If I Should Die Before I Wake (Classic Doctors, New Monsters: The Stuff of Nightmares)

Audio  Marvellous, just marvellous, as good as an Eighth and Charley has ever been.  John Dorney's script (from a story by Jac Rayner) runs with Big Finish current tagline "for the love of stories" as the cue for a meditation on myths, narrative structure and the connection between dreams and imagination.  The Doctor's reading a series of Greek myths to Charley which she's apparently experiencing in the first person and frustrates him by giving her "character" easy ways to survive.  But there are other random elements in the console room and it slowly becomes apparent that the Dream Crabs from TV's Last Christmas have their claws into one or both of them.

As I said about The End of the Beginning recently, it's incredible that after all these years as soon as Paul and India are interacting with one another again, twenty odd years disappear from both their voices and we're right back in that first exciting week when most of the first series was recorded and the chemistry between them returns.  In the extras, both are clearly delighted to be working together again, albeit in lockdown in bedrooms and cupboards unable to even see each other.  There's an electricity which you just don't get when one or the other isn't present (although to be fair that was the case for large sections of the 8th+Lucie stories and I didn't notice.

Although he's not mentioned, I wonder how much of this was influenced by Lionel Fanthorpe.  Although I knew him best for Fortean TV back in the 90s, my science fiction writing tutor spoke warmly of his many hundreds of novels in which he'd often write an abrupt ending because he'd reached his word count, "one leap and he was free".  That's often how Doctor Who stories end, plenty of build up then a quick squeeze of the sonic screwdriver or whatever.  Fanthorpe also incorporated ancient mythology including Greece into his stories as he crafted a novel based on a cover which had already been selected, kind of like the "shopping lists" which Who writers often have to work from.

It's also a companion piece to Rob Shearman's Scherzo, which was also a two hander and which also featured a fair amount of body horror.  Like that story the Doctor and Charley are trying to escape a place were the laws of time and reality no longer exist but whereas there they had to overcome a fractured friendship, here its their closeness which is almost their undoing.  Although the Doctor becomes increasingly frustrated with Charley's attempts at preserving her own life, for various reasons, its so that she can save him.  In Scherzo, they were forced into working together as their bodies literally began to merge.

Placement: After Solitaire.