Travel in Hope, the latest Ninth Doctor full cast box set, gets off to a fun start with two well written space-based stand alone stories that may not amaze you but will definitely entertain you, in two very different ways. “Below There” I found the best of the two for creating a good sense of tension and intrigue while “The Butler Did It” was a fun little run-around “whodunnit”. Let’s take a look!
“Below There” kicks off with a long sequence focusing on Vyx (Kelly Adams), who is alone in a teleport relay station in deepest, darkest space and is finding herself haunted by nightmares and sometimes images and voices coming from nowhere. One of these voices however comes through the comms and it’s The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), who tries to get through to her but she keeps dismissing him as impossible until eventually allowing him on board. It’s here The Doctor is worried about the apparent ghostly goings on but even more so when he can’t see them, well apart from the noises coming from the floor below…
The Butler Did It’s cover sure has a lot of people in modern clothes for the far future…
“The Butler Did It” on the other hand sees The Doctor arrive on a dusty spaceship repair station to find a part for the TARDIS and happily finds out that a pair of old friends have also arrived, but then that one of them has been poisoned. The Doctor takes the station’s nurse Myra (Emma Swam) as a one-off companion as he gathers up suspects and tries to find the culprit, disappointed that there was no butler on the station as that would’ve made things quicker (as it’s “always the butler who did it”). Among the suspects are local staff like the grumpy mechanic Tillier (Andrew French) or an alien smuggler called Hargenoy (Also Andrew French) who has to stay on his ship due to needing a specific air mixture, one that would be fatal for The Doctor so he sends Myra in instead, telling her what to say via a headset. It’s all a good bit of fun, at least until Myra starts showing the same effects of poison…
As mentioned both stories are fun in their own right, and tick two different boxes while also both being in a similar space station setting.
The Continuity:
A good overall cover, without too much emphasis on the returning elements (which good given they come from by far the weakest story…)
Not much. The Doctor refers to T-Mat as the main provider of teleportation services, a reference to Second Doctor TV story “The Seeds of the Death”, though apparently T-Mat had been brought out in the meantime.
As for “The Butler Did It” there isn’t much. I suppose there are some similarities to Tenth Doctor TV story “The Unicorn and The Wasp”, but only due to the fact they were both riffing on Agatha Christie, the Tenth Doctor one more than this due to featuring the woman herself!
Overall Thoughts:
The Doctor eyes the guy of the left, knowing he’s technically a spoiler in terms of this review, but whatever… Also who’s the guy with the moustache?!
I really enjoyed “Below There” and had a lot of fun listening to “The Butler Did It” as well, though I will admit the latter falls into the “fun but I doubt I’ll remember much about it in a few weeks” whereas the first story in the set is a bit more memorable and original. Still, a good first two-thirds of the set, sadly I know going in that the final story will most likely not be to my tastes…
Below There:
The Butler Did It:
“Below There” reveals that the noises from underneath are coming from Tom Francis (Daniel Cerqueira) who was Vyx’s co-worker who tried to use the teleporter himself when there was trouble with his family back home despite not being able to afford it, and during the course of the teleportation there was a systems glitch and he was set to all corners of the universe and travelled for what to him seemed like eternity, a concept The Doctor says human minds kind comprehend, hence why he’s gone mad. Vyx is trying to keep him alive because so long as there are two life signs the company will pay Tom’s family his wages, but The Doctor soon puts a stop to that and gives him a peaceful death. After a short issue with the internal systems thinking there was only one person there, fixed when The Doctor registered himself, Vyx sends out a broadcast to all the other stations to turn off the system due to it being faulty, a speech good enough that they all do it despite what the company may do to them.
“The Butler Did It” on the other hand reveals that the poison is actually nanomachines and that they’re controlled by Tillier, who has been killing on the side for a while now, selling the ships and goods left behind by his victims. The Doctor cures everyone and finds joy in finding out that Tillier’s first job on the station was working as what was essentially a butler, thus the title of the story turned out to be true in the end. He gives Myra all of Tillier’s ill-gotten gains so she can go and become a fully-fledged Doctor at a fancy university.
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