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Alright, straddle your TARDIS console and prepare your psychic paper, darlings, because we are going back to 1999 — a time of dial-up, middle-parted hair, and the birth of Big Finish. This was their very first audio play, The Sirens of Time, and they chose to go full chaos from the jump: three Doctors, four parts, and one aggressively mediocre villain faction trying to eat time or… rewrite it… or microwave it into soup? Honestly, I blacked out.
Let’s break it down before I break down.
Part One: Seventh Doctor… in a swamp. Literally.
Sylvester McCoy is here, giving it his all in a story that feels like someone dared the writer to script an episode entirely in a bog. There’s some woman in distress, a possibly evil old crone, and timey-wimey nonsense that tries to be mysterious but mostly just feels like wading through wet newspaper. McCoy does his signature “cryptic but cheeky” thing, bless him, but the material is soggier than the setting.
Part Two: Fifth Doctor and the U-boat of Existential Ennui
Peter Davison’s in a World War I submarine surrounded by German officers, mutinies, and vague plot seeds that grow into absolutely nothing. This part tries to do something moody and introspective, but mostly it’s like reading a particularly slow game of Battleship. Davison’s trying his best, but it’s hard to emote when the plot feels like it’s stuck in neutral.
Part Three: Sixth Doctor in Space, Yelling at Time
Colin Baker’s up next, and if anyone deserves better than this storyline, it’s him. He’s got a space station, a time distortion, and a guest cast made of exposition vending machines. There’s something called a Temperon that feels like it wandered out of a rejected Star Trek script. Colin Baker is booming and brilliant — and so, so wasted here. The story keeps lurching forward like a malfunctioning Roomba.
Part Four: ALL THE DOCTORS. ALL THE EXPOSITION. NONE OF THE PAYOFF.
All three Doctors team up, you say? A chance to bounce off each other, banter, butt heads, save the universe in style? Wrong. They mostly just stand around explaining the plot to each other. Turns out the Sirens of Time — who sound cool, but are really just vaguely malevolent time moths — manipulated the events of the previous episodes for… reasons? Gallifrey’s in danger. The Temperon yeets itself into the void. The end.
It’s like the script had a checklist: “Make it sound Important
.” But the result is an overcooked stew of half-baked concepts and extremely bored-sounding villains.
Final Verdict:
The Sirens of Time is a historical curiosity — the audio equivalent of a pilot episode filmed in a garage with a fog machine and vague optimism. It’s fascinating in that “oh look how far we’ve come” kind of way, but if you’re expecting a classic… don’t. This one’s not even the sum of its parts. It’s more like the subtraction of three separate “meh” episodes taped together with fan service and hope.
2.5 out of 5 exploding time paradoxes