Station to Station

The Ninth Doctor Adventures Series 2 #1.1

Released: 4 May 2022

Listened: 10/3/22

After the first “season” went well, Christopher Eccleston came back for another round of boxed sets, starting with this one, called “Back to Earth,” because that’s where the stories take place, with one in the past, one in the recent past, and one in the “present,” which seems to be early 21st Century for the sake of continuity. The “present” story is a properly creepy fairy tale from Rob Valentine. It takes place at a train station in the middle of nowhere, literally in this case, because it’s outside of time, and populated by people who got “lost” in moments of indecision, and are now basically ghosts. The companion-substitute is Saffron Windrose, played by Indigo Griffiths, who’s trying to go home to her parents’ house to tell them that she’s getting married to a woman. She doesn’t expect to be well-received, so she’s ambivalent. Running the whole place is the Grimminy Grew, a monster, maybe troll-like; it’s never really described. The Ninth Doctor is particularly good at standing up against those. He doesn’t get shouty like the Tenth or speechy like the Eleventh; he just says no. The pseudo-science is actually pretty weak, but it would have ruined the fairy tale if it were otherwise. For sense of place and general spookiness, this one is ace.