Doctor Who Bonus Releases: An Earthly Child
Starring: Paul McGann as the Doctor and Carole Ann Ford as Susan
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? No
Standalone? Can function standalone, but also fits into the fourth season arc of Eighth Doctor Adventures. Prior awareness of The Dalek Invasion of Earth is helpful.
Recommended? Yes
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and for the final arc of Big Finish's Eighth Doctor Adventures.
Before listening
This is the story where the Doctor finally comes back to check on Susan like he said he would when he left her on post-Dalek-invasion Earth. As far as I can tell, no other medium had done this before Big Finish did it here. It is seven regenerations later for the Doctor and decades later for Susan, who if I recall correctly is now a widow with an adult son. This has the benefit of letting Carole Ann Ford play the role in her natural voice to make maximum use of her vocal talent.
While this was released as a bonus item outside of the regularly scheduled Eighth Doctor Adventures, it is absolutely part of their arc, and the Doctor's relationship with Susan at the end of this story picks up immediately in the same month's Eighth Doctor Adventures release, Relative Dimensions.
From what I recall, An Earthly Child does not try to give the Doctor a justification for having waited so long in his own timeline, although the fact that he arrives in Susan's timeline as late as he does isn't completely under his control. His feelings about Susan and his past are complicated and mostly unstated, and there's not some secret sci-fi reason why he had to stay away for the good of the universe.
If I'm not mistaken, at the time this came out the TV series was still implying that the eighth Doctor was the incarnation in which the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey in order to destroy the Daleks, and the audio adventures of this incarnation were leading him up to the point in his life where he'd be willing to make such a decision. This reunion with Susan is part of that process, and after Relative Dimensions Susan remains a presence in the Eighth Doctor Adventures straight through to their conclusion.
Having just recently heard Auld Mortality, an earlier story written by Marc Platt in which the (alternate-universe) Doctor reuinites with an adult Susan, I see why they chose Platt for this momentous occasion. From what I'm remembering, he did a good job but it's not the masterpiece that Spare Parts or Auld Mortality were. I am looking forward to relistening and I might be making a lot of mental comparisons to Auld Mortality as I do.
After listening
I had remembered this as a followup story for Susan, but I had forgotten how much of it is a followup for the Earth (England in particular of course) following the Dalek invasion. An Earthly Child presents a plausible snapshot of a slow recovery from what had been a civilization-ending event. Technological infrastructure has returned to about a mid-20th century level, with helicopters and university-owned computers but few personal electronics and no space travel. Dogma and superstition hold back the further redevelopment of technology.The concept of humanitarian aid plays a major role in An Earthly Child. Aliens offer the Earth assistance in its recovery, but they presume that Earth should naturally become dependent on them in the course of accepting that assistance, and the actions they take in offering assistance don't differ much from they actions they would take in threatening an overt military invasion. This is clearly drawn from real-world matters of international politics, and it works well to give the story a sense of large scope within its short running time.
Susan is excellently characterized and performed. Her son Alex, performed by Paul McGann's son Jake, is also a very well-drawn character, a confused teenager trying to find his priorities in a world that is not as he was raised to believe.
An Earthly Child is good. It is not the masterpiece that I would have liked it to be, for the long-awaited resolution to one of Doctor Who's oldest dangling plot threads, but it is good and I recommend it either with or without the surrounding Eighth Doctor Adventures context.
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