The Virgin New Adventures: Luciferian Blood and Rising Heat

The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…

Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore

The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.

In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.

Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…

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…

The Virgin New Adventures: Nightshade To Deceit

The story so far: after kicking off with the Timewyrm saga in 1991, the Virgin New Adventures novel line spent early 1992 with the Cat’s Cradle trilogy, in which the TARDIS was damaged due to a crash with an early Gallifreyan time machine. At the end of Witch Mark, the final Cat’s Cradle novel, the repairs were completed using demonic protoplasm – causing the TARDIS to become corrupted, with consequences for the Doctor due to his symbiotic relationship with it. By the end of the chunk of novels I’m going to cover here, that problem will be resolved. Will this new plot arc turn out to actually be prominently relevant over these six novels, developed according to a consistent and thought-out plan? Or will authors just pay lip service to it whilst writing the book they want to write anyway, like they did with the previous seven books? Place your bets now…

Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

With the TARDIS mended, you’d expect everything would be fine – but just as a speck of contamination has made its way into the fabric of the machine, a kernel of discontent is nagging at the Doctor’s psyche. In fact, he’s outright snappish and irritable, to the point where Ace is shaken by one of his moments of bad temper. The Doctor realises it’s high time he and Ace slow down and did some mental stocktaking, so he lands the TARDIS in December 1968, near the sleepy Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham; elsewhere the Sixties are getting really exciting, but here they’ve almost entirely passed the village by. As they take in the surroundings, the Doctor discloses to Ace that he’s feeling his age, and badly misses the people from his past (when he loses his temper at Ace it’s because she’s messing with some of Susan’s stuff), and he’s seriously contemplating retirement. (He will, of course, eventually get around to acting on that in The Giggle.)

Meanwhile, Edmund Trevithick is trying to make the best of his own retirement. With his wife having died and his daughter having dropped out of society, Edmund now resides in the local old folks’ home. From 1953 to 1958, Trevithick was known up and down the country as Professor Nightshade, star of the science fiction show Nightshade – a Quatermass-like affair in which the heroic Professor investigated strange enigmas and thwarted alien monstrosities. With a chap from the BBC coming up to interview him in conjunction with the repeats currently airing, Trevithick is quite enjoying being back in the limelight again. What he doesn’t enjoy is people breaking his window late at night – people who call him by the name of Nightshade…

Trevithick is not the only local to be haunted by the ghosts of the past right now – nor, for that matter, is the Doctor with his maudlin thoughts of Susan and the other companions he’s left behind. And with these ghost encounters turning fatal, it’s clear that there’s something here for the Doctor and Ace to look into. The only prior association the village has with ghosts hails from strange stories about the old tumbledown Norman castle that used to loom over the village – long since destroyed in the Civil War, in a story which has its own peculiarities. Yet the site of the castle has now become home to a large radio telescope – and the research group there, led by Dr. Christine Cooper, has started receiving readings which they cannot make head or tail of. Clearly, the Doctor’s going to head down to the radio telescope (brushing aside his Post-Logopolis Stress Disorder) and get involved again – and perhaps this time he’ll be able to count on Professor Nightshade’s help!

Doctor Who: Big Fifth-ish, Part 1

When it comes to the original Big Finish roster of Doctors, the Sixth Doctor was in most need of rehabilitation via Big Finish audio drama (what with his televised tenure being severely compromised) and the Seventh Doctor had the least to prove (due to having a really very good run on television). By process of elimination, this meant that the Fifth Doctor was hovering somewhere between the two – though perhaps a touch closer to the Sixth Doctor end of the scale than the Seventh, since Davison has gone on the record as saying that he’d have stuck it out in the televised role for longer if he’d had more material on the calibre of his last story. But when that last story is The Caves of Androzani – widely acknowledged as being one of the best serials the classic show ever aired – that’s setting a very high bar indeed.

That said, when the back end of his run saw ample signs of the blight which would smother Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor right out of the gate, perhaps solidly entertaining audio dramas which steer clear of the pitfalls of the worst Fifth Doctor tales is a reasonable enough target to aim for? Certainly, that’s the standard which was hit by Phantasmagoria – the first Big Finish audio drama that Davison had to himself without McCoy and Baker butting in. Let’s see whether his crop of Big Finish stories from 2000 improved on that.

The Land of the Dead

It’s just Nyssa with the Doctor here, situating this in between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity during that unexplored bit where they were implied to have had a bunch of adventures together after they dumped Tegan at Heathrow. Nyssa and the Doctor have arrived in Alaska, where the TARDIS seems to have caught wind of an anomalous power source. After a brief blip into 1964, the TARDIS settles in 1994 – where oil baron Shaun Brett (Christopher Scott) is building himself an expansive house, making extensive use of local materials (including animal pelts and the like) in a way which local indigenous folk find deeply obnoxious and disrespectful. The locals may have a point: strange forces have been roused – forces for whom masses of fossilised bone, such as Brett has been collecting, make ideal vessels…

This is an audio drama I couldn’t get into, and a chunk of that is because I just wasn’t able to overlook the elephant in the room. Some of the characters – Gaborik and Tulung – are meant to hail from the Koyukon First Nations people, but their voice actors (Andrew Fettes and Neil Roberts) very much don’t hail from that background. Indeed, one of them seems to be deliberately adopting a stilted speech pattern to indicate “I am playing someone of a particular ethnicity”, and whilst accents are certainly a thing it’s awkward when this sort of mimicry happens. White actors voicing a Black characters and putting on deliberate “Black” accents to play that role is something I think most of us would be uncomfortable with, after all – and I feel like the same principle applies here.

Doctor Who: The Sonic Salvaging of the Sixth, Part 1

The consensus in Doctor Who fandom seems to be that whilst the Sixth Doctor’s run on television was kind of rough, Colin Baker was really able to turn the character around in the Big Finish audio dramas, where at long last he was given solid material to work with and wasn’t caught up in a power struggle between a script editor and a producer with opposed views on the show’s direction. If we set aside the multi-Doctor oddity The Sirens of Time, Colin Baker’s first Big Finish audio was Whispers of Terror. This paired him with a returning Nicola Bryant in a story which managed to be, if not stellar, at least more consistently enjoyable than much of the material they’d starred in together. Over year 2000, Baker would go on to star in four different Big Finish audios – none of which featured Peri, or for that matter Mel – for Baker would be the first Doctor to perform the role for Big Finish opposite companions he’d never travelled with during the TV show.

In the case of the Sixth Doctor, there’s a compelling creative opportunity set up for this. The timey-wimey nature of The Trial of a Time Lord means that it sets a firm end point for his journeys with Peri, who’d been his companion since prior to his regeneration, but whilst he leaves the courtroom with Mel at the end of the saga, this sets up a bit of a paradox – because Mel comes to the courtroom from some point in her personal timeline after Terror of the Vervoids, which was picked out by the Doctor as a case from his future, involving a companion he hadn’t actually met yet.

The smoothest way to resolve the paradox is to assume that the Sixth Doctor and Mel don’t go directly from The Ultimate Foe to Time and the Rani without any stopovers in between; instead, the Doctor dropped Mel off wherever she’d been plucked away from to attend the courtroom (where she was most likely then picked up by a future version of the Sixth Doctor), and then went off on his own way, eventually encountering Mel for the first time and experiencing Terror of the Vervoids for real instead of as courtroom footage.

This means that, just like the Second Doctor is theorised to have enjoyed an entire “Season 6B” following The War Games in which he undertook tasks for the Celestial Intervention Agency before his forced regeneration was imposed upon him, so too can we imagine any number of “Season 23Bs” enjoyed by the Sixth Doctor; in fact, Season 23B is even better-supported by the TV show itself than Season 6B, because the mere existence of Terror of the Vervoids implies its existence directly, no reasoning outside of the television show needed. We can go further than that, though: sure, sooner or later the Sixth Doctor must meet Mel for the “first” time, but who says he can’t go the long way around to get there? It’s possible to infer all sorts of new friends for him to meet in between – and in doing so, this creates a creative space to explore how the character might have further developed into the softer direction which Trial gave us glimpses of.

Of course, to get the best out of that, you’d need the right companion, and as it happens Big Finish managed to strike gold the first time around…

The Marian Conspiracy

Dr. Evelyn Smythe (Maggie Stables), a middle-aged history professor, is giving a lecture on Elizabeth I’s rise to power and the difficulties she faced during the reign of Queen Mary. Unfortunately, a big-haired buffoon in a clownish coat has shown up with a machine that makes annoying bleeping noises; this proves so disruptive that Evelyn has to cut the lecture short. When she confronts the weirdo in question, he witters about how she’s somehow connected to a temporal nexus point which threatens the integrity of the timeline, and on top of all that insists that John Whiteside Smith – privy councillor to Elizabeth I and ancestor of Evelyn – never existed. To make things even more ridiculous, the stranger makes this claim on the preposterous grounds that he himself frequented Elizabeth’s court, and would have met Whiteside had he existed!

When the weirdo shows up at her home, Evelyn decides to let him see her family records for himself, just to shut him up. Not only is Whiteside missing, but Evelyn’s entire family tree starts to fade away before her very eyes! The stranger explains that some manner of time paradox has ended up affecting her history, and that if it is not resolved she too will pop out of existence. Well, Evelyn has felt a bit under the weather recently, and the disappearance of information from her notes is outright bizarre – perhaps there’s something to the stranger’s claims after all. After all, he is a Doctor…

Doctor Who: Seven’s Sonic Seasons, Part 1

As I’ve previously described, Big Finish announced the arrival of their Doctor Who audio dramas with the oddball multi-Doctor adventure The Sirens of Time, followed by a brace of stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors to establish their credentials at telling solo stories featuring the Doctors of the 1980s. Over 1999 and 2000s, they continued to put out their monthly range, expanding each Doctor’s line of audio dramas until they eventually had done the equivalent of a short season of the television show for each of them.

For this article, I’m going to look at their early Seventh Doctor stories, following The Fearmonger. On the one hand, the Seventh Doctor’s brief television run ought to have set him in good stead for adaptation to the audio drama format – his seasons of the show were good enough to act as a showcase for how writers could get the best out of McCoy’s interpretation of the Doctor, but were brief enough to leave all sorts of directions unexplored. On the other hand, the Virgin New Adventures had taken the character in an odd new direction which on the one hand would never have flown on television, but on the other hand had been broadly embraced by the fanbase. This left Big Finish at a crossroads with their Seventh Doctor material: do they mimic the TV show, follow the lead of the New Adventures, or try to find their own way?

The Genocide Machine

The Doctor and Ace have come to Kar-Charrat – a jungle world that is home to a vast library that rivals even the Matrix of Gallifrey for the sheer range of information it contains. Chief Librarian Elgin (Bruce Montague) is only too glad to greet the Doctor, who becomes quite interested in the new “wetwork” technology the library has deployed for data storage. Meanwhile, spacefaring antiquities thief Bev Tarrant (Louise Faulkner) and her team are excavating a nearby ziggurat – said ziggurat being the latest antiquity Bev has been assigned to steal – when they are assailed by violent robotic pepperpots YELL-ING ANG-RI-LY. It’s the Daleks – but what are they doing here?

Penned by Mike Tucker, The Genocide Machine is the first of the loose Dalek Empire series which ran through the Doctor Who monthly range in its early years. In theory it’s a connected arc, but in practice it doesn’t seem like there’s much connecting the arc beyond “here’s this incarnation of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks on Big Finish”; the Dalek Empire title would later be assigned to a Doctor-less spin-off series about the Daleks doing one of their bids for galactic domination and some homebrewed heroes trying to stop them.

The Virgin New Adventures: Cat’s Cradle – Prophets, Seers, and Sages

The story so far: the Virgin New Adventures have kicked off with a bang with the Timewyrm tetralogy. Though a bit hit and miss – what with the first book involving John Peel being extremely skeevy about young teenage girls and the third book being pretty bland and unambitious – it did at least offer up a pretty good Terrance Dicks story about the Doctor and Ace foiling the Nazis, and it also offered Revelation by Paul Cornell, a radically experimental book which demonstrated now the New Adventures format and ethos could really push the bounds of Doctor Who. As 1992 came around, line editor Peter Darvill-Evans was tasked with continuing the series, and he did so by inaugurating a new named story arc: Cat’s Cradle…

Before I go into that, however, I’d better explain a bit about how I’m planning on tackling the New Adventures going forwards. Like I said at the end of my review of Season 26, the best way to approach Doctor Who tie-in media (and, quite possibly, the actual show itself) is to not worry too much about being completist but to instead cherry-pick appropriately, concentrating on what interests you and skipping over the bits which don’t work for you. That’s certainly how I intend to tackle these books. I’ll make a game attempt to read at least a representative portion of each one, but I reserve the right to give up after the first few chapters if a book doesn’t grab me. If a book seems to be good, I’ll read it, and if it seems to be bad in an amusing or interesting way, I may keep going, but if it simply doesn’t engage my interest then I’ll just skip straight over it and move on to the next. Life’s too short, you know?

Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt

The Doctor and Ace have stopped over in Perivale for a cup of tea and a fry-up at the greasy spoon in the wake of the Timewyrm saga. Bizarre temporal phenomena break out, and they hustle back to the TARDIS – which is, in fact, the cause of the problem. As the Doctor takes it into the time vortex, so if necessary he can purge it of contaminating matter without polluting London, it becomes apparent that something nasty has infiltrated it, and the Doctor and Ace become separated as the Time Lord heads out to look for the intruder whilst Ace keeps an eye on things in the control room. Meanwhile, aeons ago, ancient Gallifrey rules over a vast space empire. Yet space is not the final frontier to the Gallifreyans; now they are undertaking their first tentative experiments in time travel. A prototype ship – a Time Scaphe – undertakes the most ambitious time expedition yet, only to crash headlong into the TARDIS…

After the collision, Ace awakens in a strange world-city, ruled over by an alien entity known as the Process – the thing which infiltrated the TARDIS – and occupied by the crew of the Time Scaphe. Vael, one of the latter, has become the Process’s henchman, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. What is going on? Where is the Doctor? Where, for that matter is this city? And can Ace and the crew of the Time Scaphe beat the Process? The answers may lie with a bizarre silver cat…

Doctor Who: Big Finish’s Big Debut

If you’re looking into Doctor Who tie-in media, the elephant in the room is Big Finish. Much as you can divide televised Doctor Who into the classic series and the revived show, you can divide the expanded Doctor Who canon into two eras. Prior to 1999, you had an era when novels were the biggest deal in expanded media – the Target novelisation series was the only way to experience many classic stories before home media, particularly when it came to lost serials before audience-taped audio had at least partially filled the gaps, and then you had the Virgin New Adventures providing the most prominent trickle of new stories during the wilderness years. Sure, the Pertwee audio adventures were landmark moments, but there was only two of them – for much of the wilderness period, new novels were coming out frequently and formed the most substantial and exciting bit of expanded media.

Everything changed in July 1999, when Big Finish released The Sirens of Time. Big Finish had previously been making audio dramas based on the adventures of Bernice Summerfield – a space archaeologist who had been a companion in the Virgin New Adventures, and who the New Adventures line had reconfigured around after Virgin lost the tie-in novel rights in the wake of the TV movie. Having established themselves, they then pulled off a licensing coup by convincing the BBC to let them produce their own line of full cast Doctor Who audio dramas, featuring whichever classic Doctors wanted to take part. Tom Baker, legendary curmudgeon that he is, wouldn’t return their calls, but Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy were ready to don their question mark-patterned underpants and return to the TARDIS.

The rest, of course, is history. Big Finish have produced a lot of material – their main range ended up putting out at least one Doctor Who story a month for nearly two decades, and if anything their pace has only accelerated in recent years, now that the central range has been abolished and a confusing array of series has taken its place. Their output is simultaneously a sign of their success and a big red flag; they’re now producing an absolutely absurd amount of stuff, to the point where it’s hopeless to even attempt to keep up, and their Doctor Who-related lines alone represent more material than any sensible person would ever want to plough through. Significant creative problems have arisen, some of which are clearly side-effects of the increasing tendency towards shovelware, some of which are not. Elizabeth Sandifer has offered convincing criticisms of the state of present-day Big Finish here and here.

However, it’s one thing to provide a glut of spin-off material in a time when there’s lots of other spin-off stuff being made and we’re regularly getting new Doctor Who on television, and quite another to provide an oasis in the desert in a time when there’s no televised Who on the horizon – and it was through that that Big Finish became beloved and carved out a niche which, thanks in part to a lenient attitude by RTD early on in the revival show, it has largely kept to this day. By virtue of having the Eighth Doctor mention his Big Finish companions in The Night of the Doctor, but not any companions from novels or comics, Grand Moff Steven implicitly elevated Big Finish above other strands of tie-in media. This may be somewhat unfair to the novels and the comics – but at the same time, it is kind of an acknowledgement that, if your main lens for Doctor Who is the television show (and for most people it will be), a good audio drama feels a bit closer to “proper” Doctor Who than a novel or a comic does, especially when it includes Doctors and companions you know and love from the show.

We’re not in the Wilderness Years right now, of course… but we’ve got to wait until May until the show comes back. May! It’s enough to make those four months feel like eighteen. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the roots of Big Finish and start sifting for gold – especially when much of their early material is readily and legitimately available through various channels on a highly reasonable basis. Don’t expect this occasional review series to be anywhere near as rapid as my TV watch-through, mind – or at all completist, since there’s a lot of stuff Big Finish put out I have no interest in. I will leave it to other hands to do a complete overview of Big Finish, and I absolutely reserve the right to skip over material I don’t find appealing, ignore entire product lines, or just plain stop doing these if they stop being fun.

In particular, I am not particularly enthused by the idea of product lines like the Companion Chronicles, which are more like audiobooks with an in-character narrator than audio dramas – akin, perhaps, to the Nest Cottage Chronicles – or audios which cast impersonators as their Doctors, and I am much more interested in those product lines focused on Doctors who I feel got short-changed on television, either because their eras had horrid quality control or because their stint in the show was cut short or both.

Doctor Who – The Fourteenth Doctor Specials: Doctor In Duplication

The story so far: Chris Chibnall presided over one of the most woefully misconceived eras Doctor Who has ever offered up on television, ruining the run of the first female Doctor. As ratings spiralled downwards and the fanbase began losing all hope, suddenly a beam of light shot down from Heaven, and a giant Welsh man some twelve feet tall descended to Earth hand in hand with Mickey Mouse to save Doctor Who yet again. Yes, Russell T. Davies had come back to act as showrunner, with his production company Bad Wolf co-producing the show with the BBC and Disney stepping up handle international distribution. If Missy comes back, she’ll now be a Disney princess!

The Doctor’s fresh off his latest encounter with the Daleks, and has arrived in London. A chance encounter with Donna in the street, along with her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney), prompts the Doctor to remember the difficult circumstances of Donna’s departure in Journey’s End. The Doctor should really keep away for the preservation of Donna’s life, lest her memories of her time as the DoctorDonna come rushing back and kill her. Fortunately, there’s something for the Doctor to distract himself with – an alien ship that crashed nearby. When its inhabitant, the Meep (Miriam Margoyles), shows up in Rose’s crafting shed, the Doctor is left with no choice but to come back into Donna’s life – mere minutes before UNIT and the terrifying Wrarth Warriors invade Donna’s street…

This is a mashup of three distinct ideas. The first concept is a fairly direct adaptation of The Star Beast – originally a Fourth Doctor comic by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. The second is to provide a televised debut adventure for the Fourteenth Doctor (RTD, remember, is treating Liberation of the Daleks as canon on a par with the televised stories), who spends the story trying to puzzle out why he’s regenerated into an approximation of the Tenth Doctor. The third idea is to offer a reintroduction to Donna, a catch-up with how she and her family are doing, and introduce Rose, who is trans (and by the end of the episode appears to have realised she is also nonbinary).

This latter element gives RTD the opportunity to directly tackle trans rights in an unambiguously supportive way, which coming from the BBC mere months after the Prime Minister and Home Secretary spent the Tory conference lambasting trans rights is just what was wanted. It does verge close to being exotifying, or implying that trans status is special space magic, mind, but in a political moment rife with unabashed bigotry a hearty and unambiguously well-intentioned and benign message like this going out is badly needed.

Doctor Who Comics: Liberation of the Daleks

It’s seconds after the end of The Power of the Doctor. The Doctor has just regenerated from her Thirteenth to his Fourteenth form, which looks a lot like his Tenth incarnation. Still, she was sensible enough this time to land the TARDIS safely and step outside before regenerating, so he can simply step inside and take the trusty old time machine for a spin as he gets used to his new body. Suddenly, he picks up a distress signal, and follows it to source – apparently, someone’s summoned his aid at the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley. Well, perhaps that’s for the best, due to the massive Dalek invasion force that’s shown up.

Is that the real problem, though? These Daleks seem surprisingly rubbish – when they corner the Doctor and decide to EX-TER-MIN-ATE him, their death rays seem totally harmless. And there’s alien tourists watching events unfold and getting selfies taken against global armageddon. As the Doctor investigates further, he discovers the astonishing truth: he is in one of many simulated realities provided at the Dalek Dome, a tourist trap which creates virtual environments where visitors can go and have their very own Exciting Adventure With the Daleks. One of the park’s staff is Lt. Georgette Gold, and she sent the signal in order to seek the Doctor’s input, since she’s working her way towards a doctorate in Dalek Studies and he’d be great to interview.

Initially, the Doctor is just offended at the idea of turning the atrocities of the Daleks into cheesy entertainment – but it gets worse. The simulations are not mere holograms – they’re formed from psychoplasm, the stuff that dreams are made of, shaped by the dreams of captured Dalek specimens. (That would be why military personnel are stationed in the park – it’s how the military monetises their Dalek recoveries.) Even more disturbingly, every time someone enters a simulation the park captures a model of them to use as an NPC – so Georgy, the doppelganger of Georgette that the Doctor met at the World Cup, is a simulacrum of Georgette who exists solely to be EX-TER-MIN-ATE-d over and over again in whatever scenario she gets deployed in.

And what’s worst of all, the Doctor began to infer that the simulated worlds weren’t real when he was still inside the World Cup scenario, and he may have mentioned that to the Dalek Supreme – with the result that the captive Daleks are beginning to question their reality. Disaster may strike if they find the means of bridging the dream-world and the waking world – and in the form of TARDIS, which can go anywhere, and Georgy, who is linked to Georgette, they have possibilities to hand…