Set at about the same period as Paul Magrs' novel Verdigris which I was reading at about the same time. Mike Yates tells the story of a magician who is sucking up all of London's energy. The plot is nothing terribly new; Richard Franklin does the voices adequately, as does Michael Chance playing the evil magician. Verdigris is better. ( )

I can’t claim to be a big Mike Yates fan. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the man or anything. It’s just that I’ve seen every episode of Doctor Who from "An Unearthly Child" through "Planet of the Dead", except for the majority of Seasons Nine through Eleven. The upshot of this is that I’ve had very little exposure to Mike Yates. He hardly plays a memorable role in The Claws of Axos in any case.

So I went into The Magician's Oath, featuring Franklin reprising his role as Captain Yates, with hardly any expectations at all. Franklin is by no means bad; he reads all the lines fine, and that’s about it. His impressions of Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor and Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart are generally passable, though sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s switching between himself and the other men. Other times, though, he nails the Brigadier so well you’d swear it was Courtney himself. Ditto Pertwee. It’s weird. His Katy Manning, on the other hand, is about as good as you’d expect.

Unfortunately, Scott Handcock's story is nothing terribly inspiring, either. UNIT are investigating a series of anomalous cold spots in London during the summer: snow in the London Underground, stuff like this. It starts off simple and nonthreatening, but soon a major freezing causes a massive number of deaths in Hyde Park. (This is effectively and-- pardon the pun-- chillingly portrayed.) The massacre has only two survivors: a street magician named Diamond Jack and a woman who volunteered to be disappeared in one of his performances. But for some reason, the Doctor and the Brigadier don’t think this is strange at all, leaving Mike Yates and Jo Grant to sneak off and investigate Diamond Jack themselves in the first of many baffling decisions made by characters in this story.

In the end, the whole story feels a bit aimless-- things ascribed importance in the beginning, like the sole survivor of the Hyde Park massacre, are just dropped-- and the climax is uninspiring to say the least. And though Richard Franklin's performance is adequate, this story needs more than adequate to save it. Next time I want to relive the glory days of UNIT, I’d be better off picking up one of those third Doctor serials I still haven’t seen yet, instead...

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

4,0 ( )