Curiosity Shop

The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles #4.3

Released: 21 February 2023

Listened: 3/20/23

Let’s get the easy part out of the way: Jacob Dudman blows this one out of the water. The Doctor has suffered some mental damage and forgotten who he is, so he cycles through the personas of several regenerations in the story. Which means that Jacob Dudman plays the Eleventh Doctor playing the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth Doctors, and it’s amazing. His Hartnell and Pertwee are frankly astonishing, and we’ve seen elsewhere that he can do a great Eccleston and Tennant. His two Bakers are not quite so polished, but you can see what he was going for. The little breaks where the Matt Smith accent comes through are so natural, I can’t imagine how he pulled that off. I’m amazed that James Goss felt able to write it, with the guilt that must surely follow. With that bit aside, Valerie gets put through the wringer in this one. With the Doctor not himself, she’s put in a “Human Nature” situation of taking care of him, even though he doesn’t know it. Mostly, she tells him stories about adventures they’ve had (so there have been quite a few by this point that we haven’t seen). More than that, though, this not-Doctor keeps paying her for bits of her cybernetic components. Valerie keeps providing them because she needs to keep him on the hook, but her abilities decline throughout the story as she gives up progressively more vital components. They’re not taking the easy way out here – it’s clear that Valerie considers this a violation of her person, but she does it anyway. And like many other companions before her, she discovers that sometimes the Doctor does ask too much. Saffiya Ingar totally sells it, the hope and the grief of believing the Doctor may be lost, all the way down into despair. It’s honestly heart-rending, and I hope it’ll have an impact on her character development in the future. As a set, it’s a little hard to know what to think. It’s got two episodes that underscore how the Doctor’s life is essentially made out of stories, which is appropriate for the Eleventh Doctor, but maybe would have done better split apart? I’m not sure.