I.D.

Main Range #94

Released: April 2007

Listened: 5/26/20

We’re finally done with the Trial and its aftermath, and the Doctor is just wandering around unaccompanied, having normal adventures. This story takes place some time in the future, where brain/computer interfaces are ubiquitous, and having your personality edited is commonplace. The TARDIS lands in a data junkyard, where scavengers are searching for personal data to sell on, a quasi-legal identity theft. Of course, any time profit-motivated humans are doing something ethically dodgy, it’s bound to go horribly wrong, and the Doctor will be there to call them on it. In this case, it’s a dead scientist who left behind a copy of his mind that overwrites anybody it’s downloaded into. The data junkyard concept is pretty interesting, as is the idea of a disability that leaves people unable to interface with computers, but the “selfish humans” trope is in full effect, and once you get to the running around in corridors portion, it’s pretty standard. This is still comparatively early in the Sixth Doctor’s life, so he seems pretty irritable, but to be fair, he considers personality editing to be immoral, and every other character is selfish to one degree or another, so it’s reasonable that he spends most of the story annoyed. This is a fairly short story, only three parts, each less than 30 minutes, which leaves room for a second story and very long extras.