Doctor Who: The Wrong Doctors

“He's better in the audios” is an almost clichéd refrain when discussing the Sixth Doctor. Primarily, this is just because he gets better scripts, but there's also the factor that Six is usually - though not always - portrayed in a rather more sympathetic way than the brash and overbearing character written for TV. The lack of the ghastly visual of that costume probably helps, too.

Here, however, we have a story in which TV-era Six meets audio-era (post Evelyn) Six. It's a “two Doctors” story, where the Doctors in question happen to be the same one, at different points in his personal history. Naturally, they clash somewhat, and while one can certainly see that they're the same character, Colin Baker does a good job of distinguishing the two, so that it's less confusing working out which one is which than one might think.

The story concerns TV-Six dropping off Mel in 1987 Pease Pottage following the events of The Ultimate Foe, only to get the date wrong and bump into pre-companion Mel. So, yes, two Sixes and two Mels, which one can understand might put some people off. From here, though, it rapidly becomes clear that something is wrong with both the village and younger-Mel.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I followed everything that was going on, although this was more due to whatever it was that the villain had done to the village than to the crossing-your-own-timstream elements. On the plus side, not only are the two portrayals of Six subtly contrasted, while remaining identifiably the same person, but Mel is used far better than she ever was in the TV show - that younger-Mel is largely useless is surely an intentional play on that. There are also some nice touches of humour here and there (such as the fear that, if there were a third Mel, they'd have both ‘Mel B' and ‘Mel C'...)

And there's quite a number of Shakespeare quotes, for some reason.

It's probably fair to say that this is one for the fans, not the casual listener. You need to be familiar with both the TV and audio versions of Six and, to a lesser extent, Mel, to really get what this is going for. But if you are, this nicely demonstrates just how much Big Finish have improved things for those two characters.