He wasn’t entirely sure if Ruby was listening to him. She was standing still with the toes of her shoes touching the edge of the cliff, completely enraptured by the dinosaurs. Of course she was! Who wouldn’t be?
When I wrote up the most recent season of Doctor Who, I commented of this story:
The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
I watched it again before reading the book and writing this post, and what struck me is the mismatch between, on the one hand, brilliant effects and performances, and on the other, a really poor story concept. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and re-watching it only draws your attention more firmly to the plot flaws. No doubt this is why they slipped it out as part of a double on the same night as Eurovision.
Alison Rumfitt is new to Who writing but has a couple of horror novels under her belt. This is a decent novelisation, adding a little top-and-tail narrative about a child and a monster, and digging a bit more into Ruby’s background and the resonances of the babies for her. There are also a couple more poo jokes, I think (I didn’t go back and check.) It may be difficult for an established writer to stamp their own authority on a Doctor Who story that they did not actually write, but I guess that wasn’t the point, and it’s perfectly serviceable. You can get it here.
She’d been trekking for days across the grassy plains that lay beyond the valley and the river and the settlements, but at last the ground was beginning to climb. She was sure she would find answers here.
A rather lovely Fifteenth Doctor novel, with two different sets of cute aliens in potential conflict with each other, and the Doctor and Ruby sorting out the conflict. You won’t get the same level of characterisation here as in Ruby Red, but it’s a good sfnal concept, executed in a very Whovian way. You can get it here.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ran. ‘I didn’t expect them to come after me.’
One of my disappointments about the Chibnall era of Doctor Who is that there was so little good quality spinoff material apart from the TV show itself. By contrast, Russell T. Davies has hit the ground running as usual, with one novelisation out already and another three coming later in the year, as well as two spinoff novels last month and another scheduled for November.
This is the first of the spinoff novels, taking the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby to an obscure part of European history, the Battle on the Ice in 1242, fought between Russians and Estonians (to use anachronistic and brutal shorthand) on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus. My extensive and detailed research suggests that this is the only Who story in any medium which has an Estonian setting.
Being a Doctor Who story, there are of course external incursions into the real history of what happened – three interstellar Valkyrie sisters, managing a rite of passage for the youngest of them, and an alien hive mind under the ice. On top of that the TARDIS is behaving oddly, in a foreshadowing of what we found out about its extra passenger in the recent season finale.
These sfnal trimmings are also the basis for much banter between the Doctor and Ruby, and that of course is what people will buy the book for. Given that it’s Cook’s first novel, and it must have been written before any of the recent season was shown, she catches Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor really well. The plot doesn’t gel completely perfectly (the climax in particular is lower-key than I had anticipated) but it’s a good start to the new era on paper. You can get it here.
OK, I can’t possibly not comment on the recently concluded first full series of stories featuring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. In summary, it srted a bit wobbly, had some super peaks in the middle, and ended (for me) a bit flat.
Ncuti Gatwa is great as the Doctor, and while I am of the old-school that prefers my Doctors not to have emotional vulnerability, I felt that he covered it off very well. Like all the lead actors so far, he is very watchable. The eye is drawn to him no matter where he is on the screen. I thought the chemistry with Gibson was great as well, and I am glad that she will still be around for at least some of the next series.
The two opening stories, both shown on Eurovision night six weeks ago, were OK but both were a bit silly. The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
Though it was good to see Golda Rosheuvel, the first of many excellent guest stars this series, Jocelyn here after enjoying her in the title role in Queen Charlotte. She was also a hospital doctor in two episodes of the second series of Torchwood.
Apparently a novelisation of Space Babies will be one of three published this summer, written by Angela Rumfitt who is a pioneer of the New Gross. Appropriate enough for a monster made of snot.
The Devil’s Chord has a really sinister plot, with music being removed from the world; Big Finish has sometimes dared to play with the soundscape of the fictional universe, but this is the first time that the TV show has really gone there. This time it was the execution that was a bit silly, with Jinkx Monsoon really chewing the scenery as the Maestro.
The returning figure from the show’s history that really took me by (pleasant) surprise was June Hudson, in her first appearance on screen at the age of ninety-something; she did all the costume design for late 1970s and early 1980s Who, and also for Blake’s 7. She is the only character actually killed in the 1963 part of the episode.
Then we get onto the good stuff, with a run of four brilliant episodes. Boom is not silly at all; it’s a tense story of potential sudden death in an awful war zone, where although we know that it’s only the third episode of eight in the season, the threat of disaster is real. Probably the darkest episode of the season.
The standout guest star is Varada Sethu, who is apparently joining next season as a new companion, but here playing the quietly desperate Mundy Flynn. She was great in Andor too.
I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.
This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.
Though I was also unnerved by the resemblance between Aneurin Barnard, as the fictional prime minister Roger ap Gwilliam, and Irakli Kobakhidze, who in real life is the prime minister of the Republic of Georgia.
Prime Minister of GeorgiaFictional UK prime minister(I may have those captions the wrong way round.)
73 Yards is also getting an early novelisation, this time by the series script editor Scott Handcock, who is a lovely chap though I have had mixed feelings about his previous books.
We watched Dot and Bubble in Antwerp before dental emergency brought a premature end to our romantic getaway three weeks ago. This was a return to the format of Blink, with the Doctor and Ruby participating in the story only by video until the end. Russell T. Davies doesn’t always get his social commentary right, but this was well done.
And full marks to Callie Cooke in her central role as Lindy Pepper-Bean. As she pointed out in the Unleashed episode following this, Carey Mulligan went on to big stardom after Blink. We’ll watch Callie Cooke with interest.
And the fourth in a good run of four episodes was Rogue, in which it turns out that aliens in the Doctor Who universe are also fans of Bridgerton. This had particularly good emoting from Ncuti Gatwa, suddenly taken by feelings for Jonathan Groff’s Rogue, but also had Millie Gibson playing Ruby pretending to be an alien pretending to be Ruby, and getting away with it. The contrast between spaceship and 1813 was well done.
Jonathan Groff of course was the very first King George in Hamilton, and so his voice was the first heard by the audience. I felt that (unlike Jinkx Monsoon) he avoided chewing the scenery here.
And I also cheered for Indira Varma, the Duchess here, but previously seen by me in Game of Thrones and the first season of Torchwood.
Rogue will also get the novelisation treatment, by the episode’s writers, Kate Herron and Briony Redman.
The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.
And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.
But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.
I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA. My longer-term readers may recall that I myself identified the parents of a baby abandoned in a park in Philadelphia in 1917, using DNA samples and genealogy sites, who turned out to be a local musician and an airplane executive cousin of my grandmother’s; I’m in touch with the baby’s three children, now all in their 70s, and I have met with one of them and introduced her to other relatives.
I’ve also done it for another woman much closer to Ruby Sunday’s age, and for a couple of other cases that I have not reported here. So that’s one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.
Still, I had been hoping for better.
Lots of people have been raking the episodes in order of preferences, so I will do the same.
Ruby and her band were performing their usual Christmas set, full of old classics and crowd-pleasers, with some newer, cooler Christmas anthems snuck in. The rosy-cheeked patrons laughed and chatted, coats unbuttoned, bobble hats hanging off chairs, scarves trailing forgotten on the floor. Behind the bar, a boy Ruby knew from around the area served drinks with a cheerful smile, a tinsel crown in his hair.
Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson is new to the Whoniverse, and charmed everyone at Gallifrey One this year, though unfortunately there were not enough copies of this novelisation around for me to get one. Anyway, it’s a breezy, enjoyable revisiting of the first full Fifteenth Doctor story, with a bit more background for Ruby, and sensibly not trying to reproduce the stunning visuals in printed form. She catches the voice of the new Doctor well, but we don’t find out much more about him, perhaps even less than usual for a Who novelisation; perhaps there are surprises in store. You can get it here.
I might just squee for a bit, rather non-verbally, but basically once again I loved this. The grownups are back in charge. Gatwa and Gibson are a great pair. The alternate timeline gimmick has been done much worse and more didactically in Who,and elsewhere. Not totally wild about the goblins, but again we have had much worse. And I don’t think we’ve ever had the Doctor actually singing on TV? And what of Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood – does she really not know the TARDIS at the start, or is she just making that up – have the events of the story changed her, or has she just changed her story?
Seriously though, I took an interest in the plotline about DNA testing, not least because I myself was once able to identify a foundling’s parents through DNA connections (mother then father). For any white person of British and/or Irish descent, there will be loads of connections in the various databases, perhaps not close ones, but they will be there. So we deduce that there’s something very odd about Ruby’s background. But then, the days of relatively normal backgrounds for Doctor Who companions have come and gone, I think.
