Flight to Calendra

Tweflth Doctor Chronicles #2.1

Released: 3 November 2021

Listened: 1/9/23

These next three stories are really one story, released in a boxed set entitled “Timejacked!” Much like with the Eleventh Doctor Chronicles after #1, this is a full-cast audio, but with Jacob Dudman playing the Doctor, not narrating. Without hearing Dudman’s native accent for contrast, you can get more into his Twelfth Doctor performance, and while it never really fools you into thinking it’s Peter Capaldi, it is a reasonable Twelfth Doctor. This story is explicitly set after the Doctor has been at St. Luke’s for a while, but just before he meets Bill. As in the last story, the fact that he stayed in one place for an extended period allowed people to find him if they’re determined enough. In this case, a novice time agent named Keira Sandstrom, who’s in way over her head. She’s supposed to be observing the planet Calandra, but it’s really boring, so she pushed their technology forward to the point where she could use it to augment her vortex manipulator and get to Earth. Which, oops, broke the vortex. Which is bad. So she forces the Doctor to help her out, at gunpoint. (She disables Nardole before the story starts, relieving that problem.) Being the Twelfth Doctor, he gets plenty of opportunity to pile on the scorn and sarcasm. However, Dudman’s performance doesn’t quite reach the level of scathing that Capaldi could be, even in this “calmer” period of his life. He just sounds vaguely bored with the whole thing, which more or less works, admittedly. Keira’s messing around not only broke the vortex, but also left Calendra with a teleportation system that accidentally makes zombified copies of people, called “the Confused” in a great leap of euphemism. Once that problem is fixed, they head off to fix everything else Keira broke.