Doctor Who Audio Dramas: Listening Order and Guide
::: audio-guide
If you just want to skip ahead to the full-length listening order, click here. But if you’re new to the Audio Dramas and want to get a clearer view of where to begin, then read on.
Note: The reviews in this guide are still a work in progress – so far, I’ve reviewed 56 audio dramas.
Heck, there’s so much! Where do I begin?
There are a lot of audio dramas, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed! Here are my suggestions:
Starting Place A: The Monthly Adventures
The best place to begin is the Big Finish’s range of audio dramas called The Monthly Adventures – each month, they release a standalone adventure featuring one of the classic doctors. Since they’re all self-contained, you can just choose any one of them and listen to it.
The Monthly Adventures used to be known as the Main Range or the Monthly Range.
You could start with the first, The Sirens of Time, or with one of my favourites:
My favourites
The Fearmonger, a Seventh Doctor story featuring political intrigue and a monster that feeds off fear.
The Marian Conspiracy, a Sixth Doctor story which introduces a new companion, Evelyn, and plunges her into the historical conflict between the protestants and catholics in 16th century England.
Red Dawn, a Fifth Doctor story featuring the Ice Warriors.
Sword of Orion, an Eighth Doctor story featuring Cybermen and a ship full of shady characters.
Flip-Flop, a Seventh Doctor story about time travel, parallel timelines, and slugs.
The first 100 are around £3 each from the Big Finish website, and a number of them are also available with things like a Google Play or Spotify subscription. (Note that on Google Play and Spotify, they are likely are named after the old terminology, so they’ll be something like “Main Range 15: The Mutant Phase”.)
Pros and Cons
Pros:
The early dramas are cheap (or free!)
The Monthly Adventures is the Range that has the most effort put into it, so often the stories are very good.
You don’t have to commit to listening to a whole series – you can just listen to a few here and there.
Cons:
The Monthly Adventures are based on Classic Doctor Who, so if you’ve never seen any episodes from then you might be slightly lost. (You don’t need to be a huge fan, though – as long as you’ve seen a few classic doctor who episodes, you’ll be fine).
Starting Place B: The New Series
If you’ve only watched the New Series, you might prefer to start somewhere more familiar – luckily, Big Finish makes a bunch of audio dramas under the Doctor Who New Series range. Most of these come in boxsets of (usually) 4 related dramas, and each boxset is (usually) standalone. Some of the stuff available in the New Series range includes UNIT, River Song, the Tenth Doctor Adventures, a variety of stories focusing around the Time War, and more.
(I’ve also heard that the Eighth Doctor Adventures were created with New Series fans in mind, so you can probably start there too.)
Pros and Cons
Pros:
You buy related dramas in standalone boxsets, rather than individually.
You don’t need to know anything about the Classic series.
Cons:
This is the most expensive starting place, as you have to buy an entire box set (rather than just individual stories).
Starting Place C: The Randomoids
Another option is to listen to audio dramas randomly – every week on the Big Finish podcast, they give listeners a 25% discount on a random release from their catalogue. Conveniently, there’s a link to the offer in the description of the podcast, so you don’t even need to listen to the podcast.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
You get a large variety of audio dramas for much cheaper than you would otherwise.
You can try out audio dramas that you might not have considered before.
Cons:
Sometimes (thankfully rarely) the random selection is the second part of a larger story arc, so it can’t be listened to on its own. (if you’re unsure about a particular randomoid, you can always message me for my advice – my contact details are here).
If (like me) you are intent on listening to everything, 25% off a single random release is often not worth it when compared to buying a bundle. (If you’re fine with just buying individual dramas, or can’t afford to buy an entire bundle, it’s worthwhile).
What if I want to listen to everything? What order should I do it in?
Unlike the TV show, which is released in a very clear order, the audio dramas jump all over the place – one release might be from the Fifth doctor, the next from the Eighth, then the next from the Sixth. Plus, there are often several series running simultaneously – for example, the stories in Eighth Doctor Adventures were being released alongside stories from Bernice Summerfield.
There is no “official” ordering for these stories, because they’re not inherently ordered – you can listen to the Eighth Doctor Adventures before listening to Bernice Summerfield, or after, or you could intermingle them. If you’re struggling to wrap your head around this, think of it this way: the BBC is a TV channel, and they produce a variety of shows simultaneously. Big Finish is the audio drama equivalent to this: they produce a variety of shows simultaneously (although they’re not called shows, they’re called “ranges”).
We could try and place everything into in-universe chronological order, but that would be incredibly difficult, and would make for a terrible listening experience. Instead, this list is in what I call a Natural Ordering. It is in order of release date, but instead of jumping around between different series, the guide is divided into Segments, so storylines aren’t broken into dozens of different pieces.
Almost all of the audio releases are from Big Finish, but there are a handful from the BBC itself. There are also several from BBV, a fan group that made almost-official productions. These audio dramas are really hard to get, however, so don’t feel bad if you have to skip them.
There are also the BBC audiobooks, which I’ve included in the Misc segments under a collapseable heading, so they’re easy to skip if you’re not interested in them, and easy to listen to if you want. (Note: I haven’t included the audiobooks from Tales from the TARDIS, because I missed them and don’t know how to fit them in without redoing all of the numbers in the guide. They should be between segment 2 and segment 3.)
How the recommendations work
There are 3 ratings:
Definitely – stories I enjoyed a lot, and that I think you’ll enjoy too.
Yes – stories that I enjoyed, and you’ll probably enjoy them too.
Maybe – stories that I liked, but you might not (or visa versa).
It’s important to say: “Maybe” does not mean it’s bad, it just means that you’re less likely to like it.
This guide couldn’t have been created without the efforts of MaximumSpidercide. Their Ultimate Doctor Who Universe Listening Order helped me to understand Big Finish better, and inspired me to make my own guide. There are a number of minor changes between their guide and mine: I’m a bit looser with the ordering of things, because my segments are explicitly numbered (rather than implied, as in their guide); I try to avoid segments with only one story in them; I don’t include the audiobooks, even the original-to-audio ones; and I do include the Unbound series, even though it’s set outside of the Doctor Who Universe.
Recent Updates
05–Apr–19
Listened to Dalek Empire I: Invasion of the Daleks (segment 12).
Removed the “Featuring” section from Dalek Empire tables, to avoid spoilers.
Added all the BBC Audiobooks to the guide, under the Misc segments. We are missing Tales from the Tardis, which I am unsure on how to include.
Added a “New Ranges in year” section under each year heading, and links to navigate between years.
02–Apr–19
As of yesterday, Big Finish has renamed the Main Range into “The Monthly Adventues”, which is a much more sensible name. This name change has also been reflected across the guide.
Added an audio drama I missed: Real Time to segment 19.
Listened to The Skymines of Karthos, finishing all the audio releases for segment 11.
29–Mar–19
Updated the segment titles, so that they’re more flexible when they adapt to different screen sizes.
Major Overhaul to the listening order. Visually, it should be almost un-noticeable, but many segments have been changed, many have been added (there are 38 more segments than before). The overall result should be that it’s easier to keep track of where you’re up to – instead of being a continuous stream of segments, segments are now divided into years, and they follow a repeating pattern every 6 months (or every 3 months later on in the guide): A Main Range segment for the period, then segments for all the Big Finish series that were released during that period, then a segment for every BBV release from that period, and then a segment for all the miscellaneous releases that couldn’t be in other segments. (A much-wanted side effect of this is that there are no more “complex” Main Range segments that include a bunch of things that aren’t part of the Main Range).
As a consequence of the Major Overhaul, updates before this one may not make sense anymore.
Updated some behind-the-scenes stuff, so that tables come pre-loaded with the appropriate row colours, rather than relying on your browser to run a script. If you visit this page semi-regularly, you may have to press Ctrl + r (or Cmd + r on MacOS) to convince your browser to update the colours.
The Big Finish audio dramas are often darker than the TV show, and deal with more adult themes. I’ll put a special note on the stories that are especially dark.
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If there are any problems with this list, or you have any questions about the audio dramas, please let me know.