So, Legacy of Time, the 6-disc story celebration of 20 years of Doctor Who at Big Finish reaches its final act. Guy Adams (who also wrote The Sacrifice of Jo Grant) is back to close off this many-Doctor story with Collision Course. I assume you’ve heard the first five stories, so there will be some spoilers. Let’s go for it!

Collision Course

Let’s grab the official synopsis:

Fallout from the temporal distortions has now reached Gallifrey. To find the cause, Leela and Romana remember travels with the Fourth Doctor to the same world, at different times. The enemy is revealed, and it may take more than one Doctor to prevent the destruction of everything!

Guy created this story as a set of conflicting memories making for an interesting narrative as Tom Baker gets to take the Fourth Doctor through the same journey (with variations) twice, once with each companion. It’s different though odd. The Sirens of Time, who appear in the previous story The Avenues of Possibility are actually the main villain, a nice touch really.

The story is set on both Gallifrey and a new world, one with massive significance to the Time Lords. I like this aspect of Collision Course, even if the second half of the story becomes an excuse to wheel out the other Doctors from this set, along with various other drop-ins. There’s a line between celebrating something and writing fan-fiction and I’m not sure this story doesn’t cross over. It’s a big jamboree ending and hard to see how else it might have been done.

Having lots of Doctors makes having a coherent plot a challenge, and as I said I do like the core idea of the new world and the link to Earth as the centre of temporal disturbances through the set.

And that’s it! Box set complete. Next stop the show’s 60th celebration in 2023, then Big Finish 25 years in 2024…