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TARDIS Guide

Review of The Y Factor by Joniejoon

29 June 2025

This review contains spoilers!

A strong start, but it quickly drops off and ends mediocre.

The Doctor and Dodo are investigating a mysterious warehouse in 1947, when they get split up. Dodo, now alone, flees from the men following her and soon meets Edith Garrud. A feminist with a knack for martial arts. Together, they try to find the doctor and try to unravel the mysterious happenings behind the scenes.

Let’s start with some behind the scenes “controversy”. This story is not only voiced by Dodo, but also by Stephen Noonan as the First Doctor. They caught some flack for doing this, since the companion chronicles usually only feature the Doctor through imitation or in a narrated way. Meaning this is the first time the main voice actor for the Doctor role is present in this kind of story.

I’ll be honest, I don’t see what the fuss is about. Noonan’s Doctor is always a delight, and the alternative would’ve been Lauren Cornelius reading the exact same lines in a Doctory voice. It gains way more from its inclusion than it loses and still includes the narrated style and the inner thoughts of the companion.

And those inner thoughts really shine in the first 5 minutes of this story, which is the best scene in this whole story. It almost feels modern in execution. Dodo is on the run from the aforementioned bad guys and we hear her describe every step she makes and every thought she has. And it really, for the first time, makes her feel like a proper character on audio. It felt tense, atmospheric and yet totally in character.

This comes to a close when Dodo runs into alley which turns out to be a dead end. Out of options, Dodo only has one last resort for this exact situation. She turns and faces her enemies and, without hesitations, starts screaming for help.

This moment is a highlight for me because it shows the exact strengths and potential of this range. If done well, it gives you full insight into the character. Their logic, their way of thinking and their feelings in different situations all come to light. You feel yourself standing with Dodo in that alley and you fully feel that it’s the only logical conclusion she could draw in the situation. You almost feel it before she does. It’s really impressive and I wish the story kept this type of narration up.

Instead, after Dodo is saved, the story quickly drops off. After a bit of preamble, Edith and Dodo go out to find the Doctor, who is fully in Fanservice mode. For some unexplained reason, the Doctor feels like he’s going to regenerate. In practice, this means he just keeps quoting and quoting future stories. “Change, my dear”, “The moment is not prepared for”, almost every classic regeneration gets mentioned and it really adds nothing. It feels cheap and lasts the entire first half.

Another irritation is the way dialogue is structured within the story. It relies a lot on one-sided narration, where one person talks, but the other side gets narrated. For example:

“Where are you keeping the monster, fiend?!?”

“The evil man responds by laughing and tells us that we will never find it”

This kind of narration, when used over and over again, starts to get really irritating and makes the story hard to follow.

Not that there is much else to latch on to in this story. Aside from the points mentioned previously, there’s really not much worth talking about. It’s a fairly basic story about discovering a threat, trying to fight it and ultimately defeating it. Not much that sets apart.

It tries to be something more by mentioning the feminist movement and tying that to the current narrative, but using Dodo as a vehicle for progressive feminist values was never going to be smooth sailing. It almost feels laughable. Even Dodo deserve her rights, but if you want a story that actually invests in this topic, go to “The Suffering” instead.

And that’s all we have for ‘The Y Factor’. I truly hope the writer knows what he has with those first 5 minutes and we get more of that kind of storytelling. But other than that, the story is basic and sometimes unnecessarily tough to follow. It’s a good start and I hope the Companion Chronicles keep playing with this Doctor-Companion format, but as a story this is nothing special.


Joniejoon

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