I appear to be co-piloting with that dashing young me, or rather that dashing old me. Nice to see I keep improving with age.
The Fourth Doctor
This blog post contains spoilers for Once and Future: The Union. If you haven’t listened to it yet, please go away, listen and come back!
Synopsis
The Doctor responds to a distress call from his granddaughter, Susan, taking him to the Diamond Array: a huge multidimensional space station. Once there, his instability increases, as the Fourth and Eighth Doctors discover the Array’s terrible purpose.
Meanwhile, River Song has made a deadly alliance to try to save her husband. And the truth about the Doctor’s degeneration will finally be revealed.
Review
Since The Union was released this Wednesday, I’ve listened to it twice. Once in isolation, and once following listening to the whole of Once and Future, to assess how it stands in the arc. The Union does bring a sense of closure to this degeneration storyline, and I think that having listened to the arc as a whole has helped. Big Finish have attempted to make the stories as accessible as possible to allow people to dip in and out if they wish, so I think your reaction to The Union will depend on how invested you are in the storyline and the Big Finish’s spin-off media. I think that there are parts that feel more like side-steps than essentials, like A Genius for War, but The Union brings back a version of a character that we were introduced to in Two’s Company, which makes that story slightly more important in this arc than it originally appeared.
Matt Fitton has the important role of trying to tie the story threads together before next November’s Coda and manages to do so mostly successfully. This story provides us with answers that we have been waiting for since Past Lives, and whilst some of them could have been given to the audience a bit sooner, I think that The Union hangs together well and brings a solid conclusion to what has ultimately been an arc of varying quality but has never been anything less than entertaining. This story seldom lets up, and even when the Doctor and Susan find themselves back on prehistoric Earth trying to avoid the cavemen being turned into the amalgams and the planet being destroyed, the pacing does not really drop when it very easily could do. This, of course, is a callback to the very first story of Doctor Who, which I’m sure is firmly in everybody’s minds right now, especially with the news that it will not be included in the episodes being put onto BBC iPlayer. The reference is a really lovely nod to the show’s origins.
I have the focus and will that Rassilon lacks. I will crush Skaro to an emerald and wear it at my throat.
The Union
The villain of the piece is finally revealed, as the Union is the thirteenth incarnation of the Union, who has managed to find peace through meditation. It’s a really nice touch to have this version played by Maureen O’Brien, who brings this villain to life really well. The Union is utterly callous, destroying star systems to form diamonds but ultimately trying to find sympathy amongst her fellow renegade Time Lords for the regenerative dissonance they suffer. We have another version of this Time Lord here too, with the Two reappearing and being manipulated by his future self, but O’Brien really steals the show.
You live a very confusing life, River. For someone splintered across his own existence, that’s saying something.
The Eighth Doctor
The Doctor needs allies in this story more than ever, and River and Susan are ultimately essential to the resolution of the plot. I have seen some criticisms of why the Union chooses to trust River based on her assertion that she ultimately murdered the Doctor, but it does make sense. Whilst the Eleven and other incarnations have met River Song previously, quite a lot of the time she was in disguise to prevent damage to both time itself and her relationship with the Doctor and is confined to a background role in a lot of these stories. Fitton also goes far to say that in an attempt to gain peace, the Union has hollowed herself out and removed her memories of past encounters. River’s inclusion, along with Susan’s, drives the plot along. It’s lovely to have Carol Ann Ford here, especially as Matt Fitton suggests that she is the Doctor’s anchor, having been his first companion. Ford is really strong here, and it’s nice to see her act opposite a number of Doctors who she hasn’t appeared with before, especially David Tennant, but the standout is the brief moment with Stephen Noonan’s First Doctor. This moment could have come across as really saccharine but ultimately worked for me.
There are a number of Doctors in The Union, however, our central Doctors are the Fourth and Eighth Doctors. Big Finish seem to like pairing off Tom Baker and Paul McGann, even if they do not directly interact or share dialogue in this story. Both put in stellar performances though, combining perhaps the most famous incarnation of the Doctor with the one who has benefitted the most from Big Finish.
That’s the difference, you see. You’re at war with yourself, Union, in every incarnation, whereas I, I am quintessentially the Doctor.
The Fourth Doctor
This story features almost the entire contingent of the original regeneration cycle of Doctors, with the exception of Christopher Eccleston, which is perhaps not unexpected given his attitude towards multi-Doctor stories. Of course, the first three Doctors are played by Stephen Noonan, Michael Troughton and Tim Treloar, who again do competent work, whilst the War Doctor and the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors are played by Jonathon Carley and Jacob Dudman. Sadly, Dudman’s Twelfth Doctor does not live up to the rest of the impressions and interpretations of other Doctors and his Scottish accent did take me out of the story slightly. This contrasts with his Matt Smith impression, which works really well. It’s nice to work in the War Doctor too, allowing Carley’s exceptional impression to join proceedings and giving him a scene with Rufus Hound’s Monk, which really ties everything up neatly and solves why the Doctor was looking for the Monk in Past Lives.
Verdict: The Union brings the Once and Future story to a good conclusion, and I’m curious as to where Coda will go. 9/10
Cast: Paul McGann (The Eighth Doctor), Tom Baker (The Fourth Doctor), Carol Ann Ford (Susan), Alex Kingston (River Song), Stephen Noonan (The First Doctor), Michael Troughton (The Second Doctor), Tim Treloar (The Third Doctor), David Tennant (The Tenth Doctor), Jacob Dudman (The Eleventh Doctor/The Twelfth Doctor), Maureen O’Brien (The Union), Michael Maloney (Operator Zero/The Two), Rufus Hound (The Monk), Jonathan Carley (The War Doctor), Peter Davison (The Fifth Doctor), Colin Baker (The Sixth Doctor) and Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor).
Writer: Matt Fitton
Director: Ken Bentley
Producer: David Richardson
Music: Howard Carter
Release Date: 25th October 2023
Cast Notes
- Maureen O’Brien is best known in Doctor Who circles for playing First Doctor companion Vicki.
Best Quote
Noting you have told me has convinced me you are different from a thousand other tyrants and maniacs that I’ve met. And do you know what they all have in common?
Do tell.
I stopped every one of them.
The Eighth Doctor and The Union
Once and Future:
The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50
For more Eighth Doctor stories, click here.
The Impossible Blog 
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