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TARDIS Guide

Review of The Gift by deltaandthebannermen

3 December 2024

This review contains spoilers!

This is a short story from The Twelve Doctors of Christmas collection. However, I actually watched the Fan Show's Youtube video featuring Frances Barber reading this with accompanying illustrations.

It's a sweet little tale of the 11th Doctor turning up on a child's doorstep, as he often did, and whisking her off on a brief adventure. It's a bit like an expanded DWA comic strip in it's tone. It's also got a typical 11th Doctor 'come back when the child is an adult' coda, very much in keeping with how this incarnation of the Doctor flits in and out of his companions lives.

Written by Scott Handcock, it doesn't do anything particularly original but is diverting enough. The illustrations that accompany Barber's rather fruity reading are a nice accompaniment.

The Christmassy message is a bit more overt in this one than in other short stories I've looked at in this marathon and does suggest the target audience for this is pitched a little lower than some of the other of this marathon's fare.