God Send Me Well to Keep

"The Doctor sounded very sad, and Nyssa wondered why. 'Yes, Katherine Howard, you will be Queen of England.' He touched the top of her head gently, then turned."

God Send Me Well to Keep is a fairly strong entry into Quality of Leadership. I was pleased to get another story featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, and better yet, I enjoyed it quite a bit more than Goths and Robbers and think it just works a little better.

In this story, we focus on Henry VIII. Now, it is one of those stories that works better the more you are familiar with this King and his six wives. In fact, that is where the story is at its weakest. Even as someone who has learned a think or two about Henry, I was getting a little lost in things when we have three different wives named Catherine in Henry's real history.

Where this story works best is as a complex pure historical that explores religious themes, carrying over the ideas of the Protestant Reformation from the previous story in this anthology,
The Price of Conviction. It is a troubled time in England and the perspective of our "villain" - the Duke of Norfolk, is very, very interesting. Though he comes across as a bad person in this short story, he does have a critical perspective of the King's reign and the growing sense of things getting out of control in his rule - this story taking place in 1539 is a very important detail. The Doctor actually relates to the Duke over these matters in a way that felt sincere - they both are outraged at Henry's desecration of art and there is a bit of a sense of mutual respect that emerges because of it.

Nyssa, unfortunately, basically falls into the damsel in distress role in this story, making her role across Short Trips 24 very weak on the whole. That's disappointing since this story often shows why she shouldn't just need to be the one being rescued here. It's not really in her character and it feels frustrated that she just has to be the potential wife of another despot like in The Butcher of Brisbane. The Fifth Doctor is also written inconsistently. Sometimes he is very interesting, a sombre yet touching caretaker of history unable to save people like Katherine Howard from their own doom, other times he is just getting a guard drunk and whacking the man on the head. He doesn't always feel like the Doctor I know here. Our characters also don't really have any issue to resolve - their goal is only really to escape the situation, and do a little tacked on magic show for Anne of Cleves at the end that didn't feel very connected to the rest of the story.

Still, I enjoyed God Send Me Well to Keep quite a bit. It has a lot of fairly deep things to say about religion for a short story, it has a lot of interesting thoughts on the reign of Henry VIII, and the villain actually feels like he could be a friend to the Doctor under different circumstances. On balance, in spite of some flaws and outdated bits of humour here and there, this was a fun and memorable read.