Christopher Eccleston

Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Star-Crossed

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

This meeting feels inevitable.

At some point we had to see Nine meet his wife, all the other Doctors have done it across the years and finally it is Eccleston’s turn to play alongside Kingston. There was a huge risk in doing this boxset, because Nine isn’t a Doctor with a romantic sensibility prior to Rose, at points in these audios being coded as a-romantic. Star-Crossed could have felt like forcing two characters together, just having them meet for the sake of finally getting round to having them all have met River. But it crucially isn’t.  Star-Crossed is a boxset worth making, with a relationship well worth exploring and tinged with tragedy and melodrama. The three stories in here feel like they have been crafted with care to show how the Doctor isn’t always someone River can love, that they aren’t always the idealised image River has in her diary. Dorney, Hopley and Foley have gifted us with three unique stories that all paint a fascinating picture of this brief meeting of the old married couple.

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Review: Doctor Who – Once And Future – Time Lord Immemorial

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

The penultimate episode of Big Finish’s 60th anniversary celebrations bring us our first true multi-Doctor story of the bunch, just not with the Doctors you may have been expecting. I’m surprised it took the miniseries this long to finally get round to properly pairing up a pair of Doctors for an hour, but the choice of Nine and the Unbound Doctor does make a good bit of sense since we can celebrate Big Finish’s main bespoke incarnation alongside the man who helped revitalise the program; the reason we can really have a Diamond anniversary in the way we do. However, the excitement I felt going in to this story did feel quite misplaced as this is not the story it could have been.

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Travel In Hope

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The second installment of the third series of Ninth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Productions is continuing the idea of these sets being three stories wrapped around a theme.  This set has the Ninth Doctor traveling alone once again, but with the wraparound title of Travel in Hope giving the audience an immediate understanding of the overarching theme of the set.  This theme is the Doctor bringing some sort of hope, or causing some sort of hope for the future to come around, something that allows each of the three stories to really hammer home the idea of the hope that the Doctor himself is lacking, and the need for a companion.  This need for a companion was briefly solved in the previous set, Pioneers, but sadly that Doctor/companion relationship was limited to one story.  The continual use of the Ninth Doctor without Rose is becoming a clear issue and that issue is hanging over each episode of Travel in Hope, almost enough that it feels as if writers Lauren Mooney, Stewart Pringle, James Moran, and Robert Valentine are screaming at Big Finish to schedule some dates where Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper can get together and record some stories so these turning wheels don’t just keep turning.  This is the tenth set for the Ninth Doctor Adventures and there are most likely two more where this issue will present itself, both being released in 2024.  The other solution would be to give the Ninth Doctor a second, pre-Rose companion, which may come with its own set of problems, but they would be a different set of problems with a different set of solutions as potentially interesting storytelling avenues to explore a la the forced gap Big Finish made work with the Fifth Doctor and Peri in the early monthly range.full

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Pioneers

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Review by Jacob Licklider

I ask, dear reader, to indulge me a moment before we get into this review proper for just a moment with a few pieces of context for this review.  First and foremost, I am of the firm belief that the first series of Ninth Doctor Adventures should have ended as subtly implied with the Ninth Doctor going into the events of the television story Rose and the beginning of those adventures.  Second, I am also of the belief that the Ninth Doctor especially is a character who works best when there is a companion or companion figure to be attached too.  Finally, the third story of this set deals with the historical establishment of football leagues and I am an American, so take any of my takes on the history of that third episode with the largest pinch of salt you possibly can.  Pioneers opens the third series of Ninth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Productions and marks the first set in this range to not be released on vinyl as well as CD and download.  This marks a very important shift for the style of these three episodes, mainly because they are not bound by the vinyl format of strictly being 45 minutes in total due to technical limitations, so these three episodes are expanded to an hour.  While I personally prefer my Doctor Who stories to be generally longer than that, this jump in runtime really helps this set feel like each episode is expanded just enough to provide greater depth than previous releases had allowed.

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Review: Ninth Doctor Adventures – Shades of Fear

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

It feels like only yesterday when Eccleston joined the team at Big Finish to star in a batch of new adventures, 8 boxsets later and we have reached the end of what we know the company had planned for the Ninth Doctor Adventure range. It’s been a range with some genuinely spectacular stories, reuniting this Doctor with old friends and old enemies in ways that feel new and fresh. There have been some rough patches on the journey to Shades of Fear but with 24 new stories in this series that is only to be expected. This new boxset I think is the most emblematic of the ranges strongest and weakest elements, it has the characteristic inconsistent quality that has been a bit of a blight on the range but the spirit of the era is captured so vividly with the right themes hitting home and the atmosphere fitting really nicely into what RTD helped create back in 2005. Its not the best one we’ve had from the range, but still manages to keep the momentum from previous sets rolling and delivers an all around good experience with Eccleston at the helm.

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Hidden Depths

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

If you were to have come to me at the beginning of 2021 and told me that within the next two years Big Finish Productions would have released not one, but seven total box sets with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, I would never have believed you. Yet here we are, over halfway through the second series of Ninth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Productions and with each passing day I am surprised they keep coming. Hidden Depths is the third set of the second series and like the first two of this series the title is a reference to the major theme of things under the surface both literal and metaphorical that each episode explores in some way. While Back to Earth and Into the Stars were more geographic in their themes, Hidden Depths outside of the first story leans into the lives of their characters which kind of leads to the overarching theme of the set ironically more surface level and not as the previous five sets have felt as sequential adventures under a theme.

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Big Finish announce eight-part multi-Doctor audio drama series celebrating the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who

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Big Finish marks 60 years of Doctor Who with a mammoth eight-part full-cast audio drama series beginning in May 2023.

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Into The Stars

Posted on by indiemacuser

Written by Cavan Gilbey

It’s that time of the year again where Eccleston and Big Finish bring us a fresh batch of adventures with the Ninth Doctor, a fact which still feels miraculous to this day. In previous sets we’ve had the Ninth Doctor face off against familiar foes, namely the Cybermen in a Dalek to Parting of the Ways style of progression, so here we have the Sontarans who feel like a natural fit for this Doctor given his Time War guilt. However where we deviate from those previous sets is in theming; in the first series of four sets in this range we saw thematic boxsets with three stories that represented the primary settings for RTD era narratives. But with series two we get boxsets, that while still thematically linked in their stories, focus on just story setting and explore as many avenues with it as possible. Back To Earth gave us three story set across Earth’s history so to contrast that Into The Stars sends beyond Earth to see life beyond the stars.

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Back To Earth

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Review by Jacob Licklider

Old Friends ended the first series of Ninth Doctor Adventures with a genuinely brilliant series finale that felt like a lead in to Rose, something my review of that set had some pushback since it had already been announced that Series 2 would essentially be continuing where Series 1 left off with the Ninth Doctor still travelling alone. Now Series 1 spent quite a bit of time developing the idea that this was one continuous series, including by designing the covers to mimic the single DVD releases of Series 1 of the show. Series 2 seems to be less a full series with a central character arc for the Ninth Doctor and more of a series of themed box sets with new styles of cover art, this first one being from the wonderful Caroline Tankersley, with the theme of going Back to Earth. It’s three stories set at various points in Earth’s history, mainly in the past ranging from the early 17th century to the early 1990s, with one story having some pieces in the modern day, but not really. All three of the authors here do an excellent job of taking their piece of Earth and doing something interesting with it, overcoming my initial hesitation of going into a set not really following up the character development of the Ninth Doctor within the first few minutes of the first story.

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Old Friends

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

This has been a review that I’ve let percolate in my mind for a few days. The first season of The Ninth Doctor Adventures has come to a close in a perfect parallel to Series 1 and building from genuinely humble beginnings. It is also quite difficult to discuss as it’s serving as a prequel to Series 1, ending with Old Friends implying a lead into Rose. This along with Lost Warriors, and to a lesser extent Respond to All Calls, have been an examination of the Ninth Doctor’s trauma along with other characters he meets on his lonely travels. Old Friends is a contemplative box set with two stories, a single hour long episode and one two episode serial, both parallels to Boom Town and Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways. This has been a long time coming and is honestly an odd box set to review, because it’s a box set that almost blind sided me with what it was doing and how things ended up the way they were. The covers of the sets have been mimicking the four individual releases of Series 1, from blue to red to green to purple for the finale. This ended up being an interesting example of priming listeners for what exactly to expect with these sets.

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