The Four Doctors

Special

Released: 15 December 2010

Listened: 10/27/21

This is another subscriber special, released in 2010, but in a period that requires the Doctor to be alone (all the Doctors, really), and that fits best here. The underlying plot device is seriously timey-wimey, but the story itself isn’t as much as you’d expect. The Eighth Doctor arrives at a space station conducting time experiments, but the Fifth Doctor is already there. Fortunately, they don’t meet, but the Daleks arrive and invade, because a colonel from the cybernetic race that controls the station has betrayed his people. The Fifth Doctor does a clever thing, and a couple of the Daleks and the colonel get sucked away down the vortex. That results in them bouncing into other points in the Doctor’s timeline, which affect the development of the race itself. Each segment is separate, and only involves one Doctor, so it’s more anthology than multi-Doctor. The individual pieces are pretty good, except for the Seventh Doctor’s, which takes place on Earth and involves Michael Faraday, for no good reason at all. The various Doctors only meet up at the very end, after the story has ended, because it would be a cheat if they never met up at all. On the whole, it’s a fine “bonus” story, in that it’s a bit of fan-service that doesn’t really affect anything much.