Doctor Who review: The Beginning explores the start of the Doctor’s and Susan’s journey

This week, Big Finish have made Doctor Who: The Beginning available to download for free. Is it a strong start to the Doctor’s journey?

Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions

This week’s free story from Big Finish is Doctor Who: The Beginning. Does it live up to the exciting promise of its title?

Back in 2013, Big Finish Productions had several major releases to celebrate Doctor Who‘s fiftieth anniversary. These included the mini-series Destiny of the Doctor, featuring an arc linked by eleven different Doctors, and The Light at the End, which was Big Finish’s own multi-Doctor story. One release that stood out – based on its very title – was The Beginning.

It certainly sounded intriguing. Would this release reveal the exact circumstances why the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan had to leave Gallifrey? How far back was it going to go? Would it ruin the mystery of the Doctor’s character, or enhance it?

The fact that the story was written by Marc Platt made it even more exciting. For those of you who don’t know, Marc Platt wrote Lungbarrow, a massively important Doctor Who novel. The last New Adventures novel to feature the Seventh Doctor, the story provided major revelations for the Doctor’s origins. Would The Beginning provide at least a partial take on that?

As we eventually found out, the answer was definitely no. It’s not that The Beginning ignored Lungbarrow, it’s just that it wasn’t focused on revealing the origins of either the Doctor or Susan. Instead, it reveals just the start of their journey, with their flight from Gallifrey being only the very beginning of the story.

While the lack of answers could be disappointing to some, (certainly, it was at least a little disappointing to Carole Ann Ford, as the behind the scenes interviews prove,) it’s a neat way of preserving the show’s mystery, while still going back further than previously explored on audio.

Connecting the dots

Interestingly, you may remember that we saw the moment the First Doctor left Gallifrey in the TV series that very same year – specifically, in Series 7’s finale The Name of the Doctor. While The Beginning had been released in Nov 2013, it was initially recorded back in Jul 2012. Thankfully, little touches were added to the story so that the key scene from the Eleventh Doctor episode was acknowledged.

In fact, there are a lot of little nods and references that Platt manages to include in this story – mainly because he had to. Despite the fact that we know so little of what happened when the Doctor left Gallifrey, there’s a surprising amount that we do know, spread across hundreds of episodes. So moments that reference a key plot point in Remembrance of the Daleks or resolve the discrepancy between who came up with the name “TARDIS” are nicely handled.

But what of the story itself? I’ll be honest: outside of the flight from Gallifrey, the overall plot for The Beginning has never stood out to me. It’s not bad, but it has a lot of the typical strangeness found in much of Marc Platt’s work. It also deals with some surprisingly big ideas, ideas that strongly hint why the Doctor became so attached to Earth.

On the one hand, the tone does suit the harder sci-fi stories of the early 1960s extremely well. We are presented with a rather unique alien race in the first episode, one that would’ve been hard to realize on screen if this had been made back in 1963. The music and sound design for the story are also fantastic, contributing to the Sixties aesthetic nicely. So while the overall plot of The Beginning doesn’t quite grab me, the style certainly does.

Early days

But as great as the post-production and the style of The Beginning are, its greatest strength is with its characters. One thing that Platt is brilliant at is, along with capturing the tone of the Sixties stories, he also knows how to handle the unique relationship between the Doctor and Susan.

The Doctor is a very different person at this point, one who’s running away from responsibilities rather than facing them. At the same time, he’s absolutely full of childlike wonder at seeing the universe for the first time, too. It gives us a very distinctive and interesting take on the character, exactly what you need for a story this important.

Naturally, Susan shares in that wide-eyed wonder. Perhaps not as much as the Doctor does – in some ways, she’s a little more level-headed – but it’s clear that traveling the universe with her grandfather is already special to her, at least at this point. It’s through Susan’s eyes that we experience the story, and Carole Ann Ford does a great job of narrating the story completely in character, retaining a lot of the innocent charm that Susan had.

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Quadrigger Stoyn

However, it’s not just the Doctor and Susan who feature in this story. In fact, it’s not just the two of them who leave Gallifrey in the TARDIS. Because Quadrigger Stoyn was repairing the ship when they took off. And he’s not happy.

Stoyn’s a rather interesting character. He’s not a typical villain, at least at this point. He’s someone who was enjoying life on Gallifrey, who was completely happy to remain there. It’s just through unfortunate circumstances that he ended up being stuck with the Doctor and Susan when they left. Understandably, he’s extremely upset about that.

However, unlike Ian and Barbara – who were at least as upset, considering that the Doctor basically kidnapped them – Stoyn shows absolutely no interest in seeing the universe. He’s just someone who wants to go back home – at any cost. He’s not exactly the most likable character, but he’s far from the most loathsome, either. You can’t help but feel sympathy for him, and that’s both due to Platt’s writing as well as a great performance from Terry Molloy.

As a story, The Beginning is a little strange and honestly a little forgettable. But the characters, the sense of wonder, and the glimpse that we get of the Doctor’s earliest travels more than make up for it. A great tribute to the earliest days of the series that’s certainly worth a listen.

Have you listened to The Beginning? Do you think it lived up to its title? Or do you wish it had gone deeper into exploring the Doctor’s history? Let us know in the comments below.