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Year of the Pig is what happens when you throw the Sixth Doctor into an Agatha Christie novel that got drunk on absinthe and forgot it was supposed to make sense. It’s 1913 in Ostend, the last polite year before the world explodes, and the Doctor and Peri wander into a seaside hotel full of aristocrats who talk like they’re auditioning for Downton Abbey: The Cocaine Years. The decor is aggressively mahogany, everyone’s repressing something tragic, and oh yeah, there’s a talking pig. A sapient pig. Named Toby. Who’s basically Oscar Wilde if he snuffled.
I swear this story’s main goal is to see how long it can pretend to be serious before you realize you’re listening to a gothic farce with truffles. The Sixth Doctor gets drunk, gets into a fistfight at Marcel Proust, and somehow it feels completely normal. Colin Baker plays it like he was born wearing velvet and arguing with poets. Peri’s there too, doing her best impression of the one sane person at a dinner party full of people who think telepathic livestock are simply darling. The cast is amazing, though. Everyone sounds like they’ve been trapped in a BBC period drama for too long and are starting to lose structural integrity.
And I really need to add, this is definitely Baker’s softer version of old Sixie; one who canonically simply didn’t exist until he stopped travelling with Peri and met up with Evelyn. But if we’re retconning this version of the Doc into his travels with Peri, well, I’m onboard. The chemistry they have together just rawks.
The vibe? Immaculate. You can smell the sea salt and the cigar smoke. The story takes its time, lounging around in that weird way that only Big Finish in its experimental phase could manage. It doesn’t gallop anywhere, it just wanders, politely, through rooms filled with secrets and old perfume, all while the pig lectures the Doctor on morality. It’s kind of genius. And kind of completely ridiculous. Which, you know, is exactly my aesthetic.
The thing is, beneath all the nonsense about telepathic bacon and society manners, the story actually means something. It’s about civility and monstrosity being the same thing in different outfits. It’s about how humans love the idea of being “better” than animals while being the nastiest beasts in the room. Toby, the pig, is both victim and mirror. He’s what happens when intelligence doesn’t automatically mean kindness. He’s a pink, eloquent existential crisis in a bowtie.
If I have one complaint, it’s that it all goes on a bit too long, like being cornered at a party by someone who wants to tell you about their time-travel dream journal. But honestly, I didn’t mind. It’s lush and weird and sad and funny in equal measure, the kind of story that you finish and then immediately question whether it was all an elaborate fever dream brought on by too much Belgian chocolate.
Final Thoughts:
The Year of the Pig is a mood. It’s the Doctor drunk in a ballroom arguing with a talking pig while time quietly eats itself in the background. It’s indulgent, peculiar, and weirdly beautiful. I loved it.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 dapper piggy-wiggies snuffling through a silver platter