Doctor Who: The First Doctor Adventures: Beware The City of Illusions from Big Finish Review

Big Finish has been reuniting the First Doctor with a lot of his companions in recent years. First there was Vicki, then Steven, and now he bumps into Polly Wright and Dodo Chaplet, both older and having left the Doctor; the only problem with their reunion is that the Doctor hasn’t met Polly yet.

I still can’t work out if I have enjoyed these First Doctor stories. The Vicki and Steven stories worked because they had already met the Doctor, and they all remembered each other. The charm was in the Doctor meeting his companions, now elderly, and discovering that their love for his way of life has never left them.

Beware the City of Illusions felt strangely one-sided because the Doctor hadn’t met Polly yet, so a lot of the charm of the previous releases was missing this time around.

Running at 6 episodes, the story does, to its credit, rattle along at a pace, though it’s strange that the narrative never explores what Polly has been up to since leaving the Doctor. Ben isn’t mentioned at all, and now she is an environmental activist. But nothing about Polly’s life after the Doctor is explored in any great detail, whereas the previous release’s stories hinged on the companions’ lives after the Doctor; here Polly and Dodo do feel surplus to requirements.

Dodo too should have been more interesting, written as older and still played by Lauren Cornelius, who does a brilliant job with the little material she’s given; it’s odd then that she still feels like she did when she travelled with the Doctor.

Anneke Wills is still brilliant as Polly and a welcome addition despite the story not really giving her much to do either, but Polly’s mysterious life after the Doctor and Dodo’s seeming refusal to grow up really aren’t explored in any great detail, much to the story’s detriment.

Perhaps part of the reason this story feels so confusing is that it feels like an early Third Doctor story; there are helicopter chases, cars, soldiers, explosions, military bases and corrupt politicians. Swap Polly and Dodo out for the Brigadier and Liz Shaw, and you’d have the same story. And rather than the 60s feel crossing over with the funky 70s in an exciting way, it all just falls a little flat.

What really sold me on the First Doctor Adventures and made me want to listen was the continuing adventures of the First Doctor and Dodo following the television story The Savages. Dodo is a sorely underused companion and seems ripe for exploration from Big Finish, and the first couple of boxsets did live up to this premise, showing her growing up and sowing the seeds for her sudden departure in The War Machines. It just feels incredibly unfortunate that the past three sets have sidelined her; in the Fugitive of the Daleks storyline she is even locked in the cupboard for the duration!

And then there is the Doctor and his storyline as he is thrown around his timeline. I genuinely can’t remember how this arc came about because it is so vaguely sketched. The Time Lords seem involved, so whether this is all set after The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors or some Time War shenanigans is still to be explored.

Stephen Noonan does a decent job as the Doctor, but it does feel like he’s taken a lot more time to settle in, unlike some of the other actors who feel like they’ve always played the part. The scripts still have the unfortunate habit of making him appear more doddery in a way that feels detrimental to William Hartnell. A lot of his line fluffs were due to his ill health and not because it was an aspect of the character; you can tell the difference between his mispronouncing of Ian Chesterton’s surname because he doesn’t want him there and the line, “You’ll end up floating like cinders in Spain… space…” from the end of The Chase. Here, though, it just feels a little nasty and makes it hard to listen to. I know that the writers don’t mean for it to be read that way, but this listener does wish they would stop with this aspect of the character.

The arc for the First Doctor over the course of the last three years’ worth of stories still hasn’t been resolved in any meaningful way, and perhaps if it had, I might look more favourably back on these sets. But Beware the City of Illusions falls short and makes the previous sets feel like a missed opportunity.

Maybe they’ll be sets that I rediscover in coming years, but for now, I think like the Doctor at the end of this one, I’ll try to forget they ever happened, no matter how impressive the cover art is!