Big Finish started producing Doctor Who audio dramas in 1999. That was twenty-seven years ago—meaning BF have now been producing Doctor Who content longer than the original television programme actually ran! (I got into it in 2001 myself, so twenty-five years ago... which seems quite bizarre. Twenty-five years prior to that would have been 1976, when Tom Baker and Lis Sladen were in full throttle, and that material felt quite old-fashioned to me at the time. Now you're telling me Storm Warning is as old to me now as The Masque of Mandragora was to me then!?)
Josiah W. Dogbolter
Big Finish has been running long enough that there can be some very long intervals between appearances by Big Finish characters. My attention was first drawn to this when Toby Longworth appeared in Oct. 2018's The Quantum Possibility Engine as crimelord Josiah W. Dogbolter: he had previously appeared as the character in Nov. 2002's The Maltese Penguin, meaning he had a gap of almost sixteen years between his two appearances as the character. That's a long time... especially when you keep in mind that Maltese Penguin was probably a one-day job! So you perform a character for a single day, and almost six thousand days later, you are asked to come back!
A poster on the Doctor Who BBS GallifreyBase drew my attention back to these kind of intervals when they pointed out Samuel West last appeared as Morbius in Aug. 2008's The Vengeance of Morbius, and then finally reprised the character in Apr. 2024's Dark Gallifrey: Morbius, Part One. That's fifteen years and eight months. So not quite as long as the gap between Longworth's appearances as Dogbolter, but pretty close. So with the help of the fine folks of GallifreyBase, I set out to calculate the longest gaps between Big Finish appearances for Doctor Who characters.
It had to be the same actor playing the same character. Additionally, I was only interested in Big Finish appearances; there's probably a whole different post to be made about classic series actors making returns as their characters for Big Finish. (For example, Ralph Watson last appeared on tv as Captain Knight in Mar. 1968's The Web of Fear, a role he would not reprise until Aug. 2019's The Diary of River Song: The Web of Time, a gap of over fifty years!)
Deeva Jansen
Here's what I believe to be the top fifteen contenders:
1. Michelle Livingstone as Deeva Jansen: 20 yrs., 11 mos. from Sword of Orion (Feb. 2001) to The Further Adventuress (Jan. 2022)
2. Nicholas Briggs as the Temperon: 20 yrs., 0 mos. from The Sirens of Time (July 1999) to The Legacy of Time (July 2019)
3= Toby Longworth as Josiah W. Dogbolter: 16 yrs., 3 mos. from The Maltese Penguin (July 2002) to The Quantum Possibility Engine (Oct. 2018)
3= Conrad Westmaas as C’rizz: 16 yrs., 3 mos. from Absolution (Oct. 2007) to The Battle of Giant’s Causeway (Jan. 2024)
5. Samuel West as Morbius: 15 yrs., 8 mos. from Vengeance of Morbius (Aug. 2008) to Dark Gallifrey: Morbius, Part One (Apr. 2024)
6. Sam Kisgart as the Unbound Master: 13 yrs., 2 mos. from Sympathy for the Devil (June 2003) to The Unbound Universe (Aug. 2016)
7. Sonny McGann as Alex Campbell: 11 yrs., 10 mos. from To the Death (Mar. 2011) to Cass (Jan. 2023)
8. Maggie O’Neill as Lysandra Aristedes: 11 yrs., 3 mos. from Gods and Monsters (Sept. 2012) to The Last Day, Part One (Dec. 2023)
9. Angela Bruce as Brigadier Winifred Bambera: 10 yrs., 9 mos. from Animal (June 2011) to Agents of the Vulpreen (Mar. 2022)
10. Siobhán Redmond as the Rani: 10 yrs., 7 mos. from Planet of the Rani (Oct. 2015) to Fear of the Light (May 2026)
11. Michael Jayston as the Valeyard: 10 yrs., 4 mos. from He Jests at Scars… (Aug. 2003) to Trial of the Valeyard (Dec. 2013)
12. Amy Pemberton as Sally Morgan: 9 yrs., 3 mos. from Signs and Wonders (Sept. 2014) to The Last Day, Part One (Dec. 2023)
13. Charlie Hayes as Death: 9 yrs., 0 mos. from Master (Oct. 2003) to Love and War (Oct. 2012)
14. Geoffrey Beevers as the Master: 8 yrs., 7 mos. from Master (Oct. 2003) to Trail of the White Worm (May 2012)
15. Anna Hope as DI Patricia Menzies: 8 yrs., 6 mos. from The Crimes of Thomas Brewster (Jan. 2011) to The Legacy of Time (July 2019)
Michelle Livingstone as Deeva is the most impressive in more ways than one. Many of these actors continued to appear at Big Finish, just in different roles—while Nick Briggs went twenty years between his two appearances as the Temperon, he's probably never even gone a single month without appearing in a Big Finish audio! But Livingstone made zero appearances for Big Finish in any capacity between Sword of Orion and Heart of Orion. Did she even remember she had done two days recording for Big Finish over two decades prior?
What's craziest to me is that we've entered a time when people can be nostalgic for C'rizz. I'm nostalgic for C'rizz!
Will Deeva be dethroned? Maybe someday they'll bring back Colin McIntyre as Sancroff from The Sirens of Time... as of now, that would be twenty-seven years at a minimum!
Finally, here come my rankings for the "visual" Hugo categories, namely, the two Dramatic Presentation categories, and then Best Graphic Story or Comic. (Is it still called that? I feel like they changed the name.) Unlike most people I know, I am very good at keeping up with reading and very bad at keeping up with tv. So while I finished my Hugo reading three or four days before the deadline, and even had some time for non-Hugo reading throughout, I had to watch two movies and four episodes of tv during my last week, and I finished my last film at midnight the day before votes were due at noon.
(Get yourself a wife who, when you sleep until 11am, wakes you up and checks that you remembered to submit your Hugo ballot on time!)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
[UNRANKED] The Wheel of Time 3x04: "The Road to the Spear", written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper
Back in 2022, I watched a previous episode of this show when it was a finalist, and I accidentally watched the wrong one first, so I have been bored by this show twice already. I certainly wasn't about to subject myself to it a third time.
5. Murderbot 1x10: "The Perimeter", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz
Say what you will about The Murderbot Diaries, and I have, but the thing the books undoubtedly have going for them is the cynical narration, from a character who largely wants nothing to do with other people and their feelings. Strip that out, and you mostly get a bunch of schmaltz.
4. Murderbot 1x09: "All Systems Red", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang
If an episode of a serialized show is a Hugo finalist, I typically don't watch the other episodes. You either wow me on your own, or you do not. I had a slight advantage coming into "All Systems Red," though, because I have read the first Murderbot book on which the first season is based. I thought this was decent but a bit broad; I was not very convinced by the actors playing all the humans. Some good jokes, but the occasionally sitcomesque tone was jarring.
3. Plur1bus 1x01: "We Is Us", written and directed by Vince Gilligan
This was a very well done first episode of a show with an interesting premise that I will probably never watch any more of. Works on its own in the sense that you can understand it just fine; doesn't work on its own in that it's all setting up interesting ideas, so what will be done with these interesting ideas is still to come. I thought the actress playing the main character was very good and there was some striking imagery. I wish a friend hadn't told me the premise at some point, because I think it would have been interesting to work it out while watching it. Much more involving than Murderbot.
2. Severance 2x10: "Cold Harbor", written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller
This feels less like a nomination for this specific episode of Severance and more a nomination for the second season as a whole... and indeed, two years ago, the first season as a whole was a finalist. I don't know why that didn't happen again this year. I enjoyed the second season a lot, if not quite as much as the first—I love the premise and the leads, and there's lots of great character work and good twists, but my feeling is that some of the decisions made by the antagonists would fall apart under scrutiny. (Why can they hire whole marching bands but not, like, pay one guy to watch where Mark S. goes?) Still, I enjoyed the season finale a lot, which delves into some of the ethical implications of severance in a really interesting way... but the season ends on a cliffhanger, just like the last one did, so the pleasures of resolution are continually deferred, and that's a thing I just hate about contemporary television. Thus, even though I feel like this was probably better than Doctor Who in most senses, I am penalizing it.
(Interesting to note that three of the five tv shows are Apple ones. Are they the only interesting streaming service left at this point?)
1. Doctor Who 2x05: "The Story & the Engine", written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson
To me, the best episode of the second season of the largely mediocre Disney Plus Doctor Who revival was "Lux," where the Doctor and Belinda battle an evil cartoon. But this one, set almost entirely within a Nigerian barber's shop, about the power of stories, was probably second best. Not perfect, but bubbling over with ideas, and something you couldn't have done with any other Doctor. Not Doctor Who at its greatest, but largely more interesting to me than the stuff I've ranked below it.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Frankenstein, directed and written by Guillermo del Toro
Look, maybe this is unfair, but I have more opinions about Frankenstein than probably most anyone you know, and this adaptation has largely uninteresting takes on a novel that I find intensely interesting. I was not a fan of reducing it all to Freudian family melodrama, especially its very unearned ending. I liked the earlier parts of the film better; the introduction of (essentially) Victorian Elon Musk was an interesting idea (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the end), and the bit where jaunty exciting music played while Victor was cutting up corpses was probably the best part of the entire film. If it had all been that clever and that striking, I would have ranked it much higher. Too many fight scenes; the gruesome violence of those got old fast.
(I could be wrong, but I think this is the first Frankenstein movie I have ever seen! Seems weird that that could be true after forty years, but I am pretty sure it is.)
5. KPop Demon Hunters; directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; written by Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMechan, Maggie Kang, and Chris Appelhans
This movie has been watched in my household many times since it came out last summer, and the music has been played many times more. I am very familiar with all the music videos. But I had actually never seen the movie all the way through until I was forced to when it was announced as a Hugo finalist. It was cute enough. Not deep, but I did really like "What It Sounds Like," which I think is beautiful stuff. If it had only all been that good!
4. Sinners, directed and written by Ryan Coogler
I thought this was a well done vampire story with good period details. Surprisingly funny, which I had not expected from the somewhat earnest discourse around it. ("Maybe she ain't white" made me rewind to make sure I heard it right!) Some great moments overall, just not totally my kind of thing, so not as interesting to me as Andor but certainly more interesting than Demon Hunters. Anyway, anything from this point up strikes me as a totally worthy winner.
3. Andor Season Two, created by Tony Gilroy
In 2023, two episodes of Andor season one were finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), which didn't really work, as Andor is one of those shows where the whole season is one big story. Thankfully, this year, the entire season was a finalist in Long Form. I know everyone loves Andor, but having seen a whole season of it now, I find it a very frustrating show. I think it's very well shot, it has lots of great, interesting characters (bar, weirdly, Andor himself), and every now and again there's a beautiful moment that just hits it out of the park: Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter's funeral, Mon Mothma's speech, the Ghorman massacre, Kleya Marki's infiltration of the hospital. But this series is structured as four three-episode stories, and it was hard for me to shake the feeling that every single one of these could have been cut down to two episodes and the show wouldn't have lost a thing. Its cardinal sin is that too often it's just boring! So I am ranking it above KPop Demon Hunters (clearly it is doing interesting things) but below Superman (which was never boring).
2. Superman, directed and written by James Gunn
I wanted to see this last summer (it came out on my birthday, even!), but didn't mange to get around to it. Now, having finally seen it, I would say it's good but not great. Clearly conceived as an anti–Man of Steel (every time the film shows massive devastation, it carefully demonstrates both that the area has been evacuated and that Superman scoops up innocent bystanders), it leans into a lot of stuff I like about the character, and obviously was made by someone who—like me—thinks of the Donner movies and the comics of the 1980s and '90s as the "default" version of the DC universe. Given I recently reread all the JLI comics, I of course appreciated the Guy Gardner stuff, though I wish Metamorpho's personality was more like that iteration; as someone from Cincinnati, I of course appreciated the Hall of Justice. But I feel like it never quite grabbed me; I found the emotional conflict supposedly at the heart of the film kind of distant and unclear. But anyway, obviously more to my taste than Andor, but not as interesting to me as Mickey 17.
1. Mickey 17, directed and written by Bong Joon Ho
This movie is about a guy who can't die—or rather, can die as many times as his masters need him to do so—sent into space as expendable support on a colonization mission. The boss of the mission is a sort of combined Donald Trump/Elon Musk figure; the movie as a whole uses these ideas of immortality to think about who we consider expendable in lots of different concepts, but especially imperialism and capitalism. Lots of weird tonal shifts, which I always like, and good, if dark, jokes.
This is a webcomic that has been running since 2006; its third act concluded in 2025. (It's apparently not concluded yet, but the author's blog indicates Act 4 won't begin for a couple years.) Under the way the Hugo Awards handle serial narratives, that means the entire comic is eligible for the Hugo Awards as a unit. However, only the 2025 strips, which run sixty pages, are included in the Hugo voter packet. On the other hand, reading the comic since the beginning would mean reading over two thousand strips... and the art started out quite terrible! So I decided to read the comic from the beginning of Act 3, which started in 2020, and is a more manageable 469 pages, though I did skim some of the very early strips for context.
Anyway, that means it's not totally the comic's fault I was often lost, but there are a lot of characters with a lot of history to keep track of here. That I didn't mind too much... what I did mind is that the actual stakes of the act where amorphous and unclear. I don't know if that would have been better if I'd read the whole thing or what; there's apparently a big time gap between acts 2 and 3, and from context, I think a lot of what confused me was new to Act 3. The basic thing here is that 1) ghosts are real, 2) seeing them has something to do with a brain chip (but I wasn't sure what; I think the chip lets you see ghosts but I also think there were unchipped characters who could see ghosts?), 3) the government is going to give everyone brain chips in order to connect minds to create collective empathy (the two leads are the president and first lady), 4) but this means everyone will also know about ghosts, causing a national freakout, so 5) they must figure out how to get the one without the other, and 6) contend with the Catholic Church, which has its own opinions on what people know about the afterlife. What I didn't get is why the president and first lady were so keen to give everyone brain chips. If they couldn't figure out a way to give people collective empathy without giving everyone ghost knowledge, then why not... just hold off? All the characters acted like there was a deadline of when the "Middle Bridge Project" was due to launch, but surely the launch date was chosen by the characters? It was also very unclear to me what the Catholic Church was actually trying to do. Like, they wanted to be in on it in some way... but what were they actually trying to do and how was it bad? I never really knew.
So with the stakes so unclear, I was pretty much doomed to not enjoy this.
Back in the 2000s, I was a voracious consumer of webcomics, and this struck me as "quirky" in a way very much typical of the era. It would have fit very well among the kind of stuff I read back then! It reads like a weird throwback in the 2020s, however.
(The good thing that came out of me reading this is that it spurred me to get the same creators' graphic novel Sidequested out of the library for my seven-year-old, and they loved it so much they read it three times in one week and then asked me to read it too.)
5. The Power Fantasy, Volume One: The Superpowers, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard
Kieron Gillen is one of those writers who gets on the ballot no matter what he writes at this point: since I started voting in the Hugo Awards, he has been a finalist every year since 2020 except for 2024. Gillen is a good writer... but surely not that good. The Power Fantasy is a case in point. I like to flippantly refer to him as "a poor man's Brian K. Vaughan," but Power Fantasy is actually a poor man's Alan Moore or Warren Ellis: in its depiction "what would it really be like for there to be people with superpowers on Earth?", it seems to do little we didn't see already in Miracleman or The Authority. (The super-fetus is very clearly Miracleman-derived!) It even seems to be derivative of Gillen's own work; the squabbling group of superpowered humans with complex histories is right out of The Wicked + The Divine. Of course, one of the most obnoxious things a critic can do is write something off by telling you it's like some other thing they've already read... but I found this offered little original within the medium or genre, and it definitely felt like one of those things that thinks it's being original.
But at least I (mostly) understood what was going on, so I ranked it above A Girl and Her Fed. Hopefully this series doesn't become a perennial finalist in this category like Gillen's Once & Future was.
4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford
As I said in my full review, I thought this was fun but slight. I don't know that it feels particularly award-worthy... but at least it wasn't derivative, so I ranked it above The Power Fantasy.
As noted in my full review linked above, I found this solid, well-done superhero comics... but nothing transcendent despite some of the hype it has received. Similarly, I thought Space Cat was a solid, well-done example of its genre. So they pretty much rank equally to me; I broke the tie because I'm just more into the genre that Absolute Wonder Woman belongs to than I am the genre that Space Cat belongs to.
2. A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel: Book One of Earthsea by Fred Fordham
In the oddball Hugo category that is "Best Graphic Story," one common type of finalist over the last five years is the graphic novel adaptation of an acclaimed prose work: see 2021's Parable of the Sower (which won) or 2023's Dune (though that's technically the comic of the movie of the book!) or 2024's The Three-Body Problem. I feel like the appearance of these kinds of finalists on the ballot say more about 1) the original prose work, and 2) the limited graphic novel reading of the Hugo electorate than anything else. That said, Fred Fordham's adaptation of the first Earthsea novel is clearly the best of these adaptations to ever appear on the ballot. Fordham's art is beautiful, and overall, this reads as a comic in a way that, say, Parable of the Sower did not, with the images doing the storytelling and very effective use of panelling in the storytelling. The magic still manages to feel magical, even though it's been moved out of Le Guin's beautiful prose into (arguably) the more straightforward visual medium. I did think some episodes became a little too abbreviated to follow, but overall this was very effective. (It's not totally fair to the book, though, but I do think my reading experience was diminished by the PDF provided in the voter packet rendering each two-page spread as a single page, which made the pages kind of small when read on my tablet.)
If you read my review linked above, you will see that I was highly skeptical about 1) a picture book being a finalist in this category, which has up to now entirely been comics (despite picture books technically qualifying), and 2) it being a picture book not created by people who normally do picture books (if you are a parent, you will know there is normally nothing worse). But this turned out not only to be pretty good, but to be the strongest finalist this year! I don't know that I would have thought so in a different year (I would have ranked it third in 2025 or 2024, for example), but this year the category was weak, and I think Invisible Parade clearly had the best storytelling of everything I read from a graphic standpoint: not in the quality of the images qua images, but in the way the images tell the story from page to page.
Overall Thoughts
I think that serialized streaming shows continue to be a point of difficulty for the Hugo Awards. Normally I'm loathe to propose adding categories, but I think Dramatic Presentation should be rejigged into three . I don't know what to call them, but duration-wise, they would be something like:
<60 mins.: for single episodes of tv shows (or other short things; like Dirty Computer from a few years ago); hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that actually do work on their own
60-180 mins.: for films
>180 mins.: for entire seasons of streaming television programs; hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that need their entireties to work, like Andor, Murderbot, and Severance
Right now, it's dumb that I have to judge "Cold Harbor" on its own when it clearly doesn't work on its own, but it's equally dumb that I'm comparing twelve hours of Andor to two hours of Mickey 17.
Overall, I thought both Dramatic Presentation categories just fine. I didn't love most of Short Form, but I appreciate that much of it is widely loved, so the category is presumably doing what it's meant to; as always, I am grateful to Long Form for introducing me to a couple interesting movies I probably never would have gotten around to otherwise (this year: Sinners and Mickey 17).
Best Graphic Story is the usual hodgepodge this year, but to be honest, it's probably been worse. A Girl and Her Fed was pretty bleh, but even that, I can appreciate the scale of the achievement. I suspect this category is still not really finding and rewarding the best of sf&f comics, but I also suspect it never will.
Timelink is a two-volume book from Doctor Who fan Jon Preddle, exploring the continuity of the series—at least as it existed circa 2010, when David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith (it very briefly glosses Smith's first series). Obviously, as is typical for me, I came to it very late! The book has five parts across its two volumes, and I'll tackle each of them individually. Before the five parts, though, Preddle lays out his "rules," probably the most important of which is that he only cares about what's on screen, unlike Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson's Ahistory. He is also very into taking things literally: if a character says something happened a thousand years ago, they are very much not rounding.
Timelink: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Exploration of Doctor Who Continuity, Volume One by Jon Preddle
The first part, called "The N-Space Universe," lays out a bunch of "facts" we can discern about the Doctor Who universe: how does time work, can you change history, what kinds of time anomalies are there, what are the major places, who speaks English, and so on. There is a lot of detail here, and I skimmed much of it. I very much disagree with his conclusions about language; Preddle is the kind of guy who will not go for the interpretation that people speak English because this is tv; no, Gallifreyan and English must (somehow) be the same language. It ends with a 100-page timeline; this is just a list, and I much more appreciate the detailed footnotes of Ahistory. (That said, we do get rationales for these placements in the story entries in volume two.)
The next part provides a set of histories: what are the chronological sequence of Cyberman stories, Dalek stories, UNIT stories, the 2005-09 contemporary stories, British prime ministers, and the British space program. The real highlight of these is the meticulously thought through Cyberman and Dalek stories; I don't think I've ever read a better, more detailed take on how all their screen adventures fit together. If I were, say, writing a Cyberman or Dalek Big Finish adventure, I would definitely use this. On the other hand, I very much disagree with his take on UNIT dating, because he acts like there's only one possible conclusion from the data on screen, which is very much not the case!
The third part goes into the histories of the Doctor and Gallifrey. Though I don't think it would hold up with what we saw on screen from 2010 onward, and it definitely doesn't hold up with what the comics and novels and audios have done, he provides a very compelling take on how Gallifrey's timeline syncs up with the universe's, and thus how the Doctor's age fits into this, and what counts as the "future" and the "past" from a Time Lord perspective. (His claim is that Arc of Infinity sets the present of Gallifrey as 1983, and thus you can work out everything relative to that using the Doctor's age.) He makes it all work quite nicely; it's very satisfying!
Timelink: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Exploration of Doctor Who Continuity, Volume Two by Jon Preddle
From here, I recommend jumping ahead to part five, which makes up the entirety of volume two. It's clearly here so that the two volumes are roughly equal length, not because it would read best last. This is Preddle's story-by-story history of the whole show, from 100,000 BC to The End of Time. For each story, he gives you details on its chronological placement, an estimate of how much time passed within it, links to other stories, and so on. Surely my favorite part was the estimate of time passed; it's an aspect of chronology I feel like people rarely care about! I do think he makes some weird calls sometimes (the pith-helmet-wearing explorers with English names in Kinda are supposedly not humans from Earth!) but he always explains his logic. This isn't designed to be read word for word in order, I'm sure, but I did so as much as I could. It reads very quickly... well it did for me anyway. I would guess a number of people would find it quite dull.
Lastly, part four in volume one is the "appendices": recaps of other writers' thoughts on UNIT dating, a discussion of if the Doctor is half-human (here Preddle struggles a bit, having to willfully misread the TV movie... though there's not much you can do about this if you're insisting all of Doctor Who somehow does fit together), and then story-by-story histories of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. I particularly appreciated his meticulous approach to the chronology of Torchwood and SJA; someday maybe I'll rewatch those two shows along with the present-day episodes of the parent show following his order.
Overall, my guess is that you're either a certain kind of person who
finds this kind of thing interesting or you're a kind of person who very
much does not! To be honest, I think I am less the kind of
person who finds this kind of thing interesting than I was thirteen
years ago when I bought this book, but I still find it interesting
enough.
There is a sort of idea in Doctor Who discourse, of "guns vs. frocks." This idea was apparently coined by Gareth Roberts, but is pretty well explained by Kate Orman in this interview with fan and scholar Alan McKee:
I think it’s [Doctor Who novelist] Gareth Roberts who said that Doctor Who needs less guns and more frocks. And it became a very quick shorthand for two rough schools of writing in the Doctor Who novels: one of which was militaristic space opera books that were very serious, and took themselves very seriously; and then at completely the other end of the spectrum, very camp ones that did not take themselves seriously. (10)
(Also discussed here by another writer.) Like a lot of systems that break things down into exactly two categories, you're meant to favor one—I used to read Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex, and a go-to move for him and his readership was, "There are exactly two ways of thinking, and I belong to the superior one." Guns vs. frocks doesn't hide this; it's right there in the original conception of it that Kate Orman paraphrases. As Elizabeth Sandifer points out, "this is a spectacularly loaded framing of a debate" when your main character abhors guns!
On the whole, I agree: I am much more likely to have a good time with "Flatline" than with "Time Heist." However, I can enjoy a good "gun" story: I am an unabashed fan of Resurrection of the Daleks, for example, and Earthshock and The Caves of Androzani are also in this space. (Well, I remember being a big fan of Resurrection, anyway; it's been a long time since I've seen it.)
One might argue, though, that the whole guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy isn't really applicable to Doctor Who as a whole so much as a very narrow slice of it, which is what Jacqueline Klieper says on this Tumblr post: "I’m generally kind of dubious about treating the gun/frock distinction as particularly meaningful outside of the fairly narrow parameters of the Virgin novels that the terms originated because of." It's not so much a term designed to describe Doctor Who in general as a way of describing two particular ways of making the New Doctor Who Adventures more "adult." You could take the Paul Cornell "frock" approach and embrace the weird camp elements of Doctor Who—sentient churches on the moon—or you could take the "gun" approach of macho space military people blowing things up—for me embodied by the particularly boring and tedious novel Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis. I tend to agree with Kliper; I struggle to map the guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy onto the 2005-22 revival, for example. (I very much struggled to come up an example before finally thinking of "Time Heist," to be honest. Klieper comes up with a couple of examples from the revival, but I'm not sure I really agree with them... though I may be falling victim to a common problem in genre distinctions: "any example I enjoy from a genre I generally don't enjoy must not count as a 'true' example of that genre.")
Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale
But that doesn't mean it can't occasionally happen. Trevor Baxendale never wrote an NA, but Prisoner of the Daleks reads like his attempt at one. The Doctor lands in the era of the Dalek Wars, and the book is all about that without reprieve: soldiers and squads and massacres and secret plots and plans and it's all Very Serious Stuff. Nicholas Briggs could have written this in his sleep, of course, but with Nick there's a thematic depth, an attempt to make the Daleks mean something that's completely absent from this book where they're just the Horrible Monsters You Know from TV. The one clever thing this novel does is to make you think there's going to be a sympathetic female character of the week who functions as a pseudocompanion... and then kill her off pretty quickly. I didn't expect this, so well done, and it firmly established the book's "gun" bona fides: no one is safe! Unfortunately, having done this, the book is left with no interesting or sympathetic guest characters to speak of. I think "gun" Doctor Who is probably a particularly poor fit for David Tennant's Doctor, even on the page.
All of this is to say, I think this book perfectly achieves what it sets out to do. But what it sets out to do completely fails to be of interest to me. If you know about the guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy, then what you think about that way of conceptualizing Doctor Who will probably tell you pretty clearly what you will think about this book before you even read it. (I picked this up because it's one of the more widely praised "New Series Adventures"... but I guess I should have paid more attention to who was doing the praising!)
This scholarly monograph has a topic that is kind of hard to put into a few words (hence the not-very-descriptive subtitle), but basically it's about how Doctor Who became a fan-driven thing. What happened as Doctor Who shifted into being written and created by fans, and written and created for fans? Booy takes as his jumping-off point the debut of Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine), which cultivated an audience of people interested in the mechanics of television production. Over time, these people came to write for the tv show, thus shaping it from the inside—and eventually they ended up running the whole thing once the show returned in 2005! The subtitle says "to the present" but really Booy is interested in the final decade of the classic show, which is covered in a series of
detailed chapters.
I found this a quick and easy read. Some "aca-fan" stuff is awful, either bad scholarship or bad fandom, but Booy is good at both. This is clearly written by someone who knows fandom from the inside but also knows how to bring the rigor of critical analysis to it... but also someone who can write in an engaging, accessible way. It's a little digressive at times, but overall I enjoyed it; Booy has a unique angle and executes it well.
(Booy cites the work of Australian media critic Alan McKee, pointing out in a footnote that McKee himself had a short story published in DWM back in the 1980s. Shortly after reading Love and Monsters, I happened to copyedit a journal article that cited McKee... I guess he has also published on Australian aboriginal horror film!)
This is a large hardcover that chronicles the BBC's Visual Effects Department. It begins with an overview of the history of the department from its founding in the 1950s to its closure in 2003, chronicling various expansions and moves and reorganizations the department went through over the years. (It actually extends slightly beyond the 2003 end date of the title, because once the department was closed, one employee was kept on as part of a different department, doing model work, which lasted until 2006.) There's also an introductory chapter about the basic techniques that the department used over its lifespan. After these chapters, the bulk of the book goes through a bunch of a shows the department worked on in alphabetical order, from Alice in Wonderland (1986) to the Z-Cars episode "Contact" (1976). These have anecdotes from the VFX staff and are copiously illustrated with photos from the BBC archives showing both how the work was done and how the finished effects looked.
BBC VFX: The Story of the BBC Visual Effects Department, 1954–2003 by Mat Irvine and Mike Tucker
This isn't the kind of book I would go around recommending to random people, but if you're me, you're squarely in the target audience of this book. I'm someone who enjoys reading about the practicalities of tv and film production, who likes getting nitty-gritty insights into how things are done. If you enjoyed, say, Preston Neal Jones's oral history of the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, you're the kind of person who would also enjoy this book.
Most obviously, the book has a lot of sf and fantasy stuff in it. Of course the whole reason I was originally drawn to it were its chapters on Doctor Who; there are ten pages on the 1963-89 original run and eight pages on the 2005 revival. To be honest the chapter on the original run feels a bit cursory; ten pages means there's a lot to squeeze in here and not a lot of room for detail. (I wanted some nice photos of that space station from The Trial of a Time Lord, for example.) I am sure you could do a whole book on the department's contributions to Doctor Who! I was surprised by how many contributions the Model Unit made to the revived show; I'd known it was responsible for the spaceship crashing into Big Ben in "Aliens of London," for example, but hadn't realized the exploding Auton lair in "Rose" or the barrage balloons in "The Empty Child" or damaged tower blocks in "The Christmas Invasion" were also models. There's some beautiful photos in this part.
There was, of course, a lot of insight into other BBC telefantasy shows, both known and unknown to me: Blake's 7, Five Children and It, Moonbase 3, Quatermass, Red Dwarf, Space Vets, Star Cops, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Tripods, and so on. There's nice photos of model work in particular, and good details on other aspects of production as well; the creators of Red Dwarf loved working with the department, and tried to push what was possible further every series. Also, I learned that between seasons the model of the Dwarf rolled off a shelf and had to be totally rebuilt! The giant legs used to make the tripods in The Tripods were quite impressive. I was particularly wowed by the puppets used on Five Children and It; I guess I don't know how they looked in the finished production, but in the photos here they look amazing, particularly the beautiful phoenix used in the sequel series, The Phoenix and the Carpet. And how the puppets were operated is fascinating; they buried a box under the ground with all the support staff in it! There were fun stories from Space Vets, too; as it had a very low budget (it was a kids show), they just reused spaceship model from others shows!
But what was also quite fascinating were the details on the shows that are not telefantasy: costume dramas, news programs, documentaries, soaps, sketch comedies, and so on. If someone were to ask you if visual effects play a big role in these kind of shows, you would probably say no, but if they were to ask you how, you might think it through a bit more and realize they do. Lots of cool stuff in these parts, like how to simulate an ocean at night with no water, or how to flood a historical house, or how to film in an Egyptian tomb when the authorities won't get rid of the tourists. Miniatures are way more common than I would have guessed, but once you see it, it makes perfect sense. I have never seen and will never see, say, The Great Palace: The Story of Parliament, but I loved reading about how the buildings were recreated to tell this story. If you find reading about tv more interesting than actually watching tv (which is often how I feel), then this is the book for you. Lots of great anecdotes you can annoy your partner with!
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?
Beginning in 2010, BBC Books has published a series of "prestige" Doctor Who hardcovers, with different "big name" authors of various sorts, mostly a mix of authors with legit reps outside of Doctor Who (e.g., Stephen Baxter, Jenny Colgan), "celebrities" within the Doctor Who world (e.g., Tom Baker, Sophie Aldred), and people imitating the voice of Douglas Adams. I have previously read just one of them, a 2011 Christmas book, The Silent Stars Go by by Dan Abnett.
Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles; Or, Pirates of the Second Aether!! by Michael Moorcock
The very first of those, which I have had for a long time but never read, was The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock. Moorcock is one of those authors I know of but have read very little of, just a couple short stories; the universe of print sf is so large and one only has so much time! Apparently this book's "Second Aether" is a milieu he has developed in his original fiction, and some of its characters and concepts span his wider multiverse.
As an experiment, I think it's a worthy one. BBC Books's tie-ins to the new series can be easily accused, I think, of being unambitious; of not really trying to be like novels but novelisations of unseen episodes that don't play to the strengths of the prose medium. Like, they are often fun enough, but often don't do what the best tie-ins do, refract the parent show though a different and interesting lens.
Moorcock definitely is doing that here... but I didn't find it worked terribly well in the execution. The book is meandering, which can be fine if you enjoy the diversions, but I don't know why there is so much P. G. Wodehouse pastiche when Moorcock is only "quite okay" at it. (I coincidentally read some actual Jeeves and Wooster shortly after this, and the difference was stark.)
The book is at its best when it's weird and big, like the diversion into the all-red universe depicted on the cover. Those are the coolest moments, when the book is audacious, but in a way that transcends the CGI ways in which a tv show can be audacious. There are lots of fun bits; I particularly enjoyed all the goofy sports the characters play, and the role of the Judoon is so very well pitched, having them do stuff we never saw on screen that totally fits with it. Those jokes were probably my favorite. I think Moorcock has a decent handle on both Matt Smith's Doctor and Amy Pond, though not a great one.
Overall, I'm glad this book exists, but I don't think I'm quite as glad about the actual process of reading it. Still, I look forward to reading future installments in this series.
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 enjoymentof eachfairly 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 edited by Simon Guerrier
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.
