Continuing forward with the Thirteenth Doctor Adventures reviews, the fifth in the series sees The Doctor and Yaz with their feet firmly on Earth. Landing in London, 1926, this latest instalment finds the duo in the midst of a murder investigation involving mediums and spooky spectres.

The Doctor and Yaz arrive in the East End of London, 1926. There’s grief in the air: not only the years of war and sickness, but a more recent death.

A strange message prompts them to investigate the murder of a medium. A young woman whose seances hide deeper secrets – and an unearthly power that threatens the entire city.

Big Finish Synopsis

A far cry from the wilds of futuristic alien wars, we’re brought back into the realm of the supernatural with The Violet Hour. Although set during the 1920s, there’s a distinct ghostly Victorian vibe as The Doctor and Yaz are thrown into an investigation where a grief-stricken army veteran kills spirit mediums in an attempt to cross over to the other side.  

As macabre as this idea sounds, Marcus’s intentions with this story are not about the scares but rather more about exploring its themes of grief or, more specifically, the all-consuming effect it can have on people. Exploring these themes is something this story does remarkably well, and that has a lot to do with how Marcus weaves the journey of its main human antagonist alongside its setting. With both a world war and a ruthless pandemic still fresh in everybody’s minds, the interim war years had a substantial amount of pain to work through. Maltravers, the antagonist, understands this more than most, with the death of his wife from Spanish flu being the main driving force behind his actions. Marcus weaves these ideas of personal tragedy and collective trauma, creating a complex character out of Maltravers, as these two effects work in tandem to warp his moral compass, ultimately driving him to murder.

With such an intense focus on themes of grief, however, other parts of the story inevitably suffer. Most notable sufferer is this adventure’s monster of the week: beings of pure thuron energy. Despite attempts to make them into amoral grief counsellors, the story never really explores this angle, resulting in them becoming little more than a strange, artificially created voice that pops up occasionally.  

Additionally, the story’s other characters, besides Maltravers, also suffer from a lack of any real development. The story plays with the idea of an endearing friendship between two spirit mediums and wrestles with the insurmountable trauma from The Doctor’s past during its runtime. However, the story’s 54 minutes were never going to be enough to create anything of substance with either of these concepts.