Doctor Who review: Why The Legacy of Time is THE Big Finish story to listen to this year

Before we take a look at each of the episodes, we need to say this: the Doctor Who crossover The Legacy of Time is absolutely amazing and an essential listen for fans, old and new. Here are the reasons why.

For this review, I’m taking a bit of a different approach. When I usually review Big Finish’s Doctor Who box sets, I usually like to focus on them on an episode by episode basis and then give a short overall review at the end.

But after binge-listening to the whole of The Legacy of Time, I needed to get out my thoughts on the box set as a whole first. I still plan to look at each of the stories included in this epic box set – particularly as they’re actually extremely different from each other – but it felt appropriate to look at how well Big Finish’s twentieth anniversary box set works as a whole.

After all, we’ve been waiting almost a year for this box set. With so many Doctors, companions and eras, The Legacy of Time was set up to be one of the biggest and most ambitious crossovers in Doctor Who history. Could the box set possibly live up to the hype?

In a word, yes. It’s absolutely fantastic, and quite possibly the essential Doctor Who story of the year – regardless of medium.

The Legacy of Sirens

One reason for this is the approach that Big Finish have taken with this box set. At six hours long – not even including a two-hour documentary – it’s the longest Doctor Who box set we’ve ever had from Big Finish. That’s quite ambitious to do.

However, The Legacy of Time isn’t a multi-Doctor story. At least, not as a whole. Which is good, because you couldn’t tell a multi-Doctor story for that long, anyway. Not in the usual sense, at least.

Instead, The Legacy of Time has a format that feels like a mix between The Sirens of Time and The Worlds of Doctor Who. For those of you who don’t know, The Sirens of Time – Big Finish’s first ever Doctor Who story – was a four-part story featuring the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors. Each of the episodes focused on a different Doctor having their own adventure, before they all worked together in the story’s final episode.

To be honest, this approach works even better for Legacy compared to Sirens for three reasons. First, each of the episodes are an hour long, as opposed to half an hour. This means we get a complete, solid adventure that can be wrapped up nicely by the end, rather than a story that has too short a time to make an impact.

Secondly, each of the stories is handled by a different writer. As a result of this, each of the episodes has a distinctly different flavor, and plays to different strengths. Nicholas Briggs made a great attempt at telling four linked stories in one serial in The Sirens of Time, but it didn’t quite work as well, although again, that might come down to the shorter format for that release. But every single story in Legacy is memorable and works for different reasons, and the writing helps with that.

The Worlds of Doctor Who

Lastly, as I mentioned, there’s the fact that Legacy feels like a combination of the approaches of both Sirens and The Worlds of Doctor Who. Released in 2014, Worlds was designed to celebrate fifteen years of Big Finish, and told four very different stories across three spin-offs and one Doctor Who episode.

What’s fantastic with The Legacy of Time is that, to some extent, we almost get that same approach. Not simply in terms of variety, but because each episode features brilliant and memorable characters that either have their own spin-off series already, or absolutely deserve to. (DI Menzies, looking at you!)

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So while each of these are distinctly Doctor Who stories, they also feel a little like episodes of Counter-Measures or UNIT or The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield. Essentially, The Legacy of Time highlights two reasons why Big Finish has been so successful over the past twenty years: they haven’t just explored the Doctor Who universe, they’ve expanded it.

I’m not going to single out any particular episode just yet. That’s what the upcoming episode reviews are for. What I will say is that each of the episodes works at telling a great story while focusing heavily on the characters, and reminds us what makes Big Finish, twenty years after their first Doctor Who audio, still so special.

As for that final episode…oh, that final episode…if you haven’t listened to it yet, you’re in for a treat. Think of a moment as amazing as all the Doctors saving Gallifrey in The Day of the Doctor, and you’re along the right lines in terms of sheer excitement and emotional impact.

The Legacy of Time is an incredible achievement, and it’s been absolutely worth the wait. Not just the essential Big Finish purchase of the year, but the essential Doctor Who story of the year, too.

Will you be listening to The Legacy of Time? Have you been a long-term fan of Big Finish, or will you be trying out their audio stories for the first time? Do you think it’s possible to attempt a crossover this big on television? Let us know in the comments below.