Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Curse of Time Review

When it was revealed midway through last year, The Curse of Time looked like an interesting story. Reuniting The Fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry and working as a tribute to the Fourth Doctor’s first season which turned 50 last year. It was also a quiet little affair with little to no fanfare and no massive companion and monster reveals.

Instead it was designed to work as the finale for season 12, which was originally designed to end with Terror of the Zygons, before that story was moved to open the following season.

With the untimely deaths of Ian Marter and Elisabeth Sladen, Big Finish have never been able to explore the Series 12 era of the show in the same way they have done with other eras of the show. So Series 12 has always remained unexplored despite boasting one of the best TARDIS teams to ever set foot in the police box. With the casting of Sladen’s daughter Sadie Miller as Sarah Jane and Christopher Naylor as Harry Sullivan a few years ago, we’ve been treated to a few adventures from this era, the last few years, but nothing that really celebrated their era.

And The Curse of Time does that perfectly. Written by Jonathan Morris, who has plenty of experience in writing for this team with the BBC books years ago, he captures the voices of the main characters perfectly. Being tasked with writing a story for a gap that hadn’t existed before, Morris steps up to the plate, using the reason for the Doctor to arrive on Earth in the following story – being summoned to Earth by the Brigadier – they arrive on Earth but millions of years after the message was sent. And while Harry is desperate to get back to modern day to help solve whatever crisis the Brigadier has gotten involved in, the Doctor says they are in a time machine – urgency is relative.

Within mere moments though, Morris has perfectly captured the feel of Series 12 which boasts popular stories like The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks amongst its number and some fun and underrated stories like Robot and The Sontaran Experiment, even the rather camp Cybermen have their charm in Revenge of the Cybermen and with the Nerva Beacon or Ark playing such a big part of this series, Morris rightly decides to bring elements of those two stories back.

As usual, Tom Baker is having a ball and works brilliantly with Miller and Naylor. Miller effortlessly slipped into her mother’s shoes and brought Sarah to life instantly as did Naylor with Harry Sullivan. They are easily some of the best actors Big Finish have worked with in recent years and do such a good job with their characters that they are worth just listening to without all the bells and whistles of the rest of the story!

Set hundreds of years after the events of The Ark in Space, following the disappearance of the trio at the end of that story, The Ark became a legend while humanity turned its back on technology and became a medieval society and it isn’t hard to see how the production team at the time would have made this story in the woods somewhere with a couple of stock BBC props laid about to make the technological history of Earth visible. Morris also throws in some commentary on science vs religion and how in modern day one can’t work without the era. While this isn’t the main bulk of the story, it does make for some interesting commentary.

Morris makes sure though that the nostalgic hits of the era are perfectly captured even if it does sometimes lean a little too much into the old get captured, escape and get captured again tropes. But there are some nods to other stories from the Fourth Doctor’s era. From the robot here which feels a little similar to the K-1 robot from Robot to Mother Cassava who feels reminiscent of other elderly forces of nature the Fourth Doctor encountered, most notably Maran from The Brain of Morbius, even though the villain feels a little similar to Morbius, though Morris makes sure it doesn’t completely rip off the outline of that story.

Some people might ask for more in an anniversary celebration for the Fourth Doctor. Davros, Sutekh, the Black Guardian, The Master or Morbius could have come back to haunt him but Big Finish made the right decision of keeping this party a lot more restrained allowing us to have a nice hit of nostalgia instead of a huge space opera epic. And hearing how much Tom Baker, Sadie Miller and Christopher Naylor work well together and how much of a ball they are all having is the perfect way to celebrate 50 years of the Fourth Doctor.

Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Curse of Time is available on CD and digital download now from Big Finish.