Set immediately after Dare You, this time away from the Powell Estate, the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) visit Earth in the 47th Century, during the “Second Dark Age”. Here lies the city of High High Wycombe on Cloud Eight, where teenager Elsa (Felicity Cant) lives with her fathers Marty (Charlie Condou, who played Gary Gabbastone in The Interstellar Song Contest) and Oz (Lawrence Boothman, who also voices Mr Chips).
But society is very abnormal. The residents don’t work for a living and instead enjoy leisure activities every single day, in the midst of following strict sleep curfews as the alarm sounds. While Elsa invites Rose for a girls’ sleepover and ends up having nightmares, the Doctor goes off exploring during curfew and meets Chihiro (Louise Faulkner) who gets arrested for reciting historical facts. Everything that happens goes on an endless loop; not even the Doctor and Rose can handle that instantly.
Co-written by Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle, their script brings utopian (well, rather a more dystopian) worldbuilding in a way that significantly differs from other futuristic stories in the Whoniverse. Think of The Long Game meeting The Beast Below and The Macra Terror, with a few elements of Dot and Bubble and Sleep No More. Well, the Doctor even mentions the Macra by name as a deliberate callback to the missing Second Doctor serial (which has been fully animated). That’s what I find fascinating about the key concepts, despite these episodes not being among my top favourites.
One thing in particular that didn’t occur to me was the High High Wycombe residents being named after popular culture and literature characters, especially Elsa (from Frozen), right until the Doctor and Rose had this very discussion. I laughed as the former correctly pointed out that the Disney film wouldn’t be out until “about eight years’ time”; quite meta-anachronistic since it didn’t exist back in 2005, despite being in development for decades.
Making Rose a big sister figure to Elsa is a brilliant addition to her character development; something that wasn’t explored in the TV episodes. Especially when she tries to comfort a troubled Elsa at night, as she figures out that the residents have no concept of a dream or nightmare. That brings another example of Big Finish highlighting the dangers of AI into their audios, which is brilliantly tackled. I don’t want our future to end up this way with AI controlling humanity; it’d be the end of civilisation and creativity as we know it.
Overall, Cloud Eight is a strong Ninth Doctor Adventures audio that brings a distinctive, fresh take on a hypothetical future for Earth. Weird and wonderful, yet realistically terrifying as the plot progresses.
And coming in April: the Doctor and Rose return, once again, to the Powell Estate where history breaks loose in Pandemonium, written by Katharine Armitage. I take back what I said about the first three stories forming a “loose trilogy”, as it’s now clear to me that the entire 9DA Series 4 arc is revolving around the Tyler home residence. In the meantime, make sure to check out this nostalgic “Next Time” style trailer!
Cloud Eight is available now from Big Finish.
