The Enchantress of Numbers

Fourth Doctor Adventures #8.3

Released: 16 January 2019

Listened: 4/27/22

Doctor Who is rather fond of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and honestly, why not? As a result, Ada’s timeline is getting as crowded as her father’s and Mary Shelley’s with visits from various Doctors. This visit takes place toward the end of Ada’s life, after she’s retired to the countryside and given up working on mathematics. Ada is played well as a woman hovering on the edge of madness, afraid of what she’s inherited from her father along with his genius. Of course, it doesn’t help that there are actual apparitions and sinister plague doctors popping up around her. Ann gets to do some more investigating in this story, and she’s pretty happy to violate cultural norms about her “place” in order to get her job done. K-9 is noticeably absent from this one, probably because a mobile, talking computer would change the story dramatically. The monsters are a little anticlimactic, but they’re not given a lot of space in the story. Good characterization, so-so plot.