I notice that both my feed of LJ entries to facebook and my feed of Delicious links seem to have stopped working. Any thoughts about what I should do to reinstate them?

More from , the second round in the contest to vote for the best (and worst) Who stories ever. Cast your vote by Monday.

Poll #1: "This is not life. This is tickness."

Choose up to four best stories from: Dalek, Fathers Day, Horror Of Fang Rock, Human Nature/The Family Of Blood, Partners In Crime, Terror Of The Zygons, The Daemons, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, The Daleks, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, The Seeds Of Doom and The Time Warrior.

Choose one or two worst stories from: 42, Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks, The Idiot’s Lantern or The Long Game.

(42 and The Idiot’s Lantern currently close in race for the second spot.)

Poll #2: "I am definitely a mad man with a ticky box"

Choose up to four best stories from: An Unearthly Child, Blink, Carnival Of Monsters, Doctor Who And The Silurians, Love And Monsters, Mawdryn Undead, State Of Decay, The Eleventh Hour, The Invasion, The Lodger, The Unicorn And The Wasp and The Unquiet Dead.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Doctor Who [the movie], The Lazarus Experiment, The Waters Of Mars or Time-Flight.

Poll #3: "No! Not The Tick Probe!"

Choose up to four best stories from: Amy’s Choice, Inferno, Planet Of The Spiders, Snakedance, The Caves Of Androzani, The Dalek Master Plan, The Fires Of Pompeii, The Five Doctors, The Keeper Of Traken, The Stones Of Blood, The Talons Of Weng-Chiang and The Time Meddler.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Gridlock, Planet Of The Dead, The End Of Time or Victory Of The Daleks

Poll #4: "Lots of planets have a poll"

Choose up to four best stories from: Castrovalva, Ghost Light, Revelation Of The Daleks, Rose, Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead, The Ark In Space, The Girl In The Fireplace, The Invasion Of Time, The Next Doctor, The Ribos Operation, The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone and The War Games.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Love And Monsters, Silver Nemesis, Time And The Rani or Utopia/The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Time Lords.

Poll #5: "You’re a beautiful poll, probably"

Choose up to four best stories from: Black Orchid, City Of Death, Enlightenment, Remembrance Of The Daleks, School Reunion, The Brain Of Morbius, The Christmas Invasion, The Curse Of Fenric, The Happiness Patrol, The Romans, The Three Doctors and Utopia/The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Time Lords.

(NB currently a close run thing between Remembrance of the Daleks and The Three Doctors for the last qualifying spot.)

Choose one or two worst stories from: Boom Town, The Time Monster, The Twin Dilemma or Voyage Of The Damned.

Poll #6: "You ham-fisted tick-vendor!"

Choose up to four best stories from: Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday, Doctor Who [the movie], Genesis Of The Daleks, Midnight, Shada, Terror Of The Autons, The Deadly Assassin, The Green Death, The Mind Robber, The Pirate Planet, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End and Turn Left.

(NB last two qualifying places very tight between Deadly Assassin, Green Death and Mind Robber)

Choose one or two worst stories from: Aliens Of London/World War III, Destiny Of The Daleks, Fear Her or Terror Of The Vervoids.

Poll #7: "Somewhere else the tea’s getting polled"

Choose up to four best stories from: Earthshock, Frontier In Space, Spearhead From Space, Survival, The Aztecs, The Evil Of The Daleks, The Mind Of Evil, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, The Robots Of Death, The Sea Devils, The Tomb Of The Cybermen and Warriors’ Gate.

Choose one or two worst stories from: The Chase, The Runaway Bride, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End or Timelash.

Poll #8: "Tick Lord Victorious!"

Choose up to four best stories from: Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways, Gridlock, Kinda, Logopolis, Marco Polo, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Face Of Evil, The Power Of The Daleks, The Pyramids Of Mars, The Shakespeare Code, The Waters Of Mars and Vincent And The Doctor.

Choose one or two worst stories from: Four To Doomsday, Planet Of The Ood, The Doctor’s Daughter, or The Dominators.

broadcast anniversaries

17 November 1979: broadcast of fourth episode of The Creature from the Pit. The wolf weeds kill Adrasta; Erato eats the wolf weeds; the Doctor prevents Chloris from being destroyed.

17 November 2008: broadcast of first episode of The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. The Trickster persuades Sarah to prevent her parents’ deaths.

i) births and deaths

16 November 1931: birth of Kenneth Watson who played Craddock in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) and Duggan in The Wheel in Space (1968).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

16 November 1965: broadcast of third episode of The Invasion. Vaughn takes the Doctor and Jamie to meet Professor Watkins; they escape, and Jamie has an encounter with a sinister cocoon.

16 November 1987: broadcast of third episode of Delta and the Bannermen. The Chimeron child is growing and Billy opts to become one too; the Americans and the Doctor defeat the Bannermen.

16 November 1988: broadcast of third episode of The Happiness Patrol. The Doctor and Earl bring the blues back, and Helen A is defeated.

16 November 2007: broadcast of Time Crash. The Tenth Doctor and Fifth Doctor meet when their Tardises crash.

16 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith, ending the fourth series of Sarah Jane Adventures.

My cunning plan for rewatching Who from the beginning has now brought me to the point where the next few posts will be of complete seasons – Season 13 in this case, with the Hinchcliffe / Holmes era getting into full swing.

Well, Terror of the Zygons is a great start to the season – tight writing, memorable aliens, Baker and team on form, John Woodnutt excellent as Broton/the Duke, the UNIT team all together for one last time, and not least the late Geoffrey Burgon’s memorable incidental music, a cut above the usual.

It’s a real shame that the Zygons were never brought back on TV. They do appear in a good Tenth Doctor novel and a couple of very good Eighth Doctor audio plays. I suspect that if I actually knew the Loch Ness area the fact that it’s fairly obviously Sussex would bother me, but I don’t so it doesn’t. NB also the female prime minister, assumed by most viewers at the time to be Margaret Thatcher a few years into the future, though I prefer the Wood and Miles theory that it is actually Shirley Williams (for whom I cast the only vote I have ever exercised in a Westminster election) in an alternate 1976. Tom Baker has a rather mad anecdote about being mistaken for Williams in the street.

There will be more about UNIT later on in this post but I just want to point out here that Terror of the Zygons shows Baker, Hinchcliffe and Holmes able to pick up the Pertwee format and take it to strange and different places, if they wanted. It’s not such a very different story from Claws of Axos, but it is ten times better, basically because it is trying to look like a horror film rather than The Avengers.

Slightly unexpectedly, this is the Brigadier’s last story as a recurring character (he comes back three more times in the next thirteen years, and indeed gets brought out of retirement for Sarah Jane in the following century, and the occasional Big Finish audio). Although it’s a shame that we don’t get a proper goodbye from him, it’s a good place to end; the Second Doctor saw him as a friend and ally, the Third Doctor used to snarl at him unpleasantly, while the Fourth Doctor regards him with tolerant amusement, pretty much as his straight man, and he finishes as a comfortable and respectable figure rather than the buffoon of the middle years. He’s had a good long afterlife, appearing in Big Finish audios and even the Sarah Jane Adventures, and is of course the focus of various spinoff novels, of which the most interesting, from a Brigadier point of view, is probably Gary Russell’s Scales of Injustice. I will shout out also to the 1971 Doctor Who Annual, one of the best in that series, which has a lot of good Three / Liz / Brigadier stories.

When I was a student at Clare College, Cambridge (ie around the time that I voted for Shirley Williams in 1987), we had reciprocal catering rights with the students at Girton College, which is far out of town; this arrangement generally benefited Girtonians who needed a cheap college meal near their lectures in the middle of the day, but some of us would occasionally make the great trek north on Sundays, when the Clare Buttery did not serve lunch but Girton put on a pretty decent spread. On one such occasion, one of my friends nudged me and said, ‘That man sitting over there used to play the Brigadier on Doctor Who!’ I refused to believe my friend but accepted the dare to go and ask the bloke in question if he actually was Nicholas Courtney. He confirmed that he was, and in huge embarrassment I must admit that I became completely tongue-tied and couldn’t think of anything else to say to him. Not the highlight of my personal encounters with celebrities, and certainly not his fault. (Incidentally, two important Who figures graduated from Girton – Delia Derbyshire, who arranged the original theme music, and my cousin Brian Minchin, who is the producer of the Sarah Jane Adventures.)

In the video collection The Baker Years, where Tom B reminisces about each of his stories in turn, he manifestly could not remember anything at all about Planet of Evil. It’s a bit odd how it doesn’t quite come together: the alien planet looks a bit more like some scenery dotted around a studio than usual, the script requires the Morestrans to fail to spot that Sorenson is behind it all for far longer than is at all believable, and the mechanics of the anti-matter and alternate universe are never terribly well explained (I seem to remember that Terrance Dicks does it a bit better in the novelisation).

It’s surprising because while Louis Marks was not one of the great writers, he was usually better than this, and David Maloney is one of the great Who directors. There are some good bits – Frederick Jaeger is excellent as Sorenson (poor guy plays possessed scientists every time he appears on Who), and the effects of both the monster he becomes and and the desiccated corpses are well done. But really it’s an unexciting space opera tale, which I’m coming to realise is not the sub-genre where Who is at its best.

NB that Louis Mahoney is the first PoC to have a speaking role since his own much briefer speaking role in Frontier in Space three years ago. On another casting note, I was intrigued that the camera seemed deliberately not to linger on Michael Wisher, appearing here for the third time in four consecutive stories, in case we might recognise him despite his heavy masks as Davros and Magrik. No real risk as it is certainly his least memorable appearance on Who, as well as his last.

This is a strong season of Who in any case, but it would have been even stronger if as originally planned Pyramids of Mars had been the first story of the season. It starts with the Doctor declaring his independence from UNIT, proclaiming a break with the past, and ends with UNIT HQ being destroyed (well, the building on the site anyway). The Doctor restates his fundamental purposes several times in the first episode, reminding us that this is a show about an alien Time Lord, not UNIT’s eccentric Scientific Adviser.

In other news, it is a particularly good story: Holmes as so often comes up with a good script, where pace and wit disguise the occasional hole in the plot, and stellar performances from Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard and Gabriel Woolf, as well as Baker and Sladen, combined with Paddy Russell’s inspired directing and some excellent design – note particularly how seamlessly we move from studio to location shots – make this one of the most effective stories of one of the better seasons. As it happened I was able to watch most of it with 11-year-old F and so can confirm that it remains good family viewing after 35 years.

Lewis Greifer, who wrote the first version of this script, also wrote an episode of The Prisoner (The General, the one with the teaching computer). He would qualify as the only person to have written for both great cult shows, had Robert Holmes not preformed such radical surgery on Greifer’s original text as to leave it unrecognisable (and, one suspects, much better).

The Android Invasion is not quite as great as the sum of its parts. There are some great Who stories with dopplegangers – The Massacre, The Enemy of the World, Inferno, The Caves of Androzani – and some less great ones – The Chase, Meglos, Arc of Infinity, Journey’s End (neither of those lists is exhaustive), and The Android Invasion is definitely in the second set. The Kraals are rather good, and it’s a shame we never saw them again, even if their plan is completely bonkers and relies on the deluded Guy who has never thought to check what was under his eyepatch. The directing is much better than the plot – excellent use of location shooting, good special effects especially where you have the android doubles in place, Dudley Simpson comes up to the mark with the music. But the script doesn’t quite carry it.

The most disappointing thing about the story is that it is a very weak farewell to UNIT. We do get Benton and Harry back, but only in the last episode are they really themselves rather than simulacra; the absence of the Brigadier robs the story of a core element of continuity. This is the least satisfactory farewell for any of the regular characters (far worse than Dodo); at least the Brigadier eventually comes back, but this is the last we see of either Benton (after six years) or Harry (after the intensity of Season 12). In terms of the story taken on its own it is not such a big deal, but seen in the continuity of the show from The Web of Fear on, it’s a damp squib; worse, it seems like Who has become uncomfortable with its own very recent past.

John Levene as Benton has an unexpectedly long run, starting as the Doctor’s kidnapper in The Invasion and finishing up as his own evil twin (for a second time, after Inferno) in The Android Invasion, who still has time to take his sister dancing. In the meantime he has been transformed into a baby, flirted with the villagers of Devil’s End, and walked the Second Doctor round an anti-matter world which looked like a quarry.

Levene is not one of the great performers, but perhaps that is because he is not forced to be. The role is really one of the common man caught up in uncommon events, occasionally called on for courage but rarely for thought, and he fulfills it perfectly well. I thought his chemistry with Pertwee not as good as with Troughton or Baker, but he is not the only person of whom that is true. Slightly surprising that he hasn’t been persuaded back to participate in any of the various spinoffs, apart from the one standalone Wartime which I haven’t seen.

The half-hearted writing in and writing out of Harry Sullivan is one of The Android Invasion‘s most grievous weaknesses. Unlike the other UNIT characters, he does get a half-decent farewell, but it is at the end of his second last story, Terror of the Zygons. His slightly twittish but courageous character was rather a good lightning rod for the new Doctor’s lunacy in Season 12, and put him in several of the great Who stories. Unlike, to pick a recently covered example, John Levene as Benton, he lifts every scene he is in, and even the less good stories in which he appears tend to have some good and memorable Harry moments (again, The Android Invasion is a bit of an exception).

I have written elsewhere of Ian Marter’s subsequent (and sadly abbreviated) career as a Who novelist. When he was on form, he was very good, and even going through the motions he delivered readable product. He also wrote a spinoff novel called Harry Sullivan’s War, which isn’t great plotting but has nice character moments, a theme later developed further by Jacqueline Rayner in her rather weird novel Wolfsbane. A 20-years-older Harry also appears in Justin Richards’ novel System Shock, and he gets prequelled into the Third Doctor era in David McIntee’s The Face of the Enemy.

The Brian of Morbius is really rather stunning, especially in contrast with The Android Invasion, which must have had about three times as much money spent on it for roughly a third of the impact. It could all have looked so awful and John Nathan-Turner-ish – the Muppet-like monster, the peculiar cavorting of the Sisters of Karn, the under-par acting of Gilly Brown. And yet it all comes together. All praise particularly to Christopher Barry who manages to make Dudley Simpson’s stirring music, various peculiar sound effects, and well-planned lighting come together and conceal the relative poverty of the production and the unoriginality of the plot. It’s almost a return to the early days of Who – the studio as a very small theatre in which all the action must be concentrated, rather than as a window on the universe.

Also of course it is lifted by Philip Madoc, back again after The War Games, The Krotons and the second Peter Cushing film, and also by the regulars – the Baker / Sladen chemistry is one of the great things about this season; it really set my own expectations, as a nine-year-old, as to how the Doctor / companion relationship should always work. It’s also our only Time Lord-related story of this season; we will hear much more about them next year, but it’s worth noting that since they were introduced in The War Games, every year has seen a story which further developed Time Lord lore.

The Seeds of Doom, at the end of Tom Baker’s second season, is only his second six-part story – by contrast, the last Pertwee season had three, which just shows how the pace of the show has changed. Of course, it’s in some ways a two-part story in a very well realised Antarctica, followed by a four-part story in England. It’s another good story to end what was a very strong season; the guest cast are good – a good Who story requires a memorable villain or two, and here we have the glorious Harrison Chase and his sidekick Scorbie. One wishes there had been another story or two with Sir Colin, backed up perhaps by Amelia Ducat. Even they, however, are overshadowed by the horror of the anthropophagous Krynoid and, even more nightmarish, Chase’s mulching machine.

This is the first contemporary story since The Faceless Ones / Evil of the Daleks, nine years earlier, with no appearance by the Brigadier or the wider UNIT family (including the Delgado!Master) and, seen in continuity order, this is rather puzzling and throws the viewer (well, threw me). Yes, UNIT is mentioned, but the military who come to help the Doctor are the regular army and the RAF. To be very clear, since I have mentioned it rather a lot in this post, there is of course absolutely nothing wrong with writing UNIT out of the show; I just wish it had been done a bit more gracefully.

Geoffrey Burgon’s music is again artistically and technically rather striking, but sometimes seems a bit light-hearted for the scenes it is set to. However it comes together in the last episode.

This has been an interesting season – four out of six stories set in the British countryside, and only two in studio-bound sf settings – another experiment in format after last season’s travels without the Tardis. It has seen the end of UNIT as a constant point of reference. But it has also provided some of the most memorable images ever from Who – the fetal Zygons, the crackling anti-matter monster, the robot dummies, the android Sarah’s face falling off, Morbius’s patchwork body, and the Krynoid plus the mulching machine. Even Planet of Evil, the weakest story of the six, is some way better than most of the Pertwee era space opera scripts. There is a real feeling of the production team finding its feet; and of course this peaks in the next season (in my utterly unbiased view).

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

i) births and deaths

15 November 1910: birth of Geoffey Toone, who played Temmosus in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Hepesh in The Curse of Peladon (1972).

15 November 1933: birth of Donald Pickering, who played Eyesen in The Keys of Marinus (1964), Blade in The Faceless Ones (1967), and Beyus in Time and the Rani (1987).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

15 November 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of The Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor is forced to transfer Scarman to Mars, where he destroys the Eye of Horus, liberating Sutekh. But the Doctor manages to trap Sutekh in a time tunnel, destroying him and the priory.

15 November 1980: broadcast of fourth episode of Full Circle. The Doctor helps the Starliner to leave Alzareus, and Adric stows away on the Tardis.

15 November 1986: broadcast of third episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #11). The Vervoids are gradually killing off passengers and crew; Bruchner sets the ship’s controls for a black hole to destroy them all.

15 November 1989: broadcast of fourth episode of The Curse of Fenric. The Ancient One arises to challenge the Doctor; Ace realises that Audrey’s baby is her mother; and the Doctor challenges Ace’s faith in him to release the Ancient One who then kills Fenric.

15 November 2009: broadcast of The Waters of Mars. The Doctor lands at Bowie Base One on Mars, on the day he knows it will be destroyed; he tries to change the history of the day, but is thwarted by Adelaide.

15 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith (SJA).

iii) date specified in canon

15 November 1966 (some sources have 1964): birth of Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown.

I see that I posted my review of The Dervish House just an hour before I started to read the 1977 Doctor Who annual (included on the DVD of The Hand of Fear). It is a pretty quick read – 78 pages, but a lot of them are filler. As with the 1976 annual, I found the artwork really striking, apart from the depictions of Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan – though the artist, whether Paul Crompton or Glenn Rix, is getting a bit smarter about this and tries to make a habit of showing them from behind or in shadow – did the BBC simply not provide him with any publicity shots? However his Tom Baker is excellent (see right for an example).

Apart from the artwork, though, the stories are much blander than the previous year’s, and the factual filler stuff is exceptionally basic information about the history of space flight and astronomy. It’s slightly longer than the 1976 annual, but if anything slightly worse value.

It’s 2027 and Turkey has joined the European Union. In an old tekke in Istanbul, six people find their lives intertwined around a plot involving nanotechnology, the Nabucco gas pipeline, and the arcane secrets of the mellified man. There is a lovely echo between microcalligraphy and encoding information on junk DNA. It’s Ian McDonald’s best disciplined novel so far, I think, with all the lush description and present tense intensity that we are used to, but somehow coming together rather beautifully. Nic Clarke has a longer review of it here

A Past Doctor Adventure with Harry and Sarah, which I picked up after last week’s post prompted a reaction on Twitter from Jacqueline Rayner saying

"Did I really kill off Harry? I’m sure it wasn’t proper killing off if I did, I love him too much."

To which Ian Potter responded rather telegraphically,

"Harry deaths possible branching future outcomes as I recall."

Jacqueline Rayner concluded the discussion:

"Oh yes, that sounds right. He definitely didn’t really die then, phew. Thanks for remembering my books for me, Ian."

I was sufficiently intrigued to say that I was now bumping the book up my reading list, upon which tweeted to me:

Intrigued what you make of Wolfsbane. I found it problematic – plugging into certain imagery to seek an emotional weight it lacked.

Well, despite all that preparation I found it a slightly perplexing read for continuity reasons: we have a situation where Harry leaves the Tardis somewhat accidentally one day in late 1936, and the Doctor and Sarah return two weeks later to find his tombstone and strange tales of werewolves. Meanwhile Harry, two weeks earlier, had met another Doctor, who I identified fairly confidently as Eight, but who seems unaware of Skaro, which I found odd (it turns out that the book is set in one of the periods of amnesia that various writers have seen fit to inflict on the Eighth Doctor, but of course this is not explained); and while I thought at first that Harry and Sarah were in the standard timeline between Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons, bolstered by the book’s back cover which specified the Fourth Doctor and by an early reference to "That height, that hair, that grin, that ridiculous long scarf", I was then completely thrown by a later statement that the other Doctor in the story "wasn’t a tall white-haired man, like Miss Smith’s friend" which made me wonder if I had misread the earlier line and this was some alternate timeline (a la ) in which the third regeneration had not happened. On reflection this must be a simple mistake, but it is a very serious one, and distracted me from the rest of the book.

So, werewolves. I’ve actually read/watched/heard all of the other werewolf stories of Who (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and Tooth and Claw on TV, Kursaal from the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the early but very good Big Finish Five/Turlough audio Loups-Garoux) and rather surprisingly they do generally work as a Who concept. Here, Rayner combines it with Arthurian legend and the rise of Fascism in Germany, and some fairly explicit magic (there is a seductive dryad who has no sfnal justification), and unlike I thought that the imagery did bear the weight of the story. (I felt however that it flagged a bit in the third quarter, but picked up again before the slightly confusing last couple of pages.)

But it is not the werewolves or even the confusing Doctors that matter: the author in her tweets a week ago made it clear that the book was really meant to be about Harry, and it is an excellent tribute to the character who lifted pretty much every scene he was in, and who got a rather poor send-off in The Android Invasion for his pains. She draws very much not just on the slightly twittish but courageous character we saw on screen, but also on the Harry developed by Ian Marter (who better?) in his novel Harry Sullivan’s War, somewhat nervous about women, but happy to get stuck in to defend the good guys whether or not he really knows what is going on. If you always wanted to see a story that put Harry front and centre, this is it. Any other Who fan will enjoy it despite the minor flaws mentioned above.

i) births and deaths

14 November 1959: birth of Paul McGann, who played the Eighth Doctor in Doctor Who – The Movie, in numerous Big Finish audios since 2001, and in the webcast version of Shada.

ii) broadcast anniversary

14 November 1964: broadcast of “Crisis”, third episode of the story we now call Planet of Giants. Barbara is poisoned; the Doctor starts a fire to draw attention to what is going on; and all ends well.

A 1968 anthology of stories (and one factual piece about meteor strikes) from Analog magazine. Some of these were irritating one-nifty-idea tales, but most were at least decent. The standout piece is Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days”, also the only one I was already familiar with. The best known of the other stories is Gordon Dickson’s “Call Him Lord” which is actually a story about a society with a rather brutal honour code, more fantasy than sf though the setting is Earth in a future Space Empire.

But really, considering what else was going on in sf at the time, what strikes one about these stories is juts how old fashioned they are; most of them (“Light of Other Days” being the clear exception) would not have been at all out of place in the Astounding of two or three decades earlier.

broadcast and webcast anniversaries

13 November 1966: broadcast of “The Nightmare Begins”, first episode of the story we now know as The Daleks’ Master Plan. First appearance of Nicholas Courtney, as Bret Vyon who captures the Tardis after Brian Cant’s character is killed on the planet Kembel. Meanwhile Mavic Chen, the Guardian of the Solar System, announces that he is going on holiday. In fact, he is in alliance with the Daleks.

13 November 1977: broadcast of third episode of The Deadly Assassin. The Doctor and Chancellor Goth battle through the nightmarish world of the Matrix, one of the most memorable of Who episodes.

13 November 2003: webcast of first episode of Scream of the Shalka starring Richard E. Grant as the other Ninth Doctor. The Tardis lands in the English town of Lannet, where peculiar volcanic eruptions are taking place and he meets Alison the barmaid.

13 November 2009: broadcast of second part of Mona Lisa’s Revenge. Mona Lisa attempts to unleash The Abomination upon the world, but is thwarted by Sarah’s gang with the assistance of K9.

13 November 2010: broadcast of Hound of the Korven (K9).

In the park in the centre of Moldova’s capital city, the locals enjoy good weather and free wi-fi

broadcast and publication anniversaries

12 November 1964: publication of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, the first and still the best novelisation of any of the televised stories. Hunt it down if you can – any self-respecting fan should have a copy.

12 November 1966: broadcast of second episode of The Power of the Daleks. Despite the Doctor’s best efforts, Lesterson revives one of the metal monsters, which harshly declares itself to be the humans’ “ser-vant”.

12 November 1977: broadcast of third episode of Image of the Fendahl. Much chasing around the priory, culminating in the summoning of the Fendahleen by Stael and his followers.

12 November 2006: broadcast of Small Worlds (Torchwood), the one with the creepy fairies and people coughing up rose petals.

12 November 2007: broadcast of first episode of The Lost Boy (SJA). Luke apparently is really the son of Jay and Heidi; Mr Smith is really a Xylok; Jay and Heidi are really Slitheen. (Do try to keep up.)

12 November 2008: broadcast of first episode of Mona Lisa’s Revenge (SJA). The Mona Lisa comes alive and captures Sarah Jane. (I told you, do try to keep up.)

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i) births and deaths

I considered commemorating the births of Stubby Kaye (1918) and June Whitfield (1925) but since neither appeared in more than one Doctor Who story – respectively Delta and the Bannermen (1987) and The End of Time I (2009) – I decided I wouldn’t mention them.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

11 November 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Ice Warriors. Britannica base, fighting a new Ice Age enveloping Britain (and the whole planet) finds a frozen humanoid and three people arriving from the Tardis.

11 November 1978: broadcast of third episode of The Stones of Blood. The Doctor finds the hyperspace ship and is confronted by the Megara; Amelia and K9 have to deal with the Ogri.

iii) date specified in canon

11 November 1913: the Doctor defeats the Family of Blood, as seen in, er, The Family of Blood (2007).

Some of you will have seen this elsewhere:

[Interviewer:] You have stated elsewhere that the plot of the novel was given to you in a vision while taking ayahuasca, a mind altering substance from the Amazon, a drug you have taken at least thirty times. What led you to believe that this substance is more than a hallucinogenic, and that the visions you received were more than just the ravings of a drug-enhanced mind and actually from a higher power?

[Author:] Ayahuasca, and its active ingredient dimethyltryptamine (DMT) are extremely interesting agents for bringing about deeply altered states of consciousness. People from many different walks of life and from many different cultures all report finding themselves in similar otherworldly landscapes where they meet similar intelligent non-human beings with teachings to offer.

Increasing numbers of serious researchers are willing to consider the possibility that these beings and realms are real – perhaps in ways that quantum physics can elucidate.

Mmmm. I am sure that those researchers are both very serious and vastly increasing in number.

Justin Richards is the Terrance Dicks of our day, in that he has written far more Doctor Who books than anyone should want to, and his good ones are classics while his less good ones are at least average.

System Shock doesn’t quite make it to being better than average, unfortunately. The Doctor and Sarah Jane arrive in London in 1998 to find aliens invading and Harry Sullivan now senior in MI5. The aliens are amusingly addicted to management-speak, and there are some nice riffs on the digital culture of the era. But inserting the quintessentially 70s characters of the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith into a late 1990s setting is a bold stroke that somehow doesn’t come off, and the presentation of Harry as 20 years older and considerably wiser doesn’t quite live up to its promise.

But it was interesting to read this immediately after my post on companions’ afterlife, and I shall go on now to a different Harry future in Wolfsbane, having been discussing its ending with the book’s author and also Ian Potter on Twitter.

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According to Saharawi sources, eleven people were killed during the Moroccan cattack on a protest camp in the occupied Western Sahara on Monday. The Spanish agency ABC has a report with video. The BBC article is not too bad

i) births and deaths

10 November 1989: death of Clyde Pollitt, who played a Time Lord (the Chancellor) in The War Games (1969) and The Three Doctors (1973).

10 November 1991: death of Tutte Lemkow, who played Kuiju in Marco Polo (1964), Ibrahim in The Crusade (1965), and Cyclops in The Myth Makers (1965).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

10 November 1979: broadcast of third episode of The Creature from the Pit. In a memorable scene, the Doctor talks to the Creature, and the egg device comes alive.

10 November 2008: broadcast of second episode of The Mark of the Berserker (SJA). Maria, in a welcome cameo, tells Luke, Clyde and Rani the secret of the pendant. Clyde retrieves it and tells his father to catch himself on.

iii) date specified in canon

10 November 1913: the Family of Blood arrives in England, as seen in Human Nature (2007).

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A rather decent novelisation of four of the original Thunderbirds episodes, “The Uninvited” (with the archaeologists in the pyramid), “Brink of Disaster” (with the monorail and the collapsing bridge), “Sun Probe” (with the, er, Sun probe), and “Atlantic Inferno” (where the drilling rigs are exploding pockets of submarine gas and Jeff tries to take a holiday). The Tracy family are sadly indistinguishable in terms of character; Brains has a speech impediment, and Lady Penelope and Tin-Tin are girls (one posh, one Asian) so at least you know who they are; but Morris has injected a certain depth of context and a little moral didacticism into what were originally sheer adventure scripts, it’s nicely illustrated, and there are some good lines (in “Brink of Disaster”, our heroes are propelled along the corridor in the crashing train as if they were puppets – well I never); and having read every single Doctor Who novelisation myself, I think he has done a decent job.

i) births and deaths

None that grabbed me.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

9 November 1968: broadcast of second episode of The Invasion. First appearance of UNIT and Benton, and return of the (newly promoted) Brigadier. The Doctor and Jamie are taken to UNIT, and then go in search of Zoe and Isobel; everyone is captured by IE.

9 November 1987: broadcast of second episode of Delta and the Bannermen. The Bannermen pursue Delta, the Doctor and Mel try to help, and the two Americans wonder what they are doing there.

9 November 1988: broadcast of second episode of The Happiness Patrol. The Doctor and Ace run around separately getting captured and escaping; the Kandy Man really ought to lock up the lemonade.

9 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of Lost in Time (SJA).

iii) real event described in canon

9 November 1923: The Doctor and Ace witness the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, as told in Terrance Dicks’ 1991 novel Timewyrm: Exodus.

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Rather a good Seventh Doctor story, with Ace returning to the Doctor/Benny setup, and mysterious and murderous goings-on in orbit around the planet Lucifer, but in a setting invoking many of the more space operatic Who stories – particular shout-outs to Colony in Space and Caves of Androzani, but various others are also referenced. Lots of incidental characters who almost all get decent treatment (in narrative terms). We also have the reunion of the Doctor and Benny with an older, hardened Ace. Both authors went on to greater things than this, but it is a good start.

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Reuters reports on the situation outside Laayoune in the occupied Western Sahara, where locals are protesting with their feet against the continued Moroccan occupation. Latest reports are that the Moroccans are planning to clear the camps by force and have cut off cell phone signals to as to prevent sneaky stuff like uploading video of what they are doing. You probably won’t read much about this in the international press because Morocco is a darling of the West and news editors generally don’t care much about the Saharawis. (BBC, Guardian, etc, where are you on this?)

i) births and deaths

8 November 1956: birth of Richard Curtis, executive producer of The Curse of Fatal Death (1999) and writer of Vincent and the Doctor (2010)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8 November 1975: broadcast of third episode of Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor and Sarah fail to blow up the rocket, and the Doctor is transported to Sutekh’s chamber.

8 November 1980: broadcast of third episode of Full Circle. The Doctor and Dexeter analyse their samples, but Romana lets the Marshmen onto the starliner.

8 November 1986: broadcast of second episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #10). One of the Mogarians turns out to be a detective in disguise, and the Isolation Room contains a plant/human hybrid.

8 November 1989: broadcast of third episode of The Curse of Fenric. The Haemovores attack the church and Judson is possessed by Fenric.

8 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of Lost in Time (SJA).

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I’m lagging behind on my Doctor Who annuals – should have read this last month while watching Season 12. I have mixed feelings about it; on the plus side, the stories are better written than usual and the artwork is pretty gorgeous, but on the minus side it is very short, the factual filler rubbish seems to take up about half of the 64 pages, and worst of all the pictures of Harry and Sarah don’t look remotely like either of them – very well drawn, just the wrong people. I think I would have felt a bit disappointed at paying £1 for this in 1975. You can find it on the Genesis of the Daleks DVD.

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Various spinoff media have addressed the question of what happened to the Doctor’s companions after (and in some cases before) their time with our favourite Time Lord. I don’t pretend that the list below is complete but I think it is fairly comprehensive, and at least is a good place to find out what other writers may have done with your favourite companion (unless your favourite companion is Steven Taylor).

Susan

Unlike most companions, but for obvious reasons, there is a fair amount of spinoff media about Susan’s life before her first TV appearance. I particularly recommend the Telos novellas Frayed by ‘Tara Samms’ (a pseudonym for Stephen Cole) and Time and Relative by Kim Newman, which explore respectively the Doctor and Susan’s choice of names and what happened in London in the winter of 1962. There are also a bunch of short stories in the various Short Trips anthologies set in the pre-Ian and Susan period.

Susan appears in The Five Doctors as one of the main characters, but we hear nothing about what she has been up to since leaving the Tardis. The Eighth Doctor novel Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel has her helping the doctor defeat the Delgado!Master. The Eighth Doctor audio An Earthly Child has her and her son (who is played by Paul McGann’s son) thwarting an alien invasion. The BBC audio Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? has her becoming European Commissioner for Education in the mid-1990s. There are also two Big Finish stories featuring an alternate Susan with Geoffrey Bayldon as the Doctor; she becomes President of the Time Lords. Take your pick.  (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Ian and Barbara

It is pretty much received wisdom that Ian and Barbara got married after leaving the Tardis ans returning to 1965. In David McIntee’s novel The Face of the Enemy they are roped in by UNIT to join the Delgado!Master in dealing with curious events relating to many televised adventures. their son, rock singer Johnny Chess full name John Alydon ganatus Chesterton) turns up in Keith Topping’s novel The King of Terror and has a fling with Tegan. We heard in Death of the Doctor (SJA) that they had both become professors at Cambridge and had not aged since the 1960s.

Vicki

In a brilliant short story, “Apocrypha Bipedium” (Short Trips: Companions), Vicki/Cressida meets up with the Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard and a young William Shakespeare in the immediate aftermath of the rather duff Eight/Charley audio The Time of the Daleks. The Big Finish audio Frostfire by Marc Platt has quite a substantial framing narrative set in Carthage many years after The Myth Makers, though most of the plot involves Jane Austen in 1814.

Katarina

Apparently Steve Lyons’ short story, “Katarina in the Underworld” (Short Trips: The Muses) describes her afterlife following her death in The Daleks’ Master Plan, but I haven’t read it. Lyons is a good writer though so I shall look out for it.

Sara Kingdom

Big Finish have done three Companion Chronicles featuring Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom, with an imaginative solution to how you can write stories about a dead character: Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System, all by Simon Guerrier, all recommended.

Steven

Uniquely, nobody seems to have written anything about what happened to Steven on the planet of the Elders and the Savages, despite Peter Purves’ repeated and increasingly plaintive statements that he would love to reprise the role in such a story. (Maybe he should write it himself – see below under Mike Yates and Harry Sullivan.) I’m really rather surprised by this: how can it possibly have come about that there are more post-Tardis stories about Kamelion than about Steven??? [Edited to add: Apparently this is due to problems with the estate of Ian Stuart Black, who retain copyright in the planet of the Elders and Savages.]

Dodo

Having had one of the worst write-outs of any companion, Dodo gets one of the better afterstories in David Bishop’s novel Who Killed Kennedy?, in which the narrator, James Stevens, discovers her after years of treatment for psychiatric problems, and has a love affair with her which ends tragically. Though in “Ships” by Jamie Woolley, published in DWM 185 in 1992, she is still alive.

Ben and Polly

There are a couple of short stories about Ben and Polly finally getting together (unlike Ian and Barbara, their love is not generally assumed to be plain sailing) and in Death of the Doctor (SJA) we are told that they are running an orphanage in India. However…

Polly without Ben

In Marc Platt’s typically intricate Big Finish audio The Three Companions, Polly joins forces with the Brigadier and audi-only companion Thomas Brewster to thwart alien forces casuing climate change. We are told that she is now working in a senior position in Whitehall, so presumably Ben has found someone else of the same name to run his orphanage with.

Victoria

Victoria foolishly returned to Det-Sen monastery in the early 1990s and became possessed by the Great Intelligence; under its direction she ended up running a sinister north London university and had to be rescued by the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith, as shown in yet another Marc Platt story, Downtime. In The Great Space Elevator, she is expecting her first grandchild (presumably in 2008).  (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Zoe

Zoe appears as an illusory flashback in The Five Doctors, and has a post-Tardis framing narrative in the audio Fear of the DaleksLegend of the Cybermen. But I particularly want to flag up Peter Anghelides’ short story “The Tip of the Mind” in the Short Trips: Companions anthology, which features a rather moving encounter between an amnesiac Zoe and the Third Doctor.

Jamie

Jamie also appears as illusion in The Five DoctorsThe Two Doctors and Terrance Dicks’ novel World Game. The recent Big Finish audio sequence comprising City of Spires, Night’s Black Agents, The Wreck of the Titan and Legend of the Cybermen brings back an older Jamie for adventures with the Sixth Doctor (and in the last of these also Zoe). DWM got there years before, though, actually killing Jamie off in a Six/Peri comic story, “The World Shapers”, published in 1987 in ssues 127-129. [Edited to add: see also the framing narrative of Big Finish audio The Glorious Revolution.]

Liz Shaw

Her actual departure isn’t shown on TV, but it is covered in Gary Russell’s novel The Scales of Injustice. Liz also appears briefly in Who Killed Kennedy? and as an illusion in The Five Doctors, and apparently features in several novels I haven’t read – Blood Heat, The Devil Goblins from Neptune, The Wages of Sin and Eternity Weeps in which she is killed off. The four P.R.O.B.E. videos feature her as the leader of the Pretenatural Research Bureau, with Louise Jameson playing her sidekick and numerous other Who actors involved (in particular the first features Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker, Silvester McCoy, and the third Peter Davison), but only Caroline John is explicitly playing the same role as on Who. [Edited to add: According to Death of the Doctor she is on the Moon.] (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Jo Grant

Her reappearance in last month’s Death of the Doctor (SJA) was what prompted me to write this entry. She had previously sent the Metebelis crystal back in Planet of the SpidersGenocide) or stayed with him (Death of the Doctor, Big Finish audio The Doll of Death). She also had a very weird experience doing her Christmas shopping in late 2010 (Big Finish audio Find and Replace). It is reported in 2040 that she died in a house fire in 2028 (“Carpenter/Butterfly/Baronet” by Gareth Wigmore in Short Trips: 2040).

Mike Yates

The first TV companion to get a comeback after his departure, if you count Planet of the SpidersThe Five Doctors. Also features in Paul Cornell’s Seventh Doctor novels No Future and Happy Endings, and is also the central character of the Doctor-less novel The Killing Stone by none other than Richard Franklin, which brings him together with the Brigadier and Benton to confront the Master (published as an audiobook by BBV in 2002). Most recently, of course, he has teamed up with the Fourth Doctor for two series of audio adventures. (He is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

The Brigadier

Crumbs, where to start? Apart from the TV stories Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, Battlefield and Enemy of the Bane (SJADowntimeSpectre of Lanyon Moor, Minuet in Hell, Zagreus and The Three CompanionsUNIT series; the Big Finish stories with David Warner as the Doctor; various novels including No Future and Happy EndingsThe Warkeeper;s CrownTerror of the Zygons. [Edited to add: According to Death of the Doctor he is in Peru. Again.] (He is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Benton

Benton is the central character of Wartime, which was the first serious spinoff Who video; I haven’t seen it (though reports are not terribly encouraging). Other post-Android Invasion appearances include the novel No Future and cameos in the novel Happy Endings and John Peel’s novelisation of The Power of the Daleks. The Brigadier reports that he is now a used car salesman in Mawdryn Undead.

Harry Sullivan

Harry actually gets prequelled in The Face of the EnemyHarry Sullivan’s War, which was published by Target back in the 1990s (Marter also wrote novelisations of two of Harry’s TV stories, Ark in Space and The Sontaran Experiment). Apparently he is in Justin Richards’ novels Millennium Shock and System Shock which are both reasonably high on my to-read pile. He is reported to have died in both Jacqueline Rayner’s novel Wolfsbane, and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (SJA), though in Russell T. Davies’ novel Damaged Goods, set in 2015, he is still alive. Sarah says in Death of the Doctor (SJA) that he saved thousands of lives by vaccinating people. His brother Will features in the second run of audio sarah Jane Smith stories.

Sarah Jane Smith

Now in her fourth series of spinoff TV show, which follows two Big Finish series of audio plays about her and her appearances in K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend, The Five Doctors (and Downtime) and her New Who appearances in School Reunion. (and The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End and The End of Time II). Also appears in Lawrence Miles’ two-part Interference novel, and appears to be killed off in David McIntee’s Bullet Time though is clearly alive and well some time later in other stories. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Leela

We see her life on Gallifrey with Andred and K9 Mark 1 in the novel Lungbarrow and the audio story Zagreus, and she then joins forces with Romana for Big Finish’s three excellent series of Gallifrey audios; apparently a fourth is on its way. In three Companion Chronicle audios – The Catalyst, Empathy Games and The Time Vampire – she appears to be imprisoned and dying, but we don’t really find the sequence of events leading up to this. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Romana

Romana ends up returning to Gallifrey (Big Finish audio The Chaos Pool) and becomes President (Paul Cornell’s novels Goth Opera and Happy EndingsShadaThe Apocalypse Element, Neverland and Zagreus), eventually teaming up with Leela to try and save Gallifrey in the excellent Big Finish Gallifrey series (which at one point also brings back Mary Tamm as a development of Romana’s first incarnation). A regenerated third version of Romana appears in the novels The Shadows of Avalon and The Ancestor Cell. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

K9

Mark I:  Having stayed on Gallifrey with Leela, is destroyed during the finale of the second series of Gallifrey audios, but somehow gets transferred and regenerated to future London for the K9 spinoff TV series.
Mark II: Returns to Gallifrey with Romana and has quite a sparky relationship with Mark I before the other one gets destroyed. Fate after the Great Time War is unknown.
Mark III: May possibly be the K9 who travels with the Fourth Doctor and Adric in the stories of the 1982 Doctor Who Annual, before being sent off to join Sarah Jane Smith. Broke down irretrievably in “Moving On” by Peter Anghelides (Decalog 3: Consequences) and dismantled by Hilda Winters in the first Sarah Jane Smith audio series, before being repaired by the Doctor in School Reunion.
Mark IV: shouldn’t really be on this list as has never travelled with the Doctor; but continues to appear occasionally on SJA and New Who. In David Martin’s 1986 Make Your Own Adventure novel, Search for the Doctor, set in the year 2056, he is bequeathed to an unnamed viewpoint character [thanks for correction].
(Other/Unknown: There is also a K9 in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Adric

Adric was rather boldly brought back from the dead by Big Finish in The Boy That Time Forgot, this time played by Andrew Sachs (or as Peter Davison puts it, “this time played by an actor“). It turns out that he survived the freighter crash and now rules over a race of intelligent scorpions, which works better than it sounds.

Nyssa

Peter Darvill-Evans’ novel Asylum has Nyssa meeting the Fourth Doctor after she has left the Tardis but much earlier in the Doctor’s timeline. Two of the four stories in the Big Finish audio Circular Time are vignettes of her life after the Tardis, and fifty years after Terminus she rejoins the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough in Big Finish audios Cobwebs, The Whispering Forest and The Cradle of the Snake, with more to come. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Tegan

Apart from the possibly non-canonical incident where she teams up with the Sixth Doctor (In A Fix With Sontarans), we next find Tegan in Brisbane in 2006, briefly reunited with the Fifth Doctor but apparently suffering from a terminal illness, in the Big Finish audio The Gathering. However she seems to have recovered; according to Sarah Jane in Death of the Doctor (SJA) she is fighting for Aboriginal rights.

Turlough

Turlough appears with the Sixth Doctor and Peri in Michael Holt’s 1986 Make Your Own Adventure novel Crisis in Space. He also has an entire spinoff novel about his subsequent career, Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma by Tony Attwood, which is really for completists only.

Kamelion

To my astonishment, there are several stories featuring Kamelion post-Planet of Fire. In Christopher Bulis’ novel The Ultimate Treasure he is resurrected and destroyed again; in Matthew Griffiths’ short story “The Reproductive Cycle” (Short Trips: Life Science) it is revealed that he somehow had a child with the Tardis; and he makes an appearance also in the last part of the Circular Time audio.

Peri

I have to say that in my personal fanon poor Peri is mindwiped and killed during the events of Mindwarp, and the subsequent assurances that she survived are false. However, I’m in a minority. In Age of Chaos, a full-length comic story by Colin Baker himself, the Sicth Doctor goes to Thoros Alpha to find her; David Carroll’s 1992 short story “Reunion” in DWM 191 has her still annoyed with the Doctor; and in Matthew Jones’ novel Bad Therapy the Seventh Doctor returns her to Earth. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Mel

Mel reappears in Steve Lyons’ novel Head Games, and her subsequent travels feature in two short stories in the More Short Trips anthology, Gary Russell’s “Missing, Part One: Business as Usual” and Robert Perry and Mike Tucker’s “Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle”. She is reported to have died in Dale Smith’s novel Heritage. The Big Finish Unbound audio He Jests At Scars… explores what might have happened if the Valeyard had won. (She is also in Dimensions in Time, but we don’t talk about that.)

Ace

Last but by no means least (indeed featuring in more spinoff literature than any other TV companion), because the TV series ended with her still in the Tardis, Ace features in 34 novels of the New Adventures series, all of which are presumably set after Survival, in 22 main sequence Big Finish audios (as well as others set before Survival), and in 18 DWM comic stories. Her ultimate fate is not clear: according to Sarah Jane Smith in Death of the Doctor (SJA) a “Dorothy something” is running a company called A Charitable Earth (initials suggesting that this is Ace rather than Dodo Chaplet); she is apparently killed in “Ground Zero”, a DWM comic story by Scott Gray published in issues 238-242 in 1996; and most radically of all, in the webcast Death Comes To Time she actually becomes a Time Lord herself.  (She too is in Dimensions in Time, but we really really really don’t talk about that.)

This piece is much longer than I expected anyway but once I got started it just grew! Please do comment if I have made any particularly egregious omission. I had originally meant to link to my reviews of books mentioned above, and may still do that, but writing this has taken me all day and I want to finish up now. I think this all illustrates the wisdom of Paul Cornell’s essay on canonicity from a couple of years back. Much briefer thoughts on the subject are embedded in a typically long and witty review of Death of the Doctor by an unspecified Daddy (probably Richard) on Millennium Elephant’s blog.