Before continuing, please be aware that all of this content is made possible by the goodwill and support of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy the work on this site, please consider supporting the creation of more content like this by clicking the button.
I.D. and Urgent Calls is such an odd little two-piece, like ordering a tasting menu where one dish is dry toast and the other is a perfectly cooked crème brûlée, except they serve them both on the same chipped plate and tell you it’s “thematic.”
So first, I.D.. The Doctor turns up in a corporate dystopia of the future where identity is literally a commodity, a handful of executives have turned personality transfer into a subscription service, and people are being murdered by robots because… reasons. It’s got this desperate “Blade Runner by way of office temp agency” vibe, full of people saying things like “initiate protocol nine” in rooms that sound like filing cabinets. There’s a clever idea buried under the grey sludge — who are you if your mind isn’t your own, etcetera, etcetera — but the story can’t seem to care about its own cleverness. It’s loud, cold, and paced like someone trying to read the fine print of a warranty agreement. I don’t even dislike it; I just feel like it’s daring me to stay awake.
Then Urgent Calls happens, and it’s like someone cracked a window open. The whole story unfolds over a series of misdialed phone calls. That’s it. No explosions, no laser beams, no technobabble lectures about positronic synapses. Just human voices. A woman, the Doctor, a creeping sense of wrongness. It feels weirdly voyeuristic — you’re eavesdropping on something small and private, and then it turns into something bigger and unsettling. The performances are beautiful, intimate in a way Big Finish rarely lets itself be. There’s this faint hum of loneliness in the background, like static that almost becomes music. The only thing that spoils it is the transitional music, this plinky-plonky nonsense that sounds like it wandered in from an episode of Crossroads. But maybe that’s part of the charm.
Thematically, it’s identity and connection — one story about how easily we lose ourselves in the machinery, the other about how easily we find each other through it. Both circle the same drain but only one of them remembers to swim.
Final thoughts:
I.D. feels like being trapped in a grey cubicle watching robots file incident reports, while Urgent Calls feels like sitting alone in the dark, phone in hand, waiting for the universe to dial your number. One’s noise, the other’s whisper, and I’ll always take the whisper.
Rating:
I.D. – 1.5 out of 5 robots with very important messages
Urgent Calls – 4 out of 5 funny misdialed numbers left on alien answering machines.