When Big Finish's license to produce prose Short Trips anthologies ended, they did a big sale to get rid of their remaining stock before they would be unable to sell it. I snapped up the ones that sounded interesting to me but had never gotten around to; over fifteen years later, I've finally read the last of that lot.
I went into How the Doctor Changed My Life feeling a bit nervous; over the past couple years, I've read three Short Trips anthologies and, to be honest, found my enjoyment of each fairly limited. On top of that, I knew the book was the result of a fan writing contest; Big Finish had originally reserved one spot in Short Trips: Defining Patterns for a previously unpublished writer, but had gotten so many good entries that they'd published twenty-five runners-up in their own volume. But if the three volumes of Short Trips by professional writers I'd read had been mediocre, what did I have to anticipate from a volume by people who'd never been professionally published?
Well, to my delight, the book not only defied my low expectations, but it turned out to be one of the very best Short Trips volumes I can remember reading. Surely it at least partially benefits from the fact there are so many stories here: with twenty-five stories in 184 pages, that means they average six-to-seven pages in length. So the good ones are punchy, and the bad ones are mercifully short! (Not that, however, there were honestly very many bad ones.) Additionally, the book very much benefits from the theme, which you can see right in the title: the stories had to be about the Doctor changing someone's life. This encourages perspectives from characters who are not the Doctor and his companions, and telling stories about key significant moments in those characters' lives, which plays to the strengths of the medium of the short story—no one here makes the mistake a lot of first-time Doctor Who short story writers do, and tries to cram a four-part 1970s-style serial into 6½ pages.
Doctor Who: Short Trips #26: How The Doctor Changed My Life |
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Published: 2008 Acquired: May 2009 Read: October 2025 |
I enjoyed a lot of these, as I said, so here I'll just try to gloss some of the ones I particularly liked and why.
Many of the stories focus on ordinary people who encounter the Doctor and find some kind of courage within in themselves, a trope that I think probably owes something to the original Russell T Davies television era (which this book came out during), but is here imported back into "classic" Doctor Who (at the time this was published, Big Finish's license only went up to the 1996 tv movie). It's a trope that works well, especially when it leans into one of my favorite things about the Doctor Who format, the juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane. Ones along these lines I particularly liked included "Change Management" by Simon Moore:
Fair enough, it would be bad for the economy if the Flux Beast was allowed to devour the tourist worlds, but there must be a better way of containing the Beast than trapping it in space and feeding it lots of poor people. Pip had been going to complain, but when the guy sitting next to him got vaporised while raising similar concerns, he decided to keep his head down. He would definitely do something about it if he ever got into management.
Along these lines, I also really liked "The Shopping Trolleys of Doom" by Caleb Woodbridge, where the Doctor intervenes when shopping carts begin attacking people; "The Man on the Phone" by Mark Smith, told from the perspective of someone working in a call center selling mediocre kitchens who accidentally dials the TARDIS; and "£436" by Nick May, about a cab driver who drives the Doctor and Peri around as they fight off an alien invasion.
(In one story, this even kind of happens without the Doctor turning up; in John Callaghan's "The Andrew Invasion," a guy named Andrew gets mistaken for the Doctor, and hilarity ensues. I think John Dorney's The Diary of River Song story "My Dinner with Andrew," about a guy who looks exactly like the fifth Doctor and is played by Peter Davison, is a stealth sequel to this story, but maybe I am crazy because no one else seems to have noticed this if so.)
Even though this is probably the book's most common approach, other stories go in different directions. I liked "Second Chances" by Bernard O'Toole a lot, which follows a maniacal mad scientist after he is defeated by the Doctor and Charley. How does an adult man move back in with his parents and rebuild his life after all his dreams of conquest have been crushed? Or there's Michael Montoure's "Relativity," where a kid loses his twin brother in a weird time accident thanks to the Doctor and Ace, but eventually has an even weirder chance to get him back. I also liked Violet Addison's "Those Left Behind," about one of Susan's classmates at Coal Hill School meeting the fourth Doctor. (One oddity of the book, if I'm not mistaken, is that among its twenty-five stories, it has one from every "classic" Doctor... except the first!) There's also "Evitability" by Andrew K Purvis, where the Doctor finds someone who's going to do a terrible thing as an adult and shows them the future as a child to help put them on a better path. Michael Rees's "Swamp of Horrors (1957) – Viewing Notes" is inventively told in the form of a blog post about a B-horror movie that costars the Doctor and Mel!
One of my very favorites was "The Monster in the Wardrobe" by James C McFetridge, about a man who dies every day defending his daughter from a monster in the wardrobe, but always comes back to life the next, when he always has a new job that he's not very good at but enjoys a lot, like ice cream taster or bikini inspector.
It feels a bit churlish to complain about ones you don't like, especially when they come from first-time writers, but I did find a few unsatisfying and/or undercooked: "Curiosity" by Mike Amberry and "The Last Thing You'll Ever See" by Richard Goff among them. The only outright bad one, though, was "Time Shear" by Steven Alexander, where two alien kids see their mother brutally gunned down in front of them, and the story and the character just shrug this off as a minor inconvenience in its rush to get to a happy ending.
If there's an overall fault to the volume, it's that, despite what Paul Cornell hopes for in his foreword, few of these writers ever went on to make many more contributions to Doctor Who; there were just two Short Trips volumes after this, and some contributed to one of those, and some others I think wrote for the Bernice Summerfield anthologies. Other than that, though, the only writer to go onto publishing more Doctor Who stories is LM Myles, who here writes the story "Child's Play," and has since written a number of Big Finish audio dramas. But that's not a slight on this book, it's a slight on the stale community of Doctor Who tie-in writers, whose bright young things of the 1990s and early 2000s have never moved on thirty years later.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Prisoner of the Daleks
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