Lost Property

Stranded #1.1

Released: 17 June 2020

Listened: 12/30/21

This story is the beginning of a new boxed set, this time a little different. With the TARDIS badly damaged after the last story, the team has crash-landed on Earth, specifically 2020 London, and they’re going to be stuck there for quite a while. (It’s a COVID-free version of 2020, because the writers couldn’t possibly have predicted that, so just roll with it.) Although the Baker Street house is still standing, it’s been turned into flats (by Thomas Brewster, who’s no longer around, but it’s a nice continuity nod). That means the Doctor has to confront the one enemy he can never defeat: responsibility. He’s very good at running from it, however, and gives it his best shot here, essentially abandoning Liv and Helen so he can tinker with ways to get the TARDIS working again. Helen is the closest thing they have to a native, so she gets to reluctantly handle most of the paperwork, but she’s from 1963, and 2020 tech and bureaucracy is a big challenge for her. Liv was here with Molly for a while in the 1970s, but apparently she didn’t absorb enough to be much help. The focus of this entire series will be on the people living in the flats, so this story mostly just introduces them: Tania, who lives alone and has a crush on Liv; Aisha and Zakia, sisters who live together and don’t trust the Doctor; Tony and Ron, an older couple who have typical complaints about young people; Jim, a workaholic, and his son Robin, a disgruntled teen, who’ve just moved in. All of this plays to Matt Fitton’s strengths of creating realistic character interactions. The major challenge for Big Finish is keeping the Doctor out of the way of other characters and groups known to be active in 2020. Fortunately, the Thirteenth Doctor is spending most of her time up North, so that’s easy. As for the others, well, we’ll have to see. And then there’s the Curator, Tom Baker’s mysterious character from “The Day of the Doctor.” I’m not sure he was ever meant to be used as a major character in a story, but that never stops Big Finish. They’re playing him very much as a future Doctor, who remembers everything currently going on, but is trying hard not to interfere. He’s not entirely succeeding, but is limiting himself to behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Specifically, he makes himself known to Liv and Helen, but avoids the Doctor. There is actually an alien plot in here too, one involving Jim and Midge, a couple of aliens the Doctor knows in London, who collect alien artifacts to keep them out of the wrong hands, in the guise of a couple of lost property shops. The Doctor used Midge in “Absent Friends” to hide a piece of the Doomsday Chronometer, unsuccessfully. The Doctor is basically trying to scavenge parts from them, and ends up with two puzzle boxes that shouldn’t be kept together. A large part of the fun of this is seeing the Doctor far out of his element, although it does lead to friction with Liv and Helen. The other part is playing spot-the-reference, and there’s plenty of material for that. Also, Big Finish stopped releasing covers for each individual story at this point, so I'm just stuck with the ones for each boxed set. It’s a slow beginning, but this series is going to go that way, so it’s appropriate.