Displaced

Main Range #268

Released: 8 September 2020

Listened: 12/15/20

The second short story from this release is a locked-house mystery, where the TARDIS crew is trying to discover what happened to a family who’s been living in this one house on the Fens for generations. The mystery itself is part alien, and part very mundane, which is a nice twist as they figure it out. The house also has a smart speaker, and the story is set in 2020, although the speaker is rather smarter than a typical Alexa. (Hex also implies that he comes from further in the future, but he’s only from 2021, so that’s a bit of an error.) A large chunk of the story plays out in the emotions between the characters, as is fitting for a locked-room mystery. It’s partially Ace and Hex’s unspoken feelings for each other, but also the fact that the Doctor’s constant testing gets on their nerves sometimes. There’s also a stronger use of wordplay than in most stories, but it verges on “too clever,” and may not have been strictly necessary to the story. This was written and recorded before covid, and of course doesn’t mention it, but author Katharine Armitage notes in the extras that the story has eerie echoes of lockdown. I think this is the better of the two stories.