As Peter Anghelides points out in the liner notes, television has given us The Two Doctors, The Three Doctors, and The Five Doctors (and as he doesn't point out, spin-offs have given us The One Doctor, The Eight Doctors, and The Infinity Doctors), leaving a natural gap to fill with The Four Doctors. And though Big Finish Productions has had four Doctors at its disposal since 2001, there’s never been a "proper" multi-Doctor story; Zagreus features all four actors, but they're all playing different characters except for one scene. So it's natural that there's been some anticipation for this release. Myself, I was hoping for a fun romp featuring four incarnations of my favorite Time Lord.

That's largely what I got. The story features the four Doctors fighting the Daleks across time and space. It begins when the eighth Doctor materializes on a Jariden space station where the fifth Doctor is trying to stop a dangerous temporal experiment-- and the Daleks show up, complete with Jariden accomplice Colonel Ulrik, to steal something they want. But neither Ulrik nor the Daleks quite get what they bargained for...

The biggest disappointment to fans will probably be that the Doctors don't get much in the way of scenes together (similar to The Sirens of Time, but not even that much). One might almost suggest that there's more inter-Doctor dialogue in Zagreus than this! But perhaps the biggest regret here is that for the most part, this dialogue doesn’t really sparkle like Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee in The Three Doctors, or Peter Davison not knowing what to make of David Tennant in Time Crash. Admittedly, there was one line that gave me the biggest laugh of the play. (And the conceit in one encounter is pretty clever.)

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

The Four Doctors is a special release, available for BF subscribers only, uniting Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann as the Fifth to Eighth Doctors, in a story which Peter Anghelides says was partly an attempt to do the Daleks and time travel, like in The Chase, but to get it right this time. It's a rather nice romp, not too intricate (as it might have been if Marc Platt had written it) but intricate enough to please the average sf fan, with the Doctors separated for most of the time but some very nice interaction between McGann and Davison, which I don't think we have ever seen before. David Bamber (who played Hitler in Valkyrie against Tom Cruise and Kenneth Branagh) here plays the unfortunate time-travelling general who gets sucked into the Daleks' evil plans, and he and the other guest cast, Nigel Lambert, Ellie Burrow and the ubiquitous Alex Mallinson, add welcome colour, but basically it's the Doctors and Nick Briggs as the Daleks that we want to hear, and we get them all very nicely thank you. ( )