The Light at the End

Special

Released: 23 October 2013

Listened: 7/29/21

Here we come to the 50th Anniversary special, featuring the first Eight Doctors, but primarily the Fourth through Eighth, as Big Finish didn’t yet have the rights to the modern series characters. There’s a special, one-time version of the theme tune which is both rollicking and over the top as it tries to jam in aural references to all the previous eras. That’s pretty much true of the story as well, which is rather overstuffed, even though it clocks in at just two hours. Nick Briggs wrote this one, so while there is a lot going on, it’s all kind of straightforward, without the twistiness that other Big Finish writers might have brought. The Eighth (with Charley) and Fourth (with Leela) Doctors get to drive the first chunk of the plot paired up, as their new series were the biggest draws in 2013. Later on, the action shifts to the Sixth (with Peri) and Seventh (with Ace) Doctors, who also team up briefly, and aren’t nearly as snarky to one another as you might expect them to be. The Fifth Doctor (with Nyssa) seems to go it alone, picking up Bob Dovie, a human from November 23, 1963. The first three Doctors are present in minor roles, with the Third played by Tim Treloar for the first time, and the First and Second played by William Russell and Frazer Hines, as they’d done in Companion Chronicles. It’s revealed almost immediately that the Master is the bad guy -- the “crispy” version played by Geoffrey Beevers, because that was nearly the only Master Big Finish had access to in 2013 (wow, that changed quickly). He’s used a weapon that’s removing the Doctor from the timeline altogether, so none of his actions ever happened. The other bad-guy-ish character is Straxus, a CIA agent making his first appearance in this project, but he’ll be back again. Although the Master comes off as pretty threatening, there’s really never a question that eight Doctors will be able to defeat him, so the end of the story is a little bit flat, although the Master’s original plan was a good one, and takes a bit of timey-wimey to resolve. But the whole point of the story is to get the Doctors interacting, even more than the TV Anniversary did, and it comes off quite well.