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Chronology, Continuity & Canon are the eternal obsessions of fans of all TV shows, not just fans of Doctor Who. At its simplest, when something is established we don't like it when it's subsequently contradicted. We like to know the exact order when things happen and we pay attention when characters mention things we haven't seen on TV. It has always been part of the fictional reality of Doctor Who that the characters have a life beyond what we see them doing on TV. The inference is that the adventures we see the Doctor having on TV aren't the only ones he has. Question is, what are those adventures and when do they take place? And before you know it, you're off and playing Hunt The Story Gap, trying to track down the places where those non-TV adventures happened. Cue that other eternal hallmark of the fan - The List.

For the Eighth Doctor, things are either complicated or simplified, depending on your point of view, by the fact that he only had two outings on TV, giving him a very short Canon of stories. But he also had a chronology in books and comic strips.The Eighth Doctor's life in books started off with The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, the last of the Virgin Books' range that had previously chronicled the New and Missing Adventures of Doctors One to Seven. Later BBC Books took up the reins and produced their own range of original novels for the first Seven Doctors before the return of the New Series in 2005 put paid to the Past Doctors range of books in order to concentrate, understandably, on the new Ninth Doctor and Rose.

The Eighth Doctor also appeared in both the short-lived Radio Times strip and DWM's ongoing Comic Strip, his first appearance being in Endgame featuring the Celestial Toymaker and the arrival of new comic strip companion Izzy Sinclair. So the Eighth Doctor exists in three separate timelines in three different media universes - The Books Universe, The Comics Universe and The Audios Universe. Before we consider how we can, if indeed we should, integrate these chronologies, we should take a moment to consider the issue of the primacy of a text.

Doctor Who texts, the various stories told in various media for more than fifty years now, split into two basic types - Primary and Secondary. Primary Texts are those TV episodes featuring each individual Doctor. The reason for this is that Doctor Who is, first and foremost, a TV Show. Television was its originating media, everything else - books & comic strips - came later. Doctor Who is a TV Show that was subsequently turned into books and comic strips and short stories. These later texts in other media are Secondary Texts. The guiding principle of Chronology is that a Primary Text takes precedence over a Secondary one. So if a TV Story says one thing and a Novel says something contradictory, the general principle is that it's the book that's wrong as it's the Secondary Text. Of course, being Doctor Who, there's always the option of something happening and then not happening, Time being rewritten, but the guiding principle is that a Primary Text takes precedence over a Secondary one.

A Secondary Text is therefore not strictly "Canon" unless legitimised by a Primary Text - if a TV Story references something that only happened in a Comic Strip or a Novel, then that makes it Canon and gives it Primacy too. In the case of the Eighth Doctor, we have The Night of The Doctor as an clear example of an, arguably, Primary Text of an Eighth Doctor adventure on TV legitimising the Secondary Texts of the Big Finish audio adventures. Just before he regenerates in to John Hurt's War Doctor, the Paul McGann Doctor namechecks his Big Finish companions. Therefore it can be argued that the Big Finish audios are no longer Secondary Texts but have gained Primacy through their legitimisation by being mentioned in The Night of The Doctor on television, the medium of Textual Primacy.

In terms of Chronology this would appear to mean that we have to accept Big Finish adventures on an equal footing with the television adventures we have seen. The central creative conceit, that the audios are the soundtracks of "lost" television adventures, particularly for the Eighth Doctor, means we have to integrate them in a timeline that occurs between the beginning and end of the Eighth Doctor's life as seen onscreen. A simple listing of the adventures we have heard, in release order, without the need to work out which TV Stories they appeared between since there are only two of them, the very beginning and the very end. Which would be easy enough to do were it not for The Company of Friends.

The Company of Friends potentially makes coordinating the Eighth Doctor's timeline rather more complicated than we first thought. That timeline should consist of the stories, sequentially released, featuring first Charley Pollard, then Lucie Miller and, to date, Molly O'Sullivan. But now we have an audio that references the Secondary Texts of the Eighth Doctor's other timelines in comics and books, featuring three companions from those texts alongside a fourth, mentioned in Storm Warning, the very first Eighth Doctor release from Big Finish, but unheard until now - Mary Shelley. The other three companions in The Company of Friends are:

Prof Bernice Summerfield from the Virgin New Adventures novels and the DWM Comic Strip
Fitz Kreiner from the BBC Novels rage
Izzy Sinclair from the DWM Comic Strip.

Which in turn gives us several options when it comes to coordinating and reconciling the various ranges: TV + Big Finish + "The Dying Days" + BBC Books + DWM Comic Strip etc

Since this is primarily a "TV + Big Finish" Chronology, and I have neither the time, energy not inclination to co-ordinate that lot, I will leave that to others to undertake. As for this Chronology, its guiding principle will continue to be that the Books and the Comic Strips remain Secondary Texts until similarly legitimised in a Doctor Who TV episode.

But what of future audio adaptations of those Secondary Texts? For instance, Benny's Story references the events of the Virgin book The Dying Days but that book has not - yet - been adapted for audio. On the other hand, the Virgin New Adventures Love And War and The Highest Science have, so those can be included in this Chronology. My position on the other Secondary Texts from the Books Universe, is that they exist between those that have been adapted as Untold Adventures similar to any other Story Gap for any of the Doctors.