The World Beyond the Trees

Short Trips #7.1

Released: 31 January 2017

Listened: 11/19/21

This isolated Short Trip takes place concurrently with “Damascus,” also by Jonathan Barnes. That’s possible because Liv is currently in 1972, living in Baker Street with Molly. Liv receives a strange message from the Doctor in a dream, and wakes the next morning to find all the humans asleep, or at least dazed and inattentive. Of course an alien did this, for pretty good reasons, and Liv helps her get to Project Damascus. The whole story has a strange, dream-like quality to it, which even Liv remarks on, but it leaves a lot of plot elements unexplained. If you listen to both this and “Damascus,” you’ll supposedly get the whole story, except it doesn’t really feel that way. The story is told in first-person by Liv, in the form of a letter to her father, so it’s fitting that Nicola Walker narrates. It fits nicely as a connection to “Absent Friends,” but that’s still a ways off yet.