Big Finish – The Fifth Doctor Adventures – Forty 2 Review

Big Finish is continuing their celebration of the Fifth Doctor’s fortieth anniversary with their second boxset, which continues the story of the time-jumping Fifth Doctor, as he goes backwards and forwards across his timeline. In the previous set, he travelled back to meet Nyssa, Tegan and Adric. This time, the Doctor is paired with Tegan, Turlough and Kamelion with the Brigadier along for the ride too.

This marks the third six-part adventure for the Fifth Doctor, whose era was mainly made up of 2 or 4-parters. The story, The Auton Infinity, which gives us a nicer title than Forty 2, sees the return of the titular Autons. Author Tim Foley wastes no time in connecting everything to the Fifth Doctor and the shows continuity or more likely, what should have happened, with the leader of the Autons, Prodigal, having been originally planned as part of the games in the Death Zone. She very quickly tells Tegan that she was plucked from her time and dumped amongst other Autons in the Death Zone. She learnt that she was supposed to be used in the game but was forgotten about.

This is a nice reference to the unused script for The Five Doctors, which would have seen the Third Doctor and Sarah find themselves in a strange town infested by the Autons. And now she is armed with the knowledge of what happened on Gallifrey, she has come back to “invade” our universe. But we quickly learn that Prodigal is something new.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. The story opens with the TARDIS arriving in Snowdonia where UNIT are conducting training exercises for a new rapid response division. The Brigadier has been called in to help with these exercises but out in the wilderness, the Autons are taking over the various troops of UNIT soldiers. And with a peace conference occurring nearby, the Autons roaming the surroundings might not be the best thing. But the Autons have once again teamed up with the Master. The first two episodes feel a little like the Third Doctor story, Terror of the Autons, but luckily, Tim Foley isn’t the kind of writer to make it a copy of an existing story and instead, hits us with nostalgia, but is very adept at giving us something completely new.

Foley takes great delight in throwing in many twists and turns. Just when you think that you know where the story is going to go, he takes the tale in a completely different direction. Everything is leading up to the reveal of the Master being a Captain called T. Mears, being an anagram of Master, but Foley flips the table by having the Brigadier unmask as the Master instead. Both the Master and Brigadier are played by the impressionist and actor, Jon Culshaw, sometimes in the same scene, things get even more complicated for him when he joins the cast in the final two episodes as Kamelion. His take on the Brigadier is uncanny. I can’t understand why people don’t like him in the role, he sounds eerily similar. The only reason people don’t like it is that the character isn’t being played by Nicholas Courtney.

Culshaw does a brilliant job, also as Kamelion he is excellent, though the voice modulator does a great deal of the job, he still sounds like the original actor. His take on Anthony Ainley was more of a tribute than an impersonation, as I didn’t feel he got the voice quite right. But he does a good enough job that he would make Ainley proud and he does himself proud too, capturing the mannerisms expertly, and even if the voice wasn’t quite right, the air of Ainley was there and it wasn’t hard to imagine him saying these lines. My only gripe was how often the Master had to chuckle, the first couple of times was fine, but when it started to pause scenes so he could do it got a little annoying.

After two, not quite generic episodes, the remainder of the story takes place on a space station, switching the locations up, with the Doctor and the real Brigadier coming too to find themselves in space. They quickly find Tegan and Turlough, both who had, we’d been led to believe, been shot in a nice reference to the moment Auton-Rory shot Amy at the end of The Pandorica Opens. They have only been stunned but I did think that this was how the Doctor ended up travelling back down his timeline, in an attempt to prevent them from arriving at this point. But Foley throws in an Auton Doctor, which the Master uses in his grand plans rather than the proper Doctor and in typical fashion, it all goes wrong, with his mind splintering instead of the real Doctor’s. It’s all very confusing to write down and I don’t know how Foley managed to keep up but listening to it was a real treat.

For much of the story, Tegan is paired up with Prodigal. I was a little worried by Juliet Aubrey’s performance as Prodigal, in the beginning, she didn’t seem to be taking it too seriously and she seemed to sound bored for most of the opening episode. However, this is intended as throughout the script, Prodigal comes to life more and more, realising that she is a living and thinking creature, still part of a hive mind, but she’s also got a mind of her own. Janet Fielding’s Tegan does an excellent job of making her realise that she is more than just the sum of her parts and that she can stand on her two feet. There is some commentary on what makes a person a person, the workings of an individual human mind and that of a shared collective mind. But it does have to take a bit of a backseat to the main bulk of the action. But for their part, Janet Fielding and Juliet Aubrey do a tremendous job.

Mark Strickson as Turlough seems to be paired once again with the Brigadier and there are some nice throwbacks to their last meeting as teacher and student in Mawdryn Undead. The Brig still hasn’t forgiven the wayward schoolboy for destroying his car, but Foley does a much better job of making them work together than Peter Grimwade did with the pair in Undead as here they are working as a team, in Undead, they seemed to hate one another which wasn’t a nice dynamic. These scenes also highlight how much work has been done to develop Turlough’s character since he joined Big Finish in the late 1990s. What I really like is that they’ve toned down his untrustworthy character and smoothed out his evil urges and while he can still sometimes feel like a reluctant traveller, he is much quicker to help out when the situations go south. Mark Strickson does a great job here.

Peter Davison plays many different versions of his Doctor here and does them excellently. You get a sense that he is truly distraught when he thinks Tegan and Turlough have been killed but it was when his Doctor was really put through the wringer that he really seemed to hit all the right marks. In his final moments, which gives us a surprise cameo from Nicola Bryant as his final companion Peri and an extra scene to The Caves of Androzani, his performance proves why he is such an amazing Doctor.

I’ve alluded to the fact there is a lot to juggle in this story and Foley does a brilliant job of juggling everything, The Auton Infinity goes full-on Lovecraft horror in the final couple of episodes, with an ancient evil trying to gain a foothold in our universe. He does the right thing by not describing it too much, allowing us to imagine what it might look like rather than being told. As the story winds down, the Master escapes, as he always does and the ending leads nicely into Resurrection of the Daleks both in the story and Tegan’s character development, making her sudden departure feel more real.

The result is a very fun story, with tight direction from Ken Bentley, Forty 2 or The Auton Infinity makes a perfect celebration of the whole Fifth Doctor era, with plenty of references and cameos to keep the most dedicated of listeners happy, without being intrusive. But the story from Tim Foley is where the story really shines. It takes familiar creatures and characters, in the form of the Autons, Master and The Brigadier and gives them something new and exciting to do, not an easy feat, especially for creatures like The Autons who are just plastic mannequins at the end of the day. Along with the earlier release of The Annihilators, this story shows why Big Finish should be dabbling with much longer stories because it gives the script and characters a real time to shine. Forty 2 is an absolute triumph.