100
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Big Finish Productions 100 |
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| Written by | Jacqueline Rayner, Robert Shearman, Joseph Lidster and Paul Cornell |  |
| Format | Compact Disc | |
| Released | 2007 |
| Starring Colin Baker and Maggie Stables |
| Synopsis: Times, dates, numbers, anniversaries... They are all essential ingredients of the Doctor's seemingly infinite travels. Here, he emerges from the TARDIS to embark upon four separate adventures, all of them fundamentally connected by the concept of '100'. He meets Mozart, visits ancient Rome, goes to a funeral and spies on himself. Sometimes, a Time Lord's life can be quite hectic. |
A Review by Thomas Tiley 12/1/25
The hundredth release in the monthly range, 100 is a very good celebration of Doctor Who as a whole, featuring the sixth Doctor and Evelyn in an anthology of four separate stories.
Starting with author Jacqueline Rayner, in 100 BC the Doctor and Evelyn visit ancient Rome and end up interrupting Julius Caesar's parents date night. After discussing the myth of Julius Caesar's caesarian birth, they decided to check up on them later, only to discover his mother giving birth to a girl instead. The Doctor and Evelyn argue about changing time/preserving the web of time in a similar style to the argument in The Aztecs, although it does seem a bit late for her and the Doctor to have this issue, as surely it must have come up before. It is a very interesting story. Evelyn's arguments that history might be made better with a female Julia instead of a male Julius and her not wanting the female version erased gives the story an interesting moral and ethic dilemma. She has a dramatic moment when she remunerates on her own illness, which gives her and the Doctor a nice sweet moment. It is also very funny, with the sixth Doctor trying to make up for disturbing the Caesars' earlier by cooking them a romantic meal that is gatecrashed by Evelyn and her catty remarks. The story ends in a neat twist and is very good, with some very funny moments.
My Own Private Wolfgang by Rob Shearman is brilliant. Set on Mozart's 100th birthday, with the old man giving a concert with the Doctor and his companion in the audience that ends in a suicide attempt... only Mozart can't die after having made a deal with a man in a mask on his deathbed. Again, this is a very funny story with lots of jokes (Evelyn can learn the plan but only if she helps clean the dishes!) and clever lines, a bit meta (the Soprano-style ending) as well, what with the plan of destroying Mozart's reputation by making him keep working until his best work is long behind him. All his new music is awful and banal and everybody is sick of it (maybe the people behind Big Finish's more recent release schedule should give this tale a listen!). A very good story that is just long enough. Any more and it would be all filler and stretched out, but this is the perfect length.
Bedtime Story by Joseph Lidster starts with a father telling a bedtime story, and what could have been twee and too sweet turns into a rather intriguing story when the matter of someone first burial is mentioned. Visiting an old student of Evelyn's, the Doctor discovers that every grandparent in the boys family dies after the new generation is conceived. It's a good story: it starts like a sort of kitchen-sink type drama about a northern family that takes a sci-fi twist when the Doctor discovers the truth. Maggie Stables gives a good performance in dual roles as companion and the shapeshifter. A slight quibble is the shapeshifter saying she was burnt at the stake (they burnt them on the continent but hanged witches in England and Wales). At first I thought it was supposed to be a clue (a history teacher like Evelyn would have known), but it's never brought up so it couldn't have been. The story has a good twist at the end, very dark and unexpected. You wouldn't want every Doctor Who story to end that way but occasionally it is all right.
100 Days of the Doctor by Paul Cornell is the final story in this collection and ranks up there with his early NA books as being exceptionally good. Infected with an intelligent, virus the Doctor has only 100 days left to track down his assassin in order to find the cure. It is an intriguing idea: a virus capable of fighting back and sabotaging the Doctor's attempts at curing himself. It reminded me slightly of the Swarm from The Invisible Enemy.
The story is basically a sort of loving appreciation of the Doctor (both Six and the other Big Finish Doctors) with the Doctor bumping into them as he tries to track down his would-be killer and giving some rather lovely comments about their adventures, some meta commentary on the series and some funny ones as well, such as Evelyn commenting on all the attractive women travelling with past and future versions of the Doctor or how she finds the other Doctors more attractive than Six. It is a very lovely story despite the subject matter of the Doctor slowly being killed by the virus. In the background extras, Colin Baker mentions the quality of the writing for his Big Finish stories and how he doesn't think he has ever done a bad one and, while I haven't heard enough Sixth Doctor Audio and so cannot say for sure, I can say this this is probably one of the best Sixth Doctor audios that I've heard.
I can recommend it. 10/10