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Other Lives is exactly what it says on the tin — the Doctor, Charlie, and C’rizz get dumped in 1851 London and each get handed a whole new existence like it’s some Victorian life-swap reality show. It should be quaint, right? Ha. This story goes full Dickensian misery-porn, gives everyone an emotional crisis, and somehow still ends up being warm and funny and a little heartbreaking. Big Finish looked at the phrase “quiet character piece” and went, “Yes, but what if we also emotionally maim the audience a little?” and honestly I love them for it.
Paul McGann is on fire here. The Doctor gets mistaken for some missing heir by Georgina Marlow, who’s barely holding it together while society squeezes the last drops of hope out of her. The Doctor could stay here. He could slip into this ready-made life and just be… someone’s husband. There’s this quiet tragedy to his performance that makes you want to scream at him to go full domestic, bake some Victorian bread, grow sideburns and have a boring human life — but of course he can’t. He’s the Doctor, and that means never standing still.
Charlie, meanwhile, is out here befriending the Duke of Wellington, and it is as hilariously extra as you think it is. Ron Moody hams it up like he’s been waiting his whole career for a script that lets him monologue about glory days and looming death, and India Fisher meets him line for line with all the chaotic energy of someone who accidentally wandered into a Jane Austen novel and is determined to cause as much trouble as possible before the Doctor finds her again.
And then there’s C’rizz. Oh, C’rizz. His plotline is grim even by C’rizz standards (and that’s saying something). He gets captured by Jacob Crackles and shoved into a literal freak show, because apparently the writers wake up every morning asking, “How can we traumatize this lizard man even more?” The whole thing is deeply uncomfortable — which is the point — but you can feel the Victorian exploitation practically oozing off the script. For once, I actually found myself invested in C’rizz’s suffering, which is a miracle considering how often his plots just make me sigh.
Tonally, this thing is a love letter to Dickens without ever getting too self-satisfied about it. It’s got grime and desperation, genteel parlors and grubby alleyways, quiet little moments about identity and belonging, and some very silly French accents courtesy of India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas that made me choke on my tea.
Final Thoughts:
Bottom line: this is peak Big Finish historical — sad, smart, atmospheric, a little bit hopeful, and absolutely unwilling to let its characters off easy. It’s about the lives we could live if we stopped running, and why we never do.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Jacob Crackles-branded human curiosities