Doctor Who: The Fourth Wall

Flip's second outing with the Sixth Doctor is a comedy story. The basic idea is essentially The Last Action Hero but satirising bad SF shows rather than action movies. This, of course, doesn't really bear too much thinking about, although the explanation is at least reasonably consistent with previous DW lore.

Much of the humour naturally comes from just how bad the TV show that Flip must be rescued from actually is. It's the sort of show that nobody would really attempt to make these days, because the clichés are too obvious... one can only assume that the audiences of the future setting have different tastes to modern ones. But it does at least mean that the story gets to play around with deus ex machina plot devices, aliens that are indestructible unless they're being punched in the face by the leading man, and so on.

There are a couple of let-downs, however. The aliens in the ‘real' world are themselves rather ridiculous stereotypes used for comic effect, which rather dents the contrast between the Doctor's reality and the fictional world of the TV show. While there are some good scenes with Flip and Six at the beginning, they're kept apart for almost the whole story, and Flip is hardly in the second half at all.

On the other hand, it is well done, and the jokes hit their target more often than not. The aliens aside, the scenes outside the TV show do provide a contrast to the comedy, involving, as they do, a fairly high body count. The main villain is good, if intentionally cheesy, and has some great lines as it dawns on him what his real motivations are. Flip is also proving to be a decent companion, although there is still something of a resemblance to Rose - minus any possible romantic attachments, of course.

On the whole, it's probably just a bit too silly, and meta-fiction of this sort has been done better before in the series (in Legend of the Cybermen, for example). But 3.5 stars seems fair, and that rounds up to 4.