The Seeds of War

Main Range #171

Released: 14 January 2013

Listened: 9/17/20

At this point in production time, Bonnie Langford hadn’t been available to Big Finish for several years, and Big Finish had switched to doing the Main Range mostly in trilogies. However, the first part of this trilogy was “The Wrong Doctors,” leaving the other two scattered throughout this era. Periodically, Big Finish comes up with a character, usually an enemy, that they become fond of, and it appears through several stories that are close together in release date, but far apart in the Doctor’s chronology. In 2013, that was the Eminence and its Infinite Warriors. Admittedly, the Eminence is pretty formidable, and just the kind of thing the Doctor would fight. Although this was the first appearance of the Eminence in release order, this is sort of a middle story, in which the Doctor hasn’t seen the Eminence in some time. In fact, humanity has just finished fighting a 50-year war against the Infinite Warriors, but emerged victorious, or so they think. The plot is a bit more convoluted than normal, with several threads and different locations, and a bunch of well-realized secondary characters. In addition, the setting changes several times during the story, moving from one planet to another. Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t have the right emotional impact, as the Doctor and Mel accept the fates of the secondary characters rather cavalierly, although the dialog indicates that they were affected. The Eminence, which is built up as a big threat, and which certainly sounds like one, doesn’t really do all that much in this story. Odd that it suffers from middle story syndrome without actually being a middle story.