“Doctor Who: Time War – Uncharted: Reflections” (bloody hell, enough subtitles for you?) is the latest Eighth Doctor Time War offering, continuing the adventures of The Doctor, his great-grandson from another universe Alex and Cass, that one off character he met right at the end of his life that has been retroactively made into a companion I guess he forgets. It’s an odd mix, but even more oddly it really works! Reflections is a really fun four story set, with each story building nicely from the one before it. Let’s take a look!
The first story is titled “Nowhere, Never” and has Cass (Emma Campbell-Jones) wake up in a regular (future) suburban house with only her fridge AI (voiced by Helen Goldwyn) as company because she’s constantly waiting for her family to come back, but they never do. A friendly neighbour (played by Hattie Morahan, yes the same actress who plays Eighth Doctor companion Helen…) comes round and tries to stop her from thinking about it too much, and to help her get the bunker when an air-raid siren suddenly goes off. Meanwhile The Doctor (Paul McGann) and Alex (Sonny McGann) are in hospital beds, with the latter unable to move and the former having memory issues again. Alex meets a soldier (played by Jon-Paul Rowden) and the two manage to have a bit of a rummage around the facility only to find pockets of other time periods where Alex’s injuries change, but the weirdness it put a stop to by the mysterious Matron (also voiced by Helen Goldwyn) The three of them are similarly shuffled off to a bomb shelter during a raid, and Alex and Cass manage to talk to each other through a vent, though neither remembers the other immediately the ball does eventually drop. It’s an interesting story idea, even if the Eighth Doctor having amnesia is beyond a parody at this point! It’s eventually revealed that they’re all in a device called an “Accumulator” and soon emerge on a ship and meet an old Friend…
So it turns out Cass’s neighbour was in fact Hieronyma Friend, who we last saw (does that work with Audio Drama?) played by Jaye Griffiths who obviously ended up playing the Eighth Doctor’s latest companion Audacity, and given outside of the simulated reality Friend is suddenly played by Conrad Westmass, formally of C’rizz fame, there’s something much deeper going on with the character, especially as The Doctor hasn’t mentioned that they’re constantly wearing the faces of his old companions. Friend’s latest scheme involves hanging out in the Void with an ancient Gallifreyan ship that looks like an old Earth gallon (because why not?) but due to the effects of the dimension loads of alternate “reflections” of possible versions of the ship are out there as well. The ship is ran by a time sensitive called Sinsa (Amara Karan) and Cass has paradoxically been apart of the crew all along, so much that shipmate Graff (Dempsey Bovell) is her lover, though she doesn’t remember any of it. The hour flew by as The Doctor tries to unravel what Friend is up to while also dealing with an infection of strange roots growing odd fruit across the ship. By the end all the characters meet up at an intersection where a mysterious blue door has appeared, and Friend has told Alex about how the actual Alex from this universe died and he’s “not the real one”, which causes a rift between him and his great grandfather, made worse when Cass falls through the door and seemingly gets splintered across time and therefore becoming “someone else he didn’t save”. The ship comes under attack from one of the reflections, something that shouldn’t happen, as we go into episode 3…
Sonny McGann gets to do the “crouching slightly with his hand out a bit” pose that all modern Doctors have done at some point. Like father, like son!
The third story, “Cass-cade”, has a really fun premise but in sticking with it for the full hour it actually became a bit dull by the end. Basically The Doctor and Alex are having a rather plain adventure where they arrive on a space station, there’s an accident that puts the station in danger of falling into a sun, they survive an assassination attempt and eventually use some technical jargon to fix everything. Standard Doctor Who stuff, but we see it all through Cass’s eyes and she sees the adventure in fragments and not in the right order, and every time she meets The Doctor and Alex they don’t remember her and she has to go through the introductions again. So it starts off as a fun story where you’re trying to piece together the timeline of events along with Cass, but once you do hearing a whole bunch more sequences of Cass casually talking to herself about her situation and then confusing The Doctor and/or Alex with her foreknowledge gets a bit old. The story ends, from Cass’s perspective, with the three to them heading off for their next adventure as a unit again, though back on the old Gallifreyan galleon things are anything but straight forward…
I’ll cover the final part in the spoilers, but it was a really fun set over all, each episode had its own thing but tied into each other really well, creating a very satisfying narrative whole. Lot’s of good sci-fi concepts and the mystery of Friend only added to the overall joy. Not without faults obviously, as listed above, but a good set of stories.
The Continuity:
Obviously the previous Time War boxset “Cass” (which I reviewed in two halves HERE and HERE) is a must, not just for how The Doctor and Alex met Cass but also the introduction of Friend. Beyond that though, there isn’t much. Possibly Fourth Doctor TV story “The Invasion of Time”, not to get too spoilery before the spoiler section…
Overall Thoughts:
“Time War: Uncharted – Reflections” is a really great set of sci-fi focused Who, thankfully ignoring the Dalek and Time Lord battlefield noise for a bit more focus on the Time part of the Time War. Parts of the opening episode and a lot of the third episode slow things down a bit too much, having fun premises but riding them out for too long before moving on, so I can’t say its perfect. Still, really enjoyed myself, and I’m looking forward to the next “Uncharted” set, whenever that arrives…
The final episode, “Borrow or Rob”, has The Doctor having to join forces with Friend despite the latter manipulating Alex by using his admittedly covered-up past in hopes of shoving him through the mystery door and potentially fixing the timeline/Time War, which is what he claims in this story anyway. Meanwhile Alex heads off with Graff to try and get the ship back up and running by finding the TARDIS in the Accumulator after the galleon is seemingly invaded by Time Lords from another reflection, though they certainly don’t sound like Time Lords… Eventually they do make their way into the Accumulator reality and here Alex not only sees the previously helpful Soldier get killed but Graff too gets cut down, and even though it’s not explicitly stated, we the listener hear that the invaders are actually Sontarans (voiced as always by Dan Starkey) Alex makes it into the TARDIS and meets Cass, who has found herself on board after her Cass-cade incident.
All is not as it seems though as Alex’s eyes have changed colour and he’s not really acting like himself. He pilots the ship to The Doctor and Friend and helps them steady the Galleon but refuses to let his Great-Grandfather on board, telling him he’s had enough of seeing people die because of his lies. Cass let’s The Doctor know of Alex’s eyes before the TARDIS vanishes, and The Doctor claims it’s the mysterious fruit that has been growing on the ship that’s caused it and is once again outraged at Friend. They don’t have time to argue though as the Sontarans arrive, declaring themselves Time Lords, meaning both interpretations were right and the alternate reflection was obviously from a timeline where the Sontarans conquered Gallifrey. That was a fun twist. Anyway, we end on a cliffhanger as The Doctor and Friend leap through the mysterious blue door in a last-ditch effort to save their lives…
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