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Doctor Who: Series 11 (or 36 depending on how you count): Episode 7: Kerblam! by Pete McTighe.

Is it me or do other people have no concept of time and space when it comes to contacting let alone delivering to the time-travelling Doctor?

Be careful, you might be buying spoilers.

The TARDIS gets some shaking up as it receives a delivery from the Kerblam warehouse. It’s a bit late and missed a few regenerations but the Doctor looks great in a fez. The box also contains a help message and so they go to the warehouse moon orbiting the planet Kandoka and undercover to find out what is going on. Considering the Doctor is scanned you would have thought her IQ would have been measured as being much higher as Graham gets the higher job…although not for long. She swaps with him to get into invoicing to track down who sent the message. With the number of people missing going up, the Doctor gets annoyed and determined to get to the bottom or rather the head of what is going on. The rest you have to watch for yourself.

Hands up all of you who thought Kerblam is the future of Amazon? One will have to wonder if they will take this version as their next upgrade. Be careful with what you touch in the packaging in future. I would have thought all the Team TARDIS would have had to wear uniforms even on their first day.

In many respects, as Ryan was a warehouse worker, this should have been his story although Yaz seems to take the lead, next to the Doctor again.

There are a few mysteries. As the deliveries have already gone out at least once, including the one to the TARDIS, that means people must have already died in large quantities already.

As this opening season is going through all the basic storylines, an allegory for the present warehouse deliveries had to be on the cards. With the mixture of mechanoids and organics, we have our Science Fiction element although it could be run as a general genre story without such trappings. Getting something truly SF is going to get harder.

You do have to wonder how one moon could be large enough to handle deliveries across the galaxy. It’s also a very humans only environment and we all know that there are more than enough alien species out there to get in the way of the process.

It’s basically a good story although I poked a couple holes in it. This is one occasion where the Doctor should really have gone back to when the trouble started. I mean, she has a TARDIS after all, what time she arrives could be at her discretion unless there is a problem with crossing over her earlier regenerations lives. Even so, there’s at least 6 years or even more when you bear in mind her previous regeneration was smashing down a wall for a millennia before she arrives. That’s a lot of potential people dead in the meantime.

An interesting episode that will definitely need a repeat viewing.

© GF Willmetts

18 November 2018

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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