The Light At The End (2013) Review

The Light At The End is a mixed bag for me. Whilst it's obvious fun to have the eight Doctors + the Master around, the story just doesn't seem to go anywhere. Other than the temporal paradoxes, all it really is is: "The Master sets a trap to wipe the Doctors from history. They walk into it, reverse it and all go home."

Most of the Doctors are stellar, just the way they were in the main series. Kudos must go to Tom Baker, who finally made himself likable in my eyes. The weakest of the original actors is Colin Baker, whose gravitas and strong voice have entirely mellowed out.

Frazer Hines and Tim Treloar do a bang-on job at imitating the Second and Third Doctors, respectively. They're not spot-on identical, but close enough. On the other hand, William Russell has absolutely no business playing the First Doctor. He doesn't sound anything like Hartnell.

I liked Geoffrey Beevers as the Master. He was certainly very different from the ones we know better, but he was brilliant. One could almost imagine him drinking a cup of tea whilst plotting the downfall of his enemies. A sneaky little imp.

NOTES

*Did the Doctors really consider wiping the Master from history? Sounds unrealistic to me.

*Like her Doctor, Peri isn't very believable. Her whining voice was bad enough to begin with, but now it's just laughable.

*I thought the team-up of 4 and 8 was pretty cool.

*This takes place before Survival for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, as she doesn't recognize the Master.

*Speaking of the two, McCoy and Aldred did the best job recreating their original performances and chemistry.

*Will Paul McGann ever get a cool companion?

*Why keep the first three Doctors locked away when they already use their voices in other audio dramas?

*Hey, it's Straxus from Dark Eyes! This incarnation is pretty pathetic though.

*This story is very hard to follow or remember. Nothing really happens except the Doctors wandering around in the pocket universe and occasionally running into the Master. And loads of random explosions and teleportations to other scenes. There's a very disjointed feel to the whole thing.

*No one complained about Peri's clothes(Season 22) or the Doctor's chubbiness(Season 23)?

*Could someone explain to me how the whole "garden" and "1963 lets you into the pocket universe" thing worked? And what was up with the living mud and all that stuff? It was so random.

*Why were the drones working with the Master?

*Wait, so the Doctor would never have left Gallifrey if the right TARDIS hadn't been there? The Impossible who?

*The Fourth Doctor got all the great lines. "Is this some Doctors' afterlife?"

*So how come this evil plan didn't affect the War/Ninth-? Doctors? I know Big Finish has no right to them, but this thing is supposed to wipe out ALL the Doctors. Imagine if we could see the future Doctors in the classic series timeline where the Time War didn't happen.

*When the Seventh Doctor ushers the Sixth Doctor to hide, he refers to him as "Doctors".

CONCLUSION

A rather dull celebration. Only for the biggest multi-Doctor story or Master fans. Moffat did so much better.