Jorj (short story)

 was the first The Blogs of Doom short story, published in later 2017 in Doctor Who Magazine 519. Like other features in the series, it narrated events in the life of a minor Doctor Who TV character before and after their involvement in the Doctor's life — in this case, Jorj from World Enough and Time — in first-person perspective as a series of diary or blog entries from the character.

Summary
Janitor Jorj's log entries tell the stories of the colony ship came to enter the orbit of the black hole, how Jorj ended up alone on the top deck, and what happens when a group of unfamiliar travellers in an unusual, blue space-capsule show up out of nowhere...

Plot
On Day 43 of the colony ship's journey, the ship gets stuck in a black hole. As Jorj writes down in his log, he gets blamed for the accident by the Captain due to having been the only man on the bridge when it happened and not reacting quickly enough — when he heard the alarms blaring, he spilled his coffee and then unthinkingly spent precious time making sure none of it got onto the keyboard instead of immediately warning officers that the alarm had gone off.

When Franq and an engineering team go down to Floor 1056 to reverse the rear thrusters, Jorj volunteers to help but is forbidden from doing so by the Captain, who doesn't trust him. When life signs start being detected in the lower levels the next day, the Captain berates Jorj for not having even remotely checked for stowaways before they departed from Mondas. The Captain sends down another team to deal with the situation, but when the lift returns, a group of monsters in cloth masks and surgical gowns come out instead and abduct all human crewmembers, Captain included. Jorj is left alone.

By the next day, Jorj has sent out a distress call and re-angled all the surveillance screens in the control room, but doesn't have much hope of a rescue coming before months. However, after "nipping out of the control room for five minutes", he returns to find a blue rescue capsule has materialised on the bridge. He tells the occupants who walk out of it to stay where they are and inwardly rejoices at possibly being rescued.

A later, additional entry explains that since the girl of the party was human, the cloth mask creatures turned up, causing him to panic and accidentally shoot her. Another man who stepped out of the capsule, a "walking frown called Doctor Who", tries to explain the temporal mechanics of the ship's relative time-zones to Jorj, who doesn't follow and is eventually rendered unconscious by the Doctor.

Jorj wakes up alone with a sore head some time later and is dismayed to see that the blue capsule has gone. Just after he finishes typing up what has happened to him thus far for the ship's log, a new alarm comes in: a massive explosion has wiped out Floor 507. The last sentences of his last entry state that the life signs are still working their way up the ship, and restate his increasingly shaky hope that, as a non-human, he'll probably be okay.

Characters

 * Jorj
 * The Captain
 * Franq
 * Cloth mask creatures
 * Dr Who
 * Bald man
 * Girl
 * Girl

Continuity

 * The Twelfth Doctor was introduced to Jorj as "Doctor Who". Jorj ends up shooting his companion, fruitlessly apologising afterwards, when the cloth mask creatures show up. (TV: World Enough and Time)