The next stop in my Second Doctor marathon is the short story "Pluto" by Dale Smith in the Big Finish collection Short Trips: The Solar System. (Here's the first.)
While not the most prolific writer of Doctor Who material, Smith has penned a few things but I have only read his Seventh Doctor book, Heritage, an installment in the BBC Books Past Doctor Adventures from 2002. I enjoyed that tale of drought at every level with its sepulchral tone and the fact that it covered a time span of only one day.
"Pluto" finds the Doctor, Ben, and Polly on the titular planet's moon, Charon. The TARDIS brings them to a biodome (cue Pauly Shore references) and, in classic Doctor Who style, they stumble upon a corpse. So of course they are accused of being murderers just a few sentences later when a landing party headed by the cybernetic Professor Magellan and including his human sidekicks, Ray and Spinks, appears on the scene. But all is not as it seems with the humans having weird dreams leading to a subterranean discovery...
Doctor Who short stories tend to fall into one of two categories for me. First is a tale that tends towards following the conventions of the show but, due to space limits, is very abridged and compressed. They squeeze everything you'd expect in a Doctor Who story into many fewer pages so the story is allowed no room to breathe and characters are two dimensional. Second is when an author embraces the constraints of the format and leaves expectations behind.
Broadly speaking, "Pluto" is in the former category. Smith sets up a highly intriguing scenario but there just isn't time for him to flesh it out, to keep the mystery going as long as it should. However, I give him points for playing with our expectations. Normally, after the Doctor and his companions are found hovering over a dead body, it takes a while for them to prove their innocence. Here, one of their accusers quickly ascertains that they were not responsible.
Better than most Doctor Who short stories, "Pluto" is a fun little story but I am still a bigger fan of the novels.
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