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Unregenerate! opens with the Seventh Doctor locked up in what seems to be a space asylum, babbling incoherently like someone dared Sylvester McCoy to chew the entire Big Finish sound booth in one sitting. Meanwhile, Mel is off recruiting a cab driver to help track him down, which honestly feels like the most grounded and emotionally coherent part of the entire play. For a while, you’re led to think this might be a character piece about the Doctor’s mind being broken, but no — it’s all because there are multiple artificial intelligences stuffed into his head like a very sad, very loud hard drive.
The facility, run by Professor Klyst — who I kept accidentally conflating with Nazi Klein from Colditz, which did not help matters — is secretly filling its beds with humans near the end of their lives, not to care for them, oh no, but to use them as guinea pigs. And by guinea pigs, I mean convenient meat-suits into which they can shove TARDIS consciousnesses. Yes, apparently someone at the Celestial Intervention Agency thought this was a good idea, which raises the eternal question of whether the Time Lords have any kind of oversight committee, or if they just sit around in their silly hats rubber-stamping war crimes until the heat death of the universe.
On paper, this could have been great. It’s a story about identity, about death, about the horror of having your mind rewritten, and about the lengths to which a decaying empire will go to preserve its toys. This should have been chilling. But the execution never catches fire. The entire first half of the play is the Doctor muttering nonsense in different registers, and while Sylvester McCoy is clearly having the time of his life doing his “pretend insane” performance, it’s exhausting to listen to. There’s no tension, just a lot of noise. It’s all build-up with very little sense of danger, so when the eventual reveal comes — everyone here is a Time Lord and this is a CIA project to create living TARDISes — you just sort of shrug and say, “Alright then,” instead of clutching your headphones in horror.
Even the thematic material doesn’t get the exploration it deserves. The ethics of experimenting on dying humans, the nature of consciousness, the concept of using living beings as technology — these could have made for weighty science-fictional gut-punches. Instead they’re treated like background noise, something you’re meant to pick up on between extended sequences of corridor wandering and memory confusion. The result is an audio that feels like it’s straining to be a psychological thriller, but lands more as a technical exercise in how long an audience will wait for the plot to get somewhere. By the end, Mel is great, the Cabbie is likable, and the central idea could have worked — but the story never justifies its own noise.
Final Thoughts:
Unregenerate! is for people who spend their free time wondering what would happen if you crammed a TARDIS into a human skull. I do not spend my time thinking about that, and this story didn’t make me want to start.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 fractured TARDIS brains.