Random Ghosts

The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield #1.3

Released: 13 June 2014

Listened: 3/5/21

This is Doctor Who, so we’re accustomed to those story openings where a bunch of confusing, seemingly random, possibly contradictory things are happening, sometimes out of order. This is a 49-minute story of just those. There’s a time-loop / groundhog-day thing going on, on the planet where Benny went searching for Ace, with everybody repeating each day with no memory of what came before. Except they can leave messages for themselves, so really it’s more like Memento, if Memento took place in a random order and the messages were untrustworthy. One thing that’s constant is that Ace isn’t happy to see Benny, and she’s being particularly insistent that this planet should not be rescued. That’s pretty unlike Ace, but because we’re getting the story from Benny’s point of view, it never becomes clear. I have no idea how Guy Adams wrote this without going mad, and it definitely takes a good amount of concentration to listen to. There’s a good slap-in-the-face climax, but there isn’t really a resolution as such. If it were a standalone, that would seem like a disappointing ending. As a cliffhanger, it makes you wonder if 49 minutes were really necessary to get to this point. But it’s well constructed and experimental, so points for that.