The Love Vampires

Connections #2

Released: 6 December 2022

Listened: 1/28/23

It’s a good thing you got the comedy out of the way, because this one is both dark and heart-rending. The TARDIS lands on a space station with only a couple of surviving crew members, because the rest have been killed by vampires. Rather specific vampires, it seems: they lure people in by creating very convincing hallucinations of the victim’s lost love. Apparently the heightened emotional state is seasoning for them. They’ve got all the traditional vampire weaknesses, though, which results in the destruction of a double bass, as it’s the only source of wood. All that aside, the exciting thing for the listener is digging into the pasts of the characters. Liv has an old boyfriend from Kaldor who she wanted to run away and see the universe with, but he died. Helen sees a schoolmate named Jean, which puts an interesting light on her orientation without being overt. But the Doctor, well, who wouldn’t want to know who he saw? And we do get to find out, although how much of it was a lie, we can’t be sure. We’ve never heard of these characters before, and it remains to be seen if we ever will again, so maybe it means nothing, but the actors play the scenes completely, and you can feel both the joy and the pain of seeing people they thought lost. I think if this one had been longer, the plot could have been more developed, with some mystery around the vampires and what they do. As it is, the story sticks straight to its core, and that’s not the plot.