The Fugitive Doctor, played by Jo Martin, has divided Doctor Who fans since the moment she emerged with a signature charisma and an immortal “Let me take it from the top…”

On the one hand, that charisma was positively palpable, and every time she’s returned, Martin has anchored scenes, filled up the screen, and as some fans felt immediately, occasionally seemed to steal the focus from the “official” Doctors, Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa, by the simple power of her presence. The same fans somewhat cruelly claimed she was “more” of a Doctor than Whittaker when the two appeared together.

On the other hand, she remains practically a complete enigma. While a straight reading of the stories in which she’s appeared (especially in comic books from Titan Comics) would put her in the running as a pre-Hartnell Doctor, with Division pre-dating the likes of the Celestial Intervention Agency, there have been a whole range of other theories, that she’s something like a War Doctor incarnation or a Series 6B version of the Doctor, the Doctor we know having their memories of her erased at some point along the TV timelines we (somewhat laughably) believe we understand.

Good With Locks

For the first box set of her adventures with Big Finish, there’s some glorious licence taken and absolutely nothing given away in terms of where to place her, because the Fugitive Doctor on audio nods at least vaguely in the direction of the 6B theorists when it’s revealed that she has had a bunch of her memories stolen. 

That means we get to hear what she at least believes is her first encounter with the Daleks, though they in their turn know all about the Doctor. Not necessarily her Doctor, but the Doctor as their greatest enemy. 

It also means she can be the Fugitive Doctor without in any sense understanding why Division is chasing her through time and space. That knowledge is among her missing memories, sparking her to move largely on the instinct to run away and not be caught.

That set up, with the addition of Division cop Cosmogon (Alice Krige) to spur her flight, gives echoes of The Fugitive,  and allows this first box set to deliver energy, adventure, and above all a chance for Martin to really define her Doctor, without in any sense disturbing the fabric of canon (such as it is), or placing her definitively at a particular point in the Doctor’s chronology.

Which is both sneaky and clever and satisfying all in one punch.

What you essentially need to know is that Martin’s presence is as powerful in audio as it was on screen, delivering swagger, style and a defiantly individual approach to her Doctoring, while still being unmistakeable in any “room.” This is the Doctor as we’ve never seen or heard them before, and it’s thrilling.

Fast Times with the Fugitive Doctor

The set kicks off with a Big Finish tribute to the jailbreak format in Fast Times, by Robert Valentine. Valentine has long been a writer that can be dropped into any part of the cosmos and more or less create the template for how things work there, and he does the same here.

Introducing the chase between the Doctor and Cosmogon, he gets straight down to business and has the Doctor captured and thrown into a maximum-security prison ship.

It would be tempting to do the usual thing – have the Doctor almost immediately escape. But here, she’s more caught up in events than she is a prime mover of those events, at least initially. Despite “not doing friends,” her innate sense of fair play sees her protect an inmate called Fade (Leah Harvey) from some block bullies, and the fact that this Doctor is “good with locks” gets her more involved in the inevitable prison break than she ever initially intended to be.

Fade, on a mission of her own, travels with the Doctor in a game of time-tag, and together they outrun and out-hop Cosmogon. Ultimately the solution to that game depends on knowing your Earth history, in which this Doctor already excels. She’s also quite the skilled split-second Tardis pilot, which will only have fans frothing at the mouth in terms of where she “belongs” in the canon. Because that’s what fans do.

Valentine sets up clear strands of the Fugitive Doctor’s personality in this story – in some ways, she feels fairly fresh out of the box, not especially welcoming company in her Tardis, but in others, she has all the sass and brio (and, as mentioned, the Tardis-piloting skills) of a modern era Doctor, along with an attitude and a sense of mischief that is full-on Fugitive.

We’re not about to spoil the ending of the story for you, but Valentine delivers a lesson in turnabout being fair play without ever veering into (as the phrase has it, thank you Dead Ringers) “unearned sentimentality” or watering down the power of this incarnation. Give her a script like that and Martin with deliver it down your lugholes like a Serena Williams serve, and make all your excitement-sensors explode. Right off the bat, we’re running with the Fugitive Doctor, and we’re loving it.

Oh and did we mention – Alice Krige’s on board as Cosmogon. We don’t learn a huge amount about her personality throughout this first box set, but if you’re going to have a Doctor being pursued by anyone in this cosmos, giving the job to Krige makes a lot of sense, because here, she gives Cosmogon a sense of something far beyond “just doing my job,” including an occasional hint in her intonations that tease us with the character knowing why the Fugitive Doctor needs to be caught, far more than the Doctor does. That makes her the kind of strong, galvanising force which would trip the Doctor’s “run away!” triggers, and does, and in a sense gives the whole set its purpose.

Who Loves Ya, Baba?

The second story, The Legend of Baba Yaga by Rochana Patel, is an immediate tonal shift, a mid-section that lets you breathe, and think, and challenges the Fugitive Doctor to work out a situation that seems contrary to everything she thinks she knows.

Baba Yaga, for those of you who aren’t up on your Russian folklore, is a kind of forest witch who lives in a shack built on giant animated chicken legs, and has a host of magically enchanted objects. She also commands a handful of colourful riders who also do her bidding.

This is all an established part of our real-world folklore – you can go read the stories for yourself. But Patel drops the Fugitive Doctor into one of the better-known Baba Yaga stories and has her tiptoe through a couple of dilemmas. 

On the one hand, the Doctor believes that the forest witch could potentially help her recover her missing memories, as she has a mythic reputation both for arcane knowledge and for granted favours now and then. And on the other, she has to be careful where she puts her feet because this is folklore-as-real-life, and the one thing you don’t want to do is get yourself written into fairy stories – at least not by name.

As with Valentine’s Fast Times, there’s an expected course of Doctor-action here – Baba Yaga will turn out to be some alien supervillain getting their bleak Russian fairy tale on for some reason best known only to them. The Doctor defeats them, takes over their part in the folk tale, bish bash bosh, back to the Tardis in time for tea.

But as with Valentine’s introductory story, Patel delivers something much more interesting than such standard fare. There are elements of familiarity to the eventual, unpeeled truth of the Baba Yaga tale, and “Vasilisa the Fair” – think a freezing cold Cinderella who’ll get hypothermia unless she gets a heat source – becomes the Fugitive Doctor’s companion-cum-ward through a battle of wits as the Doctor uncovers exactly what’s going on.

It’s an incredibly intelligent, poignant, and ultimately tech-satisfying telling of a tale, and it also delivers enormous value in terms of helping to characterise the Fugitive Doctor.

The Big, Thinky Problems

On screen for the most part, we saw her either running, fighting, or double-crossing the people sent to capture her. It’s a very different vibe here to have her having to stand at least a little still and puzzle things out – particularly when the solution is more complicated and more emotionally charged than any straightforward chase or fight sequence.

Who is Baba Yaga, really? Can she help the Fugitive Doctor get her memories back? And how does this Doctor tackle the Big Thinky Problems?

Patel’s script lets Martin unveil a new strand to her Doctoring here, and it’s particularly potent stuff because her quest in this episode is ultimately tinged with disappointment and frustration and sadness. But she Doctors well and properly, refusing easy ways out when they’re not complete or “right” by her own rationale (which, written as it was significantly before the end of the 15th Doctor’s era, now feels prescient). And the result is a Doctor that also gets the chance to show her compassion during this less runaround portion of the set. 

Jacqueline King is fascinating throughout the story as Baba Yaga, delivering an antagonistic performance light years away from Sylvia Noble, but with enough investment that when, as happens towards the end of the story, the tone of the character undergoes a radical shift, she makes you feel for the forest witch on a whole new level – and the Fugitive Doctor is there to help her, because sometimes, an antagonist is more complicated than they seem. 

Midnight at the Lost and Found

Lisa McMullin closes out the box set, and she brings two sides of her storytelling clout to bear on The Dimension of Lost Things. If you want big, high-concept ideas, McMullin will never fail you. If you need small, intimate, emotion-rich relationships, she’ll deliver those instead. Here, she delivers both, in a script that’s big, bold and wonderfully bizarre, but which will also mess you up emotionally, while charting the course of an adventure that includes lost explorers, tentacular companions and, for reasons of why-the-hell-not, squirrel people.

The Dimension of Lost Things delivers on its quirky premise from the outset – all the things that mysteriously disappear, that you swear you had just a minute ago, might well end up in the Dimension, which eats keys, mobile phones, and even, occasionally, people.

Which is how we come to spend an adventure with real-life explorer and climber of mountains, Sandy Irvine (Matt Wycliffe), who along with the more famous George Mallory was believed to have died on an expedition to Everest in 1924. 

Irvine proves to be a mostly solid and useful lump of derring-do in the spirit which probably inspired a young Harry Sullivan, but there are weirdnesses aplenty to combat in The Dimension of Lost Things – not least the insidiousness of the place’s atmosphere, which if allowed to do so will cause you to lose everything, including hope, self-recognition, and of course eventually, life. 

When things get a touch timey-wimey, Jo Martin sticks the landing with a combination of optimism and reality-facing in her Doctoring, even as it becomes clear that the things the Fugitive Doctor has lost will not be found in the junkyard dimension. A final confrontation with Cosmogon in the box set is more Time Lord Clever than it is especially vicious or vitriolic, and we come out of the set with a resolution to Irvine’s story which, tragically, may be undercut by the relatively recent discovery of what appear to be his remains on Everest. 

(Obviously, his remains were going to be discovered on Everest, but at least in our heads, the Most Wanted box set allows him a happier destiny, and one to which we can fictionally cling).

More, More, More!

Most Wanted is an absolute belter of a box set for the Fugitive Doctor. It takes the trickiness of her premise – when is she from, what does she know? – and folds it into a central column of mystery that becomes a part of her driving force without ever getting in the way of either her fundamental personality or her frantic onward adventuring. 

It’s the chance you’ve been craving to find out more about who the Fugitive Doctor is through her actions in a hostile cosmos, and a joyous platform on which to raise Jo Martin’s powerful performance by giving her much, much more to do than she’s ever been allowed as yet on screen.

Most wanted? Damn straight. This was a highly anticipated release and it knocks all expectations out of the park. Get it in your ears and start running with the Fugitive Doctor today. She doesn’t exactly do “friends” – but stick around and you’ll hear her fly. Tony Fyler