The Uncollected Internet Doctor Who Short Trips, 2004–21

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about all the short Doctor Who stories with Christmas themes that had never received some kind of hard-copy publication. In the process of researching it, I had to also figure out all the Internet-published short Doctor Who stories that were not Christmas-themed. Just as I read all the Christmas-themed ones as a sort of "book" in 2022, for Christmas 2025, I read all the other ones. Once again, here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (Note there were a bunch of short stories published on the official site during lockdown in 2020, but those were all subsequently collected.)

Adventure Calendar

As covered in my previous post, the official Doctor Who web site used to run an annual "adventure calendar" that often included short stories. Some were Christmas-themed, but some were not. Here are the ones that were not:

• "Number 1, Gallows Gate Road" by Rupert Laight (4 & 11 Dec. 2008). The tenth Doctor lands at a boarding house in 1940 where everyone—including himself—is curiously lacking in ambition. Published in two parts, I found the first pretty strong and atmospheric. Like a lot of Doctor Who stories, the second part, where you have to give explanations and solutions, is less engaging, but still I enjoyed it.
• "Houdini and the Space Cuckoos" Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four by Joseph Lidster (15-16, 19, & 25 Dec. 2012). In this story, the eleventh Doctor must team up with Harry Houdini to stop some aliens. I usually get on with Joseph Lidster's work very well, but this is more action-focused and less character-focused than plays to his strengths, I think. I did think he did a good job of capturing the voice of the eleventh Doctor.
• "Doctor Who and the Horror of Coal Hill" by Gavin Collinson (21 Dec. 2017). This is a bit longer than some of the other ones, and I found it surprisingly engaging. The main story is about the first Doctor visiting Coal Hill School during the time Susan is a student there, and helping a teacher fight off an alien menace; the story periodically jumps ahead and shows later Doctors coming back to the school later on to remember the events of the story. It's a neat story that parallels the Doctor's status as an outside with the perils of immigration. I thought Collinson's Christmas stories were a bit slight, but this one is strong.

Other Stories from the Official Site

• "The Feast of the Stone" by Cavan Scott & Mark Wright (3 Apr. 2004). This is the only story in this post to predate the 2005 revival, back when the official Doctor Who site was a subsection of "BBC Cult." (It is amazing to me that twenty years on, it's still there, though!) This is the only other story to ever feature the Doctor and his companions from the webcast Scream of the Shalka; it was part of a BBC Cult vampire-themed initiative. It's decent enough, but I very much enjoyed the glimpses of this unique Doctor with his unique companions, particularly the robotic shell of the Master. Scott & Wright to a good job capturing the voices of both Richard E. Grant's Doctor and Derek Jacobi's pseudo-Master.
• "'42' Prologue" by Joseph Lidster (12 May 2007). You may remember the 2007 episode "42," about the tenth Doctor and Martha, told in real time aboard a dying spaceship. This story chronicles the four minutes before they showed up, from the perspective of one of the characters on the ship. It doesn't particularly work on its own (it would be interesting to read it and then immediately start the episode, I think), but it's Joseph Lidster, so it has a strong sense of voice and character.
• "The Lonely Computer" by Rupert Laight (24 May 2008). The David Tennant years were really the peak of content on the official site; this story is based on a passing reference to the Doctor having met a lonely computer in Belgium in "The Unicorn and the Wasp." It's a little underdeveloped but Laight does well by both the tenth Doctor and Donna.
• "Blue Moon" by Oli Smith (July 2009). For the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo missions, the BBC site released this story about the Doctor discovering secret alien intervention in the moon landing—a premise the show would use itself just a couple years later. I thought this one was just okay, not much to say about it.
• "The War of Art" by Paul Cornell (Aug. 2010). I forget what the occasion for this one was, but I feel like it did have one, like it was a tie-in to a game or something. Paul Cornell is one of my favorite writers (not just Doctor Who writers, but writers full top) and he can do good, beautiful character work—but as this story shows, he can also be quite funny. Aliens invade a futuristic gallery, and Cornell uses this as the opportunity for a number of art jokes; I laughed out loud repeatedly.
• "The Night after Hallowe'en" by Mark B. Oliver (29 Oct.–5 Nov. 2010). This is the first of several stories by Mark B. Oliver about a family of kids the eleventh Doctor keeps meeting; they also appeared in a couple Christmas stories. I find the kids pretty generic, as is the plot here. I don't feel like they warranted repeat appearances.
• "What the TARDIS Thought of 'Time Lord Victorious'" by James Goss (15 Nov. 2020). This is one of two online prose tie-ins to the "Time Lord Victorious" event; it is told from the perspective of the TARDIS, picking up from the end of "The Waters of Mars," establishing how the tenth Doctor gets from there to the events of the crossover. It's fine. Goss always writes with a strong sense of voice, but the basic premise of the crossover was a bit silly.

Stories from Other Sources

• "My Dad, The Doctor" by Jamie Mathieson (First News, 29 Oct. 2015). Mathieson, writer of several Peter Capaldi tv stories, writes this prose story about him, one where the Doctor uses his sonic sunglasses to take over the mind of a kid's dad in the middle of a crisis. Well written but I found the final twist didn't make a ton of sense. It was written for a kids newspaper, but Mathieson republished it on his own blog.
• "The Dawn of the Kotturuh" by James Goss (official newsletter, 25 Sept. 2020). This is another tie-in to Time Lord Victorious, one explaining how the alien Kotturuh brought death to the universe during the Dark Times. It was originally published in the official Doctor Who e-mail newsletter. Frankly, even by the standards of Doctor Who, I don't think the idea of a universe with living things without death makes any sense, and this story didn't make it work any better.
• "The Voice of Many Angels" by Gavin Collinson (Maze Theory’s Into the Unknown web site, 18 Mar. 2021). My understanding is that the videogame Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins had a tie-in website called Into the Unknown, purporting to be a conspiracy theorist blog focused on the Weeping Angels. This was the final post on the site, a short story from the perspective of the guy who ran the site. The site and the story are gone now, but author Gavin Collinson was kind enough to share a copy of it with me via e-mail. I really enjoyed it; creepy and suggestive, and it expanded on Weeping Angels lore in interesting ways that I liked. Amazing to think there are new angles on them, but I loved the idea of a support group!

Since the time span covered in this post, there have been a least a couple more, tie-ins to another crossover event ("Doom's Day") but I haven't read those yet. These thirteen stories run over 250 pages if formatted like an official BBC Books anthology, so it makes for a nice set of readings. I wonder if any official publisher will ever be motivated to collect any of this work?

Bernice Summerfield: In Time edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Bernice Summerfield: In Time
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

In Time was the last Bernice Summerfield book published by Big Finish in hard copy: evidently sales had diminished too much after this point to justify keeping the range going. By the time I went to buy my copy, you couldn't get one in hard copy even if you wanted to! There is not a hard copy to be had even on the secondary market, it was so rare. I had to settle for buying an ebook version, but I am keeping an eye out for a hardcover to complete my Benny books collection.

Published: 2018
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

The book was published in 2018, for Benny's twentieth anniversary at Big Finish, and it celebrates the complete run of the character, with stories set across the span of her life, from her young days at Space Academy to her time in the "Unbound Universe," and possibly even beyond that.

As a longtime fan of the character, I definitely appreciate the excuse for some nostalgia. Along those lines, my favorite story was certainly Simon Guerrier's "Benny and the Grieving Man," set during my favorite "era" of Benny, when she's based at the Braxiatel Collection, and indeed, set during one of my favorite Benny books, A Life Worth Living. The story is a human one, about Benny trying to help a man whose daughter died on the Collection... but is he all he seems? Like some of the best Benny stories, it engages in what it's like to live in a place that has undergone great tragedy and deal with the consequences, with the weight of histories, both public and personal.

Some of the stories are explicitly about Benny's history, instead of just set during it; this is particularly true of the two set in the Unbound Universe, traveling with David Warner's alternative Doctor (though of course he can't actually appear in this not-BBC-licensed anthology). "Legacy Presence" by Victoria CW Simpson has Benny meeting the ghost of someone from her time at Space Academy—in a universe where that person can't possibly have existed—and "The Death of Hope" by James Goss has Benny and the Mother Superior from the Unbound audios trying to see if there's any possibility of hope in a doomed universe. The former is so-so, much like the stories collected in True Stories (it could almost be a cut story from that book), but the latter is a strong piece of character writing, which gives us both nostalgia and its dangers.

Three stories I wanted to like more, but were just okay. Mark Clapham's "The Seventh Fanfic" (set during the Dellah years, shortly before Beige Planet Mars) has some neat ideas, but Benny feels mostly like an observer to them. I wish there'd been more recurring characters and such from the era; c'mon, where's Emile and Tameka? "The Bunny's Curse" by Doris V Sutherland (set during the Space Academy years) seems to give us the beginning of Benny's interest in archaeology, but that moment could have clicked more. "Old Ruins" by Peter Anghelides gives us an older Benny... but it's a dull story that goes on too long to too little effect, alas.

Two more were not very good at all. "Wurm Noir" by Antonio Rastelli fails to make much of anything interesting of Benny's time on Legion... but that's fair, neither could the writers of that actual era. Worst of all is Dave Stone's "Oh No, Not Again," which like much of his work (though not all!), is an unfunny joke stretched out far too much.

On the whole, it's not terrible, but it is one of the weaker Benny anthologies from Big Finish. This will remind you why you love the character (if like me, you do), but it won't make you love her. I'd have liked to have seen more stories like "The Grieving Man" and "The Death of Hope" that worked with the themes that really make Benny work, instead of adventures that just happen to be set during her past.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: none!

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Since August 2015, I've been working my way through a collection of Virgin New Adventures, BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, and various adjacent books, mostly featuring Bernice Summerfield. That began with Bernice Summerfield: Genius Loci, and eight years and twenty-seven books later, it has finally come to an end! It's been an interesting journey through some excellent (and some non-so-excellent) books. I've loved getting a better understanding of the VNAs, and getting to see more of my favorite Doctor in action in prose.

I had thought that I would circle back around and plug in some more VNAs and EDAs that interest me, but I decided that instead of buying more Doctor Who books I should focus on reading ones I already own, so—for a while at least—I'm going to start working my way through them in purchase order. First up will be Short Trips: Dalek Empire, which I got way back in July 2008!

Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: Defender of the Daleks by Jody Houser, Roberta Ingranata, et al.

 Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: Defender of the Daleks

Collection published: 2020
Contents published: 2020
Read: February 2022

Story: James Goss

Writer: Jody Houser

Artist: Roberta Ingranata

Colorist: Erica Eren Angiolini

Flatters: Sari Chankhamma, Sabrina Del Gross

Letterer: Richard Starkings

Last year, I worked through all of Big Finish's Time Lord Victorious contributions, along with one novel; with this, I add one more piece to the puzzle, though I am coming to it as a Titan Doctor Who story, not a Time Lord Victorious one. This supposedly picks up from the end of the tenth/thirteenth Doctor story Alternating Current, the recap here telling us that at the end of that story, the tenth Doctor was sucked into a time vortex... only in Alternating Current no such thing actually happened. Oops! There's also a small thirteenth Doctor appearance here that takes place between pages of Alternating Current.

The stories of TLV are sometimes pretty loosely linked; while for the tenth Doctor this takes place some time prior to his TLV appearances and isn't really connected to them, it's a stronger connection for the Daleks. For them, this directly leads into the Big Finish audio drama The Enemy of My Enemy.

What actually happens is, as is so often true of Houser/Ingranata Who comics, not very much. The tenth Doctor is asked for help by the Daleks; he seems to be in a timeline where the Time War never happened. He helps them defeat a pretty bland threat from the "Dark Times." There's some okay back-and-forth between the Doctor and the Dalek Prime Strategist of the Dalek Time Squad (not to be confused with Big Finish's Dalek Time Strategist!), but this is two double-sized issues (clearly, though, originally scripted as four regular-sized one) where it just doesn't feel like that much actually happens. The elements of the story are good, but there was a more interesting tale to be told about the tenth Doctor having to help the species he thought had destroyed his people, and who (he thought) he had destroyed himself! Not as bad as Alternating Current, I guess, but not really up to much.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: Missy: The Master Plan

Audio Catchup: Three First Doctor Stories featuring William Russell

What if William Russell read every Big Finish story, whether he was in it or not? The world would be a better place, that's what.  Recently I listened to:

• Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles #7.01: The Time Museum by James Goss
• Doctor Who: The Lost Stories #3.7: The Masters of Luxor by Anthony Coburn (adapted by Nigel Robinson)

Though both are good looks back at the earliest Doctor Who on the eve of its 50th anniversary, The Masters of Luxor is great a perfect recreation of the 1963/64 era, yet something new and different... which is quite an accomplishment for a story from that time! On the other hand, The Time Museum manages to present an oft-referenced onscreen moment in an entirely new and interesting light, which I was not expecting.