Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: anji mohindra, bbc, BBC Sounds, Charlie Craggs, doctor who, Doctor Who Redacted, Holly Quin-Ankrah, Juno Dawson, Lois Chimimba, podcast

Doctor Who: Redacted Fun & Relevant Spinoff You Didn't Know You Needed

We're into the third episode of Doctor Who: Redacted, the official spinoff podcast of Doctor Who that's a proper audio drama. At last, the story is taking shape, and the stakes are established. Conspiracy podcasters Cleo (Charlie Craggs), Shawna (Holly Quin-Ankrah), and Abby (Lois Chimimba) have been following stories about a blue box and a mysterious "Doctor" who has shown up at many strange incidents that have been hushed up over the years.

Creator Juno Dawson continues Doctor Who: Redacted like a proper side story, what the Japanese call "Gaiden", like a proper show in itself, more than a piece of fanfic. There may be callbacks to episodes of Doctor Who, but the main characters are real people who might be like us or friends we have. The main cast being LGBTQ women is a milestone in representation. Shawna and Abby have to contend with a burgeoning romance separated by distance – one of them lives in Glasgow with a boyfriend she hasn't thought to break up with yet. Cleo has to deal with her mother throwing her out when she came out as trans and keeping her job as a theatre usher when she finds a real conspiracy involving a creepy vanishing hotel, meeting the hologram of a journalist named Rani Chandra (Anji Mohindra) who tells her to find the Doctor while fighting off some transformer robot warrior that's about to invade Earth to kill everyone on the planet… and that's not even the biggest threat. What the greatest threat is that's erasing people from history, even Queen Victoria, is the biggest mystery.

Charlie Craggs, despite having no formal acting training, has emerged as the breakthrough star of the show. As Cleo, her performance is naturalistic, utterly believable, and funny, alternating between exasperation and mounting panic as she realizes people are disappearing and history is being rewritten – and she's the only one who knows this. It helps that the script depicts Cleo as the most proactive character, making her the default protagonist as she's the only one who's running around trying to figure out what's going on while Shawna, and Abby are too busy being preoccupied with their personal stuff, not to mention totally skeptical and literally forgetting The Doctor immediately after the name is brought up. Cleo also gets the best lines. Many of her lines are zingers. We haven't had a proper zinger in over four years of Chris Chibnall's run of Doctor Who!!

The menace and the theme of the series is erasure. Everyone who has ever known the Doctor is being erased from history and forgotten. It's not hard to draw the line between the disappeared in the show being people of colour, LGBTQ and "adult services providers", the marginalized and invisible. The allegory is slipped in lightly and smoothly. The irony is the heroines haven't disappeared yet because they're too obscure – nobody really knows about them! The series manages to capture the social and emotional reality of many LGBTQ people without hammering it into our heads. The scripts turn themes and ideas into emotional experiences. It's fun, urgent, and relevant and rapidly become Appointment Listening every Sunday.

Doctor Who: Redacted is streaming worldwide for free on BBC Sounds.

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