After the defeat of Padrac and his Doom Coalition, the 8th Doctor and Liv set off in the TARDIS to see if they can find and rescue Helen from The Elven if she’s still alive. Thus begins a new set of adventures, a third 4-box-set epic of four stories each entitled Ravenous. And, just like it took a while for the Doom Coalition to be revealed in Doom Coalition, it’s going to be a while before we find out who the actual Ravenous creatures/beings/characters might be.
We start off with what is essentially a stand-alone story, in which the Doctor and Liv Chenka pay Winston Churchill a visit in 1939 while they wait for the TARDIS to finish some calculations concerning how to track Helen’s trail. An alien threat has presented itself, and the Doctor and Liv are here to make sure they don’t interfere with history. It’s fun to see another incarnation working with Churchill – the 11th Doctor popularized this relationship in Victory of the Daleks, Churchill reminisces on an encounter with the 9th Doctor, and one could argue that the 6th Doctor is the one who started it in the novel Players – so in between them we get to see the 8th Doctor jump into that ongoing banter. He, too, is protective of the TARDIS and careful to guard his knowledge of the future of the war. Liv, amusingly enough, is from far enough in the future of the human race that she’s unaware of Churchill, and completely underwhelmed, which rather takes the wind out of his sails of usual bravado and charisma.
The main characters we get to spend time with, though, are two Polish pilots, representing a whole squad of Poles-in-exile who participated in the Battle of Britain. This is a neat piece of history that I didn’t know about (if not found surprising) and their heroism is celebrated as they bravely fly planes for the Doctor and for Liv investigating an invisible alien space ship nearby which has occasionally shot down British fighter planes.
We eventually learn that the aliens have a tradition of fighting proxy wars: rather than killing one another they choose someone else’s war, pick sides, and whoever wins the proxy war “wins” the virtual/cold war. Only this group of aliens is cheating, and getting involved in a way they shouldn’t be, so the Doctor is able to call home, get them recalled, and save London from destruction in the nick of time.
It’s a simple plot, in the end, which makes room for a nice heart of a story as we (especially through Liv) get to know the Polish pilots, and share her sense of bitter loss upon finding out that one of them got shot down by Nazis some time after surviving the alien encounter. It’s a classic war story in that regard, and I’m glad we got a chance to have a stand-alone story even though it’s the beginning of a new box set of adventures.
Ripples in my Tea 