Doctor Who Unbound: Auld Mortality
Starring: Geoffrey Bayldon as the Doctor and Carole Ann Ford as Susan
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Silly elements exist as in-universe fiction to serve greater plot purposes
Standalone? Yes
Recommended? Highly, to anyone with any interest in Doctor Who audio at all.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it.
Before listening
I haven't heard this one before! I got it this summer, adding to the unlistened pile that's a major reason for this blog. Like other Unbounds it's an alternate-universe Doctor, in this case one who never left Gallifrey. From the website description it sounds like there is leakage from the main Doctor Who continuity into this alternate one, maybe just in the form of the alternate Doctor's writings rather than its physical events. It's written by Marc Platt, who has usually done good Doctor Who work, and I know all the Unbounds are well-regarded except Exile, so I am expecting to enjoy it and am looking forward to it.After listening
I am writing this while Auld Mortality is playing on a second listen-through, and I will probably repeat it more times. This is partially because I need something occupying my ears for unrelated reasons, but Auld Mortality is a fortuitous audio to have for it.I enjoy the prose of Jorge Luis Borges (via English translations) and the most useful way I can describe Auld Mortality starts with it being very much in Borges's tradition. This alternate Doctor never left Gallifrey and has been writing stories for consumption by the Gallifreyan public, using a "possibility generator" similar to the Gallifreyan Matrix to create universes to visit for material for the stories. The universes are based on what the Doctor has read of other worlds, but with inaccuracies and creative license. Much of Auld Mortality happens in a version of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps in which the elephants talk.
It is unclear whether any of the present-tense action of the story is happening in a "real world". It's left open as an option that the Doctor is strapped into the possibility generator from start to end and the entire course of events, including Susan arriving and guiding him back to reality, is just happening inside the projections. It also seems entirely possible that most of the seemingly "real world" scenes actually are, for the "real world" of an alternate Gallifrey rather than Doctor Who's main timeline, and that the Doctor is never mistaken about which ones are projections. The most correct reading of the story seems to be as the superposition of these possibilities, rather than accepting one as the specific course of events. The fact that the entire story is itself expressly an alternate timeline to a more established continuity is important here; the listener can go in accepting that none of this needs to be interpreted as real even within the fictional frame of Doctor Who media.
The alternateness of this Gallifrey and its universe extends much further back than the Doctor not leaving Gallifrey. His reasons for not leaving are the doings of a villain and conspiracy not present in normal continuity, and an empire of "Thaleks" is taking over the universe for lack of Gallifreyan intervention. The fact that a device like the Doctor's possibility generator can exist seems to be consistent with how Gallifrey and alternate timelines work in other stories such as Zagreus, but the specific device having actually been invented might be a deviation.
The ending is a particularly strange piece of audio that more or less openly asks to be subjected to multiple simultaneous interpretations. Paul Magrs often ends (or, in my opinion, fails to end) his works with a reminders that none of it is real in the first place, but while I feel Magrs does this as a lazy cop-out in stories that call for a more traditional closure, here writer Marc Platt and sound designer Alistair Lock do it meticulously as a resolution to the story's primary themes. I credit the sound designer for this, rather than director Nicholas Briggs, because I know how important the process of sound editing is especially for a scene like this and I don't think highly enough of Nicholas Briggs to believe he was the driving force behind the achievement.
Checking release dates, I am surprised that Auld Mortality slightly predates Zagreus, as it seems to me to be building on themes established there; it does it far better than Zagreus does. It was released later than Neverland, so it's possible that by this point Big Finish had already decided on the broad strokes of Zagreus's contributions to continuity.
I recommend Auld Mortality highly. It is a low-priced download and has supplanted the already-impressive Spare Parts as the Marc Platt story I am most impressed by. I place it in the highest tier of my Big Finish collection alongside such stories as Just War, UNIT: The Coup, Jubilee, No More Lies, and Death in the Family. It does require some awareness of Gallifreyan political elements from the TV series for maximum effect.
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