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Doctor Who: Why the Fifth Doctor’s comic run should be adapted to audio

By James Aggas

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Following the success of the audio adaptations of classic Doctor Who comic strips with the Fourth Doctor, should the Fifth Doctor’s era also get the same treatment?

After both re-listening to 2009’s Stockbridge trilogy – which comprises of Castle of Fear, The Eternal Summer and Plague of the Daleks – as well as volume one of The Comic Strip Adaptations, it got me wondering: What should Big Finish adapt next?

What leaps to mind is the Fifth Doctor’s comics. Partially because it’s a natural follow-up to the adaptations of two Fourth Doctor comic stories. But also, it’s because the whole run of the Fifth Doctor comprises of a huge arc for his character.

The Fourth Doctor’s comics were bold and brilliant. Written and drawn by British comics legends, Pat Mills and John Wagner wrote the stories while Dave Gibbons was the artist. These stories partially matched the tone of what Doctor Who was going for back in 1980. At the same time, these rather colorful adventures in black-and-white went for something far bigger than the TV series could ever achieve.

When Steve Parkhouse took over and covered the whole of the Fifth Doctor’s run in Doctor Who Monthly (now Doctor Who Magazine), he gave us a very different take. Not just for the comics, but also for the Fifth Doctor. On television, the Doctor was often joined on his travels by three companions, travelling throughout time and space and having (mostly) fun adventures.

But in the comics, the Fifth Doctor had made the village of Stockbridge his home. We never saw his TV companions show up. We don’t know where they were, just that the comics decided not to use them.

More than that: the comic stories during the Fifth Doctor’s era were very heavily linked. For example, The Stockbridge Horror naturally followed on from Stars Fell on Stockbridge, while Lunar Lagoon helped to set up the more epic 4-Dimensional Vistas. There’s a huge narrative that develops nicely over time.

Stockbridge has already been explored on audio in 2009’s Stockbridge trilogy. Could the original stories be adapted to the same format?

(Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

Why the comics should be adapted

There’s a nice mix of stories within this arc while still giving us great development. The Tides of Time, for example, is a full-on epic, while The Stockbridge Horror is a scary and claustrophobic story.

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Across these adventures, Peter Davison’s Doctor is explored in a way that very few stories have achieved. We get to see this Doctor at his most desperate, his most depressed. There’s a rather bleak and shocking moment in which he casually walks into the sea, being utterly consumed with despair.

These sides of the Doctor would be great to hear portrayed by Davison himself. He could really throw himself into the role, and we’d get to hear a version of the Fifth Doctor that, while true to who he was on television, still has sides to him that we hadn’t seen or heard before outside of the comics.

Lastly, all of the stories in this arc are excellent. It would be fantastic to see them adapted in a new medium, and therefore exposing them to a whole new audience. After the success of Big Finish’s adaptations of both The Iron Legion and The Star Beast, it would be fantastic to see the Fifth Doctor’s excellent comic run get the same treatment.

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What do you think? Do you think The Tides of Time and other great Fifth Doctor comic stories should be adapted into audio? Or would you prefer other stories from other Doctors to be adapted, such as The World Shapers or Endgame? Let us know in the comments below.

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