THE LIGHT AT THE END

In an act that almost brought down their servers and crippled their website, Big Finish released The Light at the End one month early (yesterday, 23rd October).

Needless to say, everyone wanted to download it at the same time.  I was able to download it and I listened to it last night.  This is a brief review so beware of spoilers.

The Light At The End is a two-part story designed to be split over two CDs.  Each “episode” is about an hour long.  It’s not episodic like a traditional 4-part story, and the end of the first part doesn’t really have a cliffhanger.

There are some positives and negatives to take from this story with the key positive one being that, hey, this is an Eight Doctors story.  Yes, the first three Doctors are present in the story.

The story itself isn’t necessarily the kind of epic tale you might expect.  The plot is relatively simple.  The Master (Geoffrey Beevers) gets his hand on a particularly nasty weapon that, through one tiny act, erases the Doctors from history by ensuring he never left Gallifrey in the first place.  The Doctors, trapped in a pocket dimension while time is folding in on itself to complete the “erasing” has to figure out what’s going on and thwart the Master’s plan before ultimately defeating him.

The story features many familiar elements such as sonic screwdrivers, the Doctor going back to the “big bang”, the Master’s tissue compression eliminator, the celestial intervention agency, and so on.

The execution of the story is, unfortunately, not quite as satisfactory as you might wish.  Many sequences repeat the same theme of the Doctor and companion leaving the TARDIS to investigate, they run into some peril, they run back to the TARDIS, the TARDIS starts exploding around them – at which point we switch to another Doctor and companion who do the same thing.

The plot uses the “exploding TARDIS” and “time folding in on itself” conceits to bring the Doctors together for the scenes that we want to hear – Doctors meeting each other.  The 4th Doctor spends some time with the 8th Doctor, for example.

As the story progresses and the Doctor is progressively “erased”, his companions disappear one by one (because he never met them).  This leads up to the climax scenes in which all the Doctors need to work together to thwart the Master.

If your purpose in listening to The Light At The End is to revel in the presence of the five surviving classic Doctors, and the first three, then you won’t go away disappointed.  If your purpose is to seek out a solid story that’s well plotted and has something for everyone to do, then you’ll probably find yourself favouring The Five Doctors or similar.

In short, expect what you would expect from a “multi-Doctor celebration” and that’s what’s delivered.

The highpoint of the adventure is, unarguably, the presence of Tom Baker.  At almost all times, whenever he speaks you’re immediately transported back to the 70s.  It’s almost chilling.  He’s possibly the only character here that hasn’t aged.

Colin Baker possibly comes next in that he has the best stab of the others at recapturing the voice of his Doctor.  Sylvester McCoy sounds a little older than his Doctor (which you could put down to him ageing before the TVM, but Ace hasn’t met the Master at the time of this story so you can’t really).  Peter Davison doesn’t really sound like the 5th Doctor, but he’s still recognisable.  Paul McGann sounds like his Big Finish 8th Doctor.  If you’ve only ever watched the TVM, you may recognise him more as Paul McGann than the Doctor.  Geoffrey Beevers only played the Master once on TV and he doesn’t really sound like his Master anyway, but he has a distinctive enough voice that you soon get used to him.

Less successful are the first three Doctors.  Of the three, the most successful is the 2nd Doctor who is voiced by Frazer Hines.  Many times (not all the time) you could be mistaken for thinking they’d lifted Patrick Troughton’s voice from TV adventures.  Tim Treloar voices a 3rd Doctor that’s only recognisable on occasional words and phrases.  William Russell voices the 1st Doctor and, sadly, is barely recognisable at all.  You only really know it’s the 1st Doctor as a process of elimination (if he doesn’t sound like the 2nd, or the 3rd, that you assume its the 1st), and by virtue that he ends most lines with “my boy” or uses the word “ship” instead of “TARDIS”.  They aren’t helped by the fact that the first three Doctors are mostly heard through some “temporal haze” so you don’t have the chance to tune in on their voices enough to recognise them.

Each Doctor is teamed with a companion.  Leela joins the 4th Doctor.  Nyssa is with the 5th Doctor.  Peri is with the 6th.  Ace is with the 7th.  And Big Finish’s Charley is with the 8th.  Each of the companion actresses try hard to recapture their original voices, with varying degrees of success.  They have all aged and this is most notably for the earlier companions (Leela and Nyssa in particular).  Nicola Bryant struggles to recapture her 80s American accent (but at least she’s recognisable by virtue of no one else having that accent).  Sophie Aldred is mostly successful, albeit with her voice occasionally losing its sparkle.  I hadn’t heard India Fisher as Charley before, so I have nothing to compare to there.  As the most “recent” companion, I’m sure she was the most successful.

Other companions have cameos when Charley is trapped in the TARDIS time explosions.  She drops in on Susan and Ian.  Carole Ann Ford easily recaptures her Susan voice.  You’d think they’d taken her voice from original episodes, too, except that William Russell is, sadly, almost unrecognisable as Ian (it’s something that can be forgiven for just having him in the episode, but he does sound like the age he is).  Frazer Hines is instantly recognisable as Jamie (like Nicola Bryant’s American accent, Frazer Hines plays the only Scottish character so it’s very easy to adapt to him).  With the same advantage due to her Australian accent, Janet Fielding’s Tegan is also very recognisable (although it’s a little more difficult to recognise Mark Strickson’s Turlough voice).  Jean Marsh is there in a cameo you can’t miss by the way her very Jean Marsh voice bellows “I am Sara Kingdom”.

According to the cast list, there are also brief cameos from Maureen O’Brien (Vicki), Peter Purves (Steven), Anneke Wills (Polly), Wendy Padbury (Zoe), and Katy Manning (Jo).  I’m sure I heard Zoe’s voice and Polly, but the others are ones I’ll need to listen out for when I next listen to it.

In short, The Light At The End is a very ambitious project clearly designed as “one for the fans”.  If you prepare yourself to forgive it as much as you would for any previous “multi-Doctor” celebration story, then you’ll enjoy it.  Go looking for the best Doctor Who adventure ever, and you probably won’t.  It’s certainly not a story to introduce new fans to the series.

For me, one of the main bonuses of listening to this story is that it’s given me a renewed enthusiasm for checking out some of Big Finish‘s 4th Doctor stories with Tom Baker.  I feared that he’d sound a lot like the weary and lethargic 4th Doctor as featured in Hornet’s Nest (I listened to the first part, bought the second but haven’t listened to it yet, and didn’t bother with the others), but if he’s voicing the part like he does here then I’m all for it.  Also, I have to admit to an interest in hearing more of Frazer Hines voicing the 2nd Doctor.  When he sounds like Patrick Troughton, he really sounds like Patrick Troughton – so I’m quite hopeful about a full-length adventure in which he voices the 2nd Doctor.

This almost 1hr documentary spends a good proportion of its running time name-checking the stars and guest-stars of the adventure.  Each of the Doctors and many of the companion actors are there to say “I am …. and I play … and I’m so pleased that something is being done to bring all the Doctors back for the 50th Anniversary”.

The actual “making of” aspect of the documentary is writer/director Nicholas Briggs describing how the adventure came about –  beginning with his initial reluctance to do a “Multi-Doctor story”.  We learn a little about the difficulties of doing a multi-Doctor story given that it was logistically impossible to get all the Doctors together at the same time.  Towards the end of the documentary, we hear quite a bit from sound designer/musician Jamie Robertson.  I’m not sure why this is because the music/sounds leave quite a bit to be desired a lot of the time.  The opening title music is also of questionable merit (only saved by the final end theme which is back to being the original).

Nevertheless, it is good to hear snippets from each of the actors (even if Sylvester McCoy does seem more interested in promoting his “hobbit” character at this point of his acting career).

I haven’t yet received the physical package of The Light At The End, so I can’t comment on any of that right now.

The download comes in three formats.  An audiobook (m4b) file format that doesn’t seem to want to work on my iPod Touch; a regular audio (MP3) file format which does work and is the one I listened to; and a bonus 5.1 surround sound (MP4) format.  I don’t think the 5.1 version is available on the “standard” release.  I’m sure the music/sounds would deserve merit if played back on a 5.1 system, but I can’t comment on that at this stage.

I haven’t yet listened to This Is Big Finish which is, I believe, a feature on Big Finish’s audio ranges.  Possibly this is just a big advert, but I’m hoping it will contain a lot of snippets from their ranges/stories to give me an insight into which I might want to buy into in the fullness of time.  The trouble with Big Finish these days is that they have so many titles in so many ranges and not very wallet-friendly prices that you don’t want to just throw money at something and hope.

The final audio extra is The Revenants – a 70 minute First Doctor story read/presented by William Russell (as Ian) in the “Companion Chronicles” format.  I haven’t yet listened to this, but I intend to tonight.