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Doctor Who: Big Finish and The Time War: Part 1 (Pre-2005)

By James Aggas

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The Sixth Doctor and Romana fight a Dalek invasion on Gallifrey in

The Apocalypse Element

, credit:

Big Finish

With the upcoming release of John Hurt’s new War Doctor audio series by Big Finish, we take a look back at their early stories and spin-offs that have been building up to this. (Spoilers ahead for early Big Finish releases.)

Before Doctor Who came back on television in 2005, it was a difficult time to be a Whovian. As we reached not just a new decade but also a new millennium and there was still no sign of the show coming back, it looked as if, on television at least, Doctor Who was dead.

Thankfully, the fans had a great deal of stories to enjoy in other media, including novels, comics, and of course, the excellent audios made by Big Finish. Since 1999, they have been consistently making great stories featuring many of the original Doctors, and helped to fill the void from the lack of a TV series.

As we all know, the show did come back. But it also introduced a huge piece of mythology that would affect everything, including Doctors past, present, and future: the Time War. No longer was the Doctor just a renegade Time Lord on the run from his own people – now, he was the last of the Time Lords, recovering from a war that took away everything from him.

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At the time, this was major news for fans of the classic series, and raised a lot of questions – no more Time Lords? What caused the War to begin? What happened to the Eighth Doctor and how did he regenerate? (The lack of an immediate answer to this question in particular frustrated this massive Eight fan, I must say.) What lead the Doctor to wipe out his own race as well as the Daleks?

Eventually, we would get answers to many of these questions, but for the longest time, no clear answers were given, only more questions. And unfortunately, due to the complications of the license, Big Finish was not allowed to cover anything introduced in the New Series for a very long time. That, however, certainly didn’t stop them from at least hinting at the Time War or even subtly build up to it. Most of these hints actually built on a great deal of Big Finish mythology before the show came back in 2005.

One significant piece of build-up was the Dalek Empire arc that started in 2000 and featured the classic Doctors. Not only were these the first Dalek stories made by Big Finish, but the second story, The Apocalypse Element, left a huge impact. The Doctor’s old friend and fellow Time Lady Romana, now President of Gallifrey, had spent more than two decades as a prisoner of the Daleks; the Daleks wiped out an entire galaxy and billions of lives in the process, and they even managed to invade Gallifrey itself! While the story didn’t lead into all-out war between the Daleks and the Time Lords, all of these things occurring at once certainly would have increased tensions between the two races, to say the least.

It’s also worth noting that, while the events of this story occur for the Doctor’s Sixth incarnation – two lives before the War starts from his perspective – Romana comments at one point that he’s in “the wrong body,” referencing that the events of the story are occurring much later as far as she and the rest of the Time Lords are concerned. While I’m not a big fan of the story overall, it’s certainly worth listening to in terms of how much of an impact it’s had on the mythology. Even Russell T. Davies referenced the events of this story in an article about the Time War, in Doctor Who Annual 2006.

Next: Page 2: Dalek Empire & the Eighth Doctor

The Daleks invade the Milky Way in their own audio spin-off series,

Dalek Empire

, credit:

Big Finish

While not related to the Time War, I feel that I should give an honourable mention to the spin-off series that the initial Dalek audios lead into: Dalek Empire.  This series doesn’t feature any Time Lords – not even our favourite one – but that’s part of what makes it so compelling. It’s a series that focuses on a group of humans as they fight a Dalek invasion, sadly without the help of the Doctor, and as a result, we realise a few key things.

First, there’s a good reason why the Daleks genuinely fear the Doctor, as without him, their evil plans aren’t defeated within a couple of hours, days, or even years. Second, the Daleks can be shockingly threatening, to the point where you’re not sure which of your favourite characters will make it to the end. Third, Nicholas Briggs is absolutely amazing when it comes to writing sci-fi war epics. As a Doctor Who writer, he can be a bit hit-or-miss at times. Sometimes, he writes a truly great story, full of human emotion and depth, but he has a slight habit of pressing a reset button and undoing most of it.

In Dalek Empire, however, he pulls no punches – the characters suffer, there are always consequences, and those consequences stick. It’s dark, even horrifying on a massive scale, and it’s exactly the kind of story you’d want told in a Time War series. While this spin-off is purely focused on Daleks vs. Humans instead of Daleks vs. Time Lords, this is easily one of the best examples of why the writers at Big Finish should be the ones to tell stories about the Time War. (The fact that the first War Doctor box set is entirely written by Briggs leaves me hugely excited about listening to it.)

The Daleks’ next encounter with the Doctor would be a significant one. In 2001, Big Finish started releasing brand new stories with Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. For fans at the time, this felt huge – as great as the stories with previous Doctors were, it was amazing to actually get stories with the “current” Doctor. There were no limits to where they could go with the character, and we had no idea where he would go next.

Oddly enough, the Daleks only have one featured appearance in the whole of McGann’s first four seasons before 2005, but again, it has an impact: ‘The Time of the Daleks.’ The fourth story in the Dalek Empire arc, this not only nicely builds on events in previous stories, but also heavily features the Daleks trying to become the new Lords of Time by constructing their own Eye of Harmony. They don’t succeed, and by the end of the story, become trapped in a time loop. There’s definitely a wonderful irony that not only are the Time Lords the only race who can release them, but also the fact that the Time Lords know that, for the good of the “Web of Time,” they have to release the race with which they will one day be at war.

Next: Page 3: Zagreus

Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann in

Zagreus

, credit:

Big Finish

The next two stories for the Eighth Doctor, Neverland and Zagreus, are very heavily focused on the Doctor’s race, and just how corrupt they can be. One Time Lord in particular, Rassilon (one of the key men who established Gallifrey’s mastery over time) was revealed to be power hungry to the point of freezing entire galaxies at their beginning and sealing potential rivals into other universes.

While Rassilon was never directly presented as a villain in the classic series (although there were certainly hints that he may have been far nastier than the Time Lords wanted to believe), this piece of development certainly fits in well with the Rassilon we saw in ‘The End of Time‘ – a Time Lord willing to sacrifice not just everything that he’s worked for, but literally everything itself to save himself and his race.

Zagreus left quite the impact on the Doctor. This isn’t really surprising, as it was meant to be for the show’s 40th anniversary, but it’s hard to think of a moment where the Doctor is more disillusioned with his own people than the end of this story. After listing the number of heroes and mentors who had let him down – including Omega, his former tutor Borusa, and of course Rassilon – he prepares to exile himself into a different universe altogether. This is not, however, before telling President Romana – arguably one of his best friends – to enjoy her corruption as President.

He has numerous reasons for leaving, but mostly, he’s just sick of what his own race has become. Again, this highlights not only the terrible relationship the Doctor has with his own people, but also why its politicians would become so self-absorbed that they’d become one of the Doctor’s greatest threats, as seen in ‘The End of Time.’

The politics of the Time Lords are explored even further in Gallifrey, a spin-off series that focused on Romana trying to change things as President on her world; Leela, a savage learning to live in a supposedly civilized world; Braxiatel, a seemingly loyal political ally to Romana and a popular character among fans of the expanded universe; and Narvin, head of the Celestial Intervention Agency and a character you’re never quite sure whether or not to trust. I’ll be covering this series in more depth in later articles, but the first series is a great exploration of just how much more complicated and dirty politics can be when you’re the masters of Time.

As for the Doctor? Naturally, he didn’t remain exiled in the Divergent Universe forever, and he finally escapes while confronting Rassilon one more time in The Next Life, the finale to Paul McGann’s final season as the “current” Doctor. The end of that story was the last time we saw Rassilon, still stuck in that very universe, before his return in the revival of the television program. What happened in between and how he escaped (or even if it’s truly the same Rassilon) certainly sounds like something Big Finish could explore later on, especially now that they finally have the New Series license.

But it’s the ending itself that’s the most important part: arriving in a darkened room, the Doctor and his companions are at first unsure if they’ve actually returned to their own universe… not until he opens the doors and is greeted by Davros and the Daleks, of course.

(Article continues after the next post box.)

Next: Is there a Bootstrap Paradox in the Doctor's Confession Dial?

Mere months away from his return to the screen, with major revelations that would change everything – including the very direction that the audios would take for the Eighth Doctor, the Time Lords, and the Daleks – the Doctor says to his companions, “We’re home…”

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