Doctor Who – Forty Volume 1: Review

The Fifth Doctor is my favourite Doctor! I’ve never quite been able to pin down why, but I just really took to him when I was first getting into Doctor Who. Castrovalva is also one of my favourite stories so when the news came out that Big Finish was celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Fifth Doctor, I was really excited!

Forty Volume 1 features the return of two classic villains, The Telos Cybermen and the Ice Warriors. Secrets of Telos sees the Fifth Doctor dragged back to the events of The Tomb of the Cybermen and God of War explores some Viking values while throwing in Adric and Ice Warriors.

Towards the end of the last year, Big Finish was slowly fading out their monthly range, which featured trilogies of adventures for certain Doctors and companions and began to replace them with box sets of adventures. For the Fifth Doctor, this sort of began with Wicked Sisters but Forty is the real start for his box sets. Of course, the problem with box sets is that you very often have to find an over-arching storyline to keep things interesting. Here, the Fifth Doctor finds himself being pulled along his timeline. This version of the Doctor comes between Four to Doomsday and Kinda, pulled forwards in time, he finds himself travelling with Tegan and Nyssa shortly after Arc of Infinity.

This is where Secrets of Telos kicks off, with the TARDIS arriving in the hold of the ship the survivors from Tomb of the Cybermen had fled Telos in. For Big Finish, this is about the third sequel to Tomb they have done, but it’s miles better than their previous lacklustre attempt with Return to Telos for the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Author Matt Fitton does a great job here though, thanks to his use of the original characters, though this adventure doesn’t take place on Telos, instead of on another planet in the Telos system.

Things unfold as you’d expect, with Tegan and Nyssa finding a Cyber-tomb while the Doctor and Professor Parry, this time played Davison’s old co-star, Christopher Timothy, come up against someone trying to revive the Cybermen, played by the ever-dependable Barbara Flynn. While the first half sees the Doctor and company trying to escape a rocket invaded by Cybermats, things ramp up in the second act, with Fitton making sure to keep the dynamic between time-displaced Doctor and companions interesting with Tegan and Nyssa having to keep Adric’s death a secret. The recreation of these 60s Cybermen works brilliantly with that warbly voice used to great and often creepy effect.

With the reveal at the end that the Doctor now knows Adric’s fate, he finds himself at odds in the next outing, God of War, which sees him return to the past and face his friend who soon has a date with destiny. Of course, these things get put on the back burner as the Ice Warriors quickly make their presence known. At first, I thought this was a really long four-part story, until about halfway through and realised it is a two-part outing, made famous throughout the Fifth Doctor era.

The Viking setting is a great time to explore, a period they have only ever looked at twice in the show’s history, with The Time Meddler and then The Girl Who Died. Of course, being a two-part story, it does mean that in some respects the story has to be over before it can even begin, and with time-displaced Doctors and future knowledge, there is a lot to cram into one short story.

Author Sarah Grochala does a great job of handling things though and making sure each character gets enough to do. And she makes sure to throw in some needed and interesting historical facts, looking at the Viking women when they are divorced from their husbands, sailing away and finding their own home. How much of it is true I’m not sure, but I’ll have fun finding out as I love learning about history. But it’s a good way of explaining that help won’t be coming and helps give the side characters some interesting backstory that a relatively short story like this probably wouldn’t have time to explain to us otherwise.

Much like Secrets of Telos, God of War sticks relatively closely to The Ice Warriors, with a crashed spaceship being found in ice and the warriors gradually being brought around. Then their plans for global domination are discovered. It’s about as close to a bog-standard Doctor Who plots as you can get but it works, thanks to the shortened runtime. Luckily, Grochala makes us care about the characters we encounter along the way, and her handling of this TARDIS team is top-notch, though some of the ways Adric comes across here really makes it hard to care that in a few episodes time he’ll die. I know that sounds harsh but I was sitting listening thinking that he is going to get no sympathy from me if he carries on like this!

For the Fifth Doctor, now knowing the fate of Adric, he is left in an interesting position, not wanting his young friend to die, but slowly pushing him towards his fate because it will always happen. In terms of the story, as much as Adric annoyed me at times in this story, there is an element of sadness knowing that he will never get the chance to really grow up and prove himself. I’ll be really interested to see where this plot thread goes in the second volume out next month!

The main cast is on fire throughout this set. You really wouldn’t know that this was recorded from their homes during the last COVID lockdown. Peter Davison continues to prove why he’s such a great Doctor, an incarnation that comes across as human but has to deal with some truly sad and alien situations. Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton continue to shine on audio, Big Finish once again proving how they can take companions that are rarely at the top of people’s top-companion lists and make them excellent.

Fielding and Sutton really shone in their scenes together in Secrets of Telos trying to keep the knowledge of Adric’s death from the Doctor, while it was obvious that Adric was no longer around. And Matthew Waterhouse feels like he’s never been away from the role, despite only coming back in recent years. His take on Adric feels a little more grown-up but still completely in keeping with the character we knew on screen. And I appreciate Adric getting a few more adventures, despite him not being one of my favourite companions.

Forty Volume 1 was a great way to kick off the anniversary of the Fifth Doctor. As standalone stories, they work and are very enjoyable but they are excellent with the time-displacement aspects of them, something I’m looking forward to, presumably, being revealed in the next set. With the Autons revealed to be one of the monsters in the next set as well as some of the returning characters including the Brigadier and Turlough, it should be a great celebratory epic!