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Kiss of Death drifts in like a damp handshake from someone you don’t remember meeting, smiles politely, and then proceeds to explain its entire personality in the flattest possible tone while I slowly realise… oh no. Oh NO. This is going to be one of those.
You know the ones. Where everything is technically fine but your soul is quietly trying to leave your body out of sheer under-stimulation.
We’ve got Peter Davison back as the Fifth Doctor, still doing that gentle, cricket-clad “please stop making everything worse” energy, alongside Nyssa (competent, kind, tragically underused here), Tegan Jovanka (who deserves better and knows it), and Vislor Turlough…
…ah. Yes. Turlough.
This is very much A Turlough Episode™. Which is great if you’re one of the approximately two people on Earth whose life mission is “more Turlough lore please,” and less great if you’re, you know, conscious.
The plot kicks off with Turlough getting kidnapped by a group of space bank robbers. Already I’m like, okay, heist vibes? Potential? Maybe some tension, some character drama, a bit of spice?
Sure. In theory. Because these robbers are trying to break into his grandfather’s vault, which should be dripping with intrigue and family secrets and oh my god give me anything to latch onto emotionally. We even get a reunion with his childhood love, which SHOULD be juicy, right? Complicated feelings, unresolved tension, longing, betrayal, something??
Instead it’s like watching two mannequins politely acknowledge each other’s existence in a department store.
I am BEGGING for chemistry. Even mild static. A small spark. A static cling sock. ANYTHING.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and the rest of the crew are in pursuit, which should create this nice split narrative of tension building on both sides. Instead it just sort of… happens. Events occur. People move from A to B. Dialogue is exchanged. My brain is gently powering down like a Windows 98 screensaver.
And then, oh yes, the monster.
The vault is protected by this sentient ice/flesh creature, which sounds AMAZING on paper. Body horror! Creeping dread! A living security system that punishes intrusion! This should be the moment where the story goes “surprise, we have teeth.”
Reader, it does not have teeth. It has the vague suggestion of teeth. Conceptual teeth. Teeth that were described in an email but never actually installed.
There’s no real sense of threat. No atmosphere thick enough to choke on. It’s just… there. Existing. Like me, listening to this, wondering if I left the oven on just to feel something.
And that’s the core problem. Nothing is offensively bad. The performances are solid because of course they are, these actors could read a cereal box and I’d applaud. The structure is coherent. The ideas are… ideas.
But it’s all so aggressively bland.
Even the themes, buried somewhere under the beige wallpaper, are trying. Legacy, identity, the weight of family expectations, the idea of emotional “vaults” we lock ourselves inside. There’s something there. There really is.
It just never comes alive. It never breathes. It never matters.
Final Thoughts
A painfully average story that squanders a decent premise and a character-focused setup on a whole lot of nothing. Not terrible, just terminally uninteresting, which somehow feels worse.
1 out of 5 emotionally unavailable space vaults that should have been way more interesting than this