Eighth Doctor Adventures

Review by Jacob Licklider

Connections is the final classic Doctor Who release this year, bringing the Eighth Doctor’s many box sets of the year to a close with three one hour stories and interestingly a focus on companion Helen Sinclair after the ending of Stranded 4 heavily implied her exit (as well as establishing the exit of Liv Chenka). Despite having a cover that connects directly to What Lies Inside?, Connections is a set that doesn’t actually connect in terms of developing a story arc for the Eighth Doctor, continuing the move away from multi-box set story arcs specifically for this Doctor as well as diminishing them in terms of Big Finish’s story arcs output. This does not mean that there isn’t a focus, like What Lies Inside? there is a general overarching theme to each of the episodes, but not as explicit as other sets. The three episodes all have a fairly tight focus on exploring the characters in various ways but each straddles very different tones from a farcical heist, to romantic drama, ending with an intense piece of character drama that manages to take a place amongst the best of Big Finish’s audio output, not just of 2022, but of all time.

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Review by Jacob Licklider

So what happens when your production company switches to a box set structure but doesn’t necessarily have themes for every set? Well that has been something that the past ten months of Big Finish Productions’ output has been, switching away from numbering their sets as to not overboard potential new listeners with so much content they would have to catch up on. It is with this in mind that the Eighth Doctor Adventures range was changed from the four box set arc model to integrate it with the other releases which had some interesting side effects. This meant that this year Big Finish have scheduled four sets featuring the Eighth Doctor, the conclusion to Stranded, the two now standard 3-disc Eighth Doctor Adventures, and a special fourth set featuring Charley Pollard. The two standard sets were scheduled for the last two months of the year, most likely to have a gap for actual production of the sets, the first being What Lies Inside? released this month while the second, Connections, is out in December. What’s especially intriguing is that while there isn’t any sort of story arc, Rafe Wallbank crafted connected covers almost reminiscent of the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels covers (Interference in particular comes to mind). What Lies Inside? is the first set that falls into the category of 2022 sets where each of the stories has been completely standalone, following Silver and Ice and The Outlaws, and like those sets the structure is a two hour adventure and a one hour adventure, though here each episode is an hour long.