The Wishing Beast and The Vanity Box

A mysterious signal brings the TARDIS to a secluded region of space where the Doctor and Mel meet a pair of old ladies living in a small cottage. The ladies are sisters, one half mad, and they both greet Mel as a heroic traveller in space and time, promising her a meeting with the Wishing Beast, who will grant her her greatest desire. The Doctor is rightfully suspicious and discovers a presence on the world is trying to make contact but is being stifled from breaking through. The warning that is sent out is dire, but surely two harmless old ladies can't be the cause of such dismay?



Oh yes they can. Both posessed by powers that cannot be fully grasped, they lure travellers to their domain and treat them like heroes, only to feed them to the Wishing Beast and leave them as non-corporeal entities. But the agony of the lost souls never ends there, as the essence of the travellers is peeled away layer by layer by the Beast as it returns to feed on them time and again.

Creepy. Old people always get a bum deal in sci fi; they're almost always posessed by some evil force, or they're older than old and seething with evil power. Or they're just plain evil. Sure there's the odd one who is a benevolant type, but the baddies far outnumber them, especially when it's a pair of old ladies living on their own (there's more of that to come in Paradise Towers). Is it cliche? Not exactly. Sucking up the remaining essence of the disembodied with a vacuum... that might be. And then there's the true nature of the Beast itself; there's enough hints dropped about who it could be across the whole story that the blind and the deaf could see and hear it coming.

The Wishing Beast is played out across three episodes, leaving one single episode as another one-off adventure, The Vanity Box.

Box picks up right where Beast ends, with the Doctor and Mel arriving in the swinging 60s looking for somewhere fabulous and finding miracle time restoring makeover magic in the backstreets of London. Or somewhere in England. Maybe it was Manchester. But there's a new salon in town, with a new man running things, and people are coming out of it with years knocked off them.

Unlike the previous 3-part and 1-part combo, I.D. and Urgent Calls, both stories here are linked together not just by mere reference but by actual progression of events, with the very French sounding Mr Coiffure (there's a shock) the salon owner unwittingly acting as the agent of an alien entity. The Doctor mixes with the locals who sound like classic 1960s characters from Coronation Street, and then for the third time in the series he does drag.

At this point, Big Finish have not produced any further adventures for the sixth Doctor and Melanie Bush, and as an interesting end to the episode, Melanie makes a wish that her travels with the Doctor could continue on indefinitely. Whether this was intentional or not remains to be seen, but once more there is this feeling that Big Finish are quietly tidying up their own continuity as if they're moving on. I've still not heard if their license is being renewed for these adventures or not, but in time we shall see.

NEXT EPISODE : SPIRAL SCRATCH