Big Finish – Doctor Who Unbound: Doctor of War Vol 2: Destiny Review

Way back in 2003, Doctor Who was still off air, the new series was still a little way away and the show was about celebrate its fortieth anniversary. Luckily, Big Finish stepped up to the plate and created the Unbound range, a series of What If stories that featured new Doctors and old companions. These stories proved very popular despite their strange release schedule and with David Warner’s Unbound Doctor having thrilled fans in recent years throughout The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, it’s been nice that this year Big Finish decided to return to the Unbound range properly, even if they were playing it a little safe.

The set opens with Who Am I? by Nigel Fairs, which sees the action return to The Face of Evil. The Tesh and the Sevateem are still at war over their god Xoanon. But neither side knows that this war is being fought for a higher purpose and that Xoanon’s Time Lord associate The Master is manipulating things behind the scenes. In the previous volume, the Master popped up initially to cause trouble but then, realising that things were going wrong, and trying to help the Doctor, or is it The Warrior? (That gets a little confused as the stories go on.) Here though, he has taken the Doctor’s place entirely and while it’s fun to hear Geoffrey Beavers playing the Master play the Doctor, things get confused when Xoanon, the Master and the Doctor are involved.

Essentially what the story boils down to is the Doctor and Master trying to create a race of intelligent killers to help them in this version of the Time War, using Leela and a Tesh male to create genetically modified children. While it’s always great to hear Louise Jameson back as Leela, I did feel sorry for her here, she seemed like a much weaker version of her original character. I’ve never been a fan of The Face of Evil so Who Am I? didn’t particularly do it for me either, there was far more manipulation going on. The Doctor feels like the nasty version of the Sixth Doctor that people don’t like and while you’re supposed to be rooting for the Doctor and Master to correct the universe, the story doesn’t make either of them likeable. As a result, I found myself just waiting for the end.

The second story of the set, Time Killers by Lizzie Hopley, I much preferred with the TARDIS landing on Marinus, where they find that time has literally become money. Everything revolves around people creating more and more time. Hearing the Master and the Doctor find themselves on two sides, the Master trapped in a place where time is running normally, while the Doctor is stuck in the city, sees the pair have two different perspectives on how to deal with the core problem.

And it’s really nice to hear Beavers and Colin Baker clearly having a ball with their material. Perhaps the weakest element of this story is the location itself because aside from a few nods to The Keys of Marinus, nothing is really made of the planet. There are no Voord, no Keys, nothing that could set this planet apart from any other. But Hopley does succeed in making all the time travel shenanigans a lot of fun to hear, and fun isn’t necessarily a word I would use talking about this take on the Unbound universe.

The set concludes with The Key to Key to Time by Tim Foley. It’s a mouthful of a title, but the story is a lot more, with a lot of twisty and time travel narratives, which I feel the cast and crew got a little weighed down by. In principle the premise is an exciting one, the Doctor is called by the Guardians to find the Key to Time, a device that could help the right side win the Time War. But things are complicated because as his companion, the Guardians have decided to give him Davros.

The story quickly becomes who will hold the most pieces of the Key and nothing is really done that we haven’t heard or seen before. Who is right, the Time Lords or the Daleks? It’s a shame because after a genuinely strong opening, the story gets bogged down in underused ideas and too many characters tossed into the mix to create anything resembling a cohesive story.

It is nice however to hear Colin Baker and Terry Molloy getting to face off again and they seem to really enjoy playing with the idea that two great enemies have to work together to protect everything they hold dear. It’s just a shame that everything gets crammed into a story that runs for about an hour and there isn’t enough time to glue everything together.

In fact, not having enough time to glue everything together feels like an accurate description for this story, the previous volume worked because it was a set of three individual episodes designed to set up the story, but Destiny should have been one long story split through episodes, to give all the elements and themes it was trying to glue together a time to dry. The Time War seems to have taken a back seat here, instead, people just seem desperate to recreate their favourite stories and that’s a shame because throughout the previous two boxsets there have been germs of a good story hidden underneath all the comebacks. But it all feels a little ill-conceived and one is forced to wonder if we needed this story at all.

It’s a shame because Colin Baker is so good in it, even if I didn’t really take to his Warrior. It’s clear that Baker is giving nothing short of a fantastic performance but when in the extras he doesn’t seem to understand what the story is actually about, how can the creators expect the listeners to? The concept of this series of Unbound stories was brilliant, with the Doctor actually destroying the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks when Sarah and Harry get exterminated.

But things just felt far too hollow after that, pulling in aspects and creations from throughout the Doctor Who universe, even doing some universe-bending things when we hear Colin Baker performing in the Big Finish studio, I thought my download had gone wrong, but it all just feels people overindulging and as a result, Destiny just can’t stick the landing.