The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond

Second frame of third original issue:

Two completely different stories in a single album here, both featuring the Eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory, both pretty firmly tied into the sequence of events in the TV series.

(And by the way, congratulations to Karen Gillan on the recent birth of her daughter Clementine!)

“The Hypothetical Gentleman”, by Andy Diggle with excellent art by Mark Buckingham, starts with a somewhat disconnected section fighting Nazis in London in 1936, and then takes the team to 1851 and a time-stealing monster. I found the pacing of squeezing two stories into the space for one a bit odd, but the 1851 bit of the story worked perfectly well as Doctor Who.

The second half, “The Doctor and the Nurse”, is written by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond. I didn’t warm to Bond’s art which seemed to me cartoonish and not really looking like the characters. The story is a comedy about the Doctor and Rory having some guy time together, while Amy finds herself dealing solo with the Silents infiltrating the TARDIS. Comedy Who can go horribly wrong, but this one sticks the landing.

You can get it here.

Next in this sequence: The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al.

When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al

Second frame of third part:

Doctor: I really won’t agree with you! Too stringy! And I’ll keep repeating! Come on, come on! Why did I let Amy keep the sonic screwdriver –

Again, this unites a one-shot story with a three-parter, both by Tony Lee. We start with the Tardis going astray on its way to the 1966 World Cup final (though I think that Amy, being Scottish, might have had mixed feelings about that), and getting mixed up with a conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the future site of Wembley stadium, which maybe fails to interrogate the full historical detail, especially as regards gender; Matt Smith of course in real life was captain of the youth team of Leicester City, before a back injury ended his football career and forced him into acting. The art is by the always reliable Mark Buckingham.

The rest of the book takes the Tardis crew to a world where they encounter various parallel versions of themselves, a trope that always appeals to me, and it turns out to be all part of a Truman Show-like entertainment; and there are Nazi Sontarans tied up with it all. Enjoyable writing and art by Matthew Dow Smith (as opposed to any other person with a similar name involved with Doctor Who). You can get it here.

The Ripper, by Tony Lee et al

Second frame of third part:

Back to a different sequence of Eleventh Doctor graphic stories, this unites a one-shot, where Rory’s spam emails come alive in the Tardis,with a three-parter, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory get mixed up with the police investigation of Jack the Ripper. It’s a bit dubious, frankly, to adapt the very real femicidal atrocities of the Ripper murders for a Doctor Who story and to make an anthropophagic alien the secret killer. Doctor Who doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or even Ireland much, and this isn’t so very different.

But Tony Lee (as usual) captures the characters well, and the first bit with living spam emails is sheer fun; and the Ripper story is superbly illustrated by the art of Tim Hamilton, who I don’t think I had otherwise come across, but I shall definitely look out for now.

You can get it here.

The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al

Second frame of third story:

Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics featuring companions Alice Obiefune and The Sapling, a sentient tree-like being. I found this one a bit episodic, four different stories none of which really advanced the arc for any of the main characters. The best is the first one with the Ood, by James Peaty with art by Ian Culbard (who never disappoints). You can get it here.

The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al

Second frame of third part:

Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics, this keeps Alice, the Doctor’s librarian companion from the previous two sequences, and introduces the mysterious Sapling, a young sapient tree which is at the centre of a mystery that needs to be solved. Some very good story concepts, the first half involving a weirdly stereotypically British planet and a Silent that even other Silents cannot see, and the second half involving one of Alice’s neighbours who has unaccountably become multiply duplicated. A good start. You can get it here.

The Malignant Truth, by Si Spurrier et al

Second frame of third issue:

There’s a lot thrown in here: the Doctor, the new comics companions Alice and the Quire, Abslom Daak the Dalek hunter, River Song, the War Doctor, an unexpected incarnation of the Master, and a complex storyline told over the previous two volumes and concluded here. I didn’t think it was quite as good as the middle volume, but I came away satisfied anyway. You can get it here.

The One, by Si Spurrier et al

Second frame of third section:

Next in the Year Two sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, following from The Then and the Now, with Abslom Daak, the mysterious Squire and Alice the librarian now joined by River Song to work out what the Doctor was up to during the Time War. Some great references to past stories, though I’m a little uneasy with the somewhat harsher characterisation of the Doctor. Scrapes through the Bechdel test.

You can get it here.

The Then and the Now, by Si Spurrier et al

Second frame of third part:

This is the first of the three-volume second series of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, and I must say it’s a good start. We’ve kept Alice, one of the great comics companions, and we add The Squire, who claims to have been a companion of the War Doctor; and also, of all great comics-only characters, none other than Abslom Daak, Dalek Hunter. Meanwhile the Eleventh Doctor is being pursued by a bounty hunter called The Then And The Now for dreadful crimes apparently carried out by the War Doctor that nobody can quite remember. And there is a twist at the end bringing in another favourite character. Looking forward to next month when I read the next in the series. Meanwhile you can get this here.

Bechdel fail at the first hurdle, I think, it is a very Doctor-centric story where the only female-presenting character is Alice.

The Angel of Redemption: a 2010s story, by Nikita Gill

Second verse of third chapter:

Trying to find each other,
in the distance they saw
what was a shooting star.
And desperate to see each other
to know themselves,

So, this is very unexpected. It’s a story written in the form of poetry, the internal reflections of the Weeping Angel who is destined to yank Amy and Rory back in time in The Angels Take Manhattan, telling the story of the origin of the Angels, their desperate attempts to feed and deal with a hostile universe, and towards the end their interaction with the Doctor and with the world of the early twenty-first century in England. Doctor Who stories rarely take the perspective of the monster, and even more rarely do it well (though see the Century 21 Dalek comic strips for another example). You can get it here.

A Bechdel fail for an unusual reason. Most stories that fail Bechdel step 1 will also fail steps 2 and 3 (that two female characters must have a conversation, and that it is not about a man). The Angels present as female, and they have many interactions (which can pass for conversations here) about the nature of reality and the fate of their race; but none of them has a name, so while the book would pass the original form of the Bechdel test, it doesn’t get over the first hurdle of the generally understood criterion that there must be two named female characters.

Serve You, by Al Ewing, Rob Williams et al

Second frame of third installment:

(Alice, thinking):
“The Doctor would smile, that special excited-little-boy grin he got when something wonderful and impossible and brilliant happened.
And he’d say something like:”
Doctor:
Ha! Yes! Temporal protogenic reversal!

Second in the sequence of Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with recently bereaved London librarian Alice, anonymous musician Jones and chameleon entity ARC. Alice is much more interesting than the other two and gets much more plot, especially when her dead mother appears to come back. The standout however is the first episode where time starts running backwards – this has been done a couple of times before in Who, but it’s difficult to do well and it is carried off with aplomb. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail. When Alice meets her resurrected mother, they talk about the Doctor. There is a flashback scene to Alice’s childhood, but it’s not a dialogue.

After Life, by Al Ewing et al

Second frame of third part (“What He Wants”, by Rob Williams):

First of the 2014 line of Eleventh Doctor comics by Titan, this introduces a new companion, Alice Obiefune from Hackney, as a regular Tardis traveller along with invisible musician John Jones and an alien entity called ARC. I like the new dynamic between the primaries, but the other two companions seem a bit superfluous, and the historical story set in the segregated Deep South pulls its punches. Pleasing enough, good art, and you can get it here.

Vincent and the Doctor, by Paul Driscoll (and Richard Curtis)

This is one of my favourite New Who stories. I wrote of my 2011 Hugo votes:

1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor. Yes, I do plan to give my first preference to the writer of The Tall GuyBlackadderMr. BeanFour Weddings and a Funeral, and The Vicar of Dibley. (Not forgetting his first great work with The Heebeegeebees.) I thought this was the outstanding Who episode of last year, the best since Blink, and my biggest difficulty in deciding which others to nominate for the Hugos was a fear that if I nominated any of them, Vincent might be crowded out. But luckily we got through that stage OK; hopefully the Alternative Vote will see the award go where it ought.

Two weeks into the 2020 lockdown, I was one of those who participated in the Twitter watchalong of the episode.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1244699509118164994

I also found that it was the top-rated Eleventh Doctor episode on IMDB.

Rewatching it again for this exercise, I still loved it a lot. It looks gorgeous, it sounds gorgeous, the acting is spot-on and the script sparkles. I have two reservations: the actual monster bit is slightly surplus to requirements, and at the end, the exhibition of van Gogh’s work would certainly have displayed his dates of birth and death rather prominently. I’ms also still irritated that a teaching moment in Dutch phonology was missed. As I wrote at the time, in the name “van Gogh”:

1) the ‘a’ is very short and low, heading towards a short ‘o’ in English.
2) both the ‘g’ and the ‘gh’ are pronounced as a softer version of ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’.
3) ‘Vahn Goff’ is completely and utterly wrong. (And if you thought it was ‘Van Go’, I don’t ever want to talk to you again.)

I like his art, and we saw some at the Kröller-Müller Museum a year and a half ago. I’ve also read two biographies in graphic novel format. He’s a fascinating character who left us an evocative legacy, and Richard Curtis pushes it just far enough in Vincent and the Doctor.

Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two title characters are both men, and apart from Amy there is no named female speaking part. (We are told Giselle’s name after she is dead.)

Paul Driscoll’s Black Archive monograph is one of the longer and more substantial ones. Like the last one I read, on The Haunting of Villa Diodati, it links a historical story about real-life historical creators to the actual biographies and works of those creators. I found it much more successful, I think partly because I like the story much more but mainly because Driscoll has written a better book.

The first chapter, “The Voice of the Writer”, looks at the career of Richard Curtis and how Vincent and the Doctor flows from a lot of his previous themes, and also the very personal one of his sister who he lost to depression a year before the episode was written. I’ve seen less than half of the films and stories referenced, but I am convinced of a linear narrative thread connecting Vincent with About Time and Blackadder: Back and Forth. It’s detailed and well argued.

The second and longest chapter, “The Voice of the Artist”, starts by looking at other screen treatments of van Gogh’s life and death, then looks at how the episode treats him as tortured genius vs visionary artist, and finished by looking at van Gogh’s own letters for indications of how he himself saw his art.

The third chapter, “The Voice of the Monster”, looks at the monster as a metaphor for mental illness and considers how Doctor Who portrays trauma more generally. Its second paragraph is:

In a lengthy scene cut during post-production, the Doctor tells Amy that artists often see real things that nobody else notices. As they prepare to head off in the TARDIS to meet Vincent for the first time, he shows her various examples from Fuseli, Bosch, Munch and De Goya3. The Doctor’s point is that nightmares and monsters cannot always be dismissed as flights of fantasy on the part of the artist. The monster in The Church at Auvers (1890) painting reminds him of a fairy tale he’d read as a child. He cannot be sure, but he sets off on the presumption that the creature is real and not a product of Vincent’s imagination.
3  TCH [The Complete History] #65, p94f.

The fourth chapter, “The Voice of the Paintings”, looks first at how little the visual arts feature in Doctor Who outside the Moffat era and then at how much Moffat emphasised them, and then looks at several specific van Gogh paintings and the way in which they are used in the episode.

A brief conclusion considers the story as a fairy tale.

An appendix lists 46 (!) different van Gogh paintings that appear in or are referred to in the episode.

As I said, this was a long but meaty Black Archive, and I recommend it. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Doctor Who: A Fairytale Life, by Lilah Sturges, Kelly Yates and Brian Shearer

Second frame of third part:

Having finished the IDW Tenth Doctor comics last month, I’m into the Eleventh Doctor run; and rather than start at the beginning of a long narrative, I picked up this one-shot album from 2011 for a sample. The author, Lilah Sturges, is best known for collaboration with Bill Willingham on the Fables series and spinoffs; I was really into that, ten years ago or so, but drifted off once the main narrative ended.

This is an enjoyable enough fantasy-world-actually-a-theme-park story, with the Doctor and Amy liberating the oppressed. The art by Kelly Yates is seriously below par though, with Amy much more freckled than the real Karen Gillan and the Doctor often looking like someone else entirely. This was early in the Eleventh Doctor era, so perhaps the lead characters’ images were not well communicated to the artist, but it’s a barrier to enjoyment. There are some nice covers by Bill Willingham though. You can get it here.

Bechdel pass: Amy and Aurelia battle an evil robot together on page 48, and then review progress on page 56.

The Night of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith, Alasdair Stuart and Steven Moffat

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).

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/401103755825147905

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 [TheDay 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 DoctorsSilver NemesisDimensions 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 collection Decalog 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.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates

As is often the case with more recent New Who, I don’t seem to have written up the closing episodes of Series 5 previously. In case you have forgotten, it is the climax to the first set of stories featuring Matt Smith as the Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy and Arthur Darville as Rory, first shown in 2010. (And Alex Kingston also turns up as River Song.) It’s a story that merrily zips back and forth from Roman times to the present day, with loads of Doctor Who monsters and also Stonehenge. The universe gets destroyed and then put back together again, and the Doctor and the TARDIS are almost eliminated from it but summoned back by Amy at her wedding to Rory. It’s a lot of fun.

Doctor Who is meant to be entertaining, and I’m with the majority who find that this time it worked – The Pandorica Opens had the highest audience ratings so far of any Series 5 episode, beaten the following week by The Big Bang. It was the fifth of six Doctor Who stories to win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), remarkably rising from second last place in both nominations and first preferences to win the award on transfers. It’s the first of the Hugo winners to be covered by the Black Archive series (and at time of writing, the only one).

I noted briefly before that it “manages to avoid pulling its punches”; I think I’d go further, and say that it’s the best of all of the Moffat era season endings (cf Dark Water / Death in Heaven, and Heaven Sent / Hell Bent).The plot doesn’t honestly make a lot of sense, but this is covered with spectacle, action, wit and knowing references to things that had happened earlier in the season so that you are made to feel that it all hangs together, more perhaps than it really does. Amy’s line “something borrowed, something blue”, tying ancient and incomprehensible wedding traditions to the TARDIS is simply beautiful.

Philip Bates has written a fair bit of commentary, but this appears to be his first book. A short prologue states his case that the story succeeds because it is “an intimate tale on epic proportions”. The rest of the book provides supporting arguments.

The first chapter, “Balancing the Epic and the Intimate”, looks at how Moffat pulls off the feat of intricately linking the story with the preceding episodes of the season, and indeed how they are linked to the rest of Doctor Who.

The second chapter, “Myths and Fairytales”, interrogates the concept of fairytales, stopping off briefly at Pandora’s Box, and the way in which fairytale lore informs both the story in question and the character of the Doctor.

The third chapter’s title is “Anomalies”. Its brief second paragraph is:

And so, we’re teased with timely anomalies that hint at what we’ve lost and what could return.

Here Bates looks at the concept of anomalies and how they contribute to the plot of the episode, going (perhaps a little more than necessary) into the scientific concepts underpinning the term.

The fourth chapter, “When Time Travel Wouldn’t Help”, looks at the “rules” of time travel and how Moffat uses them to support the plot – referring back also to his first Doctor Who work, the short story “Continuity Errors“.

The fifth chapter, “The Trouble with Time”, which is the longest in the book, looks at the arrow of time, time loops, and (again) the current scientific understanding behind them, and the way in which they are used in the story.

The sixth chapter, “Endings and Beginnings”, is mostly about scientific understandings of the end (and beginning ) of the universe.

A brief conclusion meditates on the concept of “favourite stories”.

An appendix, “Good Question for Another Day”, attempts to unpack the question of why the TARDIS explodes and who, if anyone, is responsible.

This book lacks a lot of the things I usually like about the Black Archives – analysis of the development of the script or of details of the production -and includes a fair bit of science, which is not what I get the Black Archives for. But I can forgive a lot of it for Bates’ infectious enthusiasm for a story that I already liked a lot. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw

I don’t seem to have written anything about The Rings of Akhaten when it was first broadcast in 2013, nor did I pick is as one of my essential Twelfth Doctor watches in my 2017 guide to New Who. Both on first watching and on rewatching ten years later, I enjoyed it without especially loving it. It’s Clara’s first proper adventure as a companion, after several previous appearances, and I like the variety of alien races and the back-story for Clara, while regretting that more wasn’t made of either of these in the continuity. Emilia Jones rather glows as the main guest actor, in a story filmed when she was ten years old. She went on to star in an Oscar-winning film (CODA). I am less wild about planet-sized (let alone star-sized) evil aliens. Like I said, I enjoyed it without especially loving it.

It has not been adapted for print, and no subsequent adventure in TV or other media has returned to Akhaten. Several of the alien species have been seen again, notably as exhibits in Nightmare in Silver, and the story itself is moored into the wider continuity by the Doctor’s remark that he had previously visited Akhaten with his granddaughter. (And one of the alien races is a Hooloovoo, encountered differently in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

William Shaw’s Black Archive monograph has really opened my eyes to what was actually going on in the story. and succeeded in making me feel that I need to give it another go to catch what I missed first time round. (Though I don’t think of myself as a careless watcher, so perhaps I should not take all the blame for my having missed some of these points.)

A brief introduction defends Shaw’s choice of The Rings of Akhaten to analyse, and introduces the themes of the book.

The first and longest chapter, “The Doctor as New Atheist”, jumps right in by looking at the impact of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists on Doctor Who in the Russell T. Davies years (Dawkins himself actually appears on the show, of course) and examines how the Moffatt years saw a shift to a more measured engagement with gender, race, colonialism and indeed religion. The Rings of Akhaten is in fact a story about a religious ceremony, and the Doctor, coming in with a dismissive attitude to religion, is proved wrong several times. That’s a lot more interesting than I had realised.

The second chapter, “Clara, Merry, and the Most Important Leaf in Human History”, looks at the centrality of Clara and her relationship with Merry in the story, taking some time also for consideration of Murray Gold’s music and Orientalism by Edward Said. Again, I realised that there was more going on than I had noticed, especialiy if you consider the story’s place in Clara’s narrative arc.

The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Marks out of Akhaten” is:

This chapter therefore focuses on The Rings of Akhaten’s flaws, in terms of both its storytelling and its wider political context. In particular, it examines the episode’s relationship to some key concepts in postcolonial and feminist theory, and the ways in which it both exceeds, and ways in which it both exceeds, and tragically fulfils, the expectations of these schools of thought. None of this is to denigrate the episode. It is simply to argue that, while The Rings of Akhaten represents a positive step forward for Doctor Who, there are several ways in which it could have gone further.

I like very much that Shaw concedes that the story has flaws; some other Black Archive writers feel the need for total defence of their chosen story even when it’s a much worse story than The Rings of Akhaten. He mentions that its narrative beats are a bit uneven, which I agree with, and that there are not enough non-white actors, which I also agree with. He also looks at the disappointment felt by fans of writer Neil Cross’s previous career who may have expected something closer to the “gritty cop drama” Luther for which he is best known. I was not familiar with any of Cross’s non-Who work so that point passed me by.

The fourth chapter, “Anniversary Anxiety”, looks in a little more detail at the wider arc of story-telling in Moffat-era Who (though that phrase is not used), and how the story is one of the building bricks of the Clara narrative, interrogating and subverting what the show is actually about (ie the nature of the Doctor himself).

A brief conclusion explains Shaw’s own journey from sceptic to fan, having not enjoyed The Rings of Akhaten on first broadcast to realising its deeper significance.

An appendix asks whether Akhaten is a planet or a sun.

A second appendix has a decently long interview with the director, Farren Blackburn, explaining some of the artistic choices made during production.

A third appendix reproduces Blackburn’s “Director’s Statement”, his vision for the episode.

This is one of the longer Black Archives, but it really opened my mind to some of the aspects of the story that I wished I had caught for myself on watching. The last in this series that really excited me in the same way was Alyssa Franke’s monograph on Hell Bent. You may be able to get The Rings of Akhaten here. (Or here.)

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon, by John Toon

As my regular reader knows, I like to preface my write-ups of the Black Archive series of monographs on Doctor Who stories with my previous writings on each story. In this case, the two-parter that opened Matt Smith’s second season as the Doctor in 2011, I seem to have failed to write anything much about it previously. I watched it on first broadcast and again before reading the Black Archive.

If you saw it, you’ll remember that The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon is the story that starts with the Doctor apparently being killed by a mysterious astronaut, and then reappearing as a younger self; it turns out that a mysterious alien race called the Silents have been infesting humanity for a very long time, but people forget that the Silents exist as soon as they stop looking at them. The TARDIS team (Eleven, Amy, Rory, River Song) discover this while visiting Richard Nixon as president in 1969.

https://www.deviantart.com/the-hellish-gnome/art/Doctor-Who-Silence-will-fall-206344389

The Doctor embeds a subliminal message in the broadcast of the first moon landing encouraging humanity to rise up and destroy the Silents, and meanwhile a little girl who has been phoning the Oval Office regenerates a la Time Lord.

I’ll be frank. Series 6 is my least favourite of the three Matt Smith seasons, and my second least favourite of New Who as a whole (after last year’s Flux), and the opening two-parter is a large part of that. It’s difficult to take the supposed shock of the Doctor being killed too seriously; we know he’s going to be bouncing around again for more adventures after it’s all resolved. Too many threads are left hanging after the second episode (and resolved in haste months later at the end of the series). Steven Moffat is working so hard on trying to make us interested in the complex scenario that he has dreamed up that he forgets to be funny.

And to be honest, the Silents don’t actually seem to be very evil; sure, they look scary, and one of them vaporises a White House staffer, but if we decide that we’re going to exterminate any species where one of them has vaporised a White House staffer, where will we stop?

One casting comment – we’ve been watching Firefly, from a few years earlier, and it’s been amusing to see Mark Sheppard as Badger there; here he is the 1969 version of FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware (the 2011 version being played by his father, William Morgan Sheppard).

The story came in at a respectable 85th in last year’s rankings of all Doctor Who stories, run by Twitter user @Heraldofcreatio, below Robot and ahead of The Seeds of Death, but I’d put it lower myself.

John Toon had previously written the Black Archive volume on the Tom Baker story Full Circle; I commented then that it was largely about the intellectual ideas behind the story rather than on how the story was actually made, and why certain things were done or not done in the course of production, and the same is true this time. There are indeed a lot of ideas in this story, but they are not as well executed as they might have been; Toon does a good job of pulling them into the light, without going into too much agony about the story’s disappointments.

A short introduction talks about withholding key information from the audience, and conspiracy theories.

The first chapter, “Who World Order”, briefly looks at conspiracy theories around the Moon landings, Men in Black, Area 51, fake celebrity deaths, secret underground tunnels, government mind control, subliminal advertising, the Templars and Freemasons, and (at more length) Watergate.

The second chapter, “A Conspiracy of Silents”, looks at the general phenomenon of conspiracy theories, and in particular how they have fed into and been presented in Doctor Who over the years.

The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Killing in the Name of the Doctor”, is:

The term ‘genocide’ has been in circulation for less than a century. It was created in 1944 by Raphäel Lemkin in a book describing the murderous social policies of the Nazi regime that would later come to be known collectively as the Holocaust; genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 and codified as such by the United Nations in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II of that convention specifies that genocide is an act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ and lists five behaviours that could be defined as genocidal:
‘a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’3
3  ‘Definitions: Genocide’.

The chapter looks at the dubious ethics of the Doctor’s instruction to humanity to kill the Silents, and whether or not the audience is intended to question the Doctor’s morality. He doesn’t go on about it for fifty pages, at least.

The fourth chapter’s title is “‘Waste No More Time Arguing What a Good Man Should Be. Be One.'” It attempts to find a justification in plot terms for the Doctor’s actions against the Silents, looking also at other similar plot twists in the Moffat era. The discussion is interesting but the justification is not really found.

The fifth chapter, “Controlling the Narrative”, looks at the Moffat-era shift to the Doctor finding more aggressive solutions in general, and also speculates that the Silents are a metaphor for a particular type of fan, closing the main thread of discussion in the book.

The sixth chapter, “When the President Does It, It’s Not a Celebrity Historical”, switches tracks completely and asks if the story can be considered a “celebrity historical” story in the same was as The Unquiet Dead (Dickens), Tooth and Claw (Queen Victoria), The Shakespeare Code (I needn’t say) and Victory of the Daleks (Churchill), if we grant that The Girl in the Fireplace (Madame de Pompadour) may not fit that category. The answer is, probably yes.

So, I felt that the book is a valiant attempt to look at themes of interest in a story that doesn’t quite deliver. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Matt Smith: The Biography, by Emily Herbert

Second paragraph of third chapter:

But one man didn’t think like this. He believed that Doctor Who had a huge role to play in the twenty-first century, that the franchise was not dead but sleeping, and that, in short, it was high time Doctor Who made a comeback. And this particular man was in a position to do something about it.

A rather fluffy biography which I hope I picked up cheap somewhere, first published in 2010 and hastily updated for the paperback edition in 2012, with at least as much about the history of Doctor Who as about the new star, whose career had lasted less than a decade at the time of writing. (Since then of course, he’s been Prince Philip and is now Daemon Targaryen.)

Emily Herbert specialises in celebrity biographies and this is not one of her top rated works on Goodreads or LibraryThing. (For the record, her top-rated works are her biographies of Robin Williams and Lady Gaga.) She does a decent job of making bricks out of straw here, and explains the history of Doctor Who rather well to a target audience whose interest may be less than obsessive. But the really interesting biography (or autobiography) of Matt Smith will be written a couple of decades from now. Meanwhile you can get this one here.

The Eleventh Hour, by Jon Arnold

Next in the sequence of Black Archive books about individual Doctor Who stories, this time it’s the first Eleventh Doctor story and the first of Steven Moffat’s era as show-runner.

When The Eleventh Hour was first broadcast in 2010, I wrote:

I think Doctor Who is in good hands. This is one of the stronger debut stories for a new Doctor – up there with Rose and An Unearthly Child. We enjoyed every minute of the hour.

Matt Smith does it with humour and total conviction, and Karen Gillan shows promise too (though hopefully will get a bit more to do in future episodes). You can understand that each of them clicked with Moffat and Wenger as rapidly as we are told they did. Amy’s character starts with reason to be annoyed as well as fascinated by the Doctor, but is herself keeping some secrets from him and presumably from us too.

The actual plot did have a lot of elements from Moffat’s previous Who stories – but these were good stories first time round, and we went in a slightly new direction here: for instance, the Doctor’s visitation of Madame de Pompadour was him dipping into her story, whereas his visit to Amy got her into therapy (which, and this may have been a subtle point, may not be such a bad thing for a child who has lost her parents). Though I hope Moffat’s future stories are a bit more experimental.

Lots of little pleasing points. The montage of the previous Doctors – a great way of establishing 46 years of continuity for new viewers. The Tardis swimming pool (for the first time in New Who, it’s more than just the control room) and new interior (which is nicely syncretic, though children will need to be told what a typewriter is). The final shot of Amy’s fannish drawings of the Doctor and the Tardis, and her wedding dress.

I’m not blown away by the new version of the theme music, but I will get used to it.

I have rewatched it a couple of times since – on a transatlantic flight, I found it in the entertainment system and turned to it as familiar and comforting fare; and also of course it was one of Emily Cook’s lockdown rewatches (a phenomenon that I have not yet seen written up properly).

Going back to it for this review, yet again I thought it was very good, and definitely up there with the 1963 and 2005 debut episodes as one of the strongest starts for a new Doctor and production team. It’s funny and scary, and renewed my affection for Eleven, Amy and Rory as characters. (I recently rewatched The God Complex, in which the Doctor kicks them off the Tardis; they are better served in their debut.) Those who wonder if the Eleventh Doctor or indeed the Moffat era is for them would be well served by starting here (as we did in real life).

This is Jon Arnold’s third book for the Black Archive series, the other two also being reboots, one successful (Rose) and one unsuccessful (Scream of the Shalka). This is another good one; he goes well beyond the story to look at its importance in the overall sequence of Who as a show. The chapters are:

  • a prologue about the problem of relaunching Who in 2010
  • the casting and characterisation of the Eleventh Doctor
  • Moffat’s approach to romance and the characterisation of Amy
  • Moffat’s approach to drama more generally, especially comedy; the second paragraph of this third chapter, with the quote it refences, are as follows:

His career is one of the more remarkable of any British television writer: bar one episode of Stay Lucky (1989-93), three of Dawn French vehicle Murder Most Horrid and Doctor Who, Moffat’s work has entirely been on shows he has created or fully authored. Moffat’s initial break was the result of an exceptional stroke of luck. His father, Bill Moffat, was the headmaster of Thorn Primary School. When it was used for the production of an episode of Highway (1983-93), he mentioned to the producers that he had an idea for a series about a school newspaper. He had no interest in a career as a scriptwriter and sold the idea on condition that his son write a sample script. It is worth noting at this point that this was not in any way nepotistic: if the scripts had not been good enough then the production team could have declined them. If they were good then they would have a writer on board at a relatively low cost:

‘She (Sandra C Hastie, Press Gang’s producer) sort of sighed and said “Oh god I’ll read it once, I’m not paying for it obviously but I’ll read one script from him and then I’ll get a proper writer.” So, I sent in a script and she loved it. And with that kind of incredible sort of madness-cum-genius of the woman, says I immodestly, she just decided that I’d write the whole series. Out of nowhere[…]

  • the fairytale aspects of Who under Moffat, referencing also the roots of the “fish fingers and custard” scene from Tigger in The House at Pooh Corner
  • the crack in the wall and “Silence Will Fall” as respectively successful and unsuccessful foreshadowings of the season arc
  • a brief conclusion reflecting on the successful post-Who careers of Moffat, Smith and Gillan
  • an appendix looking briefly at the “Meanwhile in the Tardis” extra scene, a bonus on the DVD/Bluray.

Another decent addition to the sequence. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll

Second paragraph of third chapter:

One of the more plausible interpretations of The Shining covered in the documentary movie, Room 237 (2012), is that the movie is a reworking of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth. At the end of the film Jack dies inside a hedge maze, a location that Kubrick added to King’s novel. The association of Jack with the Minotaur is foreshadowed elsewhere in the movie: there are moments when Jack appears taurine-like – as if he’s a bull about to charge; there is a poster of a skier who looks like the Minotaur beside another of a cowboy riding a bull; and in another scene, Jack’s wife, Wendy, makes a comment about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, reminiscent of Ariadne’s thread. The God Complex is far more explicit in its mining of the Minotaur myth, but its association with The Shining extends far beyond this shared mythical inspiration.

Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs on individual Doctor Who stories, which I am reading at the rate of two a month in an attempt to catch up. (Both this and the next one in sequence are numbered #10 on the cover, but it seems that this is really #9.)

The God Complex is one of my less favourite episodes in one of my less favourite series of New Who, and I didn’t write it up at the time, nor did I recommended it in my epic “Which New Who to Watch” post. In case you need your memory refreshed, here’s the “Next Time” trailer:

It’s the one where the Doctor, Amy and Rory are stuck in a hotel with a few other characters, of whom the best developed is Rita, played by Amara Karan; but it turns out that the hotel is a prison for a Minotaur. Personally I didn’t feel that the plot held together at all, and the scene at the end, where the Doctor basically kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis to start their lives without him, was disappointingly underdeveloped. But others differ; here, for instance, is Matt Smith reflecting on what the story might have told us about the Doctor:

In a panel at Dragon Con 2017, Matt Smith revealed his own theory for what was in the mysterious Room 11 in The God Complex and it’s much darker than you’d expect. #DoctorWho #MattSmith pic.twitter.com/It95XFR3PJ

— Tom Bowen (@ThetaSigma2017) January 27, 2022

Driscoll is clearly also a fan of the story, finding a lot more depth to it than I had imagined was there. The chapters are as follows:

  • The symbolism of the Minotaur, and modern treatments of the story in and beyond Doctor Who;
  • The roots of the story in Orwell’s 1984 (surveillance in particular);
  • The roots of the story in The Shining, film rather than book (hotel horror, obviously, though he also blames it for the weakness of the closing scene);
  • The roots of the story in previous Who stories about bases under siege and about religion (though I think he misses a couple of interesting examples on religion);
  • A rather good chapter on fear and terror as storytelling devices;
  • A more confused chapter trying to work out what the story is trying to tell us about faith and religion;
  • A long chapter on the Doctor’s fallibility as a hero;
  • A chapter on the role of the companions in Doctor Who;
  • a concluding short chapter wondering what the hell the symbolism of the fishbowl is meant to be?

Driscoll likes the story more than I did, but is not unaware of its flaws. I went back myself and watched it again to prepare for this post, but I think it will be a while before I repeat the effort. You can get Driscoll’s book here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, by Frank Collins

Second paragraph of third chapter (which is, not surprisingly, about Victory of the Daleks):

During the 1960s and 1970s, in the classic series of Doctor Who, Dalek stories tended to underplay many of these initial ideas and themes and instead the Daleks were positioned as a generic race of evil aliens bent on galactic dominance. Their appearance in the TV Century 21 comic between 1965-7 echoes Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare strips, and this aesthetic and their role as conquerors of time and space are further expressed on television in The Chase and The Daleks’ Master Plan. The two Dalek films made in 1965 and 1966 also take the pulp form of the comic book as the basis for adapting the first two Terry Nation serials and the Technicolor, widescreen clashes between the Doctor and the Daleks position this relationship firmly within a children’s action-adventure story context. As we will see later, the influence of the two Dalek films is integral to how the Daleks appear in Victory of the Daleks in 2010. With The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks in the late 1960s it is David Whittaker’s influence that sees the Daleks elevated from their comic book machinations to make a brief return to the themes of their genetic inheritance, presaging much of the Dalek civil war narratives of the mid to late 1980s. Victory of the Daleks quotes extensively from both serials, with the camouflaged, Union Jack Daleks paraphrasing the claim of “I am your servant” from the former as “I am your soldier” in the reveal on the rooftop of the Cabinet War Rooms and masking their crafty behaviour by serving tea and doing the filing whilst prowling round corridors up to no good. The Doctor, as played by Matt Smith, also reiterates “the final end” as uttered by Patrick Troughton’s Doctor from the latter serial as he too prepares to witness the premature destruction of the Daleks. The Dalek stories of the early to mid 1970s such as Day of the Daleks, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks are more a reflection of the complex operations and guerrilla style tactics in the theatre of the Vietnam conflict. Aptly, Planet of the Daleks is set on the jungle planet Spiridon and Death to the Daleks plays out much of its chase narrative within the framework of the planet Exxilon’s ancient culture and temple-like city, evoking the ongoing war in Cambodia. In all three serials humans or humanoids are involved in galactic wars and are pitched against the Daleks in a desire to expunge the influence of their dogma and ideology. It is not until Genesis of the Daleks that Terry Nation’s original themes are more blatantly married to Nazi ideology and iconography, and to the use of science as a tool to prop up a xenophobic, racist and totalitarian rule. The serial also plays out as if we are witnessing both the last days of Hitler struggling to ensure the survival of the Aryan legacy of his party and the bitter end of the Vietnam War. This decades-long war, coincidentally concluding in April 1975 just as the six episodes of the serial were being transmitted, is a subtext in the story “microcosmically reflecting upon tendencies in the viewer’s world,” as Jonathan Bignell and Andrew O’Day observe in their book Terry Nation.

That’s a fair sample of the book’s content. It’s a very dense and scholarly examination of Matt Smith’s first thirteen episodes as the Eleventh Doctor, with a lot of references to studies of pop culture which I haven’t read and to some which I have. I think the balance is about 20% “I already knew that” to 70% “Hmmm, that’s interesting” and 10% “Oh come on, no way”, which is reasonable for a book of this kind.

(I must say I think that Vietnam was not the only war ever fought in a jungle, and Cambodia was not the only war ever fought around ancient places of worship, and some of those other wars actually involved British soldiers, unlike either Vietnam or Cambodia.)

I actually got this last year by mistake – I had intended to order Andy Priestner’s book about Secret Army from the same publisher, and somehow clicked on the wrong button. When it arrived I was a bit dismayed but decided to keep it in the hope that I would enjoy it, and I did. You can get it here.

March Books 15) Borrowed Time, by Naomi A. Alderman

This is a particularly good Eleventh Doctor book, read very effectively by Meera Syal (who does a very effective Scottish accent). The setting is a London bank, just before the economic crash of 2008, where key staffers are being tempted to use time-travel bracelets to multi-task; the bracelets of course come at a much higher cost than is immediately apparent. There is a particularly effective passage early on where Amy becomes addicted to the giddy possibilities of personal time-looping, and some brilliant description. After a not brilliant start in 2010, the Eleventh Doctor books are doing very well now. I shall look out for more by Alderman – I confess I had not really heard of her before compiling my list the other week but that’s clearly my loss.