Doctor Who Unbound

Doctor Who Unbound was a series produced by Big Finish Productions. It featured hypothetical stories set in variants of the Doctor Who universe with premises fundamentally altered.

These premises were often built upon "what if" propositions such as; "what if the Doctor hadn't left Gallifrey" (Auld Mortality), "what if the Doctor hadn't been UNIT's scientific advisor?" (Sympathy for the Devil) and "what if the Valeyard had won" (He Jests at Scars...). Others like Full Fathom Five's story was more vague built upon the idea of "what if the Doctor believed the ends justified the means?", while Deadline takes on the more meta-textual premise of "what if Doctor Who had never existed?" The final story in the ongoing series, Exile, featured a female Doctor, an idea that has been raised several times throughout Doctor Who's production. Each one featured a Doctor created specifically for the series, aside from He Jests at Scars, which featured the Valeyard.

First released in 2003, the first series of six Unbound stories were part of Big Finish's celebration of the 40th anniversary year of Doctor Who. Two subsequent stories were released in later years: the 2005 story A Storm of Angels was a sequel to Auld Mortality, and the 2008 story Masters of War was a sequel to Sympathy for the Devil.

As later recalled by Nicholas Briggs, the series was discontinued due to a feeling of having exhausted the "what-if" scenarios synonymous with the series, and after the BBC requested that Big Finish not cast any new actors as the Doctor, as they wanted to avoid mixed messages around the time of casting a new Doctor themselves.^[1]

In 2016, the Sympathy for the Devil version of the Doctor and the Master returned for The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield Series 3, The Unbound Universe, in which Benny, a companion to the mainstream Doctors, crossed over into the parallel world of the Unbound Third Doctor, finding it devastated by a cosmic war. This Doctor and Master would return in the subsequent volume, Ruler of the Universe, after which the Unbound Doctor travelled with Benny to the N-Space, with their travels subsequently continuing in Series 5, 6 and 7 of the New Adventures, Buried Memories, Lost in Translation, and Blood & Steel. This Doctor also appeared alongside Benny in one story of The Story So Far: Volume Two and alongside Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor (the War Doctor degenerating into a future incarnation) in the audio story Time Lord Immemorial as part of Big Finish's 60 anniversary special Once and Future, although set before his jump into the main universe from the Unbound Doctor's perspective. The Master of this universe also reappeared in stories opposite mainstream incarnations of the Master in the fourth volume of The War Master, Anti-Genesis, and in Masterful, the special marking the 50th anniversary of the Master's television debut.

The series relaunched in 2022 with Doctor of War, a saga exploring possible events had the Fourth Doctor fulfilled his mission in Genesis of the Daleks. It starred Colin Baker as an alternative version of the War Doctor known as the Warrior. Also in 2022, Big Finish released Unbound: 1 - 8 Collected, a boxset containing the first eight releases of the series.

Stories[[edit] | [edit source]]

Original range[[edit] | [edit source]]

#	Title	Author	Doctor / Main character	Featuring	Released
1	Auld Mortality	Marc Platt	The Doctor (Unbound 1)	Susan (Unbound)	May 2003
2	Sympathy for the Devil	Jonathan Clements	The Doctor (Unbound 2)	Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Unbound), Unbound Master	June 2003
3	Full Fathom Five	David Bishop	The Doctor (Unbound 3), The New Doctor (Unbound 3)	Ruth	July 2003
4	He Jests at Scars...	Gary Russell	The Valeyard, Melanie Bush	Ellie Martin, Vansell	August 2003
5	Deadline	Robert Shearman	Martin Bannister/Doctor Who	Barbara, Philip, Amy/Susan	September 2003
6	Exile	Nicholas Briggs	Previous Doctor (Unbound 6), The Doctor (Unbound 6)	Cherrie, Cheese	October 2003
7	A Storm of Angels	Marc Platt	The Doctor (Unbound 1)	Susan (Unbound)	January 2005
8	Masters of War	Eddie Robson	The Doctor (Unbound 2)	Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Unbound), Daleks (Unbound), Davros (Unbound)	December 2008

Doctor of War[[edit] | [edit source]]

Main article: Doctor of War (audio series)

Genesis[[edit] | [edit source]]

Main article: Genesis (audio anthology)

#	Title	Author	Doctor / Main character	Featuring	Released
1.1	Dust Devil	John Dorney	The Warrior	Fourth Doctor, Harry Sullivan, Sarah Jane Smith, Sixth Doctor, Peri Brown, Miss Brown, Narvin	13 April 2022
1.2	Aftershocks	Lou Morgan		The Master, Daleks, Narvin
1.3	The Difference Office	James Kettle		Romana, Borusa, Styggron, Narvin

Destiny[[edit] | [edit source]]

Main article: Destiny (audio anthology)

#	Title	Author	Doctor / Main character	Featuring	Released
2.1	Who Am I?	Nigel Fairs	The Warrior	The Master, Leela, Xoanon	27 September 2022
2.2	Time Killers	Lizzie Hopley		The Master
2.3	The Key To Key To Time	Tim Foley		White Guardian , Davros

Other usage of the term[[edit] | [edit source]]

Aside from stories officially released under the Doctor Who Unbound range, the "unbound" term has been adopted as a general descriptor of out-of-continuity stories or concepts. Paul Cornell, writer of Scream of the Shalka (which was retroactively subsumed in continuity by the BBC Wales Doctor Who series) once jokingly captioned an image taken of himself with cosplayers of the Doctor and Master from Scream of the Shalka, "Dude, they’re, like, cosplaying my unbound!"^[2] Nicholas Briggs has also informally described certain stories in Big Finish's Sherlock Holmes range which don't fit into its general continuity as "Sherlock Holmes Unbound."^[3] Furthermore, prior to the Big Finish website update removing the ability to filter by Doctor, Trevor Martin's Doctor from AUDIO: Seven Keys to Doomsday was categorised as an "Unbound" incarnation.