The Reaping

Main Range #86

Released: 18 September 2006

Listened: 5/9/20

This is a rare (for the time) Main Range story with Peri and the Sixth Doctor, and wow, is it dark. Peri returns home to Baltimore after learning that her friends’ father was murdered. She returns in the middle of the funeral, after having been missing for months, which caused the breakup of her mother’s marriage to Howard. It’s pretty emotionally intense, and would be an early example of a companion experiencing the consequences to those who are left behind, except that Rose faced that on TV a year before this story was released. Of course, there’s plot going on here too, which involves the Cybermen. That’s because this story is a prequel to “The Gathering,”from the fifth Doctor’s era. The Cybermen plot isn’t all that involved, but they’re a little more threatening than usual, because this time they have nothing to lose. Oddly, they have the stompy noise from the new series Cybermen, which is pretty effective on audio. And just when you think the story is over, there’s an even darker twist, which seems pretty gratuitous. The two stories still make more sense taken together, but listening to them in this order lets you see how the clues from this story were set up in “The Gathering,” especially the repeated “8-6-8-7,” which refers to the release number, but also a clue the Doctor left for himself...which totally fails. How much you like this one is going to depend on your tolerance for darkness in your Doctor Who stories. I think this one is up to the line, but not necessarily over it.