The Eighth Doctor

The Eighth Doctor, more than any of the others, is largely (but not entirely) an invention of Big Finish. Although the Eighth Doctor has a long run in both novels and comics, lasting from his inception in 1996 to the return of the new series in 2005, the bulk of the stories featuring Paul McGann during that period were found on Big Finish, which gives them a bit of extra weight. Unlike the Seventh Doctor stories, Big Finish didn’t try to keep their timeline consistent with the other media (mostly) which allowed them to keep the Doctor’s timeline mostly straight, and avoid the temporal complexities that were going on in the novels. Big Finish also kept going long after the novels and comics had finished, and the Eighth eventually became the first Doctor to see a new TV story (sort of) while his Big Finish adventures were still ongoing, tying this Doctor directly to events created for the new series, specifically the Time War. That gives the Doctor a destination and an arc to his life that had previously been open-ended.

As a result of the way Big Finish executed the Eighth Doctor stories, release order runs closer to chronological order than for any other Doctor, although there are exceptions of course. His tenure can also be divided into three large chunks: the early period with Charley, when he was one of several Main Range Doctors, and also considered the “current” Doctor; the middle period with Lucie, in which he became the first Big Finish Doctor to have his own specialized series, influenced by the style and pace of the new series; and the “boxed set” era, in which his adventures tended to be part of large sweeping arc of four boxed sets, each containing four stories. This last era tends to be more tied to new-series concepts and characters, and is still ongoing as I write this.