The Silent Priest (Classic Doctors, New Monsters: Broken Memories)

Audio  The stories in this fourth anthology of this series are all tonally pretty dark, with each incarnation of the Doctor on several backfeet, all of them illustrating Clive Finch's warning to Rose that the Time Lord's constant companion is death.  In the first story by Jonathan Morris, the Fourth Doctor comes face to someone else's face with the Harmony Shoal from The Return of Doctor Mysterio as they possess their way through a human colony.  The second has the Sixth Doctor and Mel defending a castle against the clockwork droids from The Girl in the Fireplace with Jac Raynor's script becomes darker and darker with each passing moment.  Both are, of course, utterly brilliant, and I applauded in my lonely room at the end of both.  But, wow, did I need to give it a day before I launched into the final two instalments.

The Silent Priest/The Silent City

This David K. Barnes two-parter doesn't offer much levity either.  We meet the Eighth Doctor at a point in this incarnation, in the midst of the Time War, in which he is done.  As the Time Lord describes, he thinks he's saved the day, then finds that everything he did has been reversed or worse that the planet on which it happened disappears from existence.  It's got the point where he's visiting a priest on the regular, looking for some kind of mental clarity but as the cover art reveals, said holy person is a member of The Silence, so he doesn't just forget he's met the man; that's why he keeps coming back.  This is the version of the wanderer who's working towards his regeneration, perhaps around the time of Lies in Ruins.  He's a professional actor, of course, and it's his job to know, but I remain impressed by the way that Paul McGann keeps track of which version of this Doctor he's playing, at the beginning, middle, and end of his journey.

The same guest cast continues into the final story with the Seventh Doctor, who's left to cope with his later incarnation's actions in trying to unite the warring factions which are breaking the city apart.  Barnes is very keen to show the different approaches of the two Doctors, the mastermind and the universally challenged, notably by putting Seventh also late in his timeline in the TARDIS, in the days or weeks before San Francisco.  There's a chilling moment when he says off-handedly that he'll shut down a casino he's surveying on behalf of the local constabulary "in the morning" as though it would be nothing for him, the kind of action that the Eighth Doctor has been trying to run away from since The Dying Days.  But like Eighth, he makes a number of catastrophic mistakes and like Eighth, he doesn't remember any of them by the end of the episode.