Wild Pastures

The Tenth Doctor Chronicles #1.3

Released: 18 April 2018

Listened: 11/16/22

This is a “Chronicles” story, so instead of David Tennant, we get Jacob Dudman, who does a perfectly decent Tenth Doctor, in pacing and intonation if not exactly in pitch. We also get Jacqueline King as Sylvia…really? Turns out the Doctor suspects something is fishy at a local old-folks home, so he drops Donna off someplace sunny and goes to fetch Wilf to help him infiltrate…except Wilf’s not around, and Sylvia likes the look of the home as a rest break, so she buffaloes the Doctor into taking her along instead. This goes about as well as you might imagine. Sylvia is nasty, acidic, displays no self-awareness, and is borderline racist and definitely ageist. Even compared to the version of Sylvia from “Kidnapped,” this one is nasty. James Goss must have a hell of a mother, is all I can say. The Doctor spends a fair amount of time elsewhere, captured, or missing a lot of his faculties, which means that Dudman is in narrator mode more often than not (which he does quite well), and that Sylvia carries the bulk of the story. Which, well…it’s a good thing it’s an hour-long story, because Sylvia wears thin rather quickly. Jackie Tyler may be unsuited to this sort of thing, but she could still be fun to hang out with. I can’t imagine anyone enjoying hanging around Sylvia. When the chips are down, though, she gets the job done, mostly through the same bull-headedness that gets Donna through. It’s nice to see the Doctor wrong-footed from time to time, even if Sylvia gets to be smug as a result.