City of Spires

Main Range #133

Released: 30 April 2010

Listened: 8/3/20

This is one of the earlier Main Range stories to be told as a tightly connected trilogy. The Doctor ends up in the Highlands in what appears to be the late 1700s, but there are baddies around with technological knowledge from later eras. There are also creatures of myth around, such as redcaps, and legendary Scottish figures like Rob Roy Macgregor. Most importantly, though, he runs into Jamie McCrimmon, an older version of Jamie who doesn’t remember the Doctor, not even the events of “The Highlanders,” which Jamie should remember even after the Time Lords altered his memories. (In the context of this project, the Doctor met Jamie not long ago, in “Last of the Cybermen,” but that isn’t referenced here, because that story hadn’t been recorded yet.) A lot of time is spent re-establishing Jamie, who’s a heroic leader even without having ever met the Doctor. The story, though, involves an awful lot of running around, getting captured, uncaptured, and recaptured, because the real villain and its motivations aren’t revealed in this story. In that sense, this being the first part of a trilogy lets the story down. At the end, the Doctor sets off to retrieve the TARDIS, and Jamie goes along to keep him safe.