Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: India Fisher, Jacqueline King, Abigail McKern, Nicola Weeks, Lucy May Barker, Nicholas Briggs, Michael Maloney, James Joyce.
Charlotte Pollard, adventuress, traveller in space and time and once close friend and confident of The Doctor, a woman born on the day that the S.S. Titanic sank and who, as history will have it, died on the Airship 101, a woman who it seems was born to be a magnet for trouble and exploits, especially when cornered at The Shadow at the End of the World.
Having finally escaped from the clutches of the Viyrans and taken her life into her own hands by going through the expanding Prolixity, Charlotte Pollard finds herself on Earth, just a few hundred miles from home and only a few short years after her parents were told of her death aboard the Airship 101. This would be the perfect opportunity for the heroine to finally get back to her parents and deal with the lost years of her life, however, things have never run that smoothly for Charlotte Pollard and in the time since she and The Doctor parted ways for the second time, or first if you go from The Doctor’s point of view, her life, although ordered and with some purpose, has left her stale and perhaps in the greatest of dangers as she fights off the creatures who lurk in the shadows and the almost desperate and frightened women she is found by.
The depth of Jonathan Barnes script leaves a wonderful tangled web of feminist viewpoints scattered throughout the hour’s production and the allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not lost upon the listener the further into the jungle the group of women are pursued by the ravenous and terrifying creatures. This is a tale of exploration, not just in the physical sense but in the moral sense as well, that after so long working for the Viyrans she has to once more keep a very firm grip on her own moral barometer to figure out what is going on before allowing the women to turn completely on those that are hunting them and on each other.
Like Jonathan Barnes’ previous tale in the Boxset, The Lamentation Cipher, the set up in this particular tale, for the series as whole, is very important, it is also there to remind the listener that this woman, who has come face to face with Daleks, Cybermen, dealt with creatures beyond the furthest reaches of time and space and who stood shoulder to shoulder with two very different Doctors, is more than just a young woman out to keep her diary interesting, she is the fixed point in which sends a signal down through time to the likes of Rose Tyler, Clara Oswald and Amy Pond that female companions do not have to be a statuesque, nor there for scenery, that they are fully rounded individuals that are more than capable of holding their own, with or without the Doctor’s assistance.
With Jacqueline King adding a friendly human-like threat to the story in the guise of Mrs Turnerman, The Shadow at the End of the World is a great continuation of the overall arc in the first stand-alone series of Charlotte Pollard’s adventures.
Ian D. Hall