#14 Doctor Who Unbound: Full Fathom Five

Iris Wildthyme has regained her courage and battled a devil, and as her bus speeds away into the multiverse my Randomoid Selectortron speeds me to...

Doctor Who Unbound: Full Fathom Five

Starring: David Collings as the Doctor
Format: one full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Generally no. At points, some characterization is broad enough to border on silly, but this does not seem intentional and does not persist through the end of the story.
Standalone? Yes. This Doctor and timeline are not revisited in any other works.
Recommended? Yes. If you haven't already been spoiled about it, consider going into it cold.

My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, including some reference to the ending.

Before listening

Doctor Who Unbound was a "what-if" series of audios in which each story explored an alternative Doctor with a different conceptual jumping-off point. Full Fathom Five differed from the others in that the nature of its jumping-off point wasn't spelled out in the synopsis, and exactly how this Doctor is significantly different from others is a twist that is revealed later in the story. It came out fifteen years ago and I have already been spoiled about the ending, but I don't know the route it takes there.
For the first time, my Selectortron spin has landed on an audio I purchased but never listened to. I think I got it when there was a clearance sale in which Big Finish were selling off the last of their CD inventory of various downloadable stories, and when the CDs of a title sold out during that sale they put the download version on sale. I am aware that Full Fathom Five has a high reputation, and also that it's darker than typical for Big Finish. I tend not to enjoy Big Finish getting dark even when I can appreciate it as quality work, and so I've never listened.
I don't mind at all that this audiodrama has come up now. It is one I figured I should get around to sooner or later, and I'm hoping to have something interesting to say about it.

After listening

Full Fathom Five alternates scenes in two sequences of events twenty-seven years apart, beginning and ending with the later story. Both time points are in the future, and nothing about that future is inconsistent with the 20th century as established in normal Doctor Who continuity.
The Doctor's companion in the later time, Ruth, wants to know the truth about what happened to her father in the earlier time. He was in charge of an undersea science base when nuclear dirty bombs went off and was posthumously blamed for the incident, which was believed to have destroyed the base entirely.
The alternation of scenes is structurally essential to the story. Several times, the point where the listener hears an event in the earlier plot lines up with the point where Ruth learns about that event in the later one, and there are misdirects that use the fact the listener hasn't yet heard the entire backstory.
It is revealed that Ruth's father's experiments were being used as a smokescreen to fund the base, but the real purpose of the base was another experiment entirely, an attempt to create super-soldiers by injecting DNA from marine life into human clones. The Doctor was horrified by this and resolved to wipe out the experiments entirely, including all notes and physical evidence. The word "Dalek" is not spoken, and the monstrosities are not particularly Dalek-like in any respect but the nature of their origin, but the Doctor's reaction seems to me to imply that he fears Earthlings developing their own version of Daleks. (This audioplay came out well before the 21st century TV series, but the specific anti-Dalek passion we see in later TV Doctors was also present in Big Finish audios.)
I knew one major event of the ending, and it happened for approximately the reason I thought it did, but I had expected there to be a clearer right side and wrong side in it, not a heavy layer of moral ambiguity with no hero. It was not a type of ending that a Doctor Who normally has, and some over-the-top-characterization earlier in the story made the presence of ambiguity particularly surprising.
The quality of this audiodrama was just as high as I expected it to be from its reputation and other Unbound episodes. My personal enjoyment of it was greater than I expected; it was not as bleak as I feared it was going to be, and the pacing didn't dwell on the darker elements more than necessary. I can easily recommend Full Fathom Five to anyone with an interest in Doctor Who audio. Even what I've already written in this post might be more prior information than ideal; knowing the ending didn't stop me from enjoying it, but if you can go in cold without it being an inconvenience you might want to do so.