The Hesitation Deviation

Short Trips #6.12

Released: 23 December 2016

Listened: 2/14/21

This one is ostensibly a Christmas story, but like a bunch of the TV Christmas episodes, it’s a regular story that happens to take place at Christmas, without that being relevant to the plot at all. Unusually, it appears to have a frame story, with Benny explaining to a psychotherapy robot why she can never see the Doctor again, and then the rest of the story told as flashback. Of course, this is a James Goss story, so it’s not what it seems. Lisa Bowerman doesn’t normally do a lot of narrating, but as a regular director of both Short Trips and Companion Chronicles, she certainly knows how it’s done. She only imitates the Doctor a little bit, and most of that is in an exaggerated Scottish accent, similar to how Sophie Aldred does it. Natural language, and the pauses in it, are a major part of the story, so it’s better that this one comes off as Benny telling a story, rather than Lisa Bowerman reading one.