The Christmas Blessing

"Every word you speak will cause destruction on the Earth."

Writer: Steve Cole

Format: Short Story

Released: October 2023

Printed in: Ten Days of Christmas 05

Featuring: Tenth Doctor

Synopsis

Return to the incredible days of Ten this Christmas...

For the Tenth Doctor, the festive season always brought adventure.

In fact, he's saved Christmas across space and time more times than we ever knew...

Join the Doctor (and Donna and Martha and Rose, and other friends old and new) for incredible tales of daring and danger. From Daleks plotting to save humanity to Sycorax working to exploit it... from star-narwhals massing on the Moon to a toy factory in space.

Because even in the jolliest of seasons there's a world or two to save.

Verdict

The Christmas Blessing was an excellent short story to continue my reading of the Ten Days of Christmas collection! I was delighted with this offering and it was certainly the best of the collection so far. I loved the concept of reuniting the Tenth Doctor with UNIT as that was always something of a frosty relationship on screen which was no different in this adventure. The UNIT in question here being from 2183 was a lot of fun and the Doctor still carrying weight with his former Scientific Advisor credentials was a lot of fun. The confirmation that a large blue box had come out of nowhere was all the confirmation required for Colonel Peshawar to give him access and not to shoot him. I wonder how long it had been for UNIT since their last encounter with the Doctor? The indication was that it had been some considerable time which made this a good reunion. Even upon exiting the TARDIS the Doctor knew where he was thanks to the comms of the greyhound base. The little nod to the Brigadier when the Doctor heard the word greyhound was a lovely touch and the ship also being called the Benton was both hilarious and lovely homage. It was nice to honour the UNIT of old some two hundred years on. The companion role in this story was filled by Eliz who was a very lovely character. The Doctor took a liking to her straight away because not only was she very much in favour of peace and not a shoot first policy, but her job was to categorise and collect space junk! That seemed very exciting but her description of low orbit debris wasn’t all that glamorous. The Doctor knew it was though. The Herkalocks were something that she named too and they were a very interesting species. The scale of them was good to explore and their efforts of communicating coming in giant sound waves was actually incredibly damage. It had been misconstrued as an attack from the soldier minds of UNIT on the Benton but the Doctor and Eliz were quick to show that they didn’t know that to be true. So they were horrified when UNIT had launched missiles at the Herkalocks because they’d landed on the Moon which was deemed Earth territory. The alien’s reaction of thinking they were refreshments was unexpected but a good moment of humour, especially when they asked for more! I’m not sure Geneva would approve of that kind of military spending. I thought the origin of the Herkalock name from Eliz was a nice story and it was fun for it to have stuck after a casual mention. The description of them being like Narwhals was good and was a fine way to get the blessing into the title with that being the term for a collective. I have no problem with it but I’m finding that the Christmas theme of the book is very loose and not at all necessary to the stories which is actually quite fun. This one was a week before Christmas and whilst Eliz took the circumstances of the ending as a Christmas present, there wasn’t anything particularly Christmassy about the story. The agreement between Eliz as the Doctor’s appointed representative of the space junk and the Herkalocks was a neat ending as they also understood the devastation that could potentially be caused by their sound wave communication. Overall, an excellent read!

Rating: 9/10