L.E.G.E.N.D.

Ravenous 3.3

Released: 9 April 2019

Listened: 12/27/21

The idea behind this one is that the Ravenous are associated with myth and legend, so the Eleven suggests seeking out Professor Marathanga, an expert. (Everyone keeps saying they’re mythical anyway; they seem more like eating machines to me, but OK.) Marathanga is one of those “celebrity academics” who’s more interested in her Q-rating than original research. She’s got a massive AI recording her researches (the titular Legend), a vast store of programmable matter called “plasm,” which can be used to make just about anything, and she’s in 19th-century Germany to get stories from the Brothers Grimm. Helen is beside herself with glee; Liv doesn’t know who they are. Turns out that if you take an overpowered AI, stuff it full of folklore, and don’t program the proper safeguards, it starts to get Ideas. If you then give it a supply of gray goo it can use to make those ideas real, that’s a recipe for disaster, so of course that’s what they get. The Doctor is trying his level best to give the Eleven the benefit of the doubt and work with him, although that’s a catastrophe waiting to happen, and it nearly does. Liv, for her part, is darkly, yet delightfully snarky, cheerfully wishing death on the Eleven at every possible juncture. On the whole, though, this episode doesn’t advance the story very much, and feels like a bog-standard “history with aliens” story. It doesn’t stick in the mind very well.