My Time Lord Victorious Order

2020-21 saw the release of Time Lord Victorious, a giant Doctor Who event encompassing audio dramas, novels, toys, comic books, escape rooms, and more. It involves the eighth, ninth, and tenth Doctors in substantial ways, with cameos from other Doctors, as well as stories with no Doctor at all. The BBC released an official "story order," and Blogtor Who did a pretty neat set of interlocking paths, allowing you to see the event from the perspective of Eight, Nine, Ten, the Kotturuh, the Daleks, and Brian the Ood.

Both are pretty complicated, of course, and while the storyline has 25-plus installments, I imagine most people won't be experiencing most of those. I myself limited myself to two things:

• stories featuring the eighth Doctor
• stories released by Big Finish

In practice, this is basically just Big Finish stories, plus the novel All Flesh is Grass. (In the future, I will read the Doctor Who Magazine and Titan Comics contributions to the series, but I will read them in those contexts, not the TLV one.) So what's the best way to experience those particular stories?

First, here's my recommended order:

1. Short Trips: Master Thief / Lesser Evils [narrated Big Finish audio]
   
2. He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not [Eighth Doctor BFA]
3. The Enemy of My Enemy [Eighth Doctor BFA]
4. All Flesh is Grass [BBC Books novel]
5. Mutually Assured Destruction [Eighth Doctor BFA]
6. Genetics of the Daleks [Fourth Doctor BFA]
7. Echoes of Extinction [Tenth/Eighth Doctor BFA]

Here's why:

• The easy thing is #2-5-- that's the order those four stories take place for the eighth Doctor, and each basically follows directly on from the previous one.
• #1, the two Short Trips featuring the Master, both don't have the Doctor in. But they make a good prelude; "Lesser Evils" sets up the Kotturuh, who play a big role in All Flesh is Grass, and if you skipped the other novel (as I did), they don't get much introduction otherwise. ("Master Thief" actually has a small link that means it follows on from The Enemy of My Enemy, so I guess you could listen to it later if you like.
• #6 may feature the fourth Doctor and thus go first on this timeline in a sense, but for the Daleks, its events follow on pretty closely from Mutually Assured Destruction.
• Echoes of Extension has a 30-minute episode each for the eighth Doctor, from before He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not, and tenth, from after All Flesh is Grass. You could split it up, but after listening to it, I felt like they went better together; I also felt that the Ten story was less interesting if heard second, even though it takes place second. There's a good justification, then, in the sense that for Ten, Echoes follows on from All Flesh, and then you loop back around to the beginning for Eight's perspective, knowing that He Kills Me comes next.

Here's my complicated pictorial way of depicting it:

• DOUBLE LINE: my recommended path*
• RED: Doctor's perspective†
• GRAY: Master's perspective
• BLUE: Kotturuh perspective
• YELLOW: Wrax perspective
• GREEN: Daleks' perspective‡
• PURPLE: Oriv perspective
  

* Put this way, you can better see that really, MAD/Genetics and Echoes are two parallel tracks emerging from All Flesh.
† Of course, this is complicated by the fact that All Flesh is experienced by Eight, Nine, and Ten.
‡ The Daleks are travelling with the eighth Doctor from Enemy of My Enemy to MAD, too.

Wow, that was something. Maybe I will come back to this post and make it even more complicated once I have read Defender of the Daleks (the Titan comics TLV tie-in) and Monstrous Beauty (the DWM comics TLV tie-in)!