The Four Doctors is a Doctor Who audio drama from Big Finish Productions and is a pretty decent multi-Doctor episode, although there have been better. It is written by Peter Anghelides and directed by Nicholas Briggs and Ken Bentley. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann all star as the Doctor. Nicholas Briggs also returns to voice the Daleks. The other members of the guest cast are David Bamber, Ellie Burrow, Nogel Lambert, andAlex Mallinson.
There is a vault with a dangerous secret, and the Fifth Doctor has discovered something called temporal leakage at this station run by biomechanoids known as the Jariden. A Dalek attack force is on the way, and a Jariden finds himself swept up in the Doctor’s timeline where he encounters several different versions of the Time Lord.
There are some interesting directions this story takes that differ from other multi-Doctor stories. The Doctors don’t really spend much time together other than kind of a tacked on final scene, which I am sorry to give that much of a spoiler. Most of the story deals with this Jariden military officer who is accompanied by a wrecked Special Weapons Dalek and pursued by the Dalek Prime. He encounters the Doctor in different incarnations as he gets swept up by some breaches in Time.
The main plot idea is solid enough, and the performances are more than acceptable. I guess I was a little let down that Anghelides felt the need to have the Doctors interact with each other without actually working together to solve a crisis. I just believe that one must have a multi-Doctor adventure, let him argue with himself and deal with the threat. If Anghelides wanted to have the Doctor work on some piece of the problem from various points in his timeline, that would be just fine because it would be something not really experienced by the audience all that much.
Doctor Who has a lot of silliness imbedded into its DNA anyway, but generally the multi-Doctor episodes tended to stretch that absurdity to the limit. They just are not usually written that well. Big Finish does do a better job with this type of episode than the television series could manage
Still, most of the major elements in this episode work quite well. Even if I feel the Daleks are a little overused, I didn’t mind their appearance here. The Doctors were still great. The main story had some creativity, and there were even a few profound moments that were kind of moving.
Even if I would have preferred a different final scene, it’s still an enjoyable episode on the whole.
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