Pretty Lies [AUDIO/2017.2.23]

★★★☆☆

  Forget the star rating for a moment... I've finally clicked with the War Doctor, and it's largely thanks to Pretty Lies here. I've struggled with this incarnation of the Doctor for the longest time, ever since he first properly appeared in The Day of the Doctor. Here is a man, I thought, who let go of all his previous morals to fight and win the Time War. I watched John Hurt's performance and started to doubt whether this was supposed to be a complete inverse of the Doctor we all know or not; he had witty lines, he knew how to smile, and it seemed to me that he still carried hearts of gold. For almost a decade, I found it impossible to relate this admittedly less warm but nonetheless Doctor-ish character to an identity that has renounced the name, shunned himself to the wastelands of memory just so that he could kill another Dalek and get that much closer to victory. I feel like admitting this is almost a declaration of my stupidity, but... I realized, listening to Pretty Lies, that the answer was staring at me in the face: this is the War Doctor. The War Doctor isn't some gun-crazy Dalek hunter, nor is he a cold-blooded assassin of few words. No, he is very much the cunning trickster and champion of the underdog we all know — what separates him from the rest of his incarnations is that he will choose the lesser of two evils without question. No remorse, no second thoughts. Here, the Doctor doesn't go off on a moralistic speech about how tricking and destroying a huge Dalek fleet would never justify decimating half of an innocent planet... he just does it in such a matter-of-fact way. If you ask me now, this isn't the Doctor I know — which means I finally understand John Hurt's Doctor.

  How fitting is it that this revelation came to me on the first story of John Hurt's final boxset as the War Doctor? I still grieve his death; Hurt was a phenomenal actor, and him as Doctor Who was simply too much for my younger self at the time it was announced. He brings such gravitas even to the blandest of scripts, and in the case of stories that present something special for him to work on (case in point: this very story I'm reviewing), he absolutely shines. Pretty Lies is about fabrication of the truth by news outlets, the manipualtion of media for a few more views, and I had more fun than I thought I would. It's a pretty good feeling to get when starting a boxset, lemme tell you.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  Now that Pretty Lies has worked up my appetite for this incarnation's stories during the Time War, I might just finish this boxset and proceed to review ones that preceded it, as well as stories from other mediums. It feels so amazing that such an integral part of the Doctor Who mythos has only just clicked with me; I've enjoyed the War Doctor audios before, true, but now I'll have an entirely new layer to enjoy.