‘TOTEM’
Please feel free to comment on my review.
Señora Panstedas and the Eighth Doctor
It’s time to check out the second ‘Short Trips’ anthology of ‘Doctor Who’ published by the BBC! 🙂
Following on from the success of the first BBC ‘Short Trips’ anthology published in March 1998, it was quickly decided to put together a second ‘Short Trips’ anthology, which was published in March 1999. This time around, there are 18 stories featured in the second collection instead of 15 stories. 🙂
Or rather, it’s 17 stories, since two entries in the ‘More Short Trips’ anthology form a two-part story called ‘Missing’, featuring Melanie Bush, albeit they’re penned by two set of writers. Regardless, I was looking forward to checking out what the stories featured in ‘More Short Trips’ would be like. 🙂
Once again, the objective was to check out a short story featuring Nyssa that I had not come across before. In the case of ‘More Short Trips’, the short story featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa is called ‘The Eternity Contract’. I hoped the certain story would be better than ‘The Parliament of Rats’.
As well as ‘Missing’ and ‘The Eternity Contract’, there are stories like ‘Totem’, ‘Scientific Adviser’, ‘Moon Graffiti’, ‘One Bad Apple’, ’64 Carlysle Street’, ‘The Sow in Rut’, ‘Special Weapons’, ‘Honest Living’, ‘Dead Time’, ‘Romans Cutaway’, ‘Return of the Spiders’, ‘Hot Ice’, ‘uPVC’, ‘Good Companions’ and ‘Femme Fatale’. A lot of the writers of these stories are familiar to me, and some not so familiar.
A couple of stories featured in the ‘More Short Trips’ BBC collection have audiobook readings to accompany them. The audiobook readings are currently included in the two ‘Tales From The TARDIS’ audio volumes. These can be purchased on CD or as downloads, as I’ve done, via Audible.
There’s an audiobook reading for ‘Moon Graffiti’, read by Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and there’s an audiobook reading for ‘Dead Time’, read by Paul McGann. As with the first BBC ‘Short Trips’ anthology, I’m hoping to identify which stories I like and dislike from the ‘More Short Trips’ collection.
Like with the first BBC ‘Short Trips’ anthology, there’s an introduction by Stephen Cole, the editor of ‘More Short Trips’. It was intriguing to learn some of behind-the-scenes details about this ‘Short Trips’ book, though Dave Owen having a Jimmy Saville impersonation hasn’t aged well very lately. 😐
The first story in ‘More Short Trips’ is called ‘Totem’ by Tara Samms. It features the Eighth Doctor. This is the second time that Tara Samms, a pseudonym for Stephen Cole, has been used in ‘Doctor Who’. The first time the pseudonym was used was for the story ‘Glass’ in the first ‘Short Trips’ book.
‘Totem’ takes place in Spain in the early 20th century. The Eighth Doctor meets a woman called Panstedas, who is the owner of a farmstead. Using the alias of John, the Doctor stays at the farmstead to work for Señora Panstedas and accepts having eggs for breakfast as a way of payment.
I’m not exactly sure why the Doctor wanted to work for Señora Panstedas, apart from uncovering the fact that her husband was murdered. She also had a son who got sick and died. The story itself is about eight pages in length. It wasn’t very exciting when I read it from beginning to end in the book.
At this point, the Eighth Doctor is travelling alone. Presumably, this is set between ‘The TV Movie’ and his adventures with Sam Jones in the BBC ‘Eighth Doctor Adventures’ book series. Although, the Doctor apparently dropped Sam off at a Greenpeace rally in order to have some adventures alone. 😐
If this story was an actual murder mystery featuring the Eighth Doctor and Señora Panstedas and if it was longer to accommodate that, maybe I would’ve been hooked into this story more. As it is, it didn’t seem to go anywhere, despite how the interactions between Panstedas and the Doctor were handled.
‘Totem’ rating – 5/10
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