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Welcome to the Doctor Who funfair from hell, where the rides don’t just break down, they eat you alive, and the clown at the ticket booth knows your mother’s maiden name. The Fifth Doctor, Peri, and Erimem roll up to the Axis, a cosmic landfill for busted timelines, and it’s basically the multiverse’s “lost and found” bin after a tequila binge. Here’s where Time Lords dump all their narrative mistakes. Whole universes. Whole people. Like cleaning your hard drive but the recycle bin screams.
We open with Peri casually deciding today is the day to bully Erimem for not being fluent in English yet. Not “your alien dialect doesn’t make sense to me” confused—no, Peri goes full condescending schoolmarm because Erimem can’t yet parse the sheer nonsense firehose that is English spelling. Which, hello? They’re on the TARDIS. The machine literally has a universal translation matrix. Why is anyone struggling with language comprehension unless the TARDIS suddenly took annual leave? And while we’re here, can we not pretend Ancient Egyptian didn’t have an actual written language? The script they had was robust, complex, and millennia older than Peri’s smug assumption that it’s just “little pictures.”
But sure, let’s all spend the opening act declaring “Erimem can’t read” as though she’s completely illiterate, when what we actually mean is “Erimem can’t read modern English orthography yet.” Which—newsflash—is a linguistic labyrinth full of silent letters, irregular verbs, and rules that exist purely to be broken. This is our starting note. It’s not promising.
From there, the TARDIS arrives at the Axis—a cosmic dumping ground for broken timelines, where the Time Lords sweep all their narrative continuity mistakes under the rug and hope no one notices. Whole universes. Whole people. It’s a fantastic premise: a prison of ghost realities, a place where the dead timelines linger like half-forgotten dreams.
Peri spends most of the runtime rolling her eyes so hard you can hear it through the audio, occasionally getting to pilot the TARDIS or throw some sarcastic shade. Erimem gets the short straw: kidnapped early on so she can sit quietly in the narrative corner while the plot focuses on the Doctor having yet another midlife crisis about whether saving people sometimes means erasing them entirely. Which—okay, fair, big theme—but maybe let Erimem do something other than be kidnapped bait in a glitter prison?
The premise is genuinely great: a space between realities where broken timelines linger, half-alive, half-forgotten. A place where the Doctor’s past mistakes aren’t just theoretical—they’re sentient. You could do horror with this. You could do a tragic morality play. You could dig into what it means to be “deleted” from history. But instead we get carnival music and a plot that meanders like a drunk staggering between tents, occasionally stopping to vomit exposition.
Sound design is the MVP here. The warped fairground noises, the dragon (yes, dragon) made of pure nightmare fire, the shifting echo of impossible spaces—chef’s kiss. You can hear the unreality bending. The problem is, you also have to hear the Jester filling every gap with yet another “LOOK AT ME, I’M CRAZY” routine. Subtlety was not invited to this party.
By the third act, the stakes are allegedly enormous—the TARDIS stolen, the Axis collapsing, timelines at risk of total obliteration—but it still feels like you’re watching someone shuffle cards for too long before pulling the wrong one anyway. We wrap with the Doctor making the kind of morally complicated choice that should linger in your brain like a haunting… but here it just sort of flops to the floor with a sad squeak.
Final verdict:
One great setting, one wasted villain, two underused companions, three too many nursery rhymes.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 screaming carnival mirrors.