Wirrn Dawn, by Nicholas Briggs (Big Finish Audio)

In the grim darkness of the far future, humanity is at war with the Wirrn. The Eighth Doctor and Lucie sort of get involved...

This is the first Eighth Doctor audio that I have listened to, unless you count Paul McGann's appearance in Survival of the Fittest. I thought he gave a reasonable performance, even if not the most inspiring Doctoral performance I have heard.

Deep down every Doctor Who fan wants to see old monsters return and so a story like this has an obvious appeal. Being on audio, we are freed from the disadvantage of seeing unconvincing monster props.

The CD booklet contains some really good artwork. This is thankfully not the only good thing about this drama. It does a great job of capturing the horror and destruction of a space war and has plenty of menace and visceral horror (without the realistic violence and gore of Project: Twilight). Starship Troopers is an obvious influence, but this is rather more serious. There is wonderful dramatic tension created when the female military officer harvested by Wirrn begs for death.

Call me a bit gung ho, but would a battle between giant bugs and humans last so long? I mean, the Wirrn can't manufacture bombs or bazookas can they?

This story is far from perfect. It is absurd that the Doctor should be puzzled by what an 'Indig' is. The characters are rather one-dimensional. Worst of all, the Doctor does very little in this story. I think most listeners, even those who like a darker side to the Doctor, will be troubled by the Doctor's too easy acceptance of the idea of humans being sacrificed to the Wirrn. Surely he has always hated the idea of individuals being sacrificed for the good of the many? It seems higly likely that the sacrificial system would be abused, with the disabled and those who are unpopular (for whatever reason) being given up to the Wirrn.

Sheridan Smith is not at all bad as Lucie, but her character is not terribly interesting in this drama. I have never heard any of her other stories, so I know little of her character in general.

A Plea to Big Finish

Dear nice people at Big Finish,

I very much enjoy your Doctor Who audio dramas. They are really enjoyable and totally recreate the feeling of watching a classic Doctor Who serial.

However, there is one thing missing.

What is going on with all these regional accents and very working-class sounding actors? Doctor Who does not sound like that at all. We all know that apart from the odd Mummerset peasent and a few cockney UNIT soldiers, everybody in classic Doctor Who is supposed to sound posh.

It would really improve my enjoyment as an enthusiastic listener to hear a bit less of these strange northern accents and a bit more proper BBC English. If we Dr. Who fans can accept that Ace comes from a London council estate while sounding incredibly posh, I am sure we can accept a few more aliens and far future human colonists sounding a bit more Home Counties.

So please can we have more received pronunciation in Big Finish Doctor Who dramas?

Thank you very much

Timewyrm: Revelation, by Paul Cornell (Virgin New Adventure)

Battling the Timewym, both the Seventh Doctor and Ace confront their inner demons.

You could say this is the only book in the Timewyrm series that really matters. Exodus was a great novel, but it did not really deal much with the Timewyrm herself and in Genesys she was a fairly uninteresting and standard alien villain. In Revelation, the Timewyrm is given real significance as both a character and a concept. In this novel, the Timewyrm is portrayed very much like the female version of Kronos the Kronovore in The Time Monster, only with a good deal more malevolence.

The New Adventures promised us stories that were "too broad and deep for the small screen." Timewyrm: Revelation finally delivers on that promise. Genesys gave us a child prostitute and open references to sex, Exodus gave us a much vaster scale of events and Apocalypse gave us nothing of the sort. Revelation takes us into the very mind of the Doctor, challenging his entire raison d'etre. This is the first truly 'Rad' Doctor Who novel.

None of the first three Timewyrm novels had taken much lead from the last season of the television series, apart from Exodus' emphasis on the manipulative side of the Seventh Doctor. In contrast, Revelation fundamentally grounds itself in the ideas and concepts explored in Season 26, with the inner torment and angst of Ace and the sinister scheming of the Seventh Doctor. We see the conflict between Ace and the Doctor become increasingly volatile, preparing the way for their parting in Cornell's next novel. Like Season 26, Revelation deals with the theme of Ace growing up and becoming a mature woman.

As with Seasons 25 and 26, Ace has to confront a lot of inner demons; a childhood bully, the agonies of growing up, her relationship with the manipulative Doctor and the shallowness of the culture she has come from. Yet this story is much more about the Doctor's inner demons, for much of it takes place within his own mind.

Timewyrm: Revelation is a story of a confrontation between the Doctor's past mistakes and his conscience. It is a story of his redemption. In the realm of his mind, he encounters ghosts of Katarina, Sara Kingdom and Adric, who identify themselves respectively as the First, Second and Third Sacrifices. He also meets ghosts of the Eocene reptiles. These echoes of the past serve to remind him of his failures. We also meet his Third incarnation who reveals the shocking revelation that the leader of the Fascist England in Inferno was an alternate version of himself. The Doctor's interaction with Ace reveal his continued involvement in suspect schemes.

It is Ace who helps to redeem the Doctor. She recognises the darkness of the path he is walking and journeys into the deepest part of his mind to free his conscience. Beautifully, the Doctor's conscience turns out to be the Fifth Doctor, who is tied to the world tree (a very 80s Doctor Whoish reference to Norse mythology) and suffering from a grievous wound to his side. This revelation of the Doctor's moral self is so inspired. The Doctor finally get's to choose "another way." Instead of sacrificing Ace in a bid to destroy the Timewyrm he traps the Timewyrm in the body of a newborn child, giving her the chance to live an human life and to learn a better way.

Timewyrm: Revelation is such a beautiful story. It takes on so many literary references and allusions to mythology. Dante's Divine Comedy is one very prominent source. It has a deep spirituality to it. Revelation is definitely one of the most deeply moving of the New Adventures. It also features a wonderful recreation of the Fourth Doctor in the person of the ferryman.

Planet of the Giants

The original TARDIS crew in a microcosmos.

This story fits in to it's era rather oddly. Not only is it the unusual length of three episodes, but it is neither an historical or "science fiction" First Doctor story. It is also, along with The War Machines, the only First Doctor story set on contemporary Earth after An Unearthly Child.

Despite the lightweight nature of the plot, there are very clear nods to the future of the show. It has an obvious environmental theme, something that would be common in the Pertwee era. Forrester is a kind of villain we don't see much of in the Hartnell era, the self-serving, ruthless capitalist. Yet his type would become very common in the show from the Third Doctor era onwards.

The sets are very well-designed despite not everything being quite to scale. Most of the guest cast performances are unfortunately mediocre. Perhaps it is also disappointing that they never get to interact with the regulars. The regular cast are on top form, even if Carol Anne Ford ends up moaning and whining yet again. Barbara's refusal to admit that she has been affected by the pesticide comes across as a little odd.

At the end of the story, Forrester is led away by the cops. Had this been the Hinchcliffe era, we can be sure that he would have died a gruesome death, probably through his own pesticide. I prefer stories like this where the bad guys don't get killed. There is often far too much death in Doctor Who.

Season 8

Despite disliking Pertwee, I quite like Season 7. That had been a very experimental period in the history of the show in which a rather gritty realistic approach had been taken. Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks felt that this approach would not chime well with the viewers and so quite a number of changes were introduced. UNIT were given a new set of uniforms and were changed from being a serious military unit into a sort of Dad's Army. The Brigadier was increasingly used for comic relief. The Doctor became increasingly chummy with him, yet also became even more arrogant and obnoxious.

Liz Shaw had been a bit boring, but she was intelligent and independent minded. This was not to the taste of Letts and Dicks, who decided to replace her with a companion who was rather less intelligent. Thus, we see the arrival in this season of Jo Grant, who is in my opinion the worst of all Doctor Who companions. Yes, Adric was annoying but teenagers often are. In Jo Grant we see the spectacle of a grown woman who talks and acts like a thirteen year old girl. She was an infantilised companion to accompany the infantilising of the show.

Season 8 also introduced Roger Delgado's Master. Letts and Dicks liked him so much that they stuck him in every story of this season. You might think even the Master deserved some annual leave. To be fair, Roger Delgado gave us some brilliant performances and few Whovians can fail to enjoy the camp fun he brought. However, in my judgment, the introduction of the Master was a bad move. In this season it lead to some rather lazy storywriting and with every appearance, his schemes became ever more ridiculous. Another problem of the Master was that he in effect acted as the Doctor's evil alter ego and this forced the Doctor to become a less ambiguous, more saintly figure. Thus, we had the Pertwee Doctor always moralizing and acting as a white knight in shining armour. The Third Doctor could never bring himself to find a final solution to the Master problem. We can well imagine that the First and Second Doctor would have made sure the Master died a violent death.

This season had some reasonable stories, but on the whole was rather lacking the inspired quality of the previous season:

Terror of the Autons- 6/10
Arguably it has a tighter plot than Spearhead from Space, but lacks the impact of the first Auton story. It also introduced an element of gimmickiness, with everyday objects becameing killing machines. RT Davies unfortunately had the idea that this was the way to do Doctor Who and gave us too many of such gimmicks in the BBC Wales series.

Mind of Evil- 5/10
This has something of the gritty realism of Season 7 and has UNIT acting as an effective military unit. However, it has an absurdly complex plot that makes little sense. The Doctor is incredibly unpleasent in this story, his worst moment being when he completely humiliates the Brigadier and boasts of being a friend of Mao Tse-Tung.

Claws of Axos- 7/10
The plot is a little silly, but it is a pretty decent production. The Axons are a well-conceived alien menace and their ship is one of the finest sets in the history of the show.

Colony in Space- 1/10
Oh dear. This has got to be the most boring story in Doctor Who ever.

The Daemons- 6/10
This story has some good ideas that were very suited to the earthbound setting, but it lacks the vital capacity to terrify. The ending is really stupid.

The Sea Devils

"He used to be a friend of mine once... a very good friend. In fact, you might almost say we were at school together."

I love the idea that the Doctor and other renegade Time Lords were at the Academy together. You can just imagine the scene- The Doctor trying to prove he's cleverer than Borusa, the Master pulling the Rani's pigtails, Runcible hiding a porno mag in his textbook, Drax making paper spaceships and Borusa holding his head in despair and thinking that going into politics would be a pushover after this.

Fans of the Pertwee era tend to rate this story very highly, considering it to be a classic of it's era. Those who are less favourable in their opinion of the Pertwee years have strong reservations about the merits of The Sea Devils. As somebody with a very low opinion of the Pertwee era, I find myself in the latter category. I think this is an extremely disappointing story. It is not without some great moments, but fails to deliver on the whole. It is well produced and has an awful lot of action, as well as some great moments with the Master, but very little that could be described as thoughtful or intelligent.




The Sea Devils is often described as a sequel to Doctor Who and the Silurians because it features an aquatic variation of the prehistoric creatures in that story. A sequel needs to justify itself with some fresh ideas and variations on the original story. The Sea Devils has the Master and it has a maritime setting, but this is all. There is not much exploration of the fascinating idea of the Eocenes as the original inhabitants of the earth. The race memory thing that was so important in Doctor Who and the Silurians is noticeably absent.

The Sea Devils is far too long. Doctor Who and the Silurians was also a very long story, but each episode made a real impact and pushed a complex and effective plot. The plot of The Sea Devils does not sustain itself so well. The material is fairly strong up until the death of Trenchard and the end of the prison plot. After that point the story gets boring very quickly.

Like many other Pertwee stories, The Sea Devils spends an awful lot of time indulging the lead actors love of different modes of transport. The Doctor is not James Bond. It does get tedious to see Pertwee pretending he is an older version of 007. The story also spends a lot of time acting as a recruitment poster for the navy. There is a clear message-

"The Royal Navy is cool! Doctor Who says sign up now, kids!"

On the other hand, as somebody who is generally hawkish on foreign policy and a bit right-wing, it is refreshing to see an alien menace that can easily be dispatched by our armed forces. There is never any sense that the Sea Devils are any real threat to our Queen and country and we are left in no doubt that our forces could wipe them out of the water with a few coordinated missile strikes. For once, mankind actually has the upper hand. This might make a nice change, but it does not fit at all with the Quatermass-like ethos of Doctor Who and the Silurians, where an ancient alien intelligence was a clear menace to humanity.

The Eocene 'Sea Devil' creatures are well designed. Terrance Dicks cruelly mocked their netting tunics, but I think they look good. The problem is not with the appearance of the Sea Devils, but the way they are presented. Only one of them speaks. They are summoned and directed by the Master's radio device, which rather makes them seem like zombies. There is a real lack of personality and identity about these creatures, in great contrast to the Eocenes in Doctor Who and the Silurians. For a change, these monsters are not immune to bullets, though given his fact it is surprising none of them are killed or seriously wounded in the firefight at the prison.

I am not a fan of the Master. I think giving the Doctor an evil alter ego was a bad idea, as it just makes him into a shining white knight in armour, a figure of unambiguous saintliness. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that Roger Delgado steals this show and makes it worth watching. He has some wonderful moments, his swordfight with the Doctor, his exasperation at Trenchard's inability to get his joke and his laughter after pretending to have reformed. The Master might have been a bad idea of Letts and Dicks, but he is good camp fun.




Trenchard is also a great element in this story. Clive Morton really captures the part of a stuffy old colonial governor with a paranoid tendency. There is a real sense of tragedy in the way his patriotism has been exploited and manipulated by the Master. It's great the way the Master sends him to distract Captain Hart by harping on about his golf tournament.

As with many Pertwee stories, there is a pompous civil servant/ minister type to act pig-headed and overbearing. This time it's parliamentary private secretary Walker. His character is unfortunately far too caricatured to be convincing, particularly when he is revealed to be an horrendous coward. He is given some terrible dialogue.

In this story and in others of the season, we have that awful Jo Grant woman to torment us. She really was the worst companion, far more irritating than Adric in my opinion. Thankfully, she is a little more bearable in this story than in many of her other serials.

Please don't be fooled into thinking this story is a classic.

Revelation of the Daleks

D.J. : Is that your real accent?
Peri: I should hope so!

Despite the title, it's not really about the Daleks, is it? It is a story about Davros, how he worms his way into an human society, manipulates others and attempts to build a new power base.

Revelation of the Daleks is a very good story that suffers from one major flaw; the fact that the Doctor plays so little part in the plot. All of the major events in the story would have happened without his being there. He is effectively reduced to being a bystander, much like in an Hartnell historical. In Caves of Androzani, the Doctor essentially took a passive role in the plot, getting captured, having to rescue Peri and then dying and regenerating. Nevertheless, he acted as a catalyst for the story. His mere arrival set in motion planet-shaking events. I think it is this irrelevance of the Doctor in Revelation of the Daleks that keeps it from being a classic like Caves of Androzani.

Despite this flaw, Revelation of the Daleks is a very good production. It evokes a very surreal, dream-like atmosphere. This is helped enormously by the snowy weather. This dreaminess makes the revelation of the mutant in the glass Dalek seem like the stuff of nightmares.

Like Snakedance before it, Revelation of the Daleks really creates the sense of an actual world inhabited by real people. The sets are a jumble of different styles, but this is much more true to life than the uniformity we usually see in Doctor Who sets. There is a sense of scale in the exterior shots of Tranquil Repose. We also get a bizarre cast of characters from all walks of life. The irrelevance of most of these to the plot about Davros and the Daleks makes this seem as though we are seeing a snapshot of the turbulent life in this future epoch. There is no real point to Davros' manipulating of Tasembeka and her subsequent murder of Jobel, except to provide an incredible piece of drama and a vision of a violent, nasty world.

William Gaunt plays the part of Orcini with an incredible stiffness and self-importance; yet this is so true to the character. His character evokes such a sense of world-weariness, yet he is resolved to the discipline of an inflexible code of honour. With his affectionate relationship with his squire, Bostock, he seems so much like a Robert Holmes creation. Or a character from a Shakespeare play. He is also really bad-ass with his leather outfit and casual flick knife killing of Kara. The faulty mechanical leg is a nice touch too!

Alexei Sayle comes across as quite deliberately annoying in his D.J. voice. What is clever about the character is the way that he is revealed to be a very shy, nervous chap. It is rather tragic the way he is shut up alone in his studio with only his records for company and then to die a tragic death. I was quite surprised at the quality of Sayle's acting after his quasi-standup performances in The Young Ones.

Terry Molloy really shines in this story. He gives a chilling performance as Davros that could rival that of Michael Wisher in Genesis of the Daleks. His moments with Tasembeka are particularly impressive. It is nice to see Eleanour Bron in Doctor Who again after her cameo appearance in City of Death. She is awfully good in the role of Kara. Does anybody else think her costume is awfully similar to that of Lady Adrasta in The Creature from the Pit?

I am not sure I like the idea of the Daleks being created from humans. Daleks are not Cybermen. The whole point of Daleks is that they are totally removed from any connection with humanity. I think Daleks created from human beings compromises this.

As with other Eric Saward stories there is an awful lot of violence in Revelation of the Daleks. I think he sometimes went too far and his habit of killing off nearly every non-regular character can get very irritating. However, I find the excessive violence in the Saward era easier to handle than the violence of the Hinchcliffe era. The violence of Saward stories might be more realistic but it is an essential part of his vision of a brutal, amoral cosmos in the far future. Saward was attempting to adopt a moral posture towards the violence in the show. On the other hand, Hincliffe seemed to include cruelty and death simply to arouse a morbid curiosity in the viewer. Hincliffe might not have gone so far in the realism, but he had a clear desire to shock and push the boundaries of what was acceptable. I find a lot of what Hinchcliffe introduced in Seventies Doctor Who to be rather tasteless. Doctor Who fans are far too quick to criticise Saward for excessive violence, while celebrating the torture and death in Hinchfliffe stories while sneering at Mary Whitehouse's sometimes legitimate criticisms.

Along with Earthshock, Revelation of the Daleks represents the best of Saward's script writing. I don't think it can called a classic, but it is undoubtedly one of the stronger stories of the Colin Baker period.

The One Doctor, by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman (Big Finish Audio)

The Sixth Doctor and Mel arrives on a planet in the far future to find that the wonderful time traveller known as 'the Doctor' and his pretty assistant Sally-Anne have saved the day.

Whatever people say, I think Colin Baker was a great Doctor. Despite his being sacked after two seasons, Big Finish thankfully granted us the chance to hear him again in audio and in this medium he really has the chance to shine. In this audio play, Colin Baker is given the opportunity to display his aptitude for comedy, something that he was not able to display so much during his television stint.

The One Doctor is a full-on comedy. This is something that the television series never did. Even the most comedic serials such as The Two Doctors and The Pirate Planet had plenty of serious elements. In fact, Delta and the Bannermen one of the stories that comes closest to comedy was probably envisioned as a much more serious story. One could even argue that the generally more po-faced Star Trek: Deep Space 9 came closer to full-on comedy than Doctor Who. I am all for experimentation with different styles of Doctor Who, so I think it was worth the effort. I can't help thinking though that an attempt to pastiche Doctor Who would work better in a more serious story, which I would argue is what The Two Doctors comes close to doing, though with an anarchic sense of satire. I would argue that the comedy in Bang-Bang-a-Boom! actually works better because it is aimed at Star Trek rather than Doctor Who, effectively neutralising the incongruity of it.

The One Doctor is funny, if not hiliariously funny. It is a lightweight story that you can enjoy and pick up all cool fan references in. The central concept of a conman impersonating the Doctor is a great one and this element works pretty well, even if the story get's a bit tired halfway through.

The plot structure closely follows The Keys of Marinus, with the characters splitting up on a quest to receive certain objects. Thus, we have three very lightweight mini-adventures. One of them has been rather upstaged by the BBC Wales series, though thankfully this story felt no need to make the Anne Robinson send-up so obvious (though Jane Goddard does a great impression). I am not a big fan of Matt Lucas' work, but it's nice to hear him in this drama. I would say pretty much all the cast of this story do a fantastic job.

It is lovely to hear Bonnie Langford alongside Colin Baker again. They worked so well together in season 23, so it was such a shame that they only had two televised stories. Big Finish have done their work well and enabled us to relive that era of the show. Bonnie is such a great actress. Admittedly, she does sound rather different to how she sounded on t.v. However, in this story she comes a lot closer to the television Mel than she does in some of her other Big Finish stories. Mel in The Juggernauts almost comes across as a different character to that of seasons 23 and 24. The One Doctor does not miss the chance to send-up the character:

Sally-Anne: Drop the goody-two shoes act!
Mel: What act?

Mel's 'Bush's never give' speech is delightful, even if you can see the punchline coming.

This story is set in what the Doctor describes as the 'vulgar end of time,' when everything has been explored, everything that can be known is known and there is no longer any mystery about anything. The Doctor hates this period and seldom travels this far into the future. This is probably the same period as that of Delta and the Bannermen, as in that story all the alien races seem to know about the Doctor and they all posess time travel.

Timewyrm: Apocalypse, by Nigel Robinson (Virgin New Adventure)

The Seventh Doctor and Ace pursue the Timewyrm into the far future, towards the end of the life of the universe.

The cover is quite good. It looks like a mass market science fiction novel of the sort published in the 1980s. The sort that invariably has a better cover than the story inside.

Timewyrm: Apocalypse is one of the weaker New Adventure novels. It attempts to tell a fairly old fashioned Doctor Who story, but ends up feeling rather little uninspiring and predictable. What is remarkable is how different this is to Nigel Robinson's second NA novel, Birthright. That was not only a far more interesting and better written story, but which also experimented more with the possibilities of what a Doctor Who novel can do.

Timewyrm Apocalypse is written in far more readable prose than Transit or Lucifer Rising, however it very much feels like reading a Target novelisation (and the author had written a few of those).

Like the previous novel, Timewyrm: Exodus, the Timewyrm arc is kept in the background. While Exodus was a great novel, it was only in the concluding part of the story arc that the Timewyrm emerges as an interesting narrative concept.

The idea of the Seventh Doctor receiving a warning from his second incarnation. It is interesting that three out of the four Timewyrm books incorporate a multi-Doctor element. I think this shows John Peel and Nigel Robinson's lack of interest in pursuing the Seventh Doctor's character and relationships. Thankfully in the Timewyrm conclusion, Paul Cornell starts to address the issues brought up in season 26, while still incorporating the multi-Doctor element.

The plot of this story takes on obvious influences from The Macra Terror, The Krotons and Revelation of the Daleks.

The Aztecs

In an attempt to alter the timeline, a being from the far future masquerades as an Aztec goddess.

There have been a fair few advanced beings masquerading as deities in the Doctor Who universe- Magnus Greel, Cessair of Diplos, Sutekh, the Jaggoroth, the Mandragora Helix and that wicked creature, Barbara Wright! It is ironic that in this early story, Barbara, who is portrayed as far more noble and heroic than the Doctor, is doing exactly the sort of thing that Doctor Who villains do! The villain of this story, Tlotoxl shows the sort of sceptical and questioning mind that would usually be celebrated in Doctor Who. I think this adds to the sense that season 1 is so enjoyable because it differs in so many ways from the very tightly defined ethos of later Doctor Who.

The story has a very melancholic mood. Nothing has really been acheived at the end. Barbara attempted to do something incredible in changing a whole culture, but discovered the hopelessness of this task. The Doctor and Cameca part with not a little sadness and Autloc's life is torn apart. This downbeat ending really sets the story apart from others across the history of the show. In my opinion, Genesis of the Daleks would have benefited from a similar ending. It seems manifestly obvious that when the Fourth Doctor claimed that he had set back the progress of the Daleks he was talking nonsense (probably to cheer Sarah and Harry up). The Daleks were hardly going to have too much trouble clearing away a bit of rubble. The Doctor had attempted to do what Barbara did here and like her, he failed.

Despite the melancholy tone, a good deal of the plot has a somewhat comedic structure with a lot of coincidence and irony. There is a certain of comedy of manners in Barbara's brilliantly scripted exchanges with Tlotoxl. Susan's preference of torture and gruesome execution over forced marriage seems (probably unintentionally funny). It's not like she is being forced to marry an ugly old man, and the bridegroom-to-be was going to be offered as a sacrificial victim anyway, so she would be a widow pretty quickly.

The Doctor's brief affair with Cameca at first seems grossly out of character. We never again see the Doctor falling in love in the classic series. Yet given what we see of the Doctor in his first season this makes sense. There are two things that are distinctive about the First Doctor. The first is that he is, contrary to appearances, a younger version of his future selves. Contrary to the impression given by The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors, the First Doctor is not older and wiser than the others. He is consistently shown to be less moral, less responsible and less emotionally mature (except when compared with the Sixth Doctor). If the Fifth Doctor is an 'old man in a young man's body,' then the First Doctor is a teenager in an old man's body. It should not thus be a surprise if he takes a woman on an emotional ride. Secondly, he is unlike the others, a family man. We don't know anything about the Doctor's sexual partner or children, but if we accept Susan at face value (there is no evidence whatsoever that Susan is only an adopted 'granddaughter'), then the Doctor has had a family (the novels Cold Fusion and The Infinity Doctors offer an whole backstory about the Doctor's marriage to a nurse called Patience, but this is of debatable canonicity). The later Doctors may have forgotten the joys of love and marriage, but they are a more recent memory to this one.




It does seem a bit odd that Barbara, an historian and apparent expert in Aztec history, believes that the abandonment of human sacrifice might save Aztec civilization from the Conquistadors. Surely, she must know that the conquest of South America was motivated but greed for gold and the ambition to create a new Christian empire on the continent, not moral disapproval of Aztec sacrificial practices. The Conquistadors were hardly men who were ashamed of bloodshed!

The Doctor tells us in this story that one cannot change history. I think it is clear by this that he means it is impossible, rather than that it is morally wrong. There is never any suggestion that any of the actions of the other members of the TARDIS crew could affect history. Given how fragile the timeline appears to be in Big Finish stories, one might imagine that Susan attending an Aztec school could easily have major implications. The Doctor is trying to show Barbara the futility of her actions. In my opion the premise that history in Doctor Who is immutable is the 'correct' one. I think it is unfortunate that later stories suggested that history could easily be altered. I am particularly concerned by Steven Moffatt's belief that Doctor Who is all about funny things happening to the timeline and parallel versions of history. I think that is a complete distorion of the ethos of the show.

The Aztecs is a great story. Given the loss of so many historical serials, we can be thankful that this one survived.