23 November 2013. In an Oxford laboratory, graduate Alice Watson helps Professor Chivers assemble the final pieces of an impossible machine. A time machine.
The scientist and his assistant believe they are making history, little suspecting that the project’s completion will threaten the existence of the entire universe. But someone has sensed the danger, and when the mysterious Doctor arrives, Alice is taken on a desperate race from libraries and dreaming spires all the way to the nightmare world of Earth’s future.
The monstrous Creevix are coming. They seek control of time itself and are certain that the Doctor is already too late to stop them. But can the key to saving the future lie in the Time Lord’s past lives?
THE TIME MACHINE
Throughout the anniversary year of 2013, Big Finish and AudioGO joined forces to produce “Destiny of the Doctor,” an eleven-part series featuring one story from each Doctor. Unfortunately, AudioGO ceased operations late in that year, making the final release in the series, Matt Fitton’s “The Time Machine,” one of the company’s last products. Fortunately, then, the story is largely successful, if only in the same vein as the rest of the series.
Fittingly for an anniversary series, each installment has served as homage to its era: this has not been a series for those searching for new, experimental forms of Doctor Who storytelling. While I don’t find nostalgia to be sufficient justification for a story, each release has involved enough interesting material to score decently in my mind. “The Time Machine” slots perfectly into the end of the series: it is very much “of the era,” featuring a fast-talking, quick-witted Doctor, an alien race with abstract powers, and a resolution “timey-wimey” enough to make Steven Moffat blush. I enjoyed the Creevix for what they were: largely incomprehensible insect-monsters that fed on the potential energy of the universe, ignoring the past and using the present and future as a food source. There’s a Time Lord message cube of dubious origin, there’s a glimpse of the end of the universe, and there’s a resolution to the other ten plays. Fitton puts the pieces together and does so with a minimum of conflict; it’s a shame that we don’t get much to think about in the process.
We also don’t get a regular TARDIS crew, uniquely for this series. Jenna Coleman narrates, but Clara is nowhere to be found: the Doctor is traveling alone, leaving Alice Watson to step in as his companion for the story. She fills the role admirably, though I do wonder why Clara was omitted from the story in the first place – perhaps it was written before she was introduced? “The Time Machine” is also unique in the range in that it features three actors instead of two: Michael Cochrane plays the embattled Professor Chivers, while Nicholas Briggs is along to voice the alien Creevix. Briggs does one of his typical alien voices, but since he’s really good at alien voices, it works well, and Cochrane brings some real sympathy to his character, especially in the face of changing history.
Unlike the other stories in the series, “The Time Machine” doesn’t work very well as a standalone tale. We’ve seen the eleventh Doctor appear in each of the ten previous stories, and each of those appearances – and the instructions he gave his prior selves – contributes directly to the conclusion. Indeed, the Doctor explains the entire solution in a massive info-dump at the climax. This is just about comprehensible if you’ve only heard this story, but it helps a lot to have heard the previous installments so you recognize the character names and the events being described. That said, it’s not exactly what you would call a massively rewarding sequence – it feels more like it’s there to justify the tie-ins and certainly doesn’t sound like it was carefully plotted out. Honestly, I think the series might have been better off had it abandoned the linking theme entirely and just told 11 stories for the anniversary. When the Creevix started ranting about the Doctor’s destiny, I just rolled my eyes – but I should have been feeling a sense of completion.
Overall, though, “The Time Machine” isn’t bad. It’s a solid eleventh Doctor story that nicely captures his era and features good performances from talented performers. But as the conclusion to a series of 11 stories, well, I don’t think you can blame me for expecting more than a five-minute info-dump.
Meh.
6/10