Start to Finish: 5.09 - The Forbidden Time

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

The black and white era of Who was notable for a number of rather eerie episodes where mysterious and seemingly overwhelming forces threatened the TARDIS crew; episodes like The Celestial Toymaker or The Mind Robber. David Lock's The Forbidden Time harks back to this style of serial.

A telepathic warning alerts the people of Earth than in a few months they will be fined, even executed, for trespassing in someone else's time. Of those who believe the threat, only one isn't really worried, because only Polly Wright has already faced this threat.

The Forbidden Time's framing narrative has Anneke Wills' Polly giving a presentation to a gathering of experts on how the Vist have already been dealt with. It's a good concept, although the presentation is too much a straight audiobook to really do it justice, and the break for coffee in the framing narrative kind of steps on the cliffhanger. Jamie's inclusion through a digitally recorded 'message in a bottle' voiced by Frazer Hines is an excellent way of getting him into the story without messing with memory again, however.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the play is that it keeps Polly with the Doctor throughout, and thus does not take the opportunity offered by the Chronicles to develop her beyond the role of witness to his brilliance. Unlike Resistance, this episode essentially gives Polly nothing to do except watch and worry. As an aside, it also muddies the waters of the Pollen question, offering a slightly different version of Polly and Ben's future incarnation than other sources.

Next up, another adventure for UNIT's former scientific advisor Liz Shaw, in The Sentinels of the New Dawn.