Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.
Before we begin reviewing the Eighth Doctor’s audio series Dark Eyes, let’s take a look at how it began, and why it had been such a highly anticipated Doctor Who series.
There have been very few Doctor Who releases that were as eagerly anticipated as Dark Eyes was.
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Oh, there are the obvious ones. There are both box sets of The Tenth Doctor Adventures, for example. Fans were also eager to hear Colin Baker’s regeneration story in The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure. And of course, the multi-Doctor epic The Light at the End was a perfect way to celebrate the show’s fiftieth anniversary.
But for Eighth Doctor fans, Dark Eyes was big. Eighteen months after the shocking ending of To The Death, we knew the Doctor was in a really bad place. He had suffered so much loss and trauma in one single episode. Even members of his family had died saving the universe from the Daleks. How could he possibly recover from that?
So after such a devastating and brutal ending, knowing that his story would continue was exciting. Especially in a four-part epic box set!
Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.
A new look
Then there was the cover. As a massive fan of McGann’s Doctor, I can’t begin to stress how mindblowing it was to see that cover.
Because, for the first time since the TV movie, the Eighth Doctor had a brand new look. With much shorter hair and wearing a leather naval coat, it was a far cry from the Eighth Doctor’s original TV movie outfit.
Paul McGann had shown off that look before, but only for a convention. To actually see that being used in-universe was exciting.
It also meant that we could expect a very different Eighth Doctor. Unsurprisingly, both the new look and Dark Eyes were heavily promoted. The story even received its own Doctor Who Magazine cover.
When Dark Eyes was finally released, demand was so high that Big Finish’s servers actually crashed from the unexpected huge increase of downloads that very day. It wasn’t surprising, though. Over a year and a half since To the Death had been released, fans were eager to hear where the Eighth Doctor’s story would go next.
Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.
Extended series
Nicholas Briggs had initially envisioned Dark Eyes to be one single box set. A four hour epic that focused on the Eighth Doctor and Molly. One with a slightly open ending, but still a complete story.
However, after the huge success of Dark Eyes’s success, Big Finish eventually continued to extend the series further. Not just with one additional box set, but with three!
Unfortunately, due to Paul McGann’s lack of availability for a short period, they weren’t able to release the second box set in Doctor Who‘s fiftieth anniversary year. So once again, fans had to wait over a year for the Eighth Doctor’s story to continue.
(Then again, during that long gap, fans were lucky enough to see how the Eighth Doctor’s story ended, at least.)
But how were Big Finish going to justify the considerably extended length? Simple: you don’t just feature one major enemy in the series. You feature three!
Along with including the Dalek Time Controller from the previous box set and other stories, Big Finish also announced that the series would feature the Eminence.
The Eminence is an interesting Big Finish monster. A creature that wants to dominate the will of everyone in the universe, the monster technically first appeared in The Seeds of War with the Sixth Doctor.
I say “technically”, because the monster’s introduction story was Destroy the Infinite in the Fourth Doctor Adventures. While that had been written and recorded as the first story, it wasn’t released until 2014. In fact, Destroy the Infinite was released after Dark Eyes 2!
Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.
Return of the Master
The other, and perhaps even more exciting villain that was brought into the series was the Master. Not just any incarnation, either. Alex Macqueen would be playing this particular incarnation.
Alex Macqueen’s Master had only appeared once before at this point, in UNIT: Dominion. When that story was released, he was advertised as playing a future Doctor, with his real identity kept under wraps. So when fans heard that story and discovered who he really was, they were eager for more!
Perhaps even bigger than Macqueen’s casting was the idea of the Eighth Doctor facing the Master once more. While they had encountered each other in various comics and books, the only time the Eighth Doctor had encountered him on audio was in The Light at the End. And that was with a previous incarnation.
As a result, this felt like the first time that the characters had truly met since the TV movie. Almost twenty years since the movie’s broadcast, and many audio stories since then, we were finally getting an Eighth Doctor story with the Master.
How well did their reunion go? In fact, how strong was Dark Eyes as a full-length series? And what impact did it leave on the Eighth Doctor? Find out soon in our upcoming reviews.
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Have you listened to Dark Eyes? What were your thoughts on the series? What did you make of the Eighth Doctor’s new look? Let us know in the comments below.