The Doctor's Gambit

Short Trips Special

Released: 21 June 2025

Listened: 3/17/26

This is a Short Trip from a special collection of two stories, called "A Feast of Steven," along with "A Forest of All Seasons" much earlier in the chronology. It's another story where Steven is playing hero, but also supporting his friends in having agency of their own. The plot involves the TARDIS team getting forcibly recruited for a deadly game of human chess, which even Jacqueline Rayner admits isn't the most original trope. But what makes this story different from "Forest" is that we spend a good chunk of time in Dodo's head, which we didn't in Vicki's. The selection process gives Dodo flashbacks to school, where she was an outsider because of her accent, as well as feeling unwanted in her family after the death of her parents, which had only been alluded to briefly on TV. This story also has more explicit continuity references, as Dodo worries that the chess game might be the work of the Celestial Toymaker. On his part, Steven reflects on the number of friends he's seen die in his time with the Doctor, specifically mentioning Bret, Katarina, and Sara, as well as Oliver, which is the first reference to Oliver I've heard outside the stories where he appears, so that made me smile. The Doctor is largely absent for this one, but Peter Purves continues to do a good job invoking William Hartnell without imitating him. In the extras, he admits that he no longer hears Hartnell in his head as he did when he first started with Big Finish, which is a reminder that we're lucky that he's still both willing and able to participate.