“The Thirteenth Doctor finally gets a Christmas Special!” was the cry as this story was announced, but honestly this doesn’t have a lot of Christmas in it, and instead is a weird mix of light-hearted banter and a look at grief and having to try and get over that major loss, two story beats at the literal opposite ends of each other. Does this blend work? Well…
The story is set at the Royal Court of Henry II (Kevin Mathurin) during the brief yearly time his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Debra Baker) is permitted to leave her exile and be with her family. References are made at several attempted revolutions by some of their children and generally the whole unusual state of affairs is played for laughs as The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yas (Mandip Gill) arrive and are confused when Eleanor recognises them as distant relatives of hers. They also meet Princess Alys (Dolly Webb) who becomes a pseudo second companion as they begin to notice things starting to decay, and Yas meets Prince Phillip (Ammar Duffus) in a hedge maze, a Prince that shouldn’t exist. Alys says he was her imaginary friend she saw in the mirror of the room she was forbidden to go into as a child but then without warning the Prince arrives at the dinner table, clearly decomposing but everyone is happy to greet him and act like nothing’s out of the ordinary…
As I said, it’s a weird mix. The light-hearted exploration of the royal family of the time was enjoyable and the drama at the end of the story (that I’ll talk about in the Spoiler section) was quite well handled as well, but the two sides don’t match and a sudden sci-fi twist right at the end further muddies the water so overall it feels quite odd.
The Continuity:
Spooky Prince Phillip in the centre… I assume, don’t think any other royal in the cast had glowing eyes anyway. It is an audio though, so you never know!
A lot of this story shares ideas with Thirteenth Doctor TV Story “It Takes You Away”, though most of how you won’t get until we get to the spoilers bit. I suppose if you’re going to copy from a same-era story you may as well copy from the best!
It also connects to the first Thirteenth Doctor audio, “Vampire Weekend”, but how exactly will once again have to wait for the spoilers…
Overall Thoughts:
“Lionesses in Winter” is a story that struggles to find its tone, starting off with well written comedy and then plunging into grief and tragedy before ending with a little bit of classic Who sci-fi. It doesn’t do any of the three badly, but the mix doesn’t feel right so by the end you feel a little… confused? Either way, I doubt I’ll feel like listening to it again.
The Doctor, Yas and Alys head to the “forbidden room” and find the mirror that Alys talked to her imaginary friend in and The Doctor feels something is off, so they trio head to the TARDIS and go back in time to when the Princess was a child and along with meeting Eleanor (thus explaining how she already knew them earlier) they find out that the room was actually for a child that Henry and Eleanor had but lost and that the mirror was reflecting an alternate timeline when the child lived and grew up to be Prince Phillip. So far so mirror-universe-y, but the Phillip escaping into “our” world back in the original time is causing everything to decay due to the two universes not being compatible. They return to the “present” and try to persuade Henry and Eleanor that Phillip isn’t real but due to grief being such a powerful tool they’ll have none of it. It’s here that The Doctor finds out that Phillip isn’t in control of himself and is instead being controlled by a powerful entity known as “The Tourist”, mentioned back in the first audio story. The Doctor manages to expel the creature who taunts her before leaving, and then Phillip returns to his own universe. The family seem to be reunited at Christmas time but The Doctor lays down a history lesson for Yas saying that things don’t really work out for the family in the long run…
Hogan Reviews 