My first ever Big Finish Doctor Who review and I thought it fitting that I should start with a story from one of my favourite ranges, the early adventures.

Daughter of the Gods is the second story of the sixth set of releases from the Early Adventures range and acts as a prequel story to the tv story The Daleks’ Master Plan. In this prequel, both the First and Second Doctor end up stuck on the planet Urbinia just as the planet is about to be invaded by Daleks. If the populous don’t surrender, then the Daleks will use their most terrifying invention to date, the Time Destructor, to turn both its people and the planet to dust.

The first two parts of the story detail the events in the immediate aftermath of both TARDIS’ colliding with one another. Part one is particularly strong putting the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe right in the middle of a panicked population attempting to flee to the spaceport. With both the main characters and the listeners unsure of what’s to come, the story reveals that this isn’t the only doctor on the planet as his early incarnations companions, Steven and Katerina are helping get people onto the spacecraft.

These questions are then resolved in the second part, as we get a retelling of events from the First Doctor and crew’s perspective. Their collision allowed them to arrive on the planet three months before the invasion, where they have now settled living amongst the population. At their present point, this TARDIS team has a lot of tension between them, especially between The Doctor and Steven as the two are constantly bickering and the Doctor’s overall lack of sensitivity towards Steven’s role on the planet and Katerina’s can come off as a little uncomfortable.

The second part also starts with the big role that Katerina plays within the story, her nightmares and guilt over surviving Troy, both of which play a large role in the solution at the end of the story. Ajjaz Awad does a great job in the role of Katerina here and whilst I can’t truly attest to how close she acts to the original, since I’ve only seen parts of The Daleks’ Master Plan, she does sell feeling like a character from ancient Greece who has ended up travelling in time and space very well.

Whilst the first half of the story is great, it is the second half where the story and characters truly shine. Now that all the characters have joined up, Barnes does a great job of managing both TARDIS teams by separating them into the most appropriate pairs. Both of the Doctors are together, Zoe and Steven end up together figuring out ways of taking out the Daleks, and Jamie and Katerina pair up and as historical characters have a lot to share and understand about one another. With both Doctors working together, they figure out what went wrong with the collision and where the First Doctor should be, on Kembel stopping the Daleks before they create the Time Destructor.

In order to stop the Daleks, it requires the Second Doctor to leave, going back to the site of the crash and fixing it. This, however, causes a problem. By going back, time will go back on course but so will Katerina’s inevitable death creating a theme of conflict the First Doctor rarely has to deal with. Barnes chooses to focus on an often overlooked aspect of Hartnell’s doctor in, whilst he looks old, in timelord terms he’s relatively immature. It’s this immature side that comes through towards the end of the story knowing that if he goes through with the plan he’ll end up losing a dear friend in Katerina and you can hear his struggle with this thought and just how human he feels within these moments. A highlight even amongst some of the greats Big Finish has put out over the years.

Daughter of the Gods is an excellent story that has a genuinely good reason for being a multi-doctor story and utilises each character in an interesting way allowing for good moments of character development. If I was to truly nitpick any issue and I really would be nitpicking, it would probably be a lack of scenes showing the impact of the Dalek invasion on other cities on world and the weird starting dynamic between Steven and the Doctor, however, this does little to diminish the overall gravity of the story.

My Rating: 9/10