Recap / Big Finish Doctor Who Short Trips S 9 E 9 Dead Media

A Doctor Who podcast? It'll never catch on.

A story for the Twelfth Doctor. Written by John Richards, and read by Jacob Dudman.

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Dead Media contains examples of the following tropes:

• Aliens in Cardiff: Taking place in the Series 10 status quo of the Doctor lecturing at St Luke's University, the episode is set in Bristol.
• Another Dimension: The creature eating away at the Doctor's universe results in breaches to others, including some not-so-different (the clock tower was never built) to some radically (a bombed out Bristol).
• Alternate Self: At the climax, the gap in dimensions results in the Doctor and student Petra conversing with an alternate Professor Petra.
• Bittersweet Ending: The creature is returned to its own dimension, but in the process of sealing the dimensional barriers, Petra is either killed, or flung somewhere in space and time.
• Broken Echo: The Doctor realises something is interfering with his tape when the magnetic echo starts causing distorting in ways that shouldn't be possible.
  • At the climax, the clip reflects in and out of parallel universes, distorting it and also making it impossible to cancel out.
• Call-Back:
  • The tape recording is of the Third Doctor, trying to device away to fix his TARDIS and escape exile.
    • Both the Blinovitch Limitation Effect and "Reverse the Polarity" are mentioned, with the latter containing the gateway to the creature's dimension.
  • The Doctor mentions his morality dilemma over being a good man, saying "someone" said the point is in the trying. At this point in his life, he's forgotten exactly who.
• Cassette Craze: Apparently the Third Doctor recorded his research and workings on the TARDIS in his UNIT days.
• Ironic Echo: Twelve talks about Three's desire to fix his TARDIS and escape Earth, quipping that he's now in the opposite scenario, with a working TARDIS but a pledge to stay.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Doctor muses on this, as its his own action in unleashing the sonic creature (believing it to be trapped) which almost breaks reality, and gets Petra killed/displaced.
• Shout-Out: Nardole and the TARDIS are absent due to taking a trip to 1974's Eurovision Song Contest to see ABBA.