So now we come to the Tenth Doctor, personally not one of my favourites but that was more down to the melodramatic writing in a lot of his stories that Russel really went overbord with throughout most of his era. When it’s at its best, the Tenth Doctro era is some of the best Doctor Who of all time and I do agree that he is neck and neck with Tom Baker for the most iconic Doctor of all time. Again, another Doctor who I feel worked better in TV than in audio, the Tenth Doctor Adventures are mostly written as being either fun but obvious fan service or stories that don’t feel out of place with Series 2 and 4 which isn’t reall the sort of thing I want from Big Finish’s take on the Tenth Doctor. That and I’ve no idea what directions Tennant’s being given but he seems to really overplay the Tenth Doctor in audio, everything I find annoying about his mannerisms is dialed up to eleven. But again there are still plenty of worthwhile episodes and audios to enjoy from the Tenth Doctor and these are some of my favourite picks.
Blink - Because of course! Do I even need to explain why this is one of Tennant’s best, it’s still talked about to this day, I was nine when this episode aired and let me tell you, it stuck with me big time. I had nightmares for years about the Weeping Angels, a simple idea that makes them so terrifying, unfortunately the Weeping Angels have lost a lot of what made them so scary to begin with the more added rules and overexposed they’ve been in episodes since. Nothing to date has topped their first appearance and it’s also some of the cleverest writing you’ll ever find in a time travel work of fiction.
Utopia - I tend to look at this seperately from the following two episodes that collectively make up a single three part story. The Sound of Drums is a good middle act that does a great job showing how hopeless the situation gets. Last of the Time Lords has all the right pieces but man that climax just utterly kills it! Not to mention both of them having John Simm who’s not even in the same league as Derek Jacobi and unfortunately kickstarted a new trend for the Master and how he/she’s written in Modern Who, written as more crazy than insane, more over the top than calm and reserved. Utopia is just an incredible experience with the Master pulling off his greatest disguise of all time, the last ten minutes is honsetly some of the best Modern Who ever put onscreen with Derek Jacobi owning every second of his tragically brief onscreen stint as the Master. Thankfully Big Finish have given him the opportunity to demonstrate his full potential as the Master and it has skyrocketed him to the top of my favourite Master list.
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead - Remember when this was how we started with River Song’s character and the mystery surrounding her and the Doctor. Much like The Empty Child, Silence in the Library is one of those special early Modern Who works where almost nothing goes wrong and it had everything going in its favour; clever, imaginative, scary, a great monster idea from something so simple, a great setting, excellent twists, great characters and a wonderful ending with the Doctor finding a last minute way to save someone’s life before it became a tired and played out trope.
Midnight - This is hands down Russel’s best written work in his entire writing career. This is the episode that made me optimistic for Russel’s return as showrunner. If you know the story behind this, Midnight was an episode Russel had in his mind very early on in Modern Who but kept putting it off cos he wasn’t sure it would go down well with the audience. So he finally relents and puts it in series 4, it becomes an aclaimed hit, by which point Russel was in the early stages of wrapping up his era so it was too late to write more like this. The fact that this turned out so well, against Russel’s expectations, gave me hope that he wouldn’t be put off writing more like it in his second tenure. Thankfully we have had episodes of a similar vein in Wild Blue Yonder and 73 Yards (and I’ve heard he’s got another one lined up for next year), it’s just a shame they’re still mixed in with his usual bag of tricks. If he’d focused on writing more episodes like Midnight, I wouldn’t have felt his era was so overated. We get David Tennant putting in his best performance as the Doctor in this chilling tale where the Doctor is trapped, terrified and locked in with a monster he has no knowledge of and a group of ordinary terrified humans that get more and more hostile the longer the situation goes. It takes the simple long running idea of the Doctor taking control of the situation and getting everyone to listen to him, and turns it on its head by having the Doctor try to take control and fail! It’s still incredible to watch all these years later.
Turn Left - As Midnight was David Tennant’s best work as the Doctor, this in turn is Catherine Tate’s best performance as Donna Noble. Donna gets tricked into changing her own past by turining left on a seemingly ordinary day, but that decision results in her never having met the Doctor, which results in his death and everything that could’ve gone run in the Russel era going wrong to an apocalyptic degree. It is over the top and stupid as Russel normally is with Rose being pointlessly enigmatic and the on the nose details around other characters in the Russel era being killed off. But they really sell just how dark and depressing this world gets, honestly the best performance in this episode isn’t even from Catherine Tate, that goes to Jacqueline King as Donna’s mother, there a moment during one of the news broadcasts where wecut to her and she just has this perfect broken look on her face! This and Midnight make for two of Doctor Who’s best back to back episodes, and together with Silence in the Library and the epic (if highly flawed) finale, this stretch of Series 4 is the peak of Modern Who!
The Waters of Mars - Modern Who really just needs to do more horror, it’s one of things it usually excels at. Here we get a typical base under seige with a disturbing monster that features some really chilling moments such as the transformation scenes. But it goes much deeper with the Doctor trying to leave the crew to their deaths as it’s a fixed point in history, not something you see often from an episode set in the future. But then he’s pushed to his breaking point and takes the laws of time into his own hands. It’s another 10/10 climax with a huge gutpunch ending in how the crew’s captain snaps the Doctor out of his god complex. The fallout of this really should’ve been the focus of Ten’s regeneration story, instead whatever the hell Russel was smoking when he wrote The End of Time. Or at least it should’ve been left open for the expaned universe to tell an epic storyline, and I don’t mean the convoluted and overly complicated mess we got in 2020!
Dalek Universe Volume 2 - This set is Big Finish Tenth Doctor at his best, like I said, a lot of the Tenth Doctor audios are played very safe, either relying on being indistinguishable from his TV run or using fan service as a crutch to lean on, and Tennant often feels like a parody of himself the way he overplays these stories. But the second volume of Dalek Universe does feel like a more balanced take on the Tenth Doctor in Big Finish and the sort of stories I’d liked to have seen more of. Dalek Universe is a fun series but it is ridiculously steeped in past lore going as far back as The Dalek’s Master Plan and even Big Finish lore connected to a series of the Fourth Doctor Adventures (and not one of the best series). I do appreciate how the Daleks aren’t even in this series for the most part, they’re more like a shadow haning overthe universe at this stage in Dalek history and it’smore about the effects the Dalek wars have had on different people and worlds. In this set for instance we get a great middle story where a military group is trying to create fake Daleks to infiltate behind enemy lines but it gets a lot darker with how they’re carrying out this operation and it features some huge consequences for our heroes. Then we get The Lost which is Big Finish’s best Tenth Doctor story, a more abstract and unconventional story where the Doctor and Anya are trapped in a seemingly deserted world with a mysterious castle that they find is occupied by an entity with no proper form who was banished to this realm from the dawn of the universe. It’s some of Tennant’s best work post-2009.
And those are my top tier Tenth Doctor stories, plenty of other good ones but these are the stories that make me see the Tenth Doctor for the icon he’s known as. Do share some of your favourites and I’ll see you all tomorrow for the Eleventh Doctor