The Defectors (Nicholas Briggs)

Taking Big Finish's main Doctor Who range up to its milestone 200th release sees a trilogy of special stories. As Big Finish's Doctor Who main range has been their backbone since July 1999 Executive Producer Nicholas Briggs revealed that 'In April, May and June - for releases 198, 199 and 200 - we are doing something very special indeed, which is all the idea of script editor Alan Barnes'.

Alan Barnes has stated 'I thought: what if the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors turned up bang in the middle of earlier, unseen adventures - standing in for their 'proper' selves, who've gone AWOL for some reason or other...? Locum Doctors, if you will! And so that's what we've done...'.

Seventh Doctor

These three stories pose the question 'If any of the Doctors changed their own past, even in the smallest way... what might happen to their future?'

We therefore get the chance to see these later Doctors interact with earlier companions, and inhabit types of stories that typified the earlier era of the show, plus there's the mystery of how and why it's all happening.

'Also, it brings up lots of questions about how Doctor Who stories from different eras work with their particular Doctor, and how that gets changed if you put a different Doctor in there', Nicholas Briggs, Executive Producer, and writer of this first story, has revealed. 'Then you start discovering that, contrary to what we all like to say, it's not the same character, and there are certain very specific nuances that do change the way in which stories are told with different Doctors, and the very nature of those stories'.

This story, released in April 2015, is a Seventh Doctor story, starring Sylvester McCoy, called "The Defectors" where he finds himself on a mysterious island in extremely unexpected circumstances...

"The Defectors" has been written and directed by Nicholas Briggs and was recorded on the 11th and 12th November 2014.

It pairs the Seventh Doctor with the Third Doctor's companion Jo Grant, while Richard Franklin also appears as Captain Mike Yates. Also starring are: Neil Roberts, Barnaby Edwards, David Graham, Rachel Bavidge and Jez Fielder.

Jo Grant

The basic setup is that The Doctor and Jo Grant are required, because of some, government emergency, to be taken to a special location by the British government who overrule UNIT and extract the entire team from UNIT HQ.

'The challenge is to put your displaced Doctor into an adventure which feels like it comes from another era, and he has to work out why he's here and what he's supposed to do', Nicholas Briggs has revealed. 'It brings up lots of questions about what makes the Doctors different. This one is a different spin on the 'base under siege' scenario, set on a remote island, but still involving lots of government and UNIT shenanigans'.

'Because we don't have Nicholas Courtney, I had to contrive something to take Jo away from UNIT, and build a mystery around why none of the regular UNIT people were there. That gave me a way into the story, actually. So in a bizarre way, I've sort of taken the Patrick Troughton base-under-siege thing, relocated it to the Jon Pertwee era, and put it on an island - and put the Seventh Doctor in it!'

'But I think it feels very much like a Third Doctor story, because of Jo', Nicholas Briggs has revealed. 'Jo, who's having difficulty accepting the Seventh Doctor, still can't instinctively feel that it's him, even though he's proved himself. We have her expecting more certainty from The Doctor, but Sylvester McCoy's Doctor is more likely to say "Well, I don't know"'. So she almost takes on the role of the Third Doctor. She keeps saying "What would my Doctor do?" That was one of the things I was playing with'.

'I think the Seventh Doctor very much struggles with what he thinks the Third Doctor might have got wrong in this scenario, and wonders what it is he has to do to maybe put it right - but he's not even sure that's why he's there. Actually, the way things happen, events run out of control, and it's very difficult for The Doctor to grab hold of them and do anything about it'.

On the Back Cover:

Jo Grant is shocked to find most of her colleagues are missing. Then she discovers that the Doctor has inexplicably changed.

But there’s little time to worry about it all, as she and her misplaced Time Lord friend are whisked to the mysterious Delphin Isle on a matter of national security. There, they encounter a disturbingly odd form of local hospitality and learn of a highly classified incident that took place during the Cold War.

Why exactly have they been brought here? And what is the truth concerning the bodies in the harbour and the vast project being undertaken under a cloak of secrecy?