Nightmare Country

Lost Stories #5.1

Released: 14 November 2019

Listened: 1/8/22

This 2019 release was the first appearance of the “Lost Stories” range since 2013. I guess they found a few more that were lost. This one features Tegan and Turlough, possibly after they picked him up again after “Frontios.” The Doctor has agreed to help some Temporal Engineers create a virtual reality to live in, because they lack a world of their own, being outside of time. Unfortunately, the process of creating such a virtual world involves going inside, so it can draw on your experiences. The Doctor and several engineers are inside when the story starts, and whoops, they’ve lost their memories. The Doctor should be the one to guide them out, but he can’t remember how. This seems like it should be a standard “amnesia, so we all have to trust each other to get out alive” story, but it isn’t, because on the outside of the VR, Tegan and Turlough are working with a bunch of engineers to try to help. Tegan is unusually empathetic in this story, convincing the other characters to work with her instead of just shouting at them, although she still has a thread of sarcasm. It’s kind of out of character, but I think I like this Tegan better. Turlough, for his part, is a little more forceful in this story than he normally is. The whole thing takes a twist in part 4, where “can we get out?” takes a back seat to “what do we do about the monsters who got out?” There’s a thread of philosophy involved, discussing the nature of reality, and what death means in VR, but it doesn’t go very deep. Still, this story was apparently rejected in the 80s for being too high-concept, and I guess I can see that, but it can’t have been that strange, because it works perfectly fine now. Also, Big Finish stalwarts Beth Chalmers and Tracy Wiles both appear as secondary characters in this story. Amazingly, this is the first time they’ve ever appeared together in one story. There are a lot of Lost Stories I didn’t care for, especially in the Sixth Doctor era, for hewing too closely to the tone of the original series, and the faults it had at the time. This one is a bit different, and I like it much better.