Written by Matt Fitton and directed by Ken Bentley.

The Legacy of Time episode 4.

Spoiler-free verdict: A pleasantly zippy romp with modern aesthetics and values, filling an empty plot with strong performances and loving, varied fanservice.

Recommended pre-listening: The Sirens of Time, Lies in Ruins, The Split Infinitive, The Sacrifice of Jo Grant

***

Relative Time is fun. It’s not deep. It doesn’t have much to say. It doesn’t need to. What it does have is Georgia Tennant at her most charismatic, Peter Davison at his most snarky and bewildered, and for bonus points, John Heffernan as one of the most delightful Big Finish antagonists in their catalogue, the Nine. Throw them into a fizzy script written with love for all eras of Doctor Who, and I’d struggle not to have a good time.

The pairings in this story are just plain fun. Putting Georgia Tennant and Peter Davison together is just an obvious choice, and the father-daughter duo play a distorted version of their actual relationship with aplomb. The contrast of their classic/new values pays dividends, with Jenny’s fast-talking exhuberance and dubious morals contrasting wonderfully with the put-upon, straight-laced Fifth Doctor. The sequence of the Doctor teaching Jenny to drive is particularly genius, bringing the parent/child bonding cliche into a sci-fi setting with cheeky energy. And in parallel, the Nine gets himself his own feminist presence of a companion in Thana, who is every bit the impossible space kleptomaniac he is, while also getting in some jabs at the Nine’s absurdities and the general patriarchal presence of Time Lords. The two teams don’t face off against each other much, but their individual dynamics make each scene independently engaging.

The contrast between era values dominates the tensions of the story, and fuels both pairings. With Jenny, there’s a delightful tension between her and her Dad in terms of ethics, stemming from her TV episode but, for my money, much sharper. Where on TV she was a fairly shallow soldier learning from the Doctor, here she has a fully-formed set of values, which just happen to include stealing from the rich to build herself a time machine. It naturally ends in reasserting the Doctor as a “man who never would,” but does so in a far less messianic and all way; Jenny clearly has affection for his ideals, but remains her own person, with the story choosing to end in asserting she’s marvelous in of herself. Meanwhile, there’s some light new series jabs about from the Nine/Thana plot; Thana’s point about how the Time Lords are patriarchal is hardly a new observation, but it’s a fitting one for a story contrasting classic values with a new feminist character. And, of course, the delivery is hilarious.

In addition, the story clearly has a lot of love not just for the classic and new series, but Big Finish itself. The story is a collage of fandom, from a plot ripped from Russell T Davies’ TV episode The End of the World to a main antagonist from recent Big Finish and, perhaps most delightfully, the return of the Vortisaurs from the early Main Range Eighth Doctor audios. The sheer delight of being able to include space-time dinosaurs in this story is obvious and deeply relatable, with Thana’s comedic reactions to a bunch of rich jerks getting massacred by them providing great entertainment value; this is a story about playing in the Big Finish toybox and knowing that that can be an inherently satisfying thing to do. For a set celebrating Doctor Who at Big Finish, this is the one story that feels like it’s celebrating what their creative output has added to the show more than any other, and as a result, it’s a vital addition to an anniversary celebration.

It’s not the deepest story in the Big Finish catalog. Hell, it’s hard to find much for me to say about it, even with how much I enjoyed it. But I have space for that in my life. Georgia Tennant proves to be one of the most fun talents Big Finish has, and Matt Fitton proves to be one of the best at giving her fun things to do.

This is a simple story that puts a smile on my face.

8/10