‘I couldn’t possibly,’ said Peri politely. ‘I’m still full after our lunch.’
Second last of the Sixth Doctor books that I read in 2015 and failed to blog at the time. To be honest, I didn’t get much out of this; the Doctor and Peri land on a planet where Autons are re-enacting the dramas of 1980s soaps, a cultural phenomenon that I’m not especially invested in. It turns out that the Nestene Consciousness is the offspring of Shub-Niggurath from the Lovecraft mythos. There are some fun nods to other parts of the Doctor Who canon. One for completists. You can get it here (at a price).
Next up: Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis.
Back to a different sequence of Eleventh Doctor graphic stories, this unites a one-shot, where Rory’s spam emails come alive in the Tardis,with a three-parter, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory get mixed up with the police investigation of Jack the Ripper. It’s a bit dubious, frankly, to adapt the very real femicidal atrocities of the Ripper murders for a Doctor Who story and to make an anthropophagic alien the secret killer. Doctor Who doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or even Ireland much, and this isn’t so very different.
But Tony Lee (as usual) captures the characters well, and the first bit with living spam emails is sheer fun; and the Ripper story is superbly illustrated by the art of Tim Hamilton, who I don’t think I had otherwise come across, but I shall definitely look out for now.
We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.
I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.
He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)
Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.
After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)
Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)
Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.
(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)
I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcast by James Goss.
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.
The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters (and which I also enjoyed very much).
The third chapter’s title is ‘He Started It, With His Stories’. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
Moffat and his interviewer, Christel Dee, were considering the themes, concerns and narrative techniques that Doctor Who shares with its folkloric precursors, rather than its more superficial aesthetic trappings. The latter, being primarily futuristic and scientific, contrast with the magical otherworlds of traditional fairy stories, and the imagined pasts, whether agrarian or courtly, from which their protagonists hail². Marina Warner’s history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time (2014), speaks of these stories being constructed from ‘building blocks includ[ing] certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings and toads),’ and while most of these items may be found in specific Doctor Who stories, they are hardly emblematic of the series as a whole³. However, her identification of fairy tales as consisting of ‘combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images’ describes Doctor Who’s overall approach just as well⁴. ² Given Doctor Who’s eclectic nature, individual stories may be identified as exceptions, but the overall point holds. ³ They can, however, be indicative of more fantasy-inflected stories: for instance, The Keeper of Traken (1981) includes a stepmother and a ring; Kinda (1982) features both apples and mirrors; and a mirror and a frog, if not a toad, appear in It Takes You Away (2018). ⁴ Warner, Marina, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, ppxx-xxi.
This chapter considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.
An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.
So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there. You can (probably) get it here.
To be honest, not one of the more memorable Sixth Doctor novels. The Doctor and Peri land in a crumbling authoritarian society, closely aligned with the setting of the Judge Dredd comics. Peri ends up with the rebels and the Doctor (after flirting with death) with the Adjudicators. Lots of running around and biffing. You can get it here.
Concluding the series of albums featuring the Twelfth Doctor, library assistant companion Alice Obiefune, and sentient tree The Sapling, here we have the showdown between the TARDIS crew and The Scream, a Silent so silent that even the other Silents can’t remember him. I felt the previous volume a bit lacking in energy, but it really picked up here to race us towards the conclusion of the story. You can get it here.
I guess this is saying good bye to Alice as well – a nicely developed comics only companion, with perhaps a bit more consistency than some of them (indeed, than some of the TV companions). She’s also in The Lost Dimension which I haven’t got to yet.
The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation [after Remembrance of the Daleks], I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.
Watching it again I find myself somewhere in between. Great performances, but a lot of running around in circles in terms of plot, no real sense of how the various bits of city connect with each other, and people just standing around to be captured or executed. We’ve had more violent assaults on our willing suspension of disbelief in the Moffat and Chibnall and Davies years since, but it felt like the director was working more on the script than the audience perception.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Graeme Curry’s novelisation of his own script is:
She could not believe her eyes – the TARDIS was pink. From the shadows of Forum Square they had a clear view of the Happiness Patrol carrying their pots of paint and putting the final touches to their work. Daisy K stood some distance from the others, overseeing the job.
I wasn’t overwhelmed by the original TV story, but Curry has produced a novelisation which is passionate and convinced – the rather odd plot holes remain, but liberated from cheap-looking special effects, it turns into rather a good yarn. Definitely one of those where the book is an improvement. Also an easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Helen A and her women warriors running around after Ace.
Nothing more to add. You can get it here. (Incidentally I tried tracking Bechdel passes and fails for all the fiction I read this year, but ran out of steam in June.)
Mike Stack’s Black Archive monograph on the story looks at its reception rather than its creation, which is fair enough given the changes in public notoriety the story has enjoyed. The first chapter, “Evaluation” looks at how poorly the story was rated by fans at the time and since, and asks “So, Is it Any Good?” He disarmingly admits its weaknesses: the padding of the plot, the unambitious design, the controversial Kandyman, the ambiguous postcolonial treatment of the Pipe People, Fifi; but comes back to the good performances.
The second and longest chapter, “Political Readings”, starts with the media flap in 2010 when several British newspapers discovered that the story had a critique of Thatcherism, and goes on to point out that spoofs of Thatcher were so universal on TV in 1988 that The Happiness Patrol easily slipped below the radar of contemporary critics. The real target, Stack argues convincingly, is authoritarianism of all kinds.
The third chapter, “Queer Readings”, addresses one of the other key points about the story. Its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces and its footnotes, is:
However, such bold statements are not universal or uncontested. In The Television Companion, Howe and Walker gave only a brief mention to the interpretation of gay themes, tentatively noting ‘some commentators have suggested that there is a gay rights message here’⁴. They do not take this observation further. Tat Wood, in About Time, went further:
‘While we’re debunking fan lore, the dispatched Andrew X (or Harold L, it hardly matters) isn’t wearing a pink triangle badge. Novelist / new series writer Matt Jones’ reading of the story as being explicitly and exclusively about gay rights misses the point, although none of his evidence (except the mention of the triangle badge) is actually invalid.’⁵
⁴ Howe and Walker, The Television Companion, p518. ⁵ Wood, About Time 6, p252.
The chapter points out that the story is actually very ambiguous in its use of queer / gay imagery. Pink is the colour of the oppressor here, not the liberator. The two main male villains escape together at the end – romantically, perhaps? On the other hand, the enforcement of happiness has echoes of the Section 28 debate of the 1980s (weirdly being played out again in attacks against trans people today). Personally I think that the ambiguity is itself rather successful.
The fourth chapter, “Happy Readings”, starts by citing the Easter 2011 sermon delivered by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in which he mentioned the story in the context of the importance of happiness as a societal aim. (I met Lord Williams once, in passing, as I was heading to a meeting at the House of Lords and bumped into him at the entrance to Parliament.) Stack looks at the concept of happiness, and why Helen A is doomed not to find it. (Certainly she ain’t gettin’ much from Joseph C.)
A Coda comes back to the question of whether the story is any good. Admitting his own personal love for it, Stack concludes:
I leave myself open to the criticism that I have credited The Happiness Patrol with more intellectual clout than it deserves. However, what strikes me is the story more than holds its own when held up to scholarly scrutiny. It elegantly depicts totalitarianism, anticipates the reclaiming of the word ‘killjoy’, and provides a parable about the need to negotiate our emotions.
Again, the Black Archives have given me new appreciation for what a Doctor Who story I don’t especially love. You can get this one here.
Incidentally, the Seventh Doctor is proportionately by far the best represented in the Black Archive (apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors). 64% of the Seventh Doctor’s episodes are covered in Black Archives as of late 2024; the closest of the rest is the Thirteenth with 46%. The gap is even bigger just counting stories: 7 of the 12 Seventh Doctor stories now have Black Archives, 58%, twice the score of the Fourth Doctor, with 12 out of 41, 29%.
(Since you asked, the end of the table has the Second Doctor, with only 13% of his episodes and 14% of his stories, though we have also yet to see any Black Archives covering either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctors.)
He wasn’t entirely sure if Ruby was listening to him. She was standing still with the toes of her shoes touching the edge of the cliff, completely enraptured by the dinosaurs. Of course she was! Who wouldn’t be?
When I wrote up the most recent season of Doctor Who, I commented of this story:
The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
I watched it again before reading the book and writing this post, and what struck me is the mismatch between, on the one hand, brilliant effects and performances, and on the other, a really poor story concept. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and re-watching it only draws your attention more firmly to the plot flaws. No doubt this is why they slipped it out as part of a double on the same night as Eurovision.
Alison Rumfitt is new to Who writing but has a couple of horror novels under her belt. This is a decent novelisation, adding a little top-and-tail narrative about a child and a monster, and digging a bit more into Ruby’s background and the resonances of the babies for her. There are also a couple more poo jokes, I think (I didn’t go back and check.) It may be difficult for an established writer to stamp their own authority on a Doctor Who story that they did not actually write, but I guess that wasn’t the point, and it’s perfectly serviceable. You can get it here.
‘I think you could do with a good stiff lemonade,’ the Doctor told Peri gently.
My rereading of Who books which I failed to blog on first reading them a decade ago has thrown up some interesting finds, and this is one of them: the Sixth Doctor and Peri land on a Scottish island where something is up, specifically the islanders are turning into mind-controlled zombies; Doctor Who meets The Wicker Man meets Night of the Living Dead. The setting is very vividly evoked, and the solution to the mystery gradually revealed; but it’s the portrayal of a small isolated community under siege from ‘orrible forces that really sits with me. A good ‘un. You can get it here, at a price.
Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics featuring companions Alice Obiefune and The Sapling, a sentient tree-like being. I found this one a bit episodic, four different stories none of which really advanced the arc for any of the main characters. The best is the first one with the Ood, by James Peaty with art by Ian Culbard (who never disappoints). You can get it here.
This must be one of the few pre-Davison stories that I had neither seen on TV nor read in novelisation form. It’s a two-parter, from immediately after the first Dalek story, featuring only the four members of the Tardis crew – the first Doctor, his grand-daughter Susan, and the teachers Ian and Barbara. There is a fifth character, not played by an actor, but I’ll get to that.
This was very very brave. The production team had run out of money, and had to do an entire story with no guest actors and no sets beyond what had already been made. The two episodes had two different directors, one of whom had never directed a television drama before. It could have been a disaster.
In fact it is very good. I would even have said excellent, were it not for the bathos of the minor technical problem with the Tardis which turns out to be at the core of the plot. But apart from that – and one or two minor slips from Hartnell, though he keeps it together for the big set-piece speeches – I was surprised by just how good it is.
I also watched the DVD documentary, which is entertaining and enlightening, and also actually slightly longer than either of the episodes. Meta-text, isn’t that the concept I’m looking for?
When I rewatched it in 2009, I wrote rather more briefly:
The Edge of Destruction is a two-episode filler with a great beginning and middle but a less good resolution. The weirdness on the Tardis screen, the clock faces and the odd behaviour of the crew are all nicely done, but the broken spring is rather banal and unmagical. However, what really makes the story memorable is the humanising of the Doctor and the repairing of his relationship with Barbara.
Rewatching it now, it seems rather staged, but staged rather well. These are four believable characters in an unbelievable situation, and the story efficiently works it through to the end.
I also read the novelisation back in 2008, and wrote then:
Robinson has taken a two-episode story and padded it out with some interesting new material of Ian and Barbara exploring the depths of the Tardis. Unfortunately, Robinson’s own prose style is thunderously bad in places. For completists only.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In the darkness, the rhythmic in-out in-out breathing of the life support system seemed even more eerily alive. Ian shuddered, but resisted the urge to share his fears with the Doctor who would only delight in ridiculing his irrational notions.
I think I was a little unfair in my first reading. Robinson is not a fluid writer, but I’ve certainly read much worse, including much worse Doctor Who books. You cn get it here (for a price).
Simon Guerrier’s Black Archive on The Edge of Destruction is one of the shortest in the series, clocking in at a mere 108 pages. The story is a short one, but James Cooray Smith got 73 pages out of the 6 minutes of Night of the Doctor, and at that rate this volume would have been about the length of The Lord of the Rings.
It starts with an introduction, which makes a bold assertion:
I’ve a theory about you, the reader of this book. I think you:
Have seen the 2013 drama An Adventure in Space and Time.
Can identify moments in it that aren’t quite what happened.
Understand why such dramatic licence was necessary.
I feel seen. It is as if I had had dinner with the author at Gallifrey One this year. Oh, wait…
The introduction further looks at the paucity of archive sources on the story, and makes the important point that he will refer to it in the book as “Series C” to distinguish between it and the first episode, whose title is “The Edge of Destruction”.
The first chapter, “Part One – On the Edge” looks in detail at what we know about the commissioning, writing and recording of the story, deflating a couple of the myths that have circulated about it in fannish circles.
The second chapter, “Part Two – Beyond the Brink” proposes Guerrier’s first five theories about the story: 1) that it is weird by design of the cast and producers, 2) that the show-runners had decided already to make it a show about alien beings; 3) that the TARDIS manipulating the minds of the crew is a metaphor for TV affecting its audience; 4) that the scientific basis of the story is relatively sound; and 5) that the story was written with a view to reinforcing the continuation of Doctor Who as a show.
The third chapter’s title is “Part Three – Inside the Spaceship”. Its second paragraph is:
The camera script for ‘The Edge of Destruction’ suggests that David Whitaker intended to exploit and adapt this existing space, but not to add an extra room to the TARDIS. Although Scene 2 is headed ‘Int. The Girls’ Bedroom’, stage directions immediately after this say, ‘Susan now has a medical box open on the table in the living quarters’, so the bedroom was intended to be part of that pre-existing space. Stage directions continue that, ‘If possible one of the circular wall pieces should be open as if it is a cupboard.’ Then, in Scene 6, Ian also ‘goes to one of the walls. He presses a switch and three of the circular wall pieces descend and a wall bed is revealed.’ The implication is that Whitaker envisaged the living quarters – even the whole TARDIS control room – as a kind of bedsit: a single space with multiple functions. (He had form in this; on 30 September 1963 he agreed to rework the scripts of The Daleks to combine sets wherever practical to reduce their overall number1.) 1 Christopher Barry, ‘Special effects in connexion with Dr Who 2nd story’, 30 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.
Here Guerrier proposes another five theories: 6) it’s the last time for a while that we see much of the inside of the TARDIS; 7) the roundels are meant to convey the thickness and robustness of the walls and door; 8) the crew were meant to have assigned positions for take-off; 9) the TARDIS is lusting for the heat of the Sun; and 10) if the TARDIS had changed shape, the protruding lock would have been a constant feature.
A brief conclusion argues that the oddness of the story is its virtue.
This is my favourite kind of Black Archive, taking a story which is not one of my all time favourites but finding sufficient points of interest in it to make me think more about the story itself, the art of story-telling on television, and Doctor Who. You can get it here.
I wrote up Kerblam! in detail in April last year, after reading the Black Archive volume about the story, so I don’t feel the need to do so again; to repeat my key point, I did not much like Kerblam!, and thought it one of the weakest stories of Jodie Whittaker’s first season. However, since then, the novelisation of the story by its original writer, Pete McTighe, has been published. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
This malaise had started some time ago – strange sensations that Max couldn’t quite comprehend but now understood to be ‘confusion’ and ‘pain’. Over time, the feelings had grown in potency, and morphed into something else. A sickness. A deep-set anger, boiling from within. What was the word for it? Yes, that’s right … Hate.
I felt that the novelisation redeemed the story in a way that the Black Archive didn’t. Giving a lot more background detail about the characters and the universe made the narrative much fuller and more credible; the punchline, that the computer itself is sentient and crying for help, is given away much earlier in the book, which gives the story much more time to fill out the details. It still doesn’t give the Doctor and her companions much to do, but it is one of the (surprisingly rare) cases where a flawed TV story has a fair number of those flaws corrected on the page. You can get it here.
Hakon shook his head. ‘This is a piece of personal initiative on my part.’ He glared at the guards. ‘Now, shoot them. That’s a direct order.’
This is a really surprising Doctor Who novel from Terrance Dicks, a writer who one doesn’t normally associate with the word “surprising”. It’s a prequel to The Brain of Morbius, but set later in the Doctor’s timeline – Peri is injured one a random planet that they happen to be visiting, so the Fifth Doctor takes her to Mehendri Solon earlier in his career to get fixed up. The two get separated, of course, and the Doctor finds himself the military commander of a grand alliance of improbable partners against Morbius, while Peri leads guerilla resistance planetside. There is a lot about war and military strategy and tactics, and one feels Dicks perhaps working through themes that he was never quite able to explore in his other work – though of course he was the co-author of The War Games. This is a very different Fifth Doctor and Peri to those we are used to, and diehard fans may want to read it as an alternate timeline. But I must say I enjoyed it, and you can get it here (for a price).
I was sufficiently intrigued by all of this to check out Dicks’ own military career. According to his obituaries, he studied English at Downing College, Cambridge and then did two years of National Service with the Royal Fusiliers. He was born in 1935, and National Service was abolished from 1957 to 1960, so he must have been in one of the last cohorts to do it, probably in 1956-58. My own father, born in 1928, told me that he had thought he could have been exempted by being from Northern Ireland, but then discovered that to get a job in England he needed to have done it (indeed he reminisced about how someone told him this at a party, ruining the evening).
Two years in the forces don’t make you an expert on military history, but 1956-58 saw the Suez crisis, the intensification of the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, the climax of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the IRA’s underwhelming border campaign, and the independence of Ghana and Malaysia. From the law of averages, Dicks must have been involved with at least one of these, even if only peripherally, and I guess it gave him some thoughts that he worked out 45 year later in this book.
Next in this series of reading: Grave Matter, by Justin Richards.
Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics, this keeps Alice, the Doctor’s librarian companion from the previous two sequences, and introduces the mysterious Sapling, a young sapient tree which is at the centre of a mystery that needs to be solved. Some very good story concepts, the first half involving a weirdly stereotypically British planet and a Silent that even other Silents cannot see, and the second half involving one of Alice’s neighbours who has unaccountably become multiply duplicated. A good start. You can get it here.
I caught the last episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on first broadcast in 1988; when I watched the whole story for the first time in 2008, the last story of Old Who that I watched first time round, I wrote:
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is not a bad end to the season (and indeed to my watching all of Old Who). It looks generally good, and performances are all pretty convincing. I did once again find myself wondering about the means and motivation of the villains, in this case the Gods of Ragnarok; and I was left a bit confused by how the Psychic Circus fitted into the planetary society (and also a bit confused by the ending). But it was all fairly watchable. Now I can go back and do it all again.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
And finally for this run, once again I enjoyed The Greatest Show In The Galaxy more than I was expecting to. The storyline is awfully simple – the Psychic Circus as a deathtrap set by ancient powerful beings, the Doctor and Ace trying to escape from it and destroy it – and there is therefore an awful lot of circular plotting before the dénouement, but somehow the extra bits tacked on to the plot all add to it. A particular cheer for T.P. McKenna’s fraudulent Captain Cook as a parody of the show’s central character, and the earnest fan played by Adrian Mole Gian Sammarco who finds that the object of his fascination is a fatal obsession; but Jessica Martin and Chris Drury are excellent too, and the whole thing just looks so much better than we were getting two years ago (or even one year ago). Let’s hope they can keep up the standards for a few more years.
What struck me this time round was how symbolic it all is. The story seems somehow not very concerned with creating a convincing secondary world, but instead with managing the characters in a particular plot and emotional space. And yet it gets away with it.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Stephen Wyatt’s novelisation of his own script is:
‘There’s something not quite right about all this,’ the Doctor mused.
Wyatt’s book is not really an improvement on the TV original. Shorn of (for once) decent production values and the compelling performances of the actors, the holes in the plot and clunky scene-setting are more apparent, and Wyatt, having written a TV script, is reduced to reporting what we saw on screen without being able to add much to it. Fails the Bechdel test – each female character is rigidly paired off with a male, and on the rare occasions that they converse it is always about one of the men (usually the Doctor).
Dale Smith wrote the punchy Black Archive on The Talons of Weng Chiang which I reviewed a few months ago; he has also written a Tenth Doctor novel that I liked and a Seventh Doctor novel that I didn’t. Here he has done what some of the best Black Archives have done, by taking a story that I had not really thought about very much and making me think about it a lot more, the thoughts going in some unexpected directions. He has also blogged about the process of writing it.
The opening chapter, “What Did You Say Your Name Was?” looks at the over production situation on Doctor who at the time the story was made and draws many parallels about what we see on screen and what was happening behind the cameras.
The second chapter, “Tears of a Clown”, looks at clowns in general and why Ace is right to be scared of them.
The third chapter, “Let There Be Rock”, looks at quarries, and then slides into an argument that the comics artist Alan Moore is a formative and pervasive influence on Andrew Cartmel’s era of Doctor Who. Its second chapter is:
This view of quarries is certainly reflected in Cartmel’s era on the show: outside of season 24 – where one story featured three separate quarries but Cartmel had limited ability to course-correct – only three stories featured quarries, and only two used them as alien planets3. Of those two stories – The Greatest Show and Survival – both used Warmwell Quarry in Dorset. Part of this was the simple reason that only these two stories featured any significant time spent on alien worlds, as Cartmel’s realisation that the BBC could do period drama very well led him to move the show to more Earthly settings. But that shift didn’t result in Doctor Who becoming completely studio-based: the production team settled into alternating between studio-based and location-based stories for the rest of their run, with The Greatest Show being intended to be studio-based until circumstances forced a rethink.
3 Doctor Who Locations Guide, ‘Season Twenty-Four’, ‘Season Twenty-Five’, ‘Season Twenty-Six’. The third was Battlefield (1989), which used the Castle Cement Quarry in Kettleton for pyrotechnics work when Ancelyn crashes into a hill on arrival, presumably on the grounds that quarries are less concerned about things blowing up than Rutland Water.
The fourth chapter, “Fingerprints of the Gods”, looks at the role of magic in Doctor Who, particularly in the Cartmel era.
The fifth chapter, “Forward”, is sheer but entertaining self-indulgence on Smith’s part; it takes the history of Doctor Who, the history of hip-hop, and finds parallels between them despite the rather imperfect rapping delivered by Ross Ricco as the Ringmaster. It is unusual subject matter for a book on Doctor Who, but Smith succeeds in making the case.
A Black Archive that I like more than the story it is about. You can get it here.
Incidentally the Seventh Doctor is the first Doctor to have more than half his stories and episodes covered by Black Archives. (Apart from the special cases of the Eighth Doctor and the Shalka!Doctor.)
She’d been trekking for days across the grassy plains that lay beyond the valley and the river and the settlements, but at last the ground was beginning to climb. She was sure she would find answers here.
A rather lovely Fifteenth Doctor novel, with two different sets of cute aliens in potential conflict with each other, and the Doctor and Ruby sorting out the conflict. You won’t get the same level of characterisation here as in Ruby Red, but it’s a good sfnal concept, executed in a very Whovian way. You can get it here.
I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)
Many electrons have been distorted in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.
The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.
It topped the nominations for the 2010 Hugo in the BDPSF category by a very wide margin, and went on to win the award though in a tighter vote.
I enjoyed rewatching it as well. There aren’t all that many Doctor Who stories about space exploration, which is odd when you think about it. And I’m not always keen on the stories which show the Doctor as a flawed hero, but sometimes it works better than others, and I think this is one of those times.
Phil Ford has now written a novelisation of his own script – he had previously done the same for one of his Sarah Jane Adventures stories, and I complained then that it was not comfortably done, but I liked his Torchwood stuff (see here and here). That SJA novelisation was seventeen years ago, and he’s clearly got a lot more writing experience under his belt since then. The Waters of Mars is one of the better recent novelisations. The second paragraph of third chapter is:
He said he had been eight years old, and it was a tomato, small but perfectly round and deeply red, that he had plucked from a spindly but leafy tomato plant grown in a pot at the back of his father’s greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was filled with tall, flourishing plants, their limbs already bowing with the weight of ripening tomatoes. The opposite side was a jungle of cucumber plants, aubergines and potted bushes of red and green chillies.
There’s a lot of juicy extra stuff here that didn’t appear in the TV story, whether because there wasn’t room for it in the original script or whether the author has imagined it more deeply when coming back to the novelisation. The characters on the Mars base are all more fully realised on the page than on the screen, and we get more into the secrets that the astronauts have discovered on planet; while the fundamental plot arc is not reinforced particularly, it isn’t weakened either. So, definitely one to look out for. You can get it here.
She had been bored with her cabin on the Newton, which was cramped and utilitarian. She had moved to the ship’s small common lounge until she had become bored with that. Finally she had taken to pacing the ship’s main corridors with a scowl disfiguring her fine features, until it seemed she reached a state of total dissatisfaction with every deckplate and bulkhead door.
Working through my backlog of unblogged Doctor Who novels brings me to this story of the Fifth Doctor, Peri and Kamelion, and a quest narrative with a host of competing quirky teams and a prize at the end that turns out to be more symbolic than valuable. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care for it much; the plot has been done better elsewhere in both Who novels and other media (The Ghost Monument comes to mind), and there were some very annoying typos – “Van Gough” was the one that grated most. The only one of Bulis’ Doctor Who books that I really liked was The Eye of the Giant. But you can get The Ultimate Treasure here.
Next in this sequence: Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks.
There’s a lot thrown in here: the Doctor, the new comics companions Alice and the Quire, Abslom Daak the Dalek hunter, River Song, the War Doctor, an unexpected incarnation of the Master, and a complex storyline told over the previous two volumes and concluded here. I didn’t think it was quite as good as the middle volume, but I came away satisfied anyway. You can get it here.
When I first listened to the audio of this lost story, with linking dialogue read by Peter Purves, in 2007, I wrote:
The Myth Makers was the four-part story between the single-episode, Doctor-less Mission to the Unknown and the twelve-part epic The Daleks’ Master Plan, bringing the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki to ancient Troy. Vicki here becomes the second regular to be written out after developing a love interest; the Doctor is mistaken for Zeus and helps Odysseus construct the wooden horse, though is somewhat obsessed with its fetlocks “no safety margin at all… if only you would have allowed me another day to fit shock absorbers!”
I liked the creative reinterpretation of the characters from the Greek legend. Priam takes a shine to Vicki, renames her Cressida and won’t hear a word against her. Both Paris and Menelaus are incompetent, the former a coward and the latter drunk, making one wonder what Helen ever saw in either of them. (Menelaus: “I was heartily glad to see the back of her!” Paris: “I think this whole business has been carried just a little bit too far. I mean, that Helen thing was just a misunderstanding.”) Helen herself never appears in person, the BBC beauty budget presumably not reaching that far. The interpretation of the story that will always remain with me, I think, is Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, but this will do as an sfnal version.
As with all the “lost” stories, one never knows what one missed, though I can make a couple of guesses – Frances White (Julia in I CLAVDIVS) as Cassandra, or Vicki in her dress. But Peter Purves’ narration is, as ever, great, even though of the three regular characters his has the least to do. We end with a real acceleration of pace towards the next story; Vicki and the Doctor say their goodbyes off-screen, while Cassandra’s handmaiden Katarina accompanies a wounded Steven aboard the Tardis as a new (but very short-lived) companion.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I watched the Loose Cannon reconstruction and wrote:
The first three episodes of The Myth Makers are tremendous fun, rather in the spirit of Carry On Cleo which came out a few months earlier. The switch to epic drama and tragedy in the last episode is rather effective and sets the tone for the next story better than I had remembered. Donald Cotton presumes that the audience will have sufficient familiarity with the Trojan legends to appreciate the paradox of the various heroes being vain, cowardly, stupid, greedy or alcoholic.
I wonder also if he deliberately reversed the events of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where Cressida leaves Troilus for Diomede rather than the other way round. I know that the received wisdom is against me on this, but mention two further, admittedly weak, hints at a deberate reversal: Vicki arrives in Troy while Shakespeare’s Cressida leaves the city; and Hector is killed at the end of the Shakespeare play but the beginning of the Who story. Also, though this may not count, Troilus kills Achilles here, whereas Shakespeare has Achilles triumphant and alive at the end.
The lore is that Hartnell was in bad form while this was being made, but he seems to me to greatly enjoy his banter with Ivor Salter as Odysseus. Mind you, I felt a bit sad when I realised that John Wiles’ name had replaced Verity Lambert’s in the credits, and I am sure Hartnell must have started wondering how much longer he would last as the sole survivor of the original cast and crew. (Another year, as it turned out.)
Watching the reconstruction again, the striking thing is how little the Doctor and companions do; Vicki and Stephen spend most of the story imprisoned, and the Doctor just does the horse (though admittedly that’s a big part of the plot). I did like the dynamics among the Trojan ruling family. Barrie Ingham, who plays Paris, had also just played Alydon in the first Peter Cushing film, Dr Who and the Daleks. You can find the recon online, and get the Purves narration here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Donald Cotton’s novelisation of his own script, written twenty years after it was broadcast, is:
Mind you, we Greeks are constantly expecting the materialisation of some god or other, agog to intervene in human affairs. Well, no – to be honest – not really expecting. Put it this way, our religious education has prepared us to accept it, should it occur. But that is by no means to say we anticipate it as a common phenomenon. It’s the sort of thing that happens to other people, perhaps; but hardly before one’s own eyes in the middle of everyday affairs, such as the present formalistic blood-letting. Certainly not. No – but, as I say, the church has warned us of the possibility, however remote.
When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:
Once again, Cotton produces a memorable Who novel through a first person narrative: this time he has the poet Homer telling the story of how he witnessed the Doctor and friends interfering with the outcome of the siege of Troy. Homer didn’t appear at all in the story as broadcast (though Cotton has him absorb the silent role of the Cyclops played by Tutte Lemkow); constricting the whole narrative to a single viewpoint character does create some difficulties in telling the story, but basically it is a really good story anyway, and while it’s not Cotton at the utter peak of his form, it is surely one of the top ten novelisations. Cotton has taken the opportunity to restore as chapter titles some of the punning episode titles scrapped by the production team (eg “Doctor in the Horse”).
Coming back to it now, I still very much enjoyed it, including the anachronistic asides, especially as I have read a few more novels loosely based on the period, and also recently read the Wilson translation of the Odyssey. You can get it here.
Before I get onto Ian Potter’s Black Archive, which (spoiler) is one of the best in the series, I have been doing a little research myself into the BBC’s previous treatments of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The first broadcast version was on the National [radio] Programme in 1935, and a couple of names leap out, most notably that Menelaus was played by Francis De Wolff, who would play Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon on Doctor Who thirty years later. It was an early break for Jack Hawkins and Anthony Quayle as well.
Francis De Wolff was in another radio production on the Third Programme in 1946, this time playing Ajax, and here Pandarus was played by Max Adrian, who of course was Priam in Doctor Who. Other Whovian names that jumped out at me were Valentine Dyall as Hector, Leonard Sachs as Paris and Laurence Payne as Troilus. Cresside was played by Belle Chrystall.
Belle Chrystall and Valentine Dyall returned in the same roles for a 1952 Third Programme production, in which Troilus was played by Marius Goring. Grizelda Hervey, who had been Helen in 1946, was Cassandra this time.
The first TV version in 1954 featured Donald Eccles as Priam, eighteen years before he played the High priest of Atlantis on Doctor Who. John Fraser was Troilus, Geoffrey Toone was Achilles, and Timothy Bateson and James Culliford also had small parts.
Familiar names again in a Third Programme production in 1959, with Francis de Wolff returning as Ajax and Valentine Dyall as Hector; Achilles is Trevor Martin, who much later played the Doctor on stage.
Another Third Programme production in 1964 is very star heavy – no crossover with The Myth Makers this time, but many actors who went on to star in Who, with Michael Kilgarriff doing the prologue and Margarelon, Julian Glover playing Hector, Stephen Thorne as Aeneas, Cyril Cusack as Pandarus, Maurice Denham as Ulysses and Peter Pratt as Ajax.
A televised National Youth Theatre production in 1966, a year after The Myth Makers, featured a young Timothy Dalton as Diomedes and also Derek Seaton, later to play Hilred in The Deadly Assassin, as Ulysses. The director was Bernard Hepton who went on to star in Secret Army.
Most entertaining of all, The Listener‘s review of a Radio 3 production in 1980 tells us that “Maureen O’Brien beautifully played Cressida as a squeaky sex kitten – a wanton from the start, with come-hitherish inflections.” Other familiar names include Gabriel Woolf as Agamemnon, Sheila Grant as Cassandra and Terence Hardiman as Hector.
The only production since then is a 2005 Radio 3 version, where the only Who-related name I spotted was Toby Jones as Thersites.
In the 47 years between 1935 and 1981 there were seven BBC radio productions and two on TV of Troilus and Cressida, not to mention several productions of William Walton’s opera which I have not listed above. In the 43 years since 1981, there has been just one.
There are two points that occur to me from this. One is that obviously expectations of how much Shakespeare you should expect to get on the BBC have shifted quite a lot since 1965. The other is that viewers of The Myth Makers when it was broadcast would have had a much better background knowledge of the Troilus and Cressida story than most viewers today.
Ian Potter’s Black Archive monograph is unashamedly longer than usual, but (spoiler) one of the best Black Archives I’ve read recently. He begins with a short note on the spelling of character names, and then a prologue explaining the good and bad points of the story (highlights – Good: it’s funny; Bad: it screws up Vicki’s departure).
The very brief first chapter, “Foundational Myths”, briefly surveys the limited archaeological evidence for Troy, a metaphor (this is not stated) for the limited evidence we have about the lost Doctor Who story.
The second chapter, “Source Texts”, looks at the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida, and frames an argument for how and why The Myth Makers differs from both.
The third chapter, “The Engaging Mr Cotton”, looks in great detail at the life and career of Donald Cotton, who wrote The Myth Makers. He wrote a lot for stage, and had written several previous treatments of Greek myth. He had a complex love life as well. (The only mistake I’ve spotted by Potter is in the name of Cotton’s protégée towards the end of his career – it was Tamsin Hickling, not Tamsin Wickling.) Its third paragraph is:
Donald Henry Cotton was born near3 Nottingham on 26 April 1928, the son of Professor Harry Cotton, the distinguished and respected head of Electrical Engineering at Nottingham University and a mother described by Cotton’s wife Hilary Wright as `neurotic and over possessive’4. According to Wright, Cotton’s father, while a popular and gregarious figure, was stand-offish with his son, and the boy seems to have grown up a solitary, guarded child. Cotton went to the local Southwell Minster Grammar School, a school which, having historically trained boy choristers, retained a strong music tradition. Reading his school’s annual magazine, Cotton seems to have made no special impact during his time there, unlike his father, who as the school’s governor regularly appears in its pages. 3 According to Cotton’s 1969 biography in the programme of My Dear Gilbert at the Worthing Connaught Theatre. His father’s address is given as Mapperley Street in Nottingham in the mid-193os, but local press places him in Gunthorpe, a small village near Nottingham, in 1952, so this may well be where Cotton grew up. 4 Testro, Lucas, ‘Man Out of Time’, DWM #58i, p25. More detail on Professor Cotton’s career can be found in Crewe, ME, ‘The Met Office Grows Up: In War and Peace’.
The fourth chapter “The Unravelling Texts”, is one of the longest I’ve seen in any Black Archive. Potter takes the extant versions of the script and traces its development from Cotton’s original hand-written notes to camera script and screen. This can be done badly or well, and here it is done very well. The most interesting conclusion (of many interesting points) is that Donald Tosh, the script editor, rewrote most of the fourth episode to take account of Vicki’s departure and the installation of Katarina as the new companion.
The fifth chapter, “What Did It Look Like?”, considers the limited evidence available, and also the reputation of director Michael Leeston-Smith, concluding that the horse itself must have been a fine thing.
The sixth chapter, “The Many Wiles”, is also long by Black Archive standards, and examines in detail the career of Doctor Who’s second producer after Verity Lambert, John Wiles. I have often given my view that the Wiles period showed a road not taken, a grittier show where companions might die and comedy mixed with tragedy, not so very different from New Who in fact. Wiles was South African, left in protest at apartheid, crashed out of his first big TV job (Doctor Who), and continued a career as a minor theatre writer and novelist. Potter has gone deeply into Wiles’ body of work, and emerged with a fascinating picture of the man, which would have been worth the cover price of this Black Archive on its own. In particular, he addresses Wiles’ attitude to racism (where he finds little case to answer) and underage sex (where the evidence is more troubling). But the crucial point is that Wiles mishandled the writing out of Maureen O’Brien and lost the confidence of William Hartnell, who was then able to get him fired (though he seems to have jumped before he was pushed).
An epilogue apologises (quite unnecessarily in my view) for the length of the book.
As I said up front, this is a standout in the usually very good Black Archive series, and you can get it here.
Next: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith (and Stephen Wyatt).
When Planet of the Ood was first broadcast in 2008, I wrote:
Russell T Davies was 15 months old when the first episode of The Sensorites was broadcast in June 1964, but it obviously made a deep impression on him – we had two explicit references to Susan’s description of her and the Doctor’s home planet last season, and now we have it confirmed that the Ood are close neighbours to the Sense-Sphere. I think The Sensorites is positively the worst First Doctor story, so to me it is a slightly weird choice, but I’m aware that this is not a universal view.
[My brother] pointed out at the time that evolving to the stage where you have to carry part of your own brain around in your hand doesn’t seem terribly viable. But that apart, I thought that the music was great, the parable about slavery and society decent enough, and Tim McInerny’s performance (and also Ayesha Dharker’s) really excellent.
I rewatched it prior to tackling the recently published novelisation, and I didn’t like it quite as much as the first time. The heavily armed guards seem to have considerable difficulty in hitting the unarmed Ood, and the company’s OpSec in general is pretty poor. But the chemistry between the various actors is good, and of course now we know that there is foreshadowing of the Tenth Doctor’s approaching end.
I noted that one of the reps is played by Tariq Jordan, the brother of Yasmin Paige of the Sarah Jane Adventures.
It seems to me an odd choice of episode to put into book form, given the wide range of available choices, but I guess that when it was published a year ago the BBC were going back to the Ten/Donna pairing in anticipation of the Fourteenth Doctor stories.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
A powerful, cutting wind whipped and howled around her, and her lungs hurt every time she inhaled. It was so cold. And it was snowing. Giant icy flakes settled on her cheeks and eyes, burning her skin with their sharp coldness. She wrapped her arms around herself and stomped her feet to stay warm.
It’s a perfectly serviceable novelisation, stretching the story a little bit and giving a bit more depth to the characters and even bringing in a new one (a senior rep). If you liked the TV story you’ll like this, and if you were not so keen on it, it won’t change your feelings. You can get it here.
I’m working through the new novelisations as they come to my attention; looking forward to the ones to be published this summer, but otherwise the next will be The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford.
‘Ordinarily, no,’ agreed the Doctor. He regarded Nyssa with a look of consternation. ‘But in this case, I think it could be something rather extraordinary. Tell me about the dream again.’
Back at the start of the 2010s, I read through all of the New Adventures, Missing Adventures, Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures at the rate of two or three a month, and wrote them up here as I went – except that at the end of 2014 and the first part of 2015, I was so overwhelmed with Arthur C. Clarke Award reading and other things that I just never got around to blogging them. So I’m going back to the missing entries now, in order of internal chronology, and that means starting with this novel of the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa, set immediately after Arc of Infinity.
Trevor Baxendale is usually reliable as a Who writer (see in particular The Janus Conjunction and Prisoner of the Daleks), and I think this is one of his better books too. The TARDIS lands on a moon where the team encounters a crew of archaeologists (or are they?) and an ancient evil is unleashed from the depths. Lots of very creepy description and good characterisation, and a couple of welcome shout-outs to Old Who. A good start to this mini-project. You can get it here.
Next up: The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ran. ‘I didn’t expect them to come after me.’
One of my disappointments about the Chibnall era of Doctor Who is that there was so little good quality spinoff material apart from the TV show itself. By contrast, Russell T. Davies has hit the ground running as usual, with one novelisation out already and another three coming later in the year, as well as two spinoff novels last month and another scheduled for November.
This is the first of the spinoff novels, taking the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby to an obscure part of European history, the Battle on the Ice in 1242, fought between Russians and Estonians (to use anachronistic and brutal shorthand) on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus. My extensive and detailed research suggests that this is the only Who story in any medium which has an Estonian setting.
Being a Doctor Who story, there are of course external incursions into the real history of what happened – three interstellar Valkyrie sisters, managing a rite of passage for the youngest of them, and an alien hive mind under the ice. On top of that the TARDIS is behaving oddly, in a foreshadowing of what we found out about its extra passenger in the recent season finale.
These sfnal trimmings are also the basis for much banter between the Doctor and Ruby, and that of course is what people will buy the book for. Given that it’s Cook’s first novel, and it must have been written before any of the recent season was shown, she catches Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor really well. The plot doesn’t gel completely perfectly (the climax in particular is lower-key than I had anticipated) but it’s a good start to the new era on paper. You can get it here.
OK, I can’t possibly not comment on the recently concluded first full series of stories featuring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. In summary, it srted a bit wobbly, had some super peaks in the middle, and ended (for me) a bit flat.
Ncuti Gatwa is great as the Doctor, and while I am of the old-school that prefers my Doctors not to have emotional vulnerability, I felt that he covered it off very well. Like all the lead actors so far, he is very watchable. The eye is drawn to him no matter where he is on the screen. I thought the chemistry with Gibson was great as well, and I am glad that she will still be around for at least some of the next series.
The two opening stories, both shown on Eurovision night six weeks ago, were OK but both were a bit silly. The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
Though it was good to see Golda Rosheuvel, the first of many excellent guest stars this series, Jocelyn here after enjoying her in the title role in Queen Charlotte. She was also a hospital doctor in two episodes of the second series of Torchwood.
Apparently a novelisation of Space Babies will be one of three published this summer, written by Angela Rumfitt who is a pioneer of the New Gross. Appropriate enough for a monster made of snot.
The Devil’s Chord has a really sinister plot, with music being removed from the world; Big Finish has sometimes dared to play with the soundscape of the fictional universe, but this is the first time that the TV show has really gone there. This time it was the execution that was a bit silly, with Jinkx Monsoon really chewing the scenery as the Maestro.
The returning figure from the show’s history that really took me by (pleasant) surprise was June Hudson, in her first appearance on screen at the age of ninety-something; she did all the costume design for late 1970s and early 1980s Who, and also for Blake’s 7. She is the only character actually killed in the 1963 part of the episode.
Then we get onto the good stuff, with a run of four brilliant episodes. Boom is not silly at all; it’s a tense story of potential sudden death in an awful war zone, where although we know that it’s only the third episode of eight in the season, the threat of disaster is real. Probably the darkest episode of the season.
The standout guest star is Varada Sethu, who is apparently joining next season as a new companion, but here playing the quietly desperate Mundy Flynn. She was great in Andor too.
I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.
This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.
Though I was also unnerved by the resemblance between Aneurin Barnard, as the fictional prime minister Roger ap Gwilliam, and Irakli Kobakhidze, who in real life is the prime minister of the Republic of Georgia.
Prime Minister of GeorgiaFictional UK prime minister(I may have those captions the wrong way round.)
73 Yards is also getting an early novelisation, this time by the series script editor Scott Handcock, who is a lovely chap though I have had mixed feelings about his previous books.
We watched Dot and Bubble in Antwerp before dental emergency brought a premature end to our romantic getaway three weeks ago. This was a return to the format of Blink, with the Doctor and Ruby participating in the story only by video until the end. Russell T. Davies doesn’t always get his social commentary right, but this was well done.
And full marks to Callie Cooke in her central role as Lindy Pepper-Bean. As she pointed out in the Unleashed episode following this, Carey Mulligan went on to big stardom after Blink. We’ll watch Callie Cooke with interest.
And the fourth in a good run of four episodes was Rogue, in which it turns out that aliens in the Doctor Who universe are also fans of Bridgerton. This had particularly good emoting from Ncuti Gatwa, suddenly taken by feelings for Jonathan Groff’s Rogue, but also had Millie Gibson playing Ruby pretending to be an alien pretending to be Ruby, and getting away with it. The contrast between spaceship and 1813 was well done.
Jonathan Groff of course was the very first King George in Hamilton, and so his voice was the first heard by the audience. I felt that (unlike Jinkx Monsoon) he avoided chewing the scenery here.
And I also cheered for Indira Varma, the Duchess here, but previously seen by me in Game of Thrones and the first season of Torchwood.
Rogue will also get the novelisation treatment, by the episode’s writers, Kate Herron and Briony Redman.
The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.
And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.
But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.
I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA. My longer-term readers may recall that I myself identified the parents of a baby abandoned in a park in Philadelphia in 1917, using DNA samples and genealogy sites, who turned out to be a local musician and an airplane executive cousin of my grandmother’s; I’m in touch with the baby’s three children, now all in their 70s, and I have met with one of them and introduced her to other relatives.
I’ve also done it for another woman much closer to Ruby Sunday’s age, and for a couple of other cases that I have not reported here. So that’s one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.
Still, I had been hoping for better.
Lots of people have been raking the episodes in order of preferences, so I will do the same.
Next in the Year Two sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, following from The Then and the Now, with Abslom Daak, the mysterious Squire and Alice the librarian now joined by River Song to work out what the Doctor was up to during the Time War. Some great references to past stories, though I’m a little uneasy with the somewhat harsher characterisation of the Doctor. Scrapes through the Bechdel test.
In Belfast in April, I spotted that Waterstone’s was selling a CD copy of the Big Finish audio drama “The Battle of Giant’s Causeway”, by Lizzie Hopley, which came out earlier this year. The story reunites the Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann, with his audio companions Charlie Pollard and the alien C’Rizz, played by India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas respectively, to a conflict between Sontarans and Rutans playing out at the Giant’s Causeway in 55 BC. I didn’t buy it in Belfast, but I got it from the Big Finish website as soon as I got home.
It’s charming to have the old gang back together again, fifteen years after C’Rizz was written out of the Big Finish continuity, but a lot of plot is left unexplained, presumably because it’s the first story in a series. I bounced off it, I’m afraid, because I was less than impressed by the throwaway remarks in the script about Celts and Ireland.
At 7:30, we have this exchange:
Doctor: “Humans are one of the deadliest life forms I know. No offence, Charlie.” Charlie: “Oh, none taken.” Doctor: “This is 55 BC. The reign of the warrior race. The Celts are definitely vying for most barbaric.”
Nobody’s perfect, but it’s news to me that the Celts were particularly barbaric by the standards of 55 BC, and it grates to have the Doctor declare this as a fact without supporting evidence. Indeed, Charlie Pollard clearly thinks differently at 9:40 when the travellers discover a pile of corpses on the Giant’s Causeway:
C’Rizz: They’re soldiers! Judging by their armour. Doctor: Not just soldiers. They’re legionnaires. Except… Charlie: Roman legionnaires? Goodness. C’Rizz: Are legionnaires not Celts then? Charlie: Oh, Romans are far more deadly.
This however is not endorsed by the Doctor. We progress a bit further when the Doctor and Charlie confront the Sontaran commander for a bit of exposition at 21:45.
General: We plan a revenge raid against the Celtish devils at dawn. Charlie: The Celts did not kill your Sonturions. tell them, Doctor. General: Sonturians? Doctor: It’s a long story. But. It appears you lot are a battalion from Sontar that somehow travelled back in time to Earth in the distant past, met some Romans, lost all sense of identity and purpose, and now think you’re part of the first Roman invasion of Britain. Doctor (thinking): Actually that means – that this isn’t where you landed. Why target Ireland? Even the Romans weren’t that stupid.
The whole scenario is weird anyway; at the time of Julius Caesar’s raid into Britain in 55 BC, it would have been impossible for Roman troops to seriously mount a similar exercise in Ireland. Even with that in mind, perhaps my hackles were up, but the line that invading Ireland is in itself a particularly stupid idea landed rather badly with me; along with the explicit assumption that Ireland is part of Britain.
And a third line from the Doctor at 40:15, where he refers to “Rutans and Sontarans in Celtic Britain”, also landed badly with me.
The Giant’s Causeway is not in Britain. Ireland is not in Britain. Celts were frankly about as barbaric as Romans. It’s a shame that the script for this play says otherwise, and it’s a real shame that these words are put into the mouth of the Doctor. Big Finish normally does better than this.
Second frame of third story (“Food for Thought”, written by Nick Briggs, art by Colin Andrew)
This had been on my shelves for ages, a compilation of six graphic stories from Doctor Who Magazine in 1993-95, featuring the first five Doctors. My particular discovery is Colin Andrew, a Scottish artist who did a total of six Doctor Who strips, two of which are collected here (see frame above); I think he captures both form and movement really well, and experiments with the boundaries of the frames on the page with interesting results. (Not everyone thinks so; I found another online review which says that his art is the weakest point of the book.)
I think most people will agree that the two Second Doctor stories by Warwick Gray, now known as Scott Gray, are the high points – especially the exploration of Doctor vs Daleks in the last one, “Bringer of Darkness”. There is lively commentary at the back from writers and artists (except Colin Andrew, who had died before this collection was put together), including an apology from Nick Briggs for his sexist portrayal of Polly in what is still his only comics script, thirty years on. This had lingered quite a long time on my shelf but was worth the wait. You can get it here.
This was my top unread English-language comic – next on that pile is Monica, by Daniel Clowes
This is the Black Archive monograph about the Peter Capaldi story from his middle season which introduces Maisie Williams (also Arya in Game of Thrones) as Viking warrior girl Ashildr, who dies in the course of the story and is resurrected by the Doctor. I didn’t write the TV story up at the time of watching, though I did enjoy it. I felt it blended humour with drama, and enjoyed the knowing subversion of tropes about Vikings and other classic fantasy themes.
Also I am a big fan of Williams, whose scenes with Charles Dance in the second season of Game of Thrones, were truly electrifying; they were filmed when she was 14.
As it happened, I had visited the Doctor Who studio in Cardiff just a couple of weeks before The Girl Who Died was shown, and bits and bobs from the story were still around, notably the Viking ship which I thought was a bit small (as indeed turns out to be the point).
Tom Marshall has taken a story about which there isn’t frankly, all that much to say, and projected onto it his own strong interest in Norse folklore and its reception. This kind of approach has been tried by a number of previous Black Archives, but it’s rarely very successful in my view. Luckily this is one of the exceptions, as Marshall unpacks not only the story’s portrayal of the Vikings but also our understanding of them, veering into the political side of the topic without losing touch with Doctor Who.
To be honest, I’m feeling a bit lazy, so I’m (mostly) cutting and pasting the chapter summaries from Marshall’s introduction, which frames the book as exploring the story’s navigation between Vikings and humour.
Chapter 1 examines how the story deviates from the typical popular culture take on Vikings and assumptions about both heroic masculinity and history itself.
Chapter 2 looks at the story’s championing of playful, irreverent humour in the face of toxic masculinity, especially in the context of the modern-day far right’s unhealthy obsession with Vikings.
Chapter 3 delves into the multiple ways in which the Doctor and the mythological Óðinn resemble each other, and to what extent this illuminates the former’s depiction here as a healer-trickster. Here is its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces:
Why might the Doctor choose to impersonate Odin specifically, rather than another Norse god such as Freyr or Þórr? His choice is far from random; indeed, there is a long history of comparisons between the two. Setting to one side Hartnell’s categorising of his character as a ‘wizard’ and other nods in this direction over the years3, the Doctor was first explicitly compared to the wizard-like god Óðinn as early as 1988, even before the seventh Doctor’s Odinic qualities manifested in TV stories drawing on Norse mythology such as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Curse of Fenric, not to mention the appearance of explicitly Odinic imagery in the novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991). Writing that the Doctor ‘is the best possible example of the shaman, the wizard-king, the wise magician’, James L Hodge grants that any comparisons with the Arthurian Merlin are ‘not too far off’4 but sees Norse mythology as providing an even more apt analogue:
‘the most potent wizard, king of the gods, master-by-force-of-knowledge-and-intellect is none other than Odin, chief of the Norse gods […] Odin has concentrated on mastery of lore, acquisition of knowledge, and a forewarning of the future. He rules more by the power of what he knows, and can therefore do, than by his physical power […] Just so, the [Doctor] confronts opponent after opponent whose arrogant plans go aground on some esoteric reef of the [Doctor]’s immense, technical knowledge’.5
3 E.g., Ben Jackson bluffing that the Doctor is a wizard in The Smugglers (1966) episode 2, or the description of the Doctor as ‘the great wizard Quiquaequod’ in The Dæmons (1971) episode 4. He is also regularly described as a ‘magician’ in The Time Warrior, a story to which The Girl Who Died bears some resemblance. 4 Amusingly, Hodge’s article appeared around 18 months before the revelation that a future incarnation of the Doctor was fated to become Merlin in Battlefield (1989). For more on the Doctor’s connections with Merlin, see Purser-Hallard, Philip, The Black Archive #34: Battlefield. 5 Hodge, James L, ‘New Bottles – Old Wine: The Persistence of the Heroic Figure in the Mythology of Television Science Fiction and Fantasy’, Journal of Popular Culture 21:4, p40 (emphasis in original).
Chapter 4 deals with the titular ‘girl’, Ashildr, and particularly with the way her transgressive gender identity contributes to the story’s queer subtext.
Chapter 5 draws these strands together in an analysis of the episode’s denouement: not only the means by which the alien threat is defeated, but also the Doctor’s morally complex act of resurrecting Ashildr.
An appendix looks at the link between the baby’s speech, as reported by the Doctor, and the normal metre of Norse poetry.
As I said, I found this a satisfying read, slightly to my surprise. You can get it here.
This is the first of the three-volume second series of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, and I must say it’s a good start. We’ve kept Alice, one of the great comics companions, and we add The Squire, who claims to have been a companion of the War Doctor; and also, of all great comics-only characters, none other than Abslom Daak, Dalek Hunter. Meanwhile the Eleventh Doctor is being pursued by a bounty hunter called The Then And The Now for dreadful crimes apparently carried out by the War Doctor that nobody can quite remember. And there is a twist at the end bringing in another favourite character. Looking forward to next month when I read the next in the series. Meanwhile you can get this here.
Bechdel fail at the first hurdle, I think, it is a very Doctor-centric story where the only female-presenting character is Alice.
Trying to find each other, in the distance they saw what was a shooting star. And desperate to see each other to know themselves,
So, this is very unexpected. It’s a story written in the form of poetry, the internal reflections of the Weeping Angel who is destined to yank Amy and Rory back in time in The Angels Take Manhattan, telling the story of the origin of the Angels, their desperate attempts to feed and deal with a hostile universe, and towards the end their interaction with the Doctor and with the world of the early twenty-first century in England. Doctor Who stories rarely take the perspective of the monster, and even more rarely do it well (though see the Century 21 Dalek comic strips for another example). You can get it here.
A Bechdel fail for an unusual reason. Most stories that fail Bechdel step 1 will also fail steps 2 and 3 (that two female characters must have a conversation, and that it is not about a man). The Angels present as female, and they have many interactions (which can pass for conversations here) about the nature of reality and the fate of their race; but none of them has a name, so while the book would pass the original form of the Bechdel test, it doesn’t get over the first hurdle of the generally understood criterion that there must be two named female characters.
As soon as it’s light outside, I get up and go to my room to change. I thought I’d feel better if I could be in my own room for a while, but I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare. Noah should be up, running through the halls, complaining about wanting cereal for breakfast instead of something healthy like my mum would suggest. My mum should be coming in to wake me up and telling me to get ready for school.
Fifth in the set of six Doctor Who YA novellas, and I’m afraid not one of the better ones; young protagonist teams up with the Ninth Doctor and Rose to rescue mum and brother from the monster which, er, lives in the cupboard. A number of implausibilities in the story’s own terms, and I wasn’t very satisfied with the characterisation of the Doctor either. A bit more skippable than the rest. But you can get it here.
Edited to add: I forgot to note that this is a fairly easy Bechdel pass; most of the characters (apart from the Doctor) are women. If you want to be specific, there’s an exchange between Rose and the protagonist at the end of Chapter 8 in which no men are present or mentioned.
