A Chronological Checklist for the Eighth Doctor (a work in progress).



TV Having recently completed the decade long business of reading, reading and listening through the mainstream of the Eighth Doctor's adventures and posting reviews, I thought I'd put together something which links to all of those reviews which could also double as a chronology should anyone decide to try and repeat the exercise.  Good luck with that.  As you'll see from the linked the dates, the novels took almost as long to read as their original publication history.

As I explained in the barebones version a few years ago although there are a number of chronologies available (and I'm grateful to @girlfromblupo for pointing me to this one) many of them tend to mix the various media together.  My own version keeps things simple and has the books then the comics then the audios since they're all relatively self contained, especially since Big Finish decided to create a whole new character to explain the reference to Sam from Minuet in Hell.

In the process of completing all of this, there is still a lot of material which I've missed so for the purposes of fannish completism, I'll be enjoying my way through those too and I'll add them into the main trunk of the list once they're reviewed where I think they should be (just to add to the challenge), as well as anything new which is published.  Some of the prose is about audio and comics characters so they'll be more obvious.  We'll see about everything else.

Finally quick word about format.  Anything which isn't in italics is original publication history.  Anything in italics was produced after the fact and I've added extra information in the brackets afterwards to explain what it is.  Originally, I did have lots more gaps to delineate "seasons", but decided in the end to just separate the more obvious runs of continuous narrative (which then runs aground with Dark Eyes which is a sixteen adventures, four adventures and a single one altogether).


Television Broadcasts


The TV Movie


BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures


Doctor Who (The Novelisation)
Doctor Who The TV Movie (The Target Novelisation)

From Little Acorns/Epilogue (Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership)


Bounty (Earth and Beyond)



Dreadnought (Radio Times Comic Strip)
Descendance (Radio Times Comic Strip)
Ascendance (Radio Times Comic Strip)
Perceptions (Radio Times Comic Strip)
Coda (Radio Times Comic Strip)
Where's The Doctor? (Doctor Who Annual 2018)
The Scent of Blood (BBC Audio Exclusive)
The Juror's Story (Short Trips: Repercussions)

The Bodysnatchers
Genocide
War of the Daleks
Alien Bodies
Kursaal
Option Lock
Longest Day
Legacy of the Daleks
Dreamstone Moon
Seeing I
Placebo Effect
Vanderdeken's Children
The Scarlet Empress
(including The Elixir of Doom (Companion Chronicle))
The Janus Conjunction
Beltempest
The Face-Eater
Femme Fatale (BBC More Short Trips)
The Taint
Demontage
Revolution Man
Dominion
Unnatural History
Autumn Mist
Interference - Book One
Interference - Book Two
The Blue Angel
The Taking of Planet 5
Frontier Worlds
Parallel 59
Growing Higher (Short Trips: Zodiac)
The Shadows of Avalon
The Fall of Yquatine
Coldheart
The Space Age
The Banquo Legacy
The Ancestor Cell

The Burning

EarthWorld
Fear Itself (BBC Past Doctor Adventure)
Vanishing Point
Eater of Wasps
The Year of Intelligent Tigers
The Slow Empire
Dark Progeny
The City of the Dead
Fitz's Story (Big Finish The Company of Friends Audio)
Grimm Reality
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
Hope
Anachrophobia
Trading Futures
The Book of the Still
The Crooked World
History 101
Fallen Gods (Telos Publishing Novella)
Notre Dame du Temps (Short Trips: Companions)
Camera Obscura
Time Zero
The Infinity Race
The Domino Effect
Reckless Engineering
The Last Resort
Timeless
Emotional Chemistry
Sometime Never...
Halflife
The Tomorrow Windows
The Sleep of Reason
The Deadstone Memorial
To the Slaughter
The Gallifrey Chronicles

We Can't Stop What's Coming (The Target Storybook)

Not in My Back Yard (Short Trips: The History of Christmas)


Doctor Who Magazine Comics


Endgame
The Keep
A Life of Matter and Death
Fire and Brimstone
By Hook or By Crook
Tooth and Claw
The Final Chapter
Wormwood


















Sunset (Planet Krynoid: Nightfall)

Doom Coalition 1
The Eleven
The Red Lady
The Galileo Trap
The Satanic Mill

Doom Coalition 2
Beachhead
Scenes From Her Life
The Gift
The Sonomancer

Doom Coalition 3
Absent Friends
The Eighth Piece
The Doomsday Chronometer
The Crucible of Souls

Doom Coalition 4
Ship in a Bottle
Songs of Love
The Side of the Angels
Stop the Clock

Ravenous 1
Their Finest Hour
How to Make a Killing in Time Travel
World of Damnation
Sweet Salvation

Ravenous 2
Escape from Kaldor
Better Watch Out
Fairytale of Salzburg
Seizure

Ravenous 3
Deeptime Frontier
Companion Piece
L.E.G.E.N.D.
The Odds Against

Ravenous 4
Whisper
Planet of Dust
Day of the Master














Time Lord Victorious










Cognition Shift






















Updated 25/07/2015  I've added "Time War era" in at the bottom because it looks like it's going to be its own multi-format thing.  It'll be interesting to see how co-ordinated Big Finish, Titan and whoever else will be.  I believe one of the IDW comics already contradicts Day of the Doctor in relation to the nature of the "moment".  No more, no more, no more ...

Updated 28/12/2015  I've added The Diary of River Song.  The Titan limited series, also set during the Time War is out but I'll post a review of those when the series is finish and add them to the timeline then in case there's something which indicates how close they're set to the regeneration.  As I've said elsewhere, the Time War era sounds like it's going to be populated without a clear narrative order unless someone decides to attempt to official apply one.  Most likely it'll be like the Baker era between Trial and his regeneration or in Big Finish terms between their ongoing (currently Doom Coalition) and Night of the Doctor.

Updated 15/01/2015  After Foreshadowing, The Elixir of Doom and Bounty (and Klein's Story although that's an alt.Eighth), I'll be hitting the subscriber wall on the audios.  The three short stories and The Four Doctors are only available if you sign up to various subscriptions at Big Finish and money is unfortunately an object right now.  Copies of The Four Doctors do turn up on eBay now and then, but £30 is still a bit steep.  Availability of these old stories is going to be a huge problem going forward especially in the hard copy Short Trips.  Expect updates to become sporadic.

Updated 21/01/2015 I've added a Miscellany section for alternative non-canonical versions of the Eighth Doctor.

 Updated 04/04/2016  Not that Titan's Eighth Doctor comics series is completed, I'm all caught up with the Eighth Doctor's canonical comics adventures.  Unless I've missed something.

 Updated 08/06/2016   The Four Doctors, Doom Coalition 2 and The Curse of the Fugue all added which means barring those pesky three subscriber specials and the reading of Bounty I'm all caught up audio wise.  Oh and Klein's Story.  Oh.

Updated 06/11/2017  Add a new category, Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Eighth Doctor, for stories featuring a version of the character from outside the main continuity: from alternate realities or degenerative cameos, that sort of thing.

Updated 12/01/2022  Made Time Lord Victorious into its own era because the alliance with the Daleks would seem to indicate it can't occur anywhere during the Time War itself (not to mention what happens to the Daleks themselves early in the general narrative of that event).  Yes, I know I'm a bit behind on everything else, but once I've finished TLV, that's my next project.

Updated 23/05/2023  I've finished the printed Big Finish Short Trips!  Just the rest of the audios to do now (although the subscriber specials still seem a bit unlikely for now).

Updated 18/12/2023  I've finished the printed Big Finish Short Trips!  Again! (missed a couple) Just the rest of the audios to do now (although the subscriber specials still seem a bit unlikely).
on Monday, July 20, 2015 1 comments Labels: ,

Ayesha Dharker on Queen Jamillia.

TV The Guardian has an interview with Ayesha Dharker, who was Solana Mercurio, the morally ambiguous PA in Planet of the Ood and one of the few actors who has appeared in both Doctor Who and Star Wars:
"Dharker was visually memorable as Queen Jamillia despite having only five lines. But she has said that the costume – layered black-and-gold capes topped off with a fan of gold blades like petals on a flower – did most of the acting. Could she call it a performance? “I didn’t have enough to do to answer that question.” Still, she got to meet George Lucas, even if she never saw the proposed doll of her character. “I don’t think they made one. I know the girl characters don’t sell as well as the boy ones. I feel sorry for any child who got given one of me – this small, Indian penguin.”"
No they did not. But there was this gaming card.
on Monday, July 20, 2015 0 comments Labels: ,

Alexander Siddig on everything.

Film Alexander Siddig is the subject of the latest random roles at the AV Club and he's entirely unguarded and generally personally uncensored. He says of DS9, "I had the stigma of Star Trek over me at that point" which makes him the Eccleston of that series and he has this to say on the subject of apocalyptic dragon film without many dragons, Reign of Fire:
"Wow, we’re covering the whole thing, aren’t we? [Laughs.] The only thing I remember about that was the first day. The first A.D. came into the trailer where we were all having our makeup and shit done, and he was, like, “Guys, I need your attention, please.” And we were, like, “Yeah?” And he said, “Um, Mr. McConaughey’s gonna arrive on set in about 15 minutes, and I have to give you a directive—which comes from the producers—that you are not to call him ‘Matthew’ or ‘Mr. McConaughey’ or anything to do with his real life. You must call him Van Zan.” Van Zan was his character name. “And even if you meet him outside in the road, even if you meet him out in town in Dublin,” where we were shooting this movie, “you must call him Van Zan.” And that is exactly what I remember about that movie, because as that first A.D. left the building, I shouted—rather lamely—“And he’s got to call me Elvis!” But he didn’t call me Elvis. In fact, he didn’t call me anything!"
on Sunday, July 19, 2015 0 comments Labels:

Dark Eyes 4.

Audio Done. It's just over ten years since I posted a review of Gary Russell's novelisation of the TV movie with the Pertwee logo to Behind The Sofa (also now hosted on this blog) and now I'm finally caught up with the continuing adventures of the Eighth Doctor.  Admittedly, as I said the other day, there's still a smattering of short stories, some comics and the odd audio (so I'll still be posting reviews for completists sake), but in terms of the main trunk of publications I'll now be listening at the same rate as everyone else.  Before you start talking about Night of the Doctor, I don't think it's really relevant unless Big Finish decide they're going to work towards it and that doesn't look like it's happening soon, instead favouring an approach of populating the Eighth Doctor's Time War period as a kind of separate era.  Despite the Doom Coalition, it has to be at the back of their minds to do a box at some point set in that period.  But then I still hold out hope for a resolution to the way he left it with Charley Pollard ...

A Life in the Day

One of the greatest hours Big Finish has ever recorded.  If there's something I've missed in the Dark Eyes mission approach to narrative, it is the rather more classical form stories in which the Doctor and his companion land and have to deal with whatever's thrown at them (desperate as I am for the return of Eighth to the main releases), so it's rather nice to have a version of that, albeit linked to his search for Molly O.  Writer John Dorney also intelligently writes to character, so while the Doctor's investigating, we have Liv discovering her deep past in a rather sweet romance with Kitty's brother.  She's a weary figure, still shell shocked by her run in with the Daleks and then the Master so what seems like her first genuine laugh, at a Buster Keaton film of course, is genuinely poignant, instinctively captured by Nicola Walker.  It's only later that I discovered she was married to Barnaby Kay who plays, Martin her date and the centre of the drama.

The Monster of Montmartre

Moulin Rouge! meets the Daleks is a killer premise and writer Matt Fritton makes the most of it, although I'll admit there's a moment when I was slightly disappointed when I was reminded that the story wouldn't resolve itself here and would lead into the rest of the story arc.  You could well imagine a version which is about the Doctor trying to convince the spouse that their domestic arrangement will ultimately lead to death and destruction which of course it does.  Rachel Stirling makes a welcome return to the audios after The Crimson Horror on television and arguably even more brilliant (and sonically unrecognisable) as the brilliantly named Demesne Furze in the Fourth Doctor story Trail of the White Worm which features the Geoffrey Beavers version of the Master.  Why couldn't we have had that incarnation of the Master?  Nope, still not a fan of the MacQueen version which makes ...

Master of the Daleks


... a difficult listen in places.  The Eighth Doctor has amnesia again for part of this story and doesn't do much other than blunder about only partially being able to recognise the Daleks before sleeping.  But my fiscal discussion in regards to The Death of Hope is less relevant here because John Dorney's script is so much fun with its embrace of the alternative history genre and the mighty Dan Starkey playing every Sontaran and somehow managing to make them all sound distinctive and often very funny.  Just as Nick Briggs is an expert in Dalek voices, Starkey knows his Sontarans, and I remember seeing a clip of him during the anniversary year perfectly mimicking the voices of the various television versions from across the years.  Clearly the best part of this hour's when they're called upon to battle each other, notably when Starkey allows a newly birthed Sontaran go full Strax entirely unphased by the killing machine that's about exterminate him.

Eye of Darkness

Like I said, done.  In the unusual position of having to carry not just the completion of this boxed set but the whole of Dark Eyes, there's a lot of business to attend to and on those terms I'm not sure it succeeds.  Sorry.  If the series was supposed to be about anything, it was about giving the Eighth Doctor back some of his hope after the death of Lucie and although I enjoy nihilistic storytelling as much as the next film studies graduate, to essentially end the next run of stories with a similar dilemma and in a similar way is really quite disappointing.  Whilst I appreciate the need to move on and reinvent characters, do they always have to (sorry) embrace the darkness?  Dark Eyes has had its moments, sometimes episodes in length, but I probably would have prefered it to have ended with the original box, the notion of that being its own era and then moved on, having never really enjoyed the overall story or some of the characters.  But as we saw with the Lucie run appearing out of the wreckage of the Divergent Universe, this is a franchise that keeps bouncing back.  The Doctor is nearly smiling on the cover of Doom Coalition.  So anything's possible.
on Saturday, July 18, 2015 0 comments Labels:

Cleaning Everhard Jabach and His Family.

on Saturday, July 18, 2015 0 comments Labels:

Dark Eyes 3.

Audio Hmm. What to make of The Eminence?  The idea that at some point in the future of this fictional universe everything will recede to be replaced by this single entity is evocative and might even explain who's knocking on the door of Orson Pink's craft in Listen.  But it's also inherently the kind of idea which would be fine in a single story, like the evil from beyond time in The Satan Pit or the mad computer inadvertently created by the Doctor in time for The Face of Evil, but loses interested when pressed into service as it is here as kind of "not Daleks" in the Mechanoid mould (somewhat due to Nick Briggs's unavailability) in what also feels like Big Finish's attempt to create their own Time War or War in Heaven to play about in, ironically just as they were on the edge of licensing the new series.  The Death of Hope even paraphrases the Doctor's own description of fighting on the fringes of that later conflict, helping where he can without getting directly involved.  It's fair to say with this as the secondary antagonist and as you'll see a primary antagonist I found unbearable, I was less than impressed with the joyless exercise that is Dark Eyes 3.

The Death of Hope

Part of the problem is that I simply don't like this incarnation of the Master as played by Alistair MacQueen.  You're not supposed to like the Master, but as with any villain you should at least be able to tolerate their presence, but between his prosaic sentence structure and MacQueen's enunciating delivery, I find him very difficult to listen to.  Which is an especial problem in this opening installment in which we essentially hear the Doctor Mystery Science Theatre 3000 an installment of a non-existent spin-off series for his foe.  On the one hand this is as bold a choice as the opening episode of Dark Eyes 2, but at a certain point in here, I began to think about the fiscal implications.  Having spent £5 on an episode of Doctor Who starring Paul McGann (one quarter of the overall cost), I'd quite like actually hear him do something.  If I'd paid current the full cd price of £40 for Dark Eyes 3, that would have been a whole £10 to listen to a Doctor-lite episode.

The Reviled

The best episode of the set, mostly due to a pretty sneaky twist at the end and some of the sound design.  Otherwise this is a heavy handed allegory about colonization, imperialism and negotiation and as anyone with long memories will remember from my initial reaction to Planet of the Ood, I generally don't like being preached to.  Neither of the groups of inhabitants of the planet Ramosa raise themselves above generic and about the only real draw are the interactions between Liv and the Doctor which really are unlike anything else we've heard in these Eighth Doctor audios, she being someone who needs saving psychologically more than anything else, to go through much the same process he does.  Some notable casting - it's Sacha Dhawan who was so brilliant as Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Space and Time.  Can I suggest once again if not Romola Garai, why not him?

Masterplan

Let's quickly run down the treatment of the primary female characters in Dark Eyes 3.  Spoilers ahead (duh..).  Molly is hypnotised and drugged for much of the duration and essentially a macguffin and no Ruth Bradley's availability isn't an excuse.  She spends all of this episode in a box.  Dr Sally Armstrong who seemed like a promising friend to the Doctor in Dark Eyes 1, is hypnotised by one madman to do his bidding and eventually dies horribly having had her brain sucked out by another. Liv Chenka who spends much of the duration thinking she's going to die from radiation poisoning, not telling the Doctor this until it becomes a useful motivational tool for him, kidnapped, forced to nursemaid Molly, also hypnotised.  Pretty much every female character is hypnotised, drugged or brainwashed at some point.  Admittedly Doctor Who's often failed to distinguish itself in this area, and a lot of male characters come of badly too, but it's especially notable in Dark Eyes 3.

Rule of the Eminence

In which everything ends with a chronological dry run for elements of three Russell T Davies season finales, all of which were of course produced years before.  The Master hypnotises the entirety of humanity to do his bidding in a similar fashion to becoming the whole of humanity in The End of Time (whilst bluffing the Doctor and I suppose us with a false version of the Saxon ruse from The Sound of Drums).  Molly's dispatched in a similar way to Donna in Journey's End (and yes, ok Jamie and Zoe in The War Games).  Perhaps, just like the Daleks who essentially repeated their planetary weapon strategy from The Daleks Invasion and Earth over and over, the Master is later simply having another go at these approaches.  One must be cautious about ticking off (literally in this case) Doctor Who stories for their familiarity, much of its fifty-odd years are variations on a theme, but...  Oh well, four episodes to go.
on Friday, July 17, 2015 0 comments Labels:

Dark Eyes 2.

Audio When Apple updated their Music app, they expunged audiobooks and dumped them into iBooks on phones, pods and tablets. Unfortunately the process included a lot of guess work, which for me meant that my carefully curated collection of Eighth Doctor audio turned into rather a mess and the various sections of Dark Eyes 2 became muddled with the episode titles being reduced to list of "tracks" none of which were in the right order. The knock on effect of that was that even though I worked out which was supposed to be the first episode, I went straight into the third and for various reasons didn't realise for about twenty minutes, assuming the sudden appearance of Molly to be part of the bold storytelling reflected in the first.  Luckily I realised in time so didn't end up listening to this lot in completely the wrong order.

Which is of course ironic since this bold storytelling involves the story being told in completely the wrong order.  Heading into spoiler territory for people who haven't heard this, Dark Eyes 2 employs a clever ouroboros structure in which the Doctor's story climaxes, or just about climaxes at the end of the first episode and we then have to listen to the other three in order to discover why he makes what seems like a momentously out of character decision (although in some ways for anyone remembers the thematic underpinnings of Deimos and The Resurrection of Mars isn't out of character at all).  When I do go back and relisten to this, which I plan to, Dark Eyes has that quality, it will include listening through this from two back to one again to see how that changes my attitude to the Doctor's attitude.  Such storytelling isn't unknown in Who with Flip Flop as a key example.

Quick word about covers.  On a few occasions just listening to the audios without looking at the covers has had an impact on how I listen to the episodes since some items which if you've looked at the covers are in no way revelations are just that, notably an amazing piece of casting in Eyes of the Master.  Which I'm now going to spoil here too so look away before the next sentence.  When he appeared in the actual television series and gave an interview to DWM it was pretty apparent that Frank Skinner was a fan and here he is before Mummy on the Orient Express in what must have been, as he thought, his one chance to be in Who.  Best bit, especially in relation to this project?  According to the making of, during the recording he was reading Mark Morris's The Bodysnatchers, which was only the third EDA and he was too shy to bring it to the recording to have it signed by McGann.  Bless him.

The Traitor

Tonally, The Traitor is closer to how I imagined the first Dark Eyes would be, with the Doctor slightly weary revealing something of his predecessor's malevolence.  Later episodes explain his mental state and his slightly more ambiguous attitude to the Daleks.  The introduction of Liv Chenka is well handled and even having not heard her introductory story Robotopia, Nick Briggs's script and Nicola Walker's performance present us with rounded character and a complete, as I found out later, reintroduction.  As with other recent adventures, Dark Eyes 2 is heavily networked into Big Finish's Who mythology but never to an extent that we feel like some of the narrative is missing, all the necessary exposition is here and carefully thought through.  The cliffhanger is chilling, earning the familiar sting.

The White Room

The appearance from the Viyrans almost had me wondering if we'd get a Charley cameo and a final resolution between those two, although given how packed these four episodes are already, putting such a momentous piece of drama at the fringes of this would have been a waste.  Alan Barnes's script is mainly a chance to see what a Molly story would be like without there being a wider context though and of all the episodes this is the most "stand alone" albeit with some set up for the Eye of the Master.  Perhaps the most significant moment is when the Doctor says he has "no money, no country, no family and no friends" which is either him lying or a notice that he's trying not to get attached to anything anymore because of what it can do to him psychologically, a bit like soldiers who go to war not wanting to know too much about their colleagues so that they won't grieve when they're gone.

Time's Horizon

There are always special moments in any drama, especially Doctor Who, when you're almost giddy with delight at how clever the writers have been irrespective of suspension of disbelief and the discovery of the Doctor and Liv appearing at different points in each other's lives but with the added confusion for the Doctor that they've already met but under different circumstances as a different incarnation doubly impressive.  Yes, it's a more simplistic version of his relationship with River Song and he quickly cottons on the ruse, but within the context of this story, it's fascinating.  Unlike River, Iris or Bernice for that matter, there's a reality to Liv, I hesitate to say reality, which is reflection of the experiences she's had with the Daleks and life in general.  She's not easily impressed with the Doctor's life which makes her one of his more compelling associates,

Eyes of the Master

Given that this is the first "recorded" meeting between the Doctor and the Master since the TV Movie, the tendency might have been to make more of them crossing paths but given that they've already bumped into each other in the novels and comics and also that the Master's own timeline is a tangled mess, writer Matt Fritton quite rightly decides to go with the "You again" and "I might have known" approach whilst referring to the evil genius's recent run in with Seventh in a boxed set I haven't heard.  In constructing the semi-conclusion to the story, the writers (because this is a joint effort) have decided to go small, effectively ending this series with a zombie battle albeit with big expositional ideas introduced through the Master.  It's now becoming clear that what Dark Eyes is actually a sixteen episode story arc in the manner of the novels and I can't wait to hear where it goes next. Eight episodes to go.
on Thursday, July 16, 2015 0 comments Labels:
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