The Missing Link

War Master #3.3

Released: 3 July 2019

Listened: 1/14/22

Once the War Master stories became an ongoing series, one of the obvious things fans wanted was an appearance from the Doctor, which would have been the Eighth Doctor, following continuity. (Although having Sirs John Hurt and Derek Jacobi together in a story would have been beyond awesome, it was established that the War Master was gone before the War Doctor came on the scene.) So we get stories like this, where the Doctor essentially drops in as a secondary character to the Master’s story, and is doomed not to remember it, because otherwise the Tenth Doctor might have recognized Professor Yana in “Utopia.” Which makes these stories a little silly, from the perspective of this project, because the listener knows about as much as the Doctor does. In this case, the Master has built a giant medical facility on some planet, and he’s got a number of scientists researching…something. Something to do with lycanthropes, or psychic abilities, or both. The Doctor pops up rather randomly and rescues one of the subjects, a psychic woman named Alice (who was introduced in the earlier stories I’m not covering). The Doctor is unusually fuzzy-headed because of her powers, and keeps forgetting what he’s doing as he and Alice run around the spacious ventilation system. He’s being even more flippant than usual, which is a bad sign, but Alice doesn’t know him well enough to know that. The Doctor fulfills his role as semi-antagonist fairly well, although the Master is continually one step ahead, because it’s his story.