Lily

This short is interesting, and brought up some mixed feelings in me. As somebody who has spent a good amount of time working with people on the spectrum, I do appreciate Lily and the attempt to formally talk about this stuff a bit within the Doctor Who universe.

Mental illness has a mixed legacy within this franchise. The Doctor is basically an excellent depiction of a neuroatypical character. The Doctor has been openly speculated to be autistic himself in another Big Finish story and there is no incarnation of the character that doesn't behave in a way that is fundamentally different not just from humans but virtually every other Time Lord we encounter. Meanwhile, the Master tends to fall into trope city, using "madness" as a catch-all way to explain his erratic behaviour while infrequently acknowledging the more nuanced reality of mental health.

So when we have a story like this, where the Fifth Doctor visits Sarah Jane Smith who is looking after her granddaughter Lily, who has autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this is a prime opportunity to engage with the material a little bit and develop on some of these earlier ideas. And I do appreciate how the story manages to avoid some tropes around neurodivergent characters - Lily doesn't have magical powers, nor is she harmful, dangerous, or evil. She's just a happy little girl that likes snow and music.

That's great, but I don't love how Lily the story treats Lily the character. On numerous occasions, Sarah openly admits to the Doctor how "difficult" Lily is, how much of a burden the girl is on her parents, thinks of her as a shapeshifting alien, and even hints that nobody in the family really understands symptoms like cold intolerance. That's painful to read. The Doctor basically has to remind Sarah that Lily is a happy little girl. She's just a little different.

Now, I get it. Parents are put in a unique and often unfair position when it comes to children with ASD. They all too frequently are not given the resources they need to raise a child like this, and the feeling of burnout is very understandable. It just definitely feels like the story is written by the perspective of a parent of somebody with ASD over a person with ASD. That experience is valid, but in a franchise that has maybe mentioned autism a handful of times in sixty years, I hope people might understand why I find it a little frustrating that this is the perspective we are taking.

But, it's not a wrong perspective, either. This is how parents would feel at this time in human history. That the Doctor understands it better makes sense, because, while Who has never outright said it, though Big Finish has hinted at it, The Doctor himself, sometimes viewed as dangerous, difficult to work with, and weird, very much meets the criteria of being on the spectrum himself. And that's the key takeaway from all of this, in my opinion. Sarah always had a level of understanding when working with the Doctor because just like Lily, these people are of remarkable value equal to any other being and have a lot of positive energy and ideas they can bring into the universe.