The Forbidden Time

A voice has been heard all over Earth stating that there has been a trespass on the current section of time, and there will be dire consequences for doing so. Polly Wright goes before the media to tell of a time when she first heard this same voice, a time when she was travelling with the Doctor, Ben and Jamie, and the TARDIS landed in an eerily deserted place where spindly legged monsters called the Vist roamed and terrorized. Aided with a recording of Jamie McCrimmon, Polly tells the world of this menace and what it means to Earth in the present day.

This is my kind of Companion Chronicle. Personally I just prefer them to be told well after the fact, showing that there is life after the TARDIS for all the Doctor's friends, not just the ones who get spin-off series treatment. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing William Russell as Ian recounting all those unseen past adventures from his current place in time, and now Polly gets her shot at it. The year in unclear; it was released in 2011 so it may have been intended to be a contemporary tale so Polly would be a much older woman now - she is not with Ben (more on that to come) although she does see him, and she looks back fondly on Jamie as a kid brother to both of them. She has not seen the Doctor again although if it were truly 2011 she would have seen evidence of him as described in the new television series being shown at the time. She doesn't say if she is married or what she is doing or did for work after she left the TARDIS, but she looks back on her travels very fondly and still considers the Doctor and Jamie to be two of her best friends, even if she has no idea where they are now.

At times the narrative seems a little too storytelling-ish for what is some big media circus, especially the forced feeling of the cliffhanger of episode 1. And really what was Polly doing at the time where she could so easily command this kind of an audience? I don't think this would cut it with the press of today, especially apeing voices of her friends and playing back select clips of Jamie (played again by Fraser Hines) when it suited her. The extra clips, however, are a clever way to show the evil of the Vist from more than one angle as the crew are split up and hunted across the desolate grey dimension. Odds are in this scenario Polly got the attention of the media just by saying she knew the Doctor.

So, Ben and Polly. I suppose it was just naive thinking that they would end up together after leaving the TARDIS as Ian and Barbara did, although a lot of non-canon additional material provides different accounts of their life after July 20, 1966. The popular one is Ben proposing to Polly and her marrying him, but the marriage failing eventually and them going their separate ways. If that were to be taken as gospel, then The Forbidden Time is told after they have parted ways. That would certainly fit the bill, with Polly's recollections of Ben, "My sailor" as she calls him, sounding quite wistful like she misses him terribly. The other expanded universe material goes on to state that they eventually reconciled, which goes well with their fate as revealed in a more canon way; in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures they get a mention as being together running an orphanage in India, which sounds like a bit of a quick turnaround of fates. But SJA is directly linked to canon Who and gets the final say, so we're going to have to accept that the two sixties twentysomethings did eventually make a go of it.

Stranger things have happened.

NEXT EPISODE: THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN