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!

This month’s Once and Future is the first to feature a future incarnation of The Doctor from what I still believe is the Eighth Doctor’s perspective as David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor makes an appearance (or is it the Fourteenth?! … Right, Big Finish don’t have the license…) While you can tell how this was written after the Once and Future strand had already been planned out, as admitted by the writing team themselves, it ends up being one of the better stories, once again having a very self-contained plot full of randomly thrown in characters but at least this time the story was good fun! So let’s take a look…

Big Finish continues with its bizarre slap-dash 60^th Anniversary “Once and Future” series with the most random line up of them all. How about jamming the Sixth Doctor, an older Harry Sullivan, Jackie Tyler and Lady Christina (you know, from that one Tenth Doctor TV story…) plus an earlier incarnation of The Eleven in The Two all together? Bloody hell… does it work? Not really, but it could’ve been far worse let’s put it that way…

The next Once and Future story, “A Genius for War”, is sadly the most generic of them all so far, though at least it’s a good example of a pretty standard Time War story only with the Seventh Doctor in it, but that’s about the only thing that’s different here. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Davros story as much as the next guy, but it’s safe to say that this one doesn’t feel like any kind of anniversary special at all and I’m beginning to long for the days of overly-crammed multi-Doctor releases… Still, let’s take a look, shall we?

Big Finish’s 60^th Anniversary series reaches part two with Once and Future: The Artist at the End of Time. In case you didn’t catch part 1, the story focuses on The Doctor (most likely his Eighth self, but possibly the War Doctor) “degenerating” into past bodies due to the effects of an unknown weapon, and that’s why this story starring Peter Davison is technically not a Fifth Doctor story. Most importantly though: is it a good story? Well, it’s more focused than the first at least, though at times it feels more like Colin Baker’s episode than Davison’s!