In the lead-up to Big Finish's The Dead Star back in 2023, I'd heard a lot of people talk about what a great writer Kate Orman is, and it wasn't until I'd read this book that I wholeheartedly agree. This is more a work of art than a book as the Doctor, Fitz and Anji have spent a few weeks relaxing on the planet Hitchemus and becoming a part of it's culture. The Doctor has taken up playing the violin and has formed a strong friendship with the conductor who seems to be developing strong feelings towards the Doctor. An unique factor of this world is that it's filled with tigers, though not quite the same tigers we get on Earth, in fact there's a great passage detailing what makes them biologically different from actual tigers. They look like tigers, they walk like tigers, behave like tigers, but they're actually much friendlier and nobody appears nervous around them. That is until one fateful day when the tigers launch a revolution, it seems that underneath their big cat exterior, the tigers are actually super intelligent and the answers lie in an ancient ruin.

This story bears a lot of resemblance to Doctor Who and the Silurians where the Doctor tries to mediate peace between the humans and tigers but it goes wrong very quickly with the humans opting for a more violent retaliation. Which prompts the Doctor to give up on the humans and go live amongst the tigers to try and understand them better.

The world building in this is some of Doctor Who's best, my favourite parts of book all centre on the tigers and their areas of the planet the goes to live among. It's a great twist at the halfway point where the Doctor after all the centuries of him trying and failing to broker peace between humans and another alien species, has finally had enough of the humans and goes to join "the other side". Its a story with no clear cut villains so to speak, just individuals on both sides who carry huge prejudice for one another and the Doctor is in the middle trying to prevent all out war, trying to understand what the tigers need and hoping for the best possible future between the two races. But his actions in doing so create distrust not just from the humans and tigers but from his own companions, particularly Anji who we learn from the beginning of the book already carries some unconscious distrust of the Doctor due to his alien nature.

This story really nails just how alien the Doctor is, we always expect him to defend the humans that we forget that he's not one himself, and when humans always revert to "us vs them" philosophy when encountering other species, the Doctor naturally gets frustrated and here his anger boils over causing him to join the aliens. But while he's more welcome with the tigers, he later has to accept he doesn't belong with them either. We also have his growing bond with conductor Karl which is perfectly handled and has a heartbreaking ending to it. The ending in particular is quite powerful, without going into spoilers it portrays a much darker side to the Doctor where in his effort to stop the war, the Doctor causes a disaster that leaves the planet worse off and the only way to save their planet is for the humans and tigers to work together. It's kind of reminded me of the ending of Watchmen where to prevent both sides killing each other in a terrible war after all attempts at peace have failed, the Doctor is pushed into doing something that could result in many more deaths down the line but has forced both sides into ending their conflict. Once again playing god with an entire world

This one's a fantastic book, probably the best Doctor Who book I've ever read, I haven't even touched on the theme of music which is worked so beautifully into not just the story, but the structure and how the book plays about with its chapters.

We have a story that if it were most other Doctors would be an easy number 1 favourite for them, but thanks to some worthy competition, from the same writer no less, it humbly takes the second place spot. But believe me, if The Chimes of Midnight is my all time favourite Doctor Who story and A Death in the Family is my second favourite, then you can consider this my third favourite Doctor Who story of all time!

The closest comparison I can make between this and the show would be Heaven Sent, Scherzo is very far outside the Doctor Who comfort zone, arguably the farthest I’ve, never experienced anything quite like this. The setup follows on from Big Finish’s 40^th anniversary story for Doctor Who in Zagreus where the Doctor carries a deadly substance called anti-time that makes him a danger to the universe, and so to protect it and Charley, he exiles himself to another universe, one where time doesn’t exist and he has no means of returning, little knowing that Charley has stowed away. This was the beginning of a new story arc for the Eighth Doctor being trapped in a universe where time doesn’t exist, one that was certainly ambitious but got ahead of itself way too quickly to the point where the stories settled into a bit of a traditional format. The story arc was also cut short by a year as 2004 was quite the significant year for Doctor Who what with the announcement of the show’s revival scheduled for the following year. This meant Paul McGann would no longer be the incumbent Doctor and Big Finish would no longer be the banner bearer for Doctor Who, so the story arc was wrapped up by the end of 2004 with the Doctor returning to the normal universe so that listeners wouldn’t feel alienated by the show’s relaunch. This resulted in the Divergent Universe story arc becoming very muddled and disappointing, personally it didn’t matter that much to me as it peaked literally from the first episode.

The Doctor and Charley find themselves in this new universe where nothing behaves as it did in their old universe, the TARDIS is seemingly destroyed and they’re left with no one but each other and having to hold on to their sense of selves as they’re trapped by a malevolent presence in the nothingness.

Scherzo is a prime example of why the idea of putting visuals to Big Finish sounds all well and good on the surface but isn’t entirely practical for stories such as this. There are whole sequences where it’s utterly impossible to take place in a visual format and that it can only ever function as an audio. The real beauty of this story is how it gets you to mentally process this new world the Doctor and Charley find themselves in, it’s honestly the most trying ordeal the Doctor and a companion have ever gone through together. Alone you can make separate arguments such as Midnight, Heaven Sent or 73 Yards, but paired together it really shows just how powerful the bond the Doctor and Charley is. Rob Shearman’s true talent lies in introspection and exploring Doctor Who on a very meta level, here he fashions an environment that asks what it truly means to be the Doctor’s companion under the surface, which leads to my favourite Doctor Who scene of all time! McGann and India Fisher are just phenomenal as the Doctor reaches his breaking point and really opens up about how he feels about Charley, but not in a way that’s conventional for humans. This is how you do a romance between the Doctor and a companion, the Doctor comes from a world where love is unorthodox, the Doctor believes that he does love Charley but he doesn’t quite understand what that means because he doesn’t love the same way that humans do.

I can’t really go into further detail as Shearman’s stories are best left going in blind but I promise you, no years of experience being a fan of Doctor Who can really prepare you for what Scherzo gives

My absolute favourite Doctor Who story of all time, just ahead of A Death in the Family, just. The Chimes of Midnight is a key chapter in the Web of Time story arc where the Eighth Doctor rescuing Charley from a doomed airship is now causing the Web of Time to unravel as she was meant to die in the crash. For this adventure they find themselves in an Edwardian house on Christmas Eve where they discover that something is not quite right with time.

As is the case with almost all of Rob Shearman’s works, it’s best to go into this knowing as little as possible and letting it take you by surprise. You’ll never forget your first experience listening to this, the sound design and music is top notch and just creeps under your skin. The Chimes of Midnight is an unrelentingly morbid and haunting Christmas story with an excellent mix of humour as it takes well known tropes from Agatha Christie novels and rearranges them into practically a mockery of the typical murder mystery scenario without ever feeling like a full on parody and still keeping you engaged with an enticing mystery as to what is truly happening in the house with a twist about the killer that I never saw coming and won’t dare ruin.

In a lot of ways, The Chimes of Midnight is my answer to anyone who responds to my complaints of the constant panto-esque and overly cheerful Christmas specials Modern Who would always churn out saying “but it’s Christmas, how can it not be head bangingly happy?!?”. Well, I give you this Christmas story which manages to be a fun murder mystery, a chilling ghost tale, features a beautifully crafted and memorable set of idiosyncratic characters, makes clever use on a strange scenario of time travel and has suicide as the theme!

This was my first experience listening to Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor in Big Finish and back then I’d only known him for the Doctor Who Movie and The Night of the Doctor, and while I felt he did a good job with the bad material he was given in the movie and was great in the mini episode, this was where I started to see the Doctor who would go on to become my favourite incarnation. McGann doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his work as the Eighth Doctor and here he’s on top form, as is his chemistry with India Fisher as Charley.

As far as being a key story in the Web of Time story arc, the good news for this one, and what helps give it the edge over A Death in the Family, is that you can listen to this like I did without the wider context. In fact, I’d say this has the reverse effect of making listeners keen to look back on the previous adventures and even follow the storyline to know where it goes. But yes, The Chimes of Midnight can be enjoyed on its own and personally I think is a perfect introductory story for newer listeners.

The real beauty of The Chimes of Midnight being my favourite story of all time is that it doesn’t feature the end of the world, or another universe ending scenario, it doesn’t cram in familiar monsters to try and be impressive, it doesn’t throw in everything and the kitchen sink to try and feel important. What it is, is a simple story set in one location with the stakes being the lives of a few characters, it’s not a story that’s important on a universal scale, but for the Doctor and Charley on a personal level, the stakes don’t get much higher as we discover how Charley’s survival and changing history affects those closest to her. The climax near the end much like Shearman’s other favourite of mine The Holy Terror never fails to bring a tear to my eye, it’s just beautiful to listen to.

There’s not much more I can really say, or should really say, it’s the Big Finish audio I’ve revisited the most. All I can do is wholeheartedly recommend this to everyone, I mean it’s my favourite Doctor Who story of all time, how much more praise can a story get to make you even slightly interested?

I look at the period between Ground Zero and this story as the golden age of the Magazine Comics, more specifically just the entire run of Eighth Doctor comics, it was some of the most consistently great material to ever come out of the magazine range and it comes to an end with one hell of a finale.

The most fascinating part of The Flood is that it was originally meant to be the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration story. With the revival of the show just under two months away, the Eighth Doctor’s time in the Magazine Comics had come to an end, so the idea proposed which was even approved by the BBC was to have Eight regenerate into the Ninth Doctor, in fact if you look at the behind the scenes in the omnibus you’ll actually see a drawing of Destrii looking over the newly regenerated Ninth Doctor. This in turn would’ve made Destrii the Ninth Doctor’s very first companion in any medium, which was the main reason this idea was abandoned. Although approving the idea, the BBC and Russell T. Davies imposed a condition that the Ninth Doctor could not be seen travelling with any other companion other than Rose. Because of this, the Eighth Doctor bows out of the Magazine Comics with an open ending for him and Destrii, similar to how Classic Who ended for Seven and Ace. In fact, Destrii herself wouldn’t appear again for eleven years. They did however sneak in a little in-joke where Destrii suggests a leather jacket following the damage to Eighth’s iconic velvet coat. It’s just amazing that the comics were nearly given the honour of depicting the end of a Doctor’s life and the beginning of a new one.

In a lot of ways The Flood feels like it sets the groundwork for a lot of Modern Who finales; present day setting, familiar monster, big world/universe ending event, deus ex machina climax, and speaking of which, for what was originally going to be the Eighth Doctor's regeneration it's eerie how similar the finale mirrors the ending of The Parting of the Ways, how the Eighth Doctor absorbs the time vortex and basically becomes a god, a vengeful god even (see what I did there). It's like Cat Concerto vs Rhapsody Rabbit, I've no idea who's ripping off who!

Our companion of the story is Destrii, the Eighth Doctor's last Magazine companion and one of the few who never gets her own exit, it's her first time travelling in the TARDIS, but not her first appearance as she initially started off as something of a recurring villain, but changed enough over her appearances for the Doctor to invite her onboard. Her true form is mainly that of a fish-like being, but for this story she takes on a human form to blend in, badly though as if it's your first time reading a Destrii story, boy are you in for a terrible first impression! Now a companion who started off as a villain is hardly the most encouraging first impression, but her behaviour in The Flood is somehow even worse as she's just flat out racist to a Chinese stallholder, and she never even gets a strong word of condemnation from the Doctor, if anything the stallholder is the one who ends up apologising! You should probably read a few of her prior appearances before getting to this one but man talk about starting on the wrong foot!

The Cybermen have one of their strongest depictions of all time, the design of which is the most far removed since the original Mondasian look and much closer to alien than human with their taller frames, slender looks, longer limbs and almost skeletal faces, it's a great way of showcasing just how advanced the Cybermen have become in their own future, probably the most advanced version the Doctor's ever encountered. Their plan is to use a chemical that heightens people's emotional state to such an extreme degree that they become hysterical, and they plan to carry it via the rain, so think Death in Heaven but done earlier and better! And the Cybermen demonstrate this in such a chilling cliffhanger and one of the most iconic panels in the comic's history where they reduce the entirety of MI6 to emotional wrecks and have them begging the Cybermen to take the pain away as they're on their knees crawling towards the Cybermen towering over them. Such a gorgeous image!

In fact as per usual for the Magazine Comics, especially the Eighth Doctor ones, the artistry is top notch and for this finale to the Eighth Doctor's comic adventures they went all out on this one. In a lot of ways it's the perfect ending to the Eighth Doctor's comic adventures, even having cameos from his previous friends and companions in the range such as Izzy, Max Edision and Grace. I cannot recommend this comic enough, but you have the patience, I'd say start from the first volume of Eighth Doctor comics and work your way through, it really is the golden age of the Magazine Comics, though there'll still be plenty of great stories in the years ahead for the Magazine.

we have one of the more recent Eighth Doctor releases with the Connections box set. Once the Stranded storyline was wrapped up in 2022 the decision was made to move away from the long-running sagas and return the Eighth Doctor to more standalone stories. Definitely a refreshing move as it’s allowed writers more freedom with their stories without feeling the need to tie them altogether. So, in late 2022 we got two box sets comprised of five stories, continuing the adventures between the Doctor, Liv and Helen. Personally, I feel this TARDIS team had run its course by the end of Stranded. To go from The Red Lady in 2015 to this makes this team going on for a near decade now, and it’s still going today. Unlike other Doctors and their companion storylines, the Eighth Doctor’s is told chronologically (with the occasional break to jump ahead to the Time War). So almost 10 years with the same TARDIS team is gonna wear out its welcome after a while. That and the fact that it was screamingly obvious Liv’s ending was to stay with her partner Tania at the end of Stranded. So much so that that’s exactly what they did, except they did so in an epilogue where Liv comes back after some undisclosed time had passed for her. Which frankly was a bit of a cheap move on Big Finish’s part, acknowledging Liv should’ve left at the end of Stranded but also wanting to keep doing stories with her when they should’ve chosen one or the other.

Despite this however, 2022’s run of Eighth Doctor stories with Liv and Helen produced some excellent outings and it finishes up with this incredible and beautifully emotional tale.

The Doctor, Liv and Helen investigate a time anomaly in 21^st century Soho, while the Doctor and Liv split off to investigate, Helen’s investigation at a music shop results in her being sent back in time by a Weeping Angel that seems to be controlled by the shopkeeper. Sent back to the 1960s, Helen is met by her long-lost brother Albie.

This story touches on a previous story in Stranded where Helen opens up to Liv about her estranged brother and how he was disowned by the family for his homosexuality. In Albie’s Angels we get to see Helen reunite with the brother she hardly knew after so many years apart and learn how he struggles to live in the 1960s at a time where he was in danger of being imprisoned. This is hands down the best material Helen’s had since Absent Friends and Hattie Morahan is absolutely stunning in this with what is easily her best performance as, in typical time travel style, she looks at this as a chance to be together with her brother again and save him from his supposed fate. All whilst leaving breadcrumbs throughout time for the Doctor and Liv to follow as they are chased by the Weeping Angels.

In regard to the Weeping Angels, you’re probably wondering how that’s even supposed to work given their silent nature and the fact that they’re a purely visual monster. Big Finish have already done a number of Weeping Angel audios with the Fifth, Sixth, Tenth and Fourth Doctors and they surprisingly work very effectively in audio. Though of course they do end up having to resort to jumpscare sounds to indicate when the Angels move and have our characters practically spell out to the audience what the Angels are doing

“That statue over there with the wings appears to be covering its eyes….and now I’ve looked away and look back it’s moved closer and is stretching it’s arm out towards me!”

Ok that’s not an actual line of dialogue, but there are plenty of lines like that which can be very ridiculous but in fairness practically every Big Finish audio has lines like that where they have the characters say out loud what we the audience can’t see. The Weeping Angel ones just seem to stick out more. There’s also the fact that in my personal opinion, the Weeping Angels should never have been made a recurring monster! I will never forget that first time watching (or half watching from behind a pillow) Blink and how fascinating and terrifying these creatures were, they felt like something out of a nightmare, and there was so little explained about them that gave them this air of mystique. Which of course has since diminished the more they’ve reappeared, and the more rules keep being introduced to the point where they’ve practically lost that sting of “that’s f**king terrifying!”

So, while I understand why the Weeping Angels keep being used as they are practically the only successful Modern Who monsters, I feel making them recurring villains was a huge mistake. That being said though, this was probably their best outing since Blink as they’re just as sinister and threatening as ever but with a slight hint that there’s more going on than what it seems and that perhaps the Angels aren’t the true monsters this time. There’s a very clever usage of a timey wimey deal with the main villain of the story and what he’s using the Angels for with some great undertones of the timelessness of music. But the Angels still maintain their own menacing presence, there’s one line in particular where one Angel is described as having an expression of laughing which, anyway I picture that would look absolutely terrifying onscreen!

But the focus of the story is kept on the emotional side between Helen and Albie and how their story ends and how it incorporates the Weeping Angels was genuinely heart-breaking to listen to and without going into spoilers, the story touches on the inspiration Roy Gill had for Albie’s character. Which was a story told by the actor who played Professor Litefoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang (the late Trevor Baxter) about how he had befriended and looked after a man who had been imprisoned for ten years after he’d been caught writing a love letter to another man. There’s a brilliant way it makes reference to Roy Gill’s inspiration at the very end. Albies Angels is an outstanding story, one of Big Finish’s strongest in recent years.

Wow! I mean wow! I said before how much I envied the generation who grew up with these comics while I when I was little had the crappy Adventures magazines and Battles in Time which were mainly just there to give the toddlers something colourful to look at for a couple pages. This story exemplifies top tier comic book storytelling, it culminates a series of previous stories that builds to a rematch between the Doctor and the Master with the fate of all reality at stake, and that's no exaggeration! This is the most visually stunning comic story I've ever come across in Doctor Who, the range of art styles used to show all the different realities the Doctor's pulled through is astonishing. But it's not just his side of the story that works well, we also have Izzy and Kroton the Cyberman facing off against an unstoppable enemy that ties into a previous story that's basically Ashildir from Series 9 but done right! Despite his short stay in the TARDIS, Kroton the Cyberman has one of the most powerful character arcs of any companion and it pays off in a brilliant ending. Unlike Ground Zero (which I also love), the pacing does flow at a more organic rate, we spend a lot more time with our characters and these different settings and the way the story keeps building and building the stakes is perfect.

As I mentioned, this features the Master in the first of a few depictions of what happened to him following the events of the movie and I think it's the best version, the way he's manipulated the events of not just the story but events leading up to the story makes this one of his best depictions. The cosmic battle between him and the Doctor does carry that old trope of "we're not so different from each other", but again, it's visually stunning and it does actually carry a lot of weight to it and calls into question some of the Doctor's flaws. The ending is a bit corny with how hope triumphs over evil, but again it's a perfect sendoff for Kroton. This is a masterful comic and I recommend reading the omnibus right from the beginning to set the stage perfectly.

Sticking with the Doom Coalition saga and John Dorney’s writing we have arguably his best work in Absent Friends.

The Doctor, Liv and Helen find themselves on Earth in 1998 after a failed attempt to return to Gallifrey where a local village has had a new phone mast set up and the villagers have been receiving strange phone calls from their dead loved ones who seem to talk like they’re still alive. While the Doctor and Liv investigate, Helen secretly takes the opportunity to look in on her family where she finds out how much damage she’s caused them after running away and seemingly never coming back and what her younger brother thinks of her after all the decades have gone by.

This story while on the surface appearing to be a completely throwaway story with a standard setup of a sinister organisation giving away technology that begins to have a negative impact on the locals, and yet it ends up being one of the heaviest emotional stories I’ve come across in Doctor Who. We get Helen pretending to be her own daughter and learning to her horror that she’s been disowned by her family and ruined their lives. This was something that Russell T. Davies seemed to be delving into with Aliens of London in exploring the consequences of a companion running away to travel with the Doctor only to come home and see the negative impact it’s had on those closest to them. The problem though was that Russell never kept that aspect consistent in the story as we would go back and forth between Jackie being dismayed about Rose’s disappearance to carrying on like nothing’s happened. Whereas Absent Friends pulls no punches in showing just how badly it’s affected Helen’s family and through this we get to learn more about her as she’d only recently joined the TARDIS. It’s then developed further by her begging the Doctor to take her home but having to learn the consequences of time travel and learning about your own future.

As if that wasn’t enough though, we get an equally emotional story for Liv as she receives a phone call from her long dead father and gets a chance to have one final conversation with him while resisting the urge to save his life. It’s one of the biggest tear-jerking scenes I’ve experienced in Doctor Who and Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan are stunning in this one!

It does present itself as a standard story with a seemingly obvious villain but there is a twist about halfway regarding the villain that I won’t give away, but it honestly was very funny and a great subversion of expectations without coming off as tonally jarring amidst the very heavy character drama.

As far as prerequisites go, I’d say you should at least listen to Volume 1 of Doom Coalition to properly introduce yourself to Helen (particularly The Red Lady), but Absent Friends is enough of a standalone story, and you can fill in the gaps from Volume 2 that you won’t have much difficulty being invested in this one.

Next we journey later down Eight’s life for his adventures in the Doom Coalition saga. After To the Death, the Eighth Doctor Adventures shifted from single releases told as a series to instead four box sets under one title which are used to represent a single storyline where each adventure is tied together by a single overarching plot. The first of these was Dark Eyes which showed the Eighth Doctor caught up in a pre Time War conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords as they were trying to erase one another from history. Once that saga ended we then got the Doom Coalition saga, which centred on a plot to destroy the universe being orchestrated by a secret Time Lord cult that glimpsed into the matrix and saw Gallifrey’s future destruction in all timelines bar one where they were the only lifeforms in existence (gee, I wonder what this catastrophe could be!)

The real triumph of Doom Coalition was the introduction of it’s main villain and one of Big Finish’s best original villains, this being a Time Lord called the Eleven. Voiced by Mark Bonnar, the Eleven is a Time Lord who suffers from a rare mental condition where unlike most Time Lords, when his previous incarnations die they don’t cease to exist or go to sleep in the back of his mind, instead they carry on existing, speaking through him and on rare occasions possessing his body. Basically think Smeagol from Lord of the Rings if he had ten Gollums inside his head, most of whom being insane and homicidal. As such, the Eleven isn’t even his proper name, it just signifies his current incarnation, and all his other selves have their own distinct personalities and vary as much as the Doctors. We get the Nine, a kleptomaniac, the Six, a sadistic blood hungry animal, the Eight, an actual good incarnation who tries to help the Doctor but is always being abused by his other selves, the Ten, an almost mind controlling hypnotist and so on. And since the character’s introduction we’ve had physical depictions of the Nine, the Eight, the Twelve, the Two and the Union (the last incarnation).

The Doom Coalition begins with the Eleven, years after being imprisoned by the Seventh Doctor escape from Gallifrey and now the Doctor and his companion Liv Chenka (a med tech from Kaldor ala The Robots of Death) have to pursue him and find out what he’s up to. Which leads into the saga’s second story The Red Lady, a story that mostly serves as an introduction to Helen. Their pursuit leads them to a museum in 1963 where a mysterious art collection spanning various formats, cultures and time periods has been donated by the friend of a deceased art collector against his wishes. However, the different works of art are connected by one factor which is the out of place appearance a strange red lady who appears off in the distance but what the Doctor and Liv soon discover is that the lady seems to get closer every time she’s looked at and is slowly removing her mask.

Now yes on the surface this sounds like a rip-off of the Weeping Angels in presenting a creature that moves closer whenever you turn away and look back but as I listened to this for the first time, all my cynicism instantly fell away and I ended up walking away with one of the most spine chilling and breath-taking Big Finish stories in the last decade. The scenes involving the Red Lady are just so tense and hair-raising to listen to, if anything she reminds me more of the entity from Midnight for the simple reason of one key detail that makes the Red Lady a terrifying monster, there’s no explanation for her. Everything about what the Lady is, where she comes from, what is the nature behind her powers, it’s all left unexplained (at least until the end of the saga), which works perfectly in the context of a horror story. I always find that the less you know about a malevolent entity the more frightening they are. Which is well reflected by the fear from the Doctor and friends as all they can do is think fast on their feet to find a way of stopping the Red Lady from escaping her artwork and killing them.

The Red Lady is an astounding story and one that can easily be enjoyed without the wider context of the saga, a top recommendation.

We now come to one of the few televised Doctor Who stories to truly shock the fans, a mini episode building towards the 50th anniversary special which released without warning on Paul McGann’s birthday no less, mostly due to the fact that it was originally scheduled for a later release but they went with the former in fear of a potential leak. Which in this day and age was a wise decision, imagine robbing fans of the surprise onscreen return of the Eighth Doctor.

My only issue with this story is just how brief Paul McGann’s onscreen return as the Eighth Doctor was, the fact that he wasn’t in Day of the Doctor at all and it seemed like this was only written to close his side of the circle between him and the Ninth Doctor while setting up the War Doctor, when the Eighth Doctor deserves so much better than that. I also would’ve been curious about the idea of Big Finish handling the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration seeing as how they’re the ones who’ve crafted a full life for him and now we may never know what those plans would’ve been. But nonetheless, The Night of the Doctor is an astounding mini episode that conveys so much in such a short space of time, there’s no padding, no loose threads, it’s just a tight, well written send-off for the Eighth Doctor and McGann just owns every second of his onscreen return. Thankfully it wouldn’t be his last onscreen appearance having appeared in Jodie Whittaker’s final episode Power of the Doctor and even then, he made the most out of every second of his brief cameo. It’s not often I would say this but thank you Chris Chibnall for giving my favourite Doctor one more appearance in the spotlight (though saying that still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth)

This was one of my earliest experiences with the Eighth Doctor novels and I've always said about the books from the 90s, whether that's the Eighth Doctor books or the Virgin novels, I've said "therein lies the gateway into madness" and Alien Bodies is a prime example of this.

This will be one of my most spoilerific reviews as there's just so many talking points that can't be glossed over. The setup being the Doctor and his companion Sam gatecrashing a private auction in the middle of the rainforest that's playing host to delegates of several species. This includes the Doctor's own people the Time Lords, only this Time Lord originates far in the Doctor's personal future. The item everyone's bidding on is a casket and within that casket lies a horrible future for the Doctor, his own corpse!

Alien Bodies is one of those rare cases of a story that just completely shakes the foundations of Doctor Who. Obviously hindsight being what it is it doesn't mean anything today but in the context of 1997 when this was the successor to the Virgin novels and continued the Eighth Doctor's story from the movie prior to Big Finish becoming the franchise's banner bearer, this changes the whole game of Doctor Who in a way like no other, even per the standards of what the show's done, this still gives it a run for its money. Not only does it establish that the Doctor will one day die, but it will come about as the result of a way this Time Lord at the auction originates from far into the Eighth Doctor's future. Yes, the Time Lords are fighting a war, a war that has actually already destroyed Gallifrey and the Time Lords are living on Gallifrey XII (which goes to show how well the war's going for them). All their most powerful weapons were lost at the start of the war and only the biodata of a former Lord President can retrieve them, hence the Time Lord's mission to acquire the future Doctor's body. Accompanying him is his TARDIS, one of the most advanced models, so advanced in fact that the TARDISes of Gallifrey's future are now walking talking humanoid forms that open up and can even have sex with other TARDISes to combined weapons and technology.

The enemy the Time Lords are at war with is never named throughout the series, but rather amusingly there's a passage in this book that utterly dismisses the Daleks being capable of waging such a war, again hindsight being what it is, it is very funny reading a book written in 1997 depicting the Time War and ridiculing the Daleks being on the same level as the Time Lords, which was always my main complaint with the Time War to begin with.

Alien Bodies also introduces a new group of recurring villains called the Faction Paradox, a cult of what you might call time satanists, people from different worlds who give up their souls to commit all kinds of atrocities that go against everything the Time Lords strive to maintain, all in service of the Grandfather. To give an example of the kind of madness the Faction Paradox is all about, one of their main acolytes wears a skull for a mask, the skull is of a monstrous bat creature, but she reveals it's actually a Time Lord's skull. In their early wars against the Time Lords, the Faction was defeated but had the Time Lords lost they would've evolved into the bat creatures their acolytes wear. The Faction Paradox is the most long lasting legacy of the Eighth Doctor novels as they have their own spin off series that continues to this day!

As if this wasn't mad enough, Lawrence Miles talked about how he wanted this book to be in the spirit of Robert Holmes, and well, what better way to pay homage to the man than by featuring his very first creation, the Krotons!! The Krotons are one of the most ridiculous looking monsters in Doctor Who history, but they actually fare much better in non-visual medium where they can focus more on the unique concept behind them and what makes them so menacing without the giant refrigerator design to distract the audience. It's honestly a great twist having them involved after teasing the appearance of the Daleks for the auction.

This book excels at world building and taking risks with Doctor Who lore, presenting Earth in the far future and what the future UNIT looks like, the Time War and how it's changed both the Time Lords and Gallifrey, the Faction Paradox, the world of the Krotons and even the force behind whoever's pulling the strings during this auction. It's one of the boldest, most ambitious Doctor Who stories ever written and I highly recommend it.