Main Range 57: Arrangements for War (spoilers)

Brilliantly piece of character drama by Paul Sutton, the Sixth Doctor at his most vulnerable thanks to a powerhouse performance from Colin Baker who shows that ole sixey is possibly the most caring & compassionate incarnation the Doctor's had, Evelyn falling in love & that Romeo & Juilet love story which ends tragically & yet beautifully.

8/10.

My two favorite scenes both involve Evelyn. The first is when she's in bed and admits that she's dying, and that Rossiter is the first one she's confided to about this. The second is the final scene where Evelyn talks the Doctor down from altering the past, and they have a truly wonderful heart to hearts that resolves the tension of the past few stories.

Maggie Stables and Gabriel Woolf are simply amazing together, they have a chemistry and you really believe that this the man for Evelyn.

The cliffhangers are brilliant. Instead of a moment of peril you know will be resolved quickly, you don't know how the next episode will proceed, and the story turns on these points. The Doctor realising he's gotten involved, Rossiter professing his love for Evelyn and the start of the Killoran invasion. These have consequences in this story and for Part 2, beyond.

That was excellent and quite a surprise to find a "Mills and Boon" style romance (as the CD notes say) in the MR. (I'm hearing most of the Evelyn stories for the first time and what a treat it's proving to be.)

An emotional, beautifully written and performed tragedy of war and peace, love and duty, friendship and understanding, politics, history - and Time. With an excellent cast (what a wonderful surprise it was to encounter Gabriel Woolf, playing a good man this time!) and orchestral music and sound design perfect for the theme and setting.

It's the story of two romances and a friendship all living on borrowed time, on a peaceful world where war is coming. It could almost be an Earth historical set just before WWI or WWII except for the twist - only the Doctor and Evelyn know that war is coming and they can't tell anyone for fear of changing history. But history is what they have already changed by being involved.

I very much liked the way the story was spread over time, using the news broadcasts at the start of the the later episodes to compress the action, giving time to concentrate on the romances between Krisztina and Marcus, and Evelyn and Rossiter. And also the political scheming and the sense of the clock ticking inexorably towards the Killoran invasion. Spreading the story over weeks like this made both the developing love-stories and political plots seem believable.

And it gave time for the story of the Doctor and Evelyn's friendship and how it was saved. After losing Jem and Cassie in quick succession, Evelyn doesn't understand the Doctor's apparent lack of emotion and it takes time apart and yet another tragedy - and the Doctor's reaction to it - to help her understand that his grief for all those lives he couldn't save is so much bigger on the inside. And knowing this and understanding him at last, Evelyn saves him from that most serious Time Lord sin - changing events in his own timeline. A bittersweet ending and so well played by Colin Baker and Maggie Stables.

I was left wondering one thing. We know the Doctor's casual words to young Reid doomed him and Krisztina by encouraging them to declare their love for each other, and the conclusion of their story is: better to die together in love than live apart without it. But... the Killoran invasion is defeated with terrible loss of life and destruction, yet early in the story the Doctor seems to say that it was (in the original history) defeated easily by the Kingdom Alliance, which (in the timeline we see) wasn't formed due to his interference.

So, don't the Doctor's presence and actions cost the lives not only of the Time-crossed lovers, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of "additional" people who died in the Killoran invasion that was more disastrous than it should have been? Far more people than would have died if the invasion had been defeated easily, if the Kingdom Alliance had been ready-formed to repel it? History changed very much for the worse. Or did I misunderstand something??

Cheers, it seemed so far from the 'history protects itself' idea that I wondered if the original history the Doctor told Evelyn had been fully accurate. I think there was a line somewhere in these stories about history not being as neat and tidy as it's written and I thought this could have been one example - an alliance eventually formed and the enemy defeated, but not as neatly (or with as little loss) as the official history recorded.

So it was one of the Doctor's worst catastrophes then. I must admit that when he described the world they were going to visit and the pivotal moment they were going to visit it at (war just ending, alliance just forming, alien invasion imminent) it did seem highly reckless, considering the potential for mistakes - and the way trouble follows the Doctor around. If only they'd gone to the Eye of Orion as he first suggested!