Linking Material (Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins).

Books It's going to become increasingly difficult for official calendar publishers to produce tie-ins for Doctor Who. Up until recently, there were twelve incarnations which fit nicely into the Gregorian calendar, but with the additions of War and Thirteen, deciding how to fit them all in is going to be increasingly tricky. Producing an anthology of stories called Seven Deadly Sins provides a similar challenge if you're Big Finish and you have to service Eight incarnations. So it makes sense that while seven of them each have a story which evokes one of the sins, that the other should provide some kind of linking tissue.

Which is why we have Eighth in a surreal version of Channel 4's blind auction game show Four Rooms, but with a Tory front bench like group of morally ambiguous rich people instead of experts and experiential therapy rather than nicknacks.  The Doctor enters each of the rooms and does something to provoke the sin of each of the "clients" to bubble to the surface before they're then plunged into experiencing a moment from his past leading into one of the short stories which they're going to experience as one of the characters.

As a piece of writing, it's customary tour-de-force from Jac Raynor.  I especially enjoyed the moment when Eighth meets a fellow Time Lord and goes into some detail about his biography in order to provoke envy in the musty old being.  It's a rather more prosaic forerunner to the later scenes on television when the Doctor invokes his biography as a way of scaring the monsters.  Something which could have been rather anemic becomes a much richer brew, largely due to the scrupulous characterisation of this Doctor.  A couple of things might have made me wince, but they're not really anything he hasn't done before.

Placement:  Presumably he's travelling alone but it feels like some time since the regeneration.  So I'll bung it between the comics and audios.