War Wounds

Tweflth Doctor Chronicles #1.2

Released: 13 February 2020

Listened: 1/7/23

Following the Chronicles tradition, if you can’t get a major character’s actor, round up a minor one! In this case, that’s Sam Anderson as Danny Pink. The Doctor comes looking for Clara at Coal Hill, she’s on a field trip, so Danny tries to tell the Doctor to get lost, but ends up with an inadvertent ride in the TARDIS. To a planet in the middle of a war, featuring both humans and saurians on both sides. A setup like that is going to plow straight into Danny’s background as a soldier, and the Twelfth Doctor’s extreme dislike of soldiers. Which honestly never made that much sense to me, given that he’s a UNIT advisor, but it’s a part of Series 8 that sticks out, so here it is. Sam Anderson does some amazing work with his grunts and gasps, convincingly simulating sliding down a steep slope and into a watery gully. However, that means Jacob Dudman is tasked with all the other characters, of which there are several, and honestly, his American woman doctor doesn’t quite come off. The whole point of this story is for the Doctor and Danny to clash, which they definitely do. Unlike the last story, the Doctor is quite nasty in this one, and Danny overreacts as well. The Doctor’s insistence on calling Danny “P.E.” is grating, but serves to underscore the few times he calls him “Danny.” Eventually, of course, they come to an understanding, which should have happened on TV, but never did. And there’s a fairly clumsy Chekov’s Gun to reset their relationship to the status quo before the end. You knew it had to happen, and there’s no elegant way to do it, but that doesn’t really make it better. Given the restraints on the writer, the story comes out as well as it can, primarily due to the efforts of the actors.