Here we go then, Big Finish’s contribution to the 60th Anniversary celebrations is a series of audios where the Eighth Doctor (seemingly) “degenerates” into his past selves and has to go searching for a way to stop the phenomena while wearing his old faces. It’s an interesting idea though it does put my ordering of the stories completely out of whack. Do I count this as a Fourth Doctor story because the Doctor is played by and apparently looks like Tom Baker? Do I put all the stories in the Eighth Doctor page? What about the fact that we know Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant are also in the series? I have no idea, that’s why I’ve made this thumbnail template using the 60th Anniversary logo… Well, either way: let’s have a look at Past Lives and hope future entries aren’t this over-packed and muddled!
The opening scene sees The Doctor taken to a medical tent at some point during the Time War and begin to degenerate, with the voices of the Seventh Doctor back through to the First (obviously 1, 2 and 3 being played by their Big Finish recasts!) before going forward up through to the Doctor’s Fourth self (Tom Baker) where he “settles” and claims to think that he must find The Monk (Rufus Hound) because he knows he had something to do with his odd condition. He finds The Monk in 20th Century Scotland then chases after him to 22nd Century Hong Kong before losing track briefly. During this time The Monk meets a man named Mr. Mallory (Ewan Bailey) who instructs him to make good on his deal, which then apparently includes kidnapping Sarah Jane (Sadie Miller) right after she was accidentally dropped off in Aberdeen by The Doctor (but before she realises this fact, to keep the Tenth Doctor’s reaction to the news he dropped her off at the wrong place intact)
Did I mention the Hyreth were alligator aliens? *looks down below* … No, I didn’t. Well, they are. Enjoy the rest of the review!
As if this wasn’t enough continuity for you the next destination of The Monk and Sarah is UNIT’s Black Archive and while they’re running around in there Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) and Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) are above dealing with a stealth ship hanging above Glastonbury. The Doctor arrives has a quick chat with the duo and then the three of them head down to the archive where they meet The Monk and Sarah and find out that the Monk is searching for an object called the Magna Gral on behalf of its creators the Hyreth, who have planted “nanobombs” in him to force his cooperation and as they’re a race that the Doctor and Sarah defeated in the (currently unrecorded) past he kidnapped Sarah because he doesn’t know what the device looks like. *sigh*!
As you can tell it’s continuity overload! I like a good bit of “fanwank” but this is going more than a little too far. It’s also weird hearing The Fourth Doctor but it not being him, he knows of Kate Stewart already for instance, so any fun first time interaction there is gone. He treats Sarah like a companion long gone in his past, which again makes sense but means we don’t get any fun Fourth/Sarah interaction. Overall it was something of a mess, which I hope isn’t an indication of what’s to come in the other parts…
The Continuity:
Not as much as you may think, given how full of returning characters it is. As mentioned Sarah Jane is literally seconds after being dropped off in “The Hand of Fear”, complete with Sadie Miller recreating her mother’s own lines from the end of the story. She mentions being stranded by The Doctor in the wrong place when they meet back up in the Tenth Doctor TV story “School Reunion”, which is kept pretty much intact during this story, but it was a close call! The Black Archive was introduced fittingly in the 50th Anniversary story “The Day of the Doctor”, and this is set a bit before that from Kate and Osgood’s perspective.
Interestingly we do find out later than the Rufus Hound incarnation of The Monk is the one that survives the Time War as Missy finds him hiding via a chameleon circuit in the story “Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated”, meaning he almost certainly was involved with whatever has caused the degeneration but just doesn’t know it yet! (or was lying, obviously…) Finally this isn’t the first time The Doctor has degenerated into past incarnations as the Fourth Doctor comic strip “Timeslip” showed just that.
Overall Thoughts:
The Special Edition cover sadly doesn’t look as interesting, and certainly doesn’t let potential buyers know of the insanity contained in this story!
I really wanted to like Past Lives, as I’ve said I do like a bit of nonsense fanwank, but this was just too much to pack into a one hour story. Hopefully with everything established and maybe one or two less cameos the rest of the series will be more enjoyable, but for now Part 1 gets a disappointingly average score.
The Monk manages to make off with the Magna Gral and arrives on the stealth ship (that’s actually the Hyreth ship) and we find out that Mr. Mallory is actually a Hyreth called Galavaunt and he plans to use the Gral to revive the rest of his kind who have been sleeping all this time due to the Doctor’s actions. The Doctor, Sarah, Kate and Osgood manage to track the Monk due to some old tech Osgood had kept from when the Third Doctor was exiled (which includes a scene in Osgood’s house that sees Sarah look as a “poster” of all The Doctor’s faces that they know of at this point, which sort of screws up her reactions during the previously mentioned return in the Tenth Doctor era, but at the same time it’s a quick look on a poster and then many years later, so it’s not exactly hard to think she can’t remember exact faces after all that time), this leads to the final confrontation.
Sadly that confrontation isn’t up to much and in fact The Doctor allows them to use the Magna Gral because it had the Hyreth sleep but didn’t stop them from aging, so Galavaunt just watches his whole race age to death and then surrenders to UNIT without incident. Sadly for The Doctor this Monk is pre-Time War so he has no idea what he’s going on about but suggests to stave off the effects by finding his generic clone daughter and use her DNA. The Doctor thanks him for the tip (even if he’s a little confused at the news!), tells him to drop Sarah off where he got her from and then heads into the TARDIS regenerating again, presumably forward into the Fifth self…
Hogan Reviews 