Animal

Lost Stories #2.5

Released: 2 June 2011

Listened: 11/17/20

This story continues again from the previous, giving this season a much more tightly coupled feeling than I think would have been normal on TV. Raine gets her first trip, but it’s just a few years into her future, to the early 21st century, which is strange enough for her, dealing with cell phones and the Internet. She and Ace have to go undercover as university students, which should present a lot of fun opportunities for sniping (Raine went to uni; Ace didn’t), but that part doesn’t last very long at all. In fact, this story has a rather unusual structure, much like the last one, where the “monsters” don’t turn up until halfway through the story. Moreover, there are two sets of monsters, and they have nothing to do with one another: sentient plants, which aren’t ever really explained, and the Numlocks, which I imagine Cartmel named by looking at his keyboard. They’re also extremely polite and dull aliens, which causes the story to drag a little. The part that doesn’t drag is the return of Brigadier Winifred Bambera from “Battlefield,” who’s a fantastic character, and Angela Bruce is clearly enjoying the heck out of her. It’s a shame she doesn’t pop up more often on audio. At the end, Raine decides to stick around on Earth for a bit, so the Doctor and Ace leave without her. Once again, we have a strong set of characters, but the story doesn’t give them much interesting to do.