The Firstborn

The Quin Dilemma #6

Released: 22 March 2024

Listened: 4/26/26

The massive Sixth-Doctor pileup that is "The Quin Dilemma" concludes here. All the various brothers arrive back at Arunopal simultaneously, with their respective Doctors. Since all this action so far has resolved precisely nothing about the succession, the Doctor offers to go back in time to witness which of them is the actual firstborn. King Otho, of course, insists on going along, setting off a chain of timey-wimey and mistaken consequences that result in the whole family having a fairly miserable 40 years. All the companions (including two versions of Peri) turning up at once with separate TARDISes just makes things worse. The fact that none of the companions could realistically manage space travel on their own is rather clumsily hand-waved. Of course, Zeta from "The Exaltation" turns out to be exactly who you probably guessed she was back in that story. And of course, history can't be rewritten on a whim...unless the person having the whim is the Doctor, and the writer mentions the Blinovitch Limitation Effect as a way of proving they've done their homework. Everything turns out lovely, and we have textual evidence that the Doctor is a better person than he was on TV in 1984. Which was the original plan, and since it's been 40 years of real time since then, I can live with that. Maybe the Doctor's actions don't perfectly line up across all the stories, but it's Doctor Who; since when does that matter? Trivial alert: While establishing their relative positions in their timelines, the "oldest" Doctor reels off a long list of his companions, several of which go in circles, but also including characters from comics and stage plays, as well as Big Finish creations Mathew Sharpe and Mari Yoshida, but sadly not Yrsa Kristjansdottir.