The Blink Review: Remembrances

The sixth story of the online Doctor Who series, ‘Remembrances’, sees the Doctor and Florence arrive at Ravenna City, a wrecked world where the Humans are enslaving the Gnaecian population. Their only hope of survival is to rise up to the Supreme Consul…

The story starts onboard a contemporary-looking space capsule, where John Heinze, the lover of the Doctor’s companion Florence, is on a mission with his crewmates Harvey and Zurab. The quiet scene soon develops into a very chilling one, when they all hear a sinister voice on the intercoms. Moments later, they have become possessed.

This sets up the thrilling episode which follows, with the Doctor and Florence’s relationship given a breath of fresh air when he returns to save her, admitting that he could never just let her go. Their beautiful friendship which was created from the very start of the series goes from strength to strength in this episode, when Florence has to deal with some painful losses, and there is only one man who can help her through it.

The greatest scene of the story came when the possessed John realised the monster that he had become, and gave his life to destroy the creature inside him. The emotional scene between him and Florence was very powerful, as he smiled at her for the last time. This sacrifice had great effects on the Doctor and Florence, yet made them determined to fight for the future of the planet, and built up an alliance between the Humans and the Gnaecians.

The only criticism of this episode would be the final scenes in the graveyard near the end of the script, where John is once again able to communicate with Florence by the psycho-refractive metals in his tombstone. Unfortunately this had the negative effect of making the earlier death scene less dramatic, by resurrecting the character only a few pages later and making him immortal.

However, the emotion was soon restored when Florence built up the courage to leave this consciousness of John, and left the graveyard with the Doctor. Although this may not have been the best episode of Dan Harma’s series, it was still a very enjoyable script with such detailed description of the characters and locations, which builds a whole world inside the reader’s head.

Rating: 4/5 stars

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The stories are available to read at www.doctorwho4b.blogspot.com