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The Boy That Time Forgot opens with the Fifth Doctor sulking in Victorian England because Thomas Brewster nicked the TARDIS like some scrappy chimney sweep with a cosmic death wish. The Doc stands there in the foggy murk, probably smelling of soot and disappointment, and decides the smartest thing to do is gather a bunch of English toffs, make them hold hands, and chant numbers until reality cracks open like an egg. He keeps insisting it is Very Serious Science. You can almost hear him sweating. If someone had told him it looked like ritual magic, he would have thrown a petticoated fit.
But hey. It works. Sort of. They tumble backward in time to a primordial Earth that feels like the fever dream of a natural history museum after eating a dodgy kebab. Sentient giant scorpions rule the land. They stroll around with posh voices, articulating every syllable like they are performing Shakespeare in the West End while waving enormous murder pincers. The Doctor gets captured because of course he does, and the whole troupe gets escorted to meet the Scorpion King. And the Scorpion King is Adric.
Yeah. That Adric. The lad who died heroically in Earthshock. Except apparently he did not. Apparently he survived by weaponizing maths so hard it rebooted his mortality. And now he has been here for five centuries, brooding and festering and building a city of scorpion people who worship him as their messiah. He has also spent five hundred years pining for Nyssa in the worst Nice Guy way possible. The story tries to make this tragedy. My entire soul screamed oh God Adric no like thirteen times.
But here’s the paradox: that ridiculousness is also part of the charm. The story leans into its own ridiculousness with a weird kind of pride. The audio effects — jungle noises, scorpion chittering, alien city ambience — absolutely deliver on atmosphere. Every time a scorpion demands loyalty or pincer-clacks something in the dark, you can almost smell the thunder and sweat of those unreal jungles. And there are genuine moments of beauty: in despair, in regret, in the Doctor wrestling with the guilt over Adric’s original sacrifice. The voice acting — Nyssa’s horror, the Doctor’s guilt, Adric’s bitterness — is raw.
Where it falls down is in cohesion and tone. The first half is scrappy and scruffy, then suddenly it tries to shoehorn heavy ideas — guilt, survival, redemption — into a monster-scorpion soap opera, and the marriage between those ideas is shaky. The scorpions talk philosophy one minute, demand blood the next, and attempt to act like a full civilisation while swinging pincers at everything that moves. The Doctor, for all his moral certainties, ends up rolling with the absurdity because, well, what else can he do? It makes the resolution feel less like reward and more like exhaustion.
Themes? There are bones of something deep. The cost of survival. What it means to cheat death. Isolation and what it does to innocence. Adric’s resentment, his warped sense that the universe owes him for being left to die — that could be a searing study in trauma and bitterness. But because the story is so wrapped up in scorpion-pincer nonsense and pulp-adventure tropes, those themes only peek out between the claws.
Final Thoughts:
And despite how utterly silly it gets, it works more often than it should. It is wobbly and daft and proudly bizarre, and the sheer gusto of the performances keeps it alive. This is not a bad story. It is a scruffy one with flashes of charm and a fondness for swinging its claws around.
Rating: 4 out of 5 vibrating scorpion pincers and improbable time-hack rituals.