Black and White

Main Range #163

Released: 16 August 2012

Listened: 1/9/21

At last we come to the story we’ve been building to since Scutari, and the answers to some lingering questions. Immediately following “Protect and Survive,” the Black TARDIS, containing Lysandra and Sally, meets up with the white one, containing Ace and Hex, but the Doctor is nowhere to be found. There’s plenty of friction between the two groups, as Ace can’t believe that the Doctor would be running military-style missions under her nose, and Lysandra can’t believe that Ace behaves “unprofessionally,” by her standards. Hex’s trust in the Doctor is at an all-time low, and believes he’d be capable of anything. However, he and Sally hit it off immediately, almost too well to be realistic. In the way of such stories, they switch up partners, with Ace and Lysandra following one thread, Hex and Sally the other. They end up in roughly the same place, but separated in time, and all of them in the middle of the story of Beowulf. There’s a fair bit of timey-wimey going on, and things don’t seem to have gone to plan for the Doctor, but that’s what he’s got companions for. It definitely helps if you know the main events of Beowulf’s story (which I do), but I think you can follow it along fairly well even without that. Ace has a soft spot for Beowulf, one warrior to another, and it’s nice to see, given how much hostility she’s carrying around in this story. There’s enough of an ending to make this a satisfying story, but it’s also clearly the middle part of the trilogy.