#71 Gallifrey: Square One

My personal Randomoid Selectortron departs one new world to take me to another...

Gallifrey: A Blind Eye

This is an out-of-order selection from a range I've decided to cover in-order, so I'm manually reselecting...

Gallifrey: Square One

Starring: Lalla Ward as Romana, Louise Jameson as Leela, and John Leeson as K9
Format: One CD-length full cast audioplay with no episode breaks. 
Silly? Not particularly, but not dryly serious either.
Standalone? No. The political situation of the Gallifrey series is relevant. 
Recommended? Yes.

My reaction to this story contains spoilers for it and possible spoilers for No More Lies and Bang-Bang-a-Boom!

Before listening

I haven't heard this one yet. The previous episode set up a dangerous situation for Romana and Leela to team up in, then ended on a temporarily stable breathing point rather than a cliffhanger. Big Finish's summary for this story sounds like it's going to use the same party split as the first episode, with Romana handling public political activity while Leela undertakes a related secret mission.
I vaguely recall reading things about later Gallifrey plot developments that might involve the events of this episode, specifically Romana making a scandalous decision that's only justifiable based on evidence from a timeline that no longer exists after she's made it. This could be an inaccurate memory or entirely unrelated to this particular episode, though.
I'm looking forward to hearing Square One.

After listening 

The cold open of this story is unusual. It sounded fairly obviously like it is part of a time loop, happening just before the loop repeats, and that led me to infer that what happened after the opening theme was the start of the next iteration of the loop. This was very misleading: after the opening theme, the story starts well before the time loop, and the cold open is a flash-forward preview to an event much later in the story. By the time that event happens, it seems clear that it it's the only time it happens.
Time loops appear in Doctor Who media fairly often. The degree to which the participants can remember the loop varies, but it's almost always the case that organic minds sense something is awry even if they can't pinpoint what. That's how this one works: some technobabble allows certain objects and information to travel back unchanged, but Leela's mystical savage abilities leave her with a sense of déjà vu even when she otherwise doesn't remember the previous iteration. There's a similarity between this and the loop in No More Lies. I was surprised when the answer to how many times the loop had happened before turned out to be a quite small number; usually these stories go into many-digit iterations before something cuts the loop, but in this case there were few iterations and every iteration had a significant difference from the others.
I also noted a similarity to Bang-Bang-a-Boom! in that everyone's attention is being drawn to one interstellar political summit while another more secret one is getting the work done. In Square One, the summit we are mostly following is the decoy. The "temporal powers" Gallifrey is negotiating with have all sent their worst dignitaries to it while the actual leaders are meeting in person elsewhere. Romana decided to also send Leela undercover, since she correctly anticipated that at least one thing would go wrong badly enough at the decoy summit to need someone like Leela to help handle it.
Some of the sci-fi mechanics of the story had issues to me, particularly regarding the summit's security and communications network and what types of hacking would or wouldn't work on it. Some dialogue early on seemed to be set up to just rule out network-related shenanigans entirely to limit the number of possible mystery solutions, but then Romana and Leela's K9 clandestinely use the network to the protagonists' advantage. The story is not primarily a mystery, so this isn't a fatal flaw, but it does feel like two conflicting script drafts might have gotten mixed together.
Some humor is present, to about the level of a Fourth Doctor TV story. Leela is undercover as an exotic dancer, but only asks K9 what the word "exotic" means, getting a literal answer that does not clarify the meaning of the two-word phrase. The temporal powers are described as recovering from a war with the Daleks that left wounds "only time will heal", which is why they don't want Gallifrey to have sole control of said time.
Square One was a good listen and I expect to enjoy more Gallifrey episodes when they come up.