The War Doctor is convalescing and hates it. Cora (Sheila Ruskin) is one of the last Sisters of Karn and his nurse. She hates it too, but there’s a war on, everywhen, and no one is safe. Not even the Time Lord dreadnought where Judd (Gareth Armstrong) is about to be given an unexpected date with destiny…

There’s a question I’ve seen a couple of times recently in fan circles: ‘How do you depict the Time War?’. It’s a good one. How do you render understandable a conflict that changed the nature of reality, of time and history? A war where the first casualty is, literally, truth?

The answer is,  for me, in this set and Susan’s War. Both wildly different, both tonally a light year away from each other and both focused on the Time War. The former is a Star Trek: TNG style exploration of the difficulties and necessities of diplomacy during wartime. The second sees Tim Foley, almost cackling with glee, putting the two biggest egos in Time Lord history in a room, tying one hand behind their backs and yelling ‘FIGHT!’

Morbius, played with delicious, fruit-cake thick aplomb by Samuel West is a monarch reduced. Feral, desperate to have his revenge and furious that he hasn’t died gloriously, he stalks around the set like a Shakespearean despot. West is really, really good at this and has a whale of a time here. Foley cleverly, openly, riffs on Star Trek II and the entire set is worth it to hear West purr ‘Perdition’s flame’. Like Khan, Morbius is the superior intellect. Like Khan that dooms him and this is where Foley earns every single one of the playful winks. The ending here takes elements of the stories Foley clearly loves so much and turns them into something entirely new. This is how you play the hits, in a new arrangement, on new instruments and with handwritten sheet music.

A big part of that is the removal of the War Doctor’s ability to travel in time without agonising pain. It’s a great conceit, one the show has used before and here Foley uses it to create an equal partnership for the War Doctor. Ruskin is superb as his serenely terse nurse and the pair rely on each other in the exact way the Doctor always has. The fact he stops complaining about it after a while only confirms that for all his protestations, the War Doctor is still the Doctor, just the Doctor through a cracked lens. The genius of the set lies in how and why that lens is cracked and Foley flips expectations on you and the characters more than once. Theo Solomon’s character is a big part of that and he brings the same effortless charm that makes him a standout in a cast of standouts in Baldur’s Gate 3 to this. Pamela Nomvete, known in these parts for her excellent work in Andor, is spectacularly good too, and there’s a hard-edged playfulness to her character that embodies both the Time War and its consequences. They, along with West, also set up the central tragedy of this set. That cracked lens and what the War Doctor chooses to see through it. Not certainty, not truth, not the Doctor. But as close as he can get.

Verdict: Wickedly clever, brutally playful, tragic and hopeful. This is how you win depicting the Time War. This is how you make excellent audio drama. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

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