The Three Regenerations Of The Sixth Doctor.

Brink OF Death because Colin actually performs it

Time's Champion was the better book IMO, but possibly a bit too mature for a general audience.

Spiral Scratch I never like

Regards

mark687

Brink of Death is really important for giving Colin that final adventure and Big Finish a legitimate regeneration story. I'm not going to understate how authoritative that must be to a great deal many people. However, Time's Champion was the one that got to me first and at such a point in being a Doctor Who fan that things like where the Valeyard came from and what exactly was going on in the NAs were at their peak for me personally. I was shoulder deep in the first hundred Big Finish stories, Sixy was front and centre and I was prowling around after The Juggernauts looking for other Six/Mel stories.

There's a lot I take away from it as a story. An unconventional invasion of Gallifrey by the Cybermen, the machinations of the Chaplain and Madam Clacice, a war in the Six-Fold Realm, a meeting of minds with the Doctor's final incarnation, but what wins me over more than anything else is that first confrontation with the Valeyard. Much like his contemplation of suicide at the end of Killing Ground, this speaks mountains of why the Sixth Doctor is such an incredible man --We all have that shadow aspect in ourselves that we reject and the Valeyard is the Doctor's own monster from the id -- a reflection of everything that he suppresses made grotesquely manifest by forces beyond his control. For us humans, we either conquer it or it ultimately destroys us and it's something of an irony that it is the Valeyard's inability to accept the flaws of his own character that ultimately leads to his downfall. Does the Doctor suffer the same fate as his shadow? Well... At the end of the road, in the twilight of his life, the Sixth Doctor finally comes to accept who he is. That he is capable of untold darkness, of evil ambition unchaste by morality, but it is not all who he is. He is responsible for his own moral character. He is the Doctor and he chooses to do good.

The Valeyard rejects the Doctor as part of himself and suffers the consequences of his actions.
The Doctor accepts the Valeyard as part of himself and attains his own personal enlightenment.

I consider all three to have "happened". At the end of Champion, the Doctor overwrites the book's events with those of Spiral Scratch. Presumably, Brink of Death and Scratch are simultaneous, given that he at one point says something that occurs in both stories. The timeline's all jumbled up, and finally resolves itself when the Doctor hits his head on the console. He remembers all three incidents as having happened, while the Valeyard from the present of Time's Champion continues onward, destined to become trapped in the Matrix forever in The Brink of Death.

Since versions of the Sixth Doctor with Evelyn showed up in Spiral scratch, I assume that the novels and audios mostly take place in different universes. Spiral Scratch happenned in one universe (well, a bunch of universes) and Brink of Death happenned in another.

Another possible is-Time's Champion timeline happens but then the Doctor overwrites it with Spiral Scratch to save Mel. However the Valeyard's meddling in the Last Adventure results in The Brink of Death happening (As he's from the future any of his meddling changes time a bit presumably) overwriting both of them. Therefore they all still 'happened', but only one stands-if that make any sense. Maybe the Doctor can remember all three, maybe that explains some of his behaviour in Time and the Rani, his brain's still trying to process this temporal mess. 

I'm not sure if it was here on Divergent or if it was back on the old Big Finish forums, but someone posited the possibility that The Brink of Death is the final chapter of Spiral Scratch being told from the Doctor's perspective rather than Mel's. Similar to the idea of "Winter" from Circular Time occurring at the same time as The Caves of Androzani.

I find it kind of poetic that for an incarnation whose life was supposedly cut short by his successor, it took no less than three separate attempts to finally bring him down.

Ole sixie sure does die a lot...wonder what's causing that?

Mee Too!!!