My Favourite Doctor Who Story of 2017.



Franchise This has been a pretty good year for Doctor Who. The television series was OK depending on your tolerance for Nardole and Big Finish has gone from strength to strength, leaning in heavily to the Time War amongst other threads. Some might argue that there's probably a little bit too much being released but it's probably that they've realised that the Who audience is multifaceted now with fans likely to concentrate on a single element rather than try to listen to everything.  My rule is anything Eighth Doctor, bits of nuWho tie-ins and anything reduced to £2.99 in a sale.

My choice of the year is All Hands on Deck, Eddie Robson's Eighth Doctor Short Trip which I originally reviewed here.  In the missing adventure genre of taking care of some continuity business, it explains how the Doctor's granddaughter Susan became involved in the Time War and of everything I've read or seen this year, there are moments of this which are still fixed in my mind, especially the eventual encounter between the family members, which between Robson's writing and Ford's performance is incredibly poignant as the inevitable unfolds.

But more than that, if you're a fan of the Eighth Doctor, you also have to appreciate the lengths the writer goes to in making sure it fits within the continuity set up at Big Finish whilst still making it accessible to listeners who probably still thought the last time the Doctor remembers seeing Susan was through the TARDIS scanner on Earth after one of the Dalek invasions of Earth (the original you might say).  For an incarnation of the Time Lord whose mythology is in flux more than most, its great to see everything interconnecting for once.

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