Past Lives

Once and Future #1

Released: 3 May 2023

Listened: 5/4/23

This multi-part series is Big Finish’s contribution to Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary. And they’re making a serious effort to make this hard to place by mashing up several different threads of the Doctor’s life. Sometime during the Time War, an unspecified version of the Doctor is hit with a “degenerative weapon,” which causes him to regenerate into past incarnations. It starts out chronologically, letting all the other Big Finish Doctors get a line or two, but doesn’t stay that way. The phenomenon settles down when the Doctor reaches the TARDIS, stabilizing on the Fourth Doctor. He’s got the Fourth’s personality and appearance, but the memories of a much later Doctor (and presumably the clothes, but nobody mentions that). The Doctor can’t exactly remember what he’s trying to do, only that it involves finding the Monk. Which means we’ve got Rufus Hound being especially Rufus Houndy. He’s got some scheme of his own going on, and seems to be unaware of the War, but he does know about Jenny, so who knows where he is in his timeline. He does pick up Sarah Jane, moments after she’s dropped off in Aberdeen, which totally backfires on him, because Sarah’s not one to be pushed around. They all end up in early 2010s London, which allows them to encounter Kate Stewart and Osgood. This seems to be pretty early in their tenure, as Osgood is completely star-struck. Kate does a bit better, but refers to Osgood as her “personal assistant” several times, which is hardly how she’d be referred to later, so definitely early days. I don’t know how to reconcile that with Osgood not having met the Doctor or traveled in the TARDIS until much later in her timeline, so maybe it’ll all get rewritten. The plot isn’t really much of anything, mostly a runaround after a macguffin that some aliens want to use to get revenge on the Doctor. The resolution is less bloody than you’d expect, especially for a UNIT story, which is nice. The big point, though, is to let Sarah have some conversation with the Doctor who she last saw less than an hour ago, from her point of view. Obviously, she never entirely comes to terms with being left behind, but this helps some. How this story holds up will depend on how the rest of the series goes, for which I’ll have to wait.