Paradise Towers
Story 145, Episodes 658-661, Season 24 Episodes 5-8
Doctor: Seventh Doctor
Companions: Mel Bush
Life on the 304th floor isn’t everything its cracked up to be as Season 24 improves the bizarre but unique Paradise Towers.
The Review
Paradise Towers feels like it’s supposed to be a satire about something nobody has ever heard of. As it stands, it’s a tale about a massive apartment complex (304 floors!) gone wrong. There are the Kangs, red and blue gangs of young women who are spraying graffiti and getting into trouble with names like ‘Fire Escape’. The Caretakers are the police force of the towers, all men, following an absurdly complex byzantine rulebook. Then, there are the Residents, old women who are surviving as cannibals. If anything, the classic series usually has white men and more white men as supporting characters, so two roving gangs of women is a fun difference. This is a story that really goes for it, it’s not great, but it feels fresh and weird and different in a way Time and the Rani failed to. Oh, and Mel screams less so that’s a plus for everyone involved.
The villain is the Chief Caretaker, played by Richard Briers. I’ve seen reviews say is absurdly over the top, to the contrary, I think he’s exaggerated performance is a perfect fit in this story. When he gets possessed by the ‘Great Architect’ who wants humans to not pollute his art, his zombie-like performance is noticeably different. We also get ‘Pex’, an amusingly buff ‘hero’ of the towers who it turns out is a coward, but after flirting with Mel sacrifices himself to save the day. In contrast, McCoy’s Doctor is disappointingly pretty generic in this story, there are some moments of character like his silly rulebook escape and looking bored to tears watching an intro video on the towers but there’s not a lot of unique characterization going on so far. He’s certainly far less obstinate than his predecessor, but nothing has stood out in the first two stories.
Overall, Paradise Towers is a weird wacky adventure that feels like a send-up of…something, I don’t know, but it’s got its place in the charm of weird Who stories.
8/10 A full improvement from the previous story on uniqueness alone
Reviewing Doctor Who from Start to Finish 