Renaissance

Gallifrey #6.2

Released: 16 October 2013

Listened: 4/26/21

This is a tightly contained story with a small cast, because it has one major job to do: Introduce Romana III, also known as “Trey,” played by Juliet Landau. Trey has a much softer tone that makes a contrast with the strident Romana, so they’re quite distinct from an audio perspective. She’s also being created at a point in the larger Doctor Who story where there have now been a number of examples of reincarnations of the same Time Lord meeting each other and not necessarily being trustworthy. Trey claims to have come from a future where Gallifrey was destroyed by the Dogma Virus, and took so long to rebuild that the other temporal powers tore apart the Web of Time without proper guidance. She wants Romana to break the laws of time by overwriting the present with the future, restored Gallifrey, to avoid the Dark Ages. That sort of lost cause appeals to Romana’s sense of heroic danger (probably cultivated by the Doctor), and so of course she’s up for it. Narvin, not so much, and Leela isn’t really sure what to make of it. Trey’s calm persuasion draws both of them to her side, with grave consequences to Romana. There’s definitely something strange going on with Trey, and the whole story has something of a dreamlike quality, with characters acting against their own interests, and realizing it, all against a background of a completely empty Gallifrey. It’s an interesting counterpoint after the Dalek carnage in the last story, and it’s still not clear where this boxed set is going.