The Switching

The Doctor wakes up on a floor, wondering how he got there. He doesn’t recognize his surroundings but deduces that he is in a cell somewhere, and may have been for a few days. He thinks his voice is oddly distorted by the cell and then when he finds a reflective surface realizes that somehow he is in the Master’s body, locked up for his crimes. Back at UNIT HQ, the Master enjoys his new freedom in the Doctor’s body and sets about putting together a plan to ensure that it is permanent, and that the Doctor will be left behind.

Ah the old body swap story. Every now and again this comes along as a device for a series episode and we are equal parts amused by the way a villain tries to imitate the hero and horrified at how the hero suffers trying to make people see that they have been tricked. And then there’s the frustration with the hero’s friends for not noticing right away that something is wrong. As this is one of the Big Finish short trips rarities range (meaning it was released as part of a compilation but now the stories can be picked up separately) there’s not enough time to make this an epic along those lines, and the whole thing feels a little like a wasted opportunity. This is a huge deal as far as plot developments go – when did the Master get this kind of skill? Isn’t this more like voodoo than science? I remember when this was done in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Faith swapped bodies with Buffy – they needed two episodes to do it properly and could get away with a magical device as a means to make it happen, but here the Master clunks together some objects with no notion as to how he even got them in his cell and pow, body swap.

The story is almost more of a Master tale as he gets more of the script, and that makes a sort of sense as a story about the Doctor in a cell under these circumstances wouldn’t really go very far. Here we have the Master confounded by the malfunctioning TARDIS and surrounded by the Doctor’s colleagues at UNIT; he tries to blend in but makes slips here and there that make Jo, the Brigadier and Benton suspicious but never enough to really tip things over. And then when it all gets wound up quickly there’s some quick moment between Jo and Mike Yates which spells out where this one really should be in continuity: this would be the day before the Doctor and Jo leave in The Curse of Peladon.

So Big Finish fell for a cliché, but no real harm done, a few fun moments and an unnecessary snog between workmates later and we can move on to another BBC Novel.

NEXT EPISODE: RAGS