Vampire Weekend

Thirteenth Doctor Adventures #1.1

Released: 3 July 2025

Listened: 6/1/26

An interesting, and somewhat low-key start to the Thirteenth Doctor's era, but also hitting all the right notes. It's not long after Graham and Ryan's departure, and Yaz is still trying to figure out how the dynamic between her and the Doctor works now. She's also trying to keep one foot in her Earthly life, as she attends a "hen-do" for a friend of hers from school in an isolated country manor house. Before you can say "locked room mystery," it all goes sideways and of course the Doctor immediately turns up. With hens. Typically of the Thirteenth Doctor, she knows full well that hens aren't needed at a hen-do, but allows Yaz to think that, in an effort to keep things calm. Incidentally, the hens are a gift from Alexander the Great, named "Ian" and "Barbara," a nice call-back, given that Alexander met them. The threat is a vampire, and the Doctor not only acknowledges them as ancient enemies of the Time Lords, but gives Yaz as nice a summary of that whole deal as I've seen. As for the locked-room mystery part, it's not bad. There's only a handful of people in the story, and any of them could be the vampire; I only figured it out when Tim Foley wanted me to, just before the reveal. The dialog sounds completely appropriate to the characters; I could even hear when the Doctor scrunched up her nose like she does when she's offended. I was a bit worried that with that many Sheffield accents in the story, I'd have trouble telling them apart. I did at first, but once the story got going, I was able to keep them straight with a little concentration. Much like the Thirteenth Doctor's TV era, it didn't start with a huge bang, but a perfectly normal story, and I think the series is better for it.