When it comes to being a fan of Doctor Who, you’ve always got to take the good as well as the bad. With such a wide variety of content to sift through, there’s no telling whether what you’ve got is gold or whether you’ve got an unfortunate piece of pyrite staring back at you. Sometimes, however, you get a story that you struggle to resonate with on a personal level, and that, for me, is The Song of Megaptera.  

Written by Pat Mills, The Song of Megaptera started life as a script idea for both the Fourth Doctor and Fifth Doctor before finding itself at the mercy of Season 22’s chopping block.  Moulded into a four-part story for this audio range, it finds The Doctor and Peri trying to save a space whale from a bunch of intergalactic whalers.

Deep space in the distant future, and Captain Greeg and his crew are hunting mile-long Space Whales on a vast harvesting ship. By pure accident, they also capture the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Peri must use all their wits to survive. But what is the creature running loose in the ship’s bowels? And can the Doctor save Megaptera before its song is extinguished forever?

Big Finish Synopsis

Despite my dissonance with this story, its initial premise does present some interesting and very Doctor Who-like ideas. Dropping The Doctor and Peri on board what is essentially a mobile whale butchery seems the perfect place to inject progressive narratives on animal cruelty and animal rights. For most of the adventure’s first quarter, these themes are sold almost entirely on Baker’s performance as The Doctor advocates for the whales by donning the hat of an intergalactic animal welfare inspector.   

While The Doctor’s performance as a member of WILF shows glimpses of brilliance, the rest of the story never quite manages to match this enthusiasm. As the adventure progresses, one of the most immediate problems it faces is a lack of complex characterisation and character relationships. These issues are at their most notable in the one-dimensional characterisation of the human whalers. Despite nearly spending two hours with these characters, their motivations throughout the plot rarely stem from anything more than being gleeful puppy killers out for a quick buck. As a result, they fail to bring any nuance to the other side of the animal welfare argument. Moreover, the story struggles to bring the expected level of dynamism to the Doctor-Companion relationship between The Doctor and Peri. Although this is somewhat unavoidable due to Peri’s illness in the plot developments, the quips and back-and-forths that characterise their relationship are almost entirely absent elsewhere, and it ultimately detracts from the story’s potential enjoyment.

Exacerbating these characterisation issues and faltering themes are the more visual aspects of the story as it reaches its concluding episodes. Watching a space whale flitter in and out of a vortex or having The Doctor and Peri explore its digestive system makes for great concepts. However, there’s only so much voices and sounds can do to convey these scenes. Consequently, there is a massive disconnect between the listener and the story.