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The Wishing Beast and The Vanity Box is one of those Big Finish double-features that feels like rummaging through a charity-shop VHS bin and somehow finding both The Tempest and Carry On Screaming. It’s gothic, ridiculous, weirdly touching, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Let’s start with The Wishing Beast, which is pure fairy-tale horror filtered through BBC afternoon drizzle. The Doctor and Mel land on this shattered asteroid fragment of a world, a little rock floating in the void where two ancient sisters live in a cottage straight out of Shakespeare’s “don’t trust the tea ladies” school of prophecy. They natter on about granting wishes and how the legendary Wishing Beast can make your dreams come true (you know, the kind of dreams that usually involve death, cosmic suffering, or polyester monsters). It’s all very Tempest by way of Forbidden Planet, but Magrs injects that extra teaspoon of madness only he can: ghosts getting Hoovered up by cackling old women, the Doctor philosophising while Mel’s just trying not to get eaten.
The twist, that the Wishing Beast is the sisters’ poor mutated brother now cursed into being a pan-dimensional monster, should feel predictable, but the story plays it with such tragic melancholy that it works. It’s grotesque and sad and oddly beautiful. Colin Baker chews through the dialogue with Shakespearean relish while Bonnie Langford grounds it with pure sincerity, and suddenly, boom, the fairytale becomes existential heartbreak. Neil Gaiman could only dream.
Then there’s The Vanity Box, the weird little dessert to follow that rich gothic meal. We hop from cosmic myth to 1960s Salford (as you do) where a beauty salon is literally stealing years off its customers. Mel’s delighted, the Doctor’s suspicious, and the salon owner’s “French” accent is so over the top it circles back around to genius. Turns out, surprise, the Wishing Beast’s spirit lives on, slurping up human vanity through the medium of perm lotion and pastel hairdryers. The plot’s thinner than the salon coffee, but god, it’s fun. There’s banter, northern accents (actual northern accents, not BBC Received Pronunciation cosplay), and that sweetly absurd image of the Doctor plugging himself into a beauty contraption until it explodes. Camp, charming, deeply stupid, I adored it.
Final thoughts:
This is Doctor Who at its most gleefully strange, gothic fairy tale meets northern sitcom, all wrapped in cosmic self-loathing. The Wishing Beast is haunting and heartfelt; The Vanity Box is the silly encore where everyone gets to let their hair down, literally.
Ratings:
The Wishing Beast – 4.5 out of 5 haunted vacuum cleaners possessed by sibling trauma.
The Vanity Box – 3.5 out of 5 perm machines overloaded with existential dread