As the story opens, the Doctor is visiting a Miss Woods at some anonymous hospital. She tells him that, despite there being multiple patients there, no visitors ever pay a call. The Doctor learns that she reads only schlocky detective novels so he offers her some titles from his own library that is his capacious jacket pocket. I smiled when the first book he pulled out was Cancer Ward which I assumed was the Solzhenitsyn book. The Doctor, a bit embarrassed says, "You probably don’t want to be reading that."
Our Time Lord hero is there because Jamie is. The patients slip into comas and dream of a void, a "velvety blackness". The Doctor follows Miss Woods into this void using a trick he learned in Tibet, presumably when he wasn't fleeing from Yetis. With all of the strange hospital's patients in the void, the Doctor pulls out a bottle with a bubble wand thingy in it. He blows a bubble which touches the blackness and creates a hole that leads back to the real world.
Everyone is able to escape except for two patients whose squabbling is resistant to mediation and so they are left behind to be "consumed in a flash of light and a shattering roar" which I guess means they blew up real good.
The Doctor explains that everyone was part of some nefarious experiment but he doesn't really have all the details. With Jamie safe, they head out to find Zoe and just who is behind this ghastly research project.
This is a wonderful little tale. I really enjoyed how it began in media res with Miss Woods just suddenly noticing that the Doctor is in her room. Similarly, I appreciated the open ending with Zoe still lost and the minds and motives behind the experiment still unknown. Plus, it's a bit of a weird story with people or perhaps their consciousnesses being transported to a mysterious void. Eddie Robson does well to keep the details under wraps. The Doctor never really explains much and I was kept wondering just what the heck was going on. Well played!
A really fine example of what a Doctor Who short story can be.
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