The Lost Generation

"The people inside the pods had long ago decomposed."

Writer: George Mann
Format: Short Story
Released: June 2015
Printed in: The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who 02

Featuring: Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane

Synopsis

The Fourth Doctor unknowingly brings Sarah Jane Smith to the Prosperity, one of the very first colony ships from Earth. It has always been thought lost, but it's just thousands of years off course. Nature has taken over as things have gone very, very wrong.

Verdict

The Lost Generation was a decent little story to continue along my somewhat sporadic reading of The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who. As fate would have it, I was again reunited with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane which is just a magnificent pairing and they certainly didn’t disappoint together in this adventure. They just work so well as a pair and it really doesn’t seem to matter what format that is in. Their relationship oozes off the page and makes for really good reading. I was a little unsure about the nature of the story but I have to be a little trepidatious given that it was only eleven pages long. That really isn’t much time at all to tell a Doctor Who adventure but I thought George Mann did a pretty good job. Due to the length of the word count available, the conclusion did suffer a bit which probably brings my rating down slightly, but that’s not a new issue with the short stories. I’m more than used to it by now! The start was very unique with the Doctor and Sarah Jane being chased by a horribly mutated sheep that was twice the size of a regular one and was extremely carnivorous. That was a little odd if not painting a comedic image in my head! The Doctor’s ‘ewe-turn’ line was a thing of beauty and I had to contain myself from bursting into uncontrollable laughter on the train. Superb stuff and you could just see that grin of the Fourth Doctor beaming through the words on the page. I really enjoyed that. The setting of the Prosperity ship was good and I liked how everything made sense to the Doctor when he realised where they were. Sarah, like the rest of us reading, wanted to be enlightened, but the Doctor would make her wait a little while longer. Thankfully, that’s where the length of the adventure was beneficial as we weren’t left waiting in the dark for much longer. It turned out that the Prosperity was the very first colonist ship sent from Earth that went missing after a mere 300 years. As of now, Ana had been piloting it for three-and-a-half millennia. The idea of the pilot speaking through an android as her original body was decomposing into a fully fledged corpse was beyond disturbing! Imagine looking at yourself slowly dying. I can’t even fathom what must have been going through her head. The Doctor’s humour regarding oak trees was good and I enjoyed Sarah Jane’s reference to The Ark in Space. This wasn’t quite like that but the Doctor could see the resemblances. Plantation had taken over and far exceeded its initial purpose of providing oxygen. There were now corridors of trees and the Doctor was starting to see through the cracks which was good. The Doctor and Sarah getting captured by the Umans and being mistaken as an enemy tribe was great and I do enjoy a tribe story. I kind of wished that element of the adventure was extended a little purely based on personal preference. I think there’s a lot you can do with them, especially when they’d pretty much reverted back to being primitive like we saw here. The mention and discussion of the Elders was decent and I liked the comparisons that the Doctor made. I thought the adventure was going a little slow over the course of the first half-dozen pages or so, but then the Doctor revealed all about the ship and how they’d got lazy through generations. Umans were of course humans and the suggestion of having both a left tenant and a right tenant was another good moment of humour. There wasn’t really a great deal else going on other than the ending with the Doctor quickly giving Ana a horrific choice. He was able to get her ship to safety, but given her connection with it by now as the pilot, the engines would blow and that would mean its death. She took the option of survival for her passengers, but I wasn’t a big fan of how quickly the Doctor deduced he could save the ship and decide on a planet for it to land on. It was all a bit quick and I know that’s probably a consequence of the format and length, but it was too much of a stretch to fully enjoy. I did like Sarah’s probing of wanting to know if the colony will make it, so they zapped forward in time a few millennia to find out, but then we didn’t even get to discover the result! That was awfully harsh on the reader. Overall, a good idea and still a decent adventure, but a little bit of a disappointing conclusion. 

Rating: 7/10