A Death in the Family

Main Range #140

Released: 13 October 2010

Listened: 12/31/20

We’re taking a deep dive into the continuity barrel with this one. Hex has left the team, and the Doctor and Ace, along with UNIT, are digging through the artifacts the Forge collected over time, when they find...the Doctor. An older version of the Seventh Doctor, mostly comatose, warning that Nobody No-One, the Word Lord from “Forty-Five,” is loose. You can’t just take on Nobody No-One for four straight episodes, so each episode is a semi-self-contained story. In the first, the Doctor hatches a clever plan to stop Nobody...which fails entirely, with catastrophic results. In the second, Hex ends up on a pastoral planet where Evelyn has been living for a while, so he gets to tell her about the Doctor, and she tells Hex about his mother (who she knows from “Project: Twilight” and “Project: Lazarus”). The third part is about Ace, and how she struggles to adapt to life back on Earth -- we’ve seen this before, especially in the modern series, but for Ace, it’s particularly hard. Meeting a guy named Henry Noone helps, but just as she starts to adjust, the Doctor’s long-term plan starts to kick in, and the timey-wimey gets really involved. The last part explains everything that’s been going on, and gives the final victory to Evelyn, closing out her story. The Word Lord remains an amazing character, and the Doctor’s plan to defeat him really feels earned, unlike some Seventh Doctor stories where we’re told he’s a schemer, but don’t really see it. The anguish that Ace and Hex go through feels real, and is brilliantly portrayed by both actors, and sets up the questions they have about how far they can trust the Doctor, which will be put to the test over the next several stories. It may be asking too much for this one story to bring closure to Evelyn as well as everything else it’s doing. If there’s a weak point, that’s it, but Maggie Stables is convincing in everything she does, and it’s a fitting end to her story as well. I’m bummed that Steven Hall hasn’t written for Big Finish again, but it’s hard to imagine how he could top this.