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Circular Time is Big Finish trying to get profound with the Fifth Doctor, which is a bit like watching someone try to write poetry using an Excel spreadsheet. It’s four short stories themed loosely around the seasons, which should feel lyrical, maybe even elegiac, but mostly feels like being trapped in a year-long therapy session about change. It’s not that it’s bad-bad, but it’s so aggressively mid that it’s like eating unbuttered toast while someone murmurs, “We all grow older, you know.”
Spring starts things off with the Doctor and Nyssa visiting a planet of bird people. Actual bird people. Feathered courtrooms, chirping dialogue, the whole poultry pantomime. The Doctor’s chasing down a rogue Time Lord who’s decided to stay among them and “improve their society,” which the Doctor disapproves of, apparently. The story wants to ask questions about morality, evolution, and when it’s right to interfere, but it’s hard to care when everyone’s going “kaw kaw” like rejected Muppets. There’s a half-decent idea in there about how empathy can’t be legislated, but it’s buried under so much avian nonsense that you just want to throw a bag of seed at it and move on.
Summer fares slightly better, mostly because David Warner strolls in as Isaac Newton and decides to act like he’s in The Exorcist. He arrests the Doctor and Nyssa on suspicion of being alchemists (fair), threatens them with all sorts of 17th-century torture implements, and chews the scenery like it owes him rent. The story’s small, weirdly claustrophobic, and kind of fun in a fever-dream way. The Doctor saves the day by curing Newton’s migraine, which sounds dumb, but honestly? It works. It’s light, silly, and self-contained — which, given how miserable some of these stories get, feels like a blessing. Still, it’s as flimsy as parchment, and just as likely to crumble if you think about it too hard.
Autumn finally lands something human. The Doctor and Nyssa decide to have a quiet holiday in Hampshire. The Doctor plays cricket, Nyssa writes a book, and the tone shifts from sci-fi to small-town melancholy. There’s romance, introspection, and a whiff of nostalgia that actually fits the seasonal conceit. The Doctor faces a subtler conflict — one not about monsters or paradoxes, but the petty prejudices of the English countryside — and it works. Nyssa’s story, about learning that creativity needs conflict, is genuinely sweet. If Circular Time were just this story, I’d probably be raving about it. It’s small, human, and warm, the kind of Doctor Who that hums softly instead of shouting.
Winter closes the circle with quiet despair. The Doctor, dying or dreaming (or both), wanders through memories and regrets in what feels like an abstract stage play inside his own head. It’s meant to be poetic and contemplative, and it is, but it’s also smothered in lore references and self-conscious symbolism. The emotion’s there — fear of ending, the longing to do more, the slow surrender to inevitability — but it’s trapped beneath the scaffolding of continuity. It wants to whisper truths about mortality, but it mostly mumbles about TARDIS metaphysics. Pretty, but hollow.
Final Thoughts:
Circular Time aims for profundity and ends up politely boring. There’s one great story, one okay one, and two that need to be composted.
Rating:
Spring – 1 out of 5 squaking bird people
Summer – 3.5 out of 5 David Warners
Autumn – 4 out of 5 moulting cricket bats
Winter – 2 out of 5 angry Masters in the wind