Continuing the Ninth Doctor Adventures into the new year, the fourth story in the series sees The Doctor and Rose finally leave the Powell Estate (or maybe not), as they land deep into humanity’s future. Discovering that humans no longer live on the surface, they find themselves aboard the box city of High High Wycombe, a utopia where sleep might just kill you.

The Doctor and Rose travel to the 47th century, Earth’s ‘Second Dark Age’, but when they arrive in the floating box city of High High Wycombe, it’s more like a paradise. The residents live an existence of endless leisure, and at night sleep a blissful, dreamless sleep.

But cracks soon begin to show on its perfect, polished surface, and something terrible is brewing in the mind of teenage Elsa – something ancient and hungry – something that sounds like a nightmare.

Big Finish Synopsis

Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle’s entry to the Ninth Doctor’s range, Cloud Eight, is another fresh look at the same locale. Set in the far future, their story is a hard sci-fi title that deals with the dangers of AI and the use of human brains as databanks.

Like any good Doctor Who story, Cloud Eight gets off to a good start by immediately establishing a strong mystery element surrounding the box city of High High Wycombe. Despite its utopic outlook where its citizens enjoy a life without work and all the time in the world to enjoy life, it is clear that all is not as it seems. As The Doctor and Rose explore the city, their curiosities are piqued as they discover strange sleep curfews and a population that can’t remember anything from the day before.

As they search for answers, the story finds itself in the heart of its themes surrounding AI and data. Difficult yet pressing topics, Mooney and Pringle manage to integrate and utilise them in interesting ways to keep the engagement levels high. The topic of using humans as databanks, for example, has its highlights during the adventure’s midpoint. During this segment, the population of High High Wycombe alongside The Doctor and Rose, start to lose their long-term memories as a result of being forced to interpret hundreds of terabytes of data as they sleep. As the damage begins to take hold, we’re given scenes that jump about through their day as they relive the same one over and over. Not only is it an interesting narrative device, but it also shows that the writers have a great deal of understanding of the topic.

Despite the story’s strong framing of its themes, one element stands out as being weaker than the rest. The key to stopping the AI nightmare revolves around a friendship that The Doctor and Rose make with Elsa, a teenage girl unable to link with the databank. Instead of processing data, Elsa spends her nights in the company of a recurring nightmare, which The Doctor ultimately uses to sever the box city’s Wi-Fi. Elsa’s immunity raises several questions about the box city and the databank that never get answered. Whilst this isn’t a problem in and of itself, the mystery isn’t set up to be ambiguous at any point during the story. This inevitably raises the issue of whether ending on this ambiguity was purposeful or whether it was used as a type of get-out clause because the writers couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer.