Big Finish: Doctor Who: Once and Future – Two’s Company – Review

Once and Future continues with Two’s Company, the fourth part of the eight-part celebration from Big Finish for Doctor Who’s Sixtieth Anniversary. Unfortunately, like the series opener Past Lives, this feels like a much more inconsequential run-around which seems to revel in Big Finish’s dartboard-like way of pairing random characters together rather than actually progressing the overall storyline.

Why on earth anyone would pick Lady Christina and Jackie Tyler to feature in a story with the Sixth Doctor and Harry Sullivan is anyone’s guess and while Christina and Jackie share some brilliant scenes, they don’t add anything to the plot beyond helping the Doctor break into somewhere in the third act. Harry Sullivan, played brilliantly again by Christopher Naylor fares a little better and actually gets some interesting things to do as he is torn between his loyalties to the Doctor and his current project with UNIT.

Colin Baker does a good job here, though the script doesn’t serve him as well as The Artist At The End Of Time did. A lot of his best material comes from his interaction with The Two, an earlier incarnation of Mark Bonnar’s The Eleven, though The Two isn’t particularly well served here. I also feel a little sorry for Harry who is always being treated as an imbecile despite the Fourth Doctor’s cry in Revenge of the Cybermen, Harry isn’t an imbecilic and I found it very hard to actually believe that he would think The Two was the Doctor, let alone try and help him in nearly destroying the Earth.

Jackie and Lady Christina aren’t well served either, despite getting plenty to do, they don’t actually do anything to progress the plot apart from helping the Doctor break into Harry’s UNIT facility. There are some nice little looks at Jackie’s life without Rose and she shares some good scenes with Christina despite the fact that Lady Christina shouldn’t have met the Doctor yet so she shouldn’t know who he is. This is one of those stories where if you think too hard then it all falls apart completely.

Because of the weird combination of characters, Lisa McMullin’s story ends up feeling a lot more than a little contrived as it has to get all these characters into the same place at the same time. This continues into the post-production elements of the product too, with one character sounding like their lines were recorded through a door, nothing about Two’s Company feels like it was given a lot of consideration and I can’t help but wonder maybe Once and Future was a bit of a mistake from Big Finish, simply relying on the fact that fans will buy everything and not settle for just good stories.

You can pick up Doctor Who: Once and Future: Two’s Company on CD (including digital) for £10.99 and on digital for £8.99 now from Big Finish.