Doctor Who: The Memory Cheats

A Second Doctor story told from the perspective of Zoe.

The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive in Uzbekistan in 1919, during the civil war against the Bolsheviks. This, the core story of the play, is relatively straightforward and unremarkable. The travellers soon discover that children are disappearing, track down the entity responsible, and deal with it in a fairly perfunctory manner. The narrative on the way here makes a few jumps, and, while it includes some nice touches that help to humanise the protagonists, there really isn't much to say about it.

What raises the play above the mediocre though, is the framing device for the narrative, explaining how and why Zoe is recounting this story in later life, given that her memory was wiped of all such events in the TV story The War Games. This is a continuation of the device in the previous story Echoes of Grey, in which an interlocutor tries to fill in the gaps in Zoe's memory and reconcile them with the physical evidence - in this case, records of her presence in 1919.

The interlocutor is ably played by Wendy Padbury's real life daughter, Charlie Hayes, while Padbury herself does a creditable job of delivering the lines by Jamie and the Doctor. But, as the title of the play (itself a quote from Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner) indicates, the memory does sometimes cheat, and Zoe may be an unreliable narrator. That's an unusual step for a Companion Chronicle, and leads to a surprising and ambiguous ending that apparently leads into the later story The Uncertainty Principle.