Best Year Ever

Stranded #4.4

Released: 6 April 2022

Listened: 4/8/22

So what else is there to do now? Well, since they’re back in “proper” 2020, they’re suddenly dealing with the pandemic. Which they agree is better than the terrible future they averted, but still pretty awful. And this time, they can’t do anything to fix the situation, well, at least no more than they would as a group of humans in London. The story continues through the entire first year of the pandemic, and it might be kind of a strangely nostalgic look back, if we weren’t still feeling the effects of the pandemic in 2022, so in a way, it’s too soon to judge the story. Some parts are sad, some are kooky, and there’s some stress caused by, well, the same things that stressed out everybody in 2020. Liv and Tania get to work on their relationship, Helen spends time with the neighbors, and the Doctor handles being locked down better than he did back in the first boxed set…for a while. Eventually, though, they need to move on, and what happens after that is still largely unknown. There’s hints that this era of “four sets of four stories, interlinked” is over now, which is fine, as it’s been going for about 10 years. For the first time in a long time, it’s not clear what happens to the Eighth Doctor now. This small story is a fitting ending for Stranded, even though nobody could have anticipated it at the start. I like the shift in tone, and the fact that there’s a canonical explanation for what was up with the Doctor during the pandemic (this Doctor, anyway).