Doctor Who: The End of the Beginning

And so here we are, after 275 releases over the course of more than two decades, at the very final story of Big Finish's flagship monthly range. From here on in, the individual Doctors will each have their own series, with less regular release schedules rather than being a slave to the calendar - or the two hour format. As the final release, it was inevitable that it, like the very first one back in 1999, would be a multi-Doctor story, featuring all of the incarnations that have appeared regularly elsewhere in this particular series.

It's a single story, but told in four distinct episodes and, to be honest, multiple Doctors aside it's good, but hardly exceptional; Day of the Doctor it isn't. The Fifth Doctor is up first, in a story set in 1911 in what is now Iraq (although this isn't clear until later). It concerns a chase against a villain trying to be the first to reach a ruined city with a fabulous treasure and has something of a Lawrence of Arabia vibe to it. It feels overly compressed, as if there was more that might have been explored, with what could have been an hour-long episode squeezed down into the 30-minute format. But, despite that, it's fun with a good sense of desert-themed adventure.

The next story is set during the 51st century, with a space colony (Titan, apparently, although it must be heavily terraformed by then, because nobody's living under domes) threatened by robotic pirates. It brings back a character from an earlier 6th Doctor audio, albeit mainly as a taxi service to get the Doctor to where he needs to be. We get Constance on her own as the companion, presumably because of the need to cut the cast list down, and she works well here - with a running gag about her not noticing when the main guest character tries to chat her up.

We then skip an incarnation to the 8th Doctor visiting London in 1999, when his only TV story was set. It's a fairly straight monster story, and with a monster that isn't original, either, but like the 6th Doctor's offering, it does feel the right length for its slot. To keep the link with Eight's audios in this series, rather than his own, we get Charlie back as the companion, but India Fisher is doing her voice so differently that it honestly took me a little while to work that out.

Everything comes together in the final episode, where the links we have seen up to this point bring the three Doctors together to face down the real villain. There are a few good twists in here, but the real strength is in seeing the characters meeting up and interacting with one another; taken on its own, the story is unremarkable. Yes, the universe gets threatened, because that's probably the sort of thing they felt they should do in a series finale, but it's been threatened a lot down the years, and it takes more than that these days to make something special. That the 7th Doctor makes only a brief cameo appearance feels like another missed opportunity, too, but I guess they only had so much time.

This all sounds pretty negative, and it probably shouldn't, because this is a decent celebration of what this particular run of 275 stories has covered, with four Doctors and stories set in the past, future, and present(ish). Plus two companions first introduced in the monthly series, reminding us of how it developed things for the Expanded Universe. If it's not quite the five-star celebration it could have been, it's still enjoyable and there's plenty more to come as the various Doctors spin off into their own audio lines.