The Nightmare Fair [Doctor Who, Diversion 39]

 The Nightmare Fair by Graham Williams
12 November 2009​

Talk about death in Blackpool. Eh? Eh?

Ahem. The Nightmare Fair marks the start of our might-have-been Season 23, for which I'll be using the Big Finish audio adaptations. It was interesting getting to this so soon after the broadcast of The Giggle, which took the torch from this canceled story in terms of reintroducing the Toymaker.

It has been a while, but you might remember that I didn't exactly get on with The Celestial Toymaker back in 1966. This wasn't because of the concept of the Toymaker, which I always thought was pretty cool, but because of the absolute dog's dinner of a script that serial had. Setting a sequel almost sixty years later seemed like the correct decision to me, since plenty of time had passed, allowing the crappiness of the original serial to recede far out of the collective memory, and allow its iconography to take on a new life.

So how does The Nightmare Fair, which would have been broadcast 20 years after The Celestial Toymaker, measure up exactly? I have to say, the setting is inspired, and I would have loved to see this in motion. The idea of incorporating video games into the Toymaker's ploys is definitely fitting for 1986, and feels like a natural evolution for this new epoch.

The ingredients are here, so it's a shame that the story ends up a little on the disappointing side. While by no means terrible, there just wasn't a whole lot to keep my interest, since it seemed like the plot moves at a bit of a stop-and-start, occasionally arriving at interesting scenes, but occasionally sitting stock-still.

The best part are probably the Toymaker's various captives, who are colorful if not exactly greatly fleshed out. The themes of dealing with the crushing boredom of immortality were an interesting angle which I might have liked to have seen explored in a better story. As it is, I only think this one was sort of middling, and suffers from never having the visual medium it was originally intended for.

I don't have much else to say about that one, so let's move on to Mission to Magnus next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 27 May 2024.)