A New Start With Big Finish
In 1999, a young startup called Big Finish released "The Sirens of Time". It was a full-cast audio story of Doctor Who. Think radio play. It featured the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors as played by Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, and was an immediate hit. Soon the company was producing a new story each month, with several of the old series companions returning as well, including the likes of the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith. In 2001, they finally got Paul McGann to come in and play the Eighth Doctor. They teamed him up with an "Edwardian adventuress" named Charlotte "Charley" Pollard, and all bets were off as one of the greatest eras in Who history began. The stories proved so popular that BBC radio even had a special series commissioned with the Doctor and a new companion named Lucie Miller. In this new audio format, the Doctor would fight the Daleks, Davros, the Master, the Monk, the Cybermen, the Autons, the Zygons, the Celestial Toymaker, and the Spiders of Metebelis 3. He'd have companions like the aforementioned Charley and Lucie, but also C'rizz, Tamsin and Molly. He met old friends, like the Brigadier, and Romana and even visited his granddaughter, Susan, where he met his great-grandson, Alex. He even ran into the Sisterhood of Karn, something that would be unexpectedly important later on. The end to the Doctor's audio stories has yet to be chronicled, and until very recently, his last story had yet to be shown. All that has changed.