The Catalyst

Companion Chronicles #2.4

Released: January 2008

Listened: 4/2/22

A couple of Companion Chronicles slip in before we jump back to the full-cast stories, which gives Louise Jameson a chance to stretch by playing several characters, including the Doctor. She says it’s difficult to do a Tom Baker impersonation, but hers is one of the better ones I’ve heard. Like most early Companion Chronicles, the frame story takes place later in Leela’s life, but for her, that’s complicated, because this was recorded in 2007, when not a lot of detail was known about the Time War. So she survived, Gallifrey didn’t, and now she’s prisoner of a race called the Z’nai. The flashback relates her first encounter with the Z’nai, which involves visiting a Victorian-era mansion (again). The owner, Joshua Douglas, was apparently a previously unknown companion of the Third Doctor, never mentioned in any other story, who parted ways with the Doctor after a disagreement about how to stop the warlike Z’nai. Leela seems pretty inexperienced herself; her reading is rudimentary, she doesn’t know table manners, and she’s very quick to violence, but the story has to be placed here for Reasons. The story itself is quite dark. The body count is absurdly high, but also the Doctor has to try to convince several people that genocide is bad, even in self-defence. And he fails. It’s really kind of a grim moment in Leela’s relationship with the Doctor, and if we didn’t have a whole bunch of Fourth Doctor Adventures to offset it, it might be quite depressing. But Louise Jameson’s fantastic acting makes up for a lot.