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*WARNING: POSSIBLE PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!*

The Eighth Doctor Adventures

Time: Between The TV Movie And The Time War

The Doctor:

The Eighth Doctor played by Paul McGann.

His Personality:

(thought I'd add this in...)

It's important to point out that the Eighth Doctor's personality is a little different from the TV Movie. In the movie he's cheery, friendly, gets beaten up a lot, doesn't ever use violence unless pushed to the very edge and is generally quite soppy. Although, at the beginning of the audios, his character stays the same as in the movie he gradually begins to harden as his adventures progress, up to the point where he can be quite cruel and harsh, a lot different from his movie persona.

Two perfect examples of this are Scherzo, which is an episode which tackles the relationship which develops between Charley and the Doctor (which I will discuss more later) and Caerdroia, in which the Doctor is split into three different versions of himself, each representing a segment of his personality (one is happy, easily distracted and a little stupid, one is grouchy and violent and the other is calm and polite). It's interesting to see the Doctor get darker as the series progresses - it's a lot like what they are attempting with the Tenth Doctor now. It's one of the reasons why I love the audios.

Companions:

Charlotte "Charley" Pollard ~ A young woman on 1930s Earth, she snuck onboard the R101 aircraft disguised as a boy. She's always wanted to be an 'Edwardian Adventuress' but has been held back by her wealthy family and social expectations.

When the R101 crashes, the Doctor rescues her and invites her onboard his TARDIS. They develop a strong friendship which later develops into love on Charley's part... but I'll talk about that later. Don't worry, it doesn't go the way of Rose.

Crizz (pronounced Keh-Ris) ~ An alien creature known as a Eutermesan. He is a kind of reptilian alien, built like a human but with a bug-like exoskeleton. His skin can also change color chameleon-style to match his surroundings. He claims to be the equivalent of a priest on his planet - peace-loving and religious. He's fairly young in terms of his species, I would guess the equivalent of Charley's age-group in human years.

The Doctor and Charley meet him on his own planet in an alternate universe. C'rizz's people had been enslaved by termite-like creatures known as the Kromon. They had turned C'rizz's wife into a Kromon-queen and it was so terrible for her she begs C'rizz to kill her. This is an action that haunts C'rizz and is one of the reasons why he decides to go with the Doctor at the end of the episode.

Another interesting fact which we later find out about C'rizz is that he not only absorbs the colours around him (to change his skin) but if he spends enough time with a person then he begins to absorb their personality too. You can see the change from when he's with the Doctor and Charley to when he's near someone cruel or manipulative.

Timeline:

The Eighth Doctor timeline can be split up into several chunks. The first chunk is made up of generally unconnected adventures featuring the Doctor and Charley. These include -

Storm Warning
Sword Of Orion
The Stones Of Venice
Minuet In Hell
Invaders From Mars
The Chimes Of Midnight
Seasons Of Fear
Embrace The Darkness
Time Of The Daleks

Pretty much all of these stories are great! I can't pick between them. During this segment of stories there is a story-arc running through them which involves Charley (definite SPOILERS here if you read ahead so I'll put them in red):

Because Charley was meant to die in the R-101 crash, the Doctor has created a paradox by saving her. This allows all sorts of anomalies in time and space to occur, for example in The Chimes Of Midnight where her death and the events that followed it - because they both did and didn't happen - caused a loop in time around one particular building, creating a creature that fed off this constant loop and the murder of people within it.

In Minuet In Hell the aliens are unable to use Charley as a vassel because she is a 'non-person' - she shouldn't really exist.

It is also used as a weapon by the Daleks in Time Of The Daleks, though they do not realise it is Charley they are using to operate their time machines.

This story-arc comes to a conclusion in the episodes Neverland and Zagreus. This is what I like to think of as segment 2. I realise this segment only has two adventures in it but they are both major episodes within the story arc and are also quite unusual, so I've kept them apart from the others.

Neverland
Zagreus (I'll do a full review of Zagreus later - it's my favourite episode!)

Summing up, in order to save Charley the Doctor allows an explosion of the destructive force known as anti-time to be contained within his TARDIS. This nearly destroys the TARDIS and since the Doctor is present at the time he also absorbs the anti-time and becomes the being known as Zagreus (more on that story later). When this happens, he develops a slightly split personality, sometimes cruel, sometimes himself, and becomes a danger to Charley and the universe.

Because he is carrying the anti-time within him, he cannot leave the TARDIS (the anti-time would react with normal time and explode everything) so he agrees to cross-over into the other universe (the Divergent Universe) where anti-time had originally been trapped by Rassilon. He can never go back. Saying his goodbyes, he leaves Charley with Leela and Romana back on Gallifrey. Before he crosses over, Charley, taking Leela's advice, sneaks back onto the TARDIS without the Doctor's knowledge, travelling with him even though she knows she can't go back either.

So begins the alternate universe segment of the audio adventures.

This is the third segment of my audio timeline and, I have to say, the weakest. Travelling into an alternate universe (which is apparently completely devoid of 'time' as we know it) should open up all sorts of possibilities for interesting plots and strangeness. Instead there are a lot of very old-fashioned sci fi stories full of giant bugs and man-eating plants.

Scherzo
The Creed Of The Kromon
The Natural History Of Fear
The Twilight Kingdom
Faith Stealer
The Last
Caerdroia
The Next Life

Although I know that if you're like me you won't want to miss out any episodes, even if you know they're terrible, if you were going to miss any out (and I say only IF you were) I'd probably miss out the Divergent Universe segment as it is the weakest overall. It does have some very well done episodes - Scherzo and Caerdroia are probably the best - and there are others that are good attempts at being new and interesting, like The Natural History Of Fear and The Last, but the other episodes are just a little messy, the acting and characters become a little predictable and the overall story arc doesn't really make a lot of sense.

I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy this segment, I did, but it falls down on several points, the biggest of which is that they never properly explain how a universe can function without time. They also have this thing about the universe being split up into segments which are completely seperate from each other and controlled by a force known as the Divergence... but yet again, this is not really explained thoroughly and you're left wondering exactly what the point of the whole thing was. Most of the people and creatures in the worlds act exactly like they would back in the 'normal' universe and in the end the lack of time becomes meaningless. It's more like a collection of worlds where time has been messed around with rather than places where time is absent. And what happened to the evil, mad Divergence we saw in Zagreus? Why were they so desperate to get out in that episode when their universe seems just as nice as our one?

Well, apparently it's because the Divergent Universe actually goes round in a big loop and has to start all over again every few thousand years. Or something like that. I'll admit, I got a bit confused. If it did go in a loop then how were the Divergence even able to spot that and remember it the next time the loop went round? If they could remember then time doesn't really loop, only the events loop... only they wouldn't because people would remember and wouldn't bother doing them again... Arrgh it makes my head hurt. Then they throw in some flimsy explanations about Rassilon too. Well, anyway, sufficed to say none of it seems to really fit together with the Neverland/Zagreus episodes.

Oh, on a side-note, if you're an actor/actress spotter like me then Daphne Ashbrook, the actress who plays Grace Holloway in the 8th Doctor TV Movie, appears in The Next Life. Just thought I'd add that in.

Anyway, the major change in this segment is that the Doctor and Charley meet C'rizz, who joins them on their travels and comes back to the 'normal' universe with them when they finally leave. Yes, they do find a way out.

C'rizz has some deep, dark secrets of his own... but I'll get to that later. I like C'rizz as a character but then I also like it when the Doctor has more than one companion and when he has an alien companion too. All these human earth girls get boring. There is a nice, friendly relationship between Charley and C'rizz (aside from some completely random argument they have in The Next Life - don't ask me, there was no reason for it...) and in general they deal with the fact that C'rizz is an alien and therefore very different quite well. Though I don't like the way he talks about himself as an alien. I know that a human wouldn't do that, he'd think of himself as normal and everyone else as aliens. Plus he seems to know a lot more about the physical differences between his own race and humans than he should... but that's by the by. OTHER THAN THAT he's a very likeable companion.

UPDATE

Ok I know it's been awhile since I wrote up my 8th Doctor summary (so this update probably won't be spotted for several months...) but I've finally finished listening to the next 'segment' of the timeline, which goes something like this:

Terror Firma
Scaredy Cat
Other Lives
Time Works
Something Inside
Memory Lane

This segment is much stronger than the last and also much more varied in style. It opens on a pretty heavy-going episode - Terror Firma - which features both the Daleks and Davros (this is not a spoiler by the way, as it is on the front cover of the CD). It's a fairly good episode which deals with a Whoniverse favorite however it falls down for me only with it's flippant treatment of two supposedly "lost" companions inserted into a side-plot near the end. I can't say anymore on that but the idea that two companions could be made, created and forgotten in the length of an episode upset me and undermines the importance of companions as a whole. It just seemed both silly and wrong. Especially as most other companions have come back again and again and again, even after they've died!

Scaredy Cat has to be the worst episode of the lot. It has an over-dose of torture (which I dislike) and a villain who starts off interesting but never goes anywhere. It could have been an in depth look at the criminal mind but then swung off into a plot about plagues. The little girl was spooky but could have been tied into the plot-line so much better. A pretty terrible story overall.

Other Lives and Memory Lane are the best two and the two I looked forward to most after hearing the trailers. Other Lives is definitely a good one for Paul McGann/8th Doctor fangirls as it wanders into the same territory as the Tenth Doctor episodes Human Nature & The Family Of Blood, pondering what the Doctor would be like if he settled down into a human life. Anyone whose seen 'Freaks' will also appreciate the influence it has had on the subplot involving C'rizz and a Victorian freak-show, the ending of which did make me shudder. Pretty nasty considering the lightness of the rest of the plot.

Memory Lane, whilst it starts with a really freaky concept (and a bleedin' AWESOME cover design!) is not as strong a story as Other Lives, though the first two episodes are suitably spooky. It's unfortunate that the two human astronauts are as annoying as they are (and the end explanation for everything as rushed as it is) because the actual setting is sheer brilliance.

Time Works felt like it belonged in the Divergent Universe segment and whilst not bad (the monsters and ideas are both good) I also forgot about it pretty quickly once it was over. Something Inside SHOULD have been really good - but it was actually rubbish. If you've ever seen 'The Cube' then it starts off with a similar concept but instead of exploring that it turns into an episode where everyone runs around a lot without really thinking it through first and everyone dies. And that's just depressing. It should have been so much more. I'd like to say that the female (is she bad/isn't she bad) medic character was really fascinating - and horribly under-used.

This concludes my longer than usual review of this segment. The next segment... well the next segment I cannot listen to at the moment since it contains the very last episodes for C'rizz and Charley. My two favorite companions... leaving...

Sufficed to say I'll be putting that off for as long as possible! I don't want them to leave and if I don't listen to the episodes then that simply won't happen... evil It's logical.

Absolution
The Girl Who Never Was

(To Be Continued...)

(Reserved For Fifth/Sixth/Seventh Stand Alone Adventures)

(Reserved For The Companion Chronicles, Unbound And Any Other Random Series')

Thanks to Richard_Swift for the following guide:

The Bernice Summerfield Adventures.

Who?
An orphan of the wars the Daleks fought against Humanity and the Draconians back before they found bigger fish to fry, Bernice Surprise Summerfield ran away from the military into which she'd been enlisted, forged her credentials as an archeologist and set off looking for adventure.

She found it. Not least on a planet named Heaven where she met a man who gave monsters nightmares. To do so this time though, the man had to do a terrible thing, which his best friend Ace just couldn't understand. Bernice though, she kind of did. So she went with him. She called him 'the Doctor', and he called her 'Benny'.

Sarcastic, self-delusional and frequently drunk, Bernice was the most human and honest friend the Doctor had ever had. If the role of a companion was, as Donna would later say, to stop the Doctor from going too far, then Bernice was perfect. But the extent to which she could reach the Doctor meant she did more. She changed him. The Doctor's speech to the couple in Father's Day about how thier lives are more important than his? That's what Bernice taught him.

But there were other influences at work. Irving Braxiatel, a man so like yet so unlike the Doctor, had an interest in her too. Maybe more to offer her too, as his famed Collection had more use for her archeological skills. But Bernice opted to remain in the TARDIS and would not see Braxiatel again until he turned up as a guest at her wedding.

Ah, yes, the wedding. In his early teens Jason Kane ran away from his abusive father, leaving his sister behind (and you think the Doctor has survivor guilt?). Perhaps he'd have found a way to get her out if he hadn't then got himself abducted by aliens and transported halfway across the galaxy, never to see anything that was even roughly shaped like a human until his thirties. Obviously he's an emotional cripple of a man; a sort of cross between Han Solo and John Constantine but minus any of thier skills, potency or redeeming features. And obviously he wasn't good enough for Bernice. She loved him anyway.

The marriage didn't last, for reasons both of them are only now discovering, but it saw her move away from a role as part of the TARDIS crew and off into her own adventures. The Doctor's 'education' of Bernice was complete and was very different to that of his other companions. Often the Doctor seems to be teaching his friends how to become heroes. That doesn't seem to have been the case at all with Benny.

Sometimes not everyone gets out alive, not everyone gets to keep thier timeline, thier sanity or thier family. The Doctor's tutorship of Bernice was, from her first appearance through to the first time he treated her as an equal, about positioning her to become someone able to choose who. Someone who, in an impossible situation, can make the impossible decisons.

She's charming, she's witty, she's sweet. She hasn't got a malevolvent bone in her body and all she really wants is just to know that her loved ones are safe so that she can curl up with a book and a glass of wine. You should be scared of what this woman's capable of.

Her last real 'adventure' with the Doctor saw her meet him near the start of his Eighth life, a meeting which came with it's own complications. When a friend who has meant everything to you suddenly turns into someone you just want to shag until doomsday, how do you handle the situation?

The Doctor and Bernice handled it by going their separate ways. The Doctor off headed towards a fateful encounter aboard the R101, and Bernice headed towards a lecturing post at a university in her own time.

Irving Braxiatel was waiting.
That's where Bernice's new adventures begin. That's where things get dangerous.

What?
Following the conclusion of the original TV series in 1989, Virgin books were granted a license by the BBC to publish the "official continuation" of the show as a series of novels called The New Adventures. Bernice was the first original companion created for these books. She also appeared in the magazine's ongoing comic strip and would have even been on TV had the Dark Dimension special not been cancelled at the last minute.

The New Adventures continued up until shortly after the Paul McGann telemovie, when (optimisticly anticipating a big Doctor Who revival such as the one we're now enjoying) the BBC decided not to renew the license and to start publishing the books themselves.

Virgin however, along with the authors, still held the copyright to everything new that had been created in the New Adventures. Which meant loosing the license to Doctor Who didn't mean the series had to end - it could continue with the extremely popular Bernice in the lead role.

Which is where Big Finish enter the picture. Before they ever got hold of the rights to make Doctor Who audios, they started off by adapting the Doctor-less Bernice New Adventures into plays. Which, by some logic, means that although Bernice Summerfield is a spin-off from Doctor Who, Big Finish's Doctor Who is a spin-off from Bernice Summerfield. smile

A modest success, Virgin's Bernice-led New Adventures were eventually crowded out of the marketplace and the company stopped publishing them.

So Big Finish stopped just adapting her stories, and started telling them instead. What they've done with her is quite interesting in that they've kept a line of original Bernice novels, short-story collections and novellas going in print as well as continuing to produce original audios. Her ongoing story, which is increasingly arc-based, moves from one medium to another. For example, one storyline began in the short-story collection Life During Wartime and concluded in the audio Death and the Daleks.

Another thing that makes Big Finish's Bernice series interesting is the oppertunity to see the Doctor Who universe from a very different perspective - a linear one. It's got Cybermen, Daleks, Time Lords, Draconians, Sea Devils and all the rest...but it's got very little time travel. Set firmly in the Twenty-Seventh Century on the planetoid on which Braxiatel has built his Collection, each story follows the preceeding one, which gives it a real chance to develop complex political storylines between the different factions and show the day to day lives of it's cast. I hate myself for using this analogy, but if Doctor Who were Star Trek, then Bernice's Big Finish series would be Deep Space Nine.

When?
Timeline-wise, these stories run parallel with the Eighth Doctor's life. By Season Two then Gallifrey has been destroyed for the first time, by Season Eight then that's been reversed but the Last Great Time War hasn't happened yet. If that confuses you, have a look at my quick and easy guide to Time Wars about halfway down this page...

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/entertainment-discussion/doctor-who-bigger-outside-the-box/t.33210825_31/

From Braxiatel's perspective, it's set after the Gallifrey series (but he breaks the Laws of Time so often that 'after' might be meaningless here).

From Bev Tarrant's perspective it's set after her audio adventures with the Seventh Doctor (The Genocide Machine and Dust Breeding)

Where?
The internal chronology of the series looks like this. Although many of the short story collections feature stories that're 'flashbacks' or even 'flash-forwards', this should be thought of as the reading/listening order.

I've not tried to include the Doctor Who stories and audios she, or her cast pop up in. I might someday though if people are interested.

The audios are in black and the books in red.

Sort-of Season 1

Oh No It Isn't!
Beyond the Sun
Walking to Babylon
Birthright
Just War
Buried Treasures
Dragon's Wrath

Note: These are adaptations of New Adventures novels that differ from the original books. The books rather than these should probably be thought of as the 'real' version of these events, although due to certain damage that's been done to her timeline, Bernice sometimes remembers both versions.

Actual Season 1
The Dead Men Diaries
The Doomsday Manuscript
Buried Treasures: Making Myths
Buried Treasures: Closure

Season 2
The Secret of Cassandra
The Gods of the Underworld
The Squire's Crystal
The Stone's Lament
The Extinction Event
The Infernal Nexus
The Skymines of Karthos
The Glass Prison

Season 3
The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy
The Green-Eyed Monsters
The Plague Herds of Excelis
A Life of Surprises
The Dance of the Dead
The Mirror Effect

Season 4
The Bellotron Incident
The Draconian Rage
The Poison Seas
Life During Wartime
Death and the Daleks

Season 5
The Grel Escape
The Big Hunt
The Bone of Contention
A Life Worth Living
The Relics of Jegg-Sau
Silver Lining
Masquerade of Death

Season 6
The Heart's Desire
The Kingdom of the Blind
The Lost Museum
The Goddess Quandary
The Tree of Life
Parallel Lives
Something Changed
The Crystal of Cantus

Season 7
Genius Loci
The Tartarus Gate
Timeless Passages
The Worst Thing in the World
Collected Works
The Summer of Love
The Oracle of Delphi
Old Friends
Empire State

Season 8
The Tub Full of Cats
The Judas Gift
The Two Jasons
Freedom of Information
Nobody's Children
The End of the World
The Final Amendment
Missing Adventures
The Wake

Which?
All of the short-story collections contain something wonderful. A Life of Surprises would be a very good sampler. Audio-wise, they're a bit hit and miss for the first few seasons; some are genius but too often it's all "which classic Who monster can Benny meet next?"

It's not really until Seasons 7&8 that the series really finds its feet, its direction and it purpose and gets back to giving the character the adventures she deserves.

You just live to annoy me, don't you Roobarb? xp

Anyway, good luck with this. There's nearly a hundred of those Big Finish audios, so you've got your work cut out for you. You might want to consider a list of 'must have' and 'avoid at all cost' audios, in case someone wants to try these out but doesn't know where to start.

Are most of these out-of-print already? It seems like amazon.co.uk only stocks a handful of these.

I've finally got round to adding in some Seventh Doctor info... I really need to catch up on all this!

There is 100 now!

BBC7 are currently broadcasting the McGann audios as part of "The Seventh Dimension". I've heard Shada, Storm Warning, Sword Of Orion, The Stones Of Venice, Invaders From Mars and I'll be listening to the rest of The Chimes Of Midnight in about half an hour. I have no idea why they missed Minuet In Hell out of the line up.

I also own copies of the Davison story Red Dawn and the McCoy story The Genocide Machine.

There is an article in the current DWM about Big Finish, celebrating its 100th release.

Isn't "Doctor Who & the Pirates" a G&S story? I've been wanting to get that one! crying