Doctor Who Review: The Ninth Doctor Chronicles (Audio)
By James Aggas
Nicholas Briggs narrates The Ninth Doctor Chronicles, featuring Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler and Bruno Langley as Adam Mitchell. (Credit: Big Finish)
So Big Finish are finally producing stories featuring the Ninth Doctor. But how much does the absence of Eccleston affect the quality of The Ninth Doctor Chronicles?
Ever since Big Finish gained the license in 2015, we’ve been receiving more and more releases with characters from the New Series. We’ve had brand new stories of the new UNIT team in their own spin-off. Popular classic series characters Jago & Litefoot have crossed paths with Strax. We’ve even had River Song in a major role in Eighth Doctor series Doom Coalition.
But what fans have been really eager for is New Doctor stories. So far, we’ve only had John Hurt and David Tennant return to the roles on audio. And while Christopher Eccleston and Matt Smith have yet to do the same, stories of their Doctors have been previously covered in spin-off box set The Churchill Years. This didn’t quite satisfy the need for stories with their full appearances, but I did like the box set overall.
‘The Doctor Chronicles’
However, there’s now a new range from Big Finish. The Doctor Chronicles. Three planned releases featuring stories about Doctors from the New Series. The first release, The Ninth Doctor Chronicles, includes four separate stories about the Ninth Doctor. None featuring Eccleston himself, as he declined to return to the role at this time. So when Big Finish wanted to tell stories with this particular incarnation, how did they compensate for the lack of the Ninth Doctor himself?
Well a good starting point was getting a rather strong team of writers. James Goss, Scott Handcock and Una McCormack have all written many stories for Big Finish before across several ranges, including Jago & Litefoot, Blake’s 7, Torchwood and Gallifrey.
But by far the best choice they picked was Cavan Scott. Not just a Big Finish veteran, he’s also currently writing the Ninth Doctor’s own comic series. Everything I’ve read so far has been absolutely marvellous. Scott is a real master at getting the unique tone of Eccleston’s era exactly right. He’s also great at including little nods to other eras, both with previous and later Doctors.
‘The Bleeding Heart’ and ‘The Window on the Moor’
So it’s unsurprising that he wrote the first story in the box set, The Bleeding Heart. This was a story that I was especially excited to listen to, as it’s pre-Rose. Not that I’m saying Rose wasn’t a great and important part of Nine’s era. Quite the opposite, as both of them went on a great journey together. But seeing Nine just after the Time War is an exciting idea.
It didn’t disappoint. Throughout the story, it’s clear that while the Doctor is trying to put on a happy grin and say how “Fantastic!” everything is, he’s still in a pretty bad place. It’s not long since the end of the War, and there’s a lot of guilt and shame that he’s trying hard to run away from. From start to finish, this is entirely Nine’s story, and Cavan Scott writes his character as brilliantly as ever. It’s a great way of truly kicking off The Ninth Doctor Chronicles.
The Window on the Moor is an interesting tale. Set later on after Nine has met Rose, this is a story that mixes a good historical setting with epic, sci-fi civil wars. It has rather strong elements of epic and dramatic romance, which considering one of the key characters is Emily Brontë, isn’t really that surprising.
While it doesn’t explore the Ninth Doctor in terms of character quite as much as the other stories of the set, it does capture the tone and feel of the era really well. Overall, this is another story I rather enjoyed. (It helps that I do love a bit of huge and epic romance when done right, which this story definitely has).
Bruno Langley as Adam Mitchell. (Credit: BBC)
‘The Other Side’
The Other Side features a “companion” who wasn’t exactly popular with fans. With good reason – he wasn’t meant to be popular in the first place. Set firmly between the episodes Dalek and The Long Game, we get to explore Adam’s reaction to the TARDIS and time travel in a lot more detail. We also get to hear him really prove himself to the Doctor, which I quite like. I like that his character is given extra dimension in this story, and that he isn’t just a cocky know-it-all.
That’s not to say he isn’t still deeply flawed. This is Adam we’re talking about, after all. In some cases, he’s more ready to give up on the Doctor than with other companions. But he’s smart, and he really gets to help out, at times. The fact that he shows at least some potential to improve adds a nice layer of tragedy to The Long Game, I think. Knowing that Adam actually could have been a great companion makes his undignified exit that much more bittersweet.
Another reason I liked The Other Side is how it explores Nine and Rose, both as individuals and their relationship. It’s small moments, really, but those moments really add a lot. There’s one particular highlight when Rose is given another reminder of how alien the Doctor is and what he can do that I really, really loved. It’s ironic that a story featuring a heavily disliked character of Nine’s era is something of a highlight for The Ninth Doctor Chronicles.
‘Retail Therapy’
The final story is Retail Therapy. This one really feels possibly the closest to Russell T. Davies Who, especially due to how much it’s set around Rose’s home. More than that – it focuses on Rose’s mother Jackie, and quite heavily, too. Again, this is another story that’s worth listening to more for the character exploration than for the plot. The story itself is quite light-hearted. But this story goes deeper into the relationship of the Doctor and Jackie than the TV series did.
A personal favourite moment of mine is Jackie and the Doctor getting to have a conversation between just the two of them. They really get to say what they think of each other, especially Jackie. It’s not that Jackie didn’t get any focus in the New Series. Something I really appreciated about RTD’s era was getting to see more of the companion’s family back home every so often. But the scenes with Jackie in this story just fit so perfectly with the TV era, and they’re all very welcome here.
So those are the stories themselves. How about the format? Well, that’s where it may prove divisive.
Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler. (Credit: BBC)
The Format of ‘The Doctor Chronicles’
Most of Big Finish’s stories aren’t exactly audiobooks, at least not in the usual sense of the word. Most of the time, they’re full cast audio drama with no narration, with the actors’ performances and the dialogue giving you a clear idea of the story. This method of storytelling really did help the stories become much more immersive than your standard audiobook reading, in my experience.
The Companion Chronicles range took a different format, with a companion usually telling someone else about an adventure they had previously had at some point. But while narration was involved there, the fact that it was usually part of the story itself still helped to draw the listener in.
The format of the new Doctor Chronicles is very different. Not only is the narration distinctly in the third person, the reading is also done by voice of the Daleks and Big Finish executive producer himself, Nicholas Briggs. This isn’t really too surprising, as Briggs has done a number of audiobook readings in the past. Briggs is usually voicing most of the characters in each story, with the exception of one other key character played by another cast member. The most important part that he’s voicing, of course, is the Ninth Doctor. How is his rendition of Eccleston’s iconic role?
New Interpretations
If I’m honest, it’s okay. Sometimes, it’s a little too exaggerated for me, particularly the Northern accent that Briggs uses for Nine. (Eccleston was distinctly Northern, but I’m not sure he was ever that Northern.) But he does get the rhythms of Eccleston’s voice right, at least.
With a lot of other productions featuring past Doctors without the original actor, there comes a point where I forget that I’m not listening to them. In The Early Adventures ranges, William Russell and Peter Purves both do a great rendition of Hartnell. Frazer Hines’s portrayal of Troughton’s Doctor is particularly incredible to hear. And Tim Treloar is very impressive playing Pertwee in The Third Doctor Adventures.
In all of these cases, it’s not that their interpretations are a perfect copy of the original actor’s voices. But they all included tiny, subtle things in their performances that made it feel like the original actors were really there. Combined with really effective and dramatic storytelling, and it works wonders at making you completely forget about the absence of such important actors while listening to them.
I never quite reached that point in The Ninth Doctor Chronicles, if I’m honest. I was always consciously aware that Eccleston wasn’t there. Partly, it’s because of Brigg’s performance. It’s good, especially when handling some of the more dramatic aspects of the story, but it isn’t quite good enough.
Concluding Thoughts
The other reason is the format. These productions feel a lot closer to “audiobook” than audio drama, as I’ve mentioned before. For me personally, that makes them slightly less immersive than many other Big Finish products. As a result, this makes me a little less likely to recommend it to fans of the New Series who are completely new to Big Finish. At least, compared to other New Series based productions, such as The Diary of River Song or The War Doctor box sets.
That’s not to say that The Ninth Doctor Chronicles is bad. In fact, I really enjoyed all four stories. Overall, they really capture the tone and feel of the era really well, and the Ninth Doctor himself is very effectively explored as a character. It’s not the best way of experiencing more stories with the Ninth Doctor. (Right now, that would definitely be the comics.) But, all things considered, and with the limitations that this box set had, this is a very enjoyable set of four great stories.
Next: News: Titan Comics reveals three part Doctor Who comic book