Customer Reviews

Stranger : In Memory Alone [VHS]

On the same planet, the Stranger and Miss Brown wake up at a train station named Rothley, with no recollection of who they are and where they are. While they retain their knowledge, or perceptions of themselves, such as that the Stranger's perception that he's a clever fellow, nothing personal about them remains, including their past together.

Miss Brown encounters a bespectacled stockbroker or accountant-type man in a suit and bowler hat who's waiting for the train, and who's obsessed about routine. "We must catch the train. We can't be late for work." She also hears a weird noise from the speakers and also from the dark downstairs, where the answer seems to lie.

The Stranger, aboard a train, wakes up and fiddles with a box on the train, which eventually reaches the station, and then vanishes just like an image being turned on or off from a television. Also, the bowler-hatted man moves jerkily at times, and freezes. It appears that he's a robot, but that's far from the case, as he plays a big part in this mysterious Kafkaesque dilemma. He is played by Nicholas Briggs, who also wrote this story.

This is the strangest in the series, in terms of how the Stranger and Miss Brown are introduced, and the idea that progresses in the story. However, for a Bill Baggs Video production, this sports a gruesome special effect-a bloody and burned corpse. The other special effects reflect the production values, not bad for a low budget video production, such as the hovering trapezoidal headed robot ticket taker. However, in the remaining three stories of the Stranger, the interesting concepts (nature vs man) in More Than A Messiah and the Ray Bradbury-ish aspects of this story and Summoned By Shadows, are gone, concentrating more on the Stranger's past, which is finally revealed.

Still, it almost worth the price just to hear Nicola Bryant's natural voice and British accent instead of the forced "American" speak she had to assume for "Peri".