The First Doctor #29

'Losing the Audience' (2008) from Short Trips: Defining Patterns.

A fun time period and character to have a story based in with BBC radio, connecting to the history of Doctor Who itself in a nice way. The antagonists are somewhat intriguing at first but become quite convoluted as it goes on. Kind of like Mummy on the Orient Express but not as interesting.

Losing the Audience - ★★★☆☆

A historical set in the fifties that tells Susan and the Doctor's encounter with two radio actors, Max and Maxine, a divorced couple that are still friends with each other. It's a story that deal with the world post World Wars and the PTSD of the survivors - through Max. But it's also one of those conspiracy narratives that unravels terrible secrets lost to time when fan of the Max's show start to disappear... They're being murdered. The culprits are aliens that alied themselves to Britain against the nazis with the promise to get a part of India, but were betrayed and imprisoned up to the day the right frequencies at the radio station made it possible for them to escape.

These are aliens from another dimension, one with physics different to ours, and they are affected by sound, radio, waves. That's how they were imprisoned, and that's how the Doctor saves the day, killing them all. Honestly, my only problem with this story is that I though this should be longer. An two hour audio or a regular book. There are a lot of good ideas that don't have enough time to breath and reach their true potential.

It's really easy to picture how it would work. Part one of four would be an horror piece focusing on the public of the radio show being killed while Max tries to make sense of what's happening - maybe Susan goes with him, behind her grandfather's back. There is enough room in a longer story for other people to believe it was Max who killed these people, which this story briefly implies could've happened. You could make him doubt himself, and link it to very obvious untreated war PTSD. One of the cliffhangers could be the Doctor and Susan in the audience just when a murder is about to happen.

There is some really interesting implications about the aliens in the story. They are not necessarily malicious, even though they don't follow anything akin to our moral code. They are killing the audience believing they are nazis, since they didn't figure out yet that they were betrayed and it has been years since the war ended. Are they truly in the wrong here? Most incarnations of the Doctor wouldn't say so. Not One though, not at this point, and that's why I find his cruel atitude towards them in the end very in character. I honestly believe the only thing in his mind in this situation would be to not disturb Earth's history; he would be picking sides, which a kind of cruelty by itself.

That's implied in this story - the characterisation is on point -, but a longer story could elaborate on this dubious morality of the First Doctor and perhaps even built some conflict between him and Susan.

This story has a lot of potential - but as it is, it's a nice 6/10.

We start in 1955 Max a Radio show host is following a women alone home not to do anything bad but to make sure she gets home safe as his audience are being killed. He looses her however and she is later found dead.

The Doctor tries to fix the Tardis with Susan trying to leave totters lane for a while and they fly it ending up in London 1955 not there goal at all. Meeting Max Wheeler who then goes on to tell the doctor about his worries about the audience going missing presumed murdered. Susan is very well written very much like a weird teenager trying to get used to 1960s Britian.

The Doctor starts to connect local deaths and the audience being missing as the same and wondering if the hum in the BBC studio might be linked. deciding to stay and help Susan and 1st decide to watch the show and keep an eye on the audience from there. Max also tells the Doctor about the Shakers, an alien race some people made a deal with during WW2 to win the war. They ended up being unneeded and forgotten about. Of course they are behind all this not knowing the war is over, this then leads to a quick trap for the Shakers saving the day.

The story ends with the Doctor and Susan travelling back too 1963 Totters Lane by accident out of all of the places to end up.

I found this story quite dull unfortunately it took a while to get into. It was there for harder to make notes on then usual because of that too. I feel I also just didn't really enjoy reading it either unfortunately