A Death in the Family
posted February 21st 2024
this post will contain spoilers!
No time to write anything particularly thoughtful or eloquent this week, but I absolutely have to talk about A Death in the Family which I listened to for the very first time this week, and despite vaguely already knowing what was going to happen, oh boy. That one hurts, huh? But in the very best of ways, as so much Big Finish does.
Although I wasn't particularly making any notes as I listened because I was too busy letting it all hit me, I did find the concept of family as defined by this episode very interesting. One could easily argue that Doctor Who is the ultimate 'found family' show, where each set of Doctor and companions forms their own little family bubble. Certainly, this is the baseline Death is working from, explicitly calling Evelyn family to the Doctor, and by extension to Hex and Ace.
It cannot be an original observation to comment on how heartbreaking Ace's role in the episode it, but I suppose if I were to interrogate a specific aspect of the 'family' in this, it would be the parallel between the Doctor and Ace. Again, not particularly groundbreaking as an idea, but what struck me was the way that Ace created a story of herself, which is what the Doctor does time and again. The Doctor has always been a legendary figure, and more than ever in Death, Dorothy Noone is emulating her Professor, weaving herself into a story where she has a happy family, while at the same time using and abandoning Henry, which is exactly what the Doctor does.
In some ways, then, I would suggest that this is what the Doctor has done in this episode with Evelyn and Hex - of course, the two are entwined from long before they could ever know they knew each other, but the fact that Evelyn calls Hex 'a friend of the family' is all the threads of stories and families coming together.
I will likely revisit this one with some more eloquence another time, but for now, I rated this episode very highly and it made me cry a lot. Which is what all the best episodes make me do.