Blessed is the Eighth Doctor devotee, for it has only been around four weeks since the last Paul McGann-led release (Causeway), and yet here we are, gifted with another outing, this time with Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan returning!
It seems like an age since Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair were paired with Paul McGann, but, in fact, it was only in May 2024 that we had their last release from Big Finish; when compared to the energy and relative freshness of the Charley Pollard and Audacity Montague releases, Empty Vessels with Chenka, Sinclair, and the Doctor does feel… weary, like a team that is nearing the point of closure. It’s something that the content of the two stories in this release openly discusses, and, while that content is not altogether terrible in terms of plot, it is still a long, long way from trying to continue the sense of originality, plotting, and momentum of the heyday of this team (seen in releases like the Ravenous and Doom Coalition storylines). From what was certainly the jewel of the Big Finish schedules, and the range where Big Finish promoted an ongoing and ‘current’ Doctor, the Eighth Doctor has slowly slipped away into the same archive as the first seven Doctors — i.e. past Doctors. If the team of Liv, Helen, and the Doctor once allowed for ambitious modernism to be used to shape their stories and direction (and four season boxsets could be planned and easily marketed each year), you really have to pause and consider what has gone so wrong with the momentum of this Doctor.
Was it Steven Moffat’s The Night of the Doctor that changed audience perceptions, that put a metaphorical boulder in the path of the once open future that the Eighth Doctor once had before him? Is it Nicola Walker’s availability? Or is it a more fundamental problem within Big Finish itself…? After all, they do still commission and publish three Eighth Doctor boxsets per year! It’s just not with this team, frustratingly. The Eighth Doctor range is no longer an open and forward-looking one, led by new companions and new threats. Instead, it has stalled, and fragmented into three different timelines!
Today, the releases with Liv and Helen are becoming fewer, the ambition more and more stifled, and despite there being potentially plenty of milage still to be travelled with the characters of Liv and Helen, it does feel very much like Big Finish is recognising that scheduling concerns are making this longstanding team too difficult to build a release schedule around… hence the lack of any firm plotting for the three starring characters anymore, and the sad loss of direction and energy for the Eighth Doctor range. But even with these changing factors, it is a decline for the Eighth Doctor that should never have been allowed to happen. If he is still popular enough to warrant three new sets per year, then it isn’t sales or popularity that are the problem; it is Big Finish’s outlook. Have the arrivals of Jodie Whittaker, Christopher Eccleston, and Billie Piper changed their priorities so profoundly…?
Eos Falling by Matt Fitton
The Doctor, Helen and Liv find themselves on an abandoned spacecraft, hurtling towards an inhabited world. The crew have vanished – but the TARDIS travellers are not alone on this empty vessel…
Have they really discovered a ghost ship?
The ambitious arcs of Dark Eyes and Ravenous, or even Stranded, are long behind us now with the Eighth Doctor range. Today, it is short-form storytelling and self-contained releases that are the order of the day, and this new release for Liv Chenka, Helen Sinclair, and the Doctor symbolises the increasing disposability of modern Chenka/Sinclair releases.
Matt Fitton’s Eos Falling is a very familiar Big Finish plot: the old ‘haunted space-station/ship after an experiment went wrong’ yarn. This plot, I am sure, sits in the drawer of Jason Haigh-Ellery or Nick Briggs and is tossed out to whatever writer has struggled for an idea, and they are told to “write that!” That’s my earned belief anyway…
So the story is standalone and, at around 45 minutes long, opening with a nicely paced introduction featuring Liv and Helen passing the time by cleaning out one of the vacant TARDIS bedrooms. This allows for some quiet honesty between the two as they realise this room likely belonged to a previous companion of the Doctor’s. Their introspection is interrupted when the TARDIS picks up a strange distress call from a ship that seems to have hit problems while in hyperspace. Caught in a situation where time is playing strange tricks within the apparently-now-empty ship, there is also a countdown element to battle against, and all while trying to resolve the truth behind the fate of those previously on board.
It’s not a bad story idea; it can still be done excellently, but this plot is, by now, such an overused story idea from Big Finish that it tends to hinge on the main cast and director being able to inject it with the required tension and urgency to make it ignite for the listener.
So the plot is actually incidental here: this isn’t a story on the same level of sharpness and quality as Peter Davison’s very similar Flight of the Nightjar in 2024, but where it does rise is in the character work on Liv and Helen, and their close connection with the other as they quietly begin to recognise that, despite their commitment to helping him, their time with the Doctor is surely not all that far from ending… What do they want next? Where do they see their lives settling down? And what are to be their aims once this chapter ends and the next begins?
It’s common knowledge that Nicola Walker has become one of Britain’s most in-demand television actresses. And that her schedule is likely making her hard to book for Big Finish, and therefore hard to plan stories and release schedules around. I was surprised to discover that this current two-story release was only recorded between May and June 2025, so clearly, Big Finish took the opportunity presented by being able to schedule the three main cast into a recording studio, and have rushed this release into post-production for a December 2025 slot. The music and sound design are very good, regardless of the speed of that post-production. But whether the two scripts were already sat in a file having been written ages ago, or were, in fact, written in a great hurry to meet the sudden availability of the three main cast for recording…?
If the latter, it would go a long way in explaining why the two stories for this release are notably lacklustre when compared to other Eighth Doctor releases these last two years. Eos Falling isn’t all that bad, but it’s so generic and by the numbers that it was actually the three main characters who I became interested in following — not the actual plot.
Lure of the Zygons by Roy Gill
A distress call draws the Doctor, Liv and Helen to a remote world and a crashed ship, where Captain Elhan is searching for her lost sibling…
As the storms close in, the two crews must investigate the wreck together. In the darkness, the Zygons are waiting…
By contrast to the compact Eos Falling, this Zygon story from old hand Roy Gill is at least 45 minutes too long. Why it is that this flat, plodding, and excitement-free script was chosen to be the big story in this release? Running at two 45-minute episodes, it reinforces my suspicion that this was a very rushed production turnaround, one with not enough pre-planning and time given to its commissioning and plotting.
The tale begins with another strange distress call picked up by the TARDIS, and becomes the equivalent of a studio-bound story. There is nothing usually wrong with these confined studio-bound settings, but this story is two 45-minute chapters with nowhere near enough action to break up the very leisurely pacing: as such, all there is is talk, talk, talk, and more talk…
The Doctor and friends find themselves on a crashed ship, there are a handful of survivors, and in amongst all of this are a struggling and desperate set of Zygons who will go to any lengths to get themselves off this planet and away to somewhere they can call home. It’s all as you would expect from a Zygon story. Suspicion, double-crossing, mistrust, and a question of identity. What is identity? That’s one interesting question seeded here from Gill, but so plodding and dull is the direction and the script that the exploration of that sinks deep into the mud of it all.
I dragged myself to the end of this story. And was so relieved that it was all over at last…
It’s not the (repetitive) stories that sticks in the memory here: it is the three main cast members. The running theme in this release is not Empty Vessels, but one of destinations — Eos Falling revolves around legacy and how history will remember you and your times; Lure of the Zygons similarly revolves around a search for ‘home’, a sense of belonging. And for Helen and Liv, the underlying questions are beginning to be asked concerning their own futures: they are realising that they cannot stay with the Doctor forever. So what, then, will be their own destinations…? Where will their endpoint be?
It does feel as if the team here is now taking its final bows. And based on the unoriginal and rather dull quality of this latest release, that may be no bad thing.
The Eighth Doctor Adventures: Empty Vessels is out now from Big Finish.
