The Silent City

Classic Doctors New Monsters #4.4

Released: 14 March 2024

Listened: 4/3/26

This story is a bit of a curveball. All the previous CDNM boxed sets have been four stories with four different Doctors, in chronological order. This time, the Seventh Doctor's story is last, and is a sequel to the Eighth Doctor story that preceded it. And although the other Doctors in this set have been operating with companions, this time around, the Doctor is solo. The "new monster" in this story is the Silence, which presents certain problems of continuity. In "The Impossible Astronaut," the Doctor had never heard of the Silence, nor even had an inkling that such a creature might exist. That's a bit of a self-solving problem, since the Doctor could have encountered the Silence multiple times before and not known it. But the Seventh Doctor, well, he's not really one for letting go of a mystery, especially if he suspects that he can't trust his own memories. As shown in the new series, the Silence need to be part of a massively coordinated cover-up, or else cracks start to show. And in this case, it's just a single Silent with a rogue agenda. Which might be a little odd, but groups of Silence have been known to go rogue before; even Madame Kovarian's gang was a splinter group. The problem is that the Doctor pretty much has to lose because of the nature of the story, and he does, badly. This leads to near-"Survival" levels of anguish...but not for too long. I imagine this story is better listened to with its counterpart, but in the spirit of this project, I didn't, and I thought it held up pretty well on its own.