Spider's Shadow

"A celebration on the eve of battle."

Writer: Stewart Sheargold

Format: Audio

Released: June 2008

Series: Main Range 109b

Featuring: Seventh Doctor

Synopsis

It is the eve of battle and the Martial Princesses Louise and Alison are hosting a royal ball. But there are unwelcome visitors in the garden and a sequence of events spiralling out of control. And what's more, the Doctor doesn't even remember arriving.

Verdict

Spider's Shadow was not the greatest continuation of Main Range adventures unfortunately. I still really cannot comprehend the thinking behind the format of the releases being split into two adventures consisting of three and one-part stories respectively. It doesn't make sense to me and it seems so obvious that the smaller story will have less attention focused on it by the writer, especially when the one-parter doesn't even get any recognition on the cover! Alas, I don't like to use custom art for my blog entries but I've had no choice but to use one as the featured image for this story's entry. I couldn't quite get on board with this one from the offset which was a big shame and it just didn't have the feel of a Seventh Doctor story. I'd like to have known more about how the Doctor came to be there and meet the Princesses but we didn't really get much at all in my opinion. Louise and Alison were somewhat interesting but I couldn't help but feel the central plot of this whole story was rather petty. Instead of being downhearted about how they were perceived as being seen as beautiful or attractive, something of much keener interest to me would have been the focus being on the impending war and the history with all previous battles. There had been so many of them and I wanted to learn a lot more, but there just wasn't the time in a single parter so that was a little frustrating. I didn't think the writing of the Doctor himself was awfully great and as a result I think Sylvester McCoy's performance was impacted. There wasn't much time or room for Doctor-ish moments which was a big flaw. I quite enjoyed the idea of a time loop prison though, but I felt like it was never really resolved fully. I thought it was good that the Doctor took both princesses into the TARDIS which essentially took them out of time, but even he was impacted by the time loop. I think there's a fine line with a time loop story and there can be an issue of repeated dialogue and if that occurs more than once, things can get boring extremely quickly. I wouldn't say this one was boring, but there were definitely times where I was drifting as things just didn't interest me. I really was trying to like it but it just was not engaging at all. Again, I found the whole thing a bit petty and I thought there needed to be more backstory for the relationship between Louise and Alison. One element of the story I did really like was knowing that it immediately followed The Death Collectors. In a release such as this, that is definitely the direction things should go in so I enjoyed that. Henry was a decent character but we didn't see enough of him and I would also like to mention the setting as I felt there was very little effort to establish where things were and how that was significant. It didn't work for me. Overall, another example of one-part stories not quite working and whilst that is of course a subjective viewpoint, I do hope this is the end of such occurrences. Overall, an average adventure sums it up.

Rating: 5/10