A Stain of Red in the Sand

I don’t entirely understand it but I liked it

Dude i love vague as hell unsettling nonsense stories that imply logic to make the listener believe it’s thought provoking even though it’s just a load of fancy meaningless words.

It’s a singular look at one person’s life in one of the many worlds that the Doctor visits. Usually when he goes about and pops on planet ultra dimension with scary aliens number threehundredthirtytwo, we don’t really think about how straight up just strange it must be for some of the people living on planet ultra dwhatever. Scary aliens are there, but that’s the status quo for them. Then out of nowhere this funny looking goober shows up, introduces themselves, disappears, reappears, does Rassilon knows what, suddenly the spooky aliens are goners.
Maybe sometimes you see him. You see him standing somewhere in the distance, fighting one of the monsters. Or someone you know has heard of him. But it’s all so vague and strange and distant. It’s just something that happens while you have daily life to go through. Intriguing for sure, but not anything you have time for to actually engage with.

It’s special in how it presents this type of story. Usually we get world building. That’s normal. We gotta understand what’s going on. But here we only look at this individual’s life. We get some exposition to the world, but everything is talked about like it is normal. Our protagonist just thinks of some stuff that the situation reminds her to. “Oh yeah my bestie, he’s been loving doing art and stuff. Makes living breathing creatures from flesh clay. They die quickly most of the time. Funny this time he’s at it again”.
We’re only looking into this person’s life for a very short amount of time. It’s only during the timeframe when the Doctor visits. It’s the experience of living on such a typical Doctor Who alien planet, and how it is when he visits and does stuff. It’s weird, it’s vague, it’s mysterious. There is seemingly no logic. It just happened. I guess that’s nice.

Or not. That’s the nice thing about this one. It’s so meaningless that you can apply all meaning to it that you want. And i just did. And now it’s a genius exploration of personal experiences of truly weird alien life and outsiders perspective on the Doctor. Or you can decide that it’s the story of gods living on a different plane of reality, not realizing their influences, not realizing what they are living, until the Doctor arrives and makes their world free to hope and understanding, making them able to see through the window, and open to a new dimension and perspective to life. You decide. You make up another one of these.