Doctor Who: Big Finish and the Time War Part 2 (2005

The Eighth Doctor encounters Davros on a very familiar world in ‘Terror Firma.’ (Credit: Big Finish)

In 2005, Doctor Who introduced the Time War into the show’s long history. How did Big Finish incorporate this into its own mythology?

When Series 1 with Christopher Eccleston introduced the Time War, it left Big Finish with a slight problem. While it had the license to make audio stories and even spin-off series based on Doctor Who, due to legal complications, it could only do so based entirely on the Classic Series. So while the first Eight Doctors and their companions could appear, no new Doctors, characters or events from the New Series could be featured or even mentioned in their stories, and the Time War was a definite no-no.

However, whereas before, many of Big Finish’s stories and series – including their Eighth Doctor audios and their spin-off series Gallifrey – could pursue their own direction, now the introduction of the Time War left a clear endgame of where everything was heading, especially for anything involving the Time Lords. However, with Big Finish unable to so much as mention the War, how difficult would this make things for the writers?

If the quality of the writing, as well as where Big Finish decided to take things is to be judged, then probably not as difficult as you might think. Yes, the Doctor and Gallifrey were destined to become embroiled in a war with the Daleks, but in 2005, this was still a long, long way ahead for all parties involved, as far as the Big Finish universe was concerned. This didn’t mean that they wouldn’t hint at future events, of course, but for a very long time, that’s virtually all they did.

The first Eighth Doctor story released following the broadcast of Eccleston’s series is a clear example. Following on from ‘The Next Life,’ with the Doctor and his companions Charley and C’Rizz finding themselves home and having to deal with Davros, ‘Terror Firma‘ pushes McGann’s Doctor almost to breaking point.

It’s a story that deals more with the Doctor’s past than his future. As the Doctor faces up to the consequences of his actions in ‘Remembrance of the Daleks,’ he finds out major revelations. Davros twists everything good about the Doctor to try and force him to, just once, do the wrong thing — not for the greater good, as he will one day come close to doing, but out of sheer psychological torture.

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While this story explores the relationship between Davros, the Daleks, and the Doctor more than the relationship between the Daleks and the Time Lords, there are still a couple of nods towards the Doctor’s future. There’s a brilliant speech by the Doctor acknowledging that his destiny is not just to be a Time Lord, but to go back to being just like the rest of them, living his remaining days on Gallifrey when he’s old and alone. It’s not a future he’s looking forward to, as he’s still so incredibly disillusioned with his own race, but it’s an option he knows he has. Once upon a time, there was a bittersweet irony to that belief, knowing that the Doctor would one day lose his home for good. Now? Who knows what the Doctor will do in his dying days?

After “Terror Firma,” the Eighth Doctor doesn’t worry about the Daleks for a long while. Neither does he worry about his own people, or vice versa. This isn’t too surprising, as on Gallifrey, they’ve got their own problems.

Next: Page 2: Gallifrey

The finale to the third season of spin-off series ‘Gallifrey.’ (Credit: Big Finish)

Series 2 and 3 of the spin-off series Gallifrey take what was great about the first series and develop it even further. Surprisingly, there isn’t so much as a hint towards the War for most of it, but that doesn’t stop the series from being a high quality listen. Not to mention the fact that it continues to give a glimpse of what Time Lord society is really like when the Doctor isn’t too worried about it. In this case, it gives us a glimpse of when things are almost at their worst.

By the end of the third series, Gallifrey is left in ruins, dealing with not just the aftermath of a devastating civil war but also a virus unleashed by a terrorist group called “Free Time” — an organisation that wanted to destroy the Time Lords, or at least remove them from power.

It was strongly hinted, however, that there was a much more dangerous power behind them. One of the characters, having explored the Universe and picking up whispers and hints throughout, confirmed that something was coming to Gallifrey. It was the most dangerous threat that the Time Lords would ever face, and it was coming when Gallifrey and its people had never been in a worse mess.

The third series surprisingly ended with a lot of major threads left unresolved. I say “surprisingly,” because the series didn’t return for another five years. When it did return, however, not only would it eventually resolve the very long running story that had begun in the first series, but would end with major revelations about what caused the Time War to begin in the first place…

As for the Eighth Doctor? Eventually, after things ended badly with C’Rizz, he parted ways with Charley Pollard (even if she didn’t technically part ways with him, as she started travelling with the Sixth Doctor), and met new companion Lucie Miller in The Eighth Doctor Adventures. This was a range of which I was always a massive fan, as it was designed for new fans who were more used to the longer episodes and faster pace of the New Series to jump on board with Big Finish.

With a classic Doctor, a more modern style, and a very modern companion, it’s a great bridge between the Classic Series and the New… and was so good that at times it was easy to forget that it wasn’t set in the current era. Even with the great use of the Time Lords, as they show up to get the Doctor to (rather reluctantly) look after Lucie in the first place, or help him to face one of the greatest threats from their dark history in the form of Morbius, it was easy to forget the horrors and darkness that the Doctor would have to later face.

And then came the fourth and final season. I’m going to be up front and say that this is one of my favourite seasons of Doctor Who ever, in any format. After a massively depressing Christmas special, it begins light-hearted enough, with the Doctor finding a new companion and having fun adventures throughout time and space. But as time goes on the series gradually starts to take a much darker turn.

‘The Resurrection of Mars‘ is a particularly strong example, as it explores exactly how incredibly moral, for better or for worse, the Doctor has become in his Eighth incarnation. He’s a man who, after everything he’s been through, (and even with the War yet to occur, poor Eight has already been through a lot), still wants to avoid taking even a single life, if possible. Even if it means that hundreds, thousands, or even millions of innocent individuals will die if he doesn’t take that action. He may have been that man once, in his previous incarnation, but he never wants to be that man again.

Next: Page 3: 'To The Death'

The Eighth Doctor joins his friends and family to fight the Daleks in ‘To The Death.’ (Credit: Big Finish)

Season four is really great at showing just how heroic Eight became. In some ways, it’s almost a happy time for him – even while he and Lucie have gone their separate ways, not only are there times when they briefly catch up, but he even reunites with his granddaughter and meets his own great-grandson in ‘An Earthly Child.’ Their initial meeting doesn’t exactly have the best start, but eventually, they have a good time over Christmas dinner in ‘Relative Dimensions.’ Even while he spends a lot of time alone, the Eighth Doctor genuinely has a family, one he can happily visit every once in a while.

That is, until ‘To The Death.’

With a Dalek invasion and several major characters reuniting, there’s more than a nod to David Tennant’s story ‘The Stolen Earth’/’Journey’s End’ with this episode. And ‘Journey’s End’ with the Eighth Doctor is a good starting point to conceptually knowing what this episode is like. To make it more accurate, imagine ‘Journey’s End’ as written by George R.R. Martin instead of Russell T. Davies, and you get a pretty good idea of just how much the Doctor suffers in this episode.

Seriously, a lot of major characters are killed off in this finale. Some are massive sacrifices, while others die for no good reason. That’s not a criticism, that’s actually praise for Nicholas Briggs sticking to his guns and not using the reset button once. Something I kept expecting to happen and have everyone be completely OK by the end, but no. This time, we have an ending of the Doctor dealing with a lot of pain and loss. He isn’t as forgiving as he once was, and he is completely sick of the Daleks. As he heads off alone with his grief into an uncertain future, one thing is clear: he’s taking his first steps towards becoming a man ready for War.

‘Lucie Miller’/’To The Death’ is the kind of Doctor Who story that’s written by the writer of Dalek Empire instead of Nicholas Briggs’s usual Doctor Who stories. It’s clear that – in a very twisted way, of course – he had a lot of fun writing a story so grim and brutal. I suspect that, as well as giving The Eighth Doctor Adventures an epic and worthy send-off, what probably helped is that we all know where the Doctor is heading, and as such, Briggs’s gets to write a story that’s considerably darker than most Doctor Who stories are allowed to be. As you’d expect, it’s a big reason why I’m eager to hear exactly what kind of stories he has planned for the War Doctor.

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Next: The Most Beautiful Garden in All of Time and Space

As I noted earlier, the build-up to the Time War in the first few years following the series’ return to television surprisingly didn’t present much clear build-up at all, only the faintest of hints. The finale to The Eighth Doctor Adventures represented something of a turning point. Following ‘To The Death,’ events in the Big Finish universe would start to rapidly escalate between the Doctor, the Time Lords, and the Daleks in a big way…