The Wizard of Time

Fourth Doctor Adventures #12.3

Released: 21 June 2023

Listened: 7/20/23

The second half of series 12 goes by the name “Angels and Demons,” which is kind of unfortunate, because it’s awfully close to a spoiler. This half has three two-part stories and one four-parter, which gives a feeling of a lot of content, so that’s nice. This story is by Roy Gill, and has a distinct fairy-tale feeling to it. In fact, it’s one of those where the TARDIS crew don’t really feature that much, as the emphasis is on the narrator, Jacob Harmer. The story starts with an older Jacob at the end of his life, telling a caretaker stories in flashback of when he’d met the Doctor, Leela, and Margaret. Jacob eventually went on to become a famous writer, using the TARDIS crew as inspiration for his “Dirk Forever” stories. Jacob stumbles into a pesky temporal anomaly behind his house, and eventually stumbles back out of it again. As a result, he meets the Doctor and friends at several different points along his lifespan, but doesn’t stay with them long. One of the latest meetings features a distinctly older Doctor, and I don’t really like it when the Doctor solves a problem by simply waiting around for decades, but there’s enough timey-wimey going on in this story that maybe that’s not really what happened. It’s definitely a departure in storytelling terms, which may be enough for variety.