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.

M049 - Master

The Doctor and the Master really do have an odd relationship. In this tale, which the Doctor is telling to an assassin with a finger on a sniper rifle trigger, he has found the Master, scarred and suffering from memory loss, living as a doctor in a remote human colony. Horrible murders, prostitutes with their hearts cut out, are scaring the community, and the Doctor, the Master (going under the Doctor's usual alias of John Smith), the strange wealthy couple that have taken the Master in, and their maidservant play out a drama of manners.

Some interesting twists keep the story moving, but the limited setting and relatively non-sci-fi tale seems like a bit of a waste of the medium. But then again even the television series has low budget episodes scattered throughout.

M046 - Flip Flop

Finally a story that addresses the time loop issue. Pity it reveals just why time travel writing usually avoids it: annoying repetition. Like the film Vantage Point, which continually rewound itself to show different characters' points of view, Flip Flop suffers from repeating sequences when the time travellers return to places they have been before.

The story starts in the middle of things and the Doctor and Mel are stepping out of the TARDIS to hear their names being called out in an Orwellian police announcement. Joining up with a pair of terrorist/assassin/time travellers, the Doctor and Mel are forced to take them back in time 30 years to assassinate the President before she makes a decision that leaves the planet in the hands of unpleasant slug overlords.

The ripple effects of their actions are revealed when they all return to the present and find it drastically altered, but for the worse. And here the time loop problem reveals itself. When you change something in the past and return to the present, a new you exists. Now the terrorists are disaffected lieutenants in the military and the Doctor and Mel have to leave before the other them arrive in their place...

Which they do, in the middle of a police alert looking for them. And then they meet up with a pair of disaffected lieutenants who want to go back in time and stop the assassination of the president to undo what has gone so wrong the past 30 years, oblivious to the fact they are to blame.

It's nice to know that the writers considered this problem, and it is a clever idea to have an infinite loop of the Doctor and Mel arriving and switching the planet's history and leaving again before a past version of themselves arrives and does the opposite, but since the whole thing essentially repeats itself (with the same sort of questions being asked and the same sort of conclusions being reached by the Doctor), it all feels a bit redundant.

M045 - Project Lazarus

When I saw that this episode was a multi-Doctor story I was quite excited. I thought I was going to have to wait until Zagreus (M050) to hear a proper team-up story. Turns out I was half-right because although both Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy are in the story it isn't quite so straightforward as two Doctors meeting.

Right away it is revealed that this is actually a sequel to Project Twilight (M023), which was a 2 TARDIS vampire story that didn't make much impact. It turns out the Doctor has not forgotten he abandoned vampiress Cassie in Norway, and now he is heading back to find her to test a cure for her condition. He and Evelyn find Cassie on the run and are soon drawn back into the world of Nimrod (least threatening villain name ever) and The Forge, his secret vampire lab.

The story actually concludes by the end of the second episode so that halfway through we switch and are now with Sylvester McCoy's seventh Doctor when he is drawn back to Nimrod and The Forge again. But this is when things get interesting.

Colin Baker steps out from behind Nimrod and reveals he has been helping the crazy scientist with his plan. Hard to believe, and Doctor #7 stays skeptical, but the two Doctors team up to solve the issue of the Forge.

The story takes a few predictable twists, but the banter of two Doctors in the same room is there to be heard anyway. It's a fairly successful story that is really only limited by Nimrod and his plot being less interesting than some of the Doctor's opponents have been.

M042 - The Dark Flame

There is a variety of good banter between the Doctor's companions in this episode, but sarcastic wit in the face of being tortured by a crazy religious zealot eventually seems a bit silly. The zealot in question is trying to unleash the "black flame" of the title, which is a sort of evil thing from an alternate universe that is all black and... Flamey.

Honestly, the stakes of this episode seem to be too high to be cared about. It's an issue that has affected many Doctor Who stories over the decades; when the entire universe is in danger of blinking out of existence I find the story can become paradoxically less engaging. Its when individuals and single planets are in peril that the danger can be felt in an emotional and not just a numerical way.

One saving grace of this episode is a robot character who gets some of the best lines and is one of the better supporting characters since he serves a plot purpose beyond being a victim or bystander.

M039 - Bang-Bang-a-Boom!

I'm not familiar enough with the classic series to know if the (silly) title of this play is a reference to the McCoy era Who, but I do know that playing the spoons is. And you have to be sure that a story where playing the spoons is central to the climax will not be one of the Doctor's serious moments. This is actually a good thing, because I've preferred McCoy's Doctor in the funnier stories.

When the TARDIS appears in the halls of an exploding ship with a dead crew, there is nothing the Doctor and Mel can do but run and hope. Luckily the nearby space station teleports--sorry--transmats them onboard, thinking they are the new command crew. Rather than spend the story in the brig, the Doctor and Mel take on their new roles and fall into a story that is Star Trek meets Agatha Christie behind the scenes of an intergalactic song contest.

A curious and bizarre cast of characters including an annoyingly-voiced mouse quickly become the dwindling cast of an "And Then There Were None" situation of mounting murders. The silliness of the play is amped up as every time someone gets to say, "It was murder!" a chorus of organs does the old-timey radio dum-dum-dummm. And it goes further when the organs are cut off by someone saying, "He's not actually dead."

M036 - The Rapture

A hot new European nightclub called The Rapture draws the Doctor's attention when he and Ace come to Ibetha to relax after their ordeal in Colditz. An angelic DJ and his brother seem to have slipped mind control into the club music. And, at the same time, a mysterious young man has set his sights on Ace for unknown purposes.

Other than a clever introduction via radio personality to the techno remix of the Doctor Who theme music, the episode relies mostly on Ace and her developing storyline while remaining very Earth-bound.

M025 - Colditz

One of the recurring joys of these radio plays is the curious connections that exist back (or forward) to the TV series. This episode from 2001 includes David Tennant voicing a ruthless Nazi commander stationed at Colditz Castle, the famous POW prison for the most escape-eager Allied officers, four years before he was cast as the 10th Doctor.

Time travel is a tricky business, and paradoxes are even trickier. Unlike some episodes, this one manages to pull together the more complex sides of time travel without losing coherance. The Doctor and Ace are captured at Colditz and meet another time traveller, a Nazi from a future where the Allies lost, who needs the Doctor to help her make her future permanent.

The episode also blends a bit of classic Hollywood with POW officers and escape attempts. It never goes full Great Escape, but the more straightforward prison genre is a nice balance to the timey-wimey science fiction.

M021 - Dust Breeding

This episode, which starts quite well, sees the 7th Doctor and Ace travel to a time just before the famous painting "The Scream" by Edvard Munch is about to disappear. The Doctor explains that he has been stocking his impressive TARDIS gallery with famous works, which he "saves" just before they are about to be lost anyway: a philosophy Ace quite rightly makes fun of the Doctor for believing. Funnily enough this episode was created just a few years before Munch's painting really was stolen (although it was recovered two years later).

After they arrive on Duchamp 331, the Doctor and Ace get caught up in the mystery of the barren dust world, which reveals a plot by the Master to take control of an ancient superweapon that has been trapped inside the painting.

It's unfortunate that the Master is involved in what is another overly-complicated and unclear story. The pseudo-science that is such an important part of Doctor Who is weakly explained and generally doesn't mesh the different elements of the Master, the superweapon, and the painting. Secondary characters are forgettable and (in the case of one accent) rather annoying. And the conclusion is nothing clever.

Overall, a skippable episode.

M012 - The Fires of Vulcan

There are quite a few TARDIS in Pompeii.

Once again (for the first time) the Doctor arrives in Pompeii just before Vesuvius goes apocalyptic. This adventure of the 7th Doctor shares a lot with David Tennants later exploration; the title being the most obvious (Tennant starred in The Fires of Pompeii), and plot revolves around the Tardis being taken away (which, honestly, describes a lot of Doctor Who plots).

Another important connection between this adventure and Tennant's is the concept of fixed points in time and the tricky way that time travel can be limited. The Doctor reveals that back in his fifth incarnation he was told by UNIT that the Tardis was found buried in the ruins of Pompeii, so when it is seemingly lost under the rubble of a collapsed building, the Doctor fears that time has caught up with him and this is the end of his journeys.

However, this is not the last journey of the Doctor, nor is it a source copy for the Tennant adventure 8 years later. This time the Doctor does not discover ancient monsters living under the mountain, but instead gets embroiled in local politics and upsets a vengeful gladiator. The gladiator is played (uncredited, so I can't be sure) by 6th Doctor Colin Baker. One of the great things about listening to these plays is catching when and where the other doctors pop up in supporting parts, and Baker does a terrific job booming with ancient indignity.

A weak part of this story is, like so many, the companion. Mel (Bonnie Langford) is a fine companion for the 7th Doctor, but in this impending disaster she does exactly the same thing Donna Noble will do on the other side of town; she becomes obsessed with trying to save everyone in the city. It's a quality goal to be sure, but it is a much less appealing storyline than uncovering conspiracies or racing against time to avert disaster.

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.