Review: Stranded 2 – Dead Time (1/4)

Still locked down on Earth in 2020, the Doctor, Helen and Liv face an easing of restrictions in this month’s Stranded 2. The TARDIS is slowly coming back to life, allowing for visits to the planet’s past and its doomed future. But does this newfound freedom enhance or detract from Stranded’s unique premise?

This first story, Matt Fitton’s Dead Time picks up immediately after the events of the first boxed set’s closer, Divine Intervention. Some residents of Baker Street are shaken by the unearthly restaurant revelations, the TARDIS has barely started rebuilding itself and the Doctor has only recently recovered from being assassinated. Perhaps not the best circumstances for a short test flight, but nonetheless the Doctor is soon breaking lockdown restrictions for a jolly into the future that puts everyone’s lives at risk. Well, maybe not breaking them, but certainly bending them a little via a rather lovely nod to HG Wells’ The Time Machine. 

At first, it feels something of a cheat to allow the Doctor to leave contemporary Earth when the whole set-up of Stranded was supposed to limit him to one place and time, to allow for smaller, more character-led stories. I don’t know how close to recording these were written, but I do wonder if, remote recording aside, there’s been another impact of COVID19 on the production? Has there been a deliberate attempt to shift focus away from contemporary Earth because the real-world events of 2020 have overtaken the Doctor Who world?  A scene between Helen and Tania where the former talks about the Doctor’s isolation, boredom and frustration certainly resonates strongly almost a year into lockdown.  

It’ll be interesting to see how the set’s other jaunts in time work, but at least for now this hop into the future feels like a necessary step in setting up the series arc. As a standalone story, it’s fairly belt and braces stuff, desolate planet, killer robots etc. However, there’s a good deal of intrigue in the threads that are left dangling. No more than in the characters themselves. The Doctor’s restlessness and reckless desperation to get the TARDIS up and running again continue to cause problems for everyone around him. More concerning is the blasé way in which he shrugs off the idea that launching a faulty time machine powered by a dying star could have any ill-effects on the surrounding area. Will the Doctor’s desperation to fix his unstable time machine cause some catastrophic event? 

Or will it be Robin, the teenage boy desperate to be noticed by his parents who’s key to the arc?  He continues to be at the centre of the action here, following on from his encounter with Divine Intervention’s space Scientologists. Could this overlooked young man be the flashpoint from which this terrible future is created? Fitton is certainly emphasising both his abandonment issues and his admiration for the Doctor in this story. Will these be key elements as we continue through the series? 

The Doctor’s admirers brings us to bloody Torchwood, which continues to feel like one element too many. PC Andy is along for the ride and continues to be an irritant, he’s essentially a comic character that isn’t particularly funny. There’s an attempt to channel the late, great Jack Lemmon in Andy’s existential panic attacks brought on by the future he finds himself in, but it just comes across as flat. Fundamentally their addition doesn’t work dramatically because the Doctor can never know who Torchwood are, and there’s only a limited amount of tension that can be mined from that. And most of that type of drama was exhausted with River Song in Doom Coalition.  

Again, let’s see where they’re going with it, but personally, it still chafes against this misleading notion that Stranded is some sort of attempt to take the Eighth Doctor range back to basics. I honestly would not be at all surprised if Captain Jack was to show up on the periphery in Stranded 3 or 4. 

 Dead Time is an episode that’s hard to judge purely on its own merits as a Doctor Who story. There’s such a lightness of touch to the robot plot that it feels a little bit like one of those old annual stories from the 1970s. The character work is a lot more developed here than those World Enterprise stories though! So in terms of how well it explores the central characters of the Doctor and Robin and in how it advances the arc, this does a very good job indeed.  

You can buy Stranded 2 here or purchase the whole series here.