Doctor Who: Maker of Demons

The premise here is quite a decent one: the Doctor returns to a planet that he saved a century before to discover that things have not gone as he expected. In that sense, it's an exploration of his habit of leaving suddenly as soon as the events of an episode appear to have finished, and not hanging around to take part in, say, the subsequent reconstruction. Which is a sensible thing to have a look at, and the story weaves in the question of just how much culpability he has for how it all turned out effectively enough.

But, otherwise, it doesn't work as well as it should. Elliott is clearly riffing of The Tempest here, and, to my mind at least, he's overdoing it. All but one of the human guest characters are named for characters in the original play, lines from it are regularly inserted into the dialogue, and, for no particularly plausible reason, the human colonists are all kitted out in Elizabethan dress. Yes, the fact that the past is prologue is literally the point of the story here, but there's such a thing as going too far.

Of course, it could be that some listeners will appreciate these references; I normally quite like nods to other works in these things, but, in this case, I happened to find them intrusive. In fact, on that subject, I'll note that the incidental music is often intrusive here as well... whoever thought that choral singing would work in this context? I kept thinking it was something that I was actually supposed to be hearing.

One could argue that the plot is rather implausible, too, but, in all fairness, it's no more so than in many other DW stories. It does have its good points, with both Ace and Mel being written well, and there being a few twists along the way. So it's not bad, but it's nothing special either. Those with greater (or perhaps lesser) knowledge of The Tempest may like it more than I did.