London. The end of November, 1963. A time of change. The old guard are being swept away by the white heat of technology. Political scandals are the talk of the town. Britain tries to maintain its international role; fanatics assassinate charismatic politicians and Group Captain Ian Gilmore is trying to get his fledgling Counter-Measures unit off the ground.
When his life is saved by a familiar umbrella bearing figure, he knows something terrible is going on. Whilst Rachel investigates an enigmatic millionaire and Allison goes undercover in an extremist organisation, Gilmore discovers a sinister plot with roots a century old.
The Doctor and Ace are back in town. A new dawn is coming. It’s time for everyone… to see the Light.
THE LIGHT AT THE END
2013 marked the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and an unprecedented amount of Doctor Who-related material was brought forth to commemorate the occasion. Big Finish got in on the act in a big way, producing multiple anniversary-themed plays, but their landmark release was “The Light at the End,” a two-hour epic from writer-director Nicholas Briggs that brings all eight classic series Doctors together with multiple companions to battle the Master across time and space. Long-time readers of my reviews will know that the combination of “Big Finish” and “epic” fills me with dread, and unfortunately “The Light at the End” does nothing to defy this trend as any nostalgic warmth it generates is overcome by its cluttered, nonsensical script.
Big Finish has always tried to resist the siren call of the multi-Doctor story. They led the range off with one, of course, but other than part four of “The Sirens of Time,” every story of theirs to feature multiple Doctors has pointedly avoided teaming them up. “Zagreus” is the best example, including countless Doctor and companion actors but casting them in different roles. But with the 50th anniversary nigh, they finally decided to bite the bullet and release a “traditional” multi-Doctor tale. With the television series apparently avoiding this path, this decision delighted fans – but was it really a good idea? I hated almost every minute of “Zagreus,” but not because it wasn’t a “true” multi-Doctor story – I hated it because the script was insulting to the intelligence. Terrance Dicks got away with it in “The Five Doctors” because he only had four Doctors to work with and split the story up into a quest narrative, giving each Doctor a companion and a mini-adventure to share. Here, Briggs has to figure out how to incorporate eight Doctors, five of whom have to share the majority of the story – and the result is far, far too cluttered.
I know the standard response to that complaint is “How can you complain about a multi-Doctor story being cluttered?” as though a multi-Doctor story automatically justifies its own existence. But in terms of audio Doctor Who, why is a multi-Doctor story a big deal? This isn’t 1983, when we hadn’t seen any of the first three Doctors on television in a decade and their mere presence was enough to tickle the nostalgic genes. Even “The Day of the Doctor,” which features the return of Matt Smith’s immediate predecessor, is still almost four years on from David Tennant’s era. But “The Light at the End” features five actors who regularly perform as the Doctor for Big Finish. The story was released literally days apart from the release of “1963: The Space Race,” a brand new story featuring Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor. So to hear, for example, Sylvester McCoy performing with Sophie Aldred doesn’t generate any nostalgia – we hear that several times a year as it is!
That leaves pairing up the Doctors as the way for “The Light at the End” to set itself apart, and Briggs doesn’t hold back in this department. Tom Baker and Paul McGann spend the majority of the story together, and it’s fascinating to hear them perform together – especially Baker, who’s never appeared in character alongside his fellow Doctors. It’s true that Big Finish could do this every month with some careful editing, but the fact remains that they haven’t, and so it has the potential to be quite rewarding – and then you remember that Nick Briggs wrote the script. I’m not trying to be uncharitable, but after two series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, it was clear that Briggs was the author least capable of capturing Tom Baker on the page, and so here Baker’s lines are thoroughly flat and unmemorable. His scenes with McGann should be sparking with energy: these are two of the most energetic performers to take the role, and yet they’re reduced to subdued, businesslike conversations with each other about the plot. For every great line about Jules Verne, there are a hundred submerged in technobabble. The same holds true for when Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy are paired up: Baker on his own is probably the best thing about the story, but put him in the room with other Doctors and it’s as though the life drains out of his performances. I understand that Briggs wanted to avoid reducing every relationship to bickering, and it’s interesting to hear the various Doctors cooperating willingly to solve a problem, but there’s a surprising lack of joy on display for a celebratory story.
My biggest fear about the story was Briggs allowing it to devolve into an incomprehensible mess of technobabble, and unfortunately that’s exactly what happened. When writing smaller-scale stories he’s good at coming up with solid central ideas; when writing self-conscious epics, he never makes his universe-spanning threats relatable. (Except of course in the Dalek Empire series, and I still don’t know how that came from the same guy.) The threat, as far as I can gather, is the Master introducing an impossibility bomb that will remove the Doctor’s TARDIS from history, thus preventing the Doctor from ever leaving Gallifrey and thus eliminating his influence from the history of the universe. The Dalek invasion of Earth will never be stopped, the Sensorites will die of poisoning, etc. Threats like this are necessarily abstract and don’t impact the drama; Gary Russell tried to avoid the problem in “He Jests at Scars…” by showing the Valeyard rampaging through history and undoing the Doctor’s influence, but that didn’t work either. And I understand the clear parallel with the anniversary: why not involve the Doctor’s history? Steven Moffat just did something similar with “The Name of the Doctor.” But where Moffat made his story about the characters, Briggs makes his about the plot, and it’s sadly uninvolving. Of course, Briggs throws in his usual emotional identification character in Bob Dovie (John Dorney), but he’s barely in the story and his emotional moments are terribly forced. Even the Master acknowledges that slaughtering Dovie’s family was a largely pointless gesture. It’s acted well, and it’s suitably creepy at the time, but in retrospect there’s not much depth there – or, indeed, in the rest of the story. This isn’t unavoidable, either. No, “The Five Doctors” isn’t a masterpiece of theme and metaphor – it’s a Terrance Dicks story, after all – but there’s a solid, strong plot running through it. “The Three Doctors” educates us on the history of Gallifrey. But “The Light at the End” is just another goofy scheme by the Master.
A few other items of note: first, the issue of recasting. As Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee are all no longer with us, the story presents William Russell, Frazer Hines, and Tim Treloar in the roles of the first, second, and third Doctors. Their voices are run through static filters to obscure the impressions, but the fact remains that Russell’s impression isn’t very good outside of stories he’s narrating and Treloar might as well be playing the Brigadier or Liz Shaw for as far off the mark as his impression lands. As these Doctors are kept in the background, the story just about gets away with it, but it’s difficult to tell what’s going on when they’re all appearing together and alternating lines. Second, the theme – it sounds like Jamie Robertson remixing his own theme from “The Silver Turk” trilogy and adding a bunch of extra sound effects. Given how fantastic that theme was to begin with, why change it? Now it sounds overcrowded and incomprehensible – unless the plan was to mirror the script, in which case well done!
I’m not even a big fan of the production. While Robertson’s sound design is largely convincing, and his music is excellent, there’s a serious problem with the use of sound to tell the story, especially in the first episode. I’m tempted to put it down to the script, because there are far too many scenes in which someone cries something like “Look out, Doctor!” immediately before an ear-shattering, crashing explosion blasts from the speakers. Explosions aren’t descriptive, and so I repeatedly found myself wondering what on earth I was listening to, only to find out later that it was apparently Eiffel Tower-sized robots gouging massive trenches through a jungle. The performances are great, though – it’s clear that all are comfortable working with Briggs as director.
Overall, “The Light at the End” is not a success. It retains substantial entertainment value purely through its extensive use of its lead actors, but it features a jumbled plot, nonexistent characterization, and no significance beyond the obvious. It’s nowhere near as bad as “Zagreus,” but when compared to other multi-Doctor or anniversary tales, it falls well short. Is it worth hearing? Perhaps, but certainly not at the inflated prices of the limited editions.
A sad, but thoroughly expected, disappointment.
4/10
Dude, your Light at the End review — which I completely agree with — is rendering on your Assassination Games page.