Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor never got a proper ‘finale’ adventure when the classic Doctor Who TV series came to an end, and so Big Finish Productions have tried to address that with the release of The Seventh Doctor Adventures: The Last Day – a twelve-episode story, across two box sets of full-cast audio drama.
Bringing together several of the Seventh Doctor’s best companions and villains, as well as crossing the streams on previous stories (most significantly Dark Universe and The Quantum Possibility Engine), The Last Day may have seemed like an epic finale adventure for this Doctor, as well as a way of sewing up loose ends. Part 1 certainly captured the essence of the Seventh Doctor’s TV run – summoning ideas, half ideas and vague themes into an incoherent amalgam of confusion – but does Part 2 rescue it in the end?
Those who have already waded well into Part 1 will be aware that Ace (or at least the good Ace) has gathered together both a magnificent seven and dirty dozen of assistants and villains to take on the archest of arch-manipulators and the Dark Citizens, and re-rewrite the timelines back to the way they should be. To avoid spoilers, we will leave the plot at that, but everything plus half a dozen kitchen sinks seems to have been thrown into the first six episodes, so the job of episodes 7 to 12 is to tie everything up.
Sadly, it feels like it’s left to episodes 11 and 12 to even begin that job, while the rest alternate between throwing more ideas at the audience like JJ Abrams backed into a plot corner, and infuriatingly dragging their feet. For a multiverse-spanning, timeline-hopping story, a frustrating amount of The Last Day’s action is played out in drawing room theatre-style scenes of characters relitigating their motivations and telling the listener things we already know.
Equally for most listeners, as wiggly and incoherent as the telling can get, it may also have been relatively obvious relatively early what the plot was about and where it was going. So, teasing it out and making us wait to meet the good (or non-bad) Doctor, while it has some dramatic value to begin with, really cheats the listener of the best of the fun of the story.
While Kane’s belligerence and Garundel’s sass are fun, few of the other characters really sparkle aside from the episode 1 good Ace and the more Doctor-y Doctor, who only emerges halfway through the six episodes of Part 2 (although he is a lot of fun when he gets there).
Episode 12 does at least to manage to tie up its own loose ends and is pacey enough to almost have you forgetting how bogged down previous episodes were by all the characters now finishing their plotlines with a (sometimes literal) bang.
That said, unless you have been particularly invested in all the characters from all these separate related properties (without being sufficiently invested in one to be frustrated by their lack of relative airtime), all the noise and fury leading up to this, more or less satisfying, finale mostly just carries the echoing resonance of half a dozen kitchen sinks clanging against one another in a slightly overstuffed and overstretched saga.
