The Long Way Round

Stranded #2.4

Released: 10 March 2021

Listened: 1/1/22

This boxed set was the first of this series affected by the 2020 covid lockdown (but unfortunately not the last). Much of the episodes were recorded remotely, but lockdown mostly didn’t affect the stories themselves…until John Dorney came along to write this. It’s structured as a series of one-on-one conversations, mostly a character interrogating the Doctor and his companions. It seems they jumped forward to 2050 to see what’s up with this broken future, and were promptly arrested. The interrogator knows about all of them, and their backgrounds. She believes the Doctor has done some horrible things, or at least, another incarnation of the Doctor has. So she wants to find out which Doctor she’s got in captivity, so she’ll know whether executing him will change anything. She spends a lot of time trying to convince the companions that the Doctor is capable of murder under the right circumstances, which makes the listener wonder as well, or at least wonder what the heck led to this situation. In parallel, the Curator is in the present, having a chat with a 12-year-old girl who’s noticed the TARDIS coming and going, and is now staking it out, even though the Doctor and his companions have never seen her. Tom Baker is delightfully batty, and the Curator is always written such that you don’t know when he’s being serious. It’s very talky, but there’s no harm in that, because there’s enough variety. I suspect this one will make more sense after the whole series is finished, because at the moment, it’s hard to figure out what it means in the larger context.