10 Nu-Who Storylines That Doctor Who Spin-Off Media Did First
8. The TARDIS As A Suspicious Life Partner
Across Steven Moffat's era in particular, there was an increasing interest in telling stories about the TARDIS. For RTD, it had been a means of getting the Doctor and their companion into the story, for Moffat it often was the story. The most notable examples are Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife, which transports the TARDIS' essence into an organic vessel, and Steve Thompson's Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS, which tackles the ship's distrust of new companion Clara.
Both these story elements had previously been tackled in Doctor Who spin-off media. The Eighth Doctor novels, for example, featured sentient TARDISes, in the form of Compassion, who was both the Doctor's companion and...er...mode of transport. Without dwelling too graphically on the ins and outs of that, the 40th anniversary audio Zagreus is centred around the ideas in Gaiman and Thompson's scripts.
Spoiler alert, but the big twist in the high-concept Big Finish anniversary special is that the TARDIS has betrayed the Doctor and his companion Charley to help Rassilon. Their motivation is jealousy of the Doctor and Charley's relationship, which is so intense that the Doctor has risked his life and that of the TARDIS to save her.
The jealous TARDIS has assumed the form of the Brigadier, played by Nicholas Courtney, which brings a whole new angle on The Doctor's Wife.