Doctor Who: Second Chances

A Second Doctor story told from the perspective of Zoe, this was the last in the original monthly run of Companion Chronicles.

The problem with Zoe as narrator, of course, is that she had all her memories of her travels with the Doctor erased in the TV episode The War Games. Over the course of her audio tales, therefore, we have had a long-running frame story in which the sinister “Company” tries to recover those memories in the hope of (among other things) learning the secrets of time travel. That began with the second Chronicle, back in 2007, and finally concludes here.

The first half follows the standard format, with an interrogator once again trying to recover those memories, this time revealing a story of the TARDIS's arrival on a doomed space station in (from Zoe's perspective) the near future. This is itself a decent tale, with some interesting plot devices used along the way, such as the interrogator skipping questions about the “boring bits” to jump the narrative forward, and, at one point, switching to the narrator role herself as her memory recovery device retrieves an event from her own past.

The real strength, however, is in the second half, once it transpires that so much time has passed since Zoe left the Doctor that that “near future” is now the present, and both she and the interrogator head to the space station to try and change the course of events. This creates a strong time travel story, with past and present colliding, and the usual frame story now becoming the central narrative. Much that happens in the first half now becomes directly relevant as we head for a dramatic and emotional ending that wraps everything up.

While this particular plot arc comprises only five of the eighty CC releases in the initial run, this feels like a fitting conclusion to the entire line, a suitable “season finale”, if you will. Not only is Zoe herself a key and proactive player in the events - the Doctor is almost sidelined - but I'll note that Padbury is particularly good at doing the voices of the other characters (often a weakness in the Chronicles).

And, oh, yeah... I loved her delivery of the very final line.