Fortunes of War (BBC Audio)

Written by Justin Richards
Read By Colin Baker

Released by BBC Worldwide - September 2018
Available from Amazon UK

Writer Justin Richards closes out his ...of War audiobook trilogy with this Sixth Doctor entry read by Colin Baker.  The Doctor has long put off actually dealing with the World War I situation, but now that he is alone, not distracted, and out of excuses...he finally goes back to the Great War in order to fix it's jumbled timeline.

I had found it problematic at the end of Horrors of War that the Third Doctor seemed to leave the situation with major threads dangling without solving it.  At least when the First Doctor fell into the mess he was also being chased through time and space by Daleks (as his entry took place during the Daleks' Master Plan), but when he is confronted with the situation he left unfixed when he was in his Third Incarnation, it didn't really make sense for him to just say "problem for another day" and then put it off for seemingly centuries. 

There are other issues with this mangled timeline as well.  When the Third Doctor and Jo landed in World War I, the timeline was askew and Jo knew the original timeline...but how can she come from a future where this timeline is mangled yet know the original. It just hurts the whole mangled timeline story when it doesn't really ripple into the future.

I did like the melancholic tone the story had.  But I did find that the Doctor's main reason for avoiding the problem, that he didn't want anyone to see what he'd have to do, fell flat when what he had to do wasn't really that cruel, so I'm not really sure I get why he put it off for so long. 

Complaints aside, there is still something of an interesting in story in this, and Colin Baker is a great narrator and always a joy to listen to.  It isn't a bad way to spend an hour or so, but the basic mechanics of the time travel problems never truly gelled for me. There are kinks in the story that maybe could've been worked out if the story wasn't being stretched to three releases with three different Doctors.  Had it focused in on one Doctor, maybe even two, I could've gone with it...but it just stretched the premise too thin to stretch it to a third incarnation.