Kill the Doctor!

Fourth Doctor Adventures #7.7

Released: 16 May 2018

Listened: 4/15/22

This is the first half of a two-part story by Guy Adams, which brings back Sutekh, but in a futuristic setting, which hasn’t been done before. Fortunately, Gabriel Woolf is still around to voice Sutekh, but I’m not sure anyone else could, and he sounds just as quietly menacing as ever. However, he’s not really the main driver of this first half. The Doctor and Leela arrive on a planet not unlike present-day earth. People are obsessed with their smartphones, in a not-veiled-at-all reference. But more important, Leela runs headfirst into late-stage capitalism, and is appalled by the treatment of the underclass. She assumes the Doctor will help overturn the government, a reasonable guess on her part, but he’s not willing to go stomping on inequality wherever it exists. Leela ends up angrier than she’s been yet with the Doctor, and decides to go fight the power on her own. The Doctor, meanwhile, gets chased by zombified mobs everywhere he goes, which he has to admit is a bit extreme even for his lifestyle. As far as the dialog goes, it’s an open secret that Tom Baker likes to punch up his lines, and he might be taking it a bit too far this time around. The Doctor seems positively flippant, even goofy at times, which isn’t really what he was like back in this season. Still, it’s a well-paced setup for a longer story.