Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

Spoiler-free verdict: A proof of concept for Doctor Who audios that sells the concept much less effectively than one would hope, though with occasional hints of the better things to come.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

Listening to The Sirens of Time in 2019 is an odd experience. Obviously, it’s something Big Finish want to encourage, given they’re commemorating it with a six-hour epic homage later this month (and yes, I did pre-order that the moment it was announced, like the good little consumer I am). But it feels in no way prepared to hold up to present day scrutiny. To be honest, it’s not very good, but I also feel a bit bad for criticizing it.

I should probably stress first, for those who don’t know, that while this is the first Big Finish Doctor Who production, it is not their first audio work in that world. The company began with an adaptation of Paul Cornell’s novel Oh No It Isn’t in 1998, followed by an entire series of Bernice Summerfield novel adaptations, the strength of which eventually got them Doctor Who rights. Doctor Who audio drama was also not a new thing at the time: Nicholas Briggs had himself worked both on the Audio-Visuals, a series of fan audios, some of which were later adapted for Big Finish, and on BBV productions, audio dramas which used Doctor Who actors and licensed properties but lacked the rights to the show proper. Failings of The Sirens of Time, then, can’t be chalked up to inexperience. So what is going on here?

Well, first, I should probably outline the failings. The Sirens of Time is conceptually misjudged, a largely tedious piece of Time Lord fanwank and banal science fiction tropes which fails to amount to a case for Big Finish to take up the reins. To be blunt, any story opening by focusing on Coordinator Vansell of the Celestial Intervention Agency is going to be fighting an uphill battle to be interesting. The structure itself is admittedly solid, three episodes with different Doctors on different adventures, followed by a fourth together, providing the fannish multi-Doctor pleasure and tying plot threads together. But the concerns of those episodes is rather telling: only one of them is historical and set on Earth, and no contemporary material is found, the rest being far-flung sci-fi. This is a story hinging on a number of dud big ideas, namely the Temperon, the Knights of Velyshaa, and the Sirens themselves. That’s not to say these couldn’t work, but they’re never given the grounding to. The multi-Doctor approach also comes without any involvement from companions, losing a human touch, or, for that matter, a female one.

There’s only two women in this entire production, and neither comes off well. Maggie Stables would go on to be one of the greatest parts of Big Finish, but her character here is disgraceful, an unsuccessful comedy of silly voices and bodily functions who gets labeled by one character as a “mad old bitch” without much pushback from anyone, not even the Doctor. But in comparison to the other woman, she comes off well, because the other woman turns the surrogate companion role into a source of great and terrible evil: the Siren of Time. I should stress, I am not attributing a hate of women to Nicholas Briggs, who has done many wonderful, even feminist, things, some of which I plan to review soon, and seems to be a genuinely good egg. But by clearing all female space in this story to make the companion evil, it comes across less as a clever twist and more as hateful derision. The early joke about not twisting her ankle feels far more dismissive than it could have, for example. And the resolution of the story, leaving her to die rather than be saved by the Doctor, misses tragic and lands on downright uncomfortable. This shouldn’t be too shocking an outcome, it’s the inevitable result of grafting in the myth of the siren, a tale of fearing the seductive power of women, uncritically into science fiction. But in practice, it feels like a fanboy telling women to get off his turf so he can play with his spacemen action figures.

So why do I feel bad criticizing it? Well, 90s fandom was a different time. Nicholas Briggs has shown himself to be capable of better. And Sirens does accomplish some things well. I have to compliment the second episode in particular, a pleasant historical with the wonderful concept of guest characters who can’t understand each other as a result of the language barrier, despite the Doctor and audience understanding both due to TARDIS translation. And as mentioned previously, the structure is genuinely solid. It also accomplishes what this story needs to: showing that Big Finish can assemble something that can be comfortably considered Doctor Who and give solid material to Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy. It’s also particularly notable that the story chooses to hinge its climax on the Sixth Doctor; Big Finish would go on to gain a reputation for the work done to redeem his character after his (rightfully) derided TV era, and here, the violence of his era is redefined as a pragmatism that sets him apart and can occasionally be heroic. I’m not entirely fond of that; there can often be a tendency to revel in the grimdark of nominally pragmatic heroes. But here, it works just well enough to state that Big Finish are planning greater things for his character and thinking critically about him, and sure enough, they deliver on it.

I struggle to recommend The Sirens of Time as anything more than a historical artifact, a time capsule of a company still proving itself to a far more masculine and trad fandom. After all, this is still early days, and the company had to show it could be a stable source of Doctor Who, if not necessarily the most radical or progressive one. That makes it easier not to hate. Because the glimmers of what Big Finish could be are there, even if not shown at their best, and sure enough, many stories would build on them. Not all, there will always be duds learning all the wrong lessons. But enough for me to pre-order a six hour tribute to this the moment it was announced, at the very least.

3/10