#74 Doctor Who: The Company of Friends

My Randomoid Selectortron may not be very good at these short hops, but hop it does, into...

Doctor Who: The Company of Friends

Starring: Paul McGann as the Doctor, Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield, Matthew Di Angelo as Fitz, Jemima Rooper as Izzy, and Julie Cox as Mary Shelley.
Format: Four separate episodes of half-CD length each.
Silly? Yes in all episodes. Least in the first, escalating successively.
Standalone? The first part assumes prior familiarity with Bernice's relationship with the seventh Doctor. The fourth ties into other eighth Doctor audios but not in an entirely mandatory way.
Recommended? Yes if you want Paul McGann Doctor Who comedy.

My thoughts on this anthology contain spoilers for it and earlier eighth Doctor audios, and possibly spoilers for the continuities it uses companions from.

Before listening

I think I've heard Mary's Story (the fourth part) twice and the others once. This is an unorthodox release. It came out while the Eighth Doctor Adventures series was ongoing with Lucie Miller as the Doctor's companion, but is taking place elsewhere in continuity. The first story pairs him with Bernice Summerfield, who is usually with the Seventh Doctor when she's with any and is in more Doctorless audios than Doctor ones. The second and third take place in the timelines of novels and comics, respectively, placing them possibly outside of a linear view of Big Finish's continuity entirely. The fourth revisits throwaway lines about the Doctor having had a significant encounter with Mary Shelley, putting her in the companion role. I remember it as a mixed back with a good first story, an inconsequential second and third, and an unusually audacious hit-or-miss comedy turn for the fourth. I'm looking forward to relistening.

After listening to 1/4 Benny's Story 

This story has some narration, first-person past tense from Bernice, but is full-cast. Bernice introduces herself in a way that informs the listener of her history with the Doctor and places this story in her timeline somewhere after Legion, though not very specifically. As she tells it, this adventure is her second-ever encounter with this particular incarnation of the Doctor. Looking it up online, I see that the mentions of their first encounter refer to the novel The Dying Days by the same author, Lance Parkin. She also mentions the events of Love and War, putting a different pronunciation on the word "Hoothi" than the later audio adaptation of that novel would use.
It's not clear when this is happening for the eighth Doctor, but he has a zest for life and casualness that suggest it's before the Charley Pollard arc, or a side trip away from the Charley Pollard arc pre-Zagreus.
The story involves Gallifreyan technology going wrong and causing temporal problems. At the end, Bernice is concerned about the aftermath of these problems, while the Doctor seems unconcerned and sure he can handle them if any arise. This, too, seems to place things well before Zagreus.
There is a vaguely metafictional element involving a character who has read ancient writings about Gallifrey. She's not specifically aware of any of the Doctor's adventures, however.
A continuity hook is introduced allowing further adventures of Bernice and the eighth Doctor to slot neatly in. As far as I know, this hook hasn't yet been used.
I enjoyed this story. It had an appropriate amount of plot for a half-CD-length audiodrama, good performances, and good use of its protagonist pairing.

After listening to 2/4 Fitz's Story

I don't know the details of the timeline of the BBC Books novels in which this story is situated. The Doctor remembers Sam and is traveling with Fitz and Anji. The's no direct mention of Gallifrey or Time Lords, but also no mention of amnesia. The Doctor knows the weaknesses of many alien invaders, trusts his companions and doesn't expect them to follow his every order to the letter, and seems generally happy and optimistic.
This story begins and ends with comedy and doesn't step away from comedy for very long. It concerns a planet the Doctor describes as Earth-like, by which he means it is television-obsessed and frequently invaded by aliens. The Doctor has saved the planet repeatedly, and as he isn't there full-time, people are concerned about the next invasion. A company is using the Doctor's likeness to advertise private anti-alien defense services, and the story begins with the Doctor and Fitz finding this out while Anji (not appearing in the story) is sleeping off an alien cocktail Fitz had served her.
I enjoyed this story. It is a very light episode in tone, but it is eventful and has a clear narrative arc with a conclusion. Writer Stephen Cole had previously written Fitz in a few of the novels, and I think I might look into reading one of those.

After listening to 3/4 Izzy's Story

After gives an introduction speech parodying Trainspotting, this story begins with heavily narrated events. It turns out Izzy is on the TARDIS loudly reading a comic book that is a clear pastiche of 2000AD, and events zoom out from what's happening within the comic to Izzy attempting to acquire a rare issue. Aliens are also after the issue, for silly reasons. Various aspects of the British comics industry are parodied, with a slight focus on the 1980's.
The focus on the British comics industry is informed by the fact that Izzy's previous adventures with the eighth Doctor had occurred in Doctor Who Magazine comics, which were published by Marvel at the time but had more in common culturally with 2000AD than with Marvel's own brand. Alan Barnes, writer of Izzy's Story, had been the writer of many of those comics, including Izzy's introduction and first several adventures.
This story felt a little bit rushed to me. An entire disc might have been too long, but it could have used another ten or fifteen minutes to give the jokes breathing room and characterize side characters. It wasn't too hard to follow at the pace it had, and I was entertained.

After listening to 4/4 Mary's Story

This story was not made to be taken seriously, and yet later releases followed up on it as serious. It involves an older, scarred eighth Doctor who has been exposed to "vitreous time" and passes out in front of Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and company after getting out the words "doctor" and "Frankenstein". Percy Shelley is high on laudanum and, thinking the Doctor dead, hooks him up to a lightning rod to see what will happen. This future version of the Doctor has memories from Big Finish audios, Doctor Who Magazine comics, Radio Times comics, and BBC Books novels, and at one point wonders whether it is time for him to go "home". If we insist on pretending to take the timeline question seriously, he seems to be either from further in the future than even the Time War audios, or from a timeline branch that never happened.
A pre-Charley eighth Doctor arrives in response to the later Doctor's distress signal. He's left "Samson" and "Gemma" in Vienna, which narrows down his continuity placement considerably. The two Doctors do not get along well even after the Frankenstein one stops rampaging.
The events of this story take authorial agency away from the Doctor Who version of Mary Shelley even more than Timelash took it away from the Doctor Who version of H. G. Wells.
Mary's Story is sort of must-listen in a car-crash way; it's well produced and certainly does the thing it sets out to do, but the thing it sets out to do is tonally a very strange thing to be doing in a Doctor Who, veering closer to The Curse of Fatal Death than to other precedents.
(Mary's Story is followed by some additional content; at the time this was released the monthly Doctor Who audios had a running bonus feature, serializing a story titled The Three Companions in pieces across many separate releases. I don't consider The Three Companions to be within the scope of this post.)
The Company of Friends seems to be organized by escalating degree of craziness, starting with a mostly straightforward Bernice Summerfield adventure, followed by mild corporate satire, followed by satire of comic books in particular, followed by the Doctor being the historical Frankenstein's Monster. It is certainly a ride, and if it sounds like a ride you want to be on it is worth getting.