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.

M050 - Zagreus

This is it. The big one. Five hours, four Doctors, and a whole host of former companions (mostly playing other characters).

Following the events of Neverland (M033), the 8th Doctor is infected by Zagreus, a myth of ancient Gallifrey, and he rages about the TARDIS like Jekyll and Hyde. Charley, meanwhile, finds herself back in 1900s England with her mother, who soon turns into a rabbit. A hologram of the Brigadier comes to her and she realizes she is not really back on Earth.

Where they really are is a lot of timey-wimey explanations that don't fully make sense, but if you go with it Zagreus is a various and entertaining story. The Doctor's former selves pop up as a strange trio of alternate characters, but eventually make appearances in their proper personalities. Dozens of former companions also make appearances, and some familiar voices are easy to spot, but because most of them are not playing their original characters they may go unnoticed by those of us who have not seen the entire original series.

But many good lines and clever references to classic children's literature like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz make for a hodgepodge epic of an audio play.

M047 - Omega

It starts quite funny, with the Doctor heading to a Time Lord museum/historical re-enactment space station with a pair of dottering old ladies. The exhibit employs actors to portray the dead characters of ancient Gallifrey, and one of them, Omega, is not quite as dead as he should be.

Just when the trapped on a spaceship with an actor possessed by the ghost of the character he was playing story is about to get old, near the end of part three, a big twist is thrown in, which causes some troubles for the story's clarity, but does a great job of rebooting interest and taking the whole play home.

M044 - Creatures of Beauty

I can't decide if there was a paradox in this story or I heard the parts out of order. I think I quite like the roundabout plot involving the Doctor and Nyssa being held by totalitarian police on a planet suffering from major atmospheric pollution, but the story takes so long to explain itself that some of the impact was lost.

Scenes of torture are not very good in audio because they involve a lot of screaming, and a few go on too long in this one. There is also the problem of no one telling the Doctor or Nyssa what is going on, which for the audience that arrives with them already captured is even worse because for the first hour there is nothing but questions without answers.

Some of the flashback structure that is used makes things more confused than they needed to be, but overall by the end I still feel like it was a good tale; just one that could have been a short story or a bonus release.

M041 - Nekromanteia

A curious combination of witches and corrupt corporations feels like two Doctor Who tales being unwillingly brought together. In one, a tale of religious belief and pagan-style ceremony, Erimem and Peri are threatened by witches. In the other, a tale involving a corporate construction project headed by a cartoonishly evil CEO, the Doctor faces his own mortality (sort of) and finds a powerful and dangerous energy source.

The evil corporation stuff is more interesting than the crazy witches, so the play's good bits are weighted down by the bad, and the result is mediocre. Once again the 5th Doctor is not given the best material to work with and comes off looking the worse for it.

M038 - The Church and the Crown

The Doctor does Dumas. With Peri and Erimem, the Egyptian Queen, along for the ride, the Doctor finds the TARDIS arriving in the France of Musketeers and Cardinal Richelieu. Taking the historical accuracy of Dumas' novels to heart, the Cardinal and the King are no simple villain and weak-willed hero, and Queen Anne is brought front and centre in the politics and plot when it turns out she is a doppelgänger for Peri.

The drawback of the audio format is definitely highlighted in this story, where many of the characters are male and are usually distinguished by the colour of their uniforms, but the script pulls it off fairly well. As far as 5th Doctor stories go, this is a straightforward historical Doctor Who adventure.

M034 - Spare Parts

Finally Peter Davison's 5th Doctor gets a good script. And it's a Cyberman story, which is all the better.

Dealing with (one of) the origins of the Cybermen, the play starts slow with the Doctor hinting that he recognizes this Earth-like planet, but then playing it off as if he landed them in England. His concern gives the story some dread going in, so that when the inhuman parts of the story start to emerge they have some proper emotional punch.

The reason Neil Gaiman was asked to write A Nightmare in Silver was because Steven Moffat felt the Doctor's silvery nemesis had lost their scaryness, and I'd say something similar was at risk with the radio plays. Without the visual side of things, the Cybermen could easily appear as Dalek ripoffs; just another weird computer-voiced collective of space Nazis. But seeing the moral dilemmas that lead the people of the planet to turn themeselves into the Cybermen makes them unique and scary again.

M026 - Primeval

I don't dislike Peter Davison. In fact, in the Children in Need special "Time Crash," I liked him quite a bit. Something about the cocky charm and the celery stick. But why are his monthly episodes so bland?

The Doctor and Nyssa are on ancient Traken, Nyssa's lost homeworld, and she is going to die if the Doctor can figure out what's going on. By the end, I wasn't sure he had. I find the Doctor stories where psychic powers play a heavy part are some of the weakest. Perhaps its because of the undefined way those powers always end up working; the rules never seem firm, and so they feel like a constant cheat in the narrative.

A grandstanding villain and the Doctor unexpectedly getting caught off guard weren't enough to make this a recommendable two hours.

M015 - The Mutant Phase

The Fifth Doctor battles the Daleks in a timey-wimey tale that nearly collapses under the weight of all the paradoxes and attempts to explain said paradoxes.

The Daleks are being killed off by a random mutation, which turns them into impure, mindless monsters. With a clever trap to stop the Doctor leaving a certain time, they draw him down to future Earth where two dozen Daleks are some of the only life left. Now faced with the destruction of the Daleks or a paradox that would destroy the universe, the Doctor has to save his mortal enemies.

Nicholas Briggs manages to pull off the more complex time travel plots quite well, and this is a mid-range example. The story is sometimes too complex for its own good, some of the supporting characters are bland, and the problem of differentiating Daleks on the radio remains, but overall the Big Finish team pull off a successful story; albeit one that felt an episode too long at just over two hours.

M001 - The Sirens of Time

The opening story of the Big Finish series is a perfect place to start listening. Later stories that are just one Doctor for four episodes, neary two hours, can sometimes drag on too long, adding one more cliffhanger just to make the right number of breaks. But this crossover tale begins with three half-hour stories, each one following a different doctor to a cliffhanger ending.

First, the 7th Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) is forced to land on a jungle planet where he saves a woman from drowning in quicksand. Then, following mysterious voices, they discover a hidden home where a long-isolated man is hiding a terrible secret. Next we meet the 5th Doctor (Peter Davidson) when he becomes embroiled with events on a German U-Boat. And, finally, the 6th Doctor (Colin Baker) is discovered dealing with a legendary time beast.

Throughout the first three parts we meet a Time Lord as he is trying to piece together the story just as we are, and in the fourth parth the stories all converge to see the three Doctors working together to save the day.

Crossover stories always have just a little bit more for Whovians because of the way the different Doctors behave around each other, and The Sirens of Time is no exception. The final confrontation has a number of good moments that give each Doctor his time to shine, and as a first episode it manages to establish these new (old) adventures of the classic Doctors.