FOUR DOCTORS VERSUS AN ARMY OF DALEKS!
The Fifth Doctor investigates the Vault of Stellar Curios, where he has observed evidence of time leakage. But then the Daleks attack, looking for the contents of the mysterious vault. The Eighth Doctor also shows up and he and his former self create a time loop trap, spanning between their lives. This sends the Daleks to the Seventh Doctor’s encounter with Michael Faraday in 1854 and the Sixth Doctor’s visit to an early Dalek battlefield.
THE FOUR DOCTORS
As a coda to the 2010 release year, Big Finish offered its annual subscriber bonus release: Peter Anghelides’ “The Four Doctors,” a story that, as the title implies, features all four Big Finish Doctor Who lead actors. Unlike previous subscriber bonuses, Big Finish courted controversy by announcing that “The Four Doctors” would never be sold individually, requiring a subscription to obtain. As a result, it became one of the most sought-after releases – which is a shame, as it’s not particularly fantastic.
Unfortunately, listening to this story two years after its release, I find that I’ve been somewhat spoiled by Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who. Anghelides approaches the multi-Doctor format from a new perspective: rather than following one or multiple Doctors, he follows a new character, Colonel Ulrik (David Bamber), as he travels back and forth through time, fighting the Daleks and meeting various incarnations of the Doctor. It’s quite skillfully constructed; the loop of Ulrik’s life is closed without any major holes and each Doctor gets a significant piece of the action without feeling tacked on. Had I heard this two years ago, I may have been more impressed; hearing it now, I found myself thinking “Yep, another temporal narrative.” When the eighth Doctor surreptitiously guided the fifth Doctor using his own memories of the moment, I thought “Yep, ‘Time Crash.’” Again, none of this takes away from the script itself, but I left “The Four Doctors” wondering what the point of the exercise was. Michael Faraday (Nigel Lambert) is fun, the Daleks are intimidating, Colin Baker gets a great haunting monologue… but with the main characters relegated to supporting roles, “The Four Doctors” ends up as a story about a character we don’t know fighting a war we don’t care about.
Considering that the brief apparently started as “Make sure the Doctors never interact,” it does make me wonder why the story was commissioned in the first place. It’s not the fannish stuff that makes “The Five Doctors” work, it’s the fact that it’s momentous: the first three Doctors haven’t been seen in the show for a decade, and even the Daleks have been absent for three years. Here, that’s not the case at all: “The Four Doctors” came out in December 2010, right in the middle of a three-month span in which all four of its participating Doctors starred in new stories. While Big Finish obviously isn’t producing multi-Doctor stories every month, the fact that they happened to put Davison, Baker, McCoy, and McGann in the same story isn’t that big of a deal – they’re all practically repertory players for the company! If the four “episodes” of “The Four Doctors” had been released at the end of sequential monthly stories, much like “The Three Companions,” nobody would have batted an eyelash. If it had been given its original title, “Reverse Engineering,” the same would have been true. Instead, much like the “Four Doctors – One Destiny” crap that blighted the “Zagreus” marketing, the story is titled “The Four Doctors” and billed as the four Big Finish Doctors teaming up to fight the Daleks. It’s nothing of the sort – it’s an anthology release with four different lead actors instead of one. (Oh, and a terrible one-minute scene at the end where they all yell at each other, an obvious last-minute justification of the advertising.) Again, I don’t blame the story itself for not being something different, but the tone of the marketing clearly implies one thing while the story delivers something entirely different. This was a cool idea for an anthology release – so bill it as such! They didn’t call “Project: Lazarus” or “Klein’s Story” “The Two Doctors,” right?
I’d comment on the production, which is very good, but I can’t find any listings of the production crew. So, ultimately, “The Four Doctors” is a solid story with an interesting central concept that doesn’t really do anything compelling with the tools at its disposal. But if Big Finish are generally opposed to multi-Doctor stories, and this was their chance to do something momentous, it’s quite the missed opportunity.
6/10