"Don't apologise to the people attacking you."
Writer: Lisa McMullin
Format: Audio
Released: October 2020
Series: War Master 5.04
Featuring: Eighth Doctor, War Master
Synopsis
"Find the Doctor... stop the Doctor... and, if necessary, kill the Doctor!"
Recruited by the Celestial Intervention Agency to track down his oldest enemy, the Master finds himself thrown into a mission that will take him into deepest Dalek territory.
Abandoned on the planet Redemption, he assembles a crew and acquires a ship – the journey that follows is certain to test them all... and not everyone will survive.
But space pirates and living corpses are the least of their worries. Their biggest threat remains at large: a Time Lord who likes to call himself 'The Doctor'.
Verdict
The Cognition Shift was a decent episode to conclude what has been a really strong Hearts of Darkness fifth series of War Master adventures! Unfortunately, the finale actually gets the lowest score of the t tier series which is a bit of a shame as I felt things were built to really nicely. I enjoyed the approach of the previous episode in The Castle of Kurnos 5 catching us up with what happened to result in the Master and the Doctor swapping bodies, but unfortunately I thought that very fact hurt this story a little. I like the idea on paper but I don’t think an audio format was the best place to utilise it. That is in mo way speaking negatively on the performances of Paul McGann or Derek Jacobi, I just think it got a bit confusing with how long they did stay in the other’s body and the amount of thinking required to remind myself of which voice was actually for what character was a little frustrating. It took me out of the relaxed nature I normally enjoy an audio adventure in. Now, as my rating suggests this was still a strong story and one I enjoyed. Speaking of the performances, it was actually really fun to hear Paul McGann voice the Master and dive into the dark side of his acting ability. I thought he was great and certainly convincing. I think it was a little more difficult to buy Jacobi as the Doctor but that’s probably because we’ve know for a while now this isn’t actually the Master. I think the problems lay in when they were interacting or at the end when the bird got involved. It felt unnatural and it didn’t come off smoothly. Finding out about the cognition shift and what the Master’s plan was made for a really entertaining reveal. If I hadn’t recently listened to The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 I might agree with the Doctor’s sentiment that this was the Master’s craziest plan yet, but it was certainly up there! Finding out what he wanted to swap minds with was incredible and certainly something I did not see coming. He wanted a transference with the entire Dalek webpath. That was an incredible concept as it was more than enough for him to infiltrate that web, but the device was one of a means of swapping so every bit of Dalek would be congested into one mind. That was frighteningly brilliant. I’d have loved more time for that to come into fruition. Dorada’s involvement was good although I wasn’t a fan of the whole bird thing. Exploring the Scaramancer’s guilt when it came to leaving her sister to die was superb and still so powerful, despite being a little repetitive. The emotion there was fantastic and it was a horrible decision. She lamented that she didn’t get to say goodbye so the Master gave her that chance, but he still refused to save her or swap places. It must have been awful knowing you had the privilege of survival. I thought the conclusion was slightly underwhelming in how the Master and the Doctor were restored to their bodies, but the Scaramancer getting to be the hero and return home to go by her proper name was a nice touch and a neat way to end things for her. The Master revealing that he’d committed a number of crimes whilst in the Doctor’s body was fun and I hope that comes into play in the Eighth Doctor’s Time War series somewhere in the future, but for now this was a good listen.
Rating: 7/10
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