I have recently been working my way through all the Big Finish ‘Short Trips’ that I have bought over the years, and come up against a bit of a problem with the way that Tardis Guide associates them with ‘series’.
Right now there seem to be three sets of audio short trips in the TG database:
- Short Trips (Audio) which contains the regular Short Trips volumes together with their ‘X’ episodes, but also somewhat oddly a couple of Time Lord Victrorious (TLV) audios.
- Short Trips - Rarities which currently contains the 15 audio stories (originally produced as subscriber short trips) which were later bundled into the ‘rarities’ collections for sale.
- Subscriber Short Trips which contains all the remaining subscriber short trips which were not bundled into ‘rarities’ collections, plus later strories released by Big Finish as ‘interludes’, after the conclusion of the ‘subscriber short trips’ series.
To me, this way of dividing up the stories does not really work. There are saeveral stories which should by rights either be in a different series, and possibly be in more than one series.
The ‘rarities’ stories should definitely be included in the ‘subscriber short trips’ series (as listed on the Big Finish website) so that working through that series in order does not require hopping out to a different collection altogether. Arguably the ‘rarities’ bundles are really more like re-issues, which are usually considered as collectibles rather than stories.
The confusion here is that the Big Finish website and app only contain details for stories which have been released for separate purchase, so the ‘rarities’ bundles look like real products but the subscriber short trips have a phantom existence as un-purchaseable, un-app-playable, downloads. An ability to include stories in multiple series might be one way to address this issue.
To my mind the TLV stories would probably be better grouped with other TLV content rather than being dumped into short trips where they don’t really fit.
Although some websites group the ‘interludes’ in with the subscriber short trips, that’s not the view of Big Finish, who have them as a separate series.
All in all, its very confusing but I do feel that the current sets would benefit from a bit of re-arranging.