Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Cast: Paul McGann, Nicola Walker, Hattie Morahan, Mark Bonnar, Matthew Cottle, Ewan Bailey.
And did those feet in ancient times…take on all the evil and trickery thrown at humanity and try to save the people of Earth or did they run? The Doctor never runs unless he has to, unless there is a specific reason and as he enters the end game against the terrifying Timelord known as The Eleven, the thought of running would not have been held against him or his two companions Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair; for in the darkness of The Satanic Mill no light truly shines in hope.
The final story in the first Doom Coalition box set sees the Doctor finally track down the multiple personalities of the dangerous Timelord to a point in time where the ethic of the Victorian era is brought into sharp focus and the mixture of the hateful workhouses and the so called good Christian work effort is balanced by the horror subjected upon the workers of the infernal machine being primed by the Doctor’s nemesis.
Whilst The Satanic Mill arguably doesn’t live up to the tremendous opener that the box set supplies, it nonetheless characterises the importance of looking back at some eras of British history with a more disdainful and distrusting eye, that for all the splendour that the Victorian period offered the country, its magnificent achievements in making the railways for example the envy of the world, the populace who found themselves working in factories, unregulated, dirty, polluted and soul destroying were not just workers, they were fodder, they were victims of a way of life grasped by a new breed of capitalist venture.
It is into this that The Satanic Mill takes its fill and the presentation of one of the workers arguing that time is irrelevant, as the day is from the moment they wake up to the moment they are dead is both heartbreaking and a frightening concept to get the head around, after all, the workhouse is only ever a natural disaster in Government planning away.
A good but slightly empty ending to a very enjoyable box set from Big Finish
The Satanic Mill is available to purchase as part of the Doctor Who: Doom Coalition 1 Box set from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall