The Sacrifice of Jo Grant

The Legacy of Time #3

Released: 17 July 2019

Listened: 4/12/23

I covered this story in the Third Doctor section, where I mostly focused on the 1970s aspects. For Jo, Osgood, and Kate, it takes place here. The characterizations are ever so slightly off, but not so much that it would cause distress. Jo and Osgood are now close friends, and Jo’s trying to draw Osgood out of her shell, taking her to a water park, and planning on paintball later. But of course this is UNIT, so they have to go deal with a time distortion that results in Jo and Kate getting shunted back to the 1970s, where the Doctor is also dealing with the same distortion. Osgood stays in the present, dealing with all kinds of side effects, and she seems more panicky than usual while also seeming rather a bit smarter, able to understand temporal physics on the Doctor’s level. (Jo doesn’t show the talent she had in the last story.) For her part, Kate seems to be beating herself up a bit more than she usually would, and gets rather wound up by the idea of talking to her Dad. Jo has a chance to spend more time with “her” Doctor, and grabs it with both hands, probably bending the rules of causality a bit, but the Doctor is good at keeping secrets. The focus isn’t on the science, of course, but rather on the interactions between the characters, and that works just fine.