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Klein’s Story and Survival of the Fittest together feel like Big Finish grabbing you by the collar and saying “no, you don’t get to be comfortable yet”. This is the midpoint of the Klein trilogy and it is doing heavy, deliberate work. Not fireworks. Pressure. Moral pressure. The kind that leaves fingerprints.
Klein’s Story is essentially a confessional booth with teeth. Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor sits opposite Klein and lets her talk. And talk. And relive. Flashbacks spool out showing her childhood, her indoctrination, her rise, and finally the annihilation of her entire reality. Hearing it dramatized rather than referenced changes everything. This was her world. Her normal. Her history. And then Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor shows up, polite, compassionate, and casually erases it from existence. The story finally locks in why Klein hates the Doctor with such personal venom. It is not just ideology. It is grief. Grief weaponized into fascism. McCoy plays this beautifully by barely playing it at all. He listens. He probes. He lets her indict herself. It is restrained, thoughtful, and quietly devastating.
4.5 out of 5 erased timelines that still scream when you remember them.
Then Survival of the Fittest comes in like a trapdoor opening beneath your feet. Three parts, dense as hell, and doing that Seventh Doctor thing where the actual point sneaks up behind you and clubs you. The setup sounds familiar. Alien insect species. Space poachers. Illegal harvesting of Vrill jelly. Normally I groan at this point. Buzz buzz sci fi nonsense incoming. Except no. The Vrill are astonishingly well realized. They communicate through scent. They do not understand writing. They do not understand deception. The entire first episode is about learning how to talk to them at all. It is anthropology as drama, and McCoy rises to the challenge with quiet precision.
And Klein? Oh Klein. For a moment you almost believe it. She respects the Vrill. She empathizes. She condemns genocide outright. She sounds like the Doctor. It is unsettling. It is hopeful. It makes you lean forward and think maybe exposure works. Maybe understanding corrodes hate. Maybe this is how people change.
And then the rug is yanked so hard you hear your spine crack.
The poachers mistake her for a galactic authority figure. They talk openly about order, hierarchy, dominance. And Klein recognizes herself reflected in the future. Fascism did not die. It adapted. It survived. And that is all the permission she needs. The sympathy was never moral growth. It was strategic flexibility. She immediately plots to steal the TARDIS and restore history to what she believes it should be. Not kinder. Not better. Stronger. Purified.
This is cruel storytelling. Intentionally so. We are trained by fiction to expect redemption arcs. To expect the villain to see the light. Real fascists do not do that. They double down. They always double down. Survival of the Fittest refuses to lie to you about that, and it hurts. It should.
5 out of 5 alien jelly harvests that curdle in your hands.