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Main Range #35

Released: 29 August 2002

Listened: 5/6/20

This one is distinctly memorable, yet both more and less than it seems. The Doctor and Peri attend a symposium where an old friend of the Doctor’s has been compiling the ultimate dictionary of English, with an AI companion. Of course, as often happens with old friends of the Doctor, she dies almost immediately after their arrival. The monster is a semi-sentient word, which mostly seems bent on destruction and chaos. The story isn’t really the important part, though; it’s giving the Doctor lots of interesting words to say, lots of discussion about the relationship between language and meaning, and lots of praise of English (specifically British English). Peri gets in on the act too, displaying verbal dexterity and a penchant for word-play that she doesn’t really have in any other stories. The resolution is a bit flat, with the Doctor out-clevering the monster as usual. It’s a story that seems to be intended as the ultimate showcase of the Sixth Doctor, and in that sense it succeeds, but as a story itself, it’s rather suspect.