Last month, Big Finish announced that they would be using Doctor Who‘s new era characters and villains in classic Doctor stories. Not only was this incredibly exciting news for Big Finish listeners, it also leaves a big question: now that they are finally able to tell stories featuring not just characters but also major established mythology from New Who, should they finally make their own series about the Time War?
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Personally, I think that if anyone could get something like that done exactly right, it would be the writers and producers at Big Finish. For one thing, there’s the lack of visual effects budget for them to worry about, something that, as much as the effects of Doctor Who have improved, would still be a heavy restriction on portraying something as grand-scale a concept as a Time War.
Even ‘The Day of the Doctor,’ the 50th anniversary special that was shown on the big screen, showed scenes from the Time War that were approximately ten minutes while the rest of the episode was focused on Elizabethan England (that was mostly in a forest) and in present day London (that was mostly in a museum). Not a criticism, as ‘The Day of the Doctor’ was a story I greatly enjoyed, but it does give a strong impression of how limited the show’s budget is even now.
However, while audio would be a more realistic medium to tell the Time War in than on television, it does also present its own challenges. An epic battle on screen, as expensive as it may be, at least gives clear visual indication of who’s fighting who, which soldiers are shot dead, which ones are merely screaming in pain, etc. Audio just doesn’t have as great an advantage at giving a clear instant visual of the horrors of war as it does on the screen.
Fortunately, Big Finish have had a great deal of experience telling convincing stories involving epic battles already. One of their earliest and very best examples is their spin-off series Dalek Empire, which focuses on what happens when a Dalek invasion spreads throughout the galaxy and the Doctor isn’t there to save the day. It’s a very bleak series that pulls no punches and truly knows how to bring the grittiness and horror of war to the listener by giving a tighter character focus and making it feel more personal.
What helps even more is how over the past few years Big Finish, while they’ve been unable to reference the Time War directly, they have been steadily building towards it throughout their Doctor Who-related ranges. The sixth season of the spin-off series Gallifrey, heavily set on the home planet of the Time Lords, ended with a very major hint of the reason why the War started in the first place.
Perhaps the most significant hints of all have come from the Eighth Doctor’s stories, particularly his own recent series, Dark Eyes. Not only does it begin to show the Time Lords and the Daleks more openly clashing against each other, but even has a heavy focus on war in its third season between humanity and an evil power known as the Eminence. The development not just in character and story but also in tone strongly seems to suggest that Big Finish are more than willing to take the next step and start to tell stories about the War. And the Big Finish fan in me is more than ready to hear those stories.