Seizure

Ravenous 2.4

Released: 9 October 2018

Listened: 12/24/21

OK, enough about Christmas, are we planning on having any actual Ravenous in this Ravenous boxed set? I’m glad you asked! Instead of Matt Fitton, who was unavailable, Guy Adams fills in, and doesn’t provide a slam-bang ending, but rather a tight, claustrophobic story with a solo Ravenous to establish what these creatures are like. The TARDIS crew respond to a distress call from the Eleven – or rather, the Doctor does, because Liv and Helen have serious misgivings about the idea. They find him in a dying TARDIS he stole from another Time Lord after he murdered her, and scared out of his wits. We eventually learn that what he’s scared of is a single Ravenous, an entity that eats Time Lords for their temporal energy, and apparently never stop hunting once they’ve got a scent. Which turns it into Alien or any other enclosed-space horror story, except in this one, the dying TARDIS can rearrange its own geometry, so getting separated is especially bad. It’s a tight story with a small cast, and a chunk of the drama comes from the rising sense of panic that’s taking over the Time Lords, which the Doctor fights against, and the Eleven totally doesn’t. It’s also the sort of story that’s effective on audio if done right, and I think this one is. It’s self-contained, which makes it a nice introduction to the Ravenous story.