Gardeners' World

"This monument doesn't belong here."

Writer: George Mann

Format: Audio

Released: February 2017

Series: Short Trips 7.02

Featuring: Third Doctor, Jo

Synopsis

Strange occurrences plague the village of Colston Burghley – a medieval monument has appeared on the village green, postboxes have disappeared... and there's trouble in Meredith Bright's back garden. When Mike Yates finds himself at a loss, it's down to the Doctor and Jo Grant to get to the root of the trouble...

Verdict

Gardeners' World was a fantastic little Short Trips audio! This was a real delight to listen to on my lunch break and was just a fun and simple (relatively) adventure. I thought it captured the era of the Third Doctor really well and I liked how well the relationship between him and Jo was also written. It just felt like it would slot in perfectly at pretty much any point between Seasons 8 and 10. That's a big compliment, but I honestly didn't expect anything less from George Mann as he is definitely one of my favourite writers. I liked how things started mysteriously with the strange goings on in the village of Colston Burghley and I initially figured that the new monument that had arrived on the green was the Master's TARDIS! It would make sense given the era for the Doctor and it just seemed like a feasible option as monuments don't tend to arrive out of thin air! I was expecting a situation similar to The Keeper of Traken. I was a big fan of how the Doctor's love of Bessie shone through when it came to getting to the village, and from there we found that the monument was actually quite old and full of moss. It gave ill effects to anyone who touched which was interesting, and I loved the deliberate use of language from the Doctor when it came to the monument not being alien and also not of this universe. His explanation of the parallel world theory was magnificent and I also enjoyed that Jo knew of and mentioned the events of Inferno despite not being with UNIT at the time. Having Yates as another familiar character in the story was good and I was intrigued when he was getting shocked by some plants. There was dimensional dissonance and the roses had mysteriously been adapting to their surroundings! They were a living alloy which heightened my interest. Meredith Bright was a fun character and I liked how she had been tending the roses in her garden. They were pretty and unusual and as a gardener, she'd found herself talking to these new additions. Incredibly, they seemed to provide her with luck before they had grown uncontrollable and attracted pests. These pests being time parasites that feed on causality in the form of Fidians was really good! They were essentially alien technology that had clung onto a meteorite that struck the village a century earlier. Each flower of the roses represented a different thread of possibility with each whole rose being a divergent point. The plants were designed to navigate future histories which I thought was just tremendous! This was how Meredith got lucky from the plants because she had unknowingly learned how to control it. The concept of the Fidians in thriving on chaos was great and I loved how they were attracted by shifting timelines and the flowers had to adapt to survive. Yates being unable to leave the garden grounds was a humorous moment and I enjoyed how it was down to Meredith to fix things with her control and find a future where nothing had happened. The Fidians impacted the process though and temporarily wrote Yates out of existence! The Doctor letting them feed on the much juicer TARDIS was good and the use of the cloister bell showed how bad things were for it. Meredith making another effort and succeeding was decent and a timeline had been found where the meteorite never destroyed the church so the Fidians never came. It was a bit paradoxical, but it worked. Overall, a terrific listen!

Rating: 9/10