Maelstrom [AUDIO/2022.5.17]

★★☆☆☆

  Jonathan Morris may just be one of my favourite Dr. Who writers ever. The man's created some of the best Who adventures, and has been for over twenty years... so it's only natural that he has a few stinkers here and there. Unfortunately for Water Worlds, the first two stories of which were very solid and enjoyable releases, Morris' Maelstrom lets the side down with some really uninteresting padding and a similarly unimpressive execution.

  I mean, the ideas are certainly there with a malevolent entity down below the depths and a group of people with no corporeal body (which means they have to inhabit bodies of different people). I didn't really need about half of the two-parter devoted on Mel's mind-swap, though -- or at least, I didn't need such an interesting idea to be executed so flatly. Bonnie Langford tries her best to be this awkward, detached Alef, but the direction must not have been enough to make the execution of the thing interesting. Coincidentally, if memory serves me correct, this is the one where Hebe gets to do the least. Perhaps that also contributed to my less than lukewarm reaction to Maelstrom? It has the echoes of cool ideas, but they're either revealed to be less intriguing at a second glance or brought to audio form in such a boring way. I rarely ever get bored by Jonathan Morris stories, so this is a first for me.