DOCTOR WHO, THE LOST STORIES:

Season 2, box set #7, story 1

THE FOE FROM THE FUTURE

Doctor: Fourth

Companion: Leela

May 2023

They just hate to see a girlboss winning.

The Foe from the Future is really good y’all. Like, it’s really good. I really highly recommend listening to it.

Okay. So The Foe from the Future is the first audio play from the Lost Stories (stories that were suggested or submitted to the show, but for one reason or another never made it to the screen and were later adapted) to feature Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor—it also has Leela, which is why I’m reviewing it now, smack-bang in the middle of watching through her time as a companion. It’s a very good story for her—but I’ll get to that in a minute. The Foe from the Future (or TFFTF, as I will not be calling it, but I wanted to share that acronym with the world) would have been the six-part season finale for Season 14, Leela’s first season: but things happened, and instead we got The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Which. Uh.

Moving on, The Foe from the Future is really good—okay, I have to stop just saying that.

It reminds me, oddly enough, of Shada: both Shada and Foe involve the Doctor & companion landing in modern-day England (i.e. the 70s), both involve a third pseudo-companion from the modern day who undergoes a sort of character arc (Chris in Shada, Charlotte in Foe), and both take wild turns on their way to the finish line. Both were even never actually screened! And, of course, both of them fuckin’ rule. I will not shut up about how much fun I had while listening to this story.

It starts out simply enough: something odd is happening in a small village in Devonshire: specifically, ghosts are appearing by the old haunted house. The Doctor, being a rationalist, immediately goes “well that’s ridiculous.” Leela, being Not a rationalist, goes “oh come on.” Charlotte, who’s just gotten mixed up in this when her cousin got hurt, goes “what on earth is happening and why am I being taken along for the ride?”

I can’t stress how much I love the character of Charlotte: we see her go from being a classic person-stuck-in-situation-experiencing-the-monster-of-the-week at the story’s beginning to fully coming into her own as a highly capable and resourceful character by the end. This is helped by the addition of a boytoy for her in a frankly adorable romance. Does it say something about me that I tend to prefer heterosexual romances where the woman is immensely more competent than the man? Maybe. But I stand by the fact that I have good taste, and that this shit rules. Incompetent sweet boytoys for the win.

I feel that I’m focusing overmuch on Charlotte’s romance. There's a lot more to her than that, it’s really a side thing: later on, she’s given basically a sub-companion of her own, and that’s where it stems from. The hierarchy of companions in this story, then, goes Doctor > Leela > Charlotte > Charlotte’s boytoy. Have I forgotten his name and thus am forced to continue to refer to him only as the boytoy? Maybe.

You may notice, I’m making a lot of jokes here in this review, and that’s not for no reason. It’s in large part I think due to how much of a damn good mood this story put me in. It’s not without its flaws, which I’ll talk about under a spoiler, but it reeks of fun and a good time and just a fun romp in general enough that it infected me completely and now I have no choice but to bow to the humor beasts in my head. I’m sorry i’ll stop

But here is your recommendation: go listen to The Foe from the Future. It’s a standalone with the Doctor and Leela, so familiarity with those two is recommended, albeit not quite required—Leela shows off her skills rather excellently in this serial, and I don’t know if it’s possible to be reading a Doctor Who review of an audio story and not know about Tom Baker’s Doctor. So go listen to it, because I went in basically blind, and oh man was it worth it; therefore, I recommend that you do too.

Finished? Great. Let’s talk about some of the other stuff.

Spoiler thoughts:

I really like the change in setting. You may have picked this up already, but it allows Charlotte a strong degree of competence compared to Shabat or whatever his name was—her boytoy, you know the one (it’s Shibac—just looked it up). It also keeps the pace from dragging in quite a long story, gives us a really strongly-defined and downright cool setting, and builds up to one of the most downright badass moments from a one-off character in this show, and I do not use that term lightly. I’m speaking, of course, of Charlotte hitting one of the giant bug things with her car, thereby rescuing the Doctor and Leela. God DAMN!

There’s not a whole lot of other things I want to mention: Jalnik is a solid villain, he does his piece well; I really was very fond of Butler, who I thought was an excellent second-in-command, from his vaguely slimy but polite opening all the way to his wonderful final duel with Leela in the forest. Amazing work. Kostal’s former-romance with Jelnik is fine, I think — it lends a little more depth to what I could see otherwise being a very flat interaction between two villains. The writer said it lent Jalnik a sort of Jacobean-tragic lens, but I don’t know how much he’s right. For me, it made him come off as much more of a loser creep who wants revenge on his ex for breaking up with him, which, don’t get me wrong, really does work for a villain and makes him eminently loathable—but it’s a different thing. There’s also a weird amount of focus on how “ugly” Jalnik and especially Kostal become: this is something that Doctor Who has struggled with for a long time, and it’s one of my few qualms with this story. There’s nothing wrong with being ugly! There’s nothing wrong with having facial (or any!) deformations, and the continuous association with being physically deformed and evil throughout many of the classic episodes (see: Talons, Timelash, et al) is reaching the point of gratingness on me. That's something that the new show has fortunately gone some ways towards combating. Kostal also seems to be weirdly fixated on her own beauty in a way that doesn’t feel totally setup? Which is, in hindsight, not a great look for a character who was apparently male in the original: was man!Kostal also horrified at the prospect of becoming “ugly”?

Still though, despite that, I really do like this story a lot. Even its weird time travel shenanigans—okay, no, I love its weird time travel shenanigans. That’s my jam right there.

An interesting thing to note discussed by the writer/adapter in a brief interview after one of the episodes is that, in the original script, there were zero other women in the supporting cast: i.e., the only woman in the entire serial was Leela. Which. Wow. Real glad that got changed.

Seriously, with those fixes—the change in gender of Geflo and Kostal (they hate to see a girlboss winning), as well as the addition of Charlotte, make this story one of the best in the classic series (such as it is) for gender diversity—and more than that, for strong, well-rounded female characters. Especially Charlotte, to a lesser extent Kostal (they hate to see a girlboss winning!! i liked Kostal’s plotline), and even with Geflo, a character we get actually very little of, we are allowed strong, brave, or cunning character moments and they feel like real people (mostly). It’s really great, and actually this makes me second-guess my initial “god i wish they made this instead of Talons” thought. I still wish they hadn’t made Talons, or that they just, yknow, stripped out the racism. But the changes in the audio adaptation are necessary, welcome, and better for the story overall.

Leela is on top form in this story: the hunting, the defending, the care that she obviously shows towards her friends, the care her friends show towards her. Her entire sequence towards the end where she’s totally separated from everyone else is one of the best sequences Leela has ever had, in my opinion. Even though Louise Jameson and Tom Baker are very audibly not as young as they once were, they are also very audibly the same people, and I got used to it within about an episode—and I still enjoyed that episode!

Overall Thoughts:

The Foe from the Future is a truly lovely piece of work. It feels like a sort of “ideal” story from the period of the show from which it would have come: Leela and the Doctor at top form, weird unraveling mystery shenanigans, large set pieces that probably would have looked schlocky as hell, and hell, even a character arc! A character arc! What more could you want?!

Seriously, The Foe from the Future is Leela and the Doctor at their very best, and I recommend it if you’ve seen a few or even one of their TV stories together (my recommendations so far would be The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death, and Horror of Fang Rock) and want more. I wanted more. And I got it! In fact, I’d say only skip this one if you don’t like the audio format, because it’s so damn good.

Eventually I will probably listen to The Valley of Death, which was packaged in a box set with this and also features Leela and the Fourth Doctor, this time in the Amazon rainforest, but first I have to, you know, get through finals and all that. Haha yeah I should be writing a paper right now. Oh well! This story provided a welcome moment (or few hours) of levity, and I love it to pieces. I expect to revisit this one probably multiple times even, which is not something I say about most Doctor Who stories.

EDIT 5/23: so i listened to the first episode of Valley of Death, and it featured some cool ideas but also some awful anti-native racism (and bad american accents) so i'm. not gonna listen to it. stick with this one tho it rules

Leela Kill Count: + at least 1, but maybe more, I wasn't really keeping track