Five Hundred Ways to Leave Your Lover (Classic Doctors, New Monsters: Faithful Friends)

Audio  Time to admit something to you, faithful reader: I haven't rewatched most of television Doctor Who since about halfway through Series Eight. I've caught smatterings here and there—the odd Whittaker, a smidge of Gatwa. But most of it has sat on the shelf, sometimes unwrapped since purchase. Much of this has to do with time; the content pipe grows ever larger, and there's a century or so of cinema to catch up with. Some of it is also to do with not enjoying parts of it. There's also the fact that I am so behind with Eighth Doctor material that the 50% of my brain which deals with ridiculous guilt looks at something like the blind Doctor trilogy and wonders if I shouldn't be listening to a five-year-old Short Trip instead, only to end up doing neither.

Five Hundred Ways to Leave Your Lover

Which means going into this story, I had little to no memory of who the Monks were or of their motives. Fortunately, Tim Foley's script fills in enough details: they invade planets by changing the population's perceptions so they believe the Monks have always been there. This attempt is based around utilising a holosuite to gain a foothold on the planet through a computer programmer who, for various reasons, is convinced that he's dating the Doctor. He is trying to break up with him, but the simulated paradises are forever intervening. It's a romance, which, as the director Barnaby Edwards says in the extras, isn't something Big Finish does too often, with the Eighth Doctor being the only one of the old guard who is mostly likely to work in this kind of story.

It's immensely entertaining. We get to hear the Eighth Doctor properly having fun for the first time in a while, which isn't something he's had much of lately across the ranges, and Paul McGann is clearly enjoying the chance to show that side of him. However, rather like a Companion Chronicle or one of those first-person, hour-long audiobooks that BBC Books produced in the 00s (usually written by James Goss), it puts Charlie Condou's Chris front and centre. The action occurs around him, and he mostly reacts until he has to take control of his own destiny (egged on by the Time Lord). The tiny cast also includes Rise of the Cybermen's Andrew Hayden-Smith as the other love interest, alongside the original voice of the Monks, Tim Bentinck.

Placement:  Ah well, spoiler, but as we discover at the very end, this isn't the Eighth Doctor. It's a digital echo of the Eighth Doctor injected into the system by the original to fight the Monks and help Chris—an alternative Eighth Doctor in a similar way to the microscopic versions of the Fourth Doctor and Leela in The Invisible Enemy. On the cover, he's wearing his leathers, so this could have happened at any time in that period, even when he was travelling with friends. But for clarity, I'll put this at the end of the era with some of this era's solo stories.