Review by Jacob Licklider
When this ninth series of The War Master was announced, it was also announced as the first of three final sets to be produced under Scott Handcock, all made as he was preparing to transfer to Doctor Who on television as script editor, though as is tradition with the range it is still a while before that final set is released (it is currently slated for a June 2024 release). Solitary Confinement is the first of these three sets and while there isn’t an intent to make a trilogy of series, the listener can’t help but notice that the final two sets have titles of Rogue Encounters and Future Phantoms, while Solitary Confinement seems like the odd one out. As a set there are moments where it feels like a greatest hits of the style of stories The War Master as a range does, building up to a final twist which in and of itself has similarities to some of the other final twists of the range (Hearts of Darkness in particular comes to mind especially). For the purposes of this review, I only listened to the set through once to analyse it on initial impressions, but I have a feeling that the recontextualisation, something that becomes quite obvious in hindsight, might explain some of the issues I found myself having with the set, mainly with how derivative it is. There is a general theme of the Master being imprisoned in an intergalactic insane asylum which is such an evocative image, yet for much of the set it is sadly used as a framing device for the middle two stories with the opening and closing episodes being the main thrust of the asylum stories, for better and for worse. Because of these issues, I have decided to forgo the usual individual episode scores as all four have highs and lows with things that work and don’t work for me not necessarily being the same for you as a listener.
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