Proving true the old adage that nobody (give or take the occasional Christopher Eccleston) is ever really done with Doctor Who, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are set to reprise their roles of the 10th Doctor and Donna Noble in a trio of hour-long audio plays due out next May. It will be the first time this particular TARDIS team has reunited since “Journey’s End,” way back in 2008. (Well, apart from the following year’s “The End Of Time,” but there Donna was an amnesiac and couldn’t so much as set eyes on the Doctor without her brain exploding. Look, Doctor Who is hard to summarize, okay?)
Tennant will become the seventh Doctor to reprise his role on audio for Big Finish Productions, joining classic series stars Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann, plus the recently announced John Hurt. Tennant was likely to be the first new series Doctor to take the audio plunge, given he’s an avowed lifelong Doctor Who superfan and he had actually appeared in a bunch of Big Finish audios before he was even cast as the 10th Doctor. Plus, he and Tate really like hanging out and giving each other good-natured shit, as this newly released interview makes clear:
The return of the 10th Doctor and Donna is only the biggest of a bunch of recently announced new series audio adventures, including stories featuring Hurt’s War Doctor, Alex Kingston’s River Song, John Barrowman’s Captain Jack Harkness and the Torchwood team, Kate Stewart and UNIT, and Winston Churchill, who we’re told may also have some historical significance beyond that one appearance in a so-so 11th Doctor episode. Big Finish’s collection of classic Doctors are also set to take on new series monsters like the Weeping Angels, Judoon, Sycorax, and, um, the Sontarans. (The new series apparently doesn’t have a deep bench, as monsters go.)
These initial three 10th Doctor stories are likely just the tip of a very nerdy iceberg—Big Finish refers to the stories as “Volume 1,” though they make no mention of potential follow-ups, which just leaves it to fans to speculate wildly about future adventures with other beloved 10th Doctor-era characters like Rose or Martha or, oh, let’s say, the back of Barack Obama’s head.
While Big Finish’s license long limited them to just the classic series, the terms of the recent license renewal now gives them access to anyone and anything before Peter Capaldi’s current tenure. All of which is to say that, given that Christopher Eccleston seriously isn’t coming back, we might as well all start staring longingly at Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, assuming we weren’t already doing that anyway. Or, you know, we could focus on the thing that’s actually happening, but that doesn’t sound like how Doctor Who fandom works. Anyway, here’s the last time the 10th Doctor and Donna reunited, showcasing their very particular chemistry in maybe the least audio-friendly way possible.