The Sleeping Blood - ★★★☆☆

The Sleeping Blood is an atmospheric story with a strong theme but not enough time. The first part is very engaging because it is structured like a horror story. The Doctor fell ill after being infected by an unknown disease by touching a wild plant on a planet he and Susan visited, and now they are traveling in search of a cure. He is taken out of the game very early in the plot when his health worsens and so the focus goes completely to Susan. Caroline Ann Ford's performance is confident and emotional, perfect for the structure of the Companions Chronicles, and the core of the narrative is a moral conflict that arises for the character at the end of the story.

That's part of the problem. For most of its running time, The Sleeping Blood is a good character study for Susan who, for the first time, must stand on her own and save her grandfather, while maintaining a tense atmosphere with horror elements. She spends about twenty minutes alone exploring this abandoned research station where the TARDIS has landed and the entire time you, and the character, have the impression that someone is watching her. The first time I listened to this audio, I thought it was going to unfold into a hunting story following the footsteps of Predator. That's not what happens. At one point, Susan will come across a military team that is there after a local criminal who has threatened the lives of important politicians, the Butcher. The horror elements continue from there but take the form of a more traditional serial killer story, albeit with the twist that he kills remotely.

The sci-fi part is interesting although a little contradictory. There's kind of a medical museum in this building that Susan landed in where she goes into to find antibiotics. It is also established that this planet, called Rua, has long abandoned this traditional model of producing medicines and now most diseases are cured through nanotechnology. And of course, at a certain point it is revealed that the Butcher has been killing his victims by hacking this nanotechnology present in the blood of practically everyone who lives on Rua. This raises the stakes of the story because, as he demonstrates during a scene, he can kill the characters at any time. I think Rua's world-building is very well done and tied together; What's a little weak are Susan's motivations. Nanomedicine was apparently child's play for her on Gallifrey, but she insists on looking for an antibiotic the entire story – shouldn't it be an outdated technology for her? Besides the obvious: there was NOTHING in the TARDIS that could help the Doctor? In the end, this doesn't matter because it's just a justification to isolate Susan from the Doctor for most of the duration of this audio and give her a reason to explore this planet alone, but it's still a small problem I have with the plot.

But as I said, the real argument of the plot only emerges at the end, when she discovers that Butcher, who is actually called Gomery, was doing all that to try to democratize access to medicines, especially those based on nanotechnology, after the death of his grandmother. It's an interesting debate of public health versus capitalism and how even the most well-intentioned of people (one of the soldiers Susan knows) can be co-opted by the system to reinforce it, but I think this discussion is a bit too on the nose – and comes too late. We barely spend time with Gomery, so when a flashback begins showing him talking to his dying grandmother in the hospital it seems like the story is trying to make you emotional – but it's very artificial. Yes, an elderly woman dying because she doesn't have money to take care of her own health is sad, but you only addressed it in the last five minutes. I understand that this is positioned at this point in the plot precisely to end it with a feeling of injustice, that Susan unintentionally perpetuated a cruel system on this planet. It is also to draw a parallel between the antagonist and Susan, both motivated by love for a grandparent, but the key difference here is that I, as a listener, know and care about Susan and the Doctor in a personal level. The story tries to make me care in the same way about Gomery and his grandmother, but it doesn't work in so little time. Therefore: it's an interesting premise that does not have room to breathe.

There are several interesting moments of characterization for Susan and they are the real reason why this story is worth listening. Her guilt at the end, all the questioning whether she should have interfered in that situation, the feeling of injustice that takes over her, the resilience she shows to save her grandfather, even her impressions about their trips and what her stay in the TARDIS has been like – there are moments, she says, when she feels completely suffocated in there. There is even a cute suggestion that it is the TARDIS itself that takes Susan to Rua knowing that she will get the cure for the Doctor there; since the TARDIS lands there without Susan piloting it and she assumes it was her grandfather – it takes place before The Edge of Destruction so they both still don't know that she has a certain level of sentience. The direction is also very good, with impeccable sound work. The plot, unfortunately, does not reach its full potential.