A neat time loop story. I loved how they took the multi-doctor concept and changed it up, a character bouncing between timelines. And that last scene was awesome!

📝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.

Eh, it's fine. The writing is okay, if unexceptional, but it gets the job done.
Now, I have to be honest, I thought it was 'made' as an anniversary release, and not simply given away for free to commemorate 25 years of Doctor Who at Big Finish, so throughout the listening experience I was looking for the story to celebrate the eras of the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th Doctors, only after finishing it did I realize that it was not meant to do that, and as such it doesn't do that.
So, looking at it as simply a story, the setting and worldbuilding of this new race whose entire trajectory of evolution was altered, by the Daleks and the event of the story itself, despite how interesting that may sound, ultimately I think it was built up pretty uninterestingly. Like one would expect from any mediocre Main Range story at the time of release.
The Characters are fine, but almost wholly unexplored, and arc-wise, there's one interesting thing which happens in the entire story.
All-together, it is the usual fare for a 6/10 Main Range release at the time, to a tee, but it just so happens to have 4 Doctors in it, rather than 1. Though the plot is contingent upon there being several Doctors, I still feel like the stakes and implications of the story itself would've been solvable by one Doctor, were they not trying to make a release with 4 Doctor in it. In other words, it doesn't feel big enough to need 4 Doctors.

6/10