Big Finish Review: Out of Time 3 – Wink

It’s the turn of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor to team up with David Tennant in Big Finish’s occasional Out of Time series. The Weeping Angels are on classic monster duty in an imaginative and tricksy plot from writer Lisa McMullin. But how does this Tenth Doctor team-up stand up against the ever-increasing competition?

Wink finds the Tenth Doctor drawn to the planet Lucidus Silvara by a temporal anomaly caused by a sight-seeing Sixth Doctor being zapped back in time by a Weeping Angel. It’s an easy mistake to make on Lucidus Silvara, as aside from a rare eclipse, the planet is bathed in blinding light. As such, the native population has never needed to develop sight. So it’s the perfect place for the Weeping Angels to hunt. The civilisation of Lucidus Silvara is well-drawn by McMullin’s writing and by Howard Carter’s sound design.

One particular scene finds both Doctors experiencing an art gallery on the planet, which is essentially a cacophony of sound installations. It’s a neat piece of sci-fi world-building, but also allows for the Tenth Doctor to make a dig at the Sixth Doctor’s coat. “They can probably hear it!” he quips when one of their sightless companions comments on the Sixth Doctor’s garish attire.

On the surface, the Tenth and Sixth Doctors don’t have much in common barring their title. The Sixth Doctor is brash and often pompous, displaying a singular fashion sense, he does not suffer fools gladly. The Tenth Doctor, on the other hand, is the Doctor as the cool, charismatic, romantic lead, he loves absolutely everybody. Until they cross him.

On paper, they sound like polar opposites, it’s hard to even square them as the same person. It’s for this reason that Lisa McMullin’s script is so clever. Throughout their interactions together, she subverts your expectations as to just how a Sixth and Tenth Doctor meet-up would play out.

You may expect the Tenth Doctor to chastise his former self’s brash disregard for the feelings of others, but McMullin instead puts him on the backfoot. Rather than puncturing the pomposity of the Sixth Doctor, the Tenth Doctor’s own pomposity is thrown into focus. It’s a fun reversal of roles that provides an original edge to some of the more well-worn “regeneration gap” comedy of modern multi-Doctor stories.

Colin Baker exasperatedly delivering the line “I am not calling you pretty” to David Tennant is admittedly a hoot, but Wink is much more fun when the Sixth Doctor gives his future self a dressing down for being a bit up himself. “Good grief, you’re excitable” is as perfect a summation of the Tenth Doctor as you’ll ever find.

Wink is a well-paced, tense thriller of a Doctor Who story that just so happens to have two Doctors in it. The multi-Doctor elements feel like a nice bonus in a solid Weeping Angel thriller. Steven Moffat’s stone angels are a nightmare to realize on audio, but in setting the story on a planet that relies on every sense but sight, McMullin makes a virtue of this. The orchestra hits are there, the scraping of the stone as the Angels move into place, it’s atmospheric stuff. This is seemingly the last Out of Time release, with no further announcements having been made.

However, off the back of the surprisingly successful pairing of the Sixth and Tenth Doctors, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Big Finish are interested in seeing how the two romantic lead Doctors, Tennant and McGann interact. Or better yet, how the manipulative Seventh Doctor and the nicey-nicey Tenth Doctor get on or don’t.

Out of Time 3 is available to buy from Big Finish here.