Start to Finish: 3.05 - Home Truths

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Some statistics about The Companion Chronicles. Of the 83 audio plays, 3 do not include the Doctor at all, while 25 feature the First Doctor and his companions. The Second and Third Doctors get 17 and 18 each (including one of the specials, which they share) and none of the later incarnations get close. Episode 3.05 is one of the cool kids, a First Doctor adventure by Simon Guerrier called Home Truths.

Sara Kingdom travelled with the Doctor only briefly before she died. In one of their journeys, they encountered a house in Ely, where two people had died in mysterious circumstances. Centuries later, an officer is sent to ask after a strange story, a tale of supernatural occurrences in a guest house in Ely, run by a woman named Sara Kingdom.

Sara Kingdom presents an even more difficult prospect for a framing narrative than Jamie and Zoe, as the third of four classic TV companions to die during their travels with the Doctor. The result is a slightly unsettling narrative with an open conclusion, in which 'Sara' is revealed to be effectively her own ghost. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the melancholy air of the earlier stories is here in spades.

It's hard to say, given how little of the original material remains, how well Jean Marsh recreates Sara Kingdom. Her additional voices are quite close to her own, with just a trace of distinction, but that actually makes a great deal of sense in context. The narrator Sara is old and tired, and the story's force is not in mimicry but in the emotion she invests in the other characters. Niall MacGregor's Robert is present only in the framing narrative, but provides a good foil for Marsh's Kingdom.

Home Truths is an interesting expansion on a pretty sparse chapter of the Doctor's story. In many ways, it is hard to judge it alongside the series, but by its own lights it is a powerful, effective SF presentation.

Next up, The Companion Chronicles goes modern, as Sarah Sutton narrates the first 'active' Doctor story in the range, a Fifth Doctor adventure through The Darkening Eye.