📝4/10

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

THE FOUR DOCTORS, or HOW MANY DOCTORS TO DEFEAT A DALEK?

The Four Doctors, the first performed multi-Doctor story with the Daleks as the main enemies, was originally an exclusive Big Finish subscriber release but has been freely available for everyone since October 2024.

THE HIGHLIGHTS:

• This is a multi-Doctor story with Five, Six, Seven, and Eight, but I like how it avoids the trope of the Doctor meeting his other incarnations (until the very end at least) and rather makes them all involved in the same adventure and the characters within it from different points in time and space.
• Colonel Ulrik makes for a fine supporting character, and David Bamber plays him well alongside all the incarnations of the Doctor. Michael Faraday is also performed well by Nigel Lambert, even if the character itself is pretty unnecessary.
• All performances are great, and the Doctors are all particularly good, but I find the way the four incarnations are used throughout the story slightly uneven.
• So the tail end of the story shows a clever thing where we return to a scene we've heard earlier from Eight’s point of view, but this time from Five’s perspective.

THE LOWLIGHTS:

• The Four Doctors opens confusingly, as it throws us straight into an adventure in such a way that it feels as if we’ve missed out on something. Who are these characters, why is the Fifth Doctor here, and where do the Daleks suddenly come from?
• There’s a lot of Dalek action, some techno-babble, fighting, and explosions, but that doesn’t make for a very coherent story. There’s even a trip back to the 1800s where we meet Michael Faraday, but it’s just there and doesn’t feel warranted at all.
• The Daleks are very tiresome in this. Dalek Prime is a boring villain, and there’s a Special Weapons Dalek that is given nothing to do.
• A lot going on here, yet somehow things don’t gel together at all, so this ends up being a disjointed adventure that wants to have a celebratory feel to it.
• The techno-babble here drags down the story. While it sounds convincing, especially when spouted by Colin Baker, it’s just too heavy to make for an interesting narrative.