Big Finish have announced details for their main range of
Doctor Who adventures over the course of next year.
January sees a new trilogy featuring the fifth Doctor and companions, which as well as Tegan and Nyssa will also see them joined with Adric, as played by
Matthew Waterhouse. Having first returned to the
Doctor Who fold in 2014's
Fifth Doctor Box Set, the character now arrives in the main range, with Matthew commenting:
I took a long time to get around to the idea of doing the audios – and now I just absolutely love it, I think the character's beautifully written. Everything we're doing at Big Finish is stuff that's already in the character, in the stories, they're just being extended a bit. Having said I don't want to do them, now I think “when's next week's one going to arrive?”. This is proper Doctor Who, they're really carefully written, they're witty and funny, they're highly inventive.
Range editor
Alan Barnes said:
It's been great to at last bring Adric into the monthly range – well, before his tragic death, at least!
Andrew Smith wrote the character's introductory story on TV, so I was determined to get Andrew to write his re-introduction. Andrew's
The Star Men, full of far-out cosmic science, is the first story of the trilogy, in which an astronomical base at the fringes of Earth's galaxy finds itself on the frontline of a war with an unimaginably alien force...
Matthew added:
Adric's quite heroic in this, and a young woman finds him rather hot because she's a bit brainy like he is: there's some genuine, character work going on with a great concept and there's some really nice moments between him and a young woman called Autumn (played by
Sophie Wu).
The characters continue their journeys over the next two months, with Alan adding:
Phil Mulryne's
The Contingency Club comes next, in which the TARDIS lands inside the most exclusive gentlemen's club in all of Victorian London – a club where all the waiters are identical clones! The final instalment of the trilogy is
Zaltys by
Matthew J Elliott, which brings the TARDIS to a world just hours from catastrophe, while Tegan is stranded in space... where she comes face to face with a very particular sort of horror, one she thought existed only in nightmares...
Additional cast members include
Sue Holderness (
Only Fools And Horses) in
The Star Men,
Philip Jackson (Inspector Japp in ITV's
Poirot) and
Clive Merrison (
The Tomb of the Cybermen,
Paradise Towers) in
The Contingency Club, and
Rebecca Root (
Boy Meets Girl),
Niamh Cusack (
Heartbeat),
Philip Franks (
The Darling Buds of May,
Heartbeat) and
Carol Sloman – daughter of
Doctor Who writer Robert Sloman - in
Zaltys. The trilogy has covers from designer
Tom Webster.
April sees a change in style for the regular range, as Big Finish embarks on the first of three special two-disc collections of two stories. The first stars
Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor in
Alien Heart by
Steve Cole, and
Dalek Soul by
Guy Adams. This is followed in May by
Colin Baker's sixth Doctor starring in
Vortex Ice by
Jonathan Morris, and
Cortex Fire by
Ian Potter, and then in June
Sylvester McCoy brings the trilogy to a close with
Shadow Planet by
AK Benedict and
World Apart by
Scott Handcock.
Alan commmented:
The double-bills in April to June came about because, er... well, we all quite liked the idea of double-bills, really! Each consists of two two-part adventures, each by a different author, one on each of the two discs; each, hopefully, has a very different style and tone to its companion piece – there should be a nice contrast between the two.
Alien Heart is about a species of weird spider-like monsters linked to the systematic destruction of planets, and
Dalek Soul is a particularly bleak piece set on the Dalek-occupied world of Mojoxalli.
May features
Lisa Greenwood as Flip – hurrah! – reunited with the sixth Doctor, in two adventures set before her (apparent) exit in
Scavenger.
Vortex Ice is a brain-scrambling conundrum of a story set in a diamond mine; then
Cortex Fire, like its title sort-of suggests, is about an epidemic of spontaneous human combustion on a distant planet. Finally, in June, there's the return of the seventh Doctor and Ace in
Shadow Planet/World Apart. The first has them at a far-out therapy centre, getting some very alternative medicine; then the second the TARDIS travellers are found marooned somewhere very inhospitable indeed...
Looking a little further into 2017, July sees the award-winning
John Dorney back writing for the main range with
The High Price of Parking starring the seventh Doctor, Mel and Ace. August's title has yet to be confirmed, but September will see two releases, with
Matthew J Elliott's
The Silurian Candidate for the seventh Doctor and
Eddie Robson's
Time in Office featuring the fifth Doctor, Tegan and another Doctor's one-time companion. The end of the year sees a full trilogy of adventures featuring the sixth Doctor, Constance and Flip, following on from this month's release,
Quicksilver.
The main range can be bought individually, or subscribed to in both six- and 12-episode runs, at money-saving prices as well as special exclusives such as PDF scripts, extended extras and up to four
Doctor Who - Subscriber Short Trips a year. Full details can be found via the
Big Finish website.
It was fifty years ago today, on Saturday 17th December 1966, that the Second Doctor met a young highland piper, James Robert McCrimmon, someone who would stay with him through the rest of his incarnation, becoming the longest serving companion in the history of the series. 
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