Nobody No-One's Pocket Whoniverse

This post if full of spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

A Brief Summary

The Doctor and Susan have been travelling for a while, but it all comes to a halt when he falls ill. The medicines on the TARDIS are not working, so they go to many planets looking for something that will. He eventually gets too sick to keep going, so the responsibility falls on Susan’s shoulders. The TARDIS takes her to an abandoned facility in the planet Rua, where she searches for antibiotics. The place is not as abandoned as it seems and she’s caught in the middle of a military mission to bring down a terrorist hiding there – the Butcher.

Antibiotics have become useless on Rua and now their medicine revolve around nanotechnology. The Butcher is holding the entire population hostage, being capable of controlling the nanomedicine in their blood. The team tasked with taking him down was supposed to be nano-free, but the Butcher turns the table by killing one of them – making Susan realize they have all been infected. Without much choice, she helps them take him down. Kendrick, the team leader, kills the Butcher. Susan gets the medicine she needs and return to the TARDIS, taking with her a message the Butcher wanted to broadcast to all of Rua. She learns from it that the pharmaceutical industry of Rua is corrupt and is keeping nanomedicine much more expensive than it truly needs to be, a truth that Gomery, the Butcher, wanted to expose. The story ends with her haunted with doubts if she should have done things differently.

Review

I’m of two minds on The Sleeping Blood. On one hand it’s fairly atmospheric and engaging - the first half in particular is structured like a horror story. It also has a strong performance from Caroline Ann Ford, confident and full of heart. But I’m not sold on its moral dilemma and that’s where is all falls apart. I’ve listened to this story a handful of times already (because I keep restarting my project) and I feel like it gets worse each time.

In the center of this story is an interesting character study for Susan who, for the first time, must stand on her own and save her grandfather. This little personal tale is tinged by horror elements, as we go about twenty minutes alone with Susan as she explores this abandoned research facility the TARDIS landed on and the entire time both we and the character have the impression that someone is watching her. The first time I listened to this I thought it would turn into something like Predator. It turns more into a serial killer episode, but the horror elements become far less prevalent once we get more characters on our ears.

The sci-fi elements are a bit contradictory. Maybe it’s me being a Chemistry student getting in the way of me having a good time, but Jesus this is not how nanotechnology works or even what it is. Not only that, but nanomedicine was apparently child’s play for Susan on her homeworld but she is after some generic antibiotic pills? If they are outdated medicine for the people of Rua, shouldn’t they be even more outdated for her? That also wouldn’t make much sense, but at least it would be consistent. At the end of the day this stuff doesn’t really matter, so I don’t hold it against the story too much. It serves the purpose of isolating Susan and raising the stakes once it’s established that the Butcher can kill any of our characters. I think its runtime works against it though because, to be blunt, there is only three characters that matter. So you don’t have any reason at all to worry about these people potentially dying. It’s a premise that I truly believe would work better as a four-parter full cast audio.

It then turns its attention to a moral dilemma. Did Susan do the right thing? Didn’t she just make things worse? Wasn’t the Butcher right? Once again one of the problems is the runtime. The story calls out to stuff like the USA healthcare system that basically extorts people to keep them alive. It’s a very serious topic that only gets tackled in the last ten minutes. If you really, really wanted to talk about this in one hour, it should’ve been your primary focus. You don’t need to turn the story into a lecture, but you can at least make the its moral conflict better integrated with the plot.

The way it’s actually done is with an exposition montage that has Susan watching Gomery talk about how his grandmother died because the treatment she needed was too expensive for them to pay even though through his work as a scientist he knew that people like her should’ve been getting all of that really, really cheap. It's just come way too late and feels a bit too emotionally manipulative. Yes, and elderly woman dying because she doesn’t have the money to care for herself is sad, but you only addressed it in the last five minutes. I get that this is positioned at the end to make the injustice of it all stick, as Susan feels that she unintentionally helped perpetuate a cruel system on this planet. It also draws a parallel between the antagonist and Susan, both motivated by their love for a grandparent. The key difference is that I, as a listener, know and care for Susan’s relationship with the Doctor; but the same can’t be said for another relationship you introduced seconds ago. It just doesn’t stick the landing.

I do still think it’s worth a listen. It has nice moments of characterization for Susan and how well this handle her character is the real reason why you should at least give it a chance. Caroline Ann Ford does a great job with the narration. It also has a quite good sound direction. Its main dilemmas, however, do not reach their full potential. Sadly, 2 out of 7.

Useless continuity notes

"What are you running from, eh? What he's done, your grandfather? No one has grandfathers these days!"

ㅤㅤ

This post if full of spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

A Brief Summary

The Beginning opens with the Doctor and Susan as they are about to escape their planet. Political exiles from home, they are surprised to find a third person aboard the time ship they stole – Quadriger Stoyn, who was working into dismantling it. Stoyn says that they’re going back, so the Doctor takes the dematerialization circuit as leverage. The TARDIS finally lands on a world, so Susan and the Doctor go out to explore followed by a hesitant Stoyn. Believing they’re on the planet Earth, they meet the Archeons – a local species that believes in order above all things and that are guiding the development of life on a nearby planet. As the Doctor gets on an argument with them over the ethics of it all, they start to dismantle the TARDIS, accidently freezing all of them in time.

Waking up millions of years later, Susan finds that they’re actually on Earth’s moon, and just as it has been colonized by humans. Susan reunites with the Doctor as they find that Stoyn is now working with the Archeons, who want revenge for the Doctor having wrecked their life mission. They attack Earth, planning to purge it and start anew, but are taken aback by a powerful counter-attack. The Doctor and Susan escape, leaving Stoyn behind on the Moon.

Review

An interesting story with a marketing that works against it. It’s not about the Doctor and Susan’s departure from home, although we do see a snippet of it in the first few minutes. It’s, in truth, their first travel in the TARDIS. The beginning of what truly matters. I hope that phrasing it like that reveals how I feel on telling too much about the Doctor’s past life. But I do understand whomever may feel frustrated because of it. I think everybody comes to this story expecting something it isn’t. Only the first in a series of weird, weird choices.

For a start, it’s the first in a trilogy in the Companion Chronicles celebrating the 50th year of Doctor Who. It makes sense to tell us the first adventure ever in an anniversary story, but the element that truly ties the trilogy together is an original character – the man, the legend… Quadriger Stoyn. And I truly can’t understand why. He’s played by Terry Molloy, better known in Doctor Who for his role as Davros. He does his part well, but I still don’t think the character justifies his presence as the central element of this celebration.

From the get go, Stoyn and the Doctor are on opposite sides – it’s to be expected, since one is a fugitive and the other wants to go back home. I don’t dislike the concept, but I admit it doesn’t feel right to have someone else onboard before Ian and Barbara enter the picture. It doesn’t feel natural. His presence in the narrative does bring out some interesting facets of the First Doctor, though.

This is an incarnation that is nothing alike the modern public perception of the character in many ways; but specially in his morals. This version of the Doctor, even more so before his character development as we see on TV, should be marked by bouts of cruelty, selfishness and arrogance. All of that is present here; he doesn’t care even a bit about what could happen with Stoyn and sees him only as an obstacle in his and Susan’s path. That leads us to them essentially keeping him hostage. Much of the clash between them, more so in the second part, revolves around Stoyn trying to get back the dematerialization circuit. All of this is good, it’s consistent with the First Doctor. It’s part of what distinguishes him tonally from his future selves and one of the many reasons why I enjoy the character so much. There are some stories in the expanded media where I miss that moral ambiguity.

I didn’t get out of this story thinking of Stoyn as a character I’m particularly fond of, but I see potential here to be explored in the next two stories as he has plenty of reason to get revenge. Susan, however, is fantastic. Caroline Ann Ford’s acting matured a lot throughout the years and here she delivers an enthusiastic and emotional performance. The Companion Chronicles are by large narrated in first person by the companions themselves reflecting or reminiscing on a past adventure; therefore it’s a format that allows a more psychological and intimate approach to the characters than the usual full cast format. This time that is used to its fullest in the first half, with the initial twenty minutes focusing mostly on Susan’s feelings about their escape and her first impressions of the TARDIS – it feels very intimate. Likewise, when the story picks up where it left off in the second part, the narrative is restructured based on Susan’s disorientation due to the sudden change of events. Ann Ford is also the one who voices the First Doctor and, although I don’t think it’s as much of a personal or emotionally charged performance, it I done with palpable affection and conveys the character’s mannerisms.

I also like the plot. The first time the crew meets the Archaeons is quite amicable and it’s marked by the Doctor and Susan’s sense of adventure and excitement as they explore this new world. It has some cool science fiction ideas: the Archaeons are not carbon-based life forms and therefore their biological and physical functioning is extremely different. Their technologies are also quite weird. There’s a scene in the first part that I particularly like in which Susan faces a body of water that behaves strangely and shows distorted reflections of the characters. She is swallowed by water and Ann Ford’s performance builds a crescendo of panic and shortness of breath and this sensation of drowning not only literal but also into her feelings. It’s one of my favorite moments.

The narrative takes another turn at the end of the first part when it is revealed that the Archeons have manipulated the development of life on Earth so that it occurs in an organized way according to their wishes. Their plans are thwarted when they try to enter the TARDIS but inadvertently cause a disturbance that temporally freezes all the characters for millions of years. When things return to normal, life on Earth has developed chaotically and humans have already colonized the Moon, making the Archaeons enter a kind of cultural existential crisis. I like how this develops because it deals with one of the central themes of the First Doctor’s era, interventionism. Part of the “cruelty” of this phase of Doctor Who is precisely how often the characters are confronted with their inability to change History. I’m unsure about how the Doctor voices his feelings on this matter here, though. It feels a bit too open minded for what I want out of a pre-TV story. He even calls himself a meddler, a title that I only feel is appropriate once Vicki joins the picture way down the line. Weirdly enough, the Doctor still acts as an agent of non-interventionism despite his discourse.

The Beginning is a very interesting release to discuss. I find more good in it than bad, as I expect may be palpable from the text. I wouldn’t put it on my list of favorites, but it’s a solid 4 out of 7.

Useless continuity notes

As they’re escaping, Susan describes the Doctor taking with him something that seems like the Hand of Omega. Platt probably only wanted to tie some “loose” ends, but it’s such a random bit of trivia.

Susan describes their homeworld as a “brown grim snow-capped planet”.

The TARDIS food machine is mentioned. This is not important at all except for my weird fondness over that thing.

The Doctor says that they ran away because his ideas were getting too dangerous. I’m not so sure how to feel about that. It implies that he wanted to get a bit interventionist, but that just doesn’t match very well with his behavior earlier in his live as depicted on TV. I’m not a purist, but I find that to be a very important beat to his development overall, as he slowly turning into an interventionist ‘hero’ is what leads us to the Second Doctor’s fate.

Giant Leap Base, the first lunar colony. I love that name, not sure why.

Quotes

“The ship was a tiny crumb of space and time pitching back and forth on the currents of raw creation.”

“What are you running from, eh? What he’s done, your grandfather? No one has grandfathers these days!”

Cute ideas