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Released:
March 1995
Story
Summary (BIG SPOILERS!):
The Time Lords have sent the Sixth Doctor on a mission,
but that’s the last thing he feels like doing right now. In the wake of his
recent trial and the sudden loss of his friend Peri, the Doctor secludes
himself amongst the shadows of the planet Torrok, mourning the loss of his
companion, and cursing the Time Lords for their treatment of him. He resolves
to change his ways, to never interfere with time ever again. However, an
unexpected meeting with a native girl called Angela will change his life again
for good...
Angela seeks to lose her loneliness and depression for
good by accompanying the Doctor on his future travels, much to his reluctance.
However, the Time Lords direct the TARDIS to a derelict spaceship closing on a
large TV Broadcasting Space Station, and the Doctor and Angela become
separated. As the Doctor hopelessly searches for the purpose of his mission
aboard the Space Station, he is swept and caught up in some of its various
horrifically violent, dangerous and tasteless Television programmes, at times
even forced to fight for his life. Meanwhile, an organic alien, but digital viral
intelligence kills Angela and sets about invading the TV Space Station with the
aim to absorb as much digital data as possible. The Doctor discovers that the
Space Station has two dimensionally transcendental sphere capsules, which are
being unethically manipulated to impose two combative TV programmes on the
environments of other planets. However the arrival of the alien virus has made
both of these capsules unstable, as well as murdering those who stand in the
way of its digital feast upon the station’s computer systems. Suddenly the chaos
rapidly spirals out of control with people dying in their hundreds and the
station simultaneously in danger of imploding and falling into the nearest Sun.
The Doctor manages to shut down the unstable Spheres and
sends what little survivors are left down to the planet Torrok, where they
unexpectedly find themselves having to fight the unruly and violent dropouts (known
as Watchers) of the local population. The Virus is finally tricked by the
Doctor into letting him escape and siphons part of itself into an Android in an
attempt to bond with the intelligence in his TARDIS. However, upon being
betrayed it fights with the Doctor to the death. The Android is successfully destroyed and the Doctor arrives upon Torrok to discover to his surprise that
the Space Station survivors have championed over and negotiated with the Watchers
to help start a more positive and proactive future for Torrok. The Doctor
himself finally accepts that he still needs to interfere after all to save
lives where it’s needed, and to help continue the fight against evil once more.
He takes on a friend he made at the Space Station, called Grant, to join him
and travel in the TARDIS. The future beckons...
Story
Placement
After The Trial of
a Time Lord (TV Serial) and Killing
Ground (Virgin Missing Adventure).
(Time of Your Life
indicates that it happens directly after the Doctor returns the future Mel back
to his future self, however whether any adventures occur between The Trial of a Time Lord and that action
is unknown at present.)
Favourite
Lines
The Doctor – “ This morning I was on a hermitage,
concerned about my increasing propensity towards violence. Tonight, for the
first time, I bludgeon a foe to death with the TARDIS hat stand. Things aren’t
getting any better”.
The Doctor – “Normal service will be resumed”.
Review:
When Colin Baker was unfairly, ignorantly, callously and
scandalously fired from Doctor Who on
BBC Television in 1986, it didn’t just leave a wound in the heath and stability
of the show (as did the recent large fallout between producer John
Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward, who promptly went AWOL soon
after), which had already been gradually in decline over the last few years;
but it also left a huge chasm in the fictional story of the programme itself.
Like nature it seems, Doctor Who fans
also abhor a vacuum, and imagined new adventures of their own for the 6th Doctor that occurred prior to the first TV appearance of the 7th Doctor in Time and the Rani, and have
continued to do so to the present day. However, some of these Who fans later became professional writers
themselves, for both books and Television, including the now recognisable and
famous names of Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat, Russell T. Davies,
Robert Shearman and Gareth Roberts. So when Virgin Publishing acquired a
licence to make original Doctor Who
fiction in the early 1990s, both for current and past Doctors, this large gap
in the fictional story of the 6th Doctor was one that many writers
leapt at the chance to write for. The first of these new books to explore it was
Time of Your Life by Steve Lyons.
Time
of Your Life tries to examine a Sixth Doctor directly
after the events of The Trial of a Time
Lord, and explores how he reacts to them, as well as the immediate after
effects they have upon his character in the short term. As we rarely get an
insight into the Doctor’s intimate thoughts and feelings, Time of Your Life presents us with a special opportunity not only
to get a sense of how he thinks, but also to delve deep into the character with
him, holding up his perceived flaws and mistakes to the light. However, the
book also presents a much appreciated opportunity to provide some real
character development payoff for the Sixth Doctor after The Trial of a Time Lord, so in that sense Time of Your Life really is a missing adventure, showing how the
character could come to terms with what came before, and slowly begin his
journey to a better and brighter future; a future which would bring out the
best of him, and the future that we never got to see on Television. However,
I’m getting ahead of myself, but suffice to say it wouldn’t be till Big Finish
came and really rejuvenated and renovated the Sixth Doctor many years later,
that audiences would really get to experience the best of him. Back to Time of Your Life though, Steve Lyons
neatly has the Sixth Doctor contextualising and reacting to his Television
adventures in the same way that he reacted to his regeneration trauma in The Twin Dilemma.
The Doctor’s reaction to the events of The Trial of a Time Lord, and perhaps in
a more general extent his actions and behaviour since The Twin Dilemma in retrospect, is a combination of regret, sadness
and quiet alarm. Sadness at the loss of of his friend Peri, regret for not
treating her as well as he should have done, and for not being as considerate
and aware of others as he should. Most of all though, the Doctor is still deep
down in shock at the truths revealed during his recent trial, the indirect consequences
of his actions and arrogant behaviour, the unnecessary deaths and suffering of
innocents and perhaps most of all, the thought that the continuation of this
path could at some point turn him into such a callous, unfeeling, bitter and
evil person such as the Valeyard. Over time, this shock has turned to anger –
angry with himself for not seeing the error of his ways sooner, anger at the
continued hypocrisy of the Time Lords who are still using and manipulating him
for their own ends, and anger at his own sheer helplessness. If he continues to
meddle in space/time events, then he fears he will be cementing his seemingly
inevitable future to become the Valeyard. However, if he does nothing, he still
has to watch others suffer anyway. Like in The
Twin Dilemma he has decided to become a loner and a hermit, only this time
he means it, and goes about it with much greater resolve and determination than
previously. On Torrok, the first planet the TARDIS takes him, the Doctor
separates himself from the ongoing events of his surroundings and hides away,
resisting the wishes of the Time Lords and cursing them for their continued
interference in his life.
This development in the Sixth Doctor’s character arc is
not only understandable and believable, but it also fits with everything we
know about the character up to now and his behaviour during his short
Television adventures. The Doctor isn’t just trying to prevent the becoming of
the Valeyard, he’s also trying to make peace with his own demons, and hopefully
try to mend his ways. It’s not very often, prior to Big Finish audios, and the
resurrection of Doctor Who on
Television in 2005 that we get to see such a naked insight into the Doctor’s
character and psyche, and the experience is both refreshing and fascinating for
the reader. Also in a cruel twist of fate written by Steve Lyons, it is perhaps
precisely the Doctor’s inaction during the first half of the story that allows
the disaster at the Meson Broadcasting Service Space Station to escalate to the
catastrophe and massacre that it does. However, that’s one of the main points
to Lyons’ story, as the Doctor needed to go through his ‘trial by fire’ in
order to come to his senses about who he really was deep down, and that he
still needs to be the hero when others are in desperate need and that he
shouldn’t stand by while there is great suffering and evil to be fought.
There also seems to be a sizeable metatextual element to Time of Your Life. The original
Television series in late 1986, was as I mentioned at the start of the review
in a very vulnerable state, and of course with the benefit of hindsight, we
know that by then the damage had already been done, and that in the eyes of
contemporary TV audiences and BBC executives, Doctor Who was living on borrowed time. Time of Your Life seems to be asking the Meta question of whether
the Doctor should still be part of the future cultural landscape, and more
importantly should Doctor Who
continue at all. Steve Lyons’ answer is a resounding yes, of course, but
interestingly with the fictional collapse of a huge Television company, maybe
isn’t necessarily saying it should have to be on Television. It’s hardly an
insightful statement for 1995, I know, given that the original Television show
had already been axed by 1989, and I could be reading too much into this, but
it’s interesting that by this point Doctor Who had come more to terms with its transition from BBC Television
programme to multimedia cultural franchise, arguably started by the blossoming
of the Target book range in the 1970s and 1980s; and while temporarily losing
its shelf life as a TV Show it had successfully established itself as a cultural work
of fiction with a near endless shelf life, just like the immortal fictional
franchises of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond; and Time of Your Life is perhaps another reiteration of the Doctor Who franchise and fandom’s final
acceptance of this.
However, the main metatextual element of Time of Your Life seems to be a critique
of Eric Saward’s script editorship of the Television show, or at least the
1984-1986 part of it. So while the Sixth Doctor is holding his own personal
character flaws to the light, Steve Lyons is doing the same with aspects of the
Eric Saward era of Doctor Who,
although his conclusions aren’t necessarily what you might expect. This brings
me onto my first big criticism of the book, in that I found it be quite
gratuitously violent and gruesome at times. Of course, any critique of the Eric
Saward period of Doctor Who is going
to mention violence at some point, but ironically I never found the
Saward-scripted episodes of Doctor Who
to be too violent, in fact being just the right side of what could be
appropriately broadcast for a mass audience, but Lyons deliberately evolves and
heightens this to an illogical extreme. So much so, that by the last third of
the book, Time of Your Life at times
feels like Doctor Who meets Saw, with Steve Lyons seeming to
particularly relish killing off a multitude of his characters in as many
horrible and gory deaths as possible, which would certainly give squeamish
readers, more than a tinge of nausea. So while the concept of Doctor Who turning into a slasher/gory
horror film may be a novel one, I would say it’s not really an agreeable one.
Another element of mid-1980s Doctor Who that features in the book is the Doctor being relegated
into the background along with the rest of the characters for the central part
of the story. While it gives the lesser characters a chance to have their
moment, Steve Lyons once again ramps this element to the extreme, badly
plotting his narrative so that for a lot of the second act, it slows down to a
very casual stroll, and the background characters are oddly made the main focus
of the book for a while, with sizeable chunks of padding where every
sub-character is explained to us and examined to the nth degree. While I
commend Steve Lyons for trying to develop all his characters, quite a few of
them are merely knowing references or satire to elements of the TV industry,
and really only deserve a couple of scenes at best, and offer nothing to the
reader afterwards beyond yet another opportunity for Lyons to create a nasty
death for them later on. I suppose it wouldn’t be so tiresome if 90% of the
characters in the story weren’t unlikeable, pretentious, criminal, narcissistic
or completely self-serving types, which again mostly end up as cannon fodder
for Lyons to play with in the final acts. While it’s an important part of the
Doctor’s character arc in the story to see the negative effects of his
reluctance to act, the plot of the second act should really have advanced
earlier than it did. So in summary, Steve Lyons doesn’t just examine Eric
Saward’s vision of Doctor Who and
acknowledge it as a legitimate direction for the Television show to take, but
seems to wholeheartedly endorse it, and even exaggerates its effects to suit
his own tastes, to the detriment of the storytelling itself. However, there are
other layers to Lyons’ story than just a reappraisal of Eric Saward.
The most important part of the narrative is of course the
central storyline itself. I love the idea of the Doctor retreating into a
silent rebellion against the Time Lords in order to take stock of not just the
tumultuous events of the character’s recent past, but also to try and work out
how to move on. It allows the unmissable opportunity for the wonderful
introspective character development Steve Lyons puts the Sixth Doctor through
during the story. However, it also allows for a very different kind of story,
one that tests the Doctor to his personal limits, both emotionally and morally.
The tragedy of Peri has made the Doctor become much more introspective and
closed to others, avoiding any personal connections or ties that he might then
endanger or hurt by association. However, his moral sensibilities are still as
sensitive as ever, so he can’t help but succumb to Angela’s persistent cries to
join him after claiming to be an abandoned and parentless youth, desperate for
companionship and escape from her miserable existence on Torrok. However, Lyons
is always able to keep us on our toes, particularly with clever, albeit brutal
plot twists, the first being the death of Angela, who had up until that point
looked like being a possible future companion. In fact it’s pretty clear that
Lyons cunningly wrote the character such that we, the audience would inevitably
like and feel for her, just before being floored by the event of her sudden and
early death.
The central story about the invasion of the Meson
Broadcasting Space Station by an intelligent, living and organic computer virus
is a fairly standard generic Doctor Who
plot, albeit a very modern one, even in 2012, seventeen years later. It’s a
testament to Steve Lyons’ skill as a horror writer (as that seems to be what a
lot of Time of Your Life is) that it’s
introduced and developed so effectively and atmospherically. From the
creature’s arrival halfway through the book (which sort of shows you how padded
some of the book’s first half was), it holds a real meaningful threat that
pervades the story from then on, gradually building until at one point near the
book’s climax it appears unstoppable, which is a textbook Doctor Who writing technique. Then there’s the twist that actually
the virus is an organic digital intelligence that merely wants to learn, and
then also become the supreme logical intelligence in the Universe, much like
Drathro in The Trial of a Time Lord.
It’s only from that point on that we realise how mundane a villain it was all
along, and indeed the Doctor overcomes it a lot easier than first envisioned,
however it’s still a fascinating variation on an age-old Sci-fi classic, the
robot with delusions of grandeur.
There’s also Steve Lyons’ final brilliant, but bleak
twist, where the survivors of the TV Space Station disaster are transported to
Torrok, only to find themselves having to fight for their lives against the
local dropouts, the Watchers. Once again we’re treated to violence, but this
time it feels a lot more justified and proactive, rather than gratuitous. In
fact, the only two comforting moments of the whole book is firstly the fact
that the survivors managed to rescue Torrok from its dystopia and look forward
to better future; and secondly the Doctor finally accepting who he is as a person, and starts towards a
better life himself.
The final layer I’ve yet to mention is perhaps the
obvious satire of the Television industry. There’s a vain and precious
newsreader, a drunken has-been actor; a selfish, shallow, cheating and promiscuous
retired actress; enthusiastic obsessive fans of an axed Sci-fi show called
Timeriders (you can guess what that satirises); a proud, self-serving executive
secretary, weak and pedantic bureaucrats; a domineering TV producer; and even a
mock Mary Whitehouse-like TV standards critic. However, while many of these
caricatures have a grain of truth in them, Steve Lyons’ satire, unlike that of
1980s Doctor Who writer Philip
Martin, who Lyons is clearly trying to emulate, is misjudged and misdirected. Just
as Eric Saward’s Doctor Who seemed to
feature a cruel and harsh universe, where even the good guys had strong
character flaws and moral ambiguities, so too does Steve Lyons’. However, Lyons’
satire is so cynical and negative that it could even be construed as a direct criticism
upon the Television industry and its perceived future evolution. Everyone
involved with it is so self-absorbed or has some other big moral vacancy that
it seems to be portrayed as completely corrupt and self-destructive, with
various conspiracies and power struggles abound purely for personal gain or
short-term success, and everything that TV touches is turned into a soulless
and lifeless wasteland where its viewers are unquestioning reclusive vegetables
who know no better.
Philip Martin’s Vengeance
on Varos attempted a similar kind of satire, where he imagined a future of
a population endlessly fed on a TV diet of the violence, manipulation and torture
of others for entertainment, predicting the future prominence and popularity of
‘reality television’. However, his satire showed a more balanced, complex and
morally ambiguous population, one controlled at the behest of both selfish
corporations and a few power mad individuals; however, most importantly had
varying degrees of conscience and with the Doctor’s influence moved on to
become better people. Lyons tries to achieve a similar kind of satire with Time of Your Life, but his attempt is so
heavy handed and off-target to be taken seriously.
To interpret then, to an extent Steve Lyons seems to be
saying that Television has, or will eventually evolve into a state where it promotes
a society with no morals, feeds its audience with a seemingly endless supply of
visual junk food, while simultaneously endlessly pushing the boundaries of good
taste and violence to extremes; is operated and worked by people who care for
nothing except their own personal wealth and success, and will seek it any
cost; and ultimately destroys both itself and society in the end. Now of
course, most satires have an element of exaggeration to their depictions, but
the satire is so one-sided, unambiguous and devastating that it’s hard not to
see it as anything other than reactionary. Of course, hindsight has shown that
Television did indeed during the 1980s find the lines in taste that it would
not cross, and has mostly settled comfortably within them, and in some cases
even retreating back from it in the cases of prime time programmes; leaving it
for the most part to cinema to try to challenge and redefine what those lines
should continue to be. Irritatingly, since the turn of the century, and maybe a
little before, a lot of television has been made that could successively be
argued to be merely visual junk food, but on the whole this has been down to
cost cutting to protect more worthy programming rather than a general disregard
for quality Television. Of course there are many vain, self-obsessed and
self-important actors, directors and other high ranking media officials;
however society, other media, and more importantly democracy and free speech
have helped keep their egos in check. There have also been corrupt media
officials revealed too, but in an age where we demand more of our leaders,
government and high society figures, the truth of wrongdoing will eventually be
revealed and the perpetrators disgraced, even if not prosecuted, and once again
reality and the common good will reassert itself.
However, what shows up Lyons are two things. Firstly, the
fact that it was written in the mid-1990s, and not the 1980s, in a time when
British TV had already started to retreat from its established 1980s boundaries
in taste and violence; and despite the BBC taking nearly another decade before
it recovered from its funding and identity crises, quality was still an
important value in programme making, with the outbreak of popularity for
reality television still a few years away, although daytime and family-friendly
viewing was probably an exception, just as it still occasionally is now. The
second point that shows up Lyons are the obvious comparisons with the fictional
Timeriders programme and Doctor Who;
not just that it was axed, seemingly for good, but also that there are hints of
a conspiracy by some of high ranking TV staff to get rid of it, as well as
shedding a negative light on the programme’s fans, also partly blaming them for
Doctor Who’s TV demise in the late
1980s. So in this context, a significant part of Steve Lyons’ satire could
conceivably be a reactionary lash out against the cancellation of Doctor Who, the people who tried to
bring it about, and even the BBC itself, as part of a paranoid view of the
makers of 1990s British Television as cultural vandals, now dominated by
shallow capitalist ethics, endlessly dumbing down in the search of the next
ratings hit.
For myself, I think the cancellation of Doctor Who in 1989 was down to a
multitude of factors. Firstly the decline in the quality of the show in the
mid-1980s due to the inexperience of Eric Saward, and both his and John Nathan-Turner’s
somewhat narrow definition of what the TV programme should be, perhaps slightly
accentuated later on by the added inexperience of Pip & Jane Baker also,
which slowly damaged the programme’s popularity and artistic integrity.
Secondly, the unimaginative and clueless BBC bosses who completely
misunderstood what the programme really was, what made it work, and what its
appeal was; compounding any possible recovery for the show by shunting it into
difficult timeslots, not to mention the cold and dismissive attitude towards
John Nathan-Turner and Colin Baker. Some of those said executives even had a
strong dislike for the show itself. Thirdly, to a lesser extent, the obsessive
and narrow-minded possessiveness of some fans during that time, who ignored Doctor Who’s previous state as a show
for a mass audience, and publically rejected any attempts by John Nathan-Turner
(or anyone else for that matter) to change and rejuvenate Doctor Who until it was far too late, creating unnecessary negative
press which helped excuse the BBC, particularly Michael Grade and Jonathan
Powell, from their poor treatment towards the series at the time. So I have
some sympathy for Steve Lyons’ view, but not much particularly considering how
cynical and delusional it is. Sure the BBC was in trouble during the 1990s,
playing it relatively safe with programming, and started to outsource its
production to much smaller independent TV and film companies to cut costs,
while ITV stole the limelight with a flurry of ground-breaking and popular
dramas, but the BBC always strived for quality. The main difference was that it
decided to concentrate more on sitcoms, entertainment shows, wildlife
documentaries and the occasional period drama. There really was no conspiracy
in Doctor Who’s demise as a TV show
in 1989. Peter Cregeen merely misunderstood how the show worked, and why it
really was working at the time. Even in 1985, when it wasn’t working, it was
Michael Grade and Jonathan Powell’s dislike for the programme that encouraged
them to attempt to cancel it.
Now getting back to Time
of Your Life, if Steve Lyons had chosen to instead satirise the Video Games
industry, or even ‘video nasties’ instead then his criticisms would appear to
be much more on target. The level of violence, gore and immorality is something
that has consistently escalated in video games for at least a decade now. Sure
the games in which this does happen are meant to be entirely fictional, just like
Doctor Who, but unlike it, these
games frequently aim to entertain and satisfy its audiences in an increasingly
basest form, particularly as the level of detail and graphics possible to
achieve become gradually more advanced, so too does the audience demand for
future games to break through those boundaries of taste and gore, and for them
to offer a more shocking experience. Sure a lot of these games are adult-rated,
but will any lines ever be drawn to prevent an eventuality where a game goes
too far, or will they still remain fairly independent to do carte blanche as
long as they have an adult certification? The level of sex, violence and gore
are frequently ahead of anything broadcast on TV, even if not always the cinema,
only made more palatable by the fact that video games look far less real, but
this is changing at a fair rate; and most extremely violent and gory films were
often banned from having cinema releases at the time they were first
distributed. As long as users can still differentiate between the fictional
immoral world of their games and the real one then there’s theoretically no
problem, but there’s good reason to be afraid that in the future that might not
always be the case. As the TV experience of the Meson Broadcasting Service is
as much virtual as it is physical then it wouldn’t have taken much rewriting to
achieve this, but the fact that the satire concentrates on TV, merely
underlines how reactionary it is.
Anyway, finally dragging myself away from my soapbox,
despite the padding and misguided satire making Time of Your Life a very challenging read in places, it is
certainly made more palatable by some of its characters. Sadly again, a lot of
these are unrelatable and immoral characters with positions on the TV station,
who while are very well developed, are ultimately just ciphers for his TV
satire, and cannon fodder for Steve Lyons to play with over the last few
chapters. However, there are some notable exceptions, the main one being
Angela, the lonely and depressed girl that yearns for travel and adventure.
After seeing the Doctor on Torrok, Angela follows and meets him from time to
time, fascinated by this unusual stranger to her world. After a while she begs
to go with him in the TARDIS, but is brutally killed on their first
destination, just minutes after the Doctor leaves her to investigate the Meson
Broadcasting Space Station. Angela is very easy to like and warm to at once,
and it’s refreshing to see a complex portrayal of loneliness and depression,
and further more as part of a relatable and immensely likeable character. So
often I’ve seen depressed and lonely people written off in a negative way in
fiction, so it’s good to find a progressive character where it isn’t, even if
Angela isn’t around for very long. As sad as it is for Angela to go, it’s a
neat twist by Lyons that helps develop the character arc the Doctor goes on,
and how he eventually begins to accept who he is again.
Grant, the computer programmer who eventually becomes the
Doctor’s companion in the story, is a likeable character too, albeit somewhat
bland. Think of Adric, without the whinging or arrogance and you’ll be mostly
there. I for one, will be curious to see if Grant develops into a much more
interesting character during his subsequent novel adventure, Killing Ground. The other character
which I really took to was Miriam Walker, the TV Standards critic. Sure, Miriam
started out as a transparent and painfully obvious satire of Mary Whitehouse,
enthusiastically pursuing a ban on any and every Television programme that she
can find. However, in later appearances, her steely facade slowly crumbles to
reveal a much warmer, vulnerable and delightful persona underneath. After reading
about so many hateful people, it’s great to see Steve Lyons at least give a
couple of his satirical characters a more enjoyable and fleshed out human side.
He even gives Miriam Walker a few wonderful jokes too.
So on balance Time
of Your Life is a fascinating read,
albeit an occasionally challenging one. There’s too much padding with
irrelevant characters which slows down the plot significantly for a time, and
his very negative, obvious and misjudged satire, as well as some excessive gore
and violence sometimes leaves a fairly bad taste in the mouth. However, the
major point and aspect of the book is also its saving grace. Steve Lyons gives
a brilliant and thought-provoking character arc for the Sixth Doctor that
encourages him and us to re-assess his past, and seek to find out and consider who
he’ll be in the future; a future that we have never got to see before 1995.
In fact this is probably the first time this particular Doctor has ever
received anything like a proper character arc before, and for that reason alone
it is an interesting read, as writers try to explore where this Doctor’s
character could have gone for the first time, beyond the obvious gaps in the TV
show’s continuity. Steve Lyons’ attempt at that exploration is one that tries
to reconcile the character’s previous persona while trying to gently push him towards a more traditional and amiable persona in possible future adventures.
Lyons importantly also sets about showing the character the positive elements
of his old ways that still needs to be continued, that he still needs
to be the hero he tried to be before, and that by completely rejecting his past self leads
to terrible effects and consequences on future innocents. The Sixth Doctor
starts off the story in a very bad and dark place, but by the end, there’s a
hint of hope for him in the air, that maybe his future is not inevitable. Time of Your Life, far from being the
end of the Sixth Doctor, is gently pointing us in the hopeful direction of his
future new beginning.
Score:
8/10
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Released:
February 2007
I did originally choose Fear of the Daleks to review for the 49th anniversary,
but after listening to how bad it was, I couldn’t bring myself to put out such
a negative review on a day of celebration, so it inevitably went on the back
burner. Weeks later, I’ve finally resolved to take it on properly, and the
audio is sadly just as poor as when I first heard it. After the delightful and
promising first release of the Companion
Chronicles range, Frostfire, Fear of the Daleks is a dire retreat
into amateurish, fairly unimaginative and possibly even lazy writing, the likes
of which I’ve never seen in a Big Finish audio production till now. While the Companion Chronicles is a great and
original audio format for Doctor Who,
listening to the very first series, one gets the impression that Big Finish
were still feeling their way along as to how to get the most out of the format,
experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t, and as a result getting
somewhat mixed results. Judging by the many positive reviews given of some of the
range’s later releases, Fear of the
Daleks appears to be one of Big Finish’s wake up calls as to how to proceed
with and improve the Companion Chronicles,
and listening to the audio itself, it’s not hard to see why.
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