Overall I'd say the First Doctor Early Adventures are better than the Second Doctor ones. Though the Second Doctor stories do at least have Elliot Chapman as Ben, by far the best of the recasts. I would say The Wreck Of The World is the best of the Second Doctor though The Yes Men and The Night Witches are pretty good as well. I'm not as fond of The Black Hole as other people are and sadly Debbie Watling's voice is by far the least like her younger self's. The best of the rest of the first Doctor stories are The Ravelli Conspiracy, The Dalek Occupation Of Winter, The Sontarans and An Ideal World (though I'm not fond of the ending). And across both Doctor's, Daughter Of The Gods is excellent.
The last Big Finish that I listened to was "Free Speech," yesterday. It was also my first Big Finish! So, I was hoping that Big Finish stuff was more like radio plays than narrated audiobooks. For some reason I also assumed that the back catalog would be a lot bigger. Haven't they been doing it for decades? Also, if I do manage to figure out which ones are the radio plays, where should I start?
They usually are, at least the main range, "Adventures" lines, and the like. I think it's mainly the Companion Chronicles and Short Trips that are narrated.
Big Finish's main output is the monthly range, that's where they got their "regular" plays featuring Doctors Five to Seven (and early on Eight). You can just listen to it in order, and the first fifty are on Spotify for free, but if you are interested in a specific Doctor or character pairing you can also go for that. I particularly enjoyed the Sixth Doctor/Evelyn audios, and I've seen a lot of people say they prefer these audios over most of Six's TV stuff. The ones free on Spotify are: The Marian Conspiracy The Spectre of Lanyon Moor The Apocalypse Element Bloodtide Project: Twilight The Sandman Jubilee (The series one episode "Dalek" was based on this play) Doctor Who and the Pirates (contains an experimental musical part, where the Doctor sings a variation of "Very Model of a Modern Major General". Even if you don't want to listen to any of these, do yourself the favor and listen to that on YouTube!) Project: Lazarus Then there's also the Eighth Doctor/Charley stuff, which is significant for being the first time since the Doctor Who movie that McGann played the Eighth Doctor. The ones within the first fifty are: Storm Warning Sword of Orion The Stones of Venice Minuet in Hell Invaders from Mars The Chimes of Midnight Seasons of Fear Embrace the Darkness The Time of the Daleks Neverland Living Legend Zagreus Spare Parts, which I haven't actually listened to yet, is basically Genesis of the Cybermen and supposedly very good. (And also on Spotify!) If you like stories about political intrigue I can recommend the Gallifrey series (or at least the first three series). It's about the reign of Romana II and I think it does a great job at showing the governmental inner workings and backstabbery of Gallifrey. For new series stuff, I've listened to the first Missy box-set, which I loved, but I think that's mostly because Michelle Gomez does such a fantastic job as Missy, so if you don't like the character, this probably won't be interesting. The Classic Doctors, New Monsters series should also be interesting if you're more familiar with the new series, and it gives you a look at the four Doctors Big Finish has done the most with. And none of these are narrated!
If you are in the US and your library is part of it, they also have quite a few Big Finish audios on Hoopla.
It's a new month, so I have a fresh set of Hoopla borrowings available, and I used 80% of them to borrow the first two seasons of The [New] Eighth Doctor Adventures. (I should've used the one I had left over from December to get the first one -- then I'd have 5 left for the month instead of 4.) I see they're a different format now, single 50-minute episodes, to emulate the new series. Blood of the Daleks was okay. I liked Part 2 better than Part 1 -- the idea of a human scientist recapitulating Davros's creation and the Doctor trying to talk them out of it, and the inevitability of the "pure" Daleks wanting to destroy the "impure" offshoot, was pretty effective. And Hayley Atwell was pretty good, though I didn't realize it was her until halfway through. (I like it that they finally have narrated credits. Is that just because this one was on radio, or will the rest have them as well?) But I'm not sold on Lucie Miller or her relationship with the Doctor yet. I guess it recapitulates the very beginning of the series, with Ian and Barbara initially having an adversarial relationship with the Doctor, but that was balanced out by their closer bond with Susan and with each other, and by Susan's warmth toward her grandfather. This is just two people bickering and not wanting to be stuck together, and that's not as appealing. I imagine the relationship will grow over time, but so far I'm not enjoying it or her. And I'm not sure I buy the conceit that the Time Lords would send someone to the Doctor for "witness protection" -- it seems rather convoluted. And as this story showed, it's kind of a bad idea to "protect" someone by pairing them off with the guy who's constantly stumbling into mortal peril every week.
The 8th Doctor stories get better. I think the 50 minute length was due to them being broadcast on Radio 4 as well. It was a big deal back then.
The format of the Eighth Doctor Adventures was about moving toward the style of the new series, not anything to do with their being broadcast on Radio 7. Radio 7 had previously aired Eighth Doctor main range stories in the 4x25 format without any issue. I found the first Lucie Miller series to be competent but largely dull. Big Finish writers have consistently struggled to do interesting Doctor Who stories in single-disc format; they’re too accustomed to the more, an, deliberate rhythms of the classic series style.
You might be right overall, but I still consider Wrath of the Iceni to be possibly the finest Doctor Who audio story I've heard, and I'm not sure it would've worked better if it were longer. Every rule has its exceptions.
Well, I don’t disagree with that; I said consistently struggled rather than invariably struggled, after all. There’s also an element of the learning curve, of course. The post-Lucie Eighth Doctor audios are also built around 50-minute episodes, and they’re stronger on average than the first Lucie series.
Well, the most entertaining thing about Horror of Glam Rock is its title. Indeed, the whole story seems to be a prolonged exercise in trying to justify the title pun, like a backward feghoot -- "Let's see, it needs to be about the glam rock era, but it has to be a claustrophobic base-under-siege story with a few people trapped in an isolated place and getting killed off by monsters." So we get an odd, inconsequential bit of fluff that doesn't really engage with the glam rock era so much as hovering around its periphery (not that I know or care enough about that subgenre to be all that disappointed). At least it had Bernard Cribbins, which counts for something. It's also weird in that it's only Lucie's second story but it treats her as if she's spent more than one adventure with the Doctor, enough to comment on how constantly danger finds him, and for them to have grown closer in a way that would carry more weight if we'd seen it earned. It's like there's a missing story or two in between. Also, is every story going to end with that person who's hunting for Lucie showing up at the end after she and the Doctor have already left? That's really hard to justify in a time travel series. Wouldn't she be just as likely to show up early as late?
As I said, they already seem to be warming to each other in Glam Rock, without any explanation (except for the implication of other unseen adventures in between).
They do that all the time at Big Finish. It allows them to add more adventures down the line. They recently just did so in that line
I can see that being worth doing later on in the season, but it seems like a bad idea to leave gaps right at the beginning, when the relationship is still just starting to form. There are places in an arc where gaps make sense and places where they don't, and this is the latter. If they ended the first story with the Doctor and companion still clashing and not wanting to be together, then we need to see how they grow to the point of saying "I'm glad I met you" and wanting to be together. Jumping right to that without earning it is just bad storytelling.