Recap / Big Finish Doctor Who NEDAS Doom Coalition 1 E 2 The Red Lady

On the trail of the Eleven, The Doctor and Liv follow a temporal anomaly to London, 1963. The Doctor's scanner takes them to the National Museum, where they encounter Helen Sinclair, a language scholar stuck as an assistant due to the sexist attitudes of the time. While the Doctor and Liv try to discover the secrets of an untranslatable stone tablet that Helen was working on, another threat begins to manifest.

For the museum has recently acquired the collection of a dead antiquarian and begin the work of analyzing the pieces, despite the man's dying wish that they be sealed up. The collection focuses on one figure-a woman with red hair, masked, that at first only one person can see at a time.

But as those people begin dying off one by one, could the Doctor and his companions be next?

Tropes

• Anomalous Art: The Red Lady doesn't come from art, but she does alter it, as a side-effect of her vast, somewhat uncontrolled psychic powers.
• Call-Back: Liv has a sense of deja vu when they arrive at the Museum, and is put in mind of her day with Martin back in 1921.
  • The Doctor also brings up their trip to London in the 70s.
  • The Doctor mentions he's been in 1963 before-several befores, both as the First Doctor and as himself, stuck on Earth for quite a period of time
  • Liv and The Doctor pop into his house at 107 Baker Street, which she's seen before and The Doctor has used in previous guises as well.
• Creepy Changing Painting: The Red Lady appears in paintings, which change the more people are aware of them-meaning only one person can see the particular changes at a time.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The prejudice Helen faces at her job is positively medieval. Despite being intelligent and experienced, she's passed over for a promotion by a man with four years less experience and is baldly told she's too emotional for serious academic work because she's a woman, and of course she can't expect to be there much longer anyway because she's getting older and needs to get married and have children. When she does end up losing her job, she's not really put out about it.
• Sequel Hook: The immediate threat dealt with, the Doctor is able to translate the stone tablet and hear a message from Galileo, hundreds of years in the past. This leads The Doctor and Liv to their next adventure, and to invite Helen along for the trip.
• Spooky Photograph: The main thrust of the plot revolves around the Red Lady possessing all kinds of art, from paintings to tapestries, and even written accounts.