Lurkers at Sunlight's Edge [AUDIO/2010.11.15]

★★☆☆☆

  Doctor Who pulling a Lovecraft with a comic-book twist seems to be the perfect story, but I'm quite sad to say that Marty Ross's story is anything but "Shuddersome". It stumbles along its road and tries to muster up the biggest noises it can, but ends up speaking to the heart so little.

  Here is, yet again, an adventure that takes a formidable promise and does almost nothing in it except the bare minimum. An underground base, a final episode featuring giant monsters, they've all been done before. Again, I'm not saying that using these tropes again and again is inherently a bad thing... but if they're presented without any novelty, if they're written and performed with such mediocrity, I can't find it in myself to enjoy it. It's no surprise, then, that Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier sound bored off their wits. They give unengaged performances, the script remains unengaging, and the whole thing becomes this... odd ball of nothingness. 

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  I'm starting to get a grasp on my own ratings (it's taken me this far, take this as positively or negatively as you will). Two stars, in the case of Lurkers at Sunlight's Edge and of all its peers, mean that I'm disappointed by the squandered potential more than anything. It showed promise, it gave me a taste of genuinely interesting things, and then it locked itself up in a standstill. I don't think I can even recommend this to people into Lovecraftian fiction; what difference do this story's aliens have from every other middle-grade Doctor Who monster?