The War Doctor and Cardinal Ollistra are stranded far from their Time Lord forces, with Daleks closing in, destroying all that stands between them. They must call on the help of new friends and old to fight their way back to the front lines. From the outer reaches of the galaxy, to the heart of Gallifrey itself, the Doctor finds casualties in every place the Time War has touched. Among them, a fighter, a travelling companion of the distant past, who remembers him quite differently. A warrior woman named Leela…
4.1 Pretty Lies by Guy Adams
Trapped and desperate, light years from their armies at the heart of the Time War, the War Doctor and Cardinal Ollistra discover that wherever they go, destruction follows. A war reporter named Schandel may provide the key to their escape, but it is often said that the first casualty of war is the truth. When the choice between grim reality and a hero’s story means life or death, will the Doctor allow Schandel to print the legend?
4.2 The Lady of Obsidian by Andrew Smith
As a Dalek Strike Fleet heads to destroy another defenceless world, the Doctor seeks help from a shadowy guerrilla force. The Time War leaves many casualties in its wake, and inside the Obsidian Nebula the monstrous Unlived are held at bay only by the ‘Lady’ and her dwindling band of fighters. The War Doctor soon finds himself at the Lady’s mercy, and two old friends face new revelations…
4.3 The Enigma Dimension by Nicholas Briggs
The Dalek Time Strategist has a new plan to ensure final victory in the Time War. As its forces gather for a huge assault on the enemy, ahead of the fleet something hovers above the planet of the Time Lords. And on Gallifrey itself, shadows move among the Cloisters. The Time Lords face a threat alien to their entire universe. To save their world, the War Doctor and his allies must enter the Enigma Dimension…
THE WAR DOCTOR: PRETTY LIES
It’s the final War Doctor set – and with the unfortunate passing of John Hurt, we can be sure there won’t be any more. It’s always a little unusual to experience a performance knowing the performer has since passed away, but one can at least hope that the material does him justice. The first story in the set, “Pretty Lies” by Guy Adams, is largely quite strong, though it takes a rather unfortunate thematic approach.
I understand what Adams is going for, to begin with. Schandel (Joseph Kloska) is a well-known archetype: the overeager reporter willing to bend the truth for the purposes of either entertainment or propaganda. He’s from some nebulous point in the future, and he knows the Doctor’s reputation: the great, heroic warrior who defeated the Daleks. (This raises an interesting question: when is Schandel from? Generally speaking, those we’ve seen on TV who knew about the Time War, the Time Lords, or the Doctor were terrified, disgusted, or occasionally sympathetic – but nobody ever hailed him as a hero.) The Doctor, of course, knows the truth about himself: he’s little more than a particularly effective soldier, doing un-heroic things in the name of the greater good. (Again, the Doctor’s words jar with what we know about him. He laments that he has become an amoral killer when he clearly hasn’t – and I know the ultimate point of the War Doctor is that he’s still the same man underneath it all, but we’re not supposed to know that yet!) So after initially dismissing Schandel as an ignorant propagandist, the Doctor realizes he can use Schandel’s reporting to his advantage and enlists him to craft a fake broadcast to deceive the Dalek invaders. This is a solid exploration of the nature of truth in reporting, especially in wartime. My problem comes with the current political climate: as of this writing, the legitimacy and honesty of the media is being directly challenged, with truth being viewed as the enemy of politicians who lie and conspire as easily as they breathe. I’m not particularly interested right now in a story about the dishonest media being used to deceive the enemy, not when real journalists are being threatened for nothing more than doing their jobs. Not that this is Adams’ fault, and I do think it’s a legitimate topic to explore – but for those reasons it does not appeal to me.
Apart from that, this is a strong, entertaining action epic. We get to see the Doctor and Ollistra working together – their relationship is a little too chummy from what we’ve seen before, but it’s good to see Ollistra in action as an effective military leader in order to give the Doctor time to think. The Daleks are also impressively scary without resorting too much to Dalek clichés. The cast is good and the production is strong. It’s nothing revolutionary, in other words, but if the range had been up to this standard all along I’d have been happy.
7/10
THE WAR DOCTOR: THE LADY OF OBSIDIAN
Okay, let’s start here: “The Lady of Obsidian” is an awkward title and “The Obsidian Lady” works much better. With that out of the way, we can discuss Andrew Smith’s story, the penultimate adventure featuring John Hurt as the War Doctor, and one that ties the series back to the past for the first time. It’s another solid entry in the range, though it mostly ignores its own potential and doesn’t accomplish anywhere near what it should.
It makes sense for Leela to be the first classic series character to appear in the War Doctor range: she has a long history on Gallifrey, especially if you’ve listened to the Gallifrey audio range, and her timeline is confused just enough to make her an ideal participant in a time war. She’s also the most openly violent companion: she’s more than willing to kill to gain an advantage, an instinct the Doctor tries to restrain throughout their travels. So how would this most warlike of companions react to meeting the War Doctor, the man who has so betrayed his morality that he won’t even call himself the Doctor? I don’t know either, because the story doesn’t explore the idea. Instead, we learn that a time weapon wounded Leela in a battle with the Daleks. Rather than removing her from history as intended, the weapon scrambled her mind, rendering her capable of seeing not only her true memories but also every possible memory arising from every single choice. She can remember staying on Gallifrey to marry Andred, but she can also remember remaining with the Sevateem and eventually becoming a mother. She remembers surviving countless battles and being killed in every single one. And so on – this is actually a very interesting idea, but unfortunately all Smith does with it is have Leela occasionally hold her head and moan about how confusing it all is. With the way she’s written and performed, it makes zero sense that she could lead an effective resistance group against the Daleks.
Of course, the other problem is that the story spends so much time with Leela under the influence of this injury that we barely get to see her actual personality. So while the Doctor recognizes her and wants to help her, she has no idea if he’s trustworthy or indeed even real. Instead of using her as a counterpoint to the War Doctor, instead of exploring (for example) how the war has changed her relative to how it has changed the Doctor, Smith presents Leela as a puzzle to be solved. As a result, we learn nothing about either character and instead spend more time with the action sequences. At the end of the story, Leela declares that she knows the Doctor is the same man, because he has the same eyes and the same soul. But this comes out of nowhere – before that, she’s barely coherent! Of course she thinks he’s a good guy, he just cured her!
Oh, there’s another monster introduced in this story – some sort of revenants from another, potential universe who are bleeding into our reality through a crack in time. They are feral, bestial distortions of humanity, consumed by a desire to rip apart everything they see. Also, they can capture and skillfully fly a Dalek scout ship. We eventually learn that they’re just trying to defend their own existence, which shouldn’t even be real – but again, rather than exploring this in any depth, the story just blows them up when they’re no longer convenient. Honestly, they’re an obvious plot device from the start: we need a good excuse for why the Daleks don’t just pursue the Doctor straight into the nebula, so here’s a random alien menace that will do it for them.
It’s a shame, because John Hurt and Louise Jameson play well off one another. We also get to see Ollistra evolving as a character, becoming more heroic in spite of herself due to her time with the Doctor. But if that’s going to go anywhere interesting, there’s only one more story left to do it. Overall, “The Lady of Obsidian” is good enough at what it does, but disappointing in what it doesn’t even try.
6/10
THE WAR DOCTOR: THE ENIGMA DIMENSION
Right off the bat, I have to say I’m surprised. It’s the final War Doctor story from Big Finish and it’s by Nicholas Briggs, so I was expecting his usual hard-bitten Dalek Empire reprisal and anticipating some appeals to nostalgia. I was shocked to discover none of those things – instead, it’s an attempt to do something different. It’s clunky, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
The biggest problem with the story is that the Enigma are basically nothing more than a plot device. The Daleks are desperate to find a way to win the Time War, so they leave this dimension entirely and journey to a different one in search of an advantage. Once there, they find a race to whom time has no meaning, and who have the ability to rewrite history at will. So the Daleks order them to rewrite history such that Gallifrey becomes a Dalek planet, and the Enigma start to do so because the Daleks take hostages. It makes sense when written down, but it’s not very dramatic: the Daleks found a race of beings that can rewrite all of history on a whim? Well that’s convenient! The moral dilemma that it sets up also isn’t very relatable, as it depends on the decision-making of those very same aliens that we know nothing about. Yes, they’re troubled by the Doctor’s sadness, but without a good sense of their needs or desires it’s impossible to expect anything. And while that does introduce an element of surprise, good drama should arise naturally from the characters’ decision-making.
Fortunately, Briggs does a much better job with the regular characters. The War Doctor in particular has the opportunity to affect the outcome of the war, and his decision is unsurprising yet very dramatically effective: he wants to wipe out both the Daleks and the Time Lords. This of course ties together with “The Day of the Doctor,” but it also feels like a natural progression for this character based on what we’ve seen over the four box sets. It also undercuts his relationship with Ollistra: they’ve become steadily closer as this set has unfolded, but this decision demonstrates that their closeness has been artificial and born of necessity. And I like what he does with Ollistra – she’s softening and starting to see things from the Doctor’s perspective, so for the Doctor to essentially dismiss her is powerful.
Leela, however, is still a problem. After spending most of the last story with her mind addled by a time weapon, she spends most of this one as the vessel through which the Enigma communicates. As a result, we spend two hours with the character and barely get to see her as herself. Leela’s part of the story is also thematically troublesome: at best, it’s patronizing; at worst, it’s colonialist. While it’s true that the fourth Doctor would playfully refer to Leela as “savage,” here Briggs embraces some sort of ridiculous notion that Leela’s savage brain is unsullied by negative emotions and immoral thoughts and thus ideal to support the Enigma. Leaving aside the fact that this blatantly contradicts what we saw of the Sevateem in “The Face of Evil,” it also ignores the fact that Leela has spent countless years living on Gallifrey along with even more years among a myriad of alien civilizations. So the only possible explanation is that her “savage” origin means her brain is physically different – and that’s the thought process that has been used to justify all sorts of horrifically racist behavior through history. I’m not saying that Briggs thinks that way, of course, but this “noble savage” stuff crops up in Big Finish from time to time even though it’s been decades since most writers retired that way of thinking.
Perhaps I’m grading on a curve, but overall, “The Enigma Dimension” is pretty good. It shows ambition beyond simple nostalgia and showcases some imaginative concepts while developing the principal character in interesting ways. The obvious flaws in its thinking keep it from reaching any great heights, but given what I was expecting, I was pleasantly surprised. I should also point out that the technical aspects of the entire box set have been first rate, with Briggs himself directing all three stories and Howard Carter providing the music and sound design. It’s a shame that “not bad” is such a high standard for this series, but it’s too late to change that now.
7/10
It’s amazing as Doctor Who fans that we got to experience John Hurt playing a previously unknown incarnation of our favorite character. And while it was even more amazing that he was willing to reprise the role on audio, it was sadly unfortunate that his failing health was the impetus for his participation. So we’re left with twelve War Doctor stories beyond what we saw on television, and it pains me to describe the range as a massive missed opportunity. While Hurt himself was excellent throughout – as one would expect from one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation – the stories too often resorted to obvious, boring war movie clichés, often taking the most unimaginative options available and never truly exploring what a Time War could be. There were a couple of enjoyable exceptions, but the lesson learned should be that of Russell T. Davies, who never dramatized the Time War because he knew there would be no way to do it justice on screen. So while it was great that Big Finish secured the participation of one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, perhaps they should have heeded the advice of one of the most acclaimed dramatists of his generation instead. Is it better to have any new Doctor Who starring John Hurt instead of none at all? I suppose so, but in the end, this was a chance to tell new, exciting stories that broke through the boundaries – and instead they’re just average Doctor Who stories with a slightly different design. This isn’t what I want out of drama, in other words, and to say that about something with such potential is a crushing disappointment – which is an apt description for the range as a whole.