The Destiny of the Doctor “advanced audiobooks” roll on with Doctors 4, 5 and 6. While none are bad the Fourth and Sixth Doctors are pretty dull but I will praise the Fifth Doctor story, “Smoke and Mirrors”, as it’s a great little story and well worth the little money these stories go for individually nowadays. Anyway, let’s see how the Eleventh Doctor cameos in these three stories then!
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I was unsure how to cover these stories as one review for all 11 would be far too long and individually would eat up far too many days of the this already lengthy catch up marathon so I compromised in the middle (and therefore had to make a new template for them…) Basically these are Companion Chronicles, one hour audiobooks read by a companion with one extra actor performing a new guest role, with one for each Doctor up to 11 (a.k.a. all of them at the time it was written) but with a linking thread through all the stories of the Eleventh Doctor communicating with his past selves in various ways due to something happening in the final part. It was a fun idea and gave me an extra story to listen to each month leading up to the 50th but ten years later and listening to them in closer proximity is quite a different experience… Let’s take a look! (at the first three…)
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We hit our first offical 50th anniversary story of this catch-up marathon (remembering that Day of the Doctor has already been reviewed…) as well as our first non-comic review and it’s Big Finish’s well advertised multi-Doctor story “The Light at the End”, the story that made me lose a lot of respect for Nick Briggs after he showed no interest in writing the multi-Doctor story until Tom Baker wanted to be in it, then he claimed the story had “his name written all over it”, and boy-oh-boy, it does have his name all over it, but not in a good way, more in a “this clearly didn’t get checked over by anyone else because he’s in charge” way. It has its moments, mostly Paul McGann and Tom Baker making a fun duo, but thank goodness the TV series delivered a fun multi-Doctor story for the 50th instead… Let’s take a closer look, anyway…
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So as to not spam two Doctor Who reviews in one day let’s take a look at the last (until next year…) entry of the Once and Future storyline before my daily Multi-Doctor story marathon kicks off tomorrow. Thankfully “The Union” was a really enjoyable story with some fun cameos and twists, to the point where I can’t help but think adding on a second hour with similar themes to the other Once and Future releases leading into this and just releasing it stand-alone would’ve been much better than the mostly weak monthly releases we’ve had, but ah well… let’s take a look!
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A seven-part full cast audio drama set during Season 7?! The crew at Big Finish would have to work pretty hard for me not to like this one and thankfully they delivered a really good story regardless. Fits the criterial of being entirely Earth based and having a cast of mainly human characters or human-looking characters even though budget obviously isn’t an issue here plus threw in plenty of fun twists and turns. Let’s take a deeper look!
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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!
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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…
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If I were to give a one sentence review for “Resistor” it would be that it’s a simple two-part story that’s just… fine. The main issue is coming right after “Pursuit of the Nightjar” which is an extremely tough job for any story, let alone one with such a comparatively short run time. Still, putting that aside and looking at it by itself, what’s it like? Let’s take a deeper look…
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What’s this? Reviewing a story in the month it was released?! I know, it’s been a while playing catch up… Anyway, “Pursuit of the Nightjar” is frankly a sleeper hit as I had no real excitement about this release but it blew me away with its writing, setting and over-arching plot, so let’s take a look!
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Big Finish continues with its bizarre slap-dash 60th 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…
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Hogan Reviews 