Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton (and Christopher H. Bidmead); and some reflections on Escher

I was again glued to the TV in January 1982 as Peter Davison took on the role of the Fifth Doctor in Castrovalva, and I really enjoyed the look and feel of the story, even if the plot was a little confusing. I was fourteen. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:

This was the first Peter Davison story and is one of the better ones, but a bit atypical in that the Doctor spends much of the time trying to reconstruct his own personality. Lots of lovely nods to earlier Doctors, most of which were rather lost on me in 1981. The companions are still rather feeling their way, with Nyssa being the clever one who explains everything, coming across as rather cold despite her warm and fuzzy fairy costume, while Tegan gets to be the one who everything has to be explained to. Adric seems to have rather enjoyed being tied up by the Master… The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the depictions of two magical places – Castrovalva itself and the Tardis interior – are both rather wonderful, and the music and general sense of goodwill makes it still good viewing.

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Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thankfully, her bedroom was on the third floor of Longstone Lighthouse. Flooding had been an unfortunately frequent occurrence in her downstairs bedroom at their old lighthouse on Brownsman Island. The windows often failed to withstand storms, meaning large waves would cascade through the broken frames and shattered glass. On one occasion, when she was a young girl, Grace came close to drowning as the room filled with seawater and forced the door shut. The memory of it still sent shivers down her spine with every subsequent storm that passed.

The first original Fifteenth Doctor novel, by Emily Cook, who organised the memorable Twitter watchalongs during lockdown in 2020. Set between the two Fifteenth Doctor seasons, it’s a straightforward aliens-intervene-in-celebrity-history story, the celebrity being lighthouse heroine Grace Darling (apparently a relative of Cook’s; Cook writes herself into the book as well) and the aliens turning out to have some complexity. Gorgeous characterisation of Ncuti’s Doctor, not massively original plot. You can get it here.

Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This arrangement, however, was strictly for the hoi polloi. If one were rich enough, one could use the docking facilities at the hub of the Mons Venturi wheel for private shuttle craft. Benny hauled herself through the airlock of one such of these, reflecting that all of this seemed to be a needlessly expensive method of transferring her back to the point from which she’d started, albeit several thousands of kilometres above it.

Next in the sequence of Bernice Summerfield novels, this was an interesting paired reading with Freya Marske’s A Restless Truth because it’s also an sfnal murder/crime mystery on a ship; a spaceship this time, with Bernice Summerfield pitted against the assembled wiles of the galaxy’s best / worst detectives to try and solve the identity of the mysterious thief known as the Cat’s Paw. (Who was prefigured in the previous three novels, though I didn’t notice.)

It’s generally funny and witty, and a good parody of the mystery genre with also some decent characterisation of Benny. As one reviewer puts it, Stone is “operating in a league entirely his own, even if nobody – himself included, one suspects – is quite certain exactly what sport he’s actually supposed to be playing.” Could have done without the digs at autism though, which really bring the book down a couple of points for me.

You can get it here.

The Dalek Invasion of Winter

Another in my sequence of First Doctor audios which I got back in January, this one dating from September 2018. This is really rather good. It’s a look at a society which has done a deal with the Daleks – or rather whose rulers have done a deal, at the expense of the ordinary citizens. The narrative of the Doctor and friends (here Vicki and Stephen) leading a rebellion against oppression is an old one (indeed at one point Vicki notes that she’s done this before), but the contrasting performances of Robert Daws as the evil collaborator Majorian, and Sara Powell (ex-War of the Sontarans), Shvorne Marks and Matthew Jacobs Morgan as the exploited populace is just tremendous; plus of course Nick Briggs as the Daleks, and Peter Purves and Maureen O’Brien doing both their own characters and Hartnell’s Doctor when necessary. I generally enjoy Big Finish audios (and I whine like anything when I don’t) but this is a particular high point.

The author is David K. Barnes, who also wrote the brilliant First Doctor / Second Doctor mashup Daughter of the Gods and one of the creepier Ninth Doctor audios. That’s three hits out of three for me, and I’ll look out for his work in future. Directed by the excellent Lisa Bowerman who rarely misses the mark.

You can get it here.

The next in this sequence is An Ideal World, with the same classic actors, but I’m going to divert to a short story before I get there.

Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

Second frame of third issue:

“Your kindness touches my heart. Such thoughtfulness is rare these days. What, may I ask, brings such a beautiful couple out on the road? Not running away together, are you?”

Having finished the Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, I’m starting the Twelfth Doctor albums, beginning with this compilation of two two-issue stories, both of which I rather liked.

Terrorformer has the newly regenerated Doctor and Clara visiting a planet which should have been an ice world but seems to have become rather hot; it turns out that there’s an intelligent star behind it all (this made me look up the temperature at the core of the Sun). Clara gets some decent character moments too.

The Swords of Okti is set in both past and future India, and puts Clara aside for most of it to give the Doctor two temporary Indian companions – who I think are the first South Asians to have that role in any medium? The story was originally published as The Swords of Kali, but re-titled after a Hindu group in Nevada protested at the appropriation of the goddess. In any case, it’s a fairly standard aliens-pose-as-gods narrative but with the extra cultural wrinkles.

You can get it here. Next in this sequence: Fractures, also by Robbie Morrison et al.

The First Doctor Chronicles vol 2

A mixed bag of Companion Chronicle style stories here, though with a strong finish. Released in 2017.

It may just have been the mood I was in when listening to it (generally out of sorts and distracted) but John Pritchard’s “Fields of Terror” failed to click for me. As drama, it is purely Maureen O’Brien wandering the Vendée in the company of a French revolutionary officer played by Robert Hands. I didn’t get into it and the plot didn’t seem to resolve.

The other three are a different matter. “Across the Darkened City” by David Bartlett is a two-hander between Peter Purves as Steven and Nick Briggs as a renegade Dalek. It’s an Enemy Mine situation, with several wrinkles and an unpleasant but shapeless alien menace. It brought me back into the sequence.

And then the third story, “The Bonfires of the Vanities”, with Anneke Wills as Polly and Elliot Chapman as Ben, made me sit up sharply. The TARDIS lands in Lewes on Bonfire Night some time in the 1950s, but it seems that there are dark human forces afoot in the town and dark alien forces out to disrupt the Doctor’s timeline. This was the best of the four for me. I let out a gasp of surprise in the commentary when I discovered that it is by my good friend Una McCormack.

Finally, the same cast are in “The Plague of Dreams”, by Guy Adams, a pre-regeneration story for the First Doctor which invokes Shakespeare in unexpected ways and also brings in a new and unexpected renegade Time Lord, tying in loosely but effectively with the previous story. I felt the second half of this box set generally worked very nicely as a unit.

You can get it here.

How Christopher Priest wrote for Doctor Who, and what happened next

I met the late Christopher Priest in 2007 at a convention in Leuven, after many years of admiring his writing, and we struck up a friendship immediately, carried on via email with occasional beers together when we happened to be in the same place at the same time.

One of the first things I asked him about was the history of his brief involvement with Doctor Who. He wrote me a couple of long emails about it, which I publish for the first time here, with the permission of Nina Allan. He had already told most of the story to David Langford in an interview in 1995, but there are a few more details and description in the account that he sent me 12 years later.

After I first published this on 21 June 2025, I was sent some very interesting extra material by Tim Roll-Pickering, Jonathan Morris and Richard Bignell (here and here), which I have now incorporated into the text below as of 22 June 2025.

Sealed Orders

I started by asking Chris about the “past controversy” of his involvement with Doctor Who, but he pushed back on that description.

Why do you call it a past controversy? There’s nothing controversial about it, at least as far as I’m concerned. Maybe people elsewhere are arguing about it without involving me?

It’s not all that interesting. I disliked the Dr Who programme from the outset, and still do. Towards the end of the 1970s I was approached by Douglas Adams, who was trying to talk “real” sf writers into writing for the series. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks”, but we enjoyed talking to each other so I went in and met him for a boozy lunch. His plaint was that it was high time Who was overhauled and given some decent scripts, and that he now had the budget and management backing to transform the series. Reluctantly, I agreed, and sent in an outline. It turned out things weren’t as radical as Douglas described, because many of the old prejudices remained. But the money was good and I was broke, so I accepted a commission for a 4-part series. While I was writing it, Douglas suddenly became famous and quit the BBC.

This much is consistent with what I guess is the most canonical version of events in The Complete History vol 33 (page 52), one of Panini Productions’ many publications on the show. In the section on Warriors’ Gate, it states:

Keen to bring ‘serious’ science-fiction into Doctor Who, script editor Douglas Adams approached science-fiction novelist Christopher Priest during 1979. Priest visited Adams and ideas for a four-part serial were developed. In December 1979, Adams left the show – but his replacement, Christopher H Bidmead, had even more of a drive towards science-fiction, and found that Adams had left very few script ideas behind. Priest’s was not among them.

Richard Bignell corresponded with Priest sooner after the events than I did, and his take is slightly different.

He met with both Douglas Adams and producer, Graham Williams (who he both liked) but decided that DW was not for him. Sealed Orders didn’t begin to come about until he met Bidmead.

Shannon Sullivan has the following summary of the plot of Sealed Orders, the first of the two Priest stories, gleaned from past issues of Doctor Who Magazine that I don’t have access to:

A political thriller set on Gallifrey in which the Doctor is seemingly ordered to kill Romana by the Time Lords. A complex plot involving time paradoxes would result in the appearance of a second Doctor (who dies) and lead to Romana’s departure; it also involved the idea of time running into itself, resulting in one TARDIS existing inside another.

If you put this plot summary in front of me, and asked me to guess which well-known science fiction writer was behind it, Christopher Priest would have been among my top choices. The doubled Doctor and intersecting realities are themes that appear in several of his later novels.

Nicholas Smale quotes an interview with Christopher Priest in Dreamwatch with a few more details:

SEALED ORDERS addressed an omission that cropped up in DOCTOR WHO stories: the central characters ride around in a time machine but use it simply as a sort of taxi, travelling from one studio-bound story to another – the curse of low-budget TV. My story was a time-paradox extravaganza, with the TARDIS creating endless complications by going backwards and forwards in time – once even materialising inside itself. In one scene, I recall, there were five Doctors on-screen at once, all with consistent plot-lines to follow: this happened, of course, five times at different points in the story, [so] you saw the scene from the viewpoint of a ‘different’ Doctor each time.

The Tardis materialising inside itself was of course used by Bidmead in Logopolis later that year.

Back to Priest’s account:

They replaced him [Bidmead] with a new script editor, but more importantly a new producer was also appointed. This was the famous John Nathan Turner, now deceased, so I am free to say he was a loathsome little BBC hack who had aspirations above his abilities. He happily adopted the mantle of “Mr Dr Who”, if you see what I mean, beneath whose brilliance everyone was subordinated. Almost the first thing he did was to commission a book about himself: a day in the life of Dr Who’s new producer, or somesuch narcissistic stuff. [A Day With a TV Producer, published 1980.] While he was queening around in his moonboots and padded jacket, my story was forgotten. Someone changed the brief (background story), and the story languished unproduced. When the brief changes, anything written within it obviously becomes unusable.

The Complete History has a slightly different version of how events unfolded.

Reading a Priest novel, Bidmead was impressed with its creativity and while Priest had no television experience, he decided he could be worth suggesting to Nathan-Turner. Contacted by Bidmead, Priest revived the storyline discussed with Adams; this was formally commissioned as a scene breakdown entitled Sealed Orders on Wednesday 27 February 1980. Bidmead was delighted with the hard science-fiction concepts Priest offered. He commissioned the four scripts for Sealed Orders on Monday 24 March; this serial would be made and run fifth in the 1980/1 series and conclude the E-Space. Aware of Priest’s lack of scripting experience, Bidmead worked closely with him and was excited by the idea of a prominent writer working on Doctor Who, but he underestimated the attention Priest required. When the first drafts were delivered, the concepts were excellent but the work was that of a novelist, with scenes that would not play well on television. Priest withdrew from the project in April.

There’s a significant variation between these two accounts. Chris Priest suggests that his story was “forgotten” and “languished unproduced”, whereas the Complete History, no doubt using Bidmead’s memories and BBC records, has several fairly intense weeks of work by both Priest and Bidmead on the story before Priest gave up. The story was formally commissioned on 24 March, and we are told that it ended in April, so that could be a week later or five weeks later.

Originally I thought that the crucial point was the introduction of Adric; Matthew Waterhouse’s casting was announced on 25 April 1980, and I suspected that Chris Priest was not sufficiently interested in the project to rewrite Sealed Orders, which sounds like a fairly tight Doctor / Romana story, to include a third companion. Also, he had already been paid. Warriors’ Gate was written as the replacement story, which worked out well.

Tim Roll-Pickering, however, has pointed out to me that the character outline for Adric was issued on 30 January 1980, before Sealed Orders was commissioned. Richard Bignell thinks that the failure of Sealed Orders “was more likely down to the fact that it had to wind up the E-Space trilogy”. Both suggest that the production team’s (ultimately unfulfilled) desire to bring back an old companion was an additional complicating factor.

The Enemy Within

The second Christopher Priest story was The Enemy Within (also one of the variant titles for the TV movie of 1996). Again, Shannon Sullivan has a summary:

Concerned a monster at the heart of the TARDIS which embodies the Doctor’s deepest fears. The story featured characters called Timewrights, and ended with Adric’s demise.

Christopher Priest’s slightly longer summary has some differences but is coming from the same direction:

THE ENEMY WITHIN was structurally much simpler, but contained what I thought was an interesting psychological argument. The BBC was always getting letters from viewers speculating about how the TARDIS was powered. I decided to answer that, dispensing with all the cheapo sonic screwdrivers, dimensional warps, etc, and suggested that the TARDIS was powered by fear. In other words, somewhere within its multi-dimensional spaces lurked the one creature in the universe that struck mortal terror into the Doctor. The story was about his journey into phobia, a descent into inner hell, to confront this enemy.

Christopher Priest’s version of events, as told to me in 2007:

        A few weeks later someone realized what had happened, and I was invited in to write a second 4-parter, to make up for the cock-up on the first. Things were different, though: where Douglas had been an amiable, slightly subversive, amusing and amiable guy to work with, the new crew were standard BBC hacks of a low order … but the money was still good (better), and it saved my bacon that year. Forewarned, I sent in each episode as I completed it, and waited for authorization to write the next. This happened, with a few small changes on the way, which I incorporated. After I had sent in the final episode, a long silence ensued. I started work on other projects, visited Australia, started a new novel, etc. I assumed the script was in progress of being produced and shot. One day I took a phonecall from Turner, demanding to know when I was going to deliver the rewrite. I said “What rewrite?”, and Turner went into an amazing display of petulance and bad temper, claiming that my script was unusably illiterate and badly written, and that the whole thing had to be rewritten from start to finish. I told him that as far as I was concerned I had submitted each episode and had had it accepted by him, before moving on to the next, and therefore as a member of the Writers Guild was not expected to undertake a rewrite without more payment. He shouted that he wasn’t going to waste any more valuable programme money on me, and hung up.

Again, The Complete History vol.35 (page 70) has the BBC’s perspective:

For some time, Sealed Orders was kept on the list of active scripts until being abandoned in the autumn. However, producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christopher Bidmead still wanted Priest to write for the series. On Friday 5 December 1980, Bidmead commissioned a breakdown for a further four-part serial entitled The Enemy Within. The story revealed that the motive power of the Doctor’s TARDIS was in fact fear – generated by the Doctor and his companions as they travelled. Again, Priest completed and delivered the breakdown as required, but Bidmead had left at the end of the year. He had been replaced on a temporary basis by Antony Root, who had different requirements for the serial (then planned as the sixth story of the 1982 series), with which Priest attempted to comply. One of Root’s requirements was that Adric, one of the Doctor’s companions, should be written out. Nathan-Turner felt that three regular companions was one character too many; the character of Adric was considered to have become rather ‘cocky’ in some serials, and as actor Matthew Waterhouse was finding the role frustrating, it was decided that he should be dropped from the regular line-up. The Enemy Within, therefore, had a problematic development, and after Priest refused to perform rewrites, it was formally rejected on Friday 17 July 1981, having not been what the production team had in mind.

Richard Bignell has put all the pieces together with evidence from the archives, and concludes:

Ultimately, the problem with The Enemy Within came down to rewrites. Priest had already done one set of rewrites and JNTs insistence that more work needed to be done and that he should come into the BBC for four days and work through them with Saward was met with a refusal as it appeared that the BBC didn’t want to pay him extra for these.

Priest’s agent tried to argue that Chris should be given the chance to put the scripts right later on, but as the story centred around the pivotal death of Adric, they wouldn’t be able to wait and the scripts were cancelled. Both the BBC and Priest’s agent agreed that there had been misunderstandings and breakdowns in communication.

Just to clarify, he’d certainly been paid for the work done to date (the original commission and the rewrite). What was under dispute was whether or not he was told by JNT that he wasn’t going to get paid for the further work that was required on the scripts after the initial 56 days had elapsed.

There is a lot more detail here, and I’m not very surprised that Priest had forgotten some of it by 2007.

Putting the pieces together, just as the decision to introduce Adric had led to the abandonment of Sealed Orders, so the decision to kill him off led to the abandonment of The Enemy Within, when Priest refused to do further rewrites without payment. (Deleting this sentence as both parts of it seem to be disproved by newer evidence.) The rapid changeover of script editors cannot have done the process any favours – Antony Root took over for the first three months of 1981 and was then replaced by Eric Saward, who lasted until 1986. One assumes that the vituperative conversation between JNT and Priest took place on 16 or 17 July; probably shortly after one of JNT’s well-lubricated lunches.

The aftermath

Well known writers write stuff all the time which may or may not get produced, and this would have been a minor blip in both Doctor Who and Christopher Priest’s histories if it had not been for what happened next. Again, Chris takes up the story.

        A few months passed. Then someone sent me a cutting from a film/TV magazine, in which Turner was being interviewed about Dr Who. One of the questions was: “Why don’t you commission stories from established SF writers like Brian Aldiss, Chris Priest (and a couple of other names)?” Turner said in reply: “We prefer experienced TV writers. We did commission one script from Priest, but it was hopelessly amateurish and unsuitable, so we won’t be wasting any more time on that sort of experiment.”

I considered this a damaging thing to say, as well as untrue, but not being particularly litigious I found out the name of Turner’s boss at the BBC and wrote him a letter. I told him what had happened, I enclosed some of the letters I’d had from Turner about the episodes (which were, to be as euphemistic as possible, badly typed), also a copy of the WG [Writers Guild] guidelines on rewrites, and a copy of the interview. I said that what Turner had published was clearly a professional libel, one which I treated with complete seriousness, but as I was not particularly litigious I would accept a full retraction and apology from Turner.

Time passed, and I began to wonder if I’d taken the wrong tack. Then a few weeks later I received a letter from the BBC Head of Series & Serials, giving me an official apology on behalf of the BBC, an assurance that any future submissions from me would be treated with the utmost professionalism, and a statement of gratefulness that I had not dragged the BBC through the courts. Best of all was a handwritten PS under the signature: “I hope you will appreciate the enclosed.”

The enclosed turned out to be two handwritten letters, one from Turner, one from his script editor, abjectly apologizing. From the visible pressure of the ballpoints on the paper I assumed these letters had been written at gunpoint. I wrote back to Douglas Read (the BBC man who had written to me) [actually David Reid] and told him that as far as I was concerned the matter was closed. A couple of weeks later I heard that Turner had been canned. [In fact he survived several more years, as did Eric Saward, the script editor.]

        If that’s a controversy, so be it. I remember it as an unnecessarily unpleasant professional dispute. The scripts are still in my drawer somewhere, and maybe one day when I’m dead and gone my kids will be able to flog them to someone. The Who fans are endlessly interested in them, but for the time being they remain in my drawer.

        Although I’m always happy to talk about this sort of thing in private, it is not, of course, to go any further.

Richard Bignell has put me right on the sequence of events from closer to the time.

[Priest’s] ire about being named by JNT as a novelist who couldn’t write for television didn’t actually happen. It was a fan (who I shan’t name here) who wrote to Saward asking why they didn’t use “real” science-fiction writers. It was Eric writing back to the fan who said that “the names of the writers you quoat are all novalists” and that when they had tried to get a script from one of them, it had been with “disasterous results.” It was the fan who subsequently wrote to Priest and asked if Saward has been talking about him. So, not an interview, not JNT and Priest was never actually named.

(I will also not name the fan, who appears to have dropped out of sight completely and need not be disturbed.)

About Time vol. 4 by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles (pages 315 and 317) quotes Saward’s letter verbatim (and I’ve also had it from Jonathan Morris):

“The names of writers you quoat are novalists. Infact one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results. That is why we don’t use novalists.”

But actually it was public knowledge that Priest had been commissioned to write an unproduced script – his authorship of Sealed Orders was discussed at the time in Doctor Who Monthly, as it then was – so for Saward to say that “one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results” could only be read as referring to Priest.

Richard Marson gives a fair account of this in his biography of John Nathan-Turner (pp. 159-160), including an interview with David Reid, the then Head of Series and Serials, who comments ruefully, “This wasn’t a one-off – very much not so.” Reid’s own pedigree includes being Executive Producer on the entire run of Sapphire and Steel.

I was aware that Saward was supposedly the author of the offending letter, and challenged Chris on his statement to me that it had been JNT.

Who fandom lore suggests that the particularly rude treatment you got was at the hands of Eric Saward the script editor (who was sacked in 1986) rather than Turner (who lasted until 1989). I seem to recall the account I read included verbatim a comment by Saward (or possibly Turner) about you along the lines you mention, but of truly staggering illiteracy. (I appreciate your euphemism.) Other than those fairly minor details, yes, you’re quite right, no particular controversy about the sequence of events or their outcome.

Chris replied,

I hardly knew Saward, although I met him a couple of times at the Beeb. He seemed pretty young and ineffectual to me, very much in Turner’s ghastly shadow. However, he was implicated in some way with the libellous comments about me, and certainly of the two handwritten apologies I received, one was from him and the other was from Turner. Perhaps it was he who said these things, but my memory is it was Turner himself. Certainly, the last conversation I had with Turner was one of the most profoundly unpleasant of my life, with a flood of petulant complaints, obscenities and spiteful personal remarks thrown at me.

It is clear that the abusive phone call from JNT lingered much more in Priest’s mind than the later letter which sparked his written complaint to the BBC, and that his dislike for JNT was far greater than his dislike for Saward – he told the story several times (including to Richard Marson), and the climax is always the phone call rather than the subsequent mopping up and apology, so he may have been a little vague as to who said what when we corresponded a quarter of a century later. In any case, Saward would have been speaking with JNT’s authority, so it comes to much the same thing. Priest wrote to Richard Bignell, much closer to the time:

If the phonecall from Turner in 1981 was (and remains) the single most unpleasant conversation of my life, then his grovelling letter of apology is probably the one that caused the loudest cries of you [presumably typo for ‘joy’] and triumph.

But I am still very intrigued by one point; can the spelling really have been as bad as is reported, with “quoat” and “novalists”? So far the only sources I’ve seen go back to Priest himself… Though if Saward is genuinely dyslexic, that’s not a crime.

I finished by asking Chris about the fate of the actual scripts – each of the stories had been developed into four full episodes. He replied:

        No, I know the value of them. It increases year by year. My only worry is that one of Turner’s pals might find the BBC copies at some point, and try to flog them. I can do nothing to stop that, but the added value to my copies is that I can sign them … and throw in the letters as a bonus.

Nina Allan tells me that in fact the scripts and associated papers have been lodged with the British Library, where no doubt they will be eventually made available to the public. Perhaps Big Finish will pick up the option to dramatise them.

Around the same time, Chris wrote an episode of the children’s telefantasy Into the Labyrinth, in which three kids chase parts of the magical Nidus throughout history, in the shadow of duelling time wizards played by Ron Moody and Pamela Salem. His episode is the second of the second series, Treason, and you can watch it here and also here, here and here. It is set around the Gunpowder Plot, with Patrick Malahide guesting as King James I and VI, and I watched it (admittedly with only with half an eye) while writing this; there is a fair bit of murky double identity stuff going on, which again is in line with Priest’s other work. It was broadcast on 10 August 1981, so it must have been written between Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, and it demonstrates that Chris was perfectly well able to produce a 25-minute story for the screen.

Many thanks to Nina Allan for allowing me, indeed encouraging me, to quote Chris’s correspondence with me; and many thanks also to Tim Roll-Pickering, Jonathan Morris and in particular Richard Bignell for chipping in with more details.

Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay (and Christopher H. Bidmead)

I was glued to the screen for Logopolis‘s first showing in 1981, a month before my fourteenth birthday. The show I loved was being remade, with a total revamp of the TARDIS crew and last of all the leading man – just as Innes Lloyd had done in 1966. And here in 2025, we’ve just been through the same process again…

When I came back to Logopolis in 2008, I wrote at length:

I saw Logopolis (of course) back in 1981 and again when it was repeated later in the year. Its biggest problem is that the pacing doesn’t quite match the amount of Stuff that is Happening; the first episode in particular is alarmingly slow, episode two is incomprehensible in places, and it is not surprising that the ratings for the last two episodes were so low.

But the two million viewers who gave up on it between eps 2 and 3 were mistaken. Things I liked about it: the Watcher works really well, even though we never really find out the details of how he works. It generally looks fascinating – the nested Tardises, the streets of Logopolis. John Fraser as the Monitor is great. Nothing that the Master does actually makes sense, but it’s a great debut story for Ainley who does some high-class evil laughter. Nyssa may pop out of nowhere but it’s good to have her back (and out-acting Adric almost instantly). The music is super – the theme for the Watcher suggesting that he is not the Master (as Adric assumes) but something else, and that final chord sequence as it transforms into the Doctor Who theme. 

The biggest problem I have with it now is that the Master’s grand plan simply doesn’t compute. How can he have known that the Doctor was headed for the Barnet by-pass? Or would then head for Logopolis? And how quickly will his message to the peoples of the universe reach them, indeed how will the radio telescope, sending messages at sluggish old light-speed, be able to affect the CVE in time? (And since Logopolis is out of commission, who will do this in future next time there is an entropy crisis?) We’ll leave out the fact that the Third Doctor survived a much longer fall in The Paradise of Death, since that story is of dubious canonicity. 

Logopolis is not one of the great regeneration stories – there are four of those, and they are The Tenth PlanetThe War GamesThe Caves of Androzani and Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways. But it is no way as bad as either Planet of the Spiders or (stretching a point as there is no regeneration) The Ultimate Foe. Good watching, with emphasis on watching rather than trying to understand what is going on.

The DVD is almost worth the cover price alone for the documentary on the transition between Doctors, “A New Body At Last”, featuring interviews with Davison, Baker (as hilarious as ever) and numerous other cast and crew.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:

Taken on its own merits, Logopolis is a bit unsatisfactory. The first couple of episodes have way too much exposition and info-dumping, and the last two episodes are basically about establishing the Master and the new Tardis team, and getting rid of the Fourth Doctor.

But actually, watched in context, I can see why it gripped me at the time; the revival of the Master, the role of the Time Lords, and the CVE’s all link back rather satisfactorily to the earlier stories in the season, and the episode and a half actually set in Logopolis, and then the final battle between the Master and the Doctor, ending in his regeneration, are effective. And it does make sense to have the departing Doctor bid farewell to all of his companions, as the Fifth and Tenth were also able to do; this is a story about goodbyes and it’s appropriate.

And the music is particularly good.

Incidentally, when we reach the police box on Earth in the first episode, this is after a run of 23 episodes set elsewhere – the last time we saw Earth was at the very beginning of The Leisure Hive. It is the longest sequence of non-terrestrial episodes in the show’s history.

Watching again, I want to particularly salute Paddy Kingsland’s music. That sequence at the very end of the story remains spine-chilling, 44 years on.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelization of his own story is:

In any case, there was something much more interesting to think about. In the Doctor’s temporary absence, Adric’s curiosity had drawn him towards the police box.

When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:

Bidmead’s write-up of his own story is reassuringly dynamic and exciting, if just a little over-written in places. In particular, Logopolis itself feels more like a real place, and the minor characters more like real people; the whole thing makes slightly better sense than what we saw on screen.

Nothing to add to that; a confident novelisation which does what it needs to do. There is no explanation of the means and motivation of the Master, but there never is. You can get it here.

Jonathan Hay’s Black Archive on Logopolis pays appropriate tribute to a story that marked a turning point in the show. At 119 pages it’s fairly brief. A brief introduction gives the context for the story in terms of the production history.

The first chapter, “Resetting the Scene”, looks at the changes to the show brought in by John Nathan-Turner, the scientific basis for the story, the reintroduction of the Master and the backgrounds of the two new companions.

The second and longest chapter, “Regeneration”, looks at the way regeneration is handled for both the Doctor and the Master, especially in Season 18 but also in later Doctor Who history.

The third chapter, “Entropy” looks at the concept of entropy and the character of the Watcher. Its second paragraph is:

As the laws of physics assert, energy within a closed system can neither increase nor decrease on aggregate; it can only change between forms. Hence, as time passes, more and more energy within a closed system inevitably transforms into the form of heat energy. Heat energy is a disordered form which is essentially unable to then transform back into any other form of energy². This principle is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and applies not only on smaller scales, but also to our universe, the largest closed system we currently know of³. As time passes, the proportion of disordered (heat) energy within the universe increases. This tendency towards gradual disorder, which applies to any given physical system, is known as entropy.
²  Maxwell, J Clerk, Theory of Heat, p93.
³  Maxwell, Theory of Heat, p153.

The fourth chapter, “Computers”, looks at the history of computers in reality, including the fact that the word used to mean a woman who does calculations, and the significance of Logopolis; it points out the importance of the computer-generated music. It’s not the longest chapter but I felt was intellectually the most substantial.

The fifth chapter, “The Singularity”, looks at the extent to which Logopolis anticipated Vernor Vinge.

The sixth chapter, “The TARDIS”, looks at the importance of the TARDIS as a plot element in Logopolis (though as I commented a few weeks ago, it’s actually interesting how often it had been a plot element in the show’s early history).

The conclusion, “‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for'”, looks at the many ways in which the new Blu-ray edition of Logopolis improves on the original. It’s on my list…

Not the most ground-breaking of Black Archives, but as I said up top, a respectful and detailed analysis of an important story. You can get it here.

Last week, the Black Archives published their 77th and latest volume, on Castrovalva, and once I have read it, this reading project will have caught up to where I wanted it to get to when I started it in September 2021.

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) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | 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) | Silver Nemesis (75) | 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) | A Christmas Carol (74) | 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: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher

Second paragraph of third story (“The Little Book of Fate”):

When he could get a word in, the Doctor thanked him and set off.

I wrote up the Black Archive on Warriors’ Gate two years ago, including the expanded and revised audio version of Stephen Gallagher’s novelisation which was released in 2019. A few months after my 2023 write-up, the BBC released a print version of the new audiobook, plus two more short stories by Stephen Gallagher set in the same continuity.

As I said before, the revised novelisation gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils than did either the TV series or the 1982 text, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Gallagher is probably the best known mainstream sf writer to have worked on 1980’s Doctor Who, and he clearly loves the story and can now shape it the way he wants.

The first of the two extra stories is quite a long one, “The Kairos Ring”, featuring Romana and the Tharils and aliens infesting an American Civil War battle. It was also originally released as an audiobook, as the first in a series of five of which the other four were all by Paul Magrs. I had not come across these before, and must look our for them.

The other new story is “The Little Book of Fate”, basically a vignette bringing the Eighth Doctor back into this particular continuity, but nicely done.

Sometimes the BBC tries to make money off us fans by putting old wine in new bottles, but this is very refreshing. You can get it here.

Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I ran a finger down the side of his face and he shuddered and wrinkled his nose as if trying to discourage an insect. And then he turned on to his back and began to snore loudly.

When I first read this in 2009, I wrote:

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

I reread it in 2015, but in the midst of Clarke and other obligations didn’t write it up that time. My original plan was only to revisit the Bernice Summerfield novels that I have never written up at all, but then I thought, I actually enjoyed this and I wonder if a return visit will work? And it did; as well as the nicely judged emotional and physical perils of Benny and her students, there’s a particularly wacky alien reproduction process which often results in hot-looking humanoids, and a deceptive Ancient Weapon. One of the good ones. You can (probably) get it here.

I had written of the audio in 2007:

Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.

I spotted Anneke Wills this time, but failed to spot Sophie Aldred, who is actually a very versatile actor. But the star is Lisa Bowerman, really getting into her stride here as Bernice, with sarcasm and emotion, helping us through what’s actually a rather convoluted plot. The only one of the first season audios not adapted by Jac Rayner but by Matt Jones, the original author. You can get it here.

The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Second frame of third story (Convention Special):

I had planned to read the Eleventh Doctor album Dead Man’s Hand next in my sequence of DW comics, but discovered that as such, it was not in fact in the Humble Bundle that I purchased some years back. However three compilations of compilations were, and the third includes the stories Sky Jacks!, which I read last month, Dead Man’s Hand, two shorts for the 50th anniversary, and also Paul Cornell’s lovely The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who.

Dead Man’s Hand, which is the one I was looking for, is a rather fun Wild West story where the Doctor and Clara team up with Calamity Jane and the visiting Oscar Wilde to fight off alien invaders, with due attention to setting and character. Great fun.

Convention Special is a rather cliched story of aliens invading San Diego Comic Con; it has been done before.

Birthday Boy has a flimsy plot excuse for the Doctor to encounter many of his past companions. Unfortunately they are not drawn very well, which weakens the impact.

But it’s worth it for the three longer pieces. You can get it here.

The Peladon audio plays

For reasons that I may or may not divulge, I have been listening to the Big Finish plays set on the planet Peladon. There are six of these: The Bride of Peladon, a main sequence Fifth Doctor story from 2008; The Prisoner of Peladon, a 2009 Companion Chronicles story starring David Troughton as King Peladon again; and a four-story box-set from 2022, set at different points in Peladon’s history and with a largely different cast for each play.

The first of these is more than two hours long, and all the rest are over an hour, for a total listening time of the guts of nine hours. I found them very rewarding, especially (shout-out in advance) The Death of Peladon by Mark Wright, the third of the four-fold sequence. Robert Valentine, as script editor for the 2022 stories, drew up a timeline for Peladon’s history, so you can experience the stories in historical order if you like (though I’m writing them up here in release order):

Valentine explained on Twitter/X that the events of the Gary Russell novel Legacy got eaten in the Time War, so the audio sequence should not be understood to be in the same continuity as the book.

In 2009, I wrote:

I loved The Bride of Peladon: OK, a substantial amount of it is a retread of The Curse of Peladon, but that is probably my favourite Third Doctor story so it’s not a bad start; and then we have the Osirans as in Pyramids of Mars, as well as Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri, Aggedor, Arcturans and all. Erimem’s departure is as you would expect (though we have some good misdirection) and Peri promises that she will not leave the Doctor to marry an alien king. I laughed so loud at that line that passers-by were very startled. But you also have Phyllida Law as the royal grandmother, and Jenny Agutter as the baddie, and it’s generally excellent.

Sixteen years later, I agree with myself. It’s a tremendous ensemble piece, one of my favourite Big Finishes. I should have said that Caroline Morris as Erimem, the Egyptian princess who is a companion for the Fifth Doctor in a dozen Big Finish plays, and Nicola Bryant as Peri, both put in great performances and have very sparkly chemistry in their last appearance together. It’s a bit odd that the dodgy McGuffin can tell who has royal descent by sniffing their blood though. You can get it here.

Also in 2009, I wrote:

The Prisoner of Peladon, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, is the latest in the Big Finish series of Companion Chronicles, although this time the story is told by a non-companion who appeared in only one story in 1972, King Peladon of the eponymous planet (played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who has also of course appeared in other Who stories both Old and New and recently took on the cloak and dead bird of the Black Guardian for Big Finish). Troughton is, as ever, great, and Nicholas Briggs is, as ever, good as the monsters (Ice Warriors this time, of course). The concept is very interesting – Peladon has taken in large numbers of Ice Warrior refugees after an internal conflict, with the result that Ice Warrior politics spills catastrophically over to the host planet; the Third Doctor arrives to sort things out, of course, but – and this is the bit I really liked – the King gets a brilliant rant about how badly Three behaves to people, to which the Doctor has no answer. Scott and Wright would not have got away with it if Pertwee was still alive, but it gladdened my heart. (This was directed by Nicola Bryant who herself visited Peladon as Peri in a Fifth Doctor audio last year.)

I should make it clear that this was a format of Big Finish plays where there were only two actors, Troughton (jr) and Briggs with Troughton doing the narration and most of the voices. Listening to it again, I stand by all of the above, and it is really remarkable how prescient the refugees plotline turned out to be – this was in 2009 when the flows from Iraq and Afghanistan had slowed to a trickle, the Syria war had not yet begun, and the wave of economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa was also yet to become a thing. You can get it here.

The four-volume box set from 2022 features Jane Goddard as Alpha Centauri in three of the four episodes, but different rulers of Peladon in each. (And unseen growling Aggedors throughout.) This brief promotional video name-checks the other big stars, but also showcases Howard Carter’s tremendous moody interpretation of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (aka “Klokkleda, Partha Mennin Klatch”) which is a unifying theme tune for all four plays.

The first of the four stories is The Ordeal of Peladon, by Jonathan Barnes and series script editor Robert Valentine. This brings back David Troughton as King Peladon in old age, dealing with a wandering prophet and a cosmic inspection by the Federation. The plot takes us on a journey across Peladon for the first time – up to now we have only seen the citadel itself and the Ice Warrior refugee camps – and gives a strong sense of a world with gross inequality and structural stress, setting the scene for the next three plays. Both the prophet and his acolyte are played by Black actors (Ashley Zhangazha and Moyo Akandé), which of course has further resonances. There is a well-judged cameo from Qnivq Graanag nf gur Sbhegrragu Qbpgbe at the end.

The Poison of Peladon, by the normally reliable Lizzie Hopley, was probably the one of the four that worked least well for me. River Song is posing as a high priestess at the court of Queen Thalira (played here by Deborah Findley); Ribble the Arcturan (Justin Salinger) is posing as a friend but actually fomenting revolution; Chancellor Gobran (Aaron Neil) is spreading literal poison; there is a villainous Earth priest played by Ariyon Bakare (recently the evil Barber in The Story and the Engine). A lot of moving plot parts that didn’t gel as much as I’d have liked. (Also, for me there is only one Ribble.)

On the other hand, the Death of Peladon by Mark Wright is a taut and well-structured political drama, with an all-female guest cast. A hundred years on from The Poison of Peladon and fifty years on from The Bride of Peladon, Queen Minaris (Sara Powell) and her disaffected daughter Isabelda (Remmie Milner) face both a dissatisfied population led by insurgent Helais (Liz White) and environmental disaster from the (now exhausted) trisilicate mines. The Sixth Doctor and Mel tumble into this but it’s mainly up to the Pels to sort themselves out.

Finally, The Truth of Peladon is more or less a two-hander between Paul McGann and Meera Syal, the latter playing expert seamstress Arla Decanto, who the Doctor persuades to become a rebel by showing her the dark side of Peladon’s society, rather like the Three Ghosts and Scrooge. Jason Watkins gets a look in as evil Chancellor Barok, and Nicholas Briggs turns up again too. Syal is always great, but I did not quite understand why the Royal Seamstress in particular needed to have her eyes opened.

I thought this was a very decent box set. As I said, the third episode was exceptional, and even the second is far from dreadful. You can get it here.

Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

I am getting to the end of the Black Archives! At the time of writing, there is only one more to go after Silver Nemesis, though I expect that there will be another in June.

I missed this story on first broadcast in 1988. When I finally saw it for the first time, twenty years later, I was unimpressed.

People had warned me that Silver Nemesis was pretty rubbish, and I’m afraid it is. One of my frequent complaints about bad Who, and indeed bad sf, is that all too often the means and motivation of the bad guys make no sense. In Silver Nemesis, the means and motivation of the hero make no sense: how and why did the Doctor launch the rocket into space in 1638??? The basic plot of three different sets of baddies (Cybermen, Nazis and Lady Peinforte) trying to get the McGuffin is comprehensible, but little else is. Am I unusual in finding Fiona Walker’s performance as Lady Peinforte rather poor? She was way better in CLAVDIVS. And the bit with the Queen is pretty silly.

I was a bit more positive on my rewatch three years on:

I can’t quite be as positive about Silver Nemesis [as I was about The Happiness Patrol], though again I liked it more than I had expected to. It is the first time we have had a contemporary English setting since, errr, the last Cybermen story three years ago, but it doesn’t really make enough of the normality such a set-up offers, setting us up with real (Courtney Pine) and fake (the Queen) celebrities and then bringing in Lady Peinforte and De Flores through literal and metaphorical timewarps, with added Cybermen. A lot of the bits work well, including the increasing sense of the Doctor as someone with a number of devious plans which we don’t know about (and Fiona Walker’s delightfully psychotic Lady Peinforte) but it doesn’t quite add up together.

Watching it again for this post, I felt a bit more negative. The unrealistic firefights between the Nazis and the Cybermen (often a problem with Who, see also here) are symptomatic of the problems of directing the story, which James Cooray Smith goes into in depth, as discussed below. I did not realise until I read the Black Archive after rewatching it that there are several different versions of the story which have been released on video. Eventually I will shell out for the Blu-Ray and discern between them all.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kevin Clarke’s novelisation of his own story is:

Such was the visitors’ interest that the materialization of the TARDIS a few yards away passed unnoticed. The Doctor and Ace stepped out. Ace sniffed the damp air as she looked around.

I wrote in 2008 that:

Clarke used the opportunity of adapting the script for novelisation to put back some of the material which apparently ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the result is if anything even more confusing. Where the TV series can just about get away with characters being darkly mysterious, the written word demands a bit more clarity (thinking especially of the portrait of Ace in Windsor Castle, never explained). Fails the Bechdel test, unless the cook who Mrs Hackensack’s ancestor bribed away from Lady Peinforte was a woman. (Hackensack is a much less likely name than the TV series’ Remington for a 17th century English aristocrat; but then, so is Peinforte.)

Not much to add to that. You can get it here.

So, the previous Black Archives that I have read by James Cooray Smith were cases where either I agreed with him that the story is good (The Massacre, The Night of the Doctor) or less good (The Ultimate Foe, The Underwater Menace). In this case, I don’t have a very high opinion of Silver Nemesis, but Cooray Smith mounts a bravura defence of the story as a major classic of the Cartmel / Nathan-Turner era. I’m still not at all convinced, but I admire the passion that he brings to it, as well as the forensic detail in his research.

The first chapter, “‘Meteor Approaches England'”, looks at the context from within DW of Andrew Cartmel’s arrival as script editor in 1987, after the great cancellation crisis of 1986, and his work to assemble a team of writers who could deliver the necessary scripts. He makes the interesting point that in 1987 there were very few experienced Doctor Who writers available; Robert Holmes had recently died, and most of the other veterans were busy with other projects, or had fallen out with John Nathan-Turner, or both.

The second chapter, “The Arrow”, looks at Kevin Clarke’s career – of the newly recruited writers, he was the most experienced on paper, but that is not saying much (and the details say even less). It then looks at how the concepts of Silver Nemesis came together; the Cybermen were there from an early stage, and the weird bit with the Queen was originally intended to be the real Prince Edward, who was active in TV drama at the time; but he said no.

The third chapter, “The Statue”, looks at the difficulties of recording, mainly at the physicakl challenges of getting everything filmed combined with the problem that the two stars, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, were very under-rehearsed due to their busy schedule working on other stories. It starts by noting that most of the guest actors were third or fourth choices for their roles. The second paragraph is:

De Flores was turned down by Charles Gray, while Anna Massey and Sarah Badel declined the opportunity to play Lady Peinforte, as did Penelope Wilton. Even the single-scene role of the mathematician was turned down by Geoffrey Bayldon, Richard Vernon and others before being accepted by Leslie French. It would be tempting to conclude that these refusals reflected Doctor Who’s declining prestige in 1988, but they are in fact common throughout the programme’s history. It’s an example of one of the usual compromises of programme-making.

The fourth chapter, “The Bow”, looks at some of the subtle allusions in the script – the fate of the muggers is a reference to the tarot, Lady Peinforte’s reference to The Winter’s Tale rewards closer analysis, and there’s a lot to say about jazz (I had not realised that Courtney Pine composed new music specially for the story).

The fifth chapter, “Critical Mass”, is the defence that I mentioned previously. Cooray Smith loves this story and is surprised that other people don’t. “Frankly, this writer genuinely struggles to understand what is not ‘explained’ in Silver Nemesis, except that which is left ambiguous for dramatic effect”. As will be apparent, I am not in agreement with Cooray Smith here, but I admire the passion of his argument.

The sixth and final chapter, “‘Re-Form'”, defends the legacy of elements from Silver Nemesis extending into New Who, and also goes into the (fairly substantial) differences between the different commercial releases of the story, including the novelisation.

An appendix lists the known script drafts for each episode, and another the scene breakdown for the first episode.

At 188 pages, this is rather a long Black Archive, but Cooray Smith has a lot to say, and says it well. You can get it here.

Incidentally, as I said last time, the Seventh Doctor has been very well served by the Black Archives; fully two thirds of his stories, and more than 70% of his episodes, are now covered by the series. Leaving aside the special cases of Withnail and I, the closest competitors are the Fourth Doctor, for whom the newly published BA on Logopolis takes his story count to over 30%, and the Thirteenth, 46% of whose episodes have been covered (though only 25% of her stories).

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) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | 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) | Silver Nemesis (75) | 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) | A Christmas Carol (74) | 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)

Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al

Second paragraph of third story (“Mission to Galacton”, by Justin Richards):

A constant stream of freight ships carried resources plundered from worlds the Daleks had conquered. As the empire continued to expand, so the need for supplies grew ever greater, and Dalek task forces ventured further and further into neutral and hostile space in search of planets to ransack. In the centuries before the Great Time War, nothing could stop the Daleks…

A collection of 26 short stories, 16 of them by Justin Richards, previously published in the Doctor Who annuals and other spinoff material. Eleven Tenth Doctor Stories, six Eleventh Doctor, two Twelfth, one with the War Doctor, and also a half-dozen Doctor-lite stories exploring a bit more of the Whoniverse. A couple of weak ones, but several corkers; having been mean to him in my last review, I particularly liked the pair of stories where Amy and Rory have the same adventure from opposite directions without either realising that the other is involved. Decent internal art. No artist or editor is credited. You can get it here.

Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘So, what do you think?’ Benny asked for about the fifth time in as many minutes.

Justin Richards is the most prolific of living Doctor Who authors – I am not completely sure if he has overtaken Terrance Dicks by now, but if not, I am sure that he will. Usually his writing is accessible and enjoyable, so I’m sorry to report that I somewhat bounced off this, the second of the independent Bernice Summerfield novels. It’s a story about a historical artefact which appears to exist in several duplicate forms, but the format kept shifting from strange dig to heist to detective novel to courtroom drama, and I felt too much was being put in without enough explanation of what was going on. A rare miss for me, for both author and series. You can get it here, at a price.

When I listened to the audio version first time round, in 2007, I wrote:

Dragon’s Wrath, like Oh, No It Isn’t!, is detached from the narrative of the other four stories. It is, frankly, not as good; plot too obvious, guest star (Richard Franklin) not sufficiently engaged, sound recording rather poor in places, basically rather skippable.

Re-listening confirmed my impressions from the first time around, and I will add that the end is very rushed. It’s interesting the Big Finish slipped it in at the end of their first Bernice Summerfield season, getting the other (and in my view better) stories out the door first. You can get it here.

It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al.

(Various factors combine to mean that you’re getting a bunch of Doctor Who reviews this week.)

Second frame of third issue:

A collection of five Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory stories, of which the most memorable is the two-part second story in which the Doctor and Amy swap bodies. More could be done with that concept, but you’ve got to start somewhere! You can get it here.

The Sontarans

I like Simon Guerrier; up to now I have generally liked his writing; I love Peter Purves both as Stephen and playing the Doctor; in the week when we got the sad news of Jean Marsh’s death, it was lovely to hear her resuming the role of Sara Kingdom; and the story of the Doctor’s first encounter with Sontarans – proper bloodthirsty Lynx and Styre type Sontarans – is well structured and well told.

But I am afraid I don’t like torture scenes, and although of course it’s perfectly consistent with Styre in The Sontaran Experiment, I didn’t like that much either. So it’s a rare thumbs down for me for this particular combination of creators.

You can get it here.

The Ravelli Conspiracy, by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky

Next in the sequence of First Doctor audios, this gives Peter Purves licence to do his famous and excellent William Hartnell impression, along with Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, in a pure historical story which takes place in Florence in 1514. Main characters are Giuliano de’ Medici, ruler of Florence; his brother Pope Leo X; and Niccolo Macchiavelli. There’s also a comic guard and a token Renaissance woman. It’s actually great fun, and my only complaint is that they all pronounce ‘Giuliano’ with a hard ‘g’ – it’s Julie-anno, folks, not Gully-anno. You can get it here.

A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry (and Steven Moffat); and Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol was the first Doctor Who Christmas special produced and written by Steven Moffat and starring Matt Smith. It has Amy and Rory trapped on a doomed spaceship, which for handwavium reasons only the Scrooge-like Kazan Sardick (Michael Gambon) can save. The Doctor goes into Sardick’s past to make him into a nicer person through the love of the beautiful Abigail (Katherine Jenkins). Unfortunately for more handwavium reasons this means that Sardick no longer has the power to save the doomed spaceship, but luckily Abigail’s voice resonates at just the right frequency, so she saves the day (it is implied that she then dies of some fatal but not very debilitating illness). The music is good.

I ranked it fourth out of five votes in that year’s Hugo Awards, noting:

Don’t get me wrong – this was a lovely episode of Doctor Who and just right for Christmas evening. But as a work of SF, I think the other nominees are better.

Rewatching it, I felt the same; it’s a remake of Dickens in Doctor Who terms with light comedic relief from Rory and Amy, the story line is a little too clever and also a little too simple (often the case with Steven Moffat), and it’s perfect fare for a day when you’re not expecting anything too demanding on the brain cells. It did inspire one of the more remarkable cosplays that I saw at Gallifrey One in 2013:

Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry have taken the interesting tack of looking at the TV episode in the context of Charles Dickens, asserting firmly that it “remains the only explicit adaptation of another text in the Doctor Who back catalogue.” I disagree with that – I think that The Androids of Tara is even more closely aligned with The Prisoner of Zenda – but I can see their point.

A short introduction looks at Christmas specials in Davies and Moffat era Doctor Who.

The first chapter, “A Traditional English Christmas With Sharks”, considers the history of Christmas in Britain, the previous adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its importance in British popular culture.

The second chapter, “A Blot of Mustard, a Crumb of Cheese”, looks at Steven Moffat’s gift for transforming apparently normal situations into fairy tales.

The third chapter, “Time and Relative Child-centrism”, looks at children as focal narrative figures in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Its second paragraph is:

Had it always been thus? Could British audiences expect throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to encounter Dickens (and ACC [A Christmas Carol]) in late December? Certainly, on British television December was seen as a good time to air adaptations of Dickens’ works. On the BBC, adaptations of ACC aired on Christmas Day 1950, Christmas Eve 1977 and a few days before Christmas in 2019. The 1999 TV series of David Copperfield debuted on Christmas Day, and the 1976 episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas was an adaptation of the short story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). The Pickwick Papers (1952), David Copperfield (1974) and Great Expectations (2011) all first aired in December. In 2007, Dickens was central to the battle for the Christmas season ratings, with the BBC broadcasting a five-part adaptation of Oliver Twist in the week leading up to Christmas, and ITV airing a feature-length adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop on Boxing Day (with production design by Michael Pickwoad, of whom more in Chapter 4).

The fourth and longest chapter, “The Pickwoad Papers”, looks in great and pleasing detail at the superb design of the story.

The fifth chapter, “What Right Have You To Be Merry?”, looks at the Doctor’s habit of interference in human timelines.

A brief conclusion, “Everything’s Got To End Some Time”, summarises the above.

I still feel that the actual story is not particularly memorable, but Beckwith and McMurtry gave me some pause for thought about where it came from. You can get their Black Archive here.

I only recently watched The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time, which sticks surprisingly closely to the original text, but as a result of that experience combined with reading the Black Archive monograph, I was inspired to go back and read Dickens once again, probably for the first time since I was a child. The second paragraph of the third ‘Stave’ of the short book is:

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.

It’s tremendous, even when you know what is going to happen; Dickens sometimes succumbed to mawkish sentimentality, but here he largely keeps himself restrained and lets the story tell itself. I found I had something in my eye as I got to the end, and you will too. God bless Us, Every One!

You can get it here.

The Child of Time, by Jonathan Morris et al

Second frame of third story (“The Golden Ones”):

Man on left: “No thank you Mr Kin. / Who’s the little girl? Your granddaughter?”
Man behind desk: “Chiyoko. And no, my wife and I were never blessed with children. / Chiyoko acts as my … marketing consultant on the Goruda project.”

This is a compilation of comic strip stories from Doctor Who Magazine during the Eleventh Doctor era, all by Jonathan Morris; I had not appreciated it at the time, but they actually have a cleverly worked out arc (about, er, the Child of Time) which culminates at the end, shortly after we meet the killer Brontë sisters.

Charlotte: “Doctor, how delightful to finally make your acquaintance!”
Emily: “If I may introduce myself – I am Emily, these are my sisters Charlotte and Anne.”
Anne: “Together, we are the Brontës!”

Having been working through the IDW Doctor Who comics dating to the same era, it’s interesting to feel a very different dynamic to the DWM strips, which have much shorter episodes and also had to respond to the TV show in real time – there are some very informative endnotes from Morris and the artists about the creative process.

Also I particularly like the story with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

C.S. Lewis: “‘…And that was the very end of the adventure of the bookshop.’ / So, what does everyone think?”
J.R.R. Tolkien: “Well, I thought it was a bit juvenile… a jumble of unrelated mythologies… all rather derivative, I’m afraid… / And I wasn’t convinced by the allegorical element at all!”

Rather a jewel. You can get it here.

The Fifth Traveller, by Philip Lawrence

I slightly regretted my decision to get into the Big Finish First Doctor stories when the last one I tried turned out to be rather a dud. But this is much better, a story of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Vicki and Jospa landing on a very alien planet with vividly realised aliens, and also the question of just how many people are in the Tardis crew. It’s a concept that was also visited in the Buffy episode Superstar and the Torchwood episode Adam (and the Torchwood novel Border Princes), but I think we have a new twist here – rather than having a strange new character intruding on our heroes’ regular setup, we have both a strange new character and a strange new world, and this being a Big Finish audio which was released more than fifty years after the TV stories with which it is in continuity sequence, we listeners don’t quite know what to make of it at first. On top of that, as I said, the aliens are very alien and well depicted; and it’s William Russell’s second last audio performance, as both Ian and the Doctor, recorded shortly before his 90th birthday. James Joyce (no relation) is suitably suave as the extra companion Jospa, and Kate Byers as the lead alien. You can get it here.

Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell (and Jacqueline Rayner)

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield woke up, stretched, and sang a single pure note. The stretch had brought on the singing. It was all because of the look of the day. Sunlight was dap­pling through leaves above her. Birds were cheeping. The air smelt of a summer morning.

The first of the Bernice Summerfield spinoff novels, adapted to become the first Big Finish audio. Bernice, settling into her new job as a professor of archæology, finds herself sucked into a world where she and her colleagues are transformed into pantomime characters, and facing down the alien Grel. (Facts! Good facts!) It’s actually rather well done – the concept risks being either too twee or too clever for its own good, but Paul Cornell bends the rules of narrative here just enough to get away with it. You can get it here.

The audio adaptation – from 27 years ago, good heavens! – is particularly memorable for Nicholas Courtney’s performance as Wolsey, Bernice’s cat, though everyone is good including Alastair Lock as the Grel. I listened to it just after re-reading the book, so can’t really tell how well it stands on its own. You can still get it here.

On my first encounter with the Grel of the Whoniverse (which was actually in the Sixth Doctor audio The Doomwood Conspiracy), I confusedly assumed that they were the same as the Grell, a D&D creature that I remember from White Dwarf #27 back in 1981 (actually invented by Ian Livingstone in WD #12, two years earlier). But the D&D Grell, with two ‘l’s, are disembodied hovering brains with a beak and barbed tentacles, while the DW Grel, with one ‘l’, are humanoids with squid-like faces. You’re welcome.

Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn

Second frame of third part:

Clara (in her first appearance in comics) falls through what appears to be a black hole, into a pocket universe where there are lots of stranded airmen and the like, and eventually the Doctor as well. The big reveal of What Is Really Going On is well done. The art seemed to me not to capture the Doctor and Clara terribly well, but is fine on the big sweeeps of scenery.

There’s also a short story about alien mind control through getting everyone on earth to wear an electronic fez, but they are rescued by Eleven, Amy and Rory, which is dire as you would expect.

You can get it here.

The Age of Endurance, by Nick Wallace

A two-hour Big Finish audio from 2013, featuring William Russell as Ian (and also playing the Doctor) and Carole Ann Ford as Susan, set during the original first season of Who. Also brings in Jemma Powell as Barbara, but doesn’t give her much to do. Unfortunately it’s not all that good; a helping-the-rebellion plot which is spread too thin, no particularly memorable lines or unusual soundscapes. Big Finish usually much better than this, alas. You can get it here.

What’s on the TARDIS bookshelves?

Back in September 2015, I was lucky enough to get a look at the Doctor Who set in Cardiff, including the TARDIS. This was just after filming had been completed on The Husbands of River Song. I took loads of photos, but the studio lights were off so it was all a bit dark and the pictures are out of focus. However, looking at them the other day, I realised that there is enough detail to make out the titles of most of the books on the TARDIS bookshelves. Lesson learned – if I ever have another chance, I’ll make sure to get better and more complete shots.

I took photos of two sets of bookshelves, and the books on this one are much less easy to distinguish than the other. On the top shelf, beside the wooden horse, are two volumes of a History of England, Vol II to the left of Vol I, and three volumes of what looks like the collected works of some author (or possibly “Philosophical Works“), Vol VIII, Vol X and Vol VII.

On the middle shelf, I can’t make out the book on the left; the next two appear to be The Holy Bible, Vol I and Vol II; another two that I can’t make out, and then The Holy Bible Vol IV followed by Vol III. The two paperbacks to the left of the skull are Term of Trial, by James Barlow, and a combined Penguin edition of D.H. Lawrence’s short novels St Mawr and The Virgin and the Gipsy. I can’t make out anything of the next two titles, to the right of the skull, but on the spine of the last fully visible book, the middle word is Plays.

On the bottom shelf, the light is too bad to see any titles clearly.

The other bookshelf that I photographed is much clearer, thanks to all of the books being paperbacks and most of them being Penguins. I can identify all 35 books on the top shelf, and 25 of the 30 on the bottom shelf with reasonable guesses at two of the other five.

On the top shelf we have:

  • Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
  • Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
  • Selected Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy
  • King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
  • Man and the Vertebrates: 1, by A.S. Romer
  • The Political Economy of Growth, by Paul A. Baran
  • New Horizons in Psychiatry, by Peter Hays
  • Roman Britain (Political History of England 1), by I.A. Richmond
  • The Simplicity of Science, by Stanley D. Beck
  • Language in the Modern World, by Simeon Potter
  • Family Policy, by Margaret Wynn
  • Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary
  • The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
  • Elizabeth and Essex, by Lytton Strachey
  • Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
  • The White Monkey, by John Galsworthy
  • Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
  • Bliss and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield
  • The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh
  • Introduction to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, by Peter L. Berger
  • Birth Control in the Modern World, by Elizabeth Draper
  • Modern Science and the Nature of Life, by William S. Beck
  • The True Wilderness, by H.A. Williams
  • The Reader’s Guide, edited by Sir William Emrys Williams
  • Organic Chemistry Today, by F.W. Gibbs
  • Maid in Waiting, by John Galsworthy
  • To Let, by John Galsworthy
  • Left Luggage, by C. Northcote Parkinson
  • In Chancery, by John Galsworthy
  • A Little of What You Fancy, by H.E. Bates
  • a second copy of In Chancery, by John Galsworthy
  • A Breath of French Air, by H.E. Bates
  • When the Green Woods Laugh, by H.E. Bates
  • Blood Rights, by Mike Phillips

The lower shelf is more out of focus, but I’m pretty sure that we see:

  • Shardik, by Richard Adams
  • Debbie Go Home, by Alan Paton
  • a second copy of Shardik, by Richard Adams
  • two copies of The Wild Cherry Tree, by H.E. Bates
  • Birds of America, by Mary McCarthy
  • The Group, by Mary McCarthy
  • one that I have difficulty reading but it might be The Innovators by Michael Shanks
  • The Chemistry of Life, by Steven Rose
  • Voters, Parties and Leaders, by Jean Blondel
  • one that I cannot read
  • A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
  • Anna of the Five Towns, by Arnold Bennett
  • Britain on Borrowed Time, by Glyn Jones and Michael Barnes
  • The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
  • Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves
  • another that I cannot read, though the author’s first name looks like “Henry” or possibly “Hilary”
  • North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell
  • a book by H.E. Bates whose title is unreadable, but it seems very odd that the Doctor would not have a copy of The Darling Buds of May despite having all four of its sequels, so that’s probably it
  • The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (upside down)
  • two copies of The Cold Moons, by Aeron Clement (the title of the second book is unreadable, but Aeron Clement’s name is clear, and he only wrote one book, so it’s got to be a duplicate)
  • a second copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy
  • Three Plays by John Webster (The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Devil’s Law-Case)
  • Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
  • Owls and Satyrs, by David Pryce-Jones
  • a third copy of Shardik, by Richard Adams
  • a second copy of A Little of What You Fancy, by H.E. Bates
  • The N****r of the Narcissus, Typhoon and Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad
  • finally, one more that I cannot read, though the author’s first name looks like “Henry”.

So: there’s a fair number of classics; a lot of middle-brow twentieth century literature (H.E. Bates, John Galsworthy); very little science fiction or fantasy (apart from Shardik, of which the Doctor has no less than three copies, and two copies of The Cold Moons, a Watership Down-style novel about badgers [edited to add: Rich Horton points out that Gormenghast surely counts too]); lots of well-meaning Penguin 1960s and 1970s sociology; some rather odd popular science books; only two history books (Roman Britain and Elizabeth and Essex); and precisely one book about religion (The True Wilderness, by H.A. Williams), though of course there’s a multi-volume Bible on the other shelf.

Unfortunately I think the Glyn Jones who co-wrote Britain on Borrowed Time is not the same person who wrote The Space Museum. That would have been nicely recursive.

There were more books in the TARDIS than this, as you can see from this screenshot from The Husbands of River Song, but I’m happy to have salvaged some information from my own archives.

Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Ryan C. Parrey and Kevin S. Decker (and Toby Whitehouse)

This was a two-part Twelfth Doctor story from Series 9 in 2015, set in the early 22nd century in a base under a Scottish reservoir, and also in 1980, in the abandoned village that was there before the reservoir was built. I don’t appear to have written it up at the time – I was a bit sparing when the last name on the screen was my first cousin, which may have been too cautious of me.

The TARDIS, with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara on board, arrives in the year 2119, in an underwater base under siege from ghosts, which appear linked with a mysterious alien vessel at the bottom of the lake. The crew of the base start getting picked off one by one. The Doctor goes back to 1980 to try and sort things out, but apparently returns as a ghost. The trouble is being caused by a semi-dead alien called the Fisher King, but I confess I did not really follow that part. Eventually all is resolved with the use of time paradoxes – the Doctor has a breaking-the-fourth-wall conversation with the viewer about who really wrote Beethoven’s music. There are some very good shots of Capaldi in particular.

Notably, Cass, the woman who takes command of the crew for most of the story (after the original commander is an early victim) is deaf, played by deaf actor Sophie Leigh Stone, and communicates with everyone else by signing through an interpreter.

I also noted with interest that two characters played by actors of Asian heritage, Zarqa Ismail and Arsher Ali, are given the thoroughly Anglo names Tim Lunn and Mason Bennett. (I don’t think we ever find out Cass’s first name.)

The writer was Toby Whitehouse, who also wrote School Reunion, one of my favorite New Who episodes; Greeks Bearing Gifts, one of my favourite Torchwood episodes; the series Being Human; and the New Who episode The God Complex, which I didn’t rate as highly and have written up here along with its Black Archive.

Rewatching Under the Lake / Before the Flood, I would rank it as average or slightly below. Over on X/Twitter, it did better, at 120th of 309 Who stories in @heraldofcreatio’s poll. Anne could not remember having seen it first time round. I find the plot decently sfnal and the base well realised, but the energy somehow not quite there, and the means and motivation of the alien menace obscure. Full marks of course for the portrayal of Cass’s disability, which we’ll get back to.

Ryan C. Parrey and Kevin S. Decker have done a solid though relatively short Black Archive on the story. The first chapter is an introduction which briefly touches on bases under siege, evil capitalism, and the reversed sequence of the narrative.

The second and longest chapter, “The Bootstrap Paradox”, goes in detail into the exploration of time paradoxes in this story and in other Doctor Who stories, and the extent to which they also carry the freight of moral dilemmas.

The third chapter, “‘Only Room for One Me’”, looks at Clara’s arc overall in the wider Doctor Who narrative. Its second paragraph is:

“This two-part story contributes important elements to Clara’s arc during her time with the 12th Doctor, an arc that begins before Danny’s death and that sees Clara act on her fascination with the Doctor’s power and responsibility. Making a conscious decision to leave certain inhibitions behind after Danny dies, she experiments here and elsewhere in series nine with, in effect, becoming the Doctor.

Incidentally I am writing this at Gallifrey One, where Jenna Coleman as usual is charming the participants.

The very brief fourth chapter, “Ghosts in the Machine”, looks at the ghosts in the story as compared to other Who stories, and unpacks how they are not really ghosts.

The fifth chapter, “New Waste Lands”, which is also short, looks at the alien Fisher King and successfully explained to me what is actually going on in the story, better than the script did.

The sixth and best chapter, “The Case of Cass”, looks at the varying ways that disabled people are portrayed in the media, especially in Doctor Who, coming to the conclusion that Cass is uniquely well depicted in this story. Hard to disagree with that, and it’s well argued.

The seventh and concluding chapter takes us back to ethics and invokes Jean-Paul Sartre.

I rate this about average of the Black Archives, but with significant bonus points for the discussion of disability. 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) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | 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) | Silver Nemesis (75) | 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) | A Christmas Carol (74) | 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)

TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The key maintains a direct link with the TARDIS at all times. Even if the TARDIS is isolated by a temporal disturbance the key should be able to summon it back (see Case Study, page 32). Conversely, the TARDIS can be concealed, a second out of sync with your current time zone, using the key as an anchor.

This is one of those really lovely BBC spinoff books, looking in detail at the TARDIS, presented as an operator’s manual and pulling together all the TARDIS lore from the first 55 years of Doctor Who (it features Jodie Whittaker but not any of her stories). None of this is new, but it’s put together very imaginatively and entertainingly. I had forgotten that many of the early stories include a TARDIS malfunction of some kind, and the authors heroically retcon everything together, even the Eye of Harmony from the TV movie. A lovely effort. You can get it here.

Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Most people called it the Jewelled City, because they had no imagination of their own and just picked up on what some down-market visnews journalist correctly thought would make a catchy slogan. The planet had originally been colonised as a source of jethryk, but the mining boom had long since died out, and it reverted to being just another human world. Nowadays there were no more jewels around than there were in any other colonial capital.

I never had the pleasure of meeting David McIntee, but we were Facebook friends for years, and like many others I was shocked and saddened when he died last December, two weeks before his 56th birthday. He wrote twelve Doctor Who novels between 1993 and 2004, one of which (Autumn Mist) is among the very few Doctor Who stories set in Belgium. My favourite is The Face of the Enemy, set while the Doctor and Jo Grant are off in Peladon, so that UNIT has to bring in the Master and some bloke called Chesterton and his wife to help out.

Mission: Impractical is the last of the Sixth Doctor novels that I read a decade ago, failed to write up at the time and have now reread again. It’s a comedy heist story, not usually one of my favourite sub-genres, but done very well here. The cast of characters includes Sabalon Glitz and his sidekick Dibber, who appeared in a couple of TV stories, and Frobisher, originally a DWM comic strip companion, who is a shape shifting alien Whifferdill and prefers to take the shape of a penguin. There are also Ogrons and an ancient artifact which is the McGuffin. McIntee had a good ear for dialogue and robustly characterizes both the continuity characters and the bad guys who turn up in this story, and the settings are vivid. So I am ending this mini-project on a high note.

The purchase link says it’s out of print and that Amazon doesn’t know of any second-hand copies. But who knows, you may be lucky?

I find that I also never wrote up some of the early Bernice Summerfield books, so I will do them next, possibly alongside the early Big Finish audio adaptations.

The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al

Second frame of third section:

Three stories here. The title story by Andy Diggle and Craig Hamilton brings Lady Christina de Souza back for a space heist with the Doctor, Amy and Rory, and raised a smile or two. The second, “Space Oddity” by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Horacio Domingues, is an excellent tale of the Vashta Nerada and an early undocumented Soviet space mission. The third, “Time Fraud” by Richard Dinnick and Josh Adams, has bird-like aliens and fake Time Lords. You can get it here.

Next in this series is Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn