The First Doctor and Dodo visit Camden Town and the seaside…

This is my first step into the First Doctor adventures and I chose well. The two stories here are defined by synced concepts, their time frame and their format. There’s a very different pace to these two stories, both mysteries unfolding with a noticeably more measured pace. That isn’t to say they’re not action-heavy; they are. But director Nicholas Briggs sets a very distinct, very different tone and it provides a foundation for the set to do some really interesting things.

‘The Demon Song’, written by Bob Ayres, plays like a Tenth Doctor story which the First Doctor has stepped into and decided to stick around. Set in London in 2020, it’s both a great opportunity for Lauren Cornelius’ wonderfully pragmatic Dodo to have a little fun and Ayres to tell one of those stories that only truly works in audio. I love very few ideas more than alien music and there’s a nice sense of paranoia to the way that music slowly takes over London, mixed with a surprisingly hard-edged tone. There’s real menace here and the final part is a deeply impressive culmination of multiple character arcs, a big science fiction idea and a multi-level redemption for Daniel De’ath (just bear with it), a would-be paranormal investigator. Played by Henry Nott, he’s loud, brash and arrogant, a YouTuber let loose in a cathode ray TV universe. Nott’s great and he, Briggs and Ayres steer into just how obnoxious Daniel is to deliver a moment of surprising, and hopeful, emotional resonance at the end. It’s a great cast all around in fact, and Bhavnisha Parmar’s unflappable Archie Pawar is a great one-story companion. Top marks too to Toby Hrycek-Robinson and Luke Pietnik’s sound designs which really land both stories.

Briggs pulls double duty with ‘The Incherton Incident’, which he also writes. This is the one I never saw coming, a cold war thriller set in 1947, the Roswell year, in coastal England. Stephen Noonan’s magnificently crotchety Doctor gets a lot to do here from chases and monologues to a moment of Professor Challenger-like coldness at the end. As the tiny town of Incherton struggles to cope with the after-effects of the war, and the device that’s crashed into the town, there’s a sense of Quatermass being one street over and the sense of menace is tangible. It’s a deeply ambitious story too, folding in alien politics, international relations, counter-espionage and the Doctor’s future.

This feels like a classic 1960s SF movie and there’s a great supporting cast once again. Thomas Michaelson’s Captain John Andrews feels like he’s in the third act of his own story that just happens to be the first act of this one and he’s one of the most well rounded and interested supporting roles I’ve heard in a long time. The various spies, from various powers, who it’s much more fun to find out for yourself, are also great.

Verdict: This is, as I say, my first step into the First Doctor series and it’s a very good one. A varied mix of unusual, contemporary SF and ice-cold post-war espionage, it’s got great scripts, production and performances especially from Noonan and Cornelius. Impressive, complex and fun. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

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