Hogan Reviews

The latest Eighth Doctor audio boxset has arrived and its title of “Echoes” seems to be a reference to the fact that these two stories feel awfully similar to other Eight/Liv/Helen stories in the recent past. They’re both well written, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t shake a sense of… I don’t know, I don’t want to saw “boredom” because again, they’re good stories, but maybe “sameness” is the right word. Not just Doctor Who stories (obviously!) but other Helen and Liv stories specifically hitting some very familiar beats to the ones here. Well, let’s take a look anyway!

“Birdsong” sees The Doctor (Paul McGann), Liv (Nicola Walker) and Helen (Hattie Morahan) arrive on a colony world eerily void of any sound at all due to there being no wildlife of any kind, but what they do find is an old fashioned cottage through a bunch of trees and there they’re greeted by Bex (Fiona Button), who is a colonist waiting for the corporation who sent her to arrive, but knew full well it was too early for our TARDIS trio to be them. The four go inside and there meet the other occupant in the house, Myra (Jane Asher), who is old and verging on senile. She claims to hear creatures outside and has a collection of bird feathers she says she got from the ground in the trees, but Bex is convinced she’s just losing it. It leads to an uncomfortable-to-listen-to argument at the dinner table where Bex loses her temper at Myra’s immature defiance and while Helen takes Bex’s side, knowing what its like to have a relative go through that, Liv takes Myra’s side as a career as a medtech makes her want to help her. While this very real conundrum is going on The Doctor heads out to find Bex’s original colony ship and not only finds its only big enough for one and is really old, but a flock of birds suddenly emerges from the ship and attacks…

I don’t know what it is with Liv and Helen stories and making me feel uncomfortable by brining very real drama into Doctor Who, but they’re at it again! Don’t get me wrong, it’s well done, but as I said for a lot of the Stranded stories it’s just not what I look for in Who. I did really enjoy the sci-fi twists that come in the latter half though, I’ll get to those in the spoiler section.

Lots going on with this cover! Really hard to focus on anything, but it’s well blended, I’ll give the artist that!

“Lost Hearts” on the other hand is full of even more familiar set pieces as not only is it set in the early 1900s, full of snooty upperclass people and sexism, but it also has Helen run into a younger version of one of her relatives, in this case her grandfather Robert (Joe Pitts) who is attending the college that this story is set in. It’s even established that The Doctor, Liv and Helen have been living and working in the school for at least a month, with one companion, Helen, really not liking her role as dinner lady. With all that being said, it does have some good build up as more and more spooky things happen around campus and Robert gets caught up in a secret society ran by the mysterious Professor Gray (Tim Bentinck). The Doctor also spends the story palling around with a teacher called Monty James (Steve Brody), who has a few ghostly encounters himself. Eventually The Doctor, Liv and Monty head out to a nearby landmark and our titular Time Lord is visited by a ghostly woman calling out his name but he’s pulled away before he can understand her. When they get back they find Robert gone and the mysterious Room 13 in his dorm becomes a key location in what’s really going on…

Like I said, it’s fine but really over-played with the time period and location, and even Liv in the script remarks how unoriginal Helen meeting a relative again is!

The Continuity:

Nothing major comes to mind really, though the Seventh Doctor novel / Tenth Doctor TV two parter “Human Nature / Family of Blood” has The Doctor and his companion go undercover in a 1913 school rather than a 1903 one, and in that case The Doctor had his memory altered into forgetting he was a Time Lord, so a little different at least. The Tenth Doctor story “School Reunion” though has The Doctor and his then-companion Rose go undercover in a school with Rose being a dinner lady much to her displeasure, so… that’s a little closer!

Beyond that any continuity is just Liv and Helen based, especially Helen meeting past family members like in “Absent Friends” or “Albie’s Angels”, two other audio stories where that exact thing happens…

Overall Thoughts:

“Birdsong” and “Lost Hearts” are both perfectly good stories, with Birdsong being a bit stronger in my eyes, but both have a definite feeling of sameness to them, especially the latter story for both setting and a key plot point surrounding companion Helen. Can’t say you’ll dislike them or anything, but I do think the Doctor / Liv / Helen run needs a bit of a boost for an upcoming set, at least a bit of a different setting or style of story…

Birdsong:

Lost Hearts:

In “Birdsong” The Doctor returns to the cottage and soon our main trio put their heads together and go off to visit the ship again, but only end up bringing another flock of birds to the cottage. They rush up the stairs and meet Myra in hopes she can explain what’s going on, as the colony ship is old and busted they assumed she was the original pilot, but what happens instead in the older woman violently throws up bird feathers and dies as other birds break in through the windows. Everyone escapes to the colony ship and there they find Bex, the original Bex, hooked up to a bunch of alien tree-branches, the Bex that followed them to the ship being constructed by her memories, the same with Myra who was based on her memories of her mother and the birds too as she was listening to a tape of birdsong as she became possessed. The Flock, as it refers to itself as, is some other-dimensional entity but when The Doctor pulls Bex free it’s soon defeated, with Bex being allowed to “look up at an alien sky” like she always wanted before she dies. Great stuff.

 While “Lost Hearts” reveals that Room 13 is a gutted TARDIS and the mysterious bell ringing heard in a school without a bell was the TARDIS cloister bell, and not just any TARDIS but The Doctor’s own TARDIS! Gray reveals he extends his life by bringing The Doctor to his past, younger self and sacrificing him to gain his regeneration energy and then deconstructing his time machines to paradoxically do it in the first place. This actually happens as well, with Robert also being killed causing Helen to vanish into thin air, but with Monty’s help Liv manages to use the TARDIS’s remaining telepathic circuits to first try and contact The Doctor on the hill (she was the ghostly woman trying to talk to him) then just appearing before everyone, her young self included, the day before it all happened and just tells them everything. This leads to The Doctor breaking into Room 13 and sabotaging it so that Gray is killed by the psychic remains of all the students he’d sacrificed over the years when he tries to turn his machine on. With everything back on track we find out that Monty is actually ghost writer M.R. James and this whole thing will no doubt inspire his ghost stories to come, as you know nobody in Doctor Who is ever actually creative, they all end up experiencing the things they end up writing about!