Desperate Measures

Gallifrey: Time War #1.4

Released: 22 February 2018

Listened: 5/16/21

After a couple of unorthodox episodes, this story jumps back into traditional Gallifrey with both feet. Narvin and Leela are spying, there’s a double agent, a risky plan, and a Presidential election; what’s more Gallifrey than that? Romana continues to be exasperated that the War Council is shutting the CIA out of decisions, particularly the Resurrection Engine that brings dead Time Lords back to life. She sends Narvin out to destroy the engine, while secretly keeping a back-channel open to the Dalek Supreme, in the hopes of finding a diplomatic solution. President Livia realizes things are going badly and decides to stand down, nominating an Admiral named Valerian as her successor, but Romana decides to run for President again. Valerian is played by the lovely David Sibley, but he runs on a platform of open warfare and radical transparency. I think it’s saying something that he’s clearly supposed to be a right-wing candidate, yet still seems like a better choice than the ones in the US or the UK at the time this story was made. Once he’s able to expose Romana’s channel to the Dalek Supreme, she’s toast in the polls (and rightly so, I must say). But it turns out that the whole thing was a ruse, even the mission to destroy the Resurrection Engine, because as soon as Valerian is invested, it’s used to replace him with (spoiler) a resurrected Rassilon. We pretty much had to reach this point, because the TV show told us who’s President during the Time War, and this series has been sure to line things up neatly with what we already know. As a single episode, it’s pretty much right on the mark, although exasperated Romana isn’t my favorite character, and she’s got plenty to be exasperated about. As a boxed set, it went in a couple of unexpected directions, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, it also closed off those directions, so it looks as though what’s coming next is more of what we’ve already seen.