, he has some problems. He is the worst acted character in the entire story, but he does have some deliciously evil delivery before he starts to transform into a monster and his acting gets pretty mediocre. And that’s about that. Also, Polly has some really interesting line delivery. Not bad, but very interesting. I like it.

Okay, effects, I love the effects of this story. The music is just amazing. It’s subtle, rare, and eerie, and sad at just the right moments. That’s literally all I got to say about it, it’s just amazing. The voice effects are all amazing, right up until you reach the final scene in the house where the monster’s voice effects are just horrible, sounding really robotic and fake deep, but hey, at least you can understand what he’s saying, so it’s not the worst it could be. The action effects are very near to perfect, with almost everything being highly detailed to the point where you notice a single knock missing when it occurs. There are also some really quiet and/or vague effects, especially during intense scenes. As for why it’s worse in part two, that’s solely because in the climax the effects just shit the bed and wind up being so vague that it just seems like an anticlimactic fade away. The background effects are just perfect, like, you know the size of the room the characters are in immediately without there even being echoes and such. There are also some weird, if not accurate to the era, effects thrown in which I sadly find distracting and weird. Finally, the transitions: they’re perfect, short, certainly, but rarely anything but perfect. Still, there is at least one that is rather poor, but the rest are just amazing.

I love this story, I find it incredibly spooky and, at times, very funny, which means that the Re-Enjoyment value is a solid 10. The thing about this story is that upon a second listen you get so much more, you see the twists coming, you see the allusions to the twists and to future events, and it really makes the story much better.

All in all, this story has issues, certainly, and quite a few, but they don’t dampen it that much. The acting is amazing the majority of the time, the effects are incredibly well detailed, and the twists are some of the clearest and yet some of the most surprising I’ve ever heard! The exposition and the resolution are mostly what bring the rating down, but even I love this story despite the ending, and I hate a bad ending.

Original Guesstimate - 9

           P1 P2 Both

Total - 9 / 8 / 9

Plot - 9 / 9 / 9
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Story - 9 / 8 / 8
Pacing - 10 / 10 / 10
Dialogue - 8 / 8 / 8
Narration - NR / NR / NR
Exposition - 7 / 7 / 7
Enjoyment - 10 / 10 / 10
Twist/s - 10 / 10 / 10
Resolution/s - NR / 6 / 6
Ending - 10 / 8 / 9

Acting - 9 / 8 / 8
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MC/s - 9 / 9 / 9
SC/s - 9 / 9 / 9
BG/s - NR / 7 / 7
Narrator/s - NR / NR / NR

Effects - 9 / 8 / 9
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Music - 10 / 10 / 10
Voices - 10 / 3 / 7
Actions - 8 / 7 / 8
Background - 9 / 10 / 10
Transitions - 9 / 10 / 10

Replay - 9 / 8 / 9
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Re-Enjoyment - 10 / 10 / 10
New Details - 7 / 6 / 7

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