The Mother Road [PROSE/2006.4.29]

★★★★☆

  Have you ever wondered what a Route 66 road trip with the First Doctor's Season 1 team would be like? Well, as it happens in the case of Gareth Wigmore's The Mother Road, the answer is that it is an extremely pleasant experience. It's obvious the writer had a lot of love for the characters, and of early-2000s Americana as well -- the Doctor using an Internet auction website to bid off his TARDIS under the username 'dr_who', Ian being disillusioned by the culinary services of an American diner, Barbara and Susan sunbathing while contemplating about their predicament (being stuck in this time without the ship) potentially being final... for such a short story, these wonderful moments are too many in quantity to count. I also love that The Mother Road has a wealth of beautifully written, genuine character moments for the TARDIS crew; as I said, Wigmore is doubtless a fan of the First Doctor era. The Doctor gets to be a delighted old man who tricks everyone into taking a long road trip for the sake of it, Ian and Barbara are explicitly in love and floating around the possibility of making a life in 2000s U.S.A., and Susan gets to be honest in her fear of being exiled from Gallifrey forever. There is so much to enjoy here; I had a blast.

  This is what I appreciate most about Dr. Who's Short Trips (prose or audio) -- without the obligation to follow conventional base structures of a "story", these snippets of the Doctor and co.'s lives can be given room to be as long as they want, portray whatever themes they want in the way they want. It's perhaps the most limitless form of Who I can think of, and examples like The Mother Road suggest that when these short stories get good, they get magnificently good.