Finished with the whole set. I found it to be good with some highlights: The Artist, Twos company, Martian, and the Artist. The rest I found to be a bit mid, good but nothing special.
I found Coda to be kind of a mess. I don’t think that this was the best start for the Fugitive Doctors audio. To much other stuff going on. Would be better with more of a normal episode.
Full series spoilers
It’s a shame it’s so without consequence. None of the characters will remember anything that happened or meeting each other. The desire to put our favourite characters together clashes with telling meaningful impactful stories.
I’ve now listened to “Coda” twice.
Yes it’s a bit of a mess, and no it doesn’t really connect to the rest of Once and Future - but by Coldstream’s Teeth do I love this one!
Jo Martin is going to be amazing on audio!
Benny was absolutely perfect to place in the middle of these two incarnations of the Doctor!
And what is going on with Vienna? Why does she have a bar? Why is her timeline shattered? Will Jexie the Ram appear more in the future? Where is Passion?
Agree, it was a great choice to include a companion very familiar with ‘alternative’ doctors
The provision and delivery of Once and Future on CD has been a literal shit show. Here’s an email I got from BF today:
Yeah I got this too.
Luckily I don’t actually use the CDs, only ordered them because I thought they might be a special collectors thing, haven’t even opened them from their packaging. So this doesn’t really affect me.
I can’t find the picture now but I was under the impression there would be a nice box to put all the CDs in or did I imagine that?
Oh boy, BF isn’t having a very good year, are they? With several delays, the website scandal, and faulty CDs. They probably sit in their offices waiting for the year to be over!
I also don’t collect the physical CDs, so this doesn’t concern me, but it stinks nonetheless!
Now that Once and Future is done, I think it’s been a very choppy run.
The idea of the degeneration wasn’t something I was hugely into given that it’s been a fan suggestion for anniversary specials pretty much since I can remember and I sort of want my stories to inspire fan fiction speculation, not be inspired by it.
But putting that reservation aside, I went in hoping for the best but the release schedule and primarily one Doctor per release made for a fairly thin ongoing story. Fine, ok, I try to reframe my thinking of it as a framing device rather than an ongoing plot and then was faced with episodes of Doctor Who. And we get those all the time.
So nothing really felt special about Once and Future and I was taking each episode on its own merits. And because they were a halfway house between standalone episodes and a link in a chain they never felt truly good episodes in their own right.
Past Lives was such a frustrating opening, The Artist at the End of Time was better but still aggravating at not being what I was wanting from this series, A Genius for War was the strongest so far, Two’s Company was fine but we were half way through at this point, months in, and it just didn’t hit hard enough.
The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 is probably my favourite of the lot, which was a surprise. Not the biggest Tenth Doctor fan and I didn’t like the idea of flitting forwards through incarnations as well as back but I found it quite interesting in the Doctor not recognising the body he’s in.
Time Lord Immemorial was a weak one but maybe the most successful in terms of casting. Eccleston, Walker, Warner and McKee were really good together I thought and so I didn’t find it a complete write off. And by this point my expectations were well and truly managed.
The Union I thought capped it off as well as it could be capped off. Maureen O’Brien was superb and stole the episode for me, plus I’m not as tired of that villain as some and I think there’s always interesting things to explore when they show up. Plus Maureen O’Brien, I may have mentioned, was superb.
Then there’s Coda. Understandably due to including the Fugitive Doctor there may have been rights issues in when it could be released but we end up with another long gap and an entry after the story has finished. So just that, a coda. And, therefore, another standalone episode. I liked it well enough, Carley is great as the War Doctor and Jo Martin’s audio debut has me excited for more from her. They worked well together.
But it was messy plotwise and so Once and Future comes to a definitive end and I find myself wishing for a boxset released all at once with a central thrust which was original and not prevalent in fan forums in the run-ups to the 40th and 50th anniversaries.
A shame.
I will give the whole thing another go further down the line but it’ll be a while I’m sure.
Completely agree, that’s pretty much all my thoughts in a much more coherent way than I could put together. Basically fine is the nicest thing I can find to say about O&F
