More Ninth Doctor audio plays from Big Finish, this time a trilogy with a very good beginning and end and a weaker middle. Here is a promotional video, not so much a trailer as a teaser with Frank Skinner doing a voiceover.
The Colour of Terror by Lizzie Hopley
This has the Ninth Doctor meeting Frank Skinner and Susan Penhaligon in a charity shop somewhere in England, where the colour red is taking on sinister and awful characteristics. It’s very well done, with a top guest cast, including also Laura Rollins and Dinita Gohil as a couple who get caught up in the situation. Coming back to Frank Skinner though – he’s obviously loving every minute of it, and it’s a joy to hear.
The Blooming Menace, by James Kettle, is the one that doesn’t quite hit the mark; it’s set around a young fogeys’ club out of P.G. Wodehouse, with carnivorous plants. The star guest here for me was Milanka Brooks, playing a chap who isn’t actually a chap.
But we’re back on track again with the finale, Red Darkness by Roy Gill. To get to the best bit first: it brings back the Vashta Nerada from Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. You might have thought that such a visual monster might not work well on audio, but with good scripting and acting it is a real hit. The Doctor comes to the rescue of a doomed colony with the help of partially sighted Callen (played by Adam Martyn) and his talking dog (played by Karki Bhambra).
The strengths of the first and third of these more than make up for the weakness in the middle, and I recommend the set. You can get it here.
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.
It took me a couple of weeks to acquire the newly colorised version of The War Games, the longest surviving Old Who series and the last of the black and white era, which was released just before Christmas by the BBC. I am of course a purist who believes that you should, if you can, watch the four hours of the original story. But in these busy times, who has four hours to sit down to a show made in 1969? So I guess I welcome the fact that it has been made accessible to viewers with less time and patience. Here’s a trailer.
It’s very pleasing, I must admit. I certainly had a jolt of excitement when I saw the first real splashes of colour on screen. There’s no denying that the human eye is naturally attracted to chromatic variation; it represents immense effort by the colourists, and it has paid off.
I’m a little more hesitant about the editing. Sure, cutting four hours down to 90 minutes is going to be a challenge, even if there are several extraneous escape-and-recapture sequences which were ripe for trimming. There is a little jerkiness in continuity as a result, which could perhaps have been smoothed over with a caption or a voiceover – thinking particularly of Vilar who comes out of nowhere.
But the ending is where the editors have added rather than taken away. We get nods to New Who at a crucial moment in the trial scene, and the two extra minutes inserted between the last seconds of the last black-and-white Doctor Who episode, and the first canonical appearance of the Third Doctor, are a delight – originally developed by a fan on YouTube, who the BBC then brought into the project. Beautifully done.
(Also the line “Too fat!” has been removed, but that’s a good thing.)
I’m not going to do an overall analysis of Joy to the World, but here were some things that struck me.
I can’t recall watching anything on screen or stage that addressed the pandemic so directly. It’s not just the explicit “those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties” line; the Doctor’s isolation for a year in the hotel, sitting chastely distanced from Anita, is a very obvious callback to 2020. In-universe of course, the Doctor could perfectly well have gone to visit with Ruby, or UNIT, or his other self and Donna’s family, since he knows he has a year but doesn’t have to be on the spot. But that’s not the story that Stephen Moffat chose to tell. (I’ve read a couple of pandemic-referencing novels – Ali Smith in particular.)
Speaking of Anita, although Nicola Coughlan was the top billed guest star as Joy, it was Steph de Whalley who nailed it as the lonely hotel receptionist. She is 37 and has not previously had a major role in her career. Hopefully that will change now.
Speaking of other members of the cast, I had seen Joel Fry, who played Trev, on stage as Jodie Whittaker’s secret husband in The Duchess last year.
Nicola Coughlan is the first Northern Irish actor to get top billing in a Doctor Who episode. (Edited to add: she is from Galway.) (Edited again: Er, after Dervla Kirwan.)
I winced a bit at the Bethlehem scene at the end. But does this mean that the whole New Testament is now an annex of the Whoniverse? Or just the gospels of Matthew and Luke?
Annexing another continuity, in case you didn’t know, Silvia Trench (the wopman on the Orient Express) is also James Bond’s London girlfriend in the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.
The usual Moffat problem: nobody ever stays dead.
But in general, I enjoyed it – the good bits definitely outweighing the misfires.
And of course the first Doctor Who content to drop over the Christmas break was the Christmas Prom, introduced by Catherine Tate. Lots of joyous energy in the hall and among the performers; audience clearly appreciating the scary monsters walking among them. The whole thing is online here:
One of my big complaints about the Chibnall era was that the Doctor Who Annuals were very thin indeed, with only weakly regurgitated plot summaries of recent episode and a few rather pathetic puzzles. This must have been set from the top, because although the credited author of the 2025 Annual, Paul Lang, is the same as for the last few, there seems to be a new energy to this side of things.
Yes, we have each episode retold briefly in hard copy; but it’s more of a sideways look, with the story told from a different angle than on TV, and the Fourteenth Doctor stories are interspersed among the first few Fifteenth Doctor stories. We also have a print adaptation (by veteran Steve Cole) of the Comic Relief skit with Davros. And even the puzzles seem to have a new level of sophistication.
I don’t seem to have read the 2023 or 2024 Annuals; I had better put that right.
I’ve been really bad at tracking my Big Finish listening here, and one of my minor New Year’s resolutions is to do that a bit better. I actually listened to this trilogy mainly while doing Christmas shopping, and perhaps I was in a good mood, but I notice that I liked it more than a few of the other reviews I have glanced at. They all feature Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, with no common companion across the three plays (though two Eighth Doctor companions pop up in the third). Here’s a trailer:
The first of these The Seas of Titan by Liz Myles, is a Sea Devils story with a difference in that it’s set on Titan, not Earth. It hits much the same beats as most other Silurian / Sea Devils stories, with the wrinkle that both humans and Sea Devils have been abandoned by the rest of their race who have moved on (or stayeed put). I really liked the change of setting and the consequent difference of pace.
BF tend to include a historical story in every trilogy, and this time it’s Lay Down Your Arms, by Lisa McMullin, set in a late Habsburg spa resort where aliens are infiltrating the convalescents. Some of the virtual architecture was a bit unbelievable (“bonkers”, as another reviewer put it), but Kate Sissons as Betha Kinzky, the companion of the hour, is tremendous with Eccleston, and there is a great sting in the tail as we discover what she did with the rest of her life. (I at least had heard of her, under her married name.)
But my breath was taken away by Flatpack, by John Dorney, the third of the trilogy. The Doctor arrives in a mysterious self-assembly furniture superstore, and encounters Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker) and Tania Bell (Rebecca Root), who featured as companions of the Eighth Doctor in the extensive (perhaps overextended) saga Stranded which I listened to last year (and never got around to writing up). It becomes clear, as the entertaining script develops, that the secret controllers of the furniture store are up to no good – but I totally missed the clues as to who they actually turn out to be, a tremendous plot twist which I don’t think I’ve seen before in any Doctor Who story.
The first Big Finish stories with the Ninth Doctor were a little uneasy, as if the star and the production team were still sizing each other up. But now they seem to have properly got into their stride, and I highly recommend getting this here.
When I first watched this 1964 story in 2006, I wrote:
This was the last of the First Doctor stories that I felt I must Get Hold Of. I think you have to allow for the fact that it is mid-1960s drama to take into account the rather slow pacing. I liked it all the same; a real attempt to get into the spirit of the historical period, with some difficult dilemmas for the time-travellers – Barbara determined to abolish human sacrifice, but ultimately fails; and the Doctor has someone fall in love with him for the first time (but not, of course the last) in his on-screen adventures. Cameca’s helping them to escape in the end, even though she knows she will never see them again, was as touching as Barbara’s acceptance of her inability to change history. A minor gem, I would say.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2009, I wrote:
The Aztecs is very good, but doesn’t quite rise to greatness. There are some great bits – Barbara struggling with the consequences of her divinity, the Doctor’s romance with Cameca, the Doctor and Barbara arguing about changing history. (It should be added that Lucarotti did some good female characters – Barbara is at her best here, and don’t forget Cameca, Ping-Cho and Anne Chaplet.) But I find Tlotoxl a little too pantomimey as a villain, and Ian just biffs Aztecs about, and gets condemned to death again, while Carole Ann Ford is on holiday. Everyone does it with great conviction, and you barely notice that it’s all done in a hot studio with a painted backdrop. And we end with another cliff-hanger into the next story, though our heroes have had enough time to change clothes.
This time around, a little wiser to the constraints of 1960s television, I am amazed at how well the director and cast managed to convey a grand sweeping city and civilization in four cramped studio sets. Also Margot van der Burgh is very impressive as Cameca, a mostly quiet but crucial role. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
The Aztecs they passed on the way to the barracks bowed respectfully to Tlotoxl, but Ian sensed they were afraid of the High Priest.
I was disappointed by Lucarotti’s novelisation of The Massacre, which stuck much more closely to his original script than the show as broadcast. Here again he has added bits and pieces which presumably were in his original concept, and I was again disappointed, but for a different reason: the narration is strangely flat, and you really miss the performances of the actors breathing life into Lucarotti’s lines back in 1964. One cannot help but feel that the production team on the whole did Lucarotti a favour by editing his material. Also he has a really annoying habit of mixing indirect speech with direct speech, which reads like a desperate attempt to make a novel out of a TV script.
Reading the book again very soon after rewatching the story, there are a few important differences included to smoothe out the plot; but I stand by my complaint about the jerky switches from indirect to direct speech. You can get it here.
Doris V. Sutherland’s Black Archive on the story has four chapters, a substantial conclusion and an interesting appendix. The first chapter, ‘Building the Pyramid’, looks at The Aztecs in the context of the 1960s historical stories of Doctor Who, as a showcase for Jacqueline Hill as Barbara, and as a reflection on the effects of time travel, pointing out how new all of this was for Doctor Who at the time.
The second chapter, ‘Not One Line? The Historical Accuracy of The Aztecs’ goes in detail, perhaps a bit too much detail, on whether or not the story is a good description of the real Aztec culture. Though there are a couple of good observations, eg “it is hard to miss the awkward results of the script’s reluctance to mention the Aztec deities by name. It appears that such monikers as Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were deemed insufficiently pronounceable for a production in which retakes were to be avoided for budget reasons.”
The third and longest chapter, ‘Narratives of Conquest’, looks at where the ideas for the story really came from. Its second paragraph is:
The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping lists, as an influence on the serial, The Royal Hunt of the Sun², a play by Peter Shaffer that depicted Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas and was performed in the same year as The Aztecs³. However, the dates here do not quite match up: as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood point out, the play was originally performed in mid-February, while Lucarotti has stated that he first discussed the possibility of an Aztec-themed story during the filming of Marco Polo, which wrapped up on 17 February⁴. [Comment: actually that looks to me like a very good match-up of the dates!] ² Cornell, Day and Topping, Discontinuity Guide, loc 370. ³ And was adapted into a movie in 1969, starring Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer. ⁴ Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood, About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, Seasons 1 to 3, p70.
Sutherland considers the 1947 film Captain from Castile and G.A. Henty before swinging again into the question of historical detail, examining very closely the extent of human sacrifice among the Aztecs and, crucially, whether or not it made much difference to the brutality of the Spanish conquest, concluding that it didn’t. I somewhat parted company with the writer here; I think that it doesn’t matter all that much that the story is not based on perfect historical knowledge.
The fourth chapter, ‘What Does The Aztecs Have to Say?’, starts by recounting critical opinion of the story but then swings back into the question of colonialism, pointing out that the barbarism of Spanish colonialism, as perceived in English culture, is a really crucial element of understanding what was going on. How very different, perhaps we are meant to think, to enlightened British colonialism! I think there is actually a bit more that could have been looked at here, in terms of 1960s British perceptions of the Franco regime. Her ultimate judgement is that the message of The Aztecs on colonialism is confused, rather than definitively pro or anti.
I have to take issue with the final section of Chapter 4, which states that “Only with the first Chibnall / Whittaker season, which aired in 2018, did the series hire its first non-white writers.” Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1985 story Timelash, is Anglo-Indian – I have checked this with him personally.
The conclusion makes the point that The Aztecs is quite different from most Doctor Who stories, while still being similar enough to be recognisable and sound enough to remain watchable decades later.
An appendix looks at the differences in the novelisation, flagging up in particular a more overtly Christian agenda, and then briefly looks at Child of the Sun God, an episode of the Andersons’ Joe 90 also written by Lucarotti with striking similarities (a lost Amazonian tribe is striking down world statesmen; Joe 90 must infiltrate them, pass himself off as a white god and save the day), but which is much less memorable.
I confess to not being completely satisfied with this particular Black Archive. Researching the factual basis of a particular story takes us quickly to the point where the commentator can show off the superiority of their knowledge to the original writer. I preferred the discussions of ideology and of Lucarotti’s use of his sources, whatever they were. But you can get it here.
‘Hmm …’ the Doctor mused as his eyes passed over the houses surrounding him. ‘Why have a plant pot without any plants?’
A Fifteenth Doctor book which is yet another story of rebels against the system, with world-building so complex that I am afraid I got lost in it, and loads of characters who barely have time to establish themselves before the book ends (or they get killed). Yes, it’s an important anti-colonial narrative; yes, there are a lot of Doctor Who stories that have this theme; but most of them are better executed. Heart in the right place, perhaps needed twice as much space (or substantial editing). You can get it here.
Judd sat behind an imposing antique desk of heavy wood. It helped conceal the fact, not obvious when he was wearing battle armour, that although he had a fine physique, he was slightly under average height. He was wearing a formal suit loosened a little at the collar. On the desk before him several neat stacks of reports were arranged about a multi-function keypad. To one side was a monitor screen, angled so that Dynes’ cameras would get an oblique view of moving columns of text and changing images, without revealing any detail. On the bulkhead behind Judd lighting panels glowed brightly while the rest of the office was rather dimly lit. Even though there was no natural day or night onboard a spacecraft, it implied that the hour was late.
This is the last in my run of Sixth Doctor re-reads, and I guess typical rather than brilliant. The Doctor and Peri land on a garden planet where not all is as it seems; most of the apparent humans are holograms, an interplanetary dictator is on his way to take over, the robots are revolting, there’s a comedy journalist recording everything and a hidden princess. Entertaining enough, but not at the top of my list. You can get it here.
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.
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.
When I first watched the two-part ending of the second Jodie Whittaker season, I wrote:
I was tremendously excited by one aspect of the first episode – no single minute of TV Doctor Who had ever previously been set in Ireland, as I have previously written. Of course, with the revelation of the second part, it turns out that there is still no moment of Doctor Who set in the “real” Ireland, is the one that exists in the same universe as the Doctor and the Tardis rather than just being in the Doctor’s imagination. Again, as someone who saw The Brain of Morbius first time round, I’m not unhappy with the disruption of what a lot of people thought was established continuity.
Rewatching it, I felt that there was a bit too much telling and not enough action. If the real point of the story is the true nature of the Doctor, why are we worrying about the Cybermen? (Except that they are obviously a Bad Thing.) But again, I enjoyed the Irish sections in the first episode, and the revelation of the Doctor’s origins in the second.
Ryan Bradley’s Black Archive on the story is longer than usual, but has only three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, so that’s a bit of a variation on the usual format. In the introduction, ‘Everything You Know is About to Change’, he sets out his stall: he believes that Chibnall’s agenda as show-runner always was to have the Doctor experience the ‘ego-death’ of psychedelia, and that the story considered here draws heavily on the story of the (real-life) CIA’sa MK-Ultra brianwashing project. These are strong claims.
But in the first chapter, ‘The Harp That Once’, he diverts from those issues to one that is very close to my own heart: the question of how Doctor Who treats Ireland, and especially how Ireland is treated in this episode. I have written myself (at length here in 2018, abbreviated and updated here in 2019 a few months before Ascension of the Cybermen was broadcast) about Ireland in the show. Before getting into Bradley’s analysis, I’ll recapitulate my own: I believe that TV Who doesn’t go to Ireland for much the same reason as it doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or to other historical atrocities: these are topics too controversial for a family show.
Chibnall did nibble at the edges here, with Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, but I would argue that these are different cases – Rosa Parks’ heroism is not remotely controversial these days, and the worst aspects of the 1947 Partition are somewhat sanitised by telling it as the story of one rural family, rather than the urban massacres. It’s also worth noting that Chibnall never returned to that semi-historical format after his first season: The Haunting of Villa Diodati is not presented as historical fact, let alone Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror or War of the Sontarans.
There are more, but still not many, references to Ireland in spinoff novels and comics, and they are generally unsatisfactory – note especially the First Doctor era villain Questor.
Audio is a different matter. There are no less than six Big Finish plays and a BBC Audio Original which are entirely set in Ireland. These go to places where I don’t think TV Who could go – Cromwell’s atrocities; the Famine. Of course, for audio it’s very easy to portray an Irish setting by simply hiring actors with the right accent; TV has to try much harder with the locations (and even here, the relevant bits of Ascension of the Cybermen are filmed in Wales, but indicated as Ireland by diddly-dee music).
Ryan Bradley, like me, is from Northern Ireland, and in this first chapter he explores the conception of Ireland in British culture and in Doctor Who. He points out that Ashad the semi-Cyberman is actually played by a Northern Irish actor, Patrick O’Kane, and draws a parallel between Ashad’s half-transformed nature and Ulster Unionism, or indeed Northern Ireland itself, constructed political concepts which have outlived their original purpose. Ko Sharmus in this story is also played by an Ulsterman, Ian McElhinney.
He goes on to look at some of the previous mentions of Ireland in Old Who, including the Gallifrey joke, and makes the point (which I had missed) that in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Terror of the Autons, Harry Towb’s Northern Irish character McDermott is transformed into a ‘stocky Northcountryman’. He misses a few other examples: Casey in Talons of Weng-Chiang, the less obvious case of Clark in The Sea Devils, and the fairly major characters of McGillop in Day of the Doctor, Morgan Blue in Into the Dalek and Angstrom in The Ghost Monument. (I’ll forgive him Bel in Flux, as it post-dates 2020.)
He then looks at law enforcement, especially the dubious aspects of the history of the Garda Síochána in Ireland (more briefly also the RUC), and at Chibnall’s previous depictions of (British) law enforcement in Broadchurch and Born and Bred. To my surprise my great-great-uncle is mentioned – not one of my Irish family connections (and my great-great-grandfather James Stewart actually was an Irish policeman), but the former US Attorney-General, George W. Wickersham, who chaired the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in 1929-31. His report is mainly remembered as giving the Hoover administration a ladder to climb down from Prohibition, but it made many interesting findings on police brutality and corruption as well.
But, perhaps because of his concentration on the Gardaí (and to a much lesser extent the RUC), Bradley misses what is surely the most spectacular portrayal of Irish law enforcement in science fiction and fantasy: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which also features human beings turning into machines. (Well, bicycles anyway.) The Third Policeman himself is clearly in the old RIC rather than a Garda, and the novel is set firmly in the Irish Midlands rather than on the coast, but I’d have thought it worth a mention.
Having said all that, the chapter is very rich in detail and references, and while there are some things that I would have liked to see included, there are others that were new to me, and I found it all very thought-provoking. I don’t think I have ever before written 800 words on a single chapter of a Black Archive (or indeed of any other book).
The second chapter, ‘Any Idiot Can Make Themselves Into a Robot’, starts by looking at Ashad in the context of Bradley’s overall themes of loss of self and hybridization, and briefly notes poor old Lisa in the Torchwood episode Cyberwoman, before moving on to absorption of personalities in Chibnall’s other work, with reference also to Robert Graves and to the First Doctor story The Savages.
The third chapter, ‘Half Sick of Shadows’, looks at what we learn here about the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:
The story has been critiqued for being a ‘scroll through a newly updated Wikipedia page’, but it essentially creates new sections on that page with entirely blank or fragmented entries under them³. Paradoxically, we know more and, perhaps more significantly, less about the Doctor than we previously knew. Their home planet, their species, the number and order of their lives, are all unknown now. Whether audiences should know more or less about the Doctor’s apparent home and past has long been a subject of spirited debate⁴. In one of the most quietly important moments in Ascension of the Cybermen, the Doctor tells Ravio, ‘Don’t need your life story’. While this appears as an oddly self-aware jab at the ill-served side characters of both this story and the Chibnall era as a whole, it anticipates the central issue that the Doctor wrestles with before deciding – both here and at the end of Flux – that she doesn’t need to know everything about her own life story either. ³ Moreland, Alex, ‘Doctor Who Review: The Timeless Children’. ⁴ See Howe, David J, and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, pp313-14.
I’ll be honest, this one lost me a bit in discussion of the Buddhist concept of anattā, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Chibnall’s previous work (again) and She-Ra, among others, but it succeeded in convincing me that the story as a whole is semiotically much thicker than perhaps I first appreciated. (Which maybe makes up for it not being better television.)
A brief conclusion argues that the story is “worth ruminating on”, and I think the book as a whole makes that argument well, though I also think Bradley goes on about the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme at unnecessary length. You can get it here.
When I first wrote up this year’s Doctor Who episodes, I wrote:
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.
Re-watching before reading the novelisation, I felt again that as an episode it hangs together very well, even if the imminent peril seems to slightly come out of nowhere (which, let’s face it, is hardly unusual in Doctor Who). Millie Gibson is really spectacularly good. There is, however, one costume that doesn’t really do it for me.
The novelisation is by the writers of the TV episode, Kate Herron and Briony Redman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
It had been a good night, all in all, but none of it could have prepared Ruby Sunday for a party like this. This was the kind of party she’d dreamed of.
As well as the efficient and effective transfer of script to page, we get lots more back story about Rogue himself and the lover who he lost on a previous mission, and a little more on the Chuldur. Rogue’s ship is named as the Yossarian, perhaps as a nod to Catch-22, though I note also that there is a London band with that name. The book has a lot of humorous flashes as well, reminiscent of Douglas Adams but not trying too hard to be him. This is the best Fifteenth Doctor book so far. You can get it here.
‘I couldn’t possibly,’ said Peri politely. ‘I’m still full after our lunch.’
Second last of the Sixth Doctor books that I read in 2015 and failed to blog at the time. To be honest, I didn’t get much out of this; the Doctor and Peri land on a planet where Autons are re-enacting the dramas of 1980s soaps, a cultural phenomenon that I’m not especially invested in. It turns out that the Nestene Consciousness is the offspring of Shub-Niggurath from the Lovecraft mythos. There are some fun nods to other parts of the Doctor Who canon. One for completists. You can get it here (at a price).
Next up: Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis.
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.
We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.
I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.
He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)
Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.
After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)
Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)
Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.
(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)
I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcast by James Goss.
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.
The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters 9and which I also enjoyed very much).
The third chapter’s title is ‘He Started It, With His Stories’. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
Moffat and his interviewer, Christel Dee, were considering the themes, concerns and narrative techniques that Doctor Who shares with its folkloric precursors, rather than its more superficial aesthetic trappings. The latter, being primarily futuristic and scientific, contrast with the magical otherworlds of traditional fairy stories, and the imagined pasts, whether agrarian or courtly, from which their protagonists hail². Marina Warner’s history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time (2014), speaks of these stories being constructed from ‘building blocks includ[ing] certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings and toads),’ and while most of these items may be found in specific Doctor Who stories, they are hardly emblematic of the series as a whole³. However, her identification of fairy tales as consisting of ‘combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images’ describes Doctor Who’s overall approach just as well⁴. ² Given Doctor Who’s eclectic nature, individual stories may be identified as exceptions, but the overall point holds. ³ They can, however, be indicative of more fantasy-inflected stories: for instance, The Keeper of Traken (1981) includes a stepmother and a ring; Kinda (1982) features both apples and mirrors; and a mirror and a frog, if not a toad, appear in It Takes You Away (2018). ⁴ Warner, Marina, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, ppxx-xxi.
This chapter considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.
An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.
So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there. You can (probably) get it here.
To be honest, not one of the more memorable Sixth Doctor novels. The Doctor and Peri land in a crumbling authoritarian society, closely aligned with the setting of the Judge Dredd comics. Peri ends up with the rebels and the Doctor (after flirting with death) with the Adjudicators. Lots of running around and biffing. You can get it here.
Concluding the series of albums featuring the Twelfth Doctor, library assistant companion Alice Obiefune, and sentient tree The Sapling, here we have the showdown between the TARDIS crew and The Scream, a Silent so silent that even the other Silents can’t remember him. I felt the previous volume a bit lacking in energy, but it really picked up here to race us towards the conclusion of the story. You can get it here.
I guess this is saying good bye to Alice as well – a nicely developed comics only companion, with perhaps a bit more consistency than some of them (indeed, than some of the TV companions). She’s also in The Lost Dimension which I haven’t got to yet.
The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation [after Remembrance of the Daleks], I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.
Watching it again I find myself somewhere in between. Great performances, but a lot of running around in circles in terms of plot, no real sense of how the various bits of city connect with each other, and people just standing around to be captured or executed. We’ve had more violent assaults on our willing suspension of disbelief in the Moffat and Chibnall and Davies years since, but it felt like the director was working more on the script than the audience perception.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Graeme Curry’s novelisation of his own script is:
She could not believe her eyes – the TARDIS was pink. From the shadows of Forum Square they had a clear view of the Happiness Patrol carrying their pots of paint and putting the final touches to their work. Daisy K stood some distance from the others, overseeing the job.
I wasn’t overwhelmed by the original TV story, but Curry has produced a novelisation which is passionate and convinced – the rather odd plot holes remain, but liberated from cheap-looking special effects, it turns into rather a good yarn. Definitely one of those where the book is an improvement. Also an easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Helen A and her women warriors running around after Ace.
Nothing more to add. You can get it here. (Incidentally I tried tracking Bechdel passes and fails for all the fiction I read this year, but ran out of steam in June.)
Mike Stack’s Black Archive monograph on the story looks at its reception rather than its creation, which is fair enough given the changes in public notoriety the story has enjoyed. The first chapter, “Evaluation” looks at how poorly the story was rated by fans at the time and since, and asks “So, Is it Any Good?” He disarmingly admits its weaknesses: the padding of the plot, the unambitious design, the controversial Kandyman, the ambiguous postcolonial treatment of the Pipe People, Fifi; but comes back to the good performances.
The second and longest chapter, “Political Readings”, starts with the media flap in 2010 when several British newspapers discovered that the story had a critique of Thatcherism, and goes on to point out that spoofs of Thatcher were so universal on TV in 1988 that The Happiness Patrol easily slipped below the radar of contemporary critics. The real target, Stack argues convincingly, is authoritarianism of all kinds.
The third chapter, “Queer Readings”, addresses one of the other key points about the story. Its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces and its footnotes, is:
However, such bold statements are not universal or uncontested. In The Television Companion, Howe and Walker gave only a brief mention to the interpretation of gay themes, tentatively noting ‘some commentators have suggested that there is a gay rights message here’⁴. They do not take this observation further. Tat Wood, in About Time, went further:
‘While we’re debunking fan lore, the dispatched Andrew X (or Harold L, it hardly matters) isn’t wearing a pink triangle badge. Novelist / new series writer Matt Jones’ reading of the story as being explicitly and exclusively about gay rights misses the point, although none of his evidence (except the mention of the triangle badge) is actually invalid.’⁵
⁴ Howe and Walker, The Television Companion, p518. ⁵ Wood, About Time 6, p252.
The chapter points out that the story is actually very ambiguous in its use of queer / gay imagery. Pink is the colour of the oppressor here, not the liberator. The two main male villains escape together at the end – romantically, perhaps? On the other hand, the enforcement of happiness has echoes of the Section 28 debate of the 1980s (weirdly being played out again in attacks against trans people today). Personally I think that the ambiguity is itself rather successful.
The fourth chapter, “Happy Readings”, starts by citing the Easter 2011 sermon delivered by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in which he mentioned the story in the context of the importance of happiness as a societal aim. (I met Lord Williams once, in passing, as I was heading to a meeting at the House of Lords and bumped into him at the entrance to Parliament.) Stack looks at the concept of happiness, and why Helen A is doomed not to find it. (Certainly she ain’t gettin’ much from Joseph C.)
A Coda comes back to the question of whether the story is any good. Admitting his own personal love for it, Stack concludes:
I leave myself open to the criticism that I have credited The Happiness Patrol with more intellectual clout than it deserves. However, what strikes me is the story more than holds its own when held up to scholarly scrutiny. It elegantly depicts totalitarianism, anticipates the reclaiming of the word ‘killjoy’, and provides a parable about the need to negotiate our emotions.
Again, the Black Archives have given me new appreciation for what a Doctor Who story I don’t especially love. You can get this one here.
Incidentally, the Seventh Doctor is proportionately by far the best represented in the Black Archive (apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors). 64% of the Seventh Doctor’s episodes are covered in Black Archives as of late 2024; the closest of the rest is the Thirteenth with 46%. The gap is even bigger just counting stories: 7 of the 12 Seventh Doctor stories now have Black Archives, 58%, twice the score of the Fourth Doctor, with 12 out of 41, 29%.
(Since you asked, the end of the table has the Second Doctor, with only 13% of his episodes and 14% of his stories, though we have also yet to see any Black Archives covering either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctors.)
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.
‘I think you could do with a good stiff lemonade,’ the Doctor told Peri gently.
My rereading of Who books which I failed to blog on first reading them a decade ago has thrown up some interesting finds, and this is one of them: the Sixth Doctor and Peri land on a Scottish island where something is up, specifically the islanders are turning into mind-controlled zombies; Doctor Who meets The Wicker Man meets Night of the Living Dead. The setting is very vividly evoked, and the solution to the mystery gradually revealed; but it’s the portrayal of a small isolated community under siege from ‘orrible forces that really sits with me. A good ‘un. You can get it here, at a price.
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.
This must be one of the few pre-Davison stories that I had neither seen on TV nor read in novelisation form. It’s a two-parter, from immediately after the first Dalek story, featuring only the four members of the Tardis crew – the first Doctor, his grand-daughter Susan, and the teachers Ian and Barbara. There is a fifth character, not played by an actor, but I’ll get to that.
This was very very brave. The production team had run out of money, and had to do an entire story with no guest actors and no sets beyond what had already been made. The two episodes had two different directors, one of whom had never directed a television drama before. It could have been a disaster.
In fact it is very good. I would even have said excellent, were it not for the bathos of the minor technical problem with the Tardis which turns out to be at the core of the plot. But apart from that – and one or two minor slips from Hartnell, though he keeps it together for the big set-piece speeches – I was surprised by just how good it is.
I also watched the DVD documentary, which is entertaining and enlightening, and also actually slightly longer than either of the episodes. Meta-text, isn’t that the concept I’m looking for?
When I rewatched it in 2009, I wrote rather more briefly:
The Edge of Destruction is a two-episode filler with a great beginning and middle but a less good resolution. The weirdness on the Tardis screen, the clock faces and the odd behaviour of the crew are all nicely done, but the broken spring is rather banal and unmagical. However, what really makes the story memorable is the humanising of the Doctor and the repairing of his relationship with Barbara.
Rewatching it now, it seems rather staged, but staged rather well. These are four believable characters in an unbelievable situation, and the story efficiently works it through to the end.
I also read the novelisation back in 2008, and wrote then:
Robinson has taken a two-episode story and padded it out with some interesting new material of Ian and Barbara exploring the depths of the Tardis. Unfortunately, Robinson’s own prose style is thunderously bad in places. For completists only.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In the darkness, the rhythmic in-out in-out breathing of the life support system seemed even more eerily alive. Ian shuddered, but resisted the urge to share his fears with the Doctor who would only delight in ridiculing his irrational notions.
I think I was a little unfair in my first reading. Robinson is not a fluid writer, but I’ve certainly read much worse, including much worse Doctor Who books. You cn get it here (for a price).
Simon Guerrier’s Black Archive on The Edge of Destruction is one of the shortest in the series, clocking in at a mere 108 pages. The story is a short one, but James Cooray Smith got 73 pages out of the 6 minutes of Night of the Doctor, and at that rate this volume would have been about the length of The Lord of the Rings.
It starts with an introduction, which makes a bold assertion:
I’ve a theory about you, the reader of this book. I think you:
Have seen the 2013 drama An Adventure in Space and Time.
Can identify moments in it that aren’t quite what happened.
Understand why such dramatic licence was necessary.
I feel seen. It is as if I had had dinner with the author at Gallifrey One this year. Oh, wait…
The introduction further looks at the paucity of archive sources on the story, and makes the important point that he will refer to it in the book as “Series C” to distinguish between it and the first episode, whose title is “The Edge of Destruction”.
The first chapter, “Part One – On the Edge” looks in detail at what we know about the commissioning, writing and recording of the story, deflating a couple of the myths that have circulated about it in fannish circles.
The second chapter, “Part Two – Beyond the Brink” proposes Guerrier’s first five theories about the story: 1) that it is weird by design of the cast and producers, 2) that the show-runners had decided already to make it a show about alien beings; 3) that the TARDIS manipulating the minds of the crew is a metaphor for TV affecting its audience; 4) that the scientific basis of the story is relatively sound; and 5) that the story was written with a view to reinforcing the continuation of Doctor Who as a show.
The third chapter’s title is “Part Three – Inside the Spaceship”. Its second paragraph is:
The camera script for ‘The Edge of Destruction’ suggests that David Whitaker intended to exploit and adapt this existing space, but not to add an extra room to the TARDIS. Although Scene 2 is headed ‘Int. The Girls’ Bedroom’, stage directions immediately after this say, ‘Susan now has a medical box open on the table in the living quarters’, so the bedroom was intended to be part of that pre-existing space. Stage directions continue that, ‘If possible one of the circular wall pieces should be open as if it is a cupboard.’ Then, in Scene 6, Ian also ‘goes to one of the walls. He presses a switch and three of the circular wall pieces descend and a wall bed is revealed.’ The implication is that Whitaker envisaged the living quarters – even the whole TARDIS control room – as a kind of bedsit: a single space with multiple functions. (He had form in this; on 30 September 1963 he agreed to rework the scripts of The Daleks to combine sets wherever practical to reduce their overall number1.) 1 Christopher Barry, ‘Special effects in connexion with Dr Who 2nd story’, 30 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.
Here Guerrier proposes another five theories: 6) it’s the last time for a while that we see much of the inside of the TARDIS; 7) the roundels are meant to convey the thickness and robustness of the walls and door; 8) the crew were meant to have assigned positions for take-off; 9) the TARDIS is lusting for the heat of the Sun; and 10) if the TARDIS had changed shape, the protruding lock would have been a constant feature.
A brief conclusion argues that the oddness of the story is its virtue.
This is my favourite kind of Black Archive, taking a story which is not one of my all time favourites but finding sufficient points of interest in it to make me think more about the story itself, the art of story-telling on television, and Doctor Who. You can get it here.
I wrote up Kerblam! in detail in April last year, after reading the Black Archive volume about the story, so I don’t feel the need to do so again; to repeat my key point, I did not much like Kerblam!, and thought it one of the weakest stories of Jodie Whittaker’s first season. However, since then, the novelisation of the story by its original writer, Pete McTighe, has been published. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
This malaise had started some time ago – strange sensations that Max couldn’t quite comprehend but now understood to be ‘confusion’ and ‘pain’. Over time, the feelings had grown in potency, and morphed into something else. A sickness. A deep-set anger, boiling from within. What was the word for it? Yes, that’s right … Hate.
I felt that the novelisation redeemed the story in a way that the Black Archive didn’t. Giving a lot more background detail about the characters and the universe made the narrative much fuller and more credible; the punchline, that the computer itself is sentient and crying for help, is given away much earlier in the book, which gives the story much more time to fill out the details. It still doesn’t give the Doctor and her companions much to do, but it is one of the (surprisingly rare) cases where a flawed TV story has a fair number of those flaws corrected on the page. You can get it here.
Hakon shook his head. ‘This is a piece of personal initiative on my part.’ He glared at the guards. ‘Now, shoot them. That’s a direct order.’
This is a really surprising Doctor Who novel from Terrance Dicks, a writer who one doesn’t normally associate with the word “surprising”. It’s a prequel to The Brain of Morbius, but set later in the Doctor’s timeline – Peri is injured one a random planet that they happen to be visiting, so the Fifth Doctor takes her to Mehendri Solon earlier in his career to get fixed up. The two get separated, of course, and the Doctor finds himself the military commander of a grand alliance of improbable partners against Morbius, while Peri leads guerilla resistance planetside. There is a lot about war and military strategy and tactics, and one feels Dicks perhaps working through themes that he was never quite able to explore in his other work – though of course he was the co-author of The War Games. This is a very different Fifth Doctor and Peri to those we are used to, and diehard fans may want to read it as an alternate timeline. But I must say I enjoyed it, and you can get it here (for a price).
I was sufficiently intrigued by all of this to check out Dicks’ own military career. According to his obituaries, he studied English at Downing College, Cambridge and then did two years of National Service with the Royal Fusiliers. He was born in 1935, and National Service was abolished from 1957 to 1960, so he must have been in one of the last cohorts to do it, probably in 1956-58. My own father, born in 1928, told me that he had thought he could have been exempted by being from Northern Ireland, but then discovered that to get a job in England he needed to have done it (indeed he reminisced about how someone told him this at a party, ruining the evening).
Two years in the forces don’t make you an expert on military history, but 1956-58 saw the Suez crisis, the intensification of the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, the climax of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the IRA’s underwhelming border campaign, and the independence of Ghana and Malaysia. From the law of averages, Dicks must have been involved with at least one of these, even if only peripherally, and I guess it gave him some thoughts that he worked out 45 year later in this book.
Next in this series of reading: Grave Matter, by Justin Richards.
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.
I caught the last episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on first broadcast in 1988; when I watched the whole story for the first time in 2008, the last story of Old Who that I watched first time round, I wrote:
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is not a bad end to the season (and indeed to my watching all of Old Who). It looks generally good, and performances are all pretty convincing. I did once again find myself wondering about the means and motivation of the villains, in this case the Gods of Ragnarok; and I was left a bit confused by how the Psychic Circus fitted into the planetary society (and also a bit confused by the ending). But it was all fairly watchable. Now I can go back and do it all again.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
And finally for this run, once again I enjoyed The Greatest Show In The Galaxy more than I was expecting to. The storyline is awfully simple – the Psychic Circus as a deathtrap set by ancient powerful beings, the Doctor and Ace trying to escape from it and destroy it – and there is therefore an awful lot of circular plotting before the dénouement, but somehow the extra bits tacked on to the plot all add to it. A particular cheer for T.P. McKenna’s fraudulent Captain Cook as a parody of the show’s central character, and the earnest fan played by Adrian Mole Gian Sammarco who finds that the object of his fascination is a fatal obsession; but Jessica Martin and Chris Drury are excellent too, and the whole thing just looks so much better than we were getting two years ago (or even one year ago). Let’s hope they can keep up the standards for a few more years.
What struck me this time round was how symbolic it all is. The story seems somehow not very concerned with creating a convincing secondary world, but instead with managing the characters in a particular plot and emotional space. And yet it gets away with it.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Stephen Wyatt’s novelisation of his own script is:
‘There’s something not quite right about all this,’ the Doctor mused.
Wyatt’s book is not really an improvement on the TV original. Shorn of (for once) decent production values and the compelling performances of the actors, the holes in the plot and clunky scene-setting are more apparent, and Wyatt, having written a TV script, is reduced to reporting what we saw on screen without being able to add much to it. Fails the Bechdel test – each female character is rigidly paired off with a male, and on the rare occasions that they converse it is always about one of the men (usually the Doctor).
Dale Smith wrote the punchy Black Archive on The Talons of Weng Chiang which I reviewed a few months ago; he has also written a Tenth Doctor novel that I liked and a Seventh Doctor novel that I didn’t. Here he has done what some of the best Black Archives have done, by taking a story that I had not really thought about very much and making me think about it a lot more, the thoughts going in some unexpected directions. He has also blogged about the process of writing it.
The opening chapter, “What Did You Say Your Name Was?” looks at the over production situation on Doctor who at the time the story was made and draws many parallels about what we see on screen and what was happening behind the cameras.
The second chapter, “Tears of a Clown”, looks at clowns in general and why Ace is right to be scared of them.
The third chapter, “Let There Be Rock”, looks at quarries, and then slides into an argument that the comics artist Alan Moore is a formative and pervasive influence on Andrew Cartmel’s era of Doctor Who. Its second chapter is:
This view of quarries is certainly reflected in Cartmel’s era on the show: outside of season 24 – where one story featured three separate quarries but Cartmel had limited ability to course-correct – only three stories featured quarries, and only two used them as alien planets3. Of those two stories – The Greatest Show and Survival – both used Warmwell Quarry in Dorset. Part of this was the simple reason that only these two stories featured any significant time spent on alien worlds, as Cartmel’s realisation that the BBC could do period drama very well led him to move the show to more Earthly settings. But that shift didn’t result in Doctor Who becoming completely studio-based: the production team settled into alternating between studio-based and location-based stories for the rest of their run, with The Greatest Show being intended to be studio-based until circumstances forced a rethink.
3 Doctor Who Locations Guide, ‘Season Twenty-Four’, ‘Season Twenty-Five’, ‘Season Twenty-Six’. The third was Battlefield (1989), which used the Castle Cement Quarry in Kettleton for pyrotechnics work when Ancelyn crashes into a hill on arrival, presumably on the grounds that quarries are less concerned about things blowing up than Rutland Water.
The fourth chapter, “Fingerprints of the Gods”, looks at the role of magic in Doctor Who, particularly in the Cartmel era.
The fifth chapter, “Forward”, is sheer but entertaining self-indulgence on Smith’s part; it takes the history of Doctor Who, the history of hip-hop, and finds parallels between them despite the rather imperfect rapping delivered by Ross Ricco as the Ringmaster. It is unusual subject matter for a book on Doctor Who, but Smith succeeds in making the case.
A Black Archive that I like more than the story it is about. You can get it here.
Incidentally the Seventh Doctor is the first Doctor to have more than half his stories and episodes covered by Black Archives. (Apart from the special cases of the Eighth Doctor and the Shalka!Doctor.)
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 enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)
Many electrons have been distorted in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.
The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.
It topped the nominations for the 2010 Hugo in the BDPSF category by a very wide margin, and went on to win the award though in a tighter vote.
I enjoyed rewatching it as well. There aren’t all that many Doctor Who stories about space exploration, which is odd when you think about it. And I’m not always keen on the stories which show the Doctor as a flawed hero, but sometimes it works better than others, and I think this is one of those times.
Phil Ford has now written a novelisation of his own script – he had previously done the same for one of his Sarah Jane Adventures stories, and I complained then that it was not comfortably done, but I liked his Torchwood stuff (see here and here). That SJA novelisation was seventeen years ago, and he’s clearly got a lot more writing experience under his belt since then. The Waters of Mars is one of the better recent novelisations. The second paragraph of third chapter is:
He said he had been eight years old, and it was a tomato, small but perfectly round and deeply red, that he had plucked from a spindly but leafy tomato plant grown in a pot at the back of his father’s greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was filled with tall, flourishing plants, their limbs already bowing with the weight of ripening tomatoes. The opposite side was a jungle of cucumber plants, aubergines and potted bushes of red and green chillies.
There’s a lot of juicy extra stuff here that didn’t appear in the TV story, whether because there wasn’t room for it in the original script or whether the author has imagined it more deeply when coming back to the novelisation. The characters on the Mars base are all more fully realised on the page than on the screen, and we get more into the secrets that the astronauts have discovered on planet; while the fundamental plot arc is not reinforced particularly, it isn’t weakened either. So, definitely one to look out for. You can get it here.
She had been bored with her cabin on the Newton, which was cramped and utilitarian. She had moved to the ship’s small common lounge until she had become bored with that. Finally she had taken to pacing the ship’s main corridors with a scowl disfiguring her fine features, until it seemed she reached a state of total dissatisfaction with every deckplate and bulkhead door.
Working through my backlog of unblogged Doctor Who novels brings me to this story of the Fifth Doctor, Peri and Kamelion, and a quest narrative with a host of competing quirky teams and a prize at the end that turns out to be more symbolic than valuable. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care for it much; the plot has been done better elsewhere in both Who novels and other media (The Ghost Monument comes to mind), and there were some very annoying typos – “Van Gough” was the one that grated most. The only one of Bulis’ Doctor Who books that I really liked was The Eye of the Giant. But you can get The Ultimate Treasure here.
Next in this sequence: Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks.
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.
