Fond Farewell

The Ninth Doctor Adventures Series 1 #4.1

Released: 16 February 2022

Listened: 9/28/22

This is the beginning of the boxed set called “Old Friends,” which will be more appropriate in later stories, but this one also fits the theme. The Doctor attends the funeral of wildlife activist Flynn Beckett, who encountered the Doctor on a recent mission. In the future, if you’re wealthy enough, you can get the contents of your brain temporarily downloaded into a synthetic being, and therefore attend your own funeral. Except Flynn doesn’t remember the Doctor, or his assistant Sasha, or his last mission. And then the murders start. Writer David K Barnes fills this story with new-series features, such as the shifty organization with something to hide and a clueless administrator, things that should be dead but aren’t, and a spooky repeated phrase that makes no sense, as in “Silence in the Library” or “The Empty Child.” In this case, it’s “I’m still here,” which is creepy enough on its own. The secondary characters are quite dynamic, giving us a tease of adventures the Ninth Doctor had that we didn’t see. Sasha, in particular, has the role of the companion-substitute, but she’s not really a great companion. She lacks the empathy that the Doctor normally likes, which makes her harder to predict. It’s a nice sci-fi trope, but it’s really just a prologue for the rest of the set.