Doctor Who: Sounds of the Eighth Incumbency, Part 1

Whilst Big Finish’s monthly range of Doctor Who audio dramas had previously shuffled about from Doctor to Doctor for the first year and a bit that they had the licence, they began 2001 with four releases all from the same Doctor. This is because something very special happened: Paul McGann agreed to come back to the role of the Eighth Doctor, having had a blink-and-you’ll-miss it televised tenure in the TV movie, and Big Finish realised that by issuing a clutch of four four-part audio dramas one after another, they could give him the full season in audio he had been denied in television.

(It’s not too late! RTD, please, do the wise thing and give McGann a season! You could do it as a spin-off show – call it the Eighth Doctor Adventures or something. Your broadcast partners at Disney+ are hungry for spin-offs, after all. You’ll need to do it before he’s aged out of the role – Night of the Doctor having set a pretty firm end point – so get on with it already!)

This was perhaps Big Finish’s biggest challenge to date. With their Bernice Summerfield line, they began with audio adaptations of some of the Doctor-less New Adventures novels (from after Virgin lost the rights and retooled things so Benny was the protagonist), giving them a clear model to work with. With Doctor Who, the television show obviously gave them ample precedent to work from; the biggest departure so far had been with the Sixth Doctor audio drams, but even then so the main difference thus far was that they gave him good stories.

With Paul McGann’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor, however, there was much more of a blank slate to work with. Sure, the TV movie happened, but nobody wanted a repeat of that – the fans wouldn’t want more of that, Big Finish’s authors didn’t want to write more of it, and Paul wanted to push past it as firmly as possible. There had, of course, by this point been years worth of Eighth Doctor Adventures novels from BBC Books, and Eighth Doctor comics in Doctor Who Magazine – but the thing about novels and comics is that they don’t require actors.

Big Finish decided – or, perhaps, were obliged to under the terms of their licence – to make their own continuity for the Eighth Doctor audio adventures, giving themselves permission to make the odd nod to the other strands of tie-in media if they wished but not regarding themselves as bound by it. This gave McGann the freedom to likewise ignore all the other tie-in media and perform the Eighth Doctor and interpret the script the way he wanted to. He’s still doing audios with Big Finish to this day, fitting them in around a fairly healthy schedule of movie, television, and stage projects, so he clearly still thinks it’s worth it – so let’s enjoy Paul McGann’s first full season of Doctor Who from a time when, despite oddball experiments like Death Comes To Time and Scream of the Shalka, he was still the incumbent Doctor.

Storm Warning

The Doctor is, as we saw him at the end of the TV movie, doing some reading in the TARDIS library – enjoying former companion/future acquaintance Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically. Suddenly, the TARDIS systems alert him to a nearby kerfuffle in the time vortex: another time ship has crashed and is stuck in a time loop, with extradimensional vortisaurs flitting about it for good measure. His attempt to intervene sees the TARDIS assailed by the beasties, forcing an emergency landing. Meanwhile in 1930, the new British Imperial Airship Scheme’s flagship, the R101, is taking off for Karachi. Among the passengers is Charlotte “Charley” Pollard (India Fisher), who’s pretending to be a boy in order to infiltrate the crew.

Charley fancies herself something of an adventuress, though this is admittedly her first adventure; caught out in her deception, she’s now a fugitive stowaway – just the sort of friend the Doctor likes to make. When the Doctor helps Charley evade pursuit, she’s quite taken with him, not least because of all the historical figures he namedrops; the Doctor, perhaps, sees something of himself in her, what with them both being runaways with romantic souls and a big dose of wanderlust. Perhaps this is the start of a wonderful friendship – or maybe more than that…

But there’s more at stake here than just the Doctor and Charley’s personal liberty and possible sparks of romance. Something sinister is going on aboard the ship, involving an unregistered guest being kept under unusual circumstances – and the vortisaurs have followed the TARDIS out of the time vortex and are harassing the R101. And once the Doctor finds out which ship he’s on, on what date, he’s even more perturbed – for the Doctor remembers that this is the R101’s final flight, which history records ended in disaster and the loss of dozens of lives, though later overshadowed by the Hindenburg. (Less people died on that, but there were cameras onsite capturing the disaster.) It would be an act of cosmological violence to save the ship, but can the Doctor resist the urge to break the laws of time just a little by saving Charley? Perhaps – especially since he has a strong sense that her presence here is already violating the fabric of time…

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Big Finish’s previous audio dramas all used the 1970s mix of the Delia Derbyshire Doctor Who theme music – incongruously, because that wasn’t used during the televised run of any of the Doctors they featured! They don’t go that route for the Eighth Doctor – instead, they debut here a new version of the theme music, cooked up especially by David Arnold. I like it! It’s firmly synth-based, rather than going the orchestral direction of the TV movie, but it’s also clearly up to date and a touch on the dark side, a bit reminiscent of the Thirteenth Doctor’s one.

That’s not the only big introduction this time around – there’s Charley herself. Daphne Ashbrook has both turned up in Big Finish audios from time to time, but she’s never reprised her roles as Grace Holloway – due to the intricacies of the licensing arrangements between Fox, the BBC, and Big Finish, they can’t touch her. This forced them to cook up a new companion for the Eighth Doctor, and here they knock it out of the park. Between India Fisher’s instantly charming performance and Alan Barnes’ script giving her ample spotlight time, Charley feels like a natural companion straight out of the gate. Barnes’ decision to make Charley a runaway actively looking for adventure means there’s no speed bumps in the way of her choosing to join on with the Doctor, and it also means she begins the story already disconnected from prior relationships, which means that maximum can be time spent establishing her character chemistry with McGann, rather than depicting character relationships which will largely stop being relevant once she starts travelling.

She also provides someone for the Doctor to talk to, which in the audio medium is crucial. If I had a major criticism of this, it’s that McGann spends a silly amount of time narrating to himself early on, a shortcoming of the medium when it comes to depicting the actions of solitary characters. It kind of comes across as him needing a bit of alone time to work his way back into the character, which on the one hand is fine, but on the other hand is the sort of thing which ideally could end up on the cutting room floor – we ultimately didn’t need to hear the Doctor narrating that stuff to himself, he could have explained to Charley in dialogue what he was doing when he arrived on the R101 and it would come across just as well since he’s describing this stuff to us in monologue anyway.

That said, the Doctor’s habit of talking to himself when he’s alone could be read as a callback to stuff like the Fourth Doctor muttering away to himself at the start of The Face of Evil, or the First Doctor’s mournful musings when Steven briefly quits towards the end of The Massacre. And it certainly means it’s an extra relief once the Doctor and Charley finally meet up. Things perk up appreciably at this point, the two actors settling into the character relationship marvellously well.

With only the TV movie to draw on from televised canon, McGann and author Alan Barnes have a limited pool of character traits to draw on in order to give the sense that this is the same Eighth Doctor we saw on that, but the combination of a penchant for spur of the moment risk-taking, a near-psychic sense for spacetime oddities, and rapid-fire dialogue does the job there whilst providing a foundation to further flesh out the character. The Doctor, for instance, manages to play Lord Tamworth (Gareth Thomas) like a fiddle, showing a capacity for manipulation comparable with his immediate predecessor but different in how it lands – he’s smoother with it, with more flattery and less prickliness, and there’s less of a sense that he’s playing a long game and more that he’s doing his best with the material immediately available to him.

The plot with the mystery passenger turns out to be an Edwardian riff on Close Encounters With the Third Kind, involving secret British Empire negotiations with aliens. There’s an interesting thing going on with Lord Tamworth representing the policy-making side of Empire, whilst white South African Rathbone (Barnaby Edwards), who is evidently the sort of chap who’d have eventually engineered the apartheid system to keep the colonial social order going, represents the ugly front line reality – committing atrocities implicit in Tamworth’s orders but which Tamworth has been overlooking due to his focus on abstract policy and large-scale strategy. And with episode 4 the Doctor overtly acts against the British Empire in a way which I kind of wish he’d done more on the classic show, and that the revived show had the guts to show him doing. (The Tenth Doctor and RTD are massive cowards for not letting the space Titanic just crash into Buckingham Palace in Voyage of the Damned.)

Taken as a whole, Storm Warning kicks off the Eighth Doctor’s adventures in fine style, getting right more or less everything the TV movie got wrong, whilst preserving the main thing it got right – namely, casting Paul to begin with, since his performance in that was never the problem. Like the TV movie, it’s a story which simply had to work, because if it didn’t the new project would be short-lived; unlike the TV movie – and unlike the R101 – it sticks the landing.

Sword of Orion

During Storm Warning, the Doctor and Charley befriended a vortisaur, who they dubbed Ramsay and who became a sort of pet. Ramsay, however, is looking decidedly peaky – so the Doctor decides to stop off at Garazone Central, an out-of-the-way backwater space station, to see if he and Charley can find some medicine. As they browse, however, the TARDIS is mistaken for scrap and taken onboard the Vanguard, a salvage ship, which the Doctor and Charley duly infiltrate. They sneak their way to the TARDIS easily enough – but then the Doctor realises that the warp drive of the ship is messing with the TARDIS’ instruments, making an elegant getaway to somewhere far away in time and space not an option.

Still, something intriguing is happening: a derelict star destroyer has shown up, and the Vanguard crew aren’t passing up the chance to check it out. The TARDIS, meanwhile, has landed onboard the star destroyer – giving the Doctor and Charley the perfect chance to check it out for themselves. When one of the Vanguard crew members is killed by a mysterious assailant onboard the ship, the Doctor and Charley are the prime suspects. Who is the real killer? What secret agendas lurk within the Vanguard crew? Did the Vanguard really only discover the abandoned star destroyer, ripe for stripping down for scrap, by accident? And what bearing does this have on Earth’s current war against the android hordes of Orion… or the recently concluded war of survival against the Cybermen?

Yes, this is the first Big Finish outing for the Cybermen! Not only is this the first time Paul McGann actually gets to tackle them, but it also gives Nicholas Briggs – who also wrote this story – a chance to do his Cyberman voice. Yet, as with his Dalek voice, he’d had previous opportunities to practice this back when he was one of the key figures behind the Audio Visuals, a series of thoroughly unofficial Doctor Who audio dramas produced on a strictly samizdat non-profit basis from 1984 to 1991.

The Audio Visuals, of course, inadvertently became a testbed of talent, many of whom would go on to contribute to Big Finish. Yet Sword of Orion owes even more to the Audio Visuals than that – for it originally was an Audio Visual, now regenerated into something a bit more official. This isn’t the first time that Big Finish would dip back into the Audio Visuals back catalogue like this – The Mutant Phase was an Audio Visual before they reframed it as a Fifth Doctor and Nyssa tale – but I think it’s a particularly smart move here.

See, the basic challenge Big Finish writers faced is that whilst they had a good idea of what a classic Fifth Doctor or Seventh Doctor story looked like – and could even faintly perceive the outlines of a good Sixth Doctor story if they looked at Vengeance On Varos and squinted really hard – they didn’t have much of a model for what a good Eighth Doctor-style story would be like; indeed, it would be largely down to them, McGann, and Fisher to forge that through these audio dramas. Sure, there’s the comics and novels, but neither of those things offer useful models for a format sticking closer to the episodic drama format of the television show, as Big Finish audios at this time did. On top of that, in these early days it must have been very hard to write for Paul McGann, who made no secret of the fact that he wasn’t thrilled with how the TV movie turned out and would have preferred to take his Doctor in a different direction.

The obvious thing to do, then, would be to not worry too much about telling “a good Eighth Doctor story” – just take a story you already know makes good Doctor Who, tweak it to allow for the new continuity, and unleash Paul on it to let him make it his own. Then, once you’ve got some good stories which happen to have Paul’s current take on the Doctor in it, the shape of an Eighth Doctor story might be able to be developed naturally, just like it did with all the televised Doctors.

The Audio Visuals made for perfect fodder for this: as deeply unofficial material, in pre-BitTorrent days their circulation was necessarily highly limited, so it’s not like they were updating a widely-known story everyone had already experienced with a different Doctor (Nicholas Briggs’ “Nth Doctor”, if you were wondering), and by not dipping into the comics or novels they helped resist the temptation to drag Paul’s performance back towards those interpretations of the character.

Of course, it would have all come to nothing if the story they picked turned out to be rubbish. I’ve not heard the original version of Sword of Orion, but if it’s anything like this it was probably a corker. As Sandifer alludes, it seems that whilst the main drive behind the Audio Visuals was the same fan passion which drives fanfic and fanzines, they were also in part a product of fan dissatisfaction; they kicked off in late 1984 and really picked up steam in 1985 and 1986, which would be the nadir of the Saward era. The original Sword of Orion was from the third Audio Visuals seasons, and based on the patchy notes I can dig up that means it would have came out in 1986 at the absolute earliest, and may well have slipped out later than that; this means it near-certainly postdates both Earthshock and Attack of the Cybermen, and a comparison here would be worthwhile.

Sword of Orion eventually becomes a Base Under Siege set on the salvage ship; Bases Under Siege are the classic model for a Cyberman story, and are often the best way to revisit the concept. (Note, for instance, how under Grand Moff Steven Nightmare In Silver was a bit of a mess, but World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls was a blinder, and the latter story is essentially a Base Under Siege on a generation starship that’s been roughly pegged by relativity.) As with the best Bases Under Siege, there’s a good sense of the inner personality clashes and conflicts within the base crew, adding spice to the story and ensuring it has impact when they get picked off by the Cybermen. As with the Saward-era Dalek and Cyberman tales, there’s lots of deaths here, but each and every one of the death feels like its mean something, whilst in Earthshock the only death anybody remembers is Adric’s. (Oh how we laughed! Oh how we celebrated!)

Attack of the Cybermen was lumbered with masses and masses of somewhat confused and vapid continuity nods, despite having Ian Levine on hand as a continuity advisor – or perhaps there’s a case for saying because of having Ian Levine on hand as a continuity advisor, because Ian Levine had a very specific attitude towards continuity which has aged poorly and was probably not what was best for the show at the time.

Remember, one of Levine’s very first contributions to the show was requiring a change in the name of the starship in State of Decay, because the same ship name had been used previously on the show. This is the sort of thing you pick up if you have a very good eye for facts, but an absolutely lousy sense of judgement when it comes to their significance. To be fair, it’s wholly possible that Ian just flagged the connection, reported it, and moved on, and other hands decided it was necessary to rename the ship (a silly decision – what prevents ships from having the same name from time to time across the entire span of galactic history?), but that’s not how it’s typically recalled.

This leads to disaster in the context of Attack of the Cybermen. Levine bizarrely keeps trying to take credit for writing this one – Eric Saward insists he did it, whereas anyone who had the slightest shred of good taste would surely try to deny writing such a turkey. If he didn’t write it, though, he was still continuity advising during it, and it shows – it’s a morass of references to past stories without much of a sense of which continuity nods are truly important and which are solely there for the sake of being there. The return to Totter’s Lane from An Unearthly Child is the nadir of this, since there is absolutely no reason it would be necessary to the story; compare to Remembrance of the Daleks, where the entire story hinges on the idea that the First Doctor left some unfinished business behind.

Sword of Orion, however, is judicious in its use of continuity. It reminds us that the Cybermen launched a devastating Cyber-War at some point in the future timeline and ended up trounced, leading to the dire straits they are in in tales like Revenge of the Cybermen. It remembers that they took to cryogenic stasis to stash away lots of their numbers on Telos, as established in Tomb of the Cybermen. And it remembers their basic abilities and the tools they make use of. All of these continuity nods help establish the context and stakes of the story and contribute to the Cybermen’s motivations in this story.

What the story doesn’t do is continue the practice of extrapolating their weaknesses out to the point where they practically explode if they notice that gold is in the same room as them – the most risible example of this in the classic show being the way that merely rubbing Adric’s crappy badge against a chest unit briefly caused enough damage to do the job in Earthshock. (The gold arrows in Silver Nemesis at least pack a punch and can be imagined to fragment on penetrating the innards of the chest unit.) It is, yet again, an exercise in making the Cybermen scary again, and that requires making them dangerous. More broadly, the story has a better sense of the horror elements of the Cybermen than the show ever exhibited in the Saward era; the detail of the part-converted Cybermen left idle so their organic parts have decayed whilst their cyber implants have stayed pristine is particularly chilling.

Placed in the context of a good story, McGann and Fisher are freed up to further develop the flavour of their performances whilst the rest of the cast’s bickering carries a substantial amount of the weight of the plot. This is particularly case in the introductory segments of the story, before the Siege of the Base kicks into high gear. The Doctor taking Charley to an offworld market and finding a gold-plated Cyberman’s head feels like the sort of moment that the new series would touch on. (Indeed, “something funny is found in an alien bazaar” is the initiating incident in Turn Left.) More broadly, “companion adores seeing awesome space sights with the Doctor as a bonding experience with lightly romantic tones” is essentially the gimmick that a whole swathe of the new series has gone with, and is overtly present here to an extent it never was in the classic series.

On the whole, Sword of Orion might not do a whole lot for the Eighth Doctor specifically – but if this is business as usual for this era, then it’s setting a high bar indeed, and it’s perhaps the best Briggs-penned story in the main range up to this point.

The Stones of Venice

Having had various adventures between Sword of Orion and now, the Doctor and Charley decide they are due a holiday. The Doctor recommends Venice – but the TARDIS takes them to a Venice of the future, a decaying city on the verge of falling into the Adriatic entirely. It’s a maudlin city, mostly empty, but not completely – for morbid revellers have come to enjoy one last carnival before the city reaches its end. Charley thinks this is way too gloomy – but she and the Doctor can’t help but find their curiosity piqued by gossip that the collapse is not due to natural forces winning out over human neglect, but the result of an honest to goodness curse…

This one was written by Paul Magrs – creator of Iris Wildthyme, though she isn’t in this one. At this point in time, his main claim to fame within the world of Doctor Who tie-ins was as the author of The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel, and Verdigris for the BBC Books range – the first two of which were Eighth Doctor stories. It makes a certain amount of sense that Big Finish would sooner or later look to the authors contributing to the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels to write for their Eigth Doctor stories, and Magrs was the first one to bite; he’d go on to be one of their more prolific writers, and would also pen the non-Big Finish audios The Nest Cottage Chronicles which were key to tempting Tom Baker in from the cold like a fussy cat.

Here, Magrs’ script does a great job of presenting you with a Venice which becomes increasingly strange the more you find out about it; the story’s a bit like Ghost Light played out on a grand scale, with a whole city as its backdrop. As matters progress, the tale takes on an atmosphere similar to The Masque of Mandragora, what with all the cults and whatnot, whilst the emphasis placed on art – a gallery proves to be a key location – suggests a less comedic, more philosophical take on City of Death. This, however, goes more gothic than either of them – perhaps to suit the gothic decor of the Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS that Charley comments on; the concept of Charley being drugged and hypnotised by a cult of Deep One-esque gondoliers to masquerade as the Duke Orsino’s late wife as part of a grand gesture to mark the culmination of the curse is a case in point.

(The web-footed gondoliers who are openly looking forward to having Venice to themselves once it falls into the sea and the tourists leave are a nice touch – not least because rather than being a Deep One-esque product of interbreeding, they’re humans who have somewhat purposefully evolved to be fishlike, so it’s a choice, not a heritage.)

All of this adds up to a big melodramatic plot with the thinnest of science fiction justification for the core weirdness for the sake of telling a gothy swoony love story, which feels largely unlike the classic show (though Enlightenment faintly approached this sort of territory), but like something the modern show might do at the drop of a hat. That being the case, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that Grand Moff Steven had the Eighth Doctor name his Big Finish companions specifically in The Night of the Doctor – because with stories like this Big Finish staked out territory that the modern show feels at home in, and which you can imagine it attempting a near-direct remake of. (Imagine a version of Series 5 where we had this instead of The Vampires of Venice; wouldn’t that be grand?) By comparison, any particular Eighth Doctor Adventures novel would likely need substantial amendment to be attempted as an episode of the modern show and, if Sandifer’s assessment of this story is correct, would not resemble current Who nearly so much.

Minuet In Hell

The USA, somewhere in the early 21st Century: the state of Malebogia has seceded from one of the other southern States (but remained in the Union), and evangelical leader Brigham Elisha Dashwood III (Robert Jezek) is in the running to be the first Governor. The Brigadier is here, using the cover of being a diplomatic observer, having been involved in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in the UK and so having experience in the establishment of new legislatures; he is actually doing a little work for UNIT. Dashwood is the founder of the Dashwood Institute, a cutting-edge psychiatric hospital, and UNIT has become decidedly worried about some of the technology Dashwood has been tinkering with.

Meanwhile, some manner of disaster has occurred, and both the Doctor and Charley have lost their memories. The Doctor has ended up in the Dashwood Institute itself, alongside fellow amnesiac Gideon Crane (Nicholas Briggs) who, having been brought in with the Doctor after an encounter with him, has become convinced he is the Doctor. Charley, meanwhile, has been snatched off the streets by the police as a vagrant, and as happens from time to time to women charged with vagrancy within state lines, she’s been sent to Dashwood’s other major institution: the Hellfire Club, a revival of the 18th Century original, where anyone who is anyone in Malebogia attends their high society Black Masses. Charley and the other women snatched off the streets are given food and board and are expected to work as “hostesses” at the club, serving at the beck and call of the attendees and doing whatever it takes to please them under pain of corporal punishment. Does Charley have the guts, the courage, and the wit to survive as a Pretty Little Satin Bottom?

Yeah, if you hadn’t guessed from that, Minuet From Hell is fucking terrible. The BBC actually aired some of Big Finish’s early Eighth Doctor stories on BBC Radio 7, and this is the only one from his first audio season they didn’t touch. The stated reason is for the adult content, but even if that weren’t a consideration this would be the right call, because this is absolutely terrible.

It’s another story cannibalised from the Audio Visuals. It’s credited to Alan W. Lear and Gary Russell; Russell is, among many other endeavours within Doctor Who tie-in media, the original executive producer of the entire Big Finish range, with extensive credits as a producer and director until he eventually stepped down to do script editing for the revived show in 2006. (He was also one of the earliest key members of the Audio Visuals team, having penned the pilot episode, The Space Wail.) Lear’s credits within Doctor Who consist of his coauthorship here, is sole authorship of the original Minuet In Hell and a few other Audio Visuals, and then that’s about it.

I’ve not heard the original story, but it is apparently a very loose adaptation which tosses in some additional ideas here and there from Lear’s other Audio Visuals, and the revision for Big Finish was the subject of no small amount of drama. Lear apparently directly rewrote his original for the first half, but the last two episodes of the serial needed a rushed rewrite from Gary Russell – hence the co-writing credit – when problems of an unknown nature came up which required the rewrites without enough time to keep Lear in the loop. (One wonders if McGann or Fisher objected to some of the material.) He was going to pen another story – Riders of the Vortex – but it was abandoned due to “creative differences” between him and Russell, and that was it.

Far and away the most objectionable parts of the story is the way the amnesiac Charley is, in effect, subjected to sex trafficking, but the story entirely fails to realise that it’s sex trafficking. Probably the worst aspect of this is that it’s treated largely like any other “companion gets captured for a while” angle in a Doctor Who story, despite being a scenario which at best is the sort of BDSM fantasy where consent abstracted out of the equation. (The fact that “Pretty Little Satin Bottom” is the official job title particularly suggests this.) At worst, this is institutionalised rape, pure and simple. Charley is not actually raped – she escapes before anything like that happens – but the threat is undeniably there.

Actually, the execution ends up even lighter than that – Charley and Becky Lee (Helen Goldwyn), the captive she befriends, soon end up treating the whole thing like a lark and kind of enjoy the 18th Century-style costumes they’re expected to wear in tribute to the original Hellfire Club, all corsets and cleavage – which suggests that Lear and Russell simply failed to realise the implications of what they was writing. (I suppose it’s also possible that Russell did not have time to do the sort of root and branch rewrite which would have been necessary to take this plot point out entirely, and he made the very misguided choice to try and lighten it up.) There is an especially risible part in which Charley punches a dude who’s getting overfamiliar, and one of the men at the club starts brandishing a whip and declaring his intent to punish her, and she reacts more like she’s a naughty schoolgirl who just got caught by a teacher in a St. Trinian’s story than someone who’s been coerced into sex work about to be physically assaulted.

I have not heard the original Minuet In Hell, but apparently it was set in the actual 18th Century, and part of me wonders whether in the original version the kidnapped homeless women were simply working prostitutes recruited from the streets of London. This would at least explain why the women more or less entirely fail to react as though they’ve been subjected to state-coerced sex trafficking; even early on, when they are being briefed on their role, they sound more disgruntled than outright terrified. The working conditions of 18th Century prostitutes were hardly a party, but it would at least contextually provide a basis for the women treating the whole thing as just another shift (and, given the context, perhaps a quite well-paying one).

Then again, trawling the comments on Sandifer’s review, I see at least one person asserting that the original is worse – which means that whatever Lear’s faults were in writing this in the first place, Gary Russell surely shares some of the blame for greenlighting a remake in the first place unless that greenlight worked in a “take out the rapey bullshit” mandate that Lear ignored.

Whatever the reasons for Russell’s rewrite, one issue which has apparently been made known is running time – apparently Lear’s script was way too long, and much of Russell’s work involved hacking it back to the bone in order to prevent it from overrunning horribly. Given that he was working on a time crunch – he was only able to get a script to the actors two days before recording – this may well explain why he didn’t have time to deal with more ingrained issues like the sex trafficking. As it stands, even after the edit the episode times creep up here – episode 1, in fact, is some 43 and a bit minutes long, leaving it around the length of an episode of the revival series, though if the revived show had aired something like Minuet In Hell in its first season we’d remember the Ninth Doctor era as a terrible mistake which killed off the show yet again, just like the TV movie.

On top of all that, going to the “Eighth Doctor has amnesia” well this soon is infuriating. What with it being a significant feature of the TV movie, tie-in media had a bad habit of rerunning that plot a lot for want of other distinctively Eighth Doctor story concepts to run with – the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel line did it multiple times – so running it back again in the first audio season is just obnoxious. Get another plot already!

It’s a particularly poor choice for a first season story because McGann here really needs all the time he can get in order to flesh out his performance as the Eighth Doctor, because the amnesia plot means he’s sidelined for the first two episodes more or less entirely, with the Brigadier and Charley getting more spotlight than he does. In fact, I got so tired of this conceit that I checked for spoilers and, on learning that the Doctor doesn’t get his memories back until a good chunk into the final episode, gave up on the audio drama as a lost cause and washed my hands of it.

Amidst all this horrible pacing, rape threats, rehashed plot concepts, and extremely bad attempts at Southern accents, there’s a kernel of an interesting idea here – riffing on the prominence of evangelical forces in American politics by presenting the Bush-era Christian right as a two-faced institution, offering patriotism by day and indulging in sin by night – but Genesis managed to sum up that idea in 4 minutes in Jesus He Knows Me, and a Doctor Who story of over 2 hours long needs deeper themes and more ideas than that to sustain itself. Minuet In Hell doesn’t have that.

And there you go – a first audio season in the can, and Paul McGann has had the pleasure of being in four distinct flavours of Doctor Who story, all of which are very different from the TV movie: there’s a companion introduction, a story with classic monsters, a detour into the fantastic that test-drives directions which would eventually creep into the revived show on television, and an absolute shitshow. (As I said in my review, the problem with the TV movie wasn’t that it was ostentatiously, luminously bad the way Minuet In Hell is – it was just aggressively mediocre.) He handles the three stories worth listening to admirably, and benefits in the final one from being sidelined for most of it. Nothing for it now but to tie this article off and come back to the Eighth Doctor in his next season, when… wait… hang on… my hand is twitching… moving by itself… what’s happening?

Best Serial: Sorry folks, it turns out I can’t resist the temptation – I’m going to break down each of the Eighth Doctor’s audio seasons during his incumbency as though they were TV seasons and slot them into my big breakdown. I won’t keep going for any stories from after the new series comes in, partly because Big Finish fundamentally changed their approach to the Eighth Doctor after that in ways which make this “season” approach less tenable, partly because I haven’t been doing it for any of the other former Doctors given new leases of life in Big Finish, partly because it would be an impossibly open-ended job otherwise.

Anyway, the best one this time is The Stones of Venice, a story you can’t imagine any previous era of the show trying in quite the same way. Sword of Orion is a close runner-up.

Worst Serial: Oh, Minuet In Hell by a mile.

Most Important Serial: Storm Warning, clearly.

Least Important Serial: Let’s see, Storm Warning introduces Charley, Sword of Orion is the first Big Finish appearance of the Cybermen, the first time Briggs did the Cybermen’s voices in an official Doctor Who thing, and arguably the first time the Eighth Doctor meets a classic enemy. (I mean, he meets the Master in the TV movie, but it’s a new regeneration of the Master there, and these are the same old Cybermen as ever.) Minuet In Hell has him meeting the Brigadier… Stones of Venice might have to take this one by default.

Season Ranking: Yes, I’m slotting McGann’s audio seasons as incumbent into here. I’ll yank them if RTD does the right thing and gives McGann a proper TV season. Let’s see where the first one lands…

1. Season 26 (10/10).
2. Season 13 (10/10).
3. Season 14 (10/10).
4. Season 25 (10/10).
5. Season 18 (9/10).
6. Series 10 (9/10).
7. Season 12 (9/10).
8. Season 7 (9/10).
9. 14th Doctor Specials (9/10).
10. Series 9 (9/10).
11. Season 17 (9/10).
12. Season 6 (8/10).
13. Season 24 (8/10).
14. Season 4 (8/10).
15. Season 8 (8/10).
16. Season 9 (8/10).
17. Season 15 (8/10).
18. Season 5 (8/10).
19. Series 4 (8/10).
20. Season 2 (8/10).
21. Series 2 (7/10).
22. Season 20 (7/10).
23. Season 16 (7/10).
24. Season 1 (7/10).
25. Series 3 (7/10).
26. 8th Doctor Audio Season 1 (7/10).
27. Season 10 (7/10).
28. Season 3 (7/10).
29. Series 8 (6/10).
30. Series 1 (6/10).
31. 2008-2010 Specials (6/10).
32. Series 6 (6/10).
33. Season 19 (6/10).
34. Series 5 (5/10).
35. The TV movie (5/10).
36. Series 7 (5/10).
37. Season 21 (5/10).
38. Series 11 (4/10).
39. Season 11 (4/10).
40. Season 23 (3/10).
41. Series 13 (2/10).
42. Season 22 (2/10).
43. Series 12 (1/10).
44. 2022 Specials (1/10).

That’s… not bad! Not bad at all. It would be much, much better if Minuet In Hell weren’t here – then it’d be a solid 9/10 for sure. But that story is such a stinker I have to mark the season down hard for it, and with seasons this short it only takes one real turkey to really hurt the average. As it stands, the season is on a par with that one Tenth Doctor season which is dragged down by the Martha plot not being well-handled but could boast Human Nature/The Family of Blood as a highlight, or the Third Doctor season where the bloom is off the rose a bit but we still got a Carnival of Monsters out of the deal; this is far from embarrassing company to be seen in, and there’s every reason to expect improvement going forwards.