The Doctor made a few half-hearted attempts to outmanoeuvre the complex restructuring the saboteur had made to the control units but he knew it would be to no avail. He shone the torch over the sealed magnetic systems box welded to the engine relays. The noise in here was incredible; the power stacks were primed well over maximum. Heat stole the oxygen from the depths of the ship.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor books which I read years ago and failed to write up at the time. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji have slipped into a parallel universe where they encounter the mysterious Sabbath, once again, and get involved with a race that is more than it seems. I’m not a fan of the Sabbath arc, and the racing story has been done better elseWho; also Messingham uses first-person narration from both Fitz and Anji, and doesn’t really get convincing voices for either. Not very memorable, for me anyway. You can get The Infinity Race here (at a price).
Second paragraph of Chapter 51 (which is the third chapter after the prologues; they are numbered going backwards from 53):
The leather cover is scuffed and worn. The binding is slightly loose and several of the pages have pulled almost free. Others are torn or stained or missing entirely.
Going back to the sequence of Doctor Who novels that I read but did not get around to reviewing in 2014-2015, this is the seventieth of the BBC Eighth Doctor series, and also a bit of a turning point in the sequence. The Doctor and faithful companions Fitz and Anji head off in three different directions for what seem at first to be three different adventures, Fitz in 1893 and the others in 2002, but it becomes clear that their stories are intertwined. Some great circumstantial detail, with the image of the TARDIS in a glacier particularly memorable, and we also pick up a good deal about what makes the companions tick. I was a bit confused by the end, though, as it is a while since I read this series and I had forgotten the exact significance of recurring characters Sabbath and Trix. Little mercy is shown to new readers here. But Justin Richards is usually a reliably entertaining writer, and here he was also the overall editor of the series: he gave himself the task of twisting it in a slightly different direction, and succeeded.
For reasons that I may or may not divulge, I have been listening to the Big Finish plays set on the planet Peladon. There are six of these: The Bride of Peladon, a main sequence Fifth Doctor story from 2008; The Prisoner of Peladon, a 2009 Companion Chronicles story starring David Troughton as King Peladon again; and a four-story box-set from 2022, set at different points in Peladon’s history and with a largely different cast for each play.
The first of these is more than two hours long, and all the rest are over an hour, for a total listening time of the guts of nine hours. I found them very rewarding, especially (shout-out in advance) The Death of Peladon by Mark Wright, the third of the four-fold sequence. Robert Valentine, as script editor for the 2022 stories, drew up a timeline for Peladon’s history, so you can experience the stories in historical order if you like (though I’m writing them up here in release order):
Valentine explained on Twitter/X that the events of the Gary Russell novel Legacy got eaten in the Time War, so the audio sequence should not be understood to be in the same continuity as the book.
I loved The Bride of Peladon: OK, a substantial amount of it is a retread of The Curse of Peladon, but that is probably my favourite Third Doctor story so it’s not a bad start; and then we have the Osirans as in Pyramids of Mars, as well as Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri, Aggedor, Arcturans and all. Erimem’s departure is as you would expect (though we have some good misdirection) and Peri promises that she will not leave the Doctor to marry an alien king. I laughed so loud at that line that passers-by were very startled. But you also have Phyllida Law as the royal grandmother, and Jenny Agutter as the baddie, and it’s generally excellent.
Sixteen years later, I agree with myself. It’s a tremendous ensemble piece, one of my favourite Big Finishes. I should have said that Caroline Morris as Erimem, the Egyptian princess who is a companion for the Fifth Doctor in a dozen Big Finish plays, and Nicola Bryant as Peri, both put in great performances and have very sparkly chemistry in their last appearance together. It’s a bit odd that the dodgy McGuffin can tell who has royal descent by sniffing their blood though. You can get it here.
The Prisoner of Peladon, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, is the latest in the Big Finish series of Companion Chronicles, although this time the story is told by a non-companion who appeared in only one story in 1972, King Peladon of the eponymous planet (played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who has also of course appeared in other Who stories both Old and New and recently took on the cloak and dead bird of the Black Guardian for Big Finish). Troughton is, as ever, great, and Nicholas Briggs is, as ever, good as the monsters (Ice Warriors this time, of course). The concept is very interesting – Peladon has taken in large numbers of Ice Warrior refugees after an internal conflict, with the result that Ice Warrior politics spills catastrophically over to the host planet; the Third Doctor arrives to sort things out, of course, but – and this is the bit I really liked – the King gets a brilliant rant about how badly Three behaves to people, to which the Doctor has no answer. Scott and Wright would not have got away with it if Pertwee was still alive, but it gladdened my heart. (This was directed by Nicola Bryant who herself visited Peladon as Peri in a Fifth Doctor audio last year.)
I should make it clear that this was a format of Big Finish plays where there were only two actors, Troughton (jr) and Briggs with Troughton doing the narration and most of the voices. Listening to it again, I stand by all of the above, and it is really remarkable how prescient the refugees plotline turned out to be – this was in 2009 when the flows from Iraq and Afghanistan had slowed to a trickle, the Syria war had not yet begun, and the wave of economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa was also yet to become a thing. You can get it here.
The four-volume box set from 2022 features Jane Goddard as Alpha Centauri in three of the four episodes, but different rulers of Peladon in each. (And unseen growling Aggedors throughout.) This brief promotional video name-checks the other big stars, but also showcases Howard Carter’s tremendous moody interpretation of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (aka “Klokkleda, Partha Mennin Klatch”) which is a unifying theme tune for all four plays.
The first of the four stories is The Ordeal of Peladon, by Jonathan Barnes and series script editor Robert Valentine. This brings back David Troughton as King Peladon in old age, dealing with a wandering prophet and a cosmic inspection by the Federation. The plot takes us on a journey across Peladon for the first time – up to now we have only seen the citadel itself and the Ice Warrior refugee camps – and gives a strong sense of a world with gross inequality and structural stress, setting the scene for the next three plays. Both the prophet and his acolyte are played by Black actors (Ashley Zhangazha and Moyo Akandé), which of course has further resonances. There is a well-judged cameo from Qnivq Graanag nf gur Sbhegrragu Qbpgbe at the end.
The Poison of Peladon, by the normally reliable Lizzie Hopley, was probably the one of the four that worked least well for me. River Song is posing as a high priestess at the court of Queen Thalira (played here by Deborah Findley); Ribble the Arcturan (Justin Salinger) is posing as a friend but actually fomenting revolution; Chancellor Gobran (Aaron Neil) is spreading literal poison; there is a villainous Earth priest played by Ariyon Bakare (recently the evil Barber in The Story and the Engine). A lot of moving plot parts that didn’t gel as much as I’d have liked. (Also, for me there is only one Ribble.)
On the other hand, the Death of Peladon by Mark Wright is a taut and well-structured political drama, with an all-female guest cast. A hundred years on from The Poison of Peladon and fifty years on from The Bride of Peladon, Queen Minaris (Sara Powell) and her disaffected daughter Isabelda (Remmie Milner) face both a dissatisfied population led by insurgent Helais (Liz White) and environmental disaster from the (now exhausted) trisilicate mines. The Sixth Doctor and Mel tumble into this but it’s mainly up to the Pels to sort themselves out.
Finally, The Truth of Peladon is more or less a two-hander between Paul McGann and Meera Syal, the latter playing expert seamstress Arla Decanto, who the Doctor persuades to become a rebel by showing her the dark side of Peladon’s society, rather like the Three Ghosts and Scrooge. Jason Watkins gets a look in as evil Chancellor Barok, and Nicholas Briggs turns up again too. Syal is always great, but I did not quite understand why the Royal Seamstress in particular needed to have her eyes opened.
I thought this was a very decent box set. As I said, the third episode was exceptional, and even the second is far from dreadful. You can get it here.
I have only just become aware of the Doctor Who Audiobook Originals range from the BBC, which looks very promising – I had listened previously to the First World War trilogy released in 2018 but hadn’t realised that they were part of an ongoing series, which I’ll have to work into my schedule somehow. This one caught my interest because it is set in Ireland – specifically in Galway in the 1890s. I winced at a couple of errors – Dún Laoghaire was Kingstown until 1920, and there is no County Connemara – but it’s a well enough done alien zombie menace story, apparently the fourth to feature the Eighth Doctor and companion James MacFarlane. And Dan Starkey, who is really tremendously versatile as an actor, does a great job of reading the text and bringing the characters to life. You can get it here.
In Belfast in April, I spotted that Waterstone’s was selling a CD copy of the Big Finish audio drama “The Battle of Giant’s Causeway”, by Lizzie Hopley, which came out earlier this year. The story reunites the Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann, with his audio companions Charlie Pollard and the alien C’Rizz, played by India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas respectively, to a conflict between Sontarans and Rutans playing out at the Giant’s Causeway in 55 BC. I didn’t buy it in Belfast, but I got it from the Big Finish website as soon as I got home.
It’s charming to have the old gang back together again, fifteen years after C’Rizz was written out of the Big Finish continuity, but a lot of plot is left unexplained, presumably because it’s the first story in a series. I bounced off it, I’m afraid, because I was less than impressed by the throwaway remarks in the script about Celts and Ireland.
At 7:30, we have this exchange:
Doctor: “Humans are one of the deadliest life forms I know. No offence, Charlie.” Charlie: “Oh, none taken.” Doctor: “This is 55 BC. The reign of the warrior race. The Celts are definitely vying for most barbaric.”
Nobody’s perfect, but it’s news to me that the Celts were particularly barbaric by the standards of 55 BC, and it grates to have the Doctor declare this as a fact without supporting evidence. Indeed, Charlie Pollard clearly thinks differently at 9:40 when the travellers discover a pile of corpses on the Giant’s Causeway:
C’Rizz: They’re soldiers! Judging by their armour. Doctor: Not just soldiers. They’re legionnaires. Except… Charlie: Roman legionnaires? Goodness. C’Rizz: Are legionnaires not Celts then? Charlie: Oh, Romans are far more deadly.
This however is not endorsed by the Doctor. We progress a bit further when the Doctor and Charlie confront the Sontaran commander for a bit of exposition at 21:45.
General: We plan a revenge raid against the Celtish devils at dawn. Charlie: The Celts did not kill your Sonturions. tell them, Doctor. General: Sonturians? Doctor: It’s a long story. But. It appears you lot are a battalion from Sontar that somehow travelled back in time to Earth in the distant past, met some Romans, lost all sense of identity and purpose, and now think you’re part of the first Roman invasion of Britain. Doctor (thinking): Actually that means – that this isn’t where you landed. Why target Ireland? Even the Romans weren’t that stupid.
The whole scenario is weird anyway; at the time of Julius Caesar’s raid into Britain in 55 BC, it would have been impossible for Roman troops to seriously mount a similar exercise in Ireland. Even with that in mind, perhaps my hackles were up, but the line that invading Ireland is in itself a particularly stupid idea landed rather badly with me; along with the explicit assumption that Ireland is part of Britain.
And a third line from the Doctor at 40:15, where he refers to “Rutans and Sontarans in Celtic Britain”, also landed badly with me.
The Giant’s Causeway is not in Britain. Ireland is not in Britain. Celts were frankly about as barbaric as Romans. It’s a shame that the script for this play says otherwise, and it’s a real shame that these words are put into the mouth of the Doctor. Big Finish normally does better than this.
Even in retreat. Chased by the chuff and crack of a line of French muskets.
This is an Eighth Doctor novel which I read back in 2015, at a time when I was slacking on my bookblogging and didn’t get around to writing it up. I came back to it last month because part of it is set in the year 2024 in Russia, where the Doctor’s companion Fitz Kreiner finds himself isolated while the Doctor and the other companion Trix McMillan zoom off to the year 5000 and to 1812 respectively. To be honest there is little here to differentiate the Russia of 2024 from the Russia of 2002 when the book was written, and if it weren’t for the back cover explicitly mentioning 2024 you would tend to think it was set in or very soon after the year of publication. I’m afraid I was not terribly excited by the plot, with a McGuffin and a time-travelling entity looking for it, but there are some pleasing references to Magnus Greel from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. You can get it here.
So, back in November 2013, I was having a dull Thursday afternoon in the office when my social media started pinging with news of a new short Doctor Who story on Youtube. I fired up the link and watched it; and watched it again. I don’t think that you can ever recreate the impact of Paul McGann, 18 seconds in, saying “I’m a Doctor – but probably not the one you were expecting.”
The continuity issues raised by precisely which companions were mentioned led me into completely inaccurate speculation about the plot of The Day of the Doctor.
That evening, still excited, I was reading through Big Finish’s online magazine and unthinkingly tweeted the final paragraph of their interview with Tom Baker, which turned into my most retweeted tweet ever (to the point that Buzzfeed ranked it ninth in their list of 16 pictures we can probably stop tweeting in 2014).
Nine days later, we drove to Germany for the showing of The Day of the Doctor in a cinema near Cologne. I wrote:
The cinema is part of the massive Hürth Park shopping complex, and we found food without difficulty at their in-house restaurant. They were showing [The] Day of the Doctor in three different screens, and ours, which was the emptiest when I booked it, was full on the night, so I guess that all three sold out. Sitting beside me were three young women speaking Russian to each other, who gasped with appropriate appreciation in all the right fannish places(such as “Bad Wolf” and “I don’t want to go”). I wondered how far they had come to watch it. Probably not as far as us on the night, anyway.
We cinemagoers also got a lecture from Dan Starkey as Strax about cinema etiquette, showing unfortunates who had been arrested by the Sontarans for using their mobile phones or for trying to record the event, but also rejoicing in the eating of popcorn; followed by Matt Smith and David Tennant demonstrating the 3D while bantering with each other. (It’s perhaps a little regrettable that the 3D glasses were not returnable, at least not where we are; I can’t imagine that we’ll ever use them again.)
And then on with the main feature. Well, I liked it a lot. As everyone has been saying, John Hurt slipped into the part of the missing incarnation utterly smoothly, and in just the right way, portraying a veteran in his own incarnation aware that there would be others to come, and mocking the future Doctors very effectively. I was also relieved that Tennant dialled it down a bit; I felt he sometimes pushed too far in his own stories. And Smith seemed totally energised by the experience, though he must have already decided to go when it was being made.
I was actually glad that Billie Piper didn’t play Rose again (and delighted with the way the script covered that); she actually does well when she gets decent material to work with. Jenna Coleman is a delight. I liked the UNIT subplot (Yay, Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver!) more than the Elizabethan subplot, but enjoyed both (Joanna Page excellent, if improbable, and softening one of the stupider lines from The End of Time). I remembered the Zygons fondly, and indeed rewatched Terror of the Zygons last weekend to refresh myself; the negotiating the deal moment was perhaps a bit contrived in plot terms, but theoretically sound from the diplomatic perspective. And the shedding of the Time War baggage, both in terms of plot and in terms of liberating the Doctor from what we now know was more than just survivor’s guilt, and possible reintroduction of the Time Lords and Gallifrey is excellent for the future of the show’s storylines.
Not to mention the fan service:
A terrific way of including the former Doctors (who did Harnell’s voice, by the way?)
Just one look from his eyes, but already we know it will be different.
I was spoilered for this, which is probably just as well as I don’t think I could have remained dignified otherwise.
In the global scheme of things, this was one of Moffat’s better Event episodes and probably the best anniversary special. (I know that Moffat has declared that there is only one previous anniversary special, The Five Doctors; he is entitled to his opinion, but I definitely count The Three Doctors, Silver Nemesis, Dimensions in Time and Zagreus, plus perhaps one or two others.) He has always been good at witty banter, and at identity confusion; he hasn’t always been as good at fitting these things to the frame of a wider show, but he did it this time, and I’m a happy fan.
I rewatched both Night and Day of the Doctor in preparation for writing this post, and they both held up really well. The Night of the Doctor packs so much into six and a half minutes. The plot threads of The Day of the Doctor just about tie up properly (this is one of Moffat’s skills). It’s all great fun and rekindled my enthusiasm.
It’s a little sad that there isn’t quite the atmosphere around the 60th anniversary as there was for the 50th, but it’s understandable why; in 2013 we had the first significant milepost since the 2005 reboot, and the show was on a high; but the Chibnall years did not reach the same level of public interest. It should also be said that I’ve heard from sources involved with the production that some at the BBC felt that 2013 went too far, with An Adventure in Space and Time, The Five-ish Doctors Rebooted, and the awful After-party alongside the actual specials. I’m sure that there will be extras around the anniversary this year, but not as many as ten years ago. (Dismayed by the rumours that the next episode will be shown on 11 November, as I will be out of town that day.)
Stephen Moffat’s novelisation, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, actually covers both Night and Day. The second paragraph of the third chapter (numbered Chapter 1) is:
‘He’s here,’ I said, keeping tight rein on the panic levels in my voice. ‘I can hear him, moving about. He’s in Time Vault Zero. The Doctor is in Time Vault Zero.’
The second paragraph of the seventh chapter (numbered Chapter 3) is:
I am writing this account so that perhaps, finally, I can leave it behind.
When it came out in 2018, simultaneously with three other New Who novelisations, I wrote:
Steven Moffat is, oddly enough, the one writer of the four new novelisations who had not previously written a Doctor Who novel. Yep, his previous written Who prose, despite his being the show-runner for the whole of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor eras, and having generated screenplay for more Doctors than any other writer (even if you don’t count the extra five in The Curse of Fatal Death), amounts to only a few short stories, starting with “Continuity Errors” in the 1996 collectionDecalog 3: Consequences, and going on to “What I Did In My Christmas Holidays – By Sally Sparrow“, the short story from the 2006 Annual that became the TV episode Blink.
Of course, I really enjoyed the 2013 50th anniversary special, which in retrospect we now see as a last salute to the Tennant era from almost the end of the Smith era. And I am glad to report that this is by far the best of the four new Doctor Who novels published last month. Moffat has veered further from the script than any of the other writers; the chapters are told by alternating narrators, in non-sequential numbers, interspersed with reports from other characters (Chapter Nine, significantly, is missing); the basics of the storyline (starting with the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration, and ending with the Curator) remain the same, but the transmission to the printed page has been done in a very different way. And there are some lovely shout-outs to odd bits of continuity – Peter Cushing’s Doctor is canonicalised; there is a desperate attempt to explain the black and white era. In general, it’s just good fun, and it feels like the process of writing the book was much more enjoyable for the author than was notoriously the case with the original script. If you are a Who fan, you should get it here.
I stand by that. Several more novelisations down the line, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor remains the best of them – so far.
The 49th and 50th Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who are on The Night of the Doctor, which is James Cooray Smith’s fourth in the series, and Day of the Doctor, by the appropriately named Alasdair Stuart, who I also know as a Hugo finalist and commentator on sf and fandom. To jump to the end, they are both very good and enhanced my appreciation still further for two stories that I already liked a lot.
James Cooray Smith’s monograph on Night is only 73 pages long, but that’s roughly 11 pages per minute of script; compare the volumes on the seven-part stories that are barely a page per minute! There’s a lot to say about these short few scenes, of course, and Smith says most of it.
The first chapter, ‘I’m a Doctor, but probably not the one you were expecting’, reminds us (as if we needed to be reminded) of the excitement around the 50th anniversary and the surprise launch of the mini-episode; and looks at the returns of past Doctors (which turns out to be an even more timely topic in 2023).
The second and longest chapter, ‘What if I get bored? I need a television’, debates whether or not Night counts as TV Doctor Who, looking at other edge cases, of which there are a lot more than you might have thought.
The third chapter, ‘The universe stands on the brink’, looks briefly at the origins of the War Doctor. Its second paragraph is
This assumption, however, fits rather less well with other aspects of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and the possible discontinuities that result are worth consideration for what they imply about the story and its relationship with The Day of the Doctor, particularly with regards to how much time passes between them. In ‘The Night of the Doctor’, Ohila describes the perilous situation in which the universe finds itself at this point in the Last Great Time War in very stark terms, saying that ‘The war between the Daleks and the Time Lords threatens all reality. You are the only hope left,’ and later insisting that, ‘The universe stands on the brink. Will you let it fall?’
The fourth chapter, ‘What do you need now?’, looks further at the concept of the War Doctor.
The fifth chapter, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any need for a Doctor any more’, looks at the Time War and the character of Cass.
The sixth chapter, ‘Physician, heal thyself’, looks at the last words of various Doctors and at the Doctor as Jesus.
The seventh chapter, ‘Doctor no more’, looks at how the episode fits into the wider Steven Moffat’s wider concept of who and what the Doctor is.
It’s a little cheeky of the publishers to offer this slim volume at the same price as others in the series which are almost three times as long, but the completist will want it, need it and enjoy it anyway. You can get it here.
Alasdair Stuart’s The Day of the Doctor is twice as long. It starts with an introduction, setting out the author’s stall: this is a story involving metafiction and death, and combining Old and New Who. Usually I write my own chapter summaries, but in this case the author has done it for me so I will lazily cut and paste, inserting the chapter titles:
The first chapter [“The Doctor Can See You Now”] looks in more detail at the concept of postmodernism and Who’s own unique flavour of it. Fans of a certain stripe will probably be thinking the word ‘discontinuity’ and they are not wrong.
The second chapter [“The Barn at the End and the Barn at the Start”] talks about the barn, what it represents to the show and also, crucially, the fictional spaces it allows the show to step into. It’s also going to look at the concept of postmodern and metafiction and what that, and 1970s BBC Shakespeare adaptations, have to do with Doctor Who.
The third chapter [“A Man Goes to War”] looks at the War Doctor. He’s arguably the most important incarnation of the Doctor and also one of the least well known. Here we’re also going to explore the idea that each one of these incarnations represents an era of the character.
Just interrupting to say that the second paragraph of the third chapter is:
But before all that, we need to talk about Christopher Eccleston.
Going back to the chapter summaries:
The fourth chapter [“The Man Who Regrets”] turns the attention to the 10th Doctor. Poster boy for the series’ triumphant return! Big-haired righter of wrongs! Lonely god and occasional near mass murderer. He’s also the representation of the show’s past, which is an odd, interesting thing for him to be.
The fifth chapter [“The Man Who Forgets”] focuses on the 11th Doctor and how this is a story which is a prelude to his final bow in The Time of the Doctor (2013) and how it sets up the future of the show. A future which is far more introspective, for both Doctor and Daleks, than it first seems.
The sixth chapter [“Impossibilities, Moments, Revolutionaries and Evolutions”] examines Clara, the Moment, Kate Stewart and Osgood and why the future of the show is carefully, subtly encoded into those four women.
Finally, [in te seventh chapter, “Midlife Crisis of the Daleks”] we take a look at the Daleks and how The Day of the Doctor is a fictional structure through which the past, present and future of both the Doctor and his nemeses are examined and defined.
There’s also an appendix looking at how the 2020 story The Timeless Children affects our understanding of Day of the Doctor now, including also the “Morbius Doctors”.
This is all good, meaty stuff, well worth adding to the thinking fan’s shelves, and you can get it here.
I missed the broadcast of Doctor Who: The Movie (as we now call it) in 1996, because I was fighting an election campaign at the time. I ought to feel grateful to the 95.9% of voters who supported other candidates in the election and liberated me to follow my subsequent career; but for some reason I hold the 4.1% who did vote for me a little closer to my heart. I did not see it until ten and a half years later, when I wrote:
It really did take me until last night to get around to watching, for the first time, the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie. I think it looks fantastic. The inside of the Tardis, especially, but also the other scenes, hospital, party, city, the policeman riding his motorbike into the Tardis, the lot. The final scenes with the Master, the Doctor and the Eye of Harmony are impossible to look away from. I think it sounds good as well. The arrangement of the theme tune is the only one to take serious liberties with the original and get away with it. (Apart from the original 1963 version, the only good opening music for the TV series is the present one. Though the opening titles for the Tom Baker era are the best of the classic series.)
There is, of course huge violence to continuity which can only really be dealt with by assuming that the post-regeneration Doctor and body-transferring Master were deluded in their statements. There is really no way the Doctor can be half-human. We suspect that Gallifreyans and humans can mate (see Leela’s departure, and the follow-up in Lungbarrow), but the Doctor has made so many remarks over the years about his own separateness and difference from humanity that I must assume he doesn’t mean what his eighth incarnation says. Also the Eye of Harmony was on Gallifrey on the Tardis as far as I remember. (Though Wikipedia has some heroic retconning on this topic.)
But in general I come down in favour. I think McGann, Ashbrook and Roberts are great. I also liked the links to continuity both forward and back – McCoy’s appearance for the first twenty minutes, McGann’s fondling a scarf as he decides what to wear; but also of course (a point that was new to me) the Doctor looking through Grace’s letterbox, a scene repeated by the Ninth Doctor and Rose in the very next episode (nine years later). Sure, the plot was just a bit threadbare, and the revival of the dead companions at the end a bit silly (if repeated for Captain Jack in The Parting of the Ways); and I can see why this did not lead to a revival of the series’ fortunes. But it is far from embarrassing.
When I came to it again at the very end of my 2009-2011 rewatch, I wrote:
And last but not quite least, forward another three years to The TV Movie. It actually has a lot of good points – the repeated motif of eyes, a lot of the business of the Doctor explaining himself to himself as well as to the rest of the world, the comedy moments mixed with SFnal horror. Daphne Ashbrook is channelling all of the female Classic Who companions, with added snogging (and in fairness a much more complicated love life than most companions arrive with); Eric Roberts is I think rather good with the somewhat two-dimensional character he is given, though of course it’s difficult for Old Who fans to accept a Master without either a beard or poached-egg eyes. The script tears big holes in continuity about the Doctor’s genetic heritage and the location of the Eye of Harmony, but I think it does make sense in its own terms (apart from the reset button that allows the dead companions to be resurrected); however, it just doesn’t lead on to great things in the way that An Unearthly Child did thirty-three years before.
Knowing what we do now about Who since 2005, The TV Movie feels like a dead end in continuity, though I was surprised by the number of elements have been first properly seen here and carried through to New Who – including some of the musical themes, which are very close to some of Murray Gold’s work. But of course that is the narrow TV viewer’s perspective; the Eighth Doctor continuity goes on in comics, books and audios, in three separate streams, all rooted in these 85 minutes of movie.
McGann, once he has regained his memory and before he gets tied up, is a rather good Doctor; he combines a wizardly young fogey with a bit of an air of surprise and almost annoyance that the world is not quite as he would wish it to be. He is at his best with Daphne Ashbrook, and fans of McGann’s audio performances will remember that the high points there tend to come with interaction with India Fisher’s Charley Pollard and Sheridan Smith’s Lucie Miller. Whereas the more alien Doctors of Old Who were alien because they were hiding their nature from us, the Eighth Doctor doesn’t even fully know himself. It would have been nice to have had more of him.
Watching it again, it annoyed me a bit more. The pacing is generally off, and it’s difficult to imagine how this could have developed into a successful TV series (as indeed it didn’t). All power to McGann, however, a very nice chap in real life.
The second paragraph of The-Book-Of-The-Movie, by Gary Russell, is:
For Dr Grace Holloway, still dressed in her now crumpled ballgown, it began drearily. She woke up and heaved her face up off her desk and tried to massage some life into her right cheek. It had taken the full weight of her sleeping head all night, and she imagined that someone could jab a needle right through it and she would still not feel a thing.
This was the novel of the TV movie, written by Gary Russell (two of whose other Who novels I have read; I liked one of them). Not really a lot to say about this; he has stuck fairly closely to the script, padding out the introduction a bit more, wisely not expanding on the Doctor’s demi-humanity. I see that I found the visuals and the acting particularly attractive in the broadcast version of the story, and inevitably those get lost in the transfer to the printed page. But it’s basically OK.
Actually I liked it a bit more this time around, perhaps because I re-read it so close to re-watching the original version of the story. A lot of the incidental characters are given significantly more back-story. The Doctor himself comes over as a bit more of an enigma, which was possibly wise. I’ve also read enough Who spinoff fiction now to realise that Russell is among the best of the writers in the stable. You can get it here.
Paul Driscoll’s monograph on The Movie is one of the longest so far in the Black Archive series, featuring an introduction by Matthew Jacobs and a long interview with him as an appendix. Jacobs loves it.
I am compelled and intrigued by patterns Paul can see that were never intended, and delighted by the patterns he has seen that so few people have ever spotted that were absolutely intended. / Intended or not, his observations are always valid and entertaining. This is without doubt the most thorough and complete analysis of the TV movie I have ever read – and there have been quite a few. If I had any idea what I was writing in 1995-6 was going to be analysed this deeply, I might never have started!
The introductory chapter, “Anxious Voices in the Wilderness”, frames the TV movie in the context of the times, not just the hiatus in Doctor Who production but the uncertain international situation.
The second chapter, “He’s Back, But It’s About How”, looks at the extent to which the TV movie does (and doesn’t) rely on Doctor Who continuity,
The third chapter, “Coming to America: Refining the Britishness of Doctor Who”, looks in depth at the extent to which the Doctor’s Britishness, and the show’s British roots, shaped the story. The BBC were much more involved in the scripting process than I had realised. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
As the most extreme example of the two cultures combining in Doctor Who, The Movie sheds much light on how Britishness is defined and mediated through the programme, as well as the effects of globalisation and Americanisation on the character of the show. Yet despite the movie’s explicit privileging of Britishness, Danny Nicol’s 2018 dissertation on Britishness in Doctor Who as a whole lacks any notable references to the production or story2. One possible explanation for this odd omission is that Nicol excludes from his study any elements of British culture that he considers to be non-political, such as the emotional restraint conveyed by the term ‘stiff British upper lip’3. The Movie prioritises the personal over the social. Structural or societal evils such as repressive governments or greedy multinational corporations, so often the focus of the Doctor’s ire, are entirely absent from the story. However, by Nicol’s own admission, ‘Britishness’ as a term is intrinsically political and the lack of political and social engagement in the script of The Movie is in itself a political act. Besides which, as we shall argue, the Britishness of the Doctor in the movie runs far deeper than his English accent and fondness for tea. 2 Nicol, Danny, Doctor Who: A British Alien? (2018). 3 Nicol, A British Alien, p31.
The fourth chapter, “Who Am I? Reimagining the Doctor for a New Audience” looks at the McGann Doctor’s literary roots in Frankenstein, Christ, superheroes including Batman, the Beast of Beauty and the Beast, Byronic heroes, Wild Bill Hickock and the operas Turandot and Madame Butterfly.
The fifth chapter, “The Doctor’s Nemesis”, looks not only at the Roberts Master but at the character before and since in terms of various villainous literary archetypes.
The sixth chapter, “How Well Do These Shoes Really Fit?”, looks at the continuities and discontinuities between The Movie and both old and new televised Who, starting with a strong comparison of the plot with that of The Deadly Assassin.
An appendix looks at audience reception of the movie as revealed from an online survey, and another appendix, as mentioned previously, interviews the writer Matthew Jacobs.
It’s a book that focuses very much on the script rather than on the production (except where the latter affected the former), but I still enjoyed it a lot. You can get it here.
Continuing my journey through my substantial backlog of Doctor Who comics, I’m now at this Eighth Doctor collection from 2016. I have generally rated George Mann poorly as a writer, and so I am glad to say that I really enjoyed these five linked stories, in which the Eighth Doctor finds a young artist squatting in his country house and takes her on a series of adventures. The third, in which sinister entities emerge from mirrors, is particularly good.
My one complaint is that artist Emma Vieceli’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor doesn’t look a lot like Paul McGann. (The cover is by someone else, I think.)
But otherwise this came as a pleasant surprise and I will give George Mann’s work at least a second glance in future. You can get it here.
Next up: the Ninth Doctor in Weapons of Past Destruction.
The lifeboat crew were subdued by the incident, and thankful that there were no further call-outs that week. The wind dropped and the rain squalls moved on, though it was still cloudy, and by Friday the sea was calm enough for the fishing boats to go out. Steve finished work at four, and at four-thirty he drove to the beach with his scuba equipment, for an appointment with Charlie Johns.
I must admit I had not heard of Louise Cooper before, but it turns out she was a well-known writer specialising in YA fantasy (best known for her Time Master trilogy, appropriately enough for present purposes). She lived in Cornwall, and set this Doctor Who novella there. It’s a very effective story of the Eighth Doctor, on his own, encountering a human brother and sister and an alien brother and sister, who duly get entangled in the problems of shipwreck – the lifeboat motif is rather well done throughout. I am not always a fan of the Telos novellas, but this one worked very well and I’ll keep an eye out for Cooper’s other books.
This is the second last of all the books featuring Doctors from Old Who, in internal sequence, as far as I know. The last is The Eye of the Tyger by Paul J. McAuley. I have a couple more Telos novellas to work through and then will decide on the next part of my project to read every Who book. (The illustration below is of the frontispiece by Fred Gambino.)
Doctor Who attempts to take on Babylon Five, just a little, in Yquatine, a world where humans and various alien species coexist in uneasy alliance. Except that when the Doctor arrives, it all gets destroyed, and then Fitz is warped back a couple of weeks and falls in love with the President’s girlfriend as planetary doom approaches. Several ideas from this book also popped up in last year’s TV Who, including the shape-shifting entities which deceptively contain the very people they look like. I enjoyed the same author’s Dominionlast year and I enjoyed this too.
I have to say that I like my current run of the Eighth Doctor adventures, which I’m nearly half way through as a whole. Fitz in particular is a brilliant concept, a sort of Everyman whose closest counterpart in the classic series was Ian Chesterton (who of course also comes from the 1960s). I bet that 95% of Who fans wouldn’t even recognise Fitz Kreiner’s name, though he has featured in more Who books than any other companion. I am brewing a longer set of thoughts on this.
An imaginative combination of the elements which make up a Who story: the Tardis, with Eight, Sam and Fitz, lands in Sweden in 1999, but an unstable wormhole is allowing nasties from a dying dimension through, and the Doctor has to save the nice aliens before it is too late, with no help from UNIT. Well described, and the nice aliens have an interesting biology. Though I was sorry that the nice Swedish girl didn’t get to go with the Tardis at the end.
