Have you ever looked at a piece of writing or a video made by AI and noticed that it doesn’t get everything to flow… naturally? The unnecessary run-on sentences, a misused idiom or perhaps a series of unnatural body movements? If you’ve spent more than a couple of seconds on the internet in the past couple of years, then the answer is probably yes. Despite how hard it tries, there’ll always be something of the uncanny valley about AI, something of an unnatural twinge that, for the moment at least, will mean that it’ll never be seen as passing for a human.

Hoping to capitalise on these AI peculiarities is the latest instalment of the Ninth Doctor Adventures, False Friends.

Rather than explore the frankly overdone themes surrounding the ramifications or the destructive nature of AI, this latest release’s choice to unravel the horrors of AI’s innate unnaturalness makes for a fascinating hour of sci-fi. Answering an incoming distress call, the story finds The Doctor and Rose on an intergalactic rescue mission. Landing on a planet eerily similar to Earth, they ultimately find themselves investigating a bizarre rough copy. While at first glance everything looks normal, it isn’t long before inaccuracies begin to occur. Tube stations with strange names, phones made of gas and museums exploring the wonderful world shape sizes. It seems that other than the seemingly human Minnie and Gary (senders of the distress call), everyone and everything on this planet is a fake.

While these explorations of the imitations are necessary, they do put the story’s pace on a slow start. However, once The Doctor and Rose arrive, things pick up speed, and the listener is rewarded with twists and turns coming in thick and fast. Possibly the most surprising (and best) reveal comes from the fact that this is actually a sequel to NuWho’s first episode, Rose. After several defeats at the hands of The Doctor, The Autons and the Nestene Consciousness have gone back to the drawing board and are quite literally using a replica of Earth to simulate a new invasion plan. Through this plan, Timothy X. Attack has provided some new dimensions to these often one-note villains. It gives them a bit more of an agency and proves that the Nestene Consciousness actually has a higher level of intelligence, as it thinks and tries to improve on its constant failures up to this point.

As the adventure progresses, it also introduces some more thought-provoking content surrounding what it means to be human. Towards the end of the episode, Rose is copied by the Consciousness, and The Doctor asks the two of them to prove they are human. A question that cuts through the noise and straight to the bone, it’s a difficult one to answer, if there even is one answer. This point also plays nicely into the climax, as The Doctor is left wondering what to do as Minnie and Gary are revealed to also be Autons.