Resistance

Polly looks back on her time in the TARDIS to a time when the ship landed in World War II France. Separated from Ben and Jamie and running from the Germans. the Doctor and Polly fall in with a downed British pilot on the run. With their new ally the Doctor and Polly enter a dangerous world of faked identities, checkpoints and betrayal, all the time knowing that there is no way to change anything around them, but their own personal fates hang in the balance.

It's back to the historical dramas again with this one, which was actually the very first Companion Chronicle audio that Anneke Wills actually did. The pure historicals still work well for this crew, even if it's all being told from Polly's perspective and her imitations of her companions. There's not exactly a sense of this being told from sometime after Polly has left the TARDIS, but it is certainly being told in hindsight which would lend itself to that idea. Otherwise this could be slipped into the continuity right after The Macra Terror and have all the recent Early Years tales come after it. There's a slight hitch with Jamie needing a train explained to him although it was done in The Mouthless Dead but otherwise there's no contradiction of anything Big Finish have laboured to create in their own expanded universe range.

To go back to a "two hander" again after everything else feels like cutting back to bare bones and simplifying things, but given it's just shy of an hour long it feels right to just be told by one person, lest the rest be left by the wayside with little to say. And Polly has some personal stake in this one; it's 1944 and she (and Ben) would be only two years old back in England, unaware of the horrors of the war. But as Ben met his father in The Mouthless Dead, here Polly begins to suspect that the pilot they encounter may be her own uncle who never came back from the war, and maybe, just maybe, she can save him. The Doctor doesn't need to give her the talk as he did with Barbara, though; events move along quickly and Polly realizes that her desire to save this man is fruitless, but there is still the very real danger of the situation itself to contend with as they sneak across France (one can almost hear the theme of 'Allo 'Allo in there despite the lack of lighter moments).

Polly still has one more tale to tell before we leave her and continue with the Doctor...

NEXT EPISODE: THE FORBIDDEN TIME