The Terror of the Umpty Ums

"Hate is just fear out loud."

Writer: Steven Moffat
Format: Short Story
Released: 7 April 2020
Series: #DoctorWhoLockdown

Featuring: Thirteenth Doctor

Synopsis

A new short story by Steven Moffat.

Verdict

The Terror of the Umpty Ums was another great little short story! This one was quite a bit longer than the other short stories I have managed to blog thus far and it was just quite surreal to have a new adventure from Steven Moffat! It was a very good read and I love that we now have a Thirteenth Doctor tale from the show runner of the two previous eras of Doctor Who. It's quite barmy really and doesn't quite seem right. It's a little bit like Russell T Davies getting to write for the Eleventh Doctor with Death of the Doctor. It's just a lot of fun. To be fair, Moffat does a pretty darn good job of capturing the personality of Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor. I was really impressed with the characterisation here. The story was a lot of fun and mostly just interaction between the Doctor and Karpagnon. Apparently he was a Deathborg 400 and the Doctor's comment about there potentially being 399 before him not boding well was very humorous. Would things really have gone right four-hundredth time lucky? I have my reservations. However, they are unnecessary as it turned out that he wasn't a Deathborg at all, but just an ordinary young boy in a very surprising twist. He had been toying with himself for much of the adventure about how the Doctor could be inside his head and infiltrated his interior defences successfully, but he knew all about her and how she was the most feared warrior in the cosmos. That was something the Doctor wasn't awfully too keen on being known as, but she wasn't in a mood for arguments. She had Dr Petrie's life to save. She was able to do so relatively easy as demonstrated on a vast number of occasions throughout the adventure, the Doctor was able to get Karpagnon to do just about anything she wanted. The Deathborg was very annoyed about this, but not as annoyed as the moment came when he realised the Doctor wasn't talking to him through an earpiece. She was inside his head all along. But how could she be? Well, because she was a character in a television show called Doctor Who of course. Again, the similar theme to Press Play here playing on the fact that the Doctor is a fictional character was excellent and something I really didn't see coming. It didn't have much of an emotional attachment to the revelation which was a slight shame, but it was still a great revelation. The suggestion that she can't be referred to as Doctor Who on TV was a lot of fun and something Steven Moffat had previously incorporated into the televised series with World Enough and Time. The development that the terrifying Umpty Ums actually referred to the Doctor Who theme music was superb and something I really didn't see coming. Prior to reading, the title of this story had very much intrigued me, but I wasn't expecting it to mean what it did! Personally, my viewpoint of the title music is more along the lines of 'dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum...', but the idea of the whoooo shift being the Doctor's arrival to come in and save the day was magnificent. I really loved that. There were a lot of trademark comments from the Doctor here about being brave, never be cowardly and that we're all stories in the end which were great. I also really liked the Doctor's analogy of what fear and hate are to each other. Overall, a terrific little short story!

Rating: 8/10