Audio
Adventures in Time and Space #33:
The Green Man
written by
Zoltán Déry
Its back to
the world of semi-legal spin-offs for one of those later run BBV
audios where they licensed the rights to monsters and wrote stories
about them. In this case its the Krynoids, a vegetable creature that
takes over humans and turns them into Krynoids.
In this case
the Krynoid has landed in darkest Mummerset sometimes in medieval
times. In theory I see the thinking. Medieval times and an alien that
possesses people and takes them over. Unfortunately, it doesn't
really work out like that. As with in the original story there are
two Krynoid pods, the first one takes over a herbalist called Osbert
but he's dispatched in pretty short order leaving us with Pod #2
which has possessed a wolf and therefore isn't much conversation.
This being an audio drama, an enemy that isn't much conversation is a
pretty bad thing to have.
Zoltán
Déry tries, bless him, to
deliver on impressive visuals but, again, this is an audio and so
having people telling me that the Krynoid has got bigger again is
just a little underwhelming.
There is
some investment to be had with the human cast even if the local (and
non-speaking) lady's fever is a pretty bad attempt at raising tension
seeing as we never get to meet her and her illness is never really
defined. The character of Moses, a Jewish doctor and scientist
brought in by the earl to heal his lady, is interesting though his
allusions to losing his family during the crusades (and at European
hands) serves as little more than a reason for the earl to feel
uncomfortable and stop calling him “Jew” to his face.
All in all,
I'd say this was a better story in concept than execution. There are
some neat ideas like Moses trying to reverse engineer Greek fire
using limited resources and a templar knight scientifically proving
the Krynoid isn't a demon by dipping his sword in holy water and
discovering it does nothing to make the sword more effective.
Oh well,
they can't all be winners.
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