Temmosus

The War Doctor Begins #3.2

Released: 10 May 2022

Listened: 8/27/22

You know who we haven’t seen in the Time War? Thals. Granted, the Thals aren’t a major temporal power, but when it comes to fighting Daleks, they’ve been doing it longer than anybody else, and they’re still here to talk about it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t count for much with the Time Lords, so while the Thals have been welcomed as allies, they’re distinctly junior partners, and some of them have had enough. The Doctor has spent the last while building a special ship, the Temmosus (named after the leader of the Thals back in “The Daleks”, which can supposedly infiltrate Dalek space, taking advantage of the fact that Thals and Daleks have the same DNA. Unfortunately, when the captain decides to defect so as to open peace talks, things go sideways quickly. But he really should have made sure the Doctor was off the ship when he decided to switch sides. What follows is a bunch of intrigue where nobody’s really sure who’s on which side, or who’s telling the truth, and in those situations, the Doctor does his best work. The shifting of “who’s in charge now?” does get a little absurd, but the moral dilemmas each character faces is portrayed realistically. The author is Rossa McPhillips, who used to serve in the British military, intelligence division, so he’s got a pretty good grasp on politics, both overt and covert, and that comes out here. There’s still plenty of gunfire, and a fairly high body count, at least percentage-wise. That just makes for a different kind of story, and one in which the Doctor can be a solider and still be doing the right thing at the same time.