Dead Woman Walking

"Ace must not die."

Writer: Roland Moore

Format: Audio

Released: April 2020

Series: Short Trips 10.04

Featuring: Seventh Doctor, Ace

Synopsis

The Doctor's meddling has taken a tremendous emotional toll on Ace over their many adventures. However, this time, it may just cost her life.

Landing in the middle of a civil war, the Doctor hoped to discreetly meddle and then slip away unnoticed. Instead, he's managed to infect Ace with an organic bomb. A bomb with a most unusual trigger.

If Ace dies, so does the planet.

Verdict

Dead Woman Walking was a great little Short Trips audio! It seems an eternity since I’ve done anything featuring the pairing of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, and this certainly didn’t disappoint! It felt like it could fit in perfectly in the latter part of the Seventh Doctor era on television and it could just as easily slot into the Monthly Adventures audios or New Adventures books, at least up to the point where I am in each of those ranges and continuities. Having a little pre-titles scene is slightly unusual for the Classic era but it worked really well here with Ace apparently dead! That’s quite a bold way to start a story, especially a short one like this. She was found in a crater and I was stunned to hear that the Doctor expected her not to make it out alive. But she did! Ace describing how she could hear the air of fatality in the Doctor’s voice was terrific because he’s experienced grief on more than one occasion by this point in his life. Their arrival on Gathrosa was good and nice to have a little time jump backwards establishing that the planet was engaged in a civil war. That seemed a good situation for the Seventh Doctor to play some games with his companion and that’s exactly what ended up happening. Ace’s glee at the Doctor wanting her to blow something up was a brilliant moment because he’s so often against that. But the civil war had got to such a stage here that one side were on the verge of deploying a psychic resonator weapon that could influence the thoughts of the opposition. Whilst that’s not exactly an original idea, it’s one I appreciate and think works well despite us not actually hearing it in action here. It was just the threat of it being deployed which was good and the Doctor realising the long term cost if it was unleashed was more than enough to sell its danger. I enjoyed the Doctor’s encouragement of Ace using the nitro-9 and he knew that it would take them years to recreate something like the resonator and by that point he would have a more solid plan on his return to bring peace to the planet. Why he couldn’t just arrive earlier in time and do the same was left unanswered and seems a bit of an error, but that didn’t take away too much from my liking of this adventure. The suggestion that there was blood on Ace’s neck once we caught up with events was good and we got the full scale explosion and missile chase after it had done its work, but it turned out to be purple fluid and that was a whole lot worse. The revelation that Ace had a tail embedded into her skin was an unexpected development but the entire concept of the companion worm and its link with the trigger worm was very good indeed. The worm had been on the planet for a considerable time and had been busy multiplying since its arrival centuries ago, and the problem of severing the psychic link if it died was great stuff. It would spit out billions and repeat the process, but what was happening here would have huge implications for Ace. If she died, then the planet would end up destroyed due to the link severing and that placed Ace in a tricky situation indeed. Tovar made a decent character as the head scientist, but it was all about the Doctor and Ace for me. The moment where the Doctor reveals to her companion that she can never leave is really impactful and there wasn’t even the usual safety net of going into the TARDIS as due to it being in a different dimension, it would also sever the link and cause destruction on a planetary scale. I was very surprised that Ace was left alone and I felt quite sorry for her when she was wondering if the Doctor had been taken by an old enemy or something to explain his absence. He was gone for four weeks which must have been an eternity for Ace, but he arrived back with some kind of answer. Knowing Ace’s importance to the survival of the planet, all of the Gathrosans were praying for Ace so the Doctor wanted to try and harness that power. If the population all thought to destroy what was inside the planet linked to Ace and the worm, then there might be a way out! That turned out to be the case, but in keeping with the era I thought it was great to discover that the Doctor waited four weeks in order to test Ace and hope that she would work it out for herself. That didn’t go down too well! Overall, a great little audio!

Rating: 8/10