S01E03 - November 13th 2025
A historical episode, and no ordinary one: the episode in which the Thirteenth Doctor says, in the beautiful French language, “Joyeux Noël!” What a delight this one is. I loved it so much that I listened to it a second time just to catch all the little sonic subtleties. It contains moments that feel worthy of an anthology and make me miss the Thirteenth Doctor’s television era all the more. Her entrance in the audio is simply iconic. The highly tactile, almost physical science-fiction idea is superb. The emotional thread is strong, even if it mainly affects the supporting characters. And the reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland is genuinely original. In short: yet another superb episode for Thirteen and Yaz.
We meet King Henry of England and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the middle of an argument—before they discover the Doctor sitting on the throne. She is simply trying to find a map so she can track down Yaz, whom she has lost in the hedge maze outside.
And there Yaz has met Prince Philip. Except… the king and queen never had a son called Philip. Worse still, everything is quite literally beginning to rot: the food, the objects, everything around them. Where does Philip come from? And why does young Alice seem to know him?…
This is a truly original story for the Thirteenth Doctor, because the particular brand of science fiction it embraces allows for some wonderfully inventive audio ideas. Rendering decay through sound is no easy feat, and it is handled brilliantly here. The challenge with this kind of historical episode is that the Thirteenth Doctor belongs to a relatively hard sci-fi register, so the writers really had to find a way of making that sensibility coexist with an old historical setting. This episode pulls that off exceptionally well. The idea that one reality can literally begin to rot if it is infected by another is simply brilliant, and a joy to uncover.
The plot unfolds smoothly despite the complexity of the concept, which is deeply impressive. That clarity is no doubt helped by the supporting cast, all of whom are perfectly embodied by their performers. The one slight weakness I can find is that the audio is so ambitious that a few cuts feel rather abrupt, making the editing difficult to sustain. I also find it a little frustrating that the maze is introduced so prominently at the start, leading us to think we are going to explore it, only for the central problem to be resolved entirely off-screen and for us never to return to that setting. That is a shame, but since the rest of the episode is fantastic, it remains a minor quibble rather than anything more.
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