Soul Music

Subscriber Short Trips #2021-1

Released: 16 March 2021

Listened: 4/20/26

Placed here rather arbitrarily. This is the last ever of the bonus Subscriber Short Trips, but there's nothing particularly special to indicate that. It's a Tenth Doctor story, and it's a little unusual in that it takes place in Las Vegas, which isn't somewhere the Doctor seems to have gone often, although he does mention that the landscape reminds him of Gallifrey a bit. The time period isn't specified, but there's a tower that seems to be the Stratosphere, and a fountain that's probably the Bellagio. It seems that the Doctor brought some humanoid aliens here some time ago, because the climate is similar to their lost planet. Except now something is making them all sick, and they can't determine the cause. Writer Victora Saxton is leaning hard on the melancholy that the Tenth Doctor feels when he thinks about home, and that part works pretty well. However, when Doctor Who pushes together a spiritual experience with a scientific explanation, the writer has to be careful of where the edges meet, and I don't think that quiet works in this story. It's decent, but that's about all.