Yeah, those two really were a perfect fit.
Spoilers Russell T. Davies' Second Turn as Doctor Who Showrunner
Alphas. Decent show, but tonally it did not fit with the other two at all. Fortunately that crossover was very minor and easy to ignore.
It had the guy from Sneakers as the lead. I don't remember it being all that good.
We did see SciFi go darker post BSG. We got Stargate Universe, which doesn't fit the tone of the other two series at all.
Something I saw on Twitter yesterday:
A quick thought on this fan's idea.
The second Wilderness Era will be nothing like the first. Yes, the Fugitive Doctor as "the face of the franchise" is a cool concept. I'd like that myself. But Big Finish, which is where the bulk of the tie-in activity is now, is diffuse in focus and doesn't have a "face," and novels and comics are niche and irregular. The media tie-in landscape, as relates to Doctor Who, is in a very different place than it was thirty-five years ago.
A quick thought on this fan's idea.
The second Wilderness Era will be nothing like the first. Yes, the Fugitive Doctor as "the face of the franchise" is a cool concept. I'd like that myself. But Big Finish, which is where the bulk of the tie-in activity is now, is diffuse in focus and doesn't have a "face," and novels and comics are niche and irregular. The media tie-in landscape, as relates to Doctor Who, is in a very different place than it was thirty-five years ago.
Well, also, Big Finish did get to work with the man who was the incumbent Doctor on live-action TV, so it was technically the place where new Doctor Who other than TV was more legitimate than others.
I know this is technically a Davies thread but, l...
Nah.
Virgin NAs had all the writers, and Sylv wrote an i to for Genysys if I recall. Platt, Cartmel, Aaronovitch all wrote an NA within the first 18 months at least of the range.
But also : Terrance Dicks.
Big Finish started out by filing the serial numbers off existing Who stuff, until it got the license, and once Gary Russell got his feet under the table it went off on its own continuity. Which I don’t like tbh.
Yeah, that was a weird one, it just didn't really fit at all.
Luckily they went back to lighter more fun stuff with shows like Wynona Earp and Vagrant Queen. It's been a while, but I think Dark Matter and The Killjoys tended to lean a little more in that direction than the BSG style.
That's kind of true of media tie-ins in general now, at least as far as novels go. Starting off with Doctor Who, when their novels were at their peak output during the period of the PDAs and EDAs, I believe they alternate between each line on a monthly basis, IE, PDA one month, EDA the next, then another PDA the month after that and so on in that order. Even ignoring the fact Doctor Who hasn't been able to maintain any kind of regular novel release schedule since RTD's first term ended, even if we were to begin to see some sort of new novel line to fill in now that DW doesn't have a presence on television, we certainly wouldn't be getting that kind of annual output. At most, we'd likely get a total of four novels per year, and we'd probably be lucky to get that. After all, Star Trek only does two or three novel a year now while Star Wars does three to four, and these are properties that during the 90s and 2000s dominated the sci-fi tie-in novel business.
The NSAs established under RTD continued for a bit under Moffat, though in a slightly larger format. Then they started doing special novels, the NSAs would return sporadically, and it all kinda went kaput. I've heard reasons why the BBC Books line broke down under Moffat from people who were there, from Moffat himself to poor sales, and I have reasons to believe all of the reasons.
An author acquaintance of mine turned down doing a Torchwood novel as the pay was too low basically.
So I guess the Labour of love element was a greater contributor to them happening than people thought.
There are Capaldi era original fiction, but then there was more of a push to a junior market and then Timelord Victorious happened. The NSAs had already shed some of the die hard EDA audience, and with Who on TV the books were no longer the main game.
(Which they really were over Big Finish, because Big Finish was expensive in comparison and much harder to come by in the wild)
Seeing Karen Gillan and Tony Curran hanging out at two World Cup matches almost makes me entertain the fan theory that Vincent van Gogh is River Song's real father. 
It didn't totally break down, the most recent novel, The Moon Cruise with The 15th Doctor and Belinda came out in November, and
The problem with the Gatwa era NSAs is they're so damned expensive. $30.00 Canadian dollars for a mini-hardcover of 240 pages? Yes, I know, prices of everything in general are getting outrageous, but that really seems ridiculous. even taking modern day inflation into account.
This is why I get most of my books from the library. Unfortunately, they don't have many Doctor Who novels.
The end of the Mass Market Paperback is tragedy, but the more I think about it, the more I think it might be related to the decline of reading for pleasure and the awful literacy rate. It's becoming the haves that can read and the have-nots that can't.
C$20 for a thin mass market-sized neo Target paperback isn't great either.
Kindle exists.
And is really cheaper than reading paperbacks. Sort of.
I mean, I used to get used books for tuppence at the library (about half a dozen Who hardcover targets that way, and my copy of five doctors is ex library) or at the church fete or jumble sale they were a bit more.
These days it’s kindle sales, and things like kindle unlimited for many people.
The *only* real barrier to reading is cultural.
And is really cheaper than reading paperbacks. Sort of.
I mean, I used to get used books for tuppence at the library (about half a dozen Who hardcover targets that way, and my copy of five doctors is ex library) or at the church fete or jumble sale they were a bit more.
These days it’s kindle sales, and things like kindle unlimited for many people.
The *only* real barrier to reading is cultural.
Not really, at least not in North America. Indeed, the fact the prices are so similar has been a factor in why books are the one market where physical media still rivals or even surpasses digital media in sales.
For a new book at full price, thats true across the world tbh.
But where it excels is accessibility, children’s reading, and the never ending sales.
Which basically brings charity shop, church fete, ex library pricing to everyone.
Through in something like Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited, and the regular discounts on hardware and theres almost no excuse to *not* be reading *something.
Amazons self publishing model (and to a lesse extent Apples, and the sundry smaller groups) has also given more people access to getting their work out there. I hate seeing the word democratisation, but it might actually apply here.
Physical media in books still does well because you can’t wrap a code at Christmas, and because various trends have helped support it as ‘lifestyle’. They also become something akin to a ‘collectors edition’ to content first experienced as ebooks.
I love a physical book, though I have quite a few and only so much space.
But as a barrier to reading?
Price is not the barrier anymore, and arguably hasn’t been for a very very long time indeed.
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