The Condemned

Main Range #105

Released: February 2008

Listened: 7/15/20

From the Doctor’s standpoint (and this project’s), this is his first meeting with Charley. (Poor Sixie; so many of his companions have temporal issues.) She’s savvy enough to know what’s going on and try to hide her knowledge from the Doctor, but she doesn’t do a very good job of it. That’s fine for the moment, because they spend a large part of this story apart. The Doctor is mostly hanging out with D.I. Patricia Menzies of Manchester, who we met before in “The Crimes of Thomas Brewster,” but this is their first meeting from her point of view. To her credit, she handles the alien strangeness pretty well. Turns out there’s a thriving, if hidden, alien community in Manchester, with all that goes along with it, including a black market, petty jealousy, and killing for insurance purposes. It’s kind of a new-series concept, which makes sense, as this story focuses around the machinations of the aliens, and one very spooky tower block. Charley gets a fair amount of time alone to show off her skills and experience, but in the end needs the Doctor to be clever in order to solve things. The main plot isn’t as important as Charley’s character work, which goes fairly well.