So the Eighth Doctor. Played by Paul McGann, he came onto our screens in 1996 and then promptly left, something which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing. Oh, McGann was fine, but the movie he was in waswell, mildly flawed is being kind. I'll let some other smart fellow launch into detail on the problems with it. But from 1996 until the 2005 series, McGann was, in fact, the Doctor. The current Doctor books featured his Doctor, as did other spinoff materials. Importantly, these spinoffs included the Big Finish line of Doctor Who audios. The Eighth Doctor hadnt been a part of the series when it launched in 1999, but he joined the audio adventures in January of 2001, and since then has gone on to have a great run of excellent stories in the monthly range and in his own separate series of adventures. While almost all of them are four or five star stories, were going to focus on the eight that are really the very best. As with the article on Sixth Doctor audios, clicking on the titles name will take you to Big Finishs page where you can listen to a trailer for the story! Lets begin!
This is the one that started it all for the Eighth Doctor. He finds himself, almost immediately after the end of the 1996 movie, onboard the airship R-101, where he meets a charming young woman named Charley Pollard (India Fisher), who, at the end of the story, becomes his companion. Given that she was supposed to die in the crash of the airship, this creates a certain problem. This really is a fun story and a great way to re-experience the character if the only way youve ever seen him is in the TV movie. McGann does a wonderful job showing just how good he would have been had the planned TV series gone into production and Fisher is delightful as Charley, which is good, because she winds up spending quite a while with the Eighth Doctorand then travels with the Sixth. It gets complicated.