Review The Nightmare Fair (1986)

[Doctor Omega]

Your thoughts on this "lost" story.....

The TARDIS falls through a time well, landing in modern-day Blackpool at an amusement fair. The Doctor and Peri, finding nothing else amiss, start to enjoy the fair's attractions. They are separated on an amusement ride; the Doctor's car is directed into the depths of the fair, while Peri encounters Kevin, a teenaged-boy looking for his brother who is missing but had last been seen at the fair weeks ago. The two are also eventually captured and brought to a prison where the Doctor has also been caged.

They discover their captor is the Celestial Toymaker, who has been stuck on Earth for several millennia, tricking a few unsuspecting humans into playing games with him and losing, become his perpetual servants. The Toymaker created the time well to bring the Doctor here, and added elements to the fair to help capture the Doctor. The Toymaker is on the verge of completing his "great work": an arcade game that feeds on the souls that lose to it, which then can generate powerful creatures with which the Toymaker plans to take over Earth. He is prepared to have the game mass-produced in America to complete his plan. The Doctor, who knows that the Time Lords do not fully know who or what the Toymaker is, learns that he is a powerful psychic being from another dimension where time moves much slower, giving him his seemingly immortality. Knowing that he cannot hurt the Toymaker physically, he works with Peri, Kevin, a Venusian engineer and a human android who is also one of the Toymaker's captives, to construct a device to disrupt the Toymaker's psychic field. The Doctor then traps him in a time field of his device that prevents the Toymaker from being able to control anyone outside of it and that will last forever. The other creatures captured by the Toymaker are freed, including Kevin's brother. The Doctor decides to return with Peri back to enjoy the fair a bit more.

2:20 for NIGHTMARE FAIR on documentary....

On to the next story.....

THE ULTIMATE EVIL.....

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/the-ultimate-evil-1986.5468/


Back to the previous story....

REVELATION OF THE DALEKS....

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/revelation-of-the-daleks-1985.5355/

 

[Doctor Omega]

 

[Doctor Omega]

 

[Doctor Omega]

It would have been nice to see Michael Gough back as the Toymaker, but am fairly confident that they would have given him a ridiculously incorrect costume, making him look frankly daft, whereas all the speculative art has him back in his 1966 costume.

 

[Doctor Omega]

I wonder if there is, indeed, an alternative universe where all of these lost stories got made at the time, never being cancelled.

Big Finish help us to live these things... to a degree, so that is one good thing I can say for them.