Paul Cornell has already written a lovely short story for the Doctor Who Lockdown that the BBC has been producing over the past several weeks. But that short story turned out to be a set up for something even more moving…
In that first short story, “The Shadow Passes”, we saw the Thirteenth Doctor in her own lockdown with the fam, thinking about her past—particularly thinking about a certain family that she punished in her Tenth iteration:
“I sometimes think that’s why I change personality instead of just making my body younger. I need to switch myself off and on again so I can handle all the memories, so a lot of it feels like it happened to someone else. I get a different perspective on what I’ve done. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. There’s this girl in a mirror. Where I put her. That doesn’t suit who I am now. When we get out of here…”
Paul Cornell is back with two more short stories, these recorded as short radio plays. The first one, “Shadow of a Doubt”, involves Big Finish audio play companion Bernice Summerfield (typically found with the Seventh Doctor), who encounters a little girl in a mirror:
The second story, “The Shadow in the Mirror”, can be found above, and shows the Thirteenth Doctor making good on her desire to fix things between herself and one member of the Family of Blood. Lauren Wilson is back to voice little Lucy Cartwright, still trapped in mirrors and refusing to apologize for what she’s done.
Cornell laces in some beautiful details for these stories as well. There’s a suggestion that a red-headed Doctor exists somewhere in the time streams, which is a clever nod to the Doctor’s long-standing desire to be ginger. This Doctor apparently believes he’s the last one, but of course, we can take that with a grain of salt. Believing that you might be the last Doctor doesn’t count for much in Whovian canon—just ask the Eleventh Doctor.
