The second Paul Spragg
Short Trips Memorial Opportunity winner is Landbound, a Third Doctor story
which is subtly constructed, showing the Doctor’s handful of meetings with a
former sailing captain at various stages of his time of exile on Earth. The
storytelling, by Selim Ulug, is neat enough to draw parallels between sailor
Ronald Henderson, who had a disturbing experience out at sea and has been
landbound ever since, and the Doctor’s enforced period of being planetbound on
Earth, and we see a new sliver of adventure in the Third Doctor’s life – at
momentous points in his Earthbound timeline, he runs into, or seeks out, Ronald
for a chat or a mini-adventure, doing what he can to help the sailor, learning
something himself in return.
As stories go, it’s neat,
contained, logical, and charming.
Where all that goes awry,
sadly, is having it narrated by Nicholas Briggs in a northern accent, in the
same year as he narrated the Ninth Doctor adventures. If you’ve heard those,
and then you listen to this, you’ll ache with the wanting for this to be more
than it is, because Briggs gives Henderson something close to his Ninth Doctor
voice. It doesn’t help dissuade you from the hope of a weird multi-Doctor
potential to the story that Henderson has an ornate pocketwatch, a friend named
Jack, and another, female friend who looks after him and his shoreside pub.
If you start thinking on
those lines, you’ll wait the whole length of Landbound waiting for the other
Gallifreyan shoe to drop. And no, of course we’re not about to tell you if it
does or not. Whether it does or not is almost irrelevant, because you’re primed
for it early on, which has the oddest tendency to make you enjoy the story in
your head rather more than the story that unfolds in front of you. The story
that does unfold in front of you has occasional vibrations reminiscent of a
David Tennant special, at least in terms of the ‘monster,’ which has a life
cycle simply inimical to our own, rather than any great or grand invasion or
colonisation plan. But Briggs’ northern narration means you’re always wondering
who’s zooming who in the conversations between the Third Doctor and Ronald
Henderson, and while the story itself is good enough to be a Short Trip any day
of the week, the story that the combination of the writing and Briggs’ narration
plants in your head is a kind of Eighth Doctor-style, oh-crap-I’m-gonna-need-a-second-mortgage
run of four box-set arc.
Bottom line, Landbound is
a perfectly acceptable Short Trip, made better by the fact that it’s by one of
us, and better still by the fact that it’s free as a bird to download. In its
simplest incarnation, it’s a story of debts, and sadness, and kinship and
kindness and healing and the wonderful joy of eventual freedom after
incarceration, whether physical or psychological.
Yes, really, that’s in its
simplest incarnation.
The more complex
incarnation brought about by that handful of either entirely inconsequential or
deeply deliberate additions to the plot and by Nick Briggs with a northern
accent is bigger and bolder and even more fun, and you get that for free too,
so what is there to complain about? Only really the uncertainty as to which
incarnation Landbound is ever actually aiming to be. Perhaps it’s aiming to be
both. Perhaps that’s why it won the Paul Spragg prize. Perhaps, perhaps,
perhaps…
Download it, listen to it,
see which version of the story you hear.
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