Hogan Reviews

The first of two Once & Future releases this month (Yes, oddly Big Finish aren’t releasing one in the anniversary month itself…) “Time Lord Immemorial” is quite the muddled mix of things, which I know is a valid description of all the previous Once & Future stories but this time it REALLY is. The previous Tenth Doctor one was hastily crammed into the existing storyline and just about worked but now this was hastily crammed in between the previously hastily crammed one and the long-established end point and it really shows, and what’s even weirder is the plot if far more high-stakes then the overarching storyline yet its treated as a bump in the road. Well, enough rambling, let’s take a look!

The story starts with The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) working his TARDIS trying to look for “The Union”, the only clue he received in the previous story, and for the first time there is zero incarnation changing, anywhere in the story. In fact The Doctor doesn’t even mention he’s in an unfamiliar body until much later, and at the end of the story not a single other Doctor voice in heard… There is however another Doctor in the story, that being the Unbound Doctor (David Warner), the Doctor from an alternate universe that crossed over to our one during the Bernice Summerfield stories, who turns up in The Doctor’s TARDIS suddenly. The two are quick to find out that they’re not the same Doctor and bicker about changing TARDIS interiors until a being made of sand appears and gives a ghostly warning about the “Sands of Time”. The Doctors decide to follow its trail…

Nice cover, though the sand creatures look more comical than threatening…

Meanwhile on a beach Liz Chenka (Nicola Walker) is relaxing next to a lady who soon reveals herself to be The Lumiat (Gina McKee), for those not following the Missy boxsets The Lumiat is the version of The Master in between Missy and the Sacha Dhawan incarnation who was almost entirely good unlike her past and future selves. Together they’re attacked and absorbed by the same sand creatures that invaded the TARDIS. Speaking of which it arrives in the grand hall of the “Time Lord Immemorial” a mythical place said to be at the centre of the multiverse and contains an all-powerful God-like Time Lord. Liv and the Lumiat arrive via the sand people a few seconds later and then they’re separated, The Doctor and The Lumiat are taken to a hallway where their lives are shown in a series of murals (and where The Doctor finds out who she is and refuses to believe she can be a Master incarnation) whereas the Unbound Doctor and Liv are sent out into the void (while protected) to see that all the various timelines and universes are starting to collapse into each other…

The story is massive in scope but amounts to some characters chatting with no real enemies to face and a very Moffat-like nursery rhyme prophecy that literally amounts to “these characters will arrive here and save the place” and sure enough! It certainly felt like it was written in a rush, and given they’ve said that the Once and Future storyline was done and written and they added Tennant and Eccleston later when they became available that was obviously the case here.

The Continuity:

The Special Edition cover, as per usual not much to say!

The Unbound Doctor first appeared in the old “Doctor Who Unbound” series of What If? Doctors (specifically “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Masters of War”) before becoming a regular member of the Bernice Summerfield range until Mr. Warner’s passing earlier in the year (and boy, you can tell he’s not quite with it during this story, sadly). The Lumiat on the other hand first appeared in Missy: The Lumiat, unsurprisingly. She also appeared in the multi-Master story “Masterful”, which is where I first became aware of her.

That’s it really (beyond being part of the Once and Future storyline, obviously) but I will mention a multiversal nexus point with a central figure controlling it was the core storyline of the Eighth Doctor comic “The Glorious Dead”, though the central figure wasn’t a Time Lord, and certainly didn’t end up being one…

Overall Thoughts:

“Time Lord Immemorial” takes a story about the multiverse collapsing and turns it into a story about people chatting while an extremely on-the-nose nursery rhyme fills them in on the details of what to do. It doesn’t move the Once and Future story on either, which frankly isn’t much compared to the END OF THE MULTIVERSE but hey-ho, I guess The Doctor’s regeneration/degeneration getting stabilized is still pretty important…?

Not actually much to say here. The two pairs reappear together in the hall and discuss both the end of the multiverse and how The Doctor and The Master are fated to be here. They say the nursery rhyme and realise that it was a literal description of them right now so all join hands and summon the Time Lord Immemorial and it fills The Doctor in on how the Sands of Time were stolen which is why this whole thing is happening, leading to The Doctor to realise those sands were used in the weapon that degenerated him. He then asks it to fix the multiverse, and it … does. Simple enough.

The Lumiat drops Liv off before trying to resist degenerating back into her evil selves while the Unbound Doctor reappears back in his TARDIS and calls for Bernice. This leaves The Doctor to remember that the Lumiat told him that “The Union” wasn’t a place but a person, just as a distress call comes in from Susan and he starts to degenerate himself…