IMMORTAL BELOVED

Following on from last week’s Horror of Glam Rock, the BBC7 Doctor Who adventures continued last night with an episode entitled Immortal Beloved by Jonathan Clements.

This one’s a bit of a mixed-bag compared to last week’s.  The 8th Doctor (Paul McGann) is still trying to get Lucie back to her own time but it’s too much for Lucie to believe that they’re closer than last week’s 1974.  They land at the top of a cliff where two young people are trying to escape their “fate”.  Their fate isn’t yet clear but the only way to escape it seems to be to hurl themselves off the cliff to certain death.

The young man and woman are wearing fine clothes that are showing signs of being battered after ascending the cliff face.  Their “fate” is apparently the decree of gods and when the TARDIS lands they believe they are in the presence of gods.  Lucie comically introduces herself and her sidekick, and the Doctor offers nothing but a sigh of expectation by way of objection.

The Doctor and Lucie try to prevent the double-suicide and are aided in this when some guards arrive, aided by flying chariots (that’s “helicopters” to me, you, the Doctor and Lucie).

Our heroes are soon embroiled in a world of greek gods – Zeus, Hera, and Ares.  Well, they do and they don’t, and it all gets a bit muddy as to what exactly is going on.

Basically, the story seems to be about a crew on a ship landing on a planet many generations ago.  They have a way of preserving their life and effectively being “immortal”.  This is very “The 6th Day” in which, as one body dies they transfer their memories and “essence” into a younger clone.  But this isn’t just some rip-off from the new Battlestar Galactica because it has a twist.  The clones cannot be grown to adulthood quickly and live a normal life until they’re older than 16.  Once over that age, they just hang about waiting for the older version to die – at which point their lives are over and the older “original” takes over the younger body and carries on for another generation.

The adoption of “god” names is to effectively brainwash the growing clones into believing that it is their destiny, their fate, to be the next “vessel” of their particular god.  The two people on the cliff were not so convinced of this, the cloning isn’t always 100% perfect, and didn’t want their lives wiped out or their bodies to be used when their aging “parents” die.  So they elect to end it all now – until the Doctor and Lucie come along.

The situation is sorted out when the Doctor announces that the “brain swapping gizmo” is a bit long in the tooth and isn’t working too well.  Hera dies before she can be transferred into the girl, and the Doctor prevents Zeus’ essence from being transferred to the boy.  The story ends with the boy pretending that the transfer worked and that he *is* Zeus so he and the girl can be together while stopping all the cloning/brain-swapping stuff from being used in the future.  Kind of…  maybe…

This episode flounders about a bit and doesn’t really go anywhere.  You come away with the impression that, even if the Doctor hadn’t turned up, the equipment would have eventually failed anyway and their society would have changed back to a normal human propagation society regardless.

Also, this time around, Lucie is less interesting as a character.  Other than telling the youngsters not to accept their “fate” and complaining at the Doctor to “stop all this”, she doesn’t do anything other than be an anachronism.  The story comes across as an exercise of using strange words to mean familiar things – the “chamber of incantations” for the “operating room”, that kind of thing.

There’s also no clearly defined description of where they are and what their surroundings are.  The write-up in the paper suggested that the story was set in ancient Greece with people using modern technology, but it actually seems like it’s just a bunch of people on an alien planet adopting old names for the sake of being pompous.  The former idea would have been very interesting, but the latter is just a bit of a mess.

Well, perhaps next week’s will be better.  I’ve ordered the first CD of the first story Blood of the Daleks from Play.com so I’ll soon have a chance to see how the season started.