The two latest Doctor Who short trip audiobooks from BBC Audio are a neat pair, each showing a whole “type” of Doctor Who adventuring. 

Counterstrike, by Una McCormack, pitted the Doctor and Belinda against an automatic system with a sense of certainty about its actions, ticking down to an impossibly destructive result, like The Armageddon Factor.

Firefall, by Beth Axford on the other hand, taps into a Midnight vibe – it introduces a potentially threatening alien life form into an unstable, jittery group of human beings, and shows us how they react to the different in their midst.

Whereas Counterstrike is set far away and at some undefined point in time, Firefall is very much tied to a sense of time and place. We are in Canada in 1833, in the unassuming town of Drummondville, watching the spectacular Leonids meteor shower of that year.

Except something else has fallen to Earth. Something that while it might also be called a Leonid, isn’t a meteor – and by the time the Doctor and Belinda make planetfall, something that is already having negative consequences in the town.

Cue burned buildings, dark mutterings about curses and the Devil, and suspicion of both strangers in town and the local astronomical oddball, young Mary Moss.

Enter Belinda Chandra 

When the Doctor and Bel bounce in, having spotted evidence of an alien arrival in the nearby forest, they are met with hostility but try to start an investigation of the oddly burned buildings. 

All the while, under the surface of the town’s activity, Mary Moss is doing her best to walk the line between the consequences of an alien visitation and her fundamental, if to her inexplicable, belief that the alien is not inherently evil.

For all we mentioned Midnight as a Doctor Who mood reference-point, Firefall has a lot more in common with the likes of Steven Spielberg’s ET – The Extra-Terrestrial – a young person making a bond beyond words with an alien visitor with extraordinary capabilities, forces of authority searching for the alien potentially to do it harm, a growing connection between the out-of-kilter human and the uncomprehending visitor, a significant stakes-raise a little over halfway through, and so on.

There’s a strong sense that Mary might be what we would now at least term “neurospicy”, and it’s refreshing in a sense to get a story in which that feels clearly like “a thing,” but a thing entirely misunderstood by the people of the time and place, leading to her being considered unusual and therefore inherently untrustworthy. She makes an initial friend in Belinda, who rather takes her breath away with her beauty on their first encounter, and in that, the story serves Belinda well, not because the young Moss finds her beautiful, but because it brings Bel’s caring, nurturing side as a nurse very much to the fore, giving Moss a friend in the world that she never especially looked to have.

A Refreshing Restatement

The Doctor, by comparison, arrives very much more like an authority, albeit a well-meaning one, and Bel acts as the bridge between his good intentions towards Mary and her alien visitor and the persona of the bouncy man who Knows Things but has a tendency to lay down his own version of the law.

In some respects, that’s a refreshing restatement of the roles of the Doctor and the companion – notsomuch the “She cares, so I don’t have to” of Clara and the Twelfth Doctor as a reminder that for all this incarnation is personable and more sensitive than many, he still carries himself with the air of an authority in the wider universe, and sometimes he needs that bridge of human compassion to interact with scared or suspicious people.

When the stakes are raised by the “arrival” of a new batch of fiery alien entities, it begins to look like there could be a pitched battle between the humans and their visitors – and in another unusual twist, the humans of 1833 are entirely capable of hurting or killing the aliens, levelling the potential playing field, with Mary, Bel and the Doctor forming a thin and precarious cordon between the two sides.

A Richly Built World

Another joy about Beth Axford’s story is that if you walk around in her world, you can see the points of view of both sides of her conflict. She gives enough background to the aliens to make you sympathize with their plight – they’re light years from home with no way of getting back, and they’re from a society that probably wouldn’t accept them back even if they made it. From their point of view, they have very few options but to establish a colony where they’ve landed. 

But on the other hand, their presence near human settlements inevitably leads to property damage and potentially death for those with a prior claim. It’s less an invasion than, say, the arrival of European settlers on the American continent, but it still results in an existential crisis for both sides. There will be blood. There will be flame. There will be needless death and destruction on both sides, with the potential for conflict shown in miniature in a single small Canadian town but with the likelihood underscored that if it’s not resolved here, it could consume the whole of the Earth. 

Axford doesn’t shy away from the fact of this emotional conflict, showing us how people from both sides of the cosmos behave when they feel small, and cornered, and like their very existence is threatened by an out-group.

A Question of Destiny

The resolution is partially obvious, but it leaves enough written in minor keys to feel poignant when it comes to the fate of Mary Moss, who is very clearly a “could-be companion” and who would doubtless have made a great contribution to the team. 

Her chosen destiny is denied her by the Doctor’s resolution to the problem of the competing needs of the humans and the Leonid fire-creatures, and Bel’s attempt to sweeten her disappointment feels weak compared to her wishes, which adds to the pathos of the minor-key ending given to her. There’s hope in her future, certainly, but there’s also an ache of feeling like in the width and breadth of the cosmos, there could have been a better way for her to find her purpose. 

Firefall is a character-rich story that describes big themes (particularly given our world of both active invasions and increasingly ludicrous fearmongering about “incomers” being responsible for a competition for resources and leading to inevitable conflict), but never grandstands or preaches, keeping us focused in the here and now of the story and the people from both sides affected by the clash of cultures. While the Doctor has his moments, the story feels like a fanfare for the “I’m not having this” determination and compassion of Belinda Chandra, who never shrinks from putting herself between scared and angry people and their would-be victims. In essence then, it’s a story that would have fitted right into Season 2, and might well have benefited the season’s story-arc as a whole, giving Belinda a stand-out chance to shine.

Now, it can slip into your consciousness and do that just – and you’ll be glad you let it. Tony Fyler

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