THE WRATH OF THE ICENI

I listened to the rest of The Wrath of the Iceni last night and, sadly, it doesn’t improve much.

There is no real plot to the story beyond the Doctor getting locked up, escaping (thanks to a woman), caught, locked up again, escaping (thanks to Leela), etc, before he finally becomes the Doctor again and goes to help save Leela from a fate worse than death.

The trouble with this story is that it’s not a story.  It’s a statement by the writer trying to correct some perceived injustice done to female characters in classic TV Doctor Who.  He wanted to do a “Leela meets Boudica” story, and hang anything else.  That he wanted to call the adventure The Women of the Iceni tells us everything we need to know about his aim.  Judging by the platitudes heaped upon him in the behind-the-scenes section, you’d think he’d achieved some remarkable pro-women goal or something.  And maybe he would have if this was still the 60s or 70s, but it isn’t, it’s the 21st Century and there are way better female characters/heroes out there on TV and film these days.

The truth is that what we get is Boudica shown as being a deranged mad woman who so blindly leads her troops into battle you wonder why anyone follows her at all.  The only one who sees through her (besides the Doctor who already knows due to history) is Leela, who befriends, idolises and adulates her for the first half of the story, and then sees the danger she poses through her blood lust towards the end of the second half.  How none of the thousands of Boudica’s followers are able to see what Leela sees so quickly must be because they’re blind.  But they’re not, presumably they’re just thickie men who are easily bullied into giving up their lives through a woman yelling at them.

If this really is a story promoting strong leadership women, then it misses the mark so widely that you’ll easily find better examples in many, many of the classic WHO stories that the writer derides as doing such injustice to them.  If the only way to write “strong women” is to remove all men from the story and emasculate the title character, then I’d rather we didn’t bother because it does justice to neither men nor women.

To sum it up, The Wrath of the Iceni feels a bit like a traditional ‘A’ and ‘B’ story adventure only with the ‘A’ story removed and the ‘B’ story inflated out of its ability to sustain itself.  Thank heaven it’s only a two-parter because I wouldn’t want to have to suffer this for the full 4-7 episode treatment.  The only thing of merit here is that Tom Baker’s voice is getting to sound much more like his 70s Doctor with every scene.

In short, nothing really happens.  Give it a miss.