Gobbledegook

Interludes #4

Released: 5 April 2023

Listened: 5/14/23

The Doctor is solo and says he’s heading for Earth, so I’ll assume this takes place hereabouts. It’s an interlude, so it’s told in a narrated style, but it’s read by Dan Starkey, who can do lots of different voices, so it feels rather full-cast. The Doctor visits Velar, an old friend of his, a member of a race of evolved armadillos called the Batearian. He comes up again in “Friendly Fire” a bit further down the line. At this point, he’s retired from being an ambassador, and is chief librarian at a university on his homeworld. If you’re familiar with university libraries, this immediately creates a visual image…with a giant armadillo. Unfortunately, there’s something wrong with the books; they’re being rendered unreadable, somehow. Lucky for Velar, the Doctor is here to help. It’s not too often that we get to see the Fifth Doctor take over and steamroll people into helping by force of personality, and I wish we did, because he’s terribly nice about it, unlike most of his other incarnations. Maybe he can get away with it when Tegan isn’t undercutting him every second. Because of the narrated format, the story is slow, almost textual, which gives Velar the opportunity to think about the previous times he met the Doctor (an earlier version, apparently), and about his place in his current society. Which is nice character work, if we’re ever going to see Velar again outside of “Friendly Fire,” and I kind of doubt that.