The Avenues of Possibility [AUDIO/2019.7.17]

★★★☆☆

  I'm glad that they chose the timeframe between The Condemned and Bloe Forgotten Planet to set this story; I suppose it makes sense, considering that it's a celebration of Doctor Who in Big Finish. Not that I don't like the TV companions (in fact, I can't begin to describe how much I love Peri and Mel), but it's always lovely for Big Finish to go with one of their own companions — the way I see it, more exposure to the general fanbase means more recognition for characters who deserve it!

  The success of the Sixth Doctor and Charlotte Pollard is a miracle story all on its own; no one had thought of the combination, let alone knew it would work at all, and yet Colin Baker and India Fisher made it a wonderful reality. Jonathan Morris's script is a celebration of that miracle, and of their contained bubble of the Doctor Who mythos. The Avenues of Possibility feels less like one of Morris's concept pieces and more of a greatest-hits run with these characters, as well as with DI Patricia Menzies (a criminally overlooked Big Finish original character)... and it more or less works! The Sirens of Time rear their ugly heads and go about their normal business of manipulating gullible people into breaking the causality of time and wreaking havoc, and the Doctor and co. are here to put a stop to it — business as usual. What I did not expect (which, in retrospect, I probably should've considering the involvement of Fisher) was Charley's big heroic act in which she attempts lures the Sirens to her by telling the Sixth Doctor about events she's faced with the Eighth, therefore making both of them massive lumps of paradoxes. Suddenly, The Avenues of Possibility is not just a love letter to Sixie and Charley, but for the history of Charley in general — the Edwardian adventuress saved from a crashing airship by a breathless romantic, led into a journey love and heartbreak in an estranged universe, and stranded on an island before reaching where she is now. Chills, I tell you. Sometimes, lore dumps are peerlessly done.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  With a fairly neither-here-nor-there story with time paradoxes and gateways popping up, I probably would've enjoyed The Avenues of Possibility less had it not featured Sixie and Charley. At this point, Colin Baker and India Fisher's chemistry is renowned throughout the fans, and this feels like a deserved victory lap of everything that came before.