The Companion Chronicles

The Companion Chronicles was a monthly Big Finish Productions audio series that ran for 80 releases across eight seasons between 2007 and 2014.

The general, but not invariable, ambition of the series was to tell stories using the companions of the first four Doctors. The typical release in the range used just two actors, a musical score, some foley work and sound design — meaning that the end result sat somewhere between an audio book and a full-cast drama.

Concept
Originally, the concept was to produce talking books featuring the companions of the first four incarnations of the Doctor who were unavailable to take part in the main range. While the range has remained primarily focused on companions who appeared earlier than season 19, most releases in the range have not been true "talking books". In fact, all but one release — The Stealers from Saiph — use the convention of at least two characters in conversation with each other. Most have a sound design worthy of any title in the main range. On rare occasion the range has moved away from its titular concern to feature characters — like Sara Kingdom, King Peladon and Henry Gordon Jago — who are more properly considered "prominent guest stars" or "allies".

Format and structure
In general, Companion Chronicles have a fairly standard format. They are usually two, 25-ish minute episodes divided by a single cliffhanger. The part of the story that has to do with the Doctor is almost always told in flashback, as a recollection of a past adventure. Thus, the central character of the piece (i.e., the companion) is often depicted in two time periods. That is, there is typically an "older" version of the companion who recounts the adventure with the Doctor, and the "younger" version of the character, who is as he or she appeared on television.

The actor not portraying a companion is used in a variety of ways to allow stories in the range to have markedly different structures. Some common narrative uses for the second actor are:
 * to voice a character trying to get the companion to recollect his or her past, as in Ringpullworld
 * to voice a friend of the companion, as in The Transit of Venus
 * to voice the principal adversary, as with Fear of the Daleks

Sometimes, the interrogator is revealed to be the principal adversary, as in Mother Russia or Frostfire; sometimes the listener knows the interrogator is the adversary right from the start, as with The Catalyst. In any case, the relationship between ex-companion and interrogator is usually a pretty obvious "framing device", which takes up a clear minority of the runtime of the release. However, in a few rare cases, as with the Home Truths trilogy, the interrogator is a co-star equal with the featured character and is given a a proper story with the "present day" companion woven into the companion's recollections of the Doctor's TARDIS.

The 2011 release Tales from the Vault was a departure from the "enhanced audiobook" format, being effectively a straight audio drama (albeit still one with a limited cast) that incorporated interviews with various companions.

Continuity
A few of the plays tie in to others in the Big Finish Doctor Who range. The Darkening Eye is a prequel to The Death Collectors; Night's Black Agents explicitly occurs between City of Spires and The Wreck of the Titan; the Leela trilogy which begins with The Catalyst relies to some degree on the listener's knowledge of the Gallifrey audio series; and The Prisoner's Dilemma occupies a complicated narrative space, tying together the Virgin New Adventures with Big Finish's Key 2 Time series.

All the plays add to the their main characters' televised continuities. More than a few detail an extra adventure in a way that doesn't add much to their lives, however. For instance, Mother Russia gives Steven a holiday in Napoleonic Russia between The Gunfighters and The Savages. Even the interchange with his interrogator is set within the main story. Thus, Steven gains merely another adventure that fits neatly in his established, televised timeline.

By contrast, other plays significantly expand the known fates of their principal characters. For instance, the "Home Truths trilogy", taking place between episodes of Sara Kingdom's only televised story, The Daleks' Master Plan, reveals that she had other adventures with Steven and the Doctor besides the quest for taranium which was the central plot of her televised adventure. More significantly, the trilogy also gives Sara, or at least her consciousness, a thousand-year-lifespan, a way to have met a different incarnation of the Doctor and thus a second chance to travel in the TARDIS.

Most plays settle somewhere between these two extremes. Thanks in part to the typical interrogative "framing device", most of the plays reveal something about the lives of the Doctor's companions after leaving him. In the very first Companion Chronicle, for instance, Vicki is shown to have remained with Troilus and to have had a large family. Equally, the series shows that Susan Foreman stayed with David Campbell, Jo Jones continued her globe-trotting life with Dr. Clifford Jones and Victoria settled down to raise a family.

Future
While the monthly Companion Chronicles are ending in 2014 after the 80th release in the range, Nicholas Briggs has not ruled out future releases under the banner.

"We've noticed that our customers are starting to pick and choose, which affects the commercial viability of the range. There's so much Doctor Who stuff on offer, there's always a danger of ranges feeding off each other, as it were, in terms of sales. So people desert one range to try another one, simply because they can't afford to buy them all. This was happening to the Companion Chronicles. So we're stopping them to give people a chance to catch up. [...] BUT, we will certainly revisit them, with specials and perhaps even box sets. So we're not really stopping them, just changing the pattern in which they are released."

- Nicholas Briggs

Special releases

 * The Three Companions was a twelve-part serialised story issued as a bonus with the regular monthly Big Finish Doctor Who releases, beginning with The Magic Mousetrap in April 2009 and concluded with Survival of the Fittest in February 2010. An edited-together version of the story is available in The Companion Chronicles: The Specials box set, released in August 2011.
 * Three stories were available for a limited time as free downloadable content for readers of Doctor Who Magazine: The Mists of Time in August 2009 via DWM 411, Freakshow in March 2010 via DWM 419 and The Revenants in May 2012 via DWM 448. The Mists of Time and Freakshow are also available in The Specials box set.