Losing the Audience - ★★★☆☆

A historical set in the fifties that tells Susan and the Doctor's encounter with two radio actors, Max and Maxine, a divorced couple that are still friends with each other. It's a story that deal with the world post World Wars and the PTSD of the survivors - through Max. But it's also one of those conspiracy narratives that unravels terrible secrets lost to time when fan of the Max's show start to disappear... They're being murdered. The culprits are aliens that alied themselves to Britain against the nazis with the promise to get a part of India, but were betrayed and imprisoned up to the day the right frequencies at the radio station made it possible for them to escape.

These are aliens from another dimension, one with physics different to ours, and they are affected by sound, radio, waves. That's how they were imprisoned, and that's how the Doctor saves the day, killing them all. Honestly, my only problem with this story is that I though this should be longer. An two hour audio or a regular book. There are a lot of good ideas that don't have enough time to breath and reach their true potential.

It's really easy to picture how it would work. Part one of four would be an horror piece focusing on the public of the radio show being killed while Max tries to make sense of what's happening - maybe Susan goes with him, behind her grandfather's back. There is enough room in a longer story for other people to believe it was Max who killed these people, which this story briefly implies could've happened. You could make him doubt himself, and link it to very obvious untreated war PTSD. One of the cliffhangers could be the Doctor and Susan in the audience just when a murder is about to happen.

There is some really interesting implications about the aliens in the story. They are not necessarily malicious, even though they don't follow anything akin to our moral code. They are killing the audience believing they are nazis, since they didn't figure out yet that they were betrayed and it has been years since the war ended. Are they truly in the wrong here? Most incarnations of the Doctor wouldn't say so. Not One though, not at this point, and that's why I find his cruel atitude towards them in the end very in character. I honestly believe the only thing in his mind in this situation would be to not disturb Earth's history; he would be picking sides, which a kind of cruelty by itself.

That's implied in this story - the characterisation is on point -, but a longer story could elaborate on this dubious morality of the First Doctor and perhaps even built some conflict between him and Susan.

This story has a lot of potential - but as it is, it's a nice 6/10.