• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Doctor Who Unbound: Full Fathom Five

My second favourite of the Unbound audios. David Collings makes for a good performance as the Doctor even this nasty version, and I'm a big fan of things set on underwater bases.

@M_Kresal makes a very good point that this story (and I suppose a few of the other Unbound too) came just at the right point before the programme was revived. Might be why the Unbound range has never properly had a second run (one of sequels to Auld Mortality and Sympathy for the Devil aside) where as it seems almost every spin-off and their dog has had a multi-series run.
 
@M_Kresal does describe the set up of this story well. For a long time it does feel like the start of a classic base under siege story. Then the Doctor has a discussion with a character about do the ends justify the means, which takes a sudden unexpected turn. Yes, there were hints dropped earlier, but our pre-conceptions about the Doctor do get in the way of noticing them.


Might be why the Unbound range has never properly had a second run (one of sequels to Auld Mortality and Sympathy for the Devil aside) where as it seems almost every spin-off and their dog has had a multi-series run.

Well apart from David Warner’s Doctor migrating to the Bernie Summerfield series.

planet-X.jpg


They do make a good pairing - there’s an entertaining amount of antagonism between them, and something of a competition between them about which one is the most cynical.
 
I did forget that, @Ncw8, have to admit the Bernice audios were the one rabbit hole I never went down.

Wonder if they asked the BBC if they could crossover any canon Doctor only to receive a curt "naw m8".

Could be. I haven’t listened to all of them, but the ones with Warner are all fairly light-hearted. I think they do take the occasional pot-shot at Nu-Who, for example by having Warner’s Doctor be President of the Universe (similar to Capaldi’s being President of Earth), but it’s a bit oblique.

I did try a couple of the earlier audios, and they tend to be a lot darker. Just War, for example, is set in Guernsey in 1941 and is definitely not played for laughs.
 
@M_Kresal makes a very good point that this story (and I suppose a few of the other Unbound too) came just at the right point before the programme was revived. Might be why the Unbound range has never properly had a second run (one of sequels to Auld Mortality and Sympathy for the Devil aside) where as it seems almost every spin-off and their dog has had a multi-series run.

Oh yeah, there's quite a few audios and spinoffs that may be still in print but you just know wouldn't have happened, or happened that way, before. The 2005 UNITs with the swearing and terrorism and murders, for example, and definitely not some of the Unbounds because of what they have the Doctor do. Can definitely see the BBC going "why is the Doctor not acting Doctorily?" (and Warner does go a bit more traditional in Masters of Wars, done at the revived show's height)

Though OTOH, must be hard to do Unbounds now. You've got the obvious ones of "Doctor never leaves Gallifrey", "Doctor wasn't around for UNIT", "Doctor alters time", "DOCTOR IS GIRL???", even "what if no Doctor Who on telly". What's left to do? ("What if Doctor Who was American", maybe, but that would take a lot of care to not suck and you'd need to decide what that means, as in having Trek-style two-fisted science adventures or is it a Buffy-style teen show or what? Either way, you know you need to cast Scott Bakula as Dr Who)
 
My own Unbound idea has always been that there's no Watcher in Logopolis, so the Fourth Doctor has a long, drawn out, painful death and the alternate Fifth Doctor is born an angry, bitter, vengeful man.

Final twist would be that, after going too far, this alternate Fifth Doctor is the Watcher.
 
The impression I've gotten regarding the lack of further Unbound audios (beyond the two sequels) was partly due to the "Well we've done the big ones," after the six initial ones. Keep in mind that, The Inside Story at least, says the original idea for the series was to do more specific jumping off points from Classic Who before everyone realized that was quite limiting in many ways (that and the ideas they first hit upon involved actors who weren't then working with them). Though I also get the impression that Modern Who kicking off and at least one of the Unbound Doctor's having been considered for the role in 2005 before someone realized they'd already played the part likewise played a part in the decision making. Given that we've learned in the last decade or so that Big Finish came within a meeting of losing the Who license all together because of rights being brought back in-house when the revival happened, and then sales took a major hit for a couple of years after the TV show started airing again, I can understand them not pursuing the matter too much. Though I adore the Warner Doctor/Benny audios and sent in something during the brief open submission window for them a couple of years ago (didn't make it in, sadly).

My own Unbound idea has always been that there's no Watcher in Logopolis, so the Fourth Doctor has a long, drawn out, painful death and the alternate Fifth Doctor is born an angry, bitter, vengeful man.

Final twist would be that, after going too far, this alternate Fifth Doctor is the Watcher.

That would be interesting to hear, I have to say. And perhaps not so much Unbound as filling in just what the #$% was going on with the Watcher to begin with.
 
The impression I've gotten regarding the lack of further Unbound audios (beyond the two sequels) was partly due to the "Well we've done the big ones," after the six initial ones.

Even then Deadline doesn’t really fit the remit as it’s not an in-universe alternate timeline. But I won’t steal the thunder from a future article.

Given that we've learned in the last decade or so that Big Finish came within a meeting of losing the Who license all together because of rights being brought back in-house when the revival happened, and then sales took a major hit for a couple of years after the TV show started airing again, I can understand them not pursuing the matter too much.

I hadn’t heard that they were that close to losing the rights. It’s not surprising that it could happen though, given that Virgin lost the book rights even without a revived tv series, and Big Finish had already lost the rights to Sapphire and Steel and The Tomorrow People. It looks like they were prepared for it happening and had followed Virgin’s example of spinning off a couple of series featuring their own characters.
 
Even then Deadline doesn’t really fit the remit as it’s not an in-universe alternate timeline. But I won’t steal the thunder from a future article.

Deadline is an interesting one because a number of its ideas started off as an entirely separate Radio 4 drama that Rob Shearman and Nev Fountain pitched. In some ways, the Unbound was an a sort of inversion of their ideas. But, as you said, "I won't steal thunder from a future article." Though I may tease a bit... 😏


I hadn’t heard that they were that close to losing the rights. It’s not surprising that it could happen though, given that Virgin lost the book rights even without a revived tv series, and Big Finish had already lost the rights to Sapphire and Steel and The Tomorrow People. It looks like they were prepared for it happening and had followed Virgin’s example of spinning off a couple of series featuring their own characters.

RTD tells the story in the Doctor Forever!: The Apocalypse Element documentary that's on the special edition release of The Visitation (and now on the first Peter Davison season/Season 19 Blu-Ray release). Mal Young of BBC Drama, who was an executive producer on that first revival series (and it only), had gone through a flap with an EastEnders DVD release (Slaters in Detention, IIRC) due to complications with the BBC Charter and the license fee and the DVD's "Never to be shown on TV" tagline. So Young was very sensitive both about possible merchandise opportunities for a revived Who and of things that might cross the line in the same way. There was apparently a meeting where such things were discussed Big Finish briefly came up. "Briefly" because RTD put in a "Don't worry about that, I'll keep an eye on it," which seemed to appease him and the conversation moved on. As RTD said in the documentary: "I swear to god, if Mal Young had found out about Big Finish, he would have canceled them. He would have axed their license.”
 
If we're doing Unbound ideas, my shout has always been doing an inverse of Sympathy For The Devil; for one reason or another, the Doctor's exile is never lifted. Eventually, UNIT get permission to dig around in the wreck of the old TARDIS, and start to take notes of what they find. The Time Lords thought that by binding the Doctor to one planet, they'd get rid of any changes in their clockwork universe, but now it looks like those little mice he's friends with (and their lizardy friends, the Sea Base 4 incident going a little better with a Doctor with more local knowledge) are getting time-active. Something Must Be Done...

A Time War is in the air. Which side is the Doctor, an alien on Earth but an Earthman to Gallifrey, going to choose?
 
If we're doing Unbound ideas, my shout has always been doing an inverse of Sympathy For The Devil; for one reason or another, the Doctor's exile is never lifted. Eventually, UNIT get permission to dig around in the wreck of the old TARDIS, and start to take notes of what they find. The Time Lords thought that by binding the Doctor to one planet, they'd get rid of any changes in their clockwork universe, but now it looks like those little mice he's friends with (and their lizardy friends, the Sea Base 4 incident going a little better with a Doctor with more local knowledge) are getting time-active. Something Must Be Done...

A Time War is in the air. Which side is the Doctor, an alien on Earth but an Earthman to Gallifrey, going to choose?

It's a neat idea, though the Doctor must have been exiled for well over a century for the events at Sea Base 4 to play out.
Craig Hinton touched upon a similar idea as one of the many alternate timelines featured in his Past Doctor Adventure The Quantum Archangel where a Mel who becomes the British Prime Minister during the events of Silver Nemesis leans on a still exiled Third Doctor for help. A Third Doctor who, after nearly two decades in exile, betrays humanity for the Cybermen getting him off the Earth at long last.
I've had a vague idea in my head for a long time about doing an Unbound where either Silurians or Warriors of the Deep plays out differently, allowing humanity and the reptiles to co-exist but the Doctor being stuck in the middle as a peacekeeper between them, watching the long-term results play out over years and decades.
 
There was a pretty good DWM strip in the tie-in-with-the-NAs days, where they find a reality where the two species have been allied for 25 years and it's now the United Races Intelligence Command. (Then they found out Blood Heat was out the same month!)
 
Back
Top