Big Finish

[moon_custafer]

Andrew’s been listening to a lot of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been meaning to post about them— these were made during the hiatus and are mostly set in the Classic Who era, with various actors from the original series taking advantage of the fact that voices usually age less noticeably than appearances.

Paul McGann gets to be the Eighth Doctor outside the confines of a one-off tv movie, and gets a new, rather likeable companion in Charlotte “Charlie” Pollard, a teenager from 1930 with a backstory that’s left her a vector for time paradoxes— their story “The Chimes of Midnight” is like a Sapphire and Steel Assignment, except cut with the grimly absurdist humour typical of its writer, Robert Sherman.

The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa have some adventures set following the death of Adric and during Tegan’s hiatus, which means Nyssa actually gets a chance to do stuff; later the Fifth Doctor and Peri are joined by an Ancient Egyptian companion not seen on the tv show.

The Sixth Doctor gets Dr. Evelyn Smythe, a gruff fifty-something academic who is a joy— she makes sure to load up her handbag with necessities (mostly powdered cocoa) before getting aboard the TARDIS, because if she knows one thing it’s that you can’t get chocolate in Tudor England. Six also reunites with Henry Jago and Professor Litefoot (from The Talons of Weng-Chiang) for a couple of adventures. Oh, and then there’s Frobisher, a companion from the Doctor Who comics who could never have appeared on tv because he’s a shapeshifter who prefers to remain in the form of a penguin.

Some of these were later reworked extensively as Nu-Who stories, and usually greatly toned down, because as independent audio drama the show can afford to be more experimental and far darker than the tv series. The one we listened to tonight, “Creatures of Beauty,” was a jigsaw puzzle of scenes in non-chronological order with a bleak punchline.

Comments

[kore]

I've heard these are really good! And there are some River Song ones too? And ones with Donna?

[moon_custafer]

Apparently there’s a whole universe of spin-offs.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, I'm glad you're enjoying them! I do love a lot of early Big Finish, especially Eight and Charley and Six and Evelyn. Lucie's fun, too, when you get to here.

[sabotabby]

I got really into Big Finish for awhile, and then I hit a whole batch of files that were corrupted and gave up. I love Frobisher and Evelyn Smythe so much. And Colin Baker just shines on audio; it's sad that the showrunners made such piss-poor decisions with his run.

[moon_custafer]

C. Baker was actually my frustrating favourite of the original series – I always felt he tried to bring an underlying wistfulness to the role, but they kept giving him scripts that required him to be loud and aggressive instead. Also, based on the novelization of “The Nightmare Fair,” I don’t know whether to be annoyed it never got filmed (it was a great story), or relieved (there are so many scenes the effects department couldn’t have handled).

[sabotabby]

He's so good, and he clearly had a vision for the character that they just wouldn't do but that would have been so much better. He's actually my favourite of the Doctors on Big Finish.