For Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary, AudioGO and Big Finish are collaborating on Destiny of the Doctor, a series of audiobooks featuring one story for each Doctor. The first of these is Hunters of Earth by Nigel Robinson, and is narrated by Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan on the television programme. In contrast to the Companion Chronicles, Destiny of the Doctor is in a third-person format, and though the story often focuses on Susan, it does occasionally cut away to other characters in scenes [...]

Love and War is (for me) the last of 2012’s “special releases” from Big Finish’s Doctor Who line. It’s an adaptation of Paul Cornell’s novel of the same title, the very first novel to feature Professor Bernice Summerfield. It’s a celebration of Benny’s twentieth anniversary, as Love and War came out back in 1992, but it’s also a celebration of Big Finish itself — the company’s first-ever audio production was Oh No It Isn’t!, also a Jacqueline Rayner adaptation of a Benny-featuring [...]

Big Finish has done a couple Doctor Who audio dramas with songs in them before, most notably the legendary (and really quite good) Doctor Who and the Pirates, or The Lass That Lost A Sailor, but just because you’ve done one musical doesn’t mean you can’t do another, and The Companion Chronicles: The Scorchies is really quite a different beast to The Pirates. Jo Grant, trying to find the Doctor, is captured by the Scorchies, the puppet stars of a popular television show… who are threatening [...]

June 2014 will give us a Fourth Doctor audio adventure called Destroy the Infinite, where the Doctor faces the Eminence for the first time. The story receives a sequel over a year prior, though, with March 2013’s The Seeds of War. The Sixth Doctor and Mel, trying to go on a nice tour of a new space elevator, instead materialise in a grim future where Earth has only just barely won a war with the Eminence and its Infinite Warriors. Written by Matt Fitton from a plot by Nicholas Briggs, one feels [...]

On the extras for Spaceport Fear, Colin Baker articulates that this story falls into a very distinctive Doctor Who genre, that of an group of people in an isolated place in a hostile environment — the one we fans might call “base-under-siege.” But, being set in a spaceport, it’s a very large isolated place, one big enough to support its own society, recalling television stories such as The Face of Evil or Paradise Towers. William Gallagher provides an interesting society in Spaceport Fear, [...]

The Doctor has just been put on trial for his life by his future self, and survived by the merest of chances. The Doctor has just been left by Dr. Evelyn Smythe, one of the best companions he ever knew. Melanie Bush is a young college-age woman living in Pease Pottage with her parents and working at the local radar installation. Melanie Bush has been travelling with the Doctor for years when she is plucked out of time by the Time Lords. Two Doctors and two Melanies end up in 1980s Pease Pottage, [...]