The Light at the End

For the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, Big Finish pulled out all the stops - and the Doctors. Gathering all five of the living Doctors they are licensed to use, and using clips and recast voices of the first three, they spin a story spanning the Doctor's many lives.

A red light on the TARDIS console has turned on, but the Doctor doesn't recognize it. This same scene plays out across five TARDIS and brings the Doctor in contact with himself. The primary team up occurs between Paul McGann and Tom Baker, the two extreme ends of the range, and they make a beautiful pair. Baker compliment's McGann's Victorian jacket and McGann compliments Baker's scarf. Their teaming is very reminiscent of the Smith/Tennant coupling that the BBC was putting together at the same time.

I do have a bias for McGann, but each of the other Doctors is given his due, and gets a few good moments. It's actually Peter Davison's Doctor who gets most of the key plot, as the Doctors discover their TARDIS have been pulled towards the same point in space-time (a familiar junkyard in 1963).

The companions are overshadowed (as usual) by the multi-Doctor scenes, but Ace manages to get a choice description across as she lists off all the Doctors with sarcastic nicknames (including Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, no points for guessing who she means).

The tale is just enough timey-wimey to make it feel like more than just an excuse to get all the actors in the same story, but not so complicated as to get lost in expository dialogue. It's also not as absurdly long as the 40th was, which means I don't have to feel bad recommending it for a single-sitting.

M054 - The Natural History of Fear

The Doctor is not the Doctor, he's the Editor. And Charley and C'Rizz aren't themselves either. Everyone is afraid of committing Orwellian thoughtcrime while being force-fed adventure stories about the Doctor and his companions. It's almost meta, and there are a few interesting lines when that starts becoming more apparent. Otherwise the criss-cross of betrayals and revolutionaries, characters being "revised" into new personalities, and dystopic jargon make for a more confusing narrative than usual.

It does come together and prove interesting, though. And the altered theme music, which winds down like a broken tape, and the sound effect and voice of the society's warning announcements are all nice audio flourishes that make for a fun listen.

M053 - The Creed of the Kromon

Continuing in the Divergent Universe, the Doctor and Charley find themselves in a kingdom ruled by the Kromon, giant insect creatures who have enslaved the humanoids. They capture Charley with plans to turn her into a new queen. The Doctor must save her by bartering his knowledge of inter-spacial travel.

Other than the introduction of a new recurring companion, C'Rizz, this story is creepy and a little over the top. Perhaps it's just my lack of interest in bugs and all things disgusting, but the whole arc of Charley being genetically and psychically tortured into a new bug queen was unappealing. C'Rizz seems like a nice enough guy to add to the mix, but when the three of them left the Kromon behind to continue their search for the TARDIS, I was happy to go with them.

BONUS - The Maltese Penguin

The classic Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler hardboiled mysteries, which lead to Bogart film noir classics like The Maltese Falcone, Key Largo, and The Long Goodbye, is a perfect fit for the audio play medium. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with science fiction as the quintessential radio genre, so this mash-up affair starring shapeshifting penguin Frobisher is a hilarious and brilliant adventure.

Deciding to go it without the Doctor (Colin Baker), Frobisher gets work as a private detective, and narrates as all the best detectives do. But to appear inconspicuous (or less conspicuous than a talking penguin), Frobisher shape shifts into the colourful sixth Doctor and gets drawn into a classic femme fatale conspiracy full of references to the Hitchcock and Huston genre classics.

M052 - Scherzo

Scherzo starts the Divergent Universe arc, where the Eighth Doctor and Charley are lost in another dimension, and it does it in a very interesting way. This could be the essential audio story, and is reminiscent of the TV series' Midnight, where David Tennant spent the whole episode dealing with an invisible creature trying to steal his voice.

In a world with nothing, and their senses dulled, Charley and the Doctor realize they are being followed by a creature made purely of sound. And as it grows and evolves they are faced with the strange experience of being parents to a new form of life.

Since the world they have arrived in operates under different laws, it would have been inconceivable to tell this story in the TV show. The audio-only format gave the storytellers great freedom, and this story runs with it. In certain ways it loses its footing, by going too bizarre with some of the later stages of the creatures' evolution, but the story is so unique that it's worth it.

Although I didn't like the narration added in The Wormery, I think the opening story, where before the title music Paul McGann continues a tale about a power-mad king, adds great atmosphere to an already atmospheric episode. In fact, the story of the king is by itself one of the more interesting stories I've heard.

M051 - The Wormery

The idea of the setting for this story is quite interesting; a bar with entrances in both 1930s Berlin and a dozen different star systems. Unfortunately the story occupying it was less engaging. This might be because it followed the bizarre epic Zagreus, but I would mostly blame the odd plot involving the Doctor being seduced by Bianca, the owner of the bar, and Mickey, the chief waitress who recounts the story years later to the mysterious Mr. Ashcroft. The Bianca side of the plot was less interesting than the trans-temporal bar, and Mickey's narrative added little except the running mystery of Mr. Ashcroft.

The interesting side of the story, that involving the bar with many doors, could have gone filled in any time occupied by Bianca, I think. Having 30s Germans finding a contact point for alien technology sees the Doctor in the middle of stopping the Nazis gaining advanced tech while trying to close the dangerously impossible bar, which might rip a hole in the Universe. No reason to distract from that. So it was a middle-of-the-road episode with some clever sides and some weaknesses.

BONUS - Living Legend

Most of the bonus releases prove to be brilliant, and this is no different. The 8th Doctor arrives with Charley in Italy in 1982 after a World Cup victory. Among the chaos of celebration they find two Threllips that are about to open a transdimentional portal for an invasion force. In the most brilliant team effort (while dressed like uptight Time Lords), the Doctor and Charley turn the two aliens against each other and avert disaster.