The Krillitane Feint

Classic Doctors, New Monsters #5.1

Released: 21 January 2025

Listened: 3/19/26

This entry in the "Classic Doctors, New Monsters" range comes from the fifth boxed set, but features Michael Troughton's Second Doctor, as well as Jamie and Zoe, making this CDNM story the chronologically earliest. Of course, that doesn't matter too much, because the Doctor in this story knows exactly who the Krillitane are and what they can do. The trick, though, is that the reader is expected to think of the bat-like creatures from "School Reunion" (and they're on the cover if you don't), but in fact this is audio, and the Krillitane are famously malleable, so the listener has no idea what they should look like. Because this is a Second Doctor story, there's a base under seige, in this case a military outpost on a near-empty planet, where they're experimenting on Krillitane. This goes more or less the same way as base-under-seige stories ever do, although the military folks aren't quite as stubborn as they would be in the 1960s. This story is written by John Dorney, which means you can expect a twist, and I was able to figure it out before the story told me. I didn't catch all the clues, though, and so it warrants a re-listen in the future. This is a good story, but not a great one in isolation, possibly because it's setting up for a sequel, which is a long, long way down the road, under the rules of this project.