Buried Memories: Pride of the Lampian

"Every object is a symbol."

Writer: Alyson Leeds

Format: Audio

Released: September 2019

Series: New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield 5.01 

Featuring: Unbound Doctor, Benny

Synopsis 

Bernice Summerfield finds the last relic of a lost civilisation. One that the Doctor is worried may never have existed.

Verdict  

Pride of the Lampian was an excellent start to the Buried Memories fifth series of the New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield! After a fascinating end to the last series with Benny and the Unbound Doctor making their way to N-Space as the former’s own universe, this was a strong start to proceedings even if that wasn’t really expanded upon. That’s not a problem as there is still a lot of time to explore moving forward in the series and the episode was a very strong one so I’m happy to be patient! It started off well with Benny taking the Doctor to a market and I was quite surprised that given her profession and academic background she was upsold so easily! She felt a connection the clay figurine which was good and certainly peaked my interest, but before she knew it she was listening to Gariff as the stall holder talk a lot of rubbish about it coming from the supposed ancient and lost race of the Lampians. I mean, it was so obvious that he had made it up and what almost made it worse was the fact that Benny even asked him if he had just looked at the lamps around them and conjured up the name in a bid to make money! She ignored that, and whilst it may not wholly have been down to her showing a little vulnerability with the figurine being something more, it still was a bit of a surprise! It was interesting though which you always want and it provided quite a frosty dynamic between the Doctor and Benny as her investigations went on. The relationship Benny built up with Drolla as the archivist was superb and I loved that she claimed to know every item in the archive catalogue. So she was very shocked to find that there was a Lampian record despite her insistence to the contrary. The Doctor was adamant that the Lampians did not exist and his desire to prove himself right didn’t sit well with Benny because as far as she was concerned, she was doing what she loved in uncovering a lost civilisation. The Lampians were supposedly removed from history and that led me to thinking that we had some Time Lord involvement in erasing them from Time, but that wasn’t to be. The Unbound Doctor also pondering on not getting involved with this universe’s version of the Time Lords was good too, although that’s something I would love to explore in the future! The pace of the episode was brilliant and I loved that the Lampians were heard in the background as if they were almost returning from the depths of oblivion. Their supposed conquests were being recreated and having the Doctor investigate and explore those planets where the Lampians had apparently conquered was brilliant because it hadn’t happened and he could be a bit pompous knowing he was right. Benny and Drolla were right in their element piecing the Lampian history together and that was lovely to hear. So it was quite saddening that they had to be told they were wrong and that the history was constructed from Benny’s mind herself. She’d been linked with the figurine and that meant she’d actually been the catalyst for the creation of the Lampians. The Doctor getting his worlds a little wrong in describing her imagination as bland was amusing but right in line with the characterisation of this alternate Doctor. I thought it was nice though that just when Benny looked like she was going to defy the Doctor that she accepted that the Lampians were fake and ousted them from the true course of history to put things back on track. That was a great conclusion. Overall, an excellent series opener!

Rating: 9/10