The God Machine

"There was no sign of life anywhere..."

Writer: Unknown

Format: Short Story

Released: September 1982

Printed in: Doctor Who Annual 1983

Featuring: Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan

Synopsis 

Forced to land the TARDIS on a desolate planet due to severity in the time vortex, the Doctor is concerned when Nyssa and Tegan don't arrive back from their exploration of the surroundings. As the Doctor goes off in search of them, he soon discovers why they didn't come back...

Verdict 

The God Machine was a pretty decent little short story and continued my extremely sporadic reading of the 1983 edition of the Doctor Who Annual very well. Now, this story didn't come without its problems and it really is a rarity that an Annual story comes without them but I thought it was a very solid story and despite my traditional thinking of the rating I awarded not being that good, I couldn't really ask for much more. That's just what the story was in my eyes. I thought it was told in a pretty exciting way and whilst the plot itself wasn't amazing nor jumped out immediately, the writing style was very good and certainly tried its best to improve the content of the adventure. I liked how the story started some time after the TARDIS had landed and that got us straight into the action and when a story is as short as this one was, you can't afford to waste time or space. The usual illustrations that accompanied the written text were good and definitely helped with the visualisation of the story. The art was actually excellent as well which couldn't always be said for some of the Doctor Who Annual stories that I've blogged which were released during the era of the Fourth Doctor. As time went on, things definitely appeared to have improved. They did exactly what they intended to do which was brilliant and it's just a shame that the plot of the story wasn't better as everything else was done right. I liked that Nyssa and Tegan went off exploring together while the Doctor saw to fixing the TARDIS components that had been slightly damaged by the disturbance and in time and space. The characterisation of Peter Davison's fifth incarnation was actually pretty decent but despite him being the main character he didn't actually have all that much to say. That's the one issue I probably did have with the story and that was the amount of text that simply explained things rather than have it done by dialogue. It can become pretty tiresome when an adventure is just told by what happens rather than interaction between the characters. We got a little bit with Sarl and it was quite humorous that once he introduced himself to the Doctor and announced where he was from and who he represented that he simply knocked the Time Lord out and rendered him unconscious! The play on religion and mythology was good and I liked how the pirates were hoping to become rich off of a long abandoned belief. They were getting away with it until the Doctor arrived and with Tegan and Nyssa captured mysterious atop the pyramid, he'd found a non-believer group who'd helped him escape his cell and discover the false gods. Although these rebels did overturn the pirates, I was quite surprised that the Doctor just left them to do the battle. That seemed uncharacteristic for me. It was good that he got the confirmation that his choice was the right one, but it just didn't seem right to me. Overall though, a pretty decent story!

Rating: 7/10