It's a fantastic start to Doom Coalition 3, and a nice change of pace to not have the world or universe in imminent danger (yet). The Doctor, Liv, and Helen arrive in 1998 (I think it was a good year Doctor, but I'm biased), and find a small town stuck with spam telephone calls. Except everyone is getting them, and not only that, they're all impersonating dead friends and family. Things get slightly slow as the phone company is investigated and the story really teases Autons before pulling the rug out from under us. Helen's storyline is brutal, she goes to see her brother posing as her own daughter and is horrified to see her disappearance fractured her family irreparably. Even worse, the whole audience knows the rule: once you see the future, you can't change the future. Liv gets a call from her father, and once she realizes it's him tells him just how much she loved him in a heartbreaking scene. It's a brutal episode for both companions, but a very well-performed one. The cause? A piece of a mysterious clock. Now there's my kind of mystery...

This is part of a series where you can follow me on my journey across time and space (more commonly known as Big Finish Productions)

You can find the original posts here: https://forum.tardis.guide/t/oh-no-big-finish-addiction/4799?u=the9thcyberlegion

I cried because of this one, but I’m sure most people did. I am talking about the star of this boxset, Absent Friends by John Dorney. The performances put in by Paul McGann, Hattie Morahan and Nicola Walker (but especially the last two) are phenomenal.

This story is mostly a pure-historical but it has a bit of alien intervention even if it’s just a clock. Basically, after the finale of Doom Coalition 2, the TARDIS lands in Calcot, August 1998 and discover that the inhabitants of the village have been troubled by mobile phone calls from dead relatives after the new telephone mast was built. Also, Helen Sinclair (Hattie Morahan) goes to London to speak to her now elderly younger brother whilst she pretends to be her own daughter.

The sequences where Liv Chenka has to speak to her dead dad after she didn’t get to say goodbye to him are absolutely heartbreaking.

Absent Friends - (10/10)

Sticking with the Doom Coalition saga and John Dorney’s writing we have arguably his best work in Absent Friends.

The Doctor, Liv and Helen find themselves on Earth in 1998 after a failed attempt to return to Gallifrey where a local village has had a new phone mast set up and the villagers have been receiving strange phone calls from their dead loved ones who seem to talk like they’re still alive. While the Doctor and Liv investigate, Helen secretly takes the opportunity to look in on her family where she finds out how much damage she’s caused them after running away and seemingly never coming back and what her younger brother thinks of her after all the decades have gone by.

This story while on the surface appearing to be a completely throwaway story with a standard setup of a sinister organisation giving away technology that begins to have a negative impact on the locals, and yet it ends up being one of the heaviest emotional stories I’ve come across in Doctor Who. We get Helen pretending to be her own daughter and learning to her horror that she’s been disowned by her family and ruined their lives. This was something that Russell T. Davies seemed to be delving into with Aliens of London in exploring the consequences of a companion running away to travel with the Doctor only to come home and see the negative impact it’s had on those closest to them. The problem though was that Russell never kept that aspect consistent in the story as we would go back and forth between Jackie being dismayed about Rose’s disappearance to carrying on like nothing’s happened. Whereas Absent Friends pulls no punches in showing just how badly it’s affected Helen’s family and through this we get to learn more about her as she’d only recently joined the TARDIS. It’s then developed further by her begging the Doctor to take her home but having to learn the consequences of time travel and learning about your own future.

As if that wasn’t enough though, we get an equally emotional story for Liv as she receives a phone call from her long dead father and gets a chance to have one final conversation with him while resisting the urge to save his life. It’s one of the biggest tear-jerking scenes I’ve experienced in Doctor Who and Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan are stunning in this one!

It does present itself as a standard story with a seemingly obvious villain but there is a twist about halfway regarding the villain that I won’t give away, but it honestly was very funny and a great subversion of expectations without coming off as tonally jarring amidst the very heavy character drama.

As far as prerequisites go, I’d say you should at least listen to Volume 1 of Doom Coalition to properly introduce yourself to Helen (particularly The Red Lady), but Absent Friends is enough of a standalone story, and you can fill in the gaps from Volume 2 that you won’t have much difficulty being invested in this one.

Doom Coalition 3 : Absent Friends (not those)

(8, Liv and Helen)

I felt so sorry for Helen and Liv

I adored the concept of this story

8/10