It's immense fun. It takes time to get a handle on Doom's character because the first quarter of her story is told through shorter comic strips in DWM and a couple of Titan Comics which use Missy as the focus. But once the longer form storytelling kicks in through the novel, the audiobook and then the Big Finish plays and Sooz Kempner's vibrant performance in the title role, we're more clearly able to understand the irony of her chasing after a figure who would completely repudiate her chosen profession.
Which is exactly what happens when Doom runs into the Doctor and Charley in the penultimate hour. She stumbles into their mission to preserve causality from The Crowd, a race of intergalactic tourists who, rather like the miscreants in Gary Kilworth's Let's Go to Golgotha, visit scenes of death and destruction for kicks and having exhausted the usual venues are now creating disasters and have it in for Thomas Becket and Canterbury. What follows in Lizzy Hopley's script are the usual hijinks intermixed with heated discussions concerning the time traveller's morality and methods.
The Crowd is the most Doctor-centric story of the whole series and Paul's clearly in his element with all of this, bringing out the Doctor's darker side from later in the Big Finish timeline especially when Charley's not around for various reasons. But India is also loving playing up to the Edwardian's similar dismissal; over the years Charley's offered a diplomatically light touch even against the darkest of foes, but Doom really rubs her up the wrong way and the feeling's mutual, the assassin referring to her a Pollard throughout.
The Eighth |Doctor at his most hard line, even authoritarian. He hates Doom and everything she stands for and says so to her face, slowly remembering the occasions when they've met before from his point of view in his first, second and sixth incarnations (Doom's met him in later versions and not really gotten along with them either presumably because they remember this meeting with greater clarity). He's life's champion and at every turn he tries to distance himself from her and even when they have to ally with one another, he's less keen than if she'd been the Master.
The effect of this is for us to re-assess how we've reacted to Doom's adventures. As consumers of various franchise content, our suspension of disbelief changes depending on what we're watching, reading or listening to. Having a hired assassin as the protagonist allows us to bend out morality to accept that for her missions to be a success she has to outright murder people and we might even cheer her on as she does so. On occasion she does find a way of dodging the murder of innocents, but bumping off crime bosses is fair game.
Except now we have the hero of the franchise, usually our hero, pointing out the moral implications of that lifestyle. Some of the hours are structured like Doctor Who stories but with someone who has a different moral compass at the centre and now we're beginning to question our own enjoyment of events and its the first occasion when Doom herself takes a good long look at her lifestyle. That makes this one of the richest of the various hours and makes the whole trip worthwhile - well that and the hilarious twist in the final hour, but you'll have to read that yourself.
Placement: Charley says she and the Doctor have been travelling for a while so let's put it just before Time of the Daleks to help that make sense.
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