When the mysterious Division tries to arrest their equally mysterious agent, the Doctor, she evades capture and heads out in search of answers… but trouble is never far behind…

‘Fast Times’ by Robert Valentine opens the set at a dead sprint as the Doctor finds herself on the run from her old bosses and promptly imprisoned. There, she meets Fade (Leah Harvey) a fugitive who the Daleks want very badly.

But who are the Daleks?

Valentine’s unenviable task of setting up a premise built on ambiguity is achieved with speed, charm and wit. Jo Martin is superb in the role, playing the Doctor as a little harder-edged but no less flamboyant than we’ve seen before. Her growing unease at the holes in her memory is especially well handled and her partnership with Fade crackles like all good Doctor/Companion stories do. Alice Krige is enormous fun as well as Cosmogon, the Time Lord troubleshooter sent to bring their errant sheep home. There are, apparently, echoes of The Chase too. If you’ve never seen that story, and I haven’t, then don’t worry, the story’s just as much fun.

In fact, the only problem here is the pace. It’s a fast, action a minute sprint and as audio action movies go it’s great. But the character is so interesting, and this time period so compelling, you can’t help but leave wanting a little more.

Rohan’s Patel’s ‘The Legend of Baba Yaga’ gives us just that as the Doctor arrives in 17th century Russia. Her plan is to find the Baba Yaga (Jacqueline King) the legendary witch who the Doctor knows has tangled with Time Lords before. She thinks the Baba Yaga has technology that can help her. Vasilisa (Sophie Shad) thinks the Doctor can help her get the fire she needs to stop her family freezing to death.

This feels like a Fugitive Doctor story and also gives us a sense of how they plug in to the Doctor’s wider evolution as a character. Martin plays her with the sort of driven pragmatism of the War Doctor and ghostly threads of the compassion that would define so many incarnations. She wants to be hardened and bitter and grim. She spends the entire story helping a legendary Russian woman find fire. Even here, isolated from everything including her own past and identity, the Doctor is still the Doctor.

The tone of the story mimics this evolutionary turn in the character and also cleverly calls forward to the current iteration of the show. It’s no distance at all between the Doctor seeking Baba Yaga’s help and UNIT sealing the Toymaker in salt. A story’s genre is just its language and Doctor Who has always been multi-lingual.

King and Shad are superb too, with King’s wonderfully boggy witch finding tremendous joy in doing unsettling witch things. Shad’s Vasilisa is the straight woman of sorts but no less interesting for that and the ending here does some audacious things with both, the idea of a Time Lord, what genre the story really is and how kindness matters when you’ve lost everything. Crammed with vibrant imagery, three great central performances and fizzing with energy this is the best story in the set.

Lisa McMullin’s ‘The Dimension of Lost Things’ wraps the set and again features a really strong cast and premise. This time the Doctor’s dislocation within their own life is explored through a literal dislocation: slipping through a hole in time to the place things and people wash up. It’s similar to the way Deadpool and Wolverine and various other Marvel titles explore limbo but McMullin finds a far more hopeful, and dangerous spin. This is less a dictatorship driven wasteland and more a place where people are doing their best with what they have. Not so much limbo as a fictional exploration or the shattered communities you see everywhere online as people rebuild with what they have. Nneka Okoye as Althelia, an explorer waylaid on her way here, is the embodiment of that idea. Brave, kind and determined. She’s a major influence on the Doctor as is Sandy Irvine played by Matt Wycliffe.

These two are McMullin’s aces, a pair of great performance and a pair of characters that cleverly represent the gaps the Doctor lives in. Althelia is an alien explorer defined by her love of the unknown and pragmatic compassion. Irvine, meanwhile is one those curious trap streets of history, Edmund Mallory’s climbing partner who was lost on the mountain with him but never recovered. The Doctor, and the story, give him an out which I loved and again speaks to the series’ lifelong fondness for the underdog and the surprise victory. Wycliffe and Okoye are instantly likable and have great chemistry and their story feels like a roadmap for what the Fugitive Doctor stories can and should do. Clever and kind, never cruel or cowardly, even here.

Again though, there’s a problem and ironically it’s the Doctor herself, not as a character but as a structure within the set. Martin herself is superb but the ending here teases revelations about the Doctor’s past that end up falling a little flat. It’s no one’s fault either. Just a sneaking suspicion that hints are all we’re getting, at least for a while. The fact the story stands perfectly well without them proves how valid a character this is and how strong the set is. But the currently unresolved ticking clock is hard to not hear, and harder to buy into.

Verdict: That aside this set is great. Jo Martin is stunningly good, the weakest story here is still a good time, and the energy and pace feels very different but familiar. As it should. A fugitive well worth tracking down. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart

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