Jacob Dudman has consistently been one of Big Finish’s strongest performers over the last few years, and after retiring his Eleventh Doctor this February, he made what is, for now, set to be his final outing as the Twelfth Doctor too.
You Only Die Twice, the third volume in Big Finish’s Twelfth Doctor Chronicles, is a three-story release that puts the Doctor alongside Keira Sanstrom, a Time Agent who interrupted his domesticity at St. Luke’s University in the previous boxset. The combination worked well then and does again now, particularly with the more humorous side of this incarnation.
Keira’s reintroduction is very similar to how she was first introduced, as she uses a vortex manipulator to barge into the Doctor’s life in the opening moments of Sunstrike by Georgia Cook. This time, the Doctor is in the Tower of London, better known as that building above UNIT headquarters, and it has been taken over by an invasive force wanting to destabilise the housing market. All is not as it seems, and Dudman is having a right romp delivering some great lines of dialogue. The Twelfth Doctor is possibly the very best at talking to himself in a way that still captivates an audience.
The titles kick in just after Keira appears, slaps a vortex manipulator on his wrist, and takes the Doctor out of his world and into that of a Time Agency he very much loathes.
This incarnation continually mocks authority whenever he meets it, and as he is unwillingly recruited for a Time Agency mission, he makes plenty of quips. He and Keira must head to a weapons auction at the Sunstrike holiday resort, which sits inside a star, and where a doomsday weapon called a keystone is locked away. It feels reminiscent of television episode Time Heist, with Keeley Hawes’ portrayal of Karabraxos writ large over the character who Keira spends much of her time with once in Sunstrike.
The main inspiration of this story (and the boxset title) is obviously the James Bond film franchise, and as the Doctor is clearly no gun-toting spy, he is told he will have to infiltrate the auction as a member of staff. Cue the Doctor immediately messing that strategy up in comedic fashion.
The visuals are fun to imagine, and we get yet another of this Doctor’s funny aliases which he fully commits to. “Greetings fellow law-breakers! Let’s compare CVs!” is certainly a line to remember.
It is mostly a comedy, in part because many attending the auction in-story are there to be entertained as well as dazzled with exciting weaponry, but once the killing inevitably begins, the Doctor starts to involve himself in his mission. A temporal spin, rather fittingly given he’s now a Time Agent, is then added and the distinctions of who really has bad motives and who is just doing bad things – a Twelfth Doctor quandary if ever there was one – also seeps into the plot.
Keira tackles the mission in her own way before eventually reuniting with the Doctor, at which point everything is somewhat out of control in Sunstrike. That means the action is fast-paced, the stakes are very high, and there’s little time for disapproval from the Doctor about the behaviour of his companion, the agency, or the weapon-wanting guests he ends up having to help.
Once the day is saved, key backstory details emerge and the Time Agency wades in again in a way that makes the organisation even more unlikebale and untrustworthy. But what does that mean for the relationship between the Doctor and Keira, and the trust she has earned so far? Cue an end scene that leads directly into Never the End Is, episode two of the boxset.
Christoph Haizmann, an Austrian known for his neurosis, and the demonic paintings that arose from it in the 17th century, is the main character of Ben Tedds’ story but it is somebody else entirely who interrupts the Doctor and Keira in the TARDIS and drags them into his world.
Once they appear in Mariazell, a city in the Styrian Alps, they encounter a tortured soul who is sharing his demonic visions with anyone who will listen, including ungrateful churchmen. The Doctor already knows that Christoph apparently had a blood pact with the devil that meant his soul would belong to him for nine years, and that the day they have arrived in Austria is the endpoint of that pact if the painter can be exorcised in time. However he is more interested in Elinor Daxus, the woman who made her way into the TARDIS and dragged them there.
There is a lot of emotional weight carried by Christoph and Elinor, played by Jack Forsyth-Noble and Georgina Beedle, but in quite different ways, and it is the mental troubles of each that essentially drives the story and keeps it interesting even when other elements come into play. One such element is suspicious Time Agency activity and a temporal plot point, and that works well both in-story and when thinking about the whole boxset, but the introduction of the devil (who is in reality a monster from Big Finish’s The Diary of River Song series) as a physical entity to face off against stumbles as a way to drive the drama.
Dudman does a great job once again, helped by the Doctor getting more interesting dialogue than anyone else and also a standout scene in which a mob put the TARDIS on a raft and send it into a big body of water and he has to save it. The key moments after that take place with the TARDIS, and set up a huge cliffhanger that may leave you revisiting all of Keira’s stories in this range in your head.
The concluding episode You Only Die Twice has a brilliantly brief story description provided by Big Finish: “This time it’s personnel.”
So is it another James Bond-inspired romp, or more focused on tying up the temporal havoc and its link to the Time Agency that has simmered in the background of the previous two stories? It’s more of the latter, and it’s hard to detail too much about where writer Fio Trethewey takes this story without spoiling the previous one’s cliffhanger.
There’s a big dramatic moment before even the titles kick in, then after that we get flashpoints of times and places that have felt the consequences of the action in the preceding episodes. The Time Agency seeks to control the Doctor, and he ends up crash-landing on a planet where he should be outside of their reach. And that planet has its own mysteries to solve to ensure survival.
Trethewey has written a lot of details of personal significance into this script, and thankfully there are plenty of moments of personal significance for the Doctor and Keira too. Given this is potentially the send-off for Dudman as the Doctor and Bhavnisha Parmar as Keira, it is not surprising they both get plenty of snappy or dramatic dialogue and scenes in which they can show off their acting chops. But to reveal how that manifests in the climax of the boxset would be spoiling it.
As a whole, the third volume of The Twelfth Doctor Chronicles is a strong character tester for the Doctor and his companion, but only the opening story could truly be described as fun. The second one was a good attempt at a historical but in some ways its ties to the overall plot of the boxset and a returning villain worked against it, and the third one felt very much like a third act or finale to a multi-episode story rather than a story in itself. In some ways, that worked in its favour, particularly if listening to the whole boxset in one go, but its similarities to Magrathea from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy probably went too far.
Sunstrike maximised its setting for storytelling and entertainment potential, whereas Never the End Is had a location that was not interesting despite it being very detailed. The location of Sunstrike worked in many ways, while the TARDIS on a raft scene was the only standout in historic Austria, and the final story was contained mostly in a place of interesting ideas but not necessarily entertaining ones.
In a way, it depends what you want from a Twelfth Doctor release when you buy it. Dudman’s portrayal of the Doctor is superb throughout, the production supports his work finely, and the stories do fit well into that period of this incarnation’s life when he was without a long-term companion. If you’re looking for fun, then Sunstrike delivers it, but if you prefer a somewhat darker tone then the two episodes after hit those marks. Personally, the former seems to make for a more rewarding listen.
The Twelfth Doctor Chronicles: You Only Die Twice is available now from Big Finish.
