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The Crimes of Thomas Brewster is what happens when Big Finish looks at its own continuity, rubs its hands together like a chaotic goblin, and says “Right, let’s get ALL the toys out and make them emotionally complicated.” And ohhh it works.
We’ve got the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe landing in modern-day London and immediately tripping over a crime wave so dramatic it might as well be wearing a neon sign that says PLOT HAPPENING HERE. Enter DCI Menzies, patron saint of caffeine and weaponised sarcasm, who clocks the Doctor in about three seconds flat and decides, yes, you’re helping me whether you like it or not.
And then the twist. The mysterious crime boss running weapons smuggling operations… is calling himself the Doctor. Oh, you already know where this is going. Thomas. Bloody. Brewster.
That scrappy little Victorian chaos gremlin has grown up into a full-blown criminal operator, and honestly I am both impressed and deeply concerned. Because Brewster doesn’t do things by halves. No, his master plan involves kidnapping people and shipping them off-world to be mind-controlled into soldiers for an alien war.
Casual. Except… here’s where it gets spicy. The war is to defend a sentient planet. A living, thinking world that is basically crying out for help. And Brewster, in his own feral, morally sideways way, has decided he’s going to be the one to save it. And this is where the story sinks its teeth in.
Because Brewster is not a villain. Not really. He’s a product. An orphan raised on survival, on theft, on doing whatever it takes. His moral compass is less a compass and more a spinning bottle at a party. He wants to help. Genuinely. But every instinct he has tells him the way to do that is through coercion, manipulation, a bit of light kidnapping. You know. Tuesday.
It’s nurture vs nature screaming at each other in a dark alley. And the Doctor? Oh, Sixie is livid. Colin Baker absolutely FEASTS here. Righteous anger, booming authority, that glorious technicolour moral outrage. You can hear him trying to drag Brewster up to a better standard while also resisting the urge to throttle him.
Meanwhile Evelyn is out here infiltrating the criminal underworld like everyone’s favourite history professor turned absolute menace, and Menzies is somehow stuck trying to explain to a sentient planet that yes, she is the Doctor, please stop asking follow-up questions. I lost it. I genuinely lost it.
The action is cinematic as hell. Flying drones. Chase sequences. Big moral confrontations. Dialogue that snaps and crackles like it’s been mainlining espresso. And threading through all of it is this aching sense that Brewster could have been better. Could still be better. If he’d just… stop doing crimes for five minutes. But he can’t. Because that’s who he is.
And that ending? Him pulling a gun and hijacking the TARDIS instead of just asking for help? That’s the character in one perfect, devastating beat. He wants to go home. He just doesn’t know how to ask. Also, blink and you’ll miss it, but hello Flip Jackson, future chaos gremlin in training. Love that for her.
Final Thoughts
A character-driven banger that juggles action, humour, and moral complexity like it’s showing off. Brewster is messy, fascinating, and heartbreakingly human, and the entire cast is firing on all cylinders.
5 out of 5 extremely illegal interplanetary recruitment drives.