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.

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.

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.