Review: Doctor Who: Alixion
By Matthew Kresal.
When Survival aired in November and December 1989, a number of ideas and serials were in development for Doctor Who’s 27th season. Ones that would, ultimately, go unmade when the series entered what has instead become known to its fans as the Wilderness Era. One of which has earned a place in fandom as a potential regeneration story for Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor set in a former monastery turned spa with giant beetles crawling beneath it.
It wasn’t until thirty-five years later that Alixion had a chance to shine, offering a glimpse of what the series could have been in 1990.
The origins of Alixion date back to the mid-1980s. Writer Robin Mukherjee had experienced success as a writer for the stage and radio but was looking to break into the more lucrative business of writing for television. His efforts landed him at a workshop with the BBC Scripts Unit alongside another up and comer named Andrew Cartmel. When Cartmel was appointed Doctor Who’s script editor in 1987, he turned to those at the workshop for potential scripts, as well as offering a potential career break. Mukherjee was a fan of the series dating back to the 1960s, something that he would relate in Doctor Who Magazine issue 620 in 2025, and took Cartmel up on the opportunity.
Mukerjee’s inexperience with the television made development an extended process. So much so that despite being pencilled in for the 1988 season, Curry’s The Happiness Patrol had to replace it. Development continued on it throughout 1989 and, by the time production finished on season 26, it looked as though Mukherjee might finally get a story onto the screen in one of the three serial slots the following year, held in reserve in case another script fell through.
Which, of course, is when Doctor Who ceased production, with producer John Nathan-Turner arranging a payment to Mukherjee before the production office closed down for the unmade serial.
Alixion would not fade away however and would receive renewed attention in 1997 inside the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. That summer in issue 255, writer Dave Owen wrote two articles on the seasons that never were. The first, What If?, was written as a speculative faux-retrospective on the end of McCoy’s tenure as the Doctor in 1990 and what future seasons of the series might have contained. In it, Owen gave Alixion as McCoy’s regeneration story where he would have become an eighth incarnation played by Richard Griffiths until the series was rested in 1992. In the follow-up article 27 Up, Owen laid out details of various stories that he’d used in his speculative piece with both Cartmel and Mukherjee speaking about the serial, though neither mentioned even a possibility of a regeneration sequence. Even so, Alixion entered into perceived fan wisdom as McCoy’s lost final adventure never to be made.
Not that the unmade script slowed down Mukherjee’s career. Cartmel moved from Doctor Who to Casualty, allowing for his colleague’s first TV script to be for that BBC series. From there, Mukherjee would go on to write episodes of ITV’s Medics which featured former Doctor Who star Tom Baker, a 1996 revival of Poldark, and the 2012 feature film Lore which became Australia’s official entry to the Academy Awards. He would later still author 2014’s The Art of Screenplays: A Writer's Guide and joined the School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities at Bath Spa University.
Nor would Doctor Who’s unmade stories be left in the wilderness. In 2008, Big Finish Productions expanded their output of licensed audio dramas with a new range of releases under the banner of Doctor Who – The Lost Stories. Initially focusing on unmade scripts from the era of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, four Seventh Doctor serials were released in 2011, once more scripted edited by Cartmel, though Alixion would not be among them (and, controversially, this 'series' didn’t follow the path that fans had long presumed that it would).
When the range ended in 2013, it appeared that Alixion would be left to the mists of time, a status it retained even when the range was revived on a recurring basis in 2019. It came as a surprise then in May 2025 when Big Finish announced that Mukherjee had penned an audio version of Alixion for the Lost Stories that would release in September.
Finally, nearly thirty years after it was first commissioned, fans could experience Alixion at long last.
Or, at least, a version of it. As Mukherjee would admit both in Doctor Who Magazine issue 620 and the extras accompanying the Big Finish release, what had been written at the tail end of the 1980s no longer existed.
As Mukherjee told the magazine, “So they trusted me, and I was honest.” Mukherjee reconstructed the proposal from what had survived in places such at the aforementioned 1997 article and his memories from the time. The change from being made on television for BBC One to an audio drama for Big Finish also necessitated other changes, including being extended by an episode, playing up the humor, and also allowing for a wider scope, with the writer noting, “I had a much bigger ‘budget,’ as it’s radio! You can have all these things, because you can just imagine it.”
The most obvious place where fan expectations might be crushed is in what Owen seemingly promised in that long ago Doctor Who Magazine article: a regeneration. Or, rather, a lack thereof. Unlike Ace’s potential departure, which was discussed for the TV season but never acted upon, it’s clear that a scene of the Doctor regenerating “straightjacketed and gagged in a confinement cell” as Owen vividly wrote was likely never on the cards. Something clear from the factual 27 Up article with comments from Cartmel and Mukherjee plus the latter’s comments on the CD extras. Not that Big Finish couldn’t have done it if they’d chosen to as more Unbound style Lost Stories such as The Ark or Genesis of the Cybermen attest, but it’s clear that this long held fan notion was a purely speculative one for an article written almost a decade after the fact. That Mukherjee and Big Finish chose not to indulge that is perhaps to their credit, but also worth remembering when listening to it.
The resulting audio drama feels less like what might have been broadcast in 1990 and closer to what it could have been if it had been aired in place of The Happiness Patrol. Something which is most apparent in the relationship and dialogue between the Doctor and Ace. Mukherjee returned to early in their travels together where the chemistry was already apparent but this Doctor was easing into his eventual role as a cosmic chess player and Ace was still her brasher, younger self. The humor harks back to the early McCoy era and runs throughout much of the first half, playing into the chemistry between performers and their characters. Mukherjee captures the season 25 versions of the Doctor and Ace well enough but, given expectations of this being a season 27 tale, it’s something that takes some adjusting to hearing again.
Even so, Mukherjee leans into where the characters would go both on TV and in later media. Alixion dives headlong into Ace as a character, including her background and fears. It was territory that season 26 explored to its benefit in serials such as Fenric and Ghost Light with Mukherjee revisiting both Ace’s memories but also the events themselves, introducing talked about characters and introducing a new one. All of which builds up to the concluding scenes that, retroactively at least, set the stage for where the pair would go in those aforementioned serials and beyond. If the first half of Alixion captures the early McCoy seasons, then its concluding episodes capture the darker and character driven aspects of the final season and this Doctor’s post-TV tales.
Mukherjee noted in both Doctor Who Magazine and the extras that he was able to do this both because of the medium and the extended runtime. While there are certainly benefits, there are also drawbacks. The pacing of Alixion is as inconsistent and its episode running times, with the 40 minute second episode feeling drawn out with sequences that go on far longer than they ought to have done. Something which is not helped by the employment of auditory hallucinations as part of a number of scenes, a tricky thing to pull off in a purely audio medium as it can risk confusing the listener every bit as much as the characters. While Big Finish had pulled off that device in the past, sadly the effort is less successful here through a combination of the script and the sound design of Toby Hrycek-Robinson under director David O'Mahony where it does become difficult to follow in places.
This difficulty is true of the overall plot, where at one point there’s four different strands happening — the Doctor, the flashbacks to a past TARDIS trip, Ace, and the actions of the character Larkin — with little sense of where and when things are happening. It’s something that perhaps would have worked better in a visual format though having an overstuffed script is certainly an authentic aspect of the era, though the two disc running time means nothing had to be cut to fit it to time slot. All of which does hamper the story to an extent, even with Mukherjee having three decades worth of additional writing experience. That it’s also a reconstruction and one that shifts away from when it likely would have been made for TV raises the question (like The Hollows of Time and perhaps The Masters of Luxor) of how close this Big Finish version actually is to what would have been broadcast in 1988, let alone 1990.
When Alixion works, however, it works. Mukherjee’s script explores guilt, remorse, and memory come into play not only for Ace but the Doctor as well, with a past TARDIS journey explored in flashback to play into the Doctor’s eventual predicament. The final episode also runs 40 minutes but it makes the use of every minute and scene to tell its story, offering strong material for both McCoy and Aldred that harks back to their best moments on TV. McCoy’s final confrontation with the queen beetle is especially strong, allowing him to tap into his Doctor’s darkness after the first half played more for whimsy.
The setting of a former monastery turned spa is well realized both in the script and in the sound design, offering both amenities and something sinister lurking underneath. That quality is also found in some of the performances, especially from Beverley Longhurst as spa host Mathilda and Jon Edgley Bond as Larkin. The icing on the cake is Jamie Robertson’s score which neatly pastiches the better scores of the McCoy era, offering a hint of what a composer like Mark Ayers might have done at the time.
While it’s worth questioning aspects of its authenticity and not ignoring its flaws, Alixion remains a worthy addition to the Lost Stories. What it might be is Mukherjee’s “writer’s cut” of the ideas he first conceived as a young man and brought to completion decades later. It also does something more rare: capturing the differing tones and eras within an era, encapsulating an entire Doctor’s era in the space of four episodes. A rare feat, even for Big Finish and the Lost Stories.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.
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