Moonflesh (2014)

Moonflesh is the first time that we have had the combination of the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa in a series since the Stockbridge trilogy of stories at the end of 2009 (even though of course they appeared in Fanfare for the Common Men). Since then we have had plenty of Nyssa/Tegan/Turlough adventures so its nice that they have decided to freshen it up by doing something different with the Fifth Doctor. I have always been a huge fan of Nyssa and she is one of only two people to win the Best Companion award at the Tomstardis Awards (winning it in 2007 and 2012). As the current holder of the Best Doctor category, Peter Davison has had a good run of stories in recent years and the run continues in this story.

What does strike me about the early stages of this story is that it seems like its going be a base under siege type story and the story does a good job of building the tension up nice and slowly and by the halfway stage I thought that this would have worked very well during the Davison era on TV.

From start to finish, I couldn’t help think that Francesca Hunt was doing an impression of Sandi Toskvig. I thought that the characters in this story were very good because Hunt did very well as Hannah Bartholomew and I thought that the character was a very strong one and it could easily have been Leela in this story. I also quite liked Phoebe Whitlock played by Rosanna Miles and thought that whilst she might not have been quite a strong as Hannah, she was still an interesting character and I wasn’t bored when she was in the scene. Phoebe really stepped up as a character when became ‘possesed’ and it was almost like an initiation into the story before she becomes accepted as a solid character.

The most famous name in this story is that of Hugh Fraser who played Hasting in the David Suchet series of Poirot stories. Here he plays Edwin Tremayne and he’s a perfectly fine character in this. Tim Bentinck is the face on the cover that I recognise from his handful of appearances in the great BBC comedy ‘The Thick of It’. Also according to Wikipedia (the fountain of truth and knowledge), he is actually Timothy Charles Robert Noel Bentinck, 12^th Earl of Portland, 8^th Count Bentinck. As Nathaniel Whitlock, Bentinck does come across as someone with more money than brains. For me the most interesting person in this entire story was Silver Crow (played brilliantly by John Banks). He just pips Hannah to most interesting character in the story. Silver Crow is a Sioux Indian and is very likeable and I couldn’t help but think of Latoni in ‘Black Orchid’ but Silver Crow is more talkative.

Mark Morris has written a great group of character who are never boring and never become annoying and that’s a rare thing in a story. I cant deny that I found his ghost dance slightly amusing but credit should go to John Banks for making it seem perfectly natural and not a comedy routine. In fact Morris does enough in the early stages of the story to stop it from becoming a comedy. The direction of the story was well handled by Ken Bentley and whilst I didn’t always understand what was going on I will say that it was an enjoyable adventure from the beginning and I look forward to the next two stories in this series.