Snow

Stranded #3.3

Released: 2 December 2021

Listened: 1/3/22

James Kettle is the writer on this one, and although he mostly does comedy writing for his day job, this one is an emotionally loaded tearjerker. For once in this set, the story starts at the beginning, rather than in the middle. The Doctor wants to narrow down the source of the Divine Intervention problem. They can’t find it in 2020, and they’ve seen 2050, so he decides to split the difference and check out 2035. Andy’s up for it, but Liv and Tania have a fight early on, based on whether their thing is permanent or temporary, given Liv’s lifestyle, so Tania sits out this mission. Going such a short distance into the future always presents temporal problems, and this time they find the Baker Street house occupied only by Ron, Tony having passed away a few years ago, and everyone else has moved out. However, for some reason it’s snowing, but just on the house, and nowhere else in the world. The Doctor is even more enigmatic and cryptic than usual in this story, and shows less regard for human emotions, which irritates Helen quite a bit. Liv, unfortunately, learns some things about the future after they left 2020, which leads her to regard them as fixed, much to Andy’s shock and dismay. It’s nice to see a companion worrying about that sort of thing, since the Doctor (and writers) often just ignore it. However, the Divine Intervention dystopia is fully dug in by this point, so they’ll have to keep looking. It’s hard to tell if the snow here is supposed to reference “The Snowmen” from TV; it’s not the same, but you could draw a connection if you wanted to, which I guess is the best kind of reference. But the point is the nature of death and mourning, and this story certainly fills that goal.