Baker Street Irregulars

Stranded #2.3

Released: 10 March 2021

Listened: 1/1/22

This one is another reference title, referring not to the group from Sherlock Holmes, but rather to the Special Operations Executive, a British spy group during WWII. Because we’ve addressed everybody else’s secrets by this point, it’s time for Aisha and Zakia to get a trip. Turns out their grandparents worked for the SOE, their grandfather as an administrator, and their grandmother as an agent, although the girls never knew that; they assumed she was a typist or something. So the Doctor takes them back to have a look, since the TARDIS is stuck near Baker Street. While finding their grandparents is easy enough, and they’re totally adorable, their popping up on this particular day threatens a mission that Grandma Nisha just went on in France, by garbling communications. The Doctor offers to go to France himself and fix things, and Zakia insists on going along. This distresses Aisha a great deal, because of another family secret between them. Worse, once they’re on-site, they realize Nisha has been captured, so the Doctor needs to rescue her while Zakia finishes Nisha’s mission. Elsewhere, Liv and Tania seem to be having some problems, mostly around the fact that there’s some things that Tania simply can’t reveal to Liv. In this case, there’s been a WWII-era bomb found in Baker Street in the present, so Tania takes advantage of the Doctor’s trip to disable it shortly after it landed, because she knows it’s alien tech, and won’t say how. This story doesn’t quite have the emotional punch of the previous, and it’s a bit odd that the Doctor would take Zakia and Aisha on a trip, because they haven’t really shown companion capabilities, but everybody else in the house knows now, so we can’t leave them out, I guess.