House of Blue Fire

Main Range #152

Released: 13 September 2011

Listened: 1/7/21

This is the last of this “Doctor alone” trilogy with the Black TARDIS, but it introduces another character who’ll be important later: Private Sally Morgan. The first half of the story plays like one of the spooky Agatha Christie variants: a creepy old house, various guests, all with amnesia, and all of them with some rather specific phobias. When the Doctor arrives, he’s once again at maximum enigmatic, and expects everyone to defer to him, although he does seem to have some sympathy, at least for Sally. The second half is more traditional base-under-seige, where the monster is yet another Thing from Outside Reality, because it’s a Seventh Doctor story after all. The first half is dark and atmospheric, but the second half is sort of rote, and not terribly interesting. Sally does a good job in the “companion auditioning” part, knowing when to stand up to the Doctor and when to trust him, which is good, given what comes next.