One Fateful Knight (Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership)

Prose  In his introduction, anthology editor Keith R A Candido offers some amazement at the names he's been able to coax into writing their first Doctor Who stories for his book.  One Fateful Knight written by Peter Freaking David, who's writing has touched on almost all of the major and minor franchises across comics and novels, not to mention his own IP.  In his single (so far) entry for the Whoniverse, David (presumably on the assumption it would be his only chance) decides to do nothing less than provide a prequel and sequel to Battlefield, attempting to explain the references to the Doctor being Merlin.

Was he aware of what's come before?  It's been pretty well established via numerous other spin-off sources that the Merlin in Battlefield is a future incarnation of the Doctor, although given the number of different explanations offered elsewhere over the years, having him be both the eighth Doctor and another Monkish renegade pretending to be the eighth Doctor, popping in and out of Arthur's life is as good as any especially since as late as 2021, Jac Raynor wrote a novel in which the Tenth Doctor inherited the mantle.

What does matter is that this is a thrilling entertaining story which packs a lot into its twenty or so pages as the author also offers his own take on what a post regeneration Eighth Doctor would be like - he even refers to still relearning how to fly the TARDIS.    Was this simply so he didn't have to deal with over a decades continuity?  Did he choose to write for the Eight?  Either way. his face offs with "Merlin" and Morgaine are as amusing as they should be and there's plenty of fun to be had seeing how David ties it into the television adventure.  

He's still experiencing ongoing health issues amid the US system, so if you want to contribute, the GoFundMe is here.

Placement:  After all these years this is the last of the Big Finish Short Trips anthologies I've had to catch-up on, so its a wild coincidence that it should be the first chronologically.  Much like Model Train Set and Totem, this is Eighth dealing with some of the more questionable choices of his previous incarnation, so lets drop it just after them.  Onwards to the rest of the audios.