Hogan Reviews

Where to start with “The Sirens of Time”? It was the first full cast Doctor Who audio Big Finish produced (not including the Bernice Summerfield spin-offs anyway) and as such the audio quality, script and small-part actors are all of lower quality that what you got even one year later honestly, it didn’t take long for them to get a better handle of things but this first release is rough. That being said the set up isn’t bad, in fact its one we’ve seen many times in this multi-Doctor marathon in that the first three parts are for one Doctor each then they all come together for the fourth, though there is a weird anti-Fifth Doctor thread across the story… Anyway, let’s take a look!

The overarching plot of the first three episodes is that Gallifrey is under attack by a race called the Knights of Velyshaa while at the same time a web-of-time-threatening time distortion seems to be centred on The Doctor. The Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) then takes centre stage as he arrives on a planet after the Cloister Bell goes off mid-flight and finds a young girl called Elenya (Sarah Mowat) stuck in quicksand. While this is going on we’re introduced to a man named Sancroff (Colin McIntyre) who is a prisoner in the house of a woman called Ruthley (Maggie Stables in a pre-Evelyn appearance!) and wishes to escape while the woman in question is in contact with several ships in orbit. As The Doctor and Elenya walk across the swampy lands ships keep plummeting down to the surface of the planet and then eventually they’re knocked out cold by a race called the Drudgers, who apparently keep Sancroff here. When they wake they’re in Ruthley’s house and Sancroff sees various assassins walking out of the wreckages and attacking the Drudgers and assumes his host has finally gotten tired of looking after him. The Doctor, Elenya and Sancroff escape up further in the house and see on a monitor that the assassins kill Ruthley as there “can be no witnesses” and then converge on our trio. Sancroff admits he’s the first Knight of Velyshaa and takes his death like a man, but the assassins once again claim there can be no witnesses so point their guns at The Doctor and Elenya.

Part 2 focuses in on the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) as he arrives on a merchant ship out at sea and is immediately locked out of his TARDIS before even his companions could exit. There he meets a lady named Helen (Sarah Mowat…) who wonders if he’s a German spy just as a German U-Boat opens fire and sinks the ship, later dragging The Doctor and Helen on board and throwing them in a cell. While U-Boat Captain Walther Schwieger (Mark Gatiss, making an early Who appearance!) worries about approaching British destroyers The Doctor becomes more worried about his and Helen’s cellmate Schmidt (Andrew Fettes) as he tries to choke him while clearly not being himself. The Doctor quickly figures out that the Time Lords possessed him and are trying to kill him but he can’t think of the reason why but we see Coordinator Vansell (Anthony Keetch) back on Gallifrey claiming the situation gives them no choice but the nameless Time Lord President (Michael Wade) isn’t so sure. After a few more attempts Schmidt manages to shoot The Doctor in the shoulder but Helen has gets the gun from him, shoots him and then starts pointing it around the ship as the Captain and co. arrive, giving The Doctor enough time to get on board a nearby ship and sail to where the TARDIS is and swim for it, but he still can’t get in…

The original cover… which is pretty much the new cover just with a black bar at the bottom. I wanted to find a copy of the cassette cover given it didn’t take long for the audios to drop that media as an option but couldn’t find it (I assume it was just this but vertically longer…)

Part 3 is Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor’s turn and sees his TARDIS get hit by a strange temporal anomaly that causes him to suddenly materialise on a starcruiser that is viewing the “Kurgon Wonder” as a potential tourist spot, but when The Doctor gets the android pilot to get a closer look, worried that is TARDIS might be stuck within it, a massive time distortion wave rocks the ship and turns every organic lifeform on board to dust save The Doctor and a girl called Ellie (Sarah Mowat…) who our main protagonist has a funny feeling he’s met before and an even funnier feeling there is more to her than it seems given she survived the blast. After fighting off super-evolved bacteria The Doctor hears a voice in his head asking for help followed by seeing a creature on board just as the ship’s hull begins to fall apart. The Knights of Velyshaa successfully invade Gallifrey and shoot The President and Vansell dead, with the latter trying to send out a physic message to The Doctor to “not free the Temperon” just as The Doctor is saved from his fate by the very same time-sensitive creature that he had just freed…

That leads into the final actual multi-Doctor part of the story, which I’ll get to in the Spoiler section. It’s not bad, the Sixth Doctor part is probably the strongest though it’s mostly a quick run-around, but again the early-days wobbly script, direction, acting and audio equipment does bring everything down a peg or two…

The Continuity:

The new cover! … Which like I said is pretty much the same. Still, breaks up the text a bit…

Surprisingly little, actually. The Sirens of Time return to celebrate Big Finish’s anniversary in the final part of the anthology “The Legacy of Time”. Coordinator Vansell reappears in quick a few early Big Finish releases, making his final appearance in the Eighth Doctor story “Neverland”.

Overall Thoughts:

“The Sirens of Time” must have been so exciting back in 1999, three Doctors reprising their roles in a full cast multi-Doctor story. Hell, when I finally got to listen to it I was still excited and really enjoyed it. Now in 2023 however it’s a bit harder to listen to. Everything is just that little bit off which I can’t be too hard on it given it was their first production and if I remember rightly it wasn’t a smooth launch either. While some of the Doctor-Doctor interaction was fun I can’t say I’ll ever really feel like listening to it again…

As it turns out all three Doctors were swallowed by the Temperon in their moments of peril and deposited in the same room on Gallifrey and after a quick back and forth and some mental “contacting” they quickly hide as some Knights of Velshaa arrive, and wouldn’t know it the head of their group is a called Lyena and it’s the same woman again (so Sarah Mowat!). They’re soon discovered and escape down a hatch but have to split up when the Fifth Doctor injures his leg on the way down. The Sixth and Seventh Doctors mull around a bit and find the captured Temperon who repeats a message to look out for the “Sirens of Time” while the Fifth Doctor is captured by Lyena, though she repairs his leg and acts all friendly, even gathers the other Doctors for a chat. She claims her race is dying from disease (something Doctors 6 and 7 can attest to after seeing a Knight out of his armour) and that The Doctor had changed history when the Fifth Doctor intervened as the ship he stole was the Lusitania and it was supposed to be destroyed by the U-Boat (thus the temporal damage and why the Time Lords tried to stop him) but also explained how it helped the Velshaa cause. She then gives the Doctors access to a Type-70 TARDIS and tells them to undo their mistake.

The Doctors find that the TARDIS is broken however so come up with a new plan where they free the Temperon and ride it back instead. This thought turns Lyena mad and she demands their capture, which of course ends up being the Fifth Doctor, who is strapped to a life-sapping machine and tortured (seriously, why was 1999 Nicholas Briggs so against Peter Davison’s Doctor?) Doctors 6 and 7 meanwhile make a break for the Temperon and it explains that Lyena and the other three women the Doctors met are all one gestalt entity known as the Sirens of Time and that they feed off paradoxical energy, thus why she steered the Doctors into committing changes to the past. The Temperon begs to be let free even though in stopping the Sirens it will experience a horrible fate itself so the Doctors hesitate until the Sixth Doctor explains that while they’re all the same person their personalities differ and he’s the only Doctor willing to go to these extremes and frees the creature, which then not only stops the Sirens but in doing so stops its interference so the Knights of Velshaa never get a second empire where they invade Gallifrey so everything returns to normal. The three Doctors reappear on the original planet with the Seventh Doctor’s TARDIS and he offers to drop them off at their right points in time while the Fifth Doctor intimates he’s less than pleased with his immediate successor’s actions.