Short Trips #12.X: "The World Tree" by Nick Slawicz (Big Finish Productions)

 

"The World Tree" is a Short Trip written by Nick Slawicz, released by Big Finish Productions in December 2022. The story is performed by veteran Big Finish actor and director, Lisa Bowerman.

"The World Tree" is the seventh winner of Big Finish's annual Paul Spragg Memorial Short Trip Opportunity, which is a competition for inspiring writers to submit their story ideas to the company. Hopeful applicants must provide a 500-word synopsis and an additional 500-word prose "sample" which is then reviewed by a panel of judges. The winning applicant must then complete their entry along with input from Big Finish and the final result is recorded and released for free on the company's website in December of the same year.

Past winners of the Paul Spragg Memorial Short Trip Opportunity have gone on to continue their writing career with Big Finish and beyond.

Nora Wicker is forgetful. Not big things - not yet anyway. She remembers her address and where the shops are. She remembers people when they come to visit, now matter how rare it is.

But she doesn't remember where the bush with the red leaves in her garden come from - and she definitely doesn't remember asking for a house call from the Eleventh Doctor.

- Synopsis from Big Finish Productions - "The World Tree"

Since 1999, Big Finish Productions have produced hundreds of audio dramas and audiobooks based around Doctor Who. In-keeping with the premise of the parent series itself, the stories feature one of the various Doctors and their companions on an adventure story with high stakes and big explosions with a nice smattering of monsters thrown in for good measure. While I like this approach very much, there was usually an itch to be scratched when it come to character focused stories that took the time to pause and reflect.

In 2007, Big Finish launched the Companion Chronicles range which, more often than not, was told in the first person perspective of a particular companion, opening up the opportunity to explore them as characters and their view of the Doctor and the mad-cap world of Doctor Who. Several years later, the Short Trips range of releases took short prose stories and released them as audiobooks. These stories further expanded on the opportunity to really get inside the minds of the characters within and generate stories that really made us think.

Nick Slawicz has certainly lived up to the fine tradition of the Short Trips range by crafting a story that doesn't focus on the Eleventh Doctor, but on an ordinary person named Nora Wicker, and how she gives the Doctor a new perspective on life. Nora is a lady who, despite beging to suffer a loss of memory and still mourning the death of her beloved husband, listens to the Doctor's stories of alien moons, space whales and world trees and is skeptical and captivated in equal measure. Through their conversations, Nora gets to entertain a very rare visitor to her cottage, and the Doctor gets to become unburdened by being the cleverest person in the room and the hero, having found a kindred spirit.

Slawicz has written a story that explores the passage of time and the effects of growing into old age, whether it be advancing memory loss, the loss of loved ones and the feeling of becoming less mobile and having less of an impact on the world around them. This story speaks to anyone who has had elderly relatives in their lives and certainly makes me reconsider what they must be thinking and feeling everyday and that we should just value them a little bit more.

NEXT TIME

The Ice Kings by Niel Bushnell