Absent Friends

Doom Coalition #3.1

Released: 22 September 2016

Listened: 12/11/21

Boxed set three is now a Dorney/Fitton two-hander, with the other writers absent. And this one starts out with a powerful tearjerker from Dorney. The Doctor wanted to go to Gallifrey to continue the search for Caleera and the Eleven, but ends up in 1998 England, a small town not far from London. Because it’s 1998, people are starting to get into mobile phones, but everyone in this town starts getting prank calls on their mobiles, with the callers pretending to be deceased loved ones. Or is that what’s happening? Helen is surprised to have landed relatively close to her own time, when people she knows could still be alive. And still being something of a newbie, she succumbs to temptation once she’s out of the Doctor’s sight. As a result, she learns the hard way the cost of being a companion. It’s a fairly new-series concept, but a companion dropping off the face of the Earth has consequences for the people left behind, which Helen hadn’t considered. The idea of one disappearance ruining a family’s place in society seems a bit much, to me, but that’s the English class system for you, I guess. Contrasting with what Helen’s going through, the Doctor and Liv are trying their usual X-Files routine, and getting an awful lot wrong. It’s rare to see the Doctor so completely confused and stuck. And then Liv has to deal with her own family issues, which Nicola Walker plays gorgeously. It’s one of the stories in this set that doesn’t appear to connect to the larger plotline, but when it does, it’s so elegant that it looks seamless. Dorney was really on form with this one, cranking out a truly memorable story in each series.