Fiesta of the Damned

Here is an interesting story.  It takes place during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930’s, which is a piece of history that many of us English-speakers know very little about.  This is a dark period for Spain, and a cruel time that not many incarnations of the Doctor would probably deal with too well.  So of course this is a 7th Doctor, Ace, and Mel story.

Fiesta of the Damned has soldiers and and priest, aliens, and a leper colony.  It’s almost fantastic in its colorful range of characters and ideas.  The writer’s personal experiences of Spain, though (as he describes wonderfully in the interviews after), really help bring all these ideas to life.  The dignified “leper” is based on a real person he met in a former-leper-colony-village.  Actors with Spanish accents are carefully selected to bring the Spanish characters an authentic sound.

And of course on top of that you’ve got the unlikely pairing of Ace and Mel.  As in the previous story they are getting along famously, complementing a strength for the other’s weakness.  Though they’ve swapped relative positions in this story from the last: this time Mel spends more time with the Doctor and Ace strikes out with a new “adrenaline-junky” friend that she flirts with off and on.

I have mixed feelings about the alien in this story, though.  They’re almost on the “evil from the dawn of time” scale, ennobled with a backstory where the Time Lords “foresaw a time” when the universe would be infested with their God Seeds and the High Council took action to wipe them out, something the Doctor not-so-subtly implies that he was once entrusted to carry out.  Although the God Seed creatures are threatening, and quickly mutate humans into their own hybrids like a plague, they don’t quite live up to the god-like sense of power and threat.  The Doctor himself seems a bit lax on making sure they’re stopped… until he learns the true scope of their infestation on Earth.  Besides, the phrase “the Time Lords have foreseen a time…” is practically a trope by now, along with the Fondue Set of Rassilon.

Anyway, this is a strong story with character relationships that develop really well, and at the same time introduces many (if not most) of its listeners to a piece of history that they’ve probably only ever heard about, at most.  I didn’t go in expecting much, and it’s not as though Fiesta of the Damned has made it to my fictitious Top Ten list, but it did come out as being quite memorable and worth a recommendation to anyone interested in the 7th Doctor’s stories.