The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors together for the first time. The three Doctors must unite to defeat a threat to time itself.
The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors together for the first time. The three Doctors must unite to defeat a threat to time itself.
EPISODE ONE
Everything starts off with some continuity-ridden nonsense on Gallifrey about the Celestial Intervention Agency, the transduction barriers, and the Lord President. Is this really the best way to start a new series of audios? Then it’s off to McCoy talking to himself and the cloister bell going off. “I need something sharper than an umbrella to hack through this” — who says that? Despite that, Maggie Stables is absolutely hysterical; I hope she wasn’t intended to be threatening, because she certainly wasn’t. “It’s not as if you’ve twisted your ankle, is it?” Oh, great, it’s self-referential humor about fifteen minutes in.
Technically, this isn’t very good at all. McCoy’s “Get down” in particular echoes just like he said it in a studio, while the explosion effects are far too generic and confusing. McCoy himself doesn’t do well at all, acting much too manic and generally acting as if he hadn’t read the script beforehand. His characterization is very weak, too; this Doctor is terribly bland. Sarah Mowat does well as companion-substitute, complete with nice, obvious companion lines. The bioassassins are simply boring, and the cliffhanger suffers as a result, serving only to awaken the listener from the slumber prompted by the preceding speech. A thoroughly weak start, and its lack of resolution doesn’t help at all.
EPISODE TWO
Much better start to this one, with Mark Gatiss and some fine incidental music lending credibility to the proceedings. Unfortunately, we’re then presented with Davison talking to himself and his lines in this situation are even worse than those given to McCoy. “Mine is not to reason why, mine is but to get back in the TARDIS” is quite good, though. And I like the brief exploration of the nature of the Doctor’s translation abilities.
The World War I setting is wonderful: in recent years, Doctor Who seems to have developed an obsession with WWII and the Nazis. Here, we see reasonable, honorable German officers and it’s rather refreshing to hear.
Meanwhile, back on Gallifrey, Vansell is conspiring against the Doctor because, in a very original plot idea, Gallifrey’s energy is being drained. I don’t get it – can any alien race just plug into the Eye of Harmony? This has been happening since we first saw the planet and it doesn’t seem to show any sign of stopping.
Davison’s great in this: he’s got that off-the-cuff sarcastic tone that characterized the best of his performances on TV. Mowat, though, takes a step back — of course, there’s more going on here than appears, but “Helen” just comes off as whiny and annoying. And the cliffhanger is okay, though it’s hard to care particularly. Better than the first part, but still inconsequential.
EPISODE THREE
More talking-to-himself at the beginning, this time by Vansell, and then nonsense about the “ancient time-beast, the Temperon.” All this Gallifrey stuff is utterly boring, with the conquest of Gallifrey being related through a low-key conversation between two people. Colin talks to himself as well, but I think it works with his character: he clearly loves the sound of his own voice, after all. However, there’s too much talking over incomprehensible noise in this one; all of the distorted voices during TARDIS-malfunctions during the TV series were annoying and that doesn’t stop here.
Baker’s performance is a fine recapturing of his TV persona: he’s arrogant, witty, and generally dismissive of those around him. But the episode itself is nonsensical, with lots of running around a deserted ship away from giant viruses in an attempt to start the engines. The Lord President of Gallifrey is shot to death offscreen, for heaven sakes — shouldn’t an event like that be given some sort of dramatic weight? It’s a bit too obvious that Sarah Mowat is evil at this point, and the attempts to put suspicion on her just make things ridiculous. The cliffhanger is the worst of the three thus far, with a hammy Baker fading out and a meaningless “Beware the Sirens of Time!” which only makes sense in light of the title.
EPISODE FOUR
The Doctors come together in this one without any explanation whatsoever other than “The Temperon brought us here!” which strikes me as a copout. A flashback sequence follows, which serves to beat the listener over the head with some very obvious plot threads and pad the episode out to a reasonable length. Still, the interaction of the three is fun, though McCoy comes across as an idiot. And the jumping down the shaft acting is diabolical. “I don’t do impressions” is cute, but after two separate “contact” instances any sort of amusement is as an oasis to the parched ears of the listener.
Baker and McCoy wander around for a while and then end up reunited with Davison and a scenery-chewing Mowat with a voice filter. Meanwhile, the revelation that the Knights of Velyshaa have imprisoned every single Time Lord just further emasculates Gallifrey. The “different aspects of the same personality!” discussion is painful to hear, and immediately afterward we’re told of the resolutions to the prior episodes that apparently weren’t deserving of being presented to the listener. Then the sinking of the Lusitania is revealed to prevent an invasion of Earth in the 3500s, and everything just gets sillier and sillier. The villain makes the Doctors look like fools with the old “No, don’t do this” ruse almost working. Eventually they figure it out, but by that time it’s just impossible to care. Easily the worst multiple-Doctor adventure at the time of its release, this episode amounts to little more than boring, humorless technobabble.
OVERALL
A lot of swearing in this — nothing severe, but the use of “hell” and “bitch” and “Christ!” and “sh*tload” comes across as an intentional attempt to make proceedings more adult. This is ironic because the rest of the script is childish, mixing endless continuity and Gallifrey technobabble with generally weak acting and production values. Having something this masturbatory to start the range seems idiotic to me — one wonders how many potential customers swore off the range after this offering. Davison and Baker are pretty good, but nowhere near good enough to save this.
3/10
“Don’t get your hopes up Sancroft. Nobody is putting you out of my misery”
So it’s the pilot episode of Big Finish. Re-introducing its three players in one go, and four stories at once in the bargain. It’s their first night, so they’re playing to an empty crowd and so the almost ambient, deserted settings and absence of companions are perfectly in tune with that, whilst the Temperon and Sancroft’s paralysis reflects the show’s stasis during the wilderness years. It will take a while for these Doctors to draw a crowd.
Meanwhile the universe has gone on without them, forgetting they exist and become a far meaner place for it. Sylvester’s Doctor is nearly killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and crucially by a people who have grown tired of and given up on the Doctor’s ideals of justice and mercy. These are the JNT Doctors, all incepted from a troubled era, all such extreme contrasts to each other that individually they’re incomplete, meaning they’re all fallible and prone to occasionally doing more harm than good. They also are clearly suited to different types of stories which is how Big Finish will alternate between them, and the final confrontation establishes that as Colin’s Doctor steps forward and announces himself as the best candidate of the three because of his ruthless pragmatism, best suited to this mean universe and this temporal minefield where the wrong act of compassion to save the wrong person could jeapordise all causality or allow evil to prevail. Immediately showing up how The Two Doctors missed a big, obvious trick (then again it’s mighty generous to credit The Two Doctors with having any aspirations to show the Doctor as being remotely competent). The much maligned Sixth Doctor, here gives his mission statement of rehabilitation, to over-compensate for both his own ruthlessness and his predecessors’ incompetence. A journey that will lead to the Sixth Doctor’s redemption in the eyes of many fans, and infact becoming the embodiment of everything we always felt the Doctor should stand for.
In a way the JNT period lends some validity to what Big Finish is doing. Since the mid-80s saw the TV show sinking to doing its own fan fiction, it seemed like there was a place for Big Finish’s add-ons to the era, and certainly we fans could hardly do worse. It also establishes Big Finish’s mission statement to play on the importance of the lessons of history, in presenting history as a minefield. This will continue with subsequent stories where the Daleks’ goal is to take Shakespeare out of time, Davros is revived specifically as a case study for someone’s historical thesis, and the Doctor is misremembered as a bogeyman to the Galyari race. There are hints of a great intergalactic war coming that even Gallifrey won’t withstand, and a moral terrain is laid where no-one can be trusted amidst devious manipulators and familiars of evil and where compassionate idealists in their own well meaning way can do the most harm.
As for whether it entertains however, objectively, once you know where the story is going it works well at isolating each of the Doctors and thus making the central drive to get them all together. And it certainly shows up how Zagreus did it all wrong. But in a first time listen it lacks momentum, the final act doesn’t connect with anything prior, and the intrigue and good will can’t last, showing the story layout of three cliffhangers with no resolution to be perhaps a mistake. Furthermore the final scene of the Doctor ignoring Helania’s cries is chilling, but like with Season 22, it’s chilling for the wrong reasons. For some this was a welcome, entertaining return for the Doctors and the promising beginnings of a new direction. For others, this was an overlong story where nothing happens for most of its length, and when it eventually does, it’s rather nasty in a way we’d hoped that Doctor Who had gotten away from.