What if, at some point between 2005 and 2022, ITV secured some Doctor Who intellectual property rights in a similar fashion to how K9 managed to appear in his own Australian television show back in 2009?
This is not as strange a starting premise to a review of the opening Fugitive Doctor Adventures boxset from Big Finish as you may think. For the Fugitive Doctor was a creation of the Chris Chibnall era of televised Doctor Who, and Chibnall was a man whose ideas were best realised on screen when in the hands of ITV or while he was showrunning within their editorial structures.
While the BBC and ITV are both public service broadcasters, they have different remits and the key difference for viewers is the latter is a commercial broadcaster which means programmes – including episodic drama – is produced to fit around advertising windows.
This can lead to storytelling which encourages you to drop your attention every 15 minutes or so, and therefore needs either cliffhanger-esque mid-episode moments that are then swiftly resolved or easy-to-follow plots that do not suffer from interruption. The Thirteenth Doctor’s era, after a genuinely refreshing and thrilling first episode, felt like it may well have been made for ITV.
This is no dig at the broadcaster; just a observation of the structure of 21st Century dramas and where ideas usually end up in the UK’s television industry. But that is now changing, with premium versions of the public service broadcasters’ catch-up services offering ad-free options so you can watch thrilling episodes of drama without someone trying to sell you a water-enhanced vacuum cleaner halfway through. And therefore new ITV dramas are being commissioned with an uninterrupted structure in mind.
In addition to structure, there are also style differences that attuned British television viewers would be able to pick up on and tell if a programme is a product of the BBC or ITV from the first few minutes. This historically applied to reality television, live programming, episodic drama, and also children’s shows. There are demographics that the BBC previously commissioned drama for that ITV did not, as ITV’s channel that was aimed at young adults was populated by reality television, but now both have lost channels that cater to younger audiences and there are programmes being produced directly with a streaming-only audience (in what we’d call ‘the renting generation’) in mind.
Apologies for all this contextualisation. But basically: Chris Chibnall made Doctor Who as if it was to be a high-budget production for ITV’s main linear channel. And the Fugitive Doctor, the first incarnation to arrive in a streaming-first era, felt like she was to be the star of an era of the show that could be exclusive to ITVX and therefore be produced in a different way.
You only have to look at the colour grading and Segun Akinola’s incredible composition on Fugitive of the Judoon to note the artistic inspiration taken from the kind of dramas the British public were spending more time watching on Netflix, and which ITV had been quicker than the BBC to mimic with its drama output.
What Is the Tone of The Fugitive Doctor Range?
So would Big Finish’s editorial direction with the Fugitive Doctor continue in the moody, crime drama-inspired tone fitting for an evening on ITV1 that accompanied her television debut, which we know they can do well from various Torchwood monthly range episodes, or take colourful risks and try to be basically a new show for a different audience? Like what Russell T Davies was supposedly attempting by making the Fifteenth Doctor bigenerate from the Fourteenth Doctor so the latter could ‘heal’ after a life loaded with lore – before he then got wrapped up in his own nostalgia as showrunner.
The answer is 50/50. First of all, Chibnall did have ideas for the Fugitive Doctor but not enough for him to guide Big Finish’s direction beyond ensuring it remains somewhat ambiguous where she sits in the Doctor’s personal timeline. Great to have that editorial freedom, and Big Finish felt sure of their direction following their discussion with Chibnall, but not great to hear the former showrunner was lacking the kind of foresight that his predecessor Steven Moffat usually had with returning characters.
Secondly, a situation that also hampered Big Finish’s original War Doctor range was struck again. The Fugitive Doctor Adventures is not fitting itself into gaps in a televised timeline of this incarnation’s life; it is the starting point for this incarnation. For the purposes of character development, you need a performance quite different to that on screen so the storylines can lead up to it (as the War Doctor Rises range does now). Yet it also needs to be as similar as possible to this Doctor’s first televised appearance to reward the fans of that performance. Listeners are also going to have their own thoughts on if she is a pre-Hartnell, post-Troughton, or post-Gatwa incarnation — a guessing game which anyone buying this boxset needs to drop before listening to enjoy it.
It’s an unenviable situation for Big Finish to be in for what is otherwise such a tantalisingly charismatic and mysterious incarnation, and its current release routine of just two three-episode boxsets truly does this series no favours. What you need is an opening episode that goes: ‘this is the Fugitive Doctor Adventures, and you can expect similar when you tune in next week’. The first 20 minutes of that opening episode, Fast Times, can be downloaded from Big Finish’s website for free, and I would recommend doing so as it really ticks those boxes and leaves listeners absolutely wanting more. Even the episode title provides a little thrill before listening.
But like the Thirteenth Doctor era, the second episode is a big tonal change from that. Thankfully, it’s another strong showing both from a script and performance perspective, and now we have details about the second and final boxset, it’s clear this is reflective of an era of the show that is going to use genre-hopping as the Doctor darts around the universe on the run from a Time Lord agency she cannot even remember working for, while also having a persistent style of sorts and more overarching narrative from the off.
The behind-the-scenes material suggests the producers of this series were keen for a variety of writers, including new voices, which would lend itself to more one-off stories rather than arc-led drama. But for now this is a six-episode run. The Eighth Doctor Adventures pulled off eight-episode runs when it was broadcast on BBC Radio Seven in the late 2000s, and this range would benefit considerably from Big Finish repeating that investment into audience reach. Alas, the second boxset won’t be ready for release until July. Even a fortnightly broadcast schedule would have done this range good.
Jo Martin
While the current television Doctor is an actor who hits every single beat but often feels like he’s not being given Doctor-y material, Big Finish has succeeded here in providing a script that neither requires too much or too little of the Doctor in the character. Which may therefore sound like bad writing, but is of course the restraint in which this incarnation has to be written in for now.
And the way to maximise that is basically: write for Jo Martin and the performance she has already put on screen, and forget that her adventures have to belong in the same show as the Thirteenth Doctor’s or any other incarnations. Like I said before, as if she belonged to a new show going straight to ITVX using the Doctor Who IP.
When that happens, it really works, and long-time Big Finish listeners can of course point to moments reminiscent of those other conflict-worn incarnations such as the Seventh Doctor and his two successors, but there’s also a Shalka Doctor–esque bravado and most tellingly at moments a clear inspiration from the absolute brilliance that is Patrick McGoohan in none other than ITV’s cult classic show, The Prisoner.
Martin clearly is having the time of her life with the scripts, and loves the role, and there is a history of strong correlations between enthusiasm from the leading actor and how enjoyable a performance — and the story as a whole — is to listen to with Big Finish’s works over the years. The setting of the second story is a particularly interesting set-up, and also occupied with lines of dialogue that fans have been quick to give great significance to as they try to piece together their own puzzles about this incarnation.
The Fugitive Doctor is authoritative and often talks down rather than to other characters, yet is easy to conversate with and actually approachable. Basically the badass quality seen on TV, and the way she commanded interactions with the Thirteenth Doctor by being a contrast to her childishness, translates into a mature yet youthful character who is simultaneously existing as a product of trauma they can’t even remember yet is able to avoid being pulled into tiredness or pessimism.
Admittedly, we’re only three episodes into her run (the halfway point!), but the Fugitive Doctor feels refreshing given the last two Doctors on television have had ‘being traumatised’ as a major character beat from their fourth episodes onwards.
What This Boxset Means to Fans of the Era
It works. The section of the Doctor Who fanbase that sees the Chibnall era (and particularly the Thirteenth Doctor and her fam) as the show’s peak may not be the largest but the key thing is they’re willing to defend the era by spending money on it. Just like how fans ‘kept the IP alive’ in the wilderness years.
Jo Martin’s Doctor is the woman those fans wanted her to be, and it doesn’t matter that aside from the TARDIS there’s only one other main character in her era and no ongoing companion. The themes and side-characters of the second and third episodes hit the marks for audience appeal, so probably also therefore meet expectations of what this era could be.
The extended universe material gave the Thirteenth Doctor better stories than on television, and although there’s only three episodes of Fugitive Doctor action there’s hopefully enough for fans to end this run with a favourite they would revisit.
The Fugitive Doctor: Most Wanted is available now from Big Finish.
