Exile review [Nicholas Briggs]

All the Doctor has to do to avoid being caught by the Time Lords is work in a supermarket and go to the pub. It's a cunning plan - certainly far less dangerous than fighting the dreaded Quarks and all those other alien fiends.

But just when everything seemed mundane and safe, alien transmissions, exploding poison gas, Princess Anne and wobbly trolleys burst onto the scene to ruin everything. It's a crisis! A fiendish alien plot! And the Doctor must use all the resources at her disposal to defeat it.

She'll probably need to have a large vodka first, though.

What If...?: Rather than being put on trial at the end of The War Games, the Doctor escaped justice and lives in hiding in a female incarnation after jumping from a pylon to regenerate.

Where and When: In another universe, after The War Games. London, 2000.

The Doctor's Case:

• A Good Quotation:
• "Oh, shit," says a Time Lord.
• "Trolleys. I hate trolleys. They're just Daleks without the interesting bits."
• "Are you really the same Doctor who defeated the dreaded Quarks time after time?" / "The Quarks were rubbish."
• The Time Lords shouldn't be funny. They're a grandiose race that work best when they're being mysterious and all-powerful, and are at least tolerable (most of the time) when they're being stuffy bureaucrats. However, they should never be made fun of or laughed at as they are at the beginning of Exile, as it's completely contrasted with what and who the Time Lords are and their position in the universe of Doctor Who. But it's hilarious and definitely belongs in this section and not the next. David Tennant puts in a great little performance as one of the squabbling Gallifreyans. This should never be done outside of the Unbound universe, though.
• The tongue-in-cheek digs at the Quarks are some of the funniest lines in the story.
• Arabella Weir is easy to listen to even if it isn't the best of scripts. She finally gets to be Doctory towards the end and she proves that she would have been a good one. Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that we'll ever be seeing her as the Doctor again.

The Valeyard's Case:

• A Bad Quotation:
• "After five pints of lager, Cheese starts thinking his beer tastes like cheese. That’s why we call him Cheese."
• Nothing really happens for most of the story. We spend time with the Doctor living her life on Earth but she's unfortunately not too engaging and her friends are very thinly sketched. The story might have worked as a character piece but as a comedy with underwritten characters, it's vacuous.
• There's a lot of burping and vomiting and not all of the humour lands.

This Reminds Me...:

• The Doctor's going by the name "Susan Foreman", chosen, of course, from her granddaughter who first appeared in An Unearthly Child.
• The Doctor uses Venusian aikido, frequently used by the canon Third Doctor.
• The Doctor echoes the Fourth Doctor's line in Logopolis; "the moment has been prepared for."
• The previous Doctor and the Time Lords mention the Quarks a lot, who appeared in The Dominators.
• The Time Lords mention a Dalek invasion of Earth in 2164, referring to The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
• The Doctor gets scarecrowed, which is what causes the Second Doctor to regenerate in the comics.
• UNIT is all but mentioned by name.
• The Time Lords allude to the possibility of a trial not unlike The Trial of a Time Lord.

The Inquisitor's Judgement: Arabella Weir does a good job with what she's given and the Time Lord double act is a hugely memorable one, but, whilst the humour is often very funny, there's almost no plot. The vomiting and burping doesn't make for the best listen and a not inconsiderable amount of the humour doesn't land. Big Finish should bring back Arabella Weir but do away with her alcoholism. This story is very bad, and that earns it an E.

Unbound

Deadline  |  Exile  |  A Storm of Angels