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Memory Lane. Oh dear oh dear, what a disappointment. The Eighth Doctor, Charley, and our good friend Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Story (C’rizz, bless his perpetually sidelined soul) land on a street that looks like it was built by the world’s most unimaginative god. Every house is identical, the road loops forever, everyone’s smiling that Stepford smile, and the ice-cream man knows far too much for someone whose job involves sprinkles. It should be deliciously eerie, like if Blue Velvet got trapped in a Tesco advert, but no. Instead it’s an alien prison simulation designed to hold a human subject for study, and you can feel the potential slipping away like a dropped Cornetto.
You can practically hear the writer whispering “Solaris! Twilight Zone! Lynch!” in your ear, and yet somehow it all feels like Doctor Who doing a GCSE project about memory. Once the Doctor figures out that this surreal cul-de-sac of doom is just a psychic hamster wheel for one poor sod of a test subject, the plot just… coasts. You can see the beats coming from twelve galaxies away. The “mystery” prisoner? Found. The aliens? Reveal themselves as your standard-issue meddling scientists with tentacles. The Doctor gets caught, Charley gets emotional, and C’rizz continues his proud tradition of breathing oxygen somewhere off-screen.
And that’s the real tragedy, isn’t it? Because the idea is fine. A false reality made of recycled memories? Sure, love that. The Doctor wandering through a dream suburb where nostalgia curdles into horror? Inject that straight into my bloodstream. But it never builds on that. There’s no bite, no strangeness, no gut-punch of surrealism. Just a polite “hmm yes memories are tricky aren’t they” before everyone dusts off their trousers and toddles back to the TARDIS.
Charley, at least, has a few good moments; her compassion gives the script a pulse when everything else feels like white noise. McGann does what he can—half melancholy philosopher, half weary dad on a long road trip—but the story keeps pulling him into exposition purgatory. And that ice-cream man! He could’ve been nightmare fuel, right? A smiling spectre of conformity, jingling bells echoing through the void. Instead he’s just… there. Missed opportunity, thy name is Memory Lane.
By the time the credits roll, you realise the story was trying to say something profound about nostalgia and the danger of living inside your own memories—but it never dares to get messy with it. It’s all very “tea-time sci-fi moral” when it could’ve been a full existential scream.
It’s not offensively bad, just achingly dull. Like a dream where you spend eight hours doing the dishes. It had every tool to be weird and unsettling, but it chose “safe” instead. Honestly, the most disturbing part is how little C’rizz actually matters.
Final Thoughts:
Skip this one and go have an actual ice-cream instead—it’ll melt faster, but at least it’ll taste like something.
Rating: 2 out of 5 funny ice-cream vans driving in circles while the Doctor sighs into eternity