Sticking with the Doom Coalition saga and John Dorney’s writing we have arguably his best work in Absent Friends.

The Doctor, Liv and Helen find themselves on Earth in 1998 after a failed attempt to return to Gallifrey where a local village has had a new phone mast set up and the villagers have been receiving strange phone calls from their dead loved ones who seem to talk like they’re still alive. While the Doctor and Liv investigate, Helen secretly takes the opportunity to look in on her family where she finds out how much damage she’s caused them after running away and seemingly never coming back and what her younger brother thinks of her after all the decades have gone by.

This story while on the surface appearing to be a completely throwaway story with a standard setup of a sinister organisation giving away technology that begins to have a negative impact on the locals, and yet it ends up being one of the heaviest emotional stories I’ve come across in Doctor Who. We get Helen pretending to be her own daughter and learning to her horror that she’s been disowned by her family and ruined their lives. This was something that Russell T. Davies seemed to be delving into with Aliens of London in exploring the consequences of a companion running away to travel with the Doctor only to come home and see the negative impact it’s had on those closest to them. The problem though was that Russell never kept that aspect consistent in the story as we would go back and forth between Jackie being dismayed about Rose’s disappearance to carrying on like nothing’s happened. Whereas Absent Friends pulls no punches in showing just how badly it’s affected Helen’s family and through this we get to learn more about her as she’d only recently joined the TARDIS. It’s then developed further by her begging the Doctor to take her home but having to learn the consequences of time travel and learning about your own future.

As if that wasn’t enough though, we get an equally emotional story for Liv as she receives a phone call from her long dead father and gets a chance to have one final conversation with him while resisting the urge to save his life. It’s one of the biggest tear-jerking scenes I’ve experienced in Doctor Who and Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan are stunning in this one!

It does present itself as a standard story with a seemingly obvious villain but there is a twist about halfway regarding the villain that I won’t give away, but it honestly was very funny and a great subversion of expectations without coming off as tonally jarring amidst the very heavy character drama.

As far as prerequisites go, I’d say you should at least listen to Volume 1 of Doom Coalition to properly introduce yourself to Helen (particularly The Red Lady), but Absent Friends is enough of a standalone story, and you can fill in the gaps from Volume 2 that you won’t have much difficulty being invested in this one.