‘Well, that’s a comfort,’ the Doctor said acidly, as a pulse round exploded a bloom behind his head, splattering his cheek with thick, sweet-smelling sap. ‘I’ll tell that to our lungs, shall I? I’m sure they’ll understand.’
A story of the Tenth Doctor and Donna, visiting Dublin to witness the first ever gig of (fictional) girl band the Blood Honeys, only to find that the event has been infiltrated by a trio of alien sisters out to exploit the emotional energy generated by the event. The aliens have a number of near relatives in both Doctor Who (the Carrionites) and Irish mythology (many cases of three sisters).
Rudden, who is himself Irish, gets the feeling of Dublin in the early Celtic Tiger days very well (even though he would have been roughly eight years old at the time the story is set), and you can very plausibly see Donna and the Doctor interacting with the changing entertainment scene. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who the five-member girl band making their debut in the mid-1990s are based on, but a pinch of satire can help a story run smoothly.
I am preparing a post grumbling about the failures of Big Finish to get Ireland right in a recent audio play, but I have no such grumbles in this case. I enjoyed this and you can get it here.
Bechdel pass in Chapter Four, where the three alien sisters discuss their plans for Earth.
The Doctor strode briskly from the TARDIS, fedora hat balanced on his thick thatch of curls, long scarf streaming behind him. Romana followed a little warily, still uncertain of her friend’s current mood. She glanced up into the flawless blue sky, shading her eyes with her hand. It was a warm morning, no doubt about to turn into a scorchingly hot summer’s day.
This is the longest of the Six Stories for Six Decades in wordcount (the next one has more pages but fewer words), though the story is straightforward enough. The Doctor and Romana, taking a break between seasons 17 and 18, arrive in a London council estate in 1984 where a local lad is achieving great things with technology. But where is he getting the technology from, and what price are he and his neighbours paying? And can police officer Hazel Harper put a stop to it?
About halfway through, it becomes fairly obvious which classic monsters have turned up and from then on the story runs on fairly predictable if entertaining lines. But I did like the way that the bad guy’s downfall has been triggered by Thatcherite economics, tying the merciless and logical free market to the merciless logic of the SPOILERS. I see a number of other reviewers who didn’t get this; perhaps you had to be there. Anyway, not quite as good as the first two in this sequence, but you can get it here.
Bechdel pass when Romana and Tiger Lily talk about cocktails in Chapter Nine.
I don’t love everyone knowing my business. And I don’t love the way you have to run, sometimes, from people who want to bash your head in.
Where the previous story in this series took a fictional town and a timespan mainly in the 1960s but stretching to the present day, The Cradle is set very firmly in 1978 in Southall, at a time of maximum tension caused by the National Front, with the protagonist a gay Indian teenager who is at the front line of racism. I know Tash Suri a bit from our joint stint as guests of honour at the 2022 Eastercon:
I remember an Eastercon discussion a few years ago about places that Doctor Who cannot go – the Holocaust, for example, or indeed Ireland (other than symbolically). 1970s racist London might at first sight seem to be potentially one of those places, but Tasha Suri has found a way of doing it, taking her protagonist and friends on a personal journey mentored by the Twelfth Doctor. At the end of the story everything is not all right, everyone is not OK, but the Doctor has helped and the future looks just a little better than it did. I liked this one too. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass in the first chapter when Seema and her grandmother talk about cooking and the strange lights in the sky.
We went to Rome, which is from history and sometimes from Sunday School. There was a lion! I think I mite like lions even more than cheetahs. The Emperer chased Barbrar and the Doctor pretended to play a liar and made it sound silent. I wish Anne would play silent when she does piano practice. There was a lady and her job was to poison people! I thought the police would come and arrest her but they did not.
This is the first in a series of six YA Doctor Who novellas published to commemorate the recent anniversary. It’s a very good start. Young Gerry has dreams of the Doctor, his companions and their adventures together, in a world that is just the same as ours, except that there is no TV show called Doctor Who and strange things happen like the unsolved murder of a pesticide researcher, or the odd goings-on at the Post Office Tower…
Really this is lovely. Jacqueline Rayner on form is one of the best current Doctor Who prose writers, and she’s on form here. She brilliantly evokes the decaying industrial atmosphere of the mid 1960s and the need for escapism, and the changing dynamics of family relationships over the last sixty years, and the universal difficulty of growing up. I loved it. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid, with tight third around the boy protagonist.
The six-part 2021 season of Doctor Who was produced under pandemic conditions, and by the time it ended, I was myself recovering from my bout with COVID and didn’t feel inspired to write about it. A year later, after the broadcast of The Power of the Doctor, I returned to Flux and wrote:
So. The 2021 six-part story, Flux, was a mess. There’s no kind way of putting it. I actually like John Bishop as new companion Dan Lewis; I love Barbara Flynn, whatever she is in; I was really thrilled by Thaddea Graham as Bel, the first semi-regular Irish character in almost sixty years [of the show’s history]; and there were some good spine-chilling moments, such as the destruction of Dan’s house and the Doctor being transformed into a Weeping Angel.
But unfortunately the plot made very little sense, and the climax took place largely offscreen. Of course it was filmed under serious constraints due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t excuse the writers from sitting back and thinking about what they were really trying to convey. For all their faults, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt generally remembered that they needed to please their audience as well as indulging their own inner impulses. I felt that Chibnall had lost the run of himself.
I rewatched it again for this blog post, and felt very much the same. This time around I had various plot summaries to hand, which helped me make a little more sense of it; but TV science fiction at its best, unlike say opera, is not normally one of those art forms which requires the consumer to follow along with notes. I love Whittaker as the Doctor, but there are far too many moments where she is attempting to carry the full burden of audience interest through facial expressions and body language, and not helped by the dim studio lighting, the lack of other actors to interact with, or (crucially) the script.
Once again, I did like the fourth instalment, Village of the Angels, much more than the rest – a coherent plot which is more than adequately explained, higher production values, and interestingly the only episode of the six for which a co-writer (Maxine Alderton) is credited alongside Chibnall; and it ends with one of the best visual cliff-hangers ever, as the Doctor herself becomes a Weeping Angel. Interestingly, when I surveyed the Internet Movie Database for the top-rated episode of each era and spinoff of Who, Village of the Angels was a clear winner for the Thirteenth Doctor.
In his editorial foreword, Paul Driscoll explains that the fact that there are six very tightly linked episodes provided a challenge for the Black Archive series. What they have done is to commission six essays from six different authors, topped and tailed with shorter pieces by Alasdair Stuart.
Stuart’s introduction reflects on the terror of the time, when Doctor Who became to an extent a pandemic coping mechanism.
James Cooray Smith’s essay on The Halloween Apocalypse, ‘Apocalypse? Now!’, starts by reflecting on Chris Chibnall’s previous career and how different his Doctor Who turned out to be from his previous work, looks also at the importance of Liverpool as a setting and 31 October as the date for the episode, and recognises the weaknesses in the characters of Karvanista, Swarm and Azure; as I like to say, their means and motivation are never made entirely clear.
Emma Reed’s ‘A History in Flux’, looking at War of the Sontarans, examines the role of history (and fictionalised history) in Doctor Who, especially the Chibnall era’s emphasis on women in history. It also explained to me what the Temple of Atropos stuff was meant to be about, a point which had escaped me on both viewings of the story.
In ‘The Primordial Division’, Once, Upon Time is examined by Philip Purser-Hallard. I found it a thoroughly confusing episode on both viewings, and rather hoped that everything would come out right with the rest of the show. Purser-Hallard explains to me much better what is going on than the actual script did. He makes a number of interesting observations also about the role of double identities in the story and the Jungian resonances, but basically he enjoyed and was interested in this episode and I didn’t, and he doesn’t sell me on it. The second paragraph of his piece is:
She’s perfectly correct, as ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ has already shown: in the Ravagers’ introductions, Swarm was confined to a cylindrical energy shield, supposedly ‘since the dawn of the universe’, while Azure was reduced to ‘Anna’, a human woman living with her partner Jón in the far north of Iceland, without recollection of her extraterrestrial past.
Village of the Angels was broadcast on the worst day of my bout with COVID in 2021, and I did wonder when re-watching if it would hold up to re-watching. I’m glad to say that it did, and as noted above it’s my favourite episode of the series. I therefore had high hopes of Oliver Tomkins’ analysis, ‘The Angels Have the Goggle Box’, and they were fulfilled – it’s an in-depth look at the Weeping Angels, where the come from in terms of story and what they mean, why they are frightening and what they do, and how they break the fourth wall. Tomkins also looks at how the Bel plotline integrates into the Flux story.
‘Doctor Who’s Mother’, by James Mortimore, looks at Survivors of the Flux, considering the colonial framing of the Time Lords (vis-à-vis the Shobogans, and the rest of the universe), and looking at Tecteun and representations of motherhood in the show.
Finally, we get to The Vanquishers. In ‘The Three Doctors… and a Sontaran Stratagem’, Matt Hills is disarmingly frank about its failure to provide satisfactory narrative resolution, and puts this down to Chibnall’s emphasis on surprise. He then looks at the triple-Jodie Whittaker Doctor in the episode as a tribute to The Three Doctors, and reflects on how a fannish show-runner reacts against fannish expectations. It’s a good explanation of what the episode was trying to do, though again I do not feel that it succeeded.
Alasdair Stuart’s conclusion, ‘You are the Universe, Doctor’, defends the whole sequence of episodes, though as will have become apparent, I am not convinced.
Incidentally there are six ways of arranging three different things, and I have arranged the episode title, essay title and essay author’s name differently in each of the previous six paragraphs.
In sum, I did learn quite a lot from this Black Archive, largely because it explained to me what several of the episodes were supposed to be about. I’m afraid that underlines to me that the entire thing was a failure of art. I prefer to understand my TV at the time that I watch it, rather than waiting until I read serious analysis two and a half years later. But you can get it here.
From here on in, I’m switching to doing just one Black Archive write-up per month, as I am catching up with current releases all too quickly.
Ruby and her band were performing their usual Christmas set, full of old classics and crowd-pleasers, with some newer, cooler Christmas anthems snuck in. The rosy-cheeked patrons laughed and chatted, coats unbuttoned, bobble hats hanging off chairs, scarves trailing forgotten on the floor. Behind the bar, a boy Ruby knew from around the area served drinks with a cheerful smile, a tinsel crown in his hair.
Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson is new to the Whoniverse, and charmed everyone at Gallifrey One this year, though unfortunately there were not enough copies of this novelisation around for me to get one. Anyway, it’s a breezy, enjoyable revisiting of the first full Fifteenth Doctor story, with a bit more background for Ruby, and sensibly not trying to reproduce the stunning visuals in printed form. She catches the voice of the new Doctor well, but we don’t find out much more about him, perhaps even less than usual for a Who novelisation; perhaps there are surprises in store. You can get it here.
Next in the series of Eleventh Doctor comics, and I’ll be honest, I read it a couple of weeks ago and don’t remember much about it. There’s some good stuff with the Cyberman, the Emperor Constantine, and the Battle of Milvian Bridge. You can get it here.
I vividly remember watching Kinda when it was first shown in 1982, and being a little baffled but also a little reassured; I wanted interesting adventures on distant planets, like we had largely had in the Tom Baker years, and apart from the one production fail of the snake itself, we got it.
I also saw Kinda on first showing in 1982, and in some ways it is even less comprehensible than Logopolis, though in other ways it is fairly clear what is going on – giant pink snake trying to penetrate Tegan’s inner recesses, and all that. It is one of Doctor Who’s most successful takes on colonialism (a theme the Pertwee era consistently tried and failed with) even though that isn’t really the point of the story. Wood and Miles point to the influence of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, and while I can see that, I think it may be a more general reflection of the ecological concerns of the day. The deep themes are laid on pretty heavily – the apple in paradise, the reflections of the “real” world in Tegan’s dream, and on the whole we are shown rather than told about it. There are some impressive performances – Janet Fielding as Tegan of course, the three colonial officers (though we never find out what happened to their missing colleagues) the two Kinda women and the Trickster, which means you can almost overlook the cheapness of the sets and how wooden Adric is. Rather fascinating.
When I rewatched it in 2011 as part of my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I had forgotten quite how fantastic Kinda is. Even the snake at the end is not as bad as I remembered. But it’s a brilliant tour de force of explorations of reality, possession by spiritual forces, possession by colonial agents, about speaking and not speaking. Again, Janet Fielding is the best of the regular cast, but everyone is good, especially of course Simon Rouse as the increasingly deranged Hindle, and Mary Morris – only in two of the four episodes, but bloody hell, what a performance – as Panna. But nobody is actually bad; Nerys Hughes and Richard Todd, big name actors hired to perform auxiliary parts, lift it; even Matthew Waterhouse, delivered with yet another Adric-as-potential-traitor script, more or less rises to the occasion; and though I see some fan criticism of Sarah Prince as Karuna I must say I find her performance pretty luminous and interesting.
It does show the value of watching Who in sequence. Taken as an attempt at a serious big-picture SF story, it would probably fail because of the limited means available. But when one bears in mind the production constraints, and considers the story as a televised theatrical piece, it really ought to blow you away. I don’t have time or energy to wax more lyrical on the subject, so just let me refer you to a brilliant write-up of the story here. [link now long dead].
Just before we go any further, here is Mary Morris 42 years earlier at the age of 25, performing the dance of the robotic Silver Maiden in The Thief of Baghdad:
As with Paradise Towers, I enjoyed revisiting Kinda, and it almost reminds me of the early Hartnell stories which were trying to tell big picture space parables in a fairly small production and budget space. Adric is still annoying, and the snake still disappoints, but the rest of it all works very well, and this was a rewatch that was more rewarding than I had hoped.
An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with four women guest characters and at least one regular (Nyssa only in briefly, but two versions of Tegan), all of whom talk to each other about various things other than men.
Terrance Dicks wrote the novelisation, and it’s not one of his more energetic efforts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
She stared challengingly at this new apparition. ‘I suppose you’re also going to tell me I don’t exist?’
Frank Collins’ Black Archive monograph on the story follows his previous writing on Warriors Gate and on the first Matt Smith season. As usual, it is dense but enjoyable, one of the longer Black Archives, with seven chapters. Like the monograph of Paradise Towers, it has clearly benefited from a lot of dialogue with the original writer of the story, in this case Christopher Bailey.
The first chapter, ‘An Eccentric Chain-Smoking Buddhist’, looks at Bailey’s personal biography and other work, and convincingly shows how a mild-mannered but politically radical playwright who had not previously touched science fiction ended up writing Kinda.
The second chapter, ‘Only Ever One Ingredient in the Stew’, looks head-on at the Buddhist themes in the story (and the limited visibility of Buddhism elsewhere in Doctor Who).
The third chapter, ‘The Important Part is the Melody’ looks at the behind-the-scene story of the commissioning and production of Kinda. In particular, Eric Saward as script editor rewrote large parts of the last two episodes, and Christopher Bailey then rewrote them again. Its second paragraph is:
However, changes were made to the scripts of The Kinda under the guidance of three different script editors. After his initial consultation with Bidmead, apart from several phone calls and letters, Bailey doesn’t recall meeting in person with him again. Bidmead later saw that Bailey was exploring a ‘strong Buddhist element’ on his own terms and while Kinda ‘lacked the form and structure and indeed the sort of subject that I thought was essential to Doctor Who […] nevertheless, it had an extraordinarily haunting quality to it’3. 3 Bidmead, ‘Dream Time’.
The fourth and longest chapter, ‘The Power of Life and Death, Over All of You!’, starts by looking at the casting of Richard Todd and Simon Rouse and the postcolonial context (unfortunately he says nothing about Nerys Hughes), and goes on to look at theories of ancient science, and then sources of inspiration such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with a brief coda on cargo cults.
The fifth chapter, ‘Otherwise Out There Gets In. Do You See?’, looks at Hindle’s disintegration, Christianity and imperialism, matriarchy and the Box of Jhana, and the Mara and Janet Fielding’s sensuous performance.
The sixth chapter, ‘The Mara Turns the Wheel of Life. It Ends as it Began’, begins and ends with the Box of Jhana again, and also looks at the unfortunate fact that all the actors are white and how this intersects with the colonial themes, and at the uncomfortable role of prophecy in the story.
The seventh chapter, ‘There is Great Danger in Dreaming Alone’, looks at dark places (Conrad again), the imperfect implementation of Bailey’s vision for gender roles among the Kinda, and the late rewrites of especially the last episode to foreground the Buddhist themes more visibly.
I sometimes complain about the Black Archives on less good Doctor Who stories, that they cannot bear the freights of the interpretation placed on them by the Black Archive authors. This is not one of those cases, and it’s a great rick unpacking of the themes informing the story and how they were realised on the screen. (Though I’d still have liked a bit more about Nerys Hughes.) You can get it here.
Paradise Towers was first broadcast at the point that I was an undergraduate and no longer watching Doctor Who regularly, so I did not see it until 2008 when I watched the whole of Season 24. I wrote then:
I actually loved Paradise Towers, apart from the music and one ill-inspired character. The whole concept of the abandoned tower block with its feral inhabitants is done, not fantastically well I admit, but at least with the courage of its convictions. Richard Briers as guest star clicks with the show in a way that Paul Darrow utterly failed to do in Timelash. The Kang chants and warping of familiar phrases are also great, and Mel actually gets something to do. This is more like Doctor Who than anything broadcast since The Caves of Androzani. (The two flies in the ointment are the awful music and the character of Pex – some blame Howard Cooke for his performance, but basically Pex doesn’t fit awfully well with the setting.)
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch three years later, I wrote:
And suddenly we seem to have a complete step change with Paradise Towers, a glorious story which merges comedy and horror – Richard Briers dressed up as a Hitler-like bureaucrat; girl gangs with extraordinary slogans; cannibalistic little old ladies; a hero who isn’t terribly heroic; an evil architect and a swimming pool. I don’t know what it is, but there is a sudden injection of energy and confidence into the show at this point that, in my view, lasts for most of the rest of Old Who’s run. The Doctor may not have much of a clue as to what is going on, but we are urging him to work it out and we get there at much the same time as he does. My daily watching of the old episodes has become a pleasure again, rather than a chore.
I’m interested to see that on both occasions, watching the story in sequence with those before and after, I noticed what a different beast it is to its predecessors. I wrote in 2011 that “I don’t know what it is”, but since then, I have read Andrew Cartmel’s reminiscences so it’s clear that Paradise Towers was his first real commission as script editor, and that he was successfully stamping his mark on the show.
This time round was the first time I had watched the story in isolation – both in 2008 and 2011 I watched it in sequence. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it held up. Yes, the production values are poor, but the story actually lampshades it by referencing the decaying tower block environment. Richard Briers is a delight and so are the two old ladies. Pex annoys me less every time; I find the character easier to accept as a send-up of hero tropes. And I actually found the music easier on the ear, especially the riff on the them tune of the show while the Caretakers are holding the Doctor captive in Episode Two.
The one thing that jumped out at me this time is that all the speaking characters, though not all the people we see on screen, are white. That is an opportunity missed. Several of the non-speaking Kangs (and one of the Janitors) are clearly of African or Asian descent, including Nisha Nayar who got a small speaking role in the Ninth Doctor two-parter Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways and has done a fair amount of Big Finish work.
The other really important thing to note is that Stephen Wyatt is the only graduate of Clare College, Cambridge to have written a Doctor Who story – so far. (The only Clare alum to have directed a Doctor Who story is Dan Zeff, who I served with on the 1988-89 JCR Committee.) Wyatt also wrote the novelisation of the story, and the second paragraph of its third chapter is:
At first Mel thought she was hearing things. She was sitting dejectedly in a grimy ill-lit corridor in Paradise Towers and someone was offering her a cup of tea. It was so unlikely Mel thought her mind must be going.
I read it at the same time as first watching it in 2008, and wrote:
Wyatt has the courage of his convictions here: a reasonably strong story in the first place, and the opportunity to overcome the weaknesses of the production (the Kangs on paper can be teenagers, and we don’t get the awful music, though Pex as a character is still an anomaly). An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with the scene where the old ladies are about to eat Mel a particular delight.
Nothing to add to that; an above-average novelisation, just about. You can get it here.
As noted above, both TV story and novelisation easily pass the Bechdel test.
John Toon’s Black Archive monograph on Paradise Towers won the Sir Julius Vogel Award last year (2023), as his previous volume on the Fourth Doctor story Full Circle had done in 2019. I complained about the Full Circle analysis that I would have liked more on the actual production of the show; and the Paradise Towers volume delivers that, for a very satisfying read. It has been richly informed by extensive correspondence between Toon and Wyatt, so that we hear the original author’s voice more clearly than in most Doctor Who analyses.
The first chapter, ‘Reception’, starts by pointing out something I had not realised – not everyone liked Paradise Towers as much as I did. I often find that alleged classic stories are not to my taste, but it’s much rarer to discover that a story I rather admire is not held in such high esteem by fandom. Toon argues that the story’s reputation has improved dramatically in the last couple of years, basically since the Blu-Ray was released, but he shows convincingly that it went down badly at the time and since – featuring at 193 out of 200 in the DWM poll of 2009, for instance.
Toon then goes on to explain the rushed process of writing and production. It all makes a lot more sense when you realise that Pex actually was supposed to be a muscle man, but they couldn’t find one in time who could actually act and were left with Howard Cooke; and that the Caretakers apart from Richard Briers were supposed to be overweight and middle-aged; and that the music was hastily rewritten because the originally commissioned score didn’t fit the way the story was going.
The second and longest chapter, ‘The Foundations’, looks in detail at the similarities and differences between Paradise Towers and J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise, and a few other sources: 2000 AD for the mega-city, A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies for the youth gangs, Toyah Willcox for the Kangs’ style.
The third chapter, ‘Windows’, makes the cases successively for interpreting Paradise Towers as a queer story, a camp story and a Gothic story. (I vote for all three.) Its second paragraph is:
There’s an anecdote often told by Andrew Cartmel about a script conference between himself, Stephen Wyatt and John Nathan-Turner that took place on 16 March 19871. According to Cartmel’s recollection, Nathan-Turner expressed concern about the cannibalistic habits of Tilda and Tabby, in response to which Wyatt confided, ‘You realise that they’re also lesbians?’ Wyatt corroborates this story, and further recalls that he suggested Nathan-Turner might tempt the tabloid press with the headline ‘Dr Who in Lesbian Cannibal Bondage Horror’2. This suggests a creative team keeping a wry eye on opportunities for sensationalism rather than seeking to give representation, sympathetic or otherwise, to non-heteronormative lifestyles. And yet Paradise Towers does lend itself readily to queer interpretation. In large part, this is likely due to the nature of Doctor Who itself in 1987. 1 See, for example, Cartmel, Script Doctor, p53. 2 Email conversation with author. The ‘bondage’ in this case would be Tilda restraining Mel with her knitting, but more on that anon.
The fourth chapter, ‘The Towers’, begins by pointing out that it’s really rare for Doctor Who to address architecture as a topic, and then goes on to sketch the appalling history of Brutalism and the British high-rise block.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Great Architect’, chases the architecture theme still further, with glances at Le Corbusier, Peter and Alison Smithson, Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher, in a very satisfying hunt for truth.
A brief conclusion pulls it all together.
Driven to produce a set of scripts quickly to break ground on Doctor Who’s 24th season, Wyatt and Cartmel created a story as rough-edged yet multi-faceted as the concrete estates they wanted to comment on. It overlays serious issues of shoddy social housing and uncaring architects with comedy fascist Caretakers, punk gang children in their twenties and cuddly teatime cannibals. But for all that, it has a comfortable charm. Be it ever so humble, some of us call it home.
Recommended for fans of the Seventh Doctor era, and of architecture. You can get it here.
I remember watching The Sun Makers aged ten when it was first shown in late 1977. It’s not the high point of Season 15 (that would be Horror of Fang Rock) but it’s not the low point either (that would be Underworld). Even at ten, however, I could feel that the show was trying not to lose its way; I did not know of course that new producer Graham Williams was fumbling to set his mark on the show, or that Robert Holmes stepped down as script editor halfway through the story.
I remembered The Sunmakers from its first broadcast in 1977, but had forgotten quite how good it is. In total contrast to The Seeds of Doom, here we have the Doctor fomenting a popular uprising against an oppressive regime. There are numerous classic sf tropes – the rag-tag rebels living in the bowels of the city, the drugs in the air supply – but also a couple of Robert Holmes touches, such as the repeated digs at the British tax system. The bad guys – Gatherer Hade and the Collector – are gratifyingly over the top, but at the same time the implied violence is pretty alarming – the Doctor almost gets his brains burnt out, Leela is almost executed by public steaming, both are threatened with ugly death by the suspicious rebels, and these seem like serious threats. Indeed I seem to remember reading somewhere that at one point there was a plan for Leela to be killed off in this story, which would certainly have been a more in-character departure than what actually happened (but would have deprived us of her in the much later Gallifrey audios). It is also, and this I think is very unusual, a good story for K9: he starts and ends by beating the Doctor at chess, and takes the initiative at several crucial points during proceedings. It seems almost churlish after all that to point out that the actual setting – humanity has been forcibly displaced to Pluto as a result of fiendish capitalist exploitation – is pretty implausible even for Who, and does great violence to any attempts to construct a future history of the Whoniverse.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
I have a feeling that last time I watched The Sun Makers, for some reason it was immediately after watching Underworld so it looked rather good in comparison. However, in sequence after the brilliance of Season 14 and the more modest successes of Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl, it is pretty awful. I think I can establish several specific reasons for the awfulness, one of which was not really anyone’s fault, but the remainder of which could have been corrected.
The unchangeable factor is that the weather for the location filming was dull, so the story gets off to a tremendously dull start; it’s difficult to make the roof of a cigarette factory in Bristol look much like the top of a kilometer-high apartment block on Pluto, but it helps if the weather cooperates. I wonder if there’s also a bit of an unconscious assumption on my part that cuddly blurry film should represent contemporary Earth settings, and sharp-edged videotape the future; so the setting looks even more like Bristol than Pluto.
But the other factors were simply mistakes made by Holmes in the script and not sufficiently rounded off in the editing process. The story is simply very nasty. The rebels are really very unpleasant people, threatening to kill him and Leela; we don’t really see why the Doctor should choose to help such unlikeable (and otherwise unmemorable) individuals. The Company of course are even worse, which is OK since they are the baddies, but the attempted steaming of Leela is a really horrific prospect, much worse actually than any of the supposedly extreme violence of the previous season.
It does have its good points. The interplay between Gatherer Hade and the Collector is great fun (though again Holmes is usually smarter than to give all the good dialogue to the villains) and K9 gets to be very useful in his first proper story after joining the Tardis. Though even then, the framing narrative of the chess match in the console room doesn’t quite gel. I don’t think I’ll watch this one again, unless the DVD commentary is particularly good.
This time around, I felt myself falling between the two poles: yes, cracking satire by Holmes and good performances from the bad guys; but the rebels are really unpleasant and the violence very squicky.
It also struck me that the future of humanity on Pluto is rather white. There is one exception, an uncredited Work Unit who appears on the roof in episode 4:
Who was she? The surviving paperwork, supplied to me by Paul Scoones, has four extras with women’s names booked for the filming in Bristol on 19 June 1977, six months before the episode was shown.
The four names are Jennie Weston, Elizabeth Havelock, Angela Towner and Marion Venn. Surprisingly, I think I have tracked down three of them.
I find a Jennie Weston who in 2010 was reported to be a Drama and English teacher, who had worked for Radio Bristol in educational broadcasting; the picture supplied doesn’t look like the person I am interested in.
An Elizabeth Havelock does have a credited page on IMDB, including four speaking TV roles from 1977-79, but was born in 1926 so clearly too old (if it’s the same Elizabeth Havelock); and again there’s a photo which is clearly a different person.
A Marion Venn was swimming coach at Dean Close School in Cheltenham from 1977 (the year of filming) to 2000; I’ve found recent photos of her and she’s definitely not the person I am looking for.
So I think my mystery actor, possibly the only actor of colour in the whole of Season 15 of Doctor Who, is Angela Towner (The Complete History thinks it’s “Angela Tower”, but Paul Scoones was able to find legible paperwork in which the name is clear). This could well have been her only professional acting role, asked to stand around with a crowd on top of a factory in Bristol on an overcast and not very warm Thursday, before going on to a life doing something completely different. It’s entirely possible that her surname subsequently changed, which would make it much more difficult to track down her later performances if any.
Oh yeah, I reread the novelisation by Terrance Dicks as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
However, K9’s brand of logic, based on his recollection of past events, and an extrapolation of future probabilities, told him that the Doctor would land in trouble within a very short time of leaving the TARDIS. He would need K9’s remarkable powers to rescue him from the dangers into which his rashness had led him. It was therefore logical that K9 should exercise these powers as soon as possible.
Doctor Who and the Sunmakers is probably the best of these nine books [the Leela novelisations]; Dicks clearly appreciated Robert Holmes’ script and seems to have really got into the spirit of it. There is an interesting scene in the book but not in the TV series where Leela encounters some elderly workers waiting for euthanasia. Various other minor details are tweaked and basically improved in Dicks’ telling of the story.
Watching the series with the production subtitles switched on, I could see that Dicks was working from Holmes’ script as originally envisaged, and making the most of it.
Anyway. After my very grumpy post about the Black Archive on Kill the Moon, I’m very glad to say that Lewis Baston’s monograph on The Sun Makers was much more to my liking.
The first chapter, “‘An Unprofitable Operation, Hade’: The Sun Makers in context”, looks at the social and economic difficulties of the UK in general and of Robert Holmes in particular at the time the story was made.
The second chapter, “‘The Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe'”, convincingly analyses the extent to which The Sun Makers draws not from contemporary Britain but from the history of the East India Company.
The third chapter, “‘Sacrifices to Tribal Gods'”, announces up front that it examines Doctor Who’s treatment of economics in general, but it also veers into the steaming subplot and death as entertainment, re-done (not as well) in Vengeance on Varos a few years later, and the influence of the Aztecs (much less in the finished programme than was planned by Holmes). Its second paragraph is:
The Sun Makers came relatively early in Doctor Who’s late 1970s engagement with economics. Before then, the principal economic concern was energy, hence baleful consequences in Fury from the Deep (1968), Inferno (1970) and The Claws of Axos (1971) and the background to Terror of the Zygons (1975). The Doctor consistently takes a dim view of humanity’s fossil fuel dependence.
The fourth chapter, “Empire of the Iron Sun”, looks at imperialism as protrayed in science fiction, especially Doctor Who, and also considers the influence of The Iron Sun by Adrian Berry (later Lord Camrose), and the anti-Semitism in the portrayal of the Collector.
The fifth chapter, “‘The People Should Rise Up and Slaughter Their Oppressors'”, looks at the frankly revolutionary and Marxist agenda of the story. It doesn’t reflect, as I did, on how remarkable it is that this story should be written by a former policeman who fought in Burma in the second world war and whose other work is usually entertaining but not nearly as subversive.
The sixth chapter, “‘Praise the Company'”, moves on from 1977, reviews what has happened to us politically and economically since then, and comes to the gloomy conclusion that to an extent we all live in the Collector’s world now.
A brief conclusion ends with a pithy summing-up:
The Sun Makers, therefore, is a revolutionary, experimental tract that shows the signs of its origins as a piece of writing by Robert Holmes which was turned into television by the BBC in the late 1970s. It deals with big ideas, and it is full of allusions and tangents. It also fulfilled its role as entertaining Saturday evening television for a family audience as the nights drew in before Christmas 1977. And, perhaps above all, it is very funny.
I’d have liked a bit more on the parts of the story I didn’t like as much – the gratuitous violence and the poor production values – but this is a case where the Black Archive has achieved redemption for me: I think I like The Sun Makers a bit more, now that I have read this analysis of it. You can get it here.
I’m going to be blunt: Kill the Moon is not just my least favourite Peter Capaldi episode, it’s my least favourite episode of New Who since 2004. In case you have forgotten, the central plot point is that the Moon is not actually a ball of rock but a gigantic dragon’s egg, which hatches, and then the dragon flies off, first laying a new egg that has exactly the same size and appearance as the former Moon. This utter violation of basic astronomy threw me out of the story when I first watched it and threw me out again when I rewatched it for this post.
On top of that, the Doctor abandons Clara on the surface of the Moon to decide whether or not to blow it all up with nukes, in a move that is frankly both cruel and cowardly, and therefore goes against the fundamentals of the character. There are people out there who love this episode, but I find it an embarrassment close to Timelash levels. (Not quite Twin Dilemma levels, though, nothing can ever be that bad again.)
Darren Mooney has a different view, and in his Black Archive earnestly looks for the virtues of the story and claims to find them.
The first chapter, “‘Now We Can Do Something Interesting’: Kill the Moon as Self-Aware Television” argues that the story’s initial reception was very positive from critics (well, it wasn’t from me!) and that it is consciously re-shaping the show’s narrative as part of a master plan for the whole eighth series.
The second chapter, “The Moon’s an Egg’: Kill the Moon and the Tension between Science Fiction and Fantasy in Doctor Who”, argues that expectations of scientific rigour are misplaced as Doctor Who has never been a hard sf show, and references the Sad Puppies who emerged the following year as champions of hard sf. I think my record on the Puppies is reasonably clear, and I don’t think you have to be a raving traditionalist to find Kill the Moon‘s treatment of science offensively stupid..
The third chapter, “‘Second-hand Space Shuttle, Third-hand Astronauts’: The Curdling and Reignition of 60s Utopianism” looks at the cultural significance and interpretation of the historical Moon landings, especially in the Troughton era. Its second paragraph is:
Implicit in this observation is the idea that any expansion of humanity beyond the surface of the Earth will most likely treat the Moon as a stepping-stone. For much of its history, humanity was fascinated by the prospect of visiting the Moon. Stories about imagined lunar expeditions became tremendously popular during the 17th century, prompted by the research and theories of Galileo Galilei1. This fantasy of Moon exploration is inexorably tied into the history of SF as a genre. Released in 1902, Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is frequently identified as the first SF film2. 1 Seed, David, ‘Moon on the Mind: Two Millennia of Lunar Literature’, Nature, 9 July 2019. 2 See, for example, Luokkala, Barry B, Exploring Science Through Science Fiction, p2.
The fourth chapter, “‘We Have to Decide Together’: Scepticism of Simple Majoritarianism in the Work of Peter Harness”, points out that all three of Harness’s Who stories undermine the concept of a democratic vote, and links this to other New Who themes.
The fifth chapter, “‘…First Woman on the Moon’: Gender in Kill the Moon“, briefly looks at the story’s reference to abortion (in my view a clumsily handled and poorly executed minor theme) and then at the way in which the story subverts the gender roles of Doctor and Clara (which I don’t think it really does).
The sixth and final chapter, “‘That’s What We Call a New Moon’: Kill the Moon as an Argument for Optimism”, cheers the themes of death and rebirth in the story, which as noted above I find crass and unconvincing.
I am sure that Darren Mooney is a perfectly reasonable person, and reading the book it’s clear that we are coming from similar directions in a lot of ways. I opened his book wondering if he could persuade me out of my view that this is the worst Doctor Who story of the last forty years; and he did not. But you can get it here.
My plan was to blog an intense account of everything I did at Gallifrey One this year. But you know what? I ran out of time. So here’s a gallery of the best moments.
Matthew “Adric” Waterhouse. “Now I’ll never know if I was right!”Matthew Waterhouse script reading. He is playing the Doctor, and the cosplayer is playing Adric.Billie Piper explains that she wanted to move on to more edgy and less well-behaved roles after Doctor Who“Hello, sweetie!”Derek Jacobi mortified with embarrassment as they play an old recording of him singing “Home on the Range”Οὐδεὶς δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· Nobody can serve two Masters.Annette Badland, Shaun Dingwall, Jacqueline King, Camille Coduri, Fraser Hines and Matthew WaterhouseJenna: Where are you going? Cally: I’m going to clear the neutron blasters for firing. Jenna: Well, what are you going to fire at? Cally: Anything that moves.
(plus the second Travis)
Cosplay
Hannah, my partner in crime, as the 8th DoctorNine and Ten.The definite article, you might say.Leela cosplayThe Meeping Angel.Cally. (Previously Leela.)Annoyed that this ended up out of focus but maybe it’s more atmospheric that way.Robot Santas. Or something.Meep: “Will you be my friend?” Me: “No.”The littlest cosplayer.
Ribbons
Our contribution to the cult of ribbons.
My ribbon collection.
Writers
Writers panelLots of writersSimon’s book (review coming soon)Sunday dinner with Simon, John and España
A fantastic weekend while other things were on fire. No actual Doctor, but maybe that made it more relaxed. Hope to come back again next year.
Second frame of third part (“What He Wants”, by Rob Williams):
First of the 2014 line of Eleventh Doctor comics by Titan, this introduces a new companion, Alice Obiefune from Hackney, as a regular Tardis traveller along with invisible musician John Jones and an alien entity called ARC. I like the new dynamic between the primaries, but the other two companions seem a bit superfluous, and the historical story set in the segregated Deep South pulls its punches. Pleasing enough, good art, and you can get it here.
I remember watching The Talons of Weng-Chiang when it was first broadcast in 1977, and loving it; the years since then have sensitised me to the racism in the story, but it retains a problematic attraction. I saw it again on videotape twice in the 1990s, and next time I saw it in 2007 I wrote:
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, from 1977, is the climax of the great Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who (also the last directed by the superb David Maloney), and is as good now as I remember it being when I was nine. (I admit I have also seen it a couple of times since, once in the company of a girl from Manila who giggled pleasingly at the line about the Filipino army advancing on Reykjavik.) Thanks to my background reading I was now alert to look out for a particular shot at the start of episode 4 which had escaped my notice previously (on the DVD commentary track, Louise Jameson laughs loudly). There is so much great stuff here: Leela and the Doctor are both alien to Victorian London, so Jago and Litefoot are effectively the viewpoint characters; Deep Roy, later to play hundreds of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, turns in a great Mr Sin. Yes, the ethnic stereotypes are rather regrettable (and quite apart from the Chinese, I would draw the attention of Irish viewers to Chris Gannon’s Casey), but the setting and drama are just fantastic.
When I came to it in my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
I always loved The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. (I know, I said this about The Deadly Assassin too, but it’s true in both cases.) There are two big problems with the story: the fairly useless and unterrifying giant rat, and the racism including having the lead Chinese role played by a non-Chinese actor. However, the settings are beautifully done, the plotting is tight enough, Magnus Greel’s distorted face is truly horrible, and everyone takes it seriously and does it well. The script has some particular delights: “I can play the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ in a bowl of live goldfish”; “sleep is for tortoises”; etc.
I know it by heart, so this time I watched it with the cast commentary and the production subtitles. Still enjoyable, except that the racism really does make you cringe. It’s also a total Bechdel fail. Apart from Leela, there are hardly any women characters, and they do not talk to each other.
As it happens, I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel at exactly the same time as rewatching the show and reading the books, and if you don’t mind connecting the sublime and the ridiculous, that’s a really interesting pairing. You can get the DVD here.
Since I have it, I also went back and reread the Robert Holmes script, edited by John McElroy. The opening of the second scene of the third episode is:
2. PROFESSOR LITEFOOT’S DINING ROOM.
(LEELA peers out of the window. She hears the front door shut, then turns around.) LITEFOOT: Nobody out there now! Fellow must have got wind of .. . (He breaks off mid-sentence with a groan. There is a rustling sound in the hall.) LEELA: Professor? (She goes towards the door.) Are you there, Professor? (She is almost at the door when it swings open. MR. SIN is standing there, a knife glinting evilly in his hand. He moves purposefully towards LEELA. For a moment she is frozen with fear, then she grabs a carving knife from the side-table. As MR. SIN moves stiffly towards her, she hurls the knife at him, with expert precision. It thuds into MR. SIN‘s throat but, to LEELA‘s amazement, it seems to have little effect. The weird little mannequin continues to shuffle towards her.)
The script, published in 1989, is really for completists only, but I would say two things: first, two of the most problematic elements of the TV series – the use of a white actor to play Li H’sen Chang, and the rather poor implementation of the giant rat – are of course invisible in the script (the racism, alas, survives); but second, so is the gorgeous staging which made it such a vivid experience when I was nine. A nice bit of nostalgia which you can get here.
Not much to add to that.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the Terrance Dicks novelisation is:
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang also loses out in the visual stakes, but gains a bit with occasional tight-third narrative from Leela’s point of view, which accentuates one of the successful aspects of the story, the confrontation between her primitive experience and the Victorian era.
The one difference I picked up on this time is that Teresa, one of Greel’s victims, is clearly coded as a sex worker in the TV story but is a gambling hostess in the adaptation. You can get it here.
With the publication of Dale Smith’s monograph on The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Black Archive covers six consecutive Tom Baker stories and 26 consecutive episodes, which is their longest run of any era. I think that underlines the consensus that the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, which ended with Talons, was a true high point of the show.
Smith’s monograph is actually quite short by Black Archive standards, at 137 pages. It has just five chapters.
The first, “Foe from the Future”, looks at the story’s roots in the Jack the Ripper murders, Fu Manchu and The Phantom of the Opera, and also reviews the production process which was deeply exhausting for Holmes.
The second chapter, “The Talons of Victoria”, looks at the affinity that Doctor Who has with the Victorian era, and explores the role of science and the narrative of colonialism (also very much applicable to Leela).
The third chapter, “The Time-Traveller and his Savage Companion”, looks at the many double-acts in the story – not just Jago/Litefoot but also Doctor/Leela and Greel/Chang and even Greel/Mr Sin – and also at the extent to which it really does draw on Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera and indeed The Island of Doctor Moreau. Its second paragraph is:
Holmes was undoubtedly a master of dialogue, creating characters painted with broad enough strokes to be immediately recognisable, but giving each of them the ability to say just the right things to give us a clear picture of who they are. Jago’s couplet of ‘You’ve been drinking’ / ‘Well, it’s time you started’ isn’t just a funny joke3: it gives us a clear picture of what is going through his mind, what he wants and how he intends to get it. But dialogue isn’t the only thing that Holmes uses to give his characters life and depth, and his ability with double acts shouldn’t be reduced to just having a way with words. Holmes had a way with every tool in the writer’s toolkit, and the best way to demonstrate that would be to look at one of the other double acts that Holmes peppered Talonswith. 3 Episode 1.
The fourth chapter, “‘Die, Bent Face!'”, looks at Greel’s disfigurement and at disability in fiction in general and Doctor Who in particular, a theme that suddenly caught fire for about 48 hours last year.
The fifth and longest chapter, “Of Its Time, and Ours” addresses the crucial issue of race and racism. I think this is one of the best such analyses I’ve read by a white guy, addressing a largely white audience. We can love things that are problematic, but it’s really important to understand why and how they are problematic. Smith very briefly reviews the history of British engagement with China in the nineteenth century (it was, again, refreshing that I had just read Kuang’s Babel) and also the history of discrimination against London’s Chinese population, led by the trade unions. (He doesn’t mention the issue of Chinese slave labour in South Africa which became one of the themes of the 1906 general election, but there is plenty else to choose from.) He makes it clear that the question of whether Talons of Weng-Chiang is a racist story isn’t a matter of debate; what is up for debate is our response.
We know this is a bigger issue than just whether one story broadcast in 1977 contains racism. Talons isn’t just a product of the 70s – that young proto-fan can find it just as easily as they would find any of Christopher Eccleston’s stories. It is impossible for anyone to watch anything in the context it was made: everything is watched within an elastic context of ‘now’, and Talons is quite literally a product of now. It is easy for someone to get down their Blu-ray and settle down to watch it, to buy books about how it was made or listen to sequels that ape its atmosphere. The same can’t be said for The Black and White Minstrel Show. That’s why we feel uncomfortable when it is raised, why the urge to minimise and argue is so strong: we have watched this story and enjoyed it, and we are not racists so something else must be wrong.
But it isn’t. We are.
If we were educated through the British school system; if we have engaged with British culture; if we have lived in this country for any length of time. If we are white. It would be impossible for us to eliminate every unconscious racist assumption we have been taught to make. That is why the onus is on those of us who are white Doctor Who fans, to listen when people raise the issue of the racism in Talons. We have to educate ourselves about what that racism is and how it displays itself, and ultimately we have to decide how we as people are going to respond to it. Because it is too easy for us to push back, to force the people that racism targets to carry out the emotional and physical labour involved in educating white people. Because racism is a white problem. We benefit from it every day. It is up to us to solve it.
As this story demonstrates, Doctor Who has not always been good to China, but I’m glad to say that China has a thriving Doctor Who fanbase, as I discovered in October. After a couple of weeks when the Chengdu Worldcon has been excoriated in public and in private (including by me) I’ll take a moment to remember the positive.
This is one of my favourite New Who stories. I wrote of my 2011 Hugo votes:
1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor. Yes, I do plan to give my first preference to the writer of The Tall Guy, Blackadder, Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and The Vicar of Dibley. (Not forgetting his first great work with The Heebeegeebees.) I thought this was the outstanding Who episode of last year, the best since Blink, and my biggest difficulty in deciding which others to nominate for the Hugos was a fear that if I nominated any of them, Vincent might be crowded out. But luckily we got through that stage OK; hopefully the Alternative Vote will see the award go where it ought.
Rewatching it again for this exercise, I still loved it a lot. It looks gorgeous, it sounds gorgeous, the acting is spot-on and the script sparkles. I have two reservations: the actual monster bit is slightly surplus to requirements, and at the end, the exhibition of van Gogh’s work would certainly have displayed his dates of birth and death rather prominently. I’ms also still irritated that a teaching moment in Dutch phonology was missed. As I wrote at the time, in the name “van Gogh”:
1) the ‘a’ is very short and low, heading towards a short ‘o’ in English. 2) both the ‘g’ and the ‘gh’ are pronounced as a softer version of ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’. 3) ‘Vahn Goff’ is completely and utterly wrong. (And if you thought it was ‘Van Go’, I don’t ever want to talk to you again.)
I like his art, and we saw some at the Kröller-Müller Museum a year and a half ago. I’ve also read two biographies in graphic novel format. He’s a fascinating character who left us an evocative legacy, and Richard Curtis pushes it just far enough in Vincent and the Doctor.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two title characters are both men, and apart from Amy there is no named female speaking part. (We are told Giselle’s name after she is dead.)
Paul Driscoll’s Black Archive monograph is one of the longer and more substantial ones. Like the last one I read, on The Haunting of Villa Diodati, it links a historical story about real-life historical creators to the actual biographies and works of those creators. I found it much more successful, I think partly because I like the story much more but mainly because Driscoll has written a better book.
The first chapter, “The Voice of the Writer”, looks at the career of Richard Curtis and how Vincent and the Doctor flows from a lot of his previous themes, and also the very personal one of his sister who he lost to depression a year before the episode was written. I’ve seen less than half of the films and stories referenced, but I am convinced of a linear narrative thread connecting Vincent with About Time and Blackadder: Back and Forth. It’s detailed and well argued.
The second and longest chapter, “The Voice of the Artist”, starts by looking at other screen treatments of van Gogh’s life and death, then looks at how the episode treats him as tortured genius vs visionary artist, and finished by looking at van Gogh’s own letters for indications of how he himself saw his art.
The third chapter, “The Voice of the Monster”, looks at the monster as a metaphor for mental illness and considers how Doctor Who portrays trauma more generally. Its second paragraph is:
In a lengthy scene cut during post-production, the Doctor tells Amy that artists often see real things that nobody else notices. As they prepare to head off in the TARDIS to meet Vincent for the first time, he shows her various examples from Fuseli, Bosch, Munch and De Goya3. The Doctor’s point is that nightmares and monsters cannot always be dismissed as flights of fantasy on the part of the artist. The monster in The Church at Auvers (1890) painting reminds him of a fairy tale he’d read as a child. He cannot be sure, but he sets off on the presumption that the creature is real and not a product of Vincent’s imagination. 3TCH [The Complete History] #65, p94f.
The fourth chapter, “The Voice of the Paintings”, looks first at how little the visual arts feature in Doctor Who outside the Moffat era and then at how much Moffat emphasised them, and then looks at several specific van Gogh paintings and the way in which they are used in the episode.
A brief conclusion considers the story as a fairy tale.
An appendix lists 46 (!) different van Gogh paintings that appear in or are referred to in the episode.
As I said, this was a long but meaty Black Archive, and I recommend it. You can get it here.
As the show itself was transforming on screen so the exhibition began to blossom as a tourist attraction. Peripheral events such as the switching on of the illuminations in 1975 and the Blackpool Centenary celebrations in 1976 helped to cement the exhibition’s place as an exciting and worthwhile visitor destination.
A 600-page sequel to the Blackpool Remembered volume, also going back to memories of the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool which ran from 1974 to 1984, but this time also with material on the Doctor Who museum that was open in the same town from 2004 to 2009, and an account of some of the spinoff merchandise that was available to fans in the Good Old Days.
Like the previous volume, it’s a beautifully assembled set of photos with literate commentary. Every corner of both the earlier exhibition (again) and David Boyle’s Doctor Who Museum is described in loving detail. There is a feature on Boyle’s life and career, including some very sad photos from his final years of ill health. He was also the maker of the Dapol models which were the authorised miniatures of characters from the TV series. Short sections also look at Jon Pertwee’s Whomobile, and at Maginty, the Blackpool double of the Doctor’s car Bessie. Again, the perspective is very male and white, which is unfortunate; but it’s a labour of love, and there’s a lot of love here. You can download it for free from here (600 pages, 140ish MB).
Having finished the IDW Tenth Doctor comics last month, I’m into the Eleventh Doctor run; and rather than start at the beginning of a long narrative, I picked up this one-shot album from 2011 for a sample. The author, Lilah Sturges, is best known for collaboration with Bill Willingham on the Fables series and spinoffs; I was really into that, ten years ago or so, but drifted off once the main narrative ended.
This is an enjoyable enough fantasy-world-actually-a-theme-park story, with the Doctor and Amy liberating the oppressed. The art by Kelly Yates is seriously below par though, with Amy much more freckled than the real Karen Gillan and the Doctor often looking like someone else entirely. This was early in the Eleventh Doctor era, so perhaps the lead characters’ images were not well communicated to the artist, but it’s a barrier to enjoyment. There are some nice covers by Bill Willingham though. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass: Amy and Aurelia battle an evil robot together on page 48, and then review progress on page 56.
Even in retreat. Chased by the chuff and crack of a line of French muskets.
This is an Eighth Doctor novel which I read back in 2015, at a time when I was slacking on my bookblogging and didn’t get around to writing it up. I came back to it last month because part of it is set in the year 2024 in Russia, where the Doctor’s companion Fitz Kreiner finds himself isolated while the Doctor and the other companion Trix McMillan zoom off to the year 5000 and to 1812 respectively. To be honest there is little here to differentiate the Russia of 2024 from the Russia of 2002 when the book was written, and if it weren’t for the back cover explicitly mentioning 2024 you would tend to think it was set in or very soon after the year of publication. I’m afraid I was not terribly excited by the plot, with a McGuffin and a time-travelling entity looking for it, but there are some pleasing references to Magnus Greel from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. You can get it here.
I was lucky enough to watch this episode at Gallifrey One in 2020, and wrote then:
I’ll always remember The Haunting of Villa Diodati for the circumstances in which I first saw it, packed into the biggest hall in the Los Angeles airport Marriott with a thousand other fans, whose reactions were so voluble (and positive) that I needed to watch it again when I got home. It’s not the first Who story with Mary Shelley and a Cyberman, which is a really obvious pairing. But it looked good, sounded good, and more or less made sense both times I watched it. See John Connors here and Darren Mooney here.
Rewatching again for this post, I wasn’t quite so sure if it all made sense; it felt like there was a lot of act-ING and not a lot of character development, and the plot was a fairly standard alien intrusion tale. But perhaps that’s because my standards had been raised by the return of RTD and the Fourteenth Doctor (I was watching in the middle of last month, before the Christmas episode). Anyway, it still evokes happy memories of February 2020, just before the world changed.
Philip Purser-Hallard has produced a longish Black Archive on the story, and I am not sure if it is entirely to the point. The introduction says that the themes he will look at are darkness and light, the Frankenstein story and parenthood.
The first chapter, “‘This Night, June 1816′” looks at other fictional treatments of the writing of Frankenstein, and other historical Doctor Who stories. Purser-Hallard makes the interesting point that “The Haunting of Villa Diodati is unique in Doctor Who to date, in that every speaking (or crying) character who does not also appear in other episodes is based on a historical person”.
The second and longest chapter, “‘I Detest All Gossip, You Understand'”, looks in considerable detail at the family backgrounds of every single historical character in the story. It is here where I became uneasy; a Doctor Who episode is not a history lesson, it is an entertainment, and it seems to me a categorical error to grade THoVD against historical accuracy, especially since we know that it consciously diverges (in that the Frankenstein story is not actually written by Mary Shelly “on time”).
The third and shortest chapter, “‘Save the Poet, Save the Universe'”, looks at the use of Percy Shelley’s poetry in the episode to characterise Ashad the Cyberman, and Byron’s to characterise the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:
Many of Percy’s poems were profoundly political, and have been taken as inspiration by radical movements from the Chartists to the Arab Spring, by way of Tiananmen Square2. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s opposition at the time of the episode’s writing, filming and broadcast, was fond of quoting his response to the Peterloo Massacre, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (written in 1819 but not published until 1832) at Labour Party rallies, and the line ‘Ye are many, they are few’ was credited with inspiring the party’s 2017 election slogan, ‘For the many, not the few’3. While it might be extreme to state, as the Doctor goes on to, that Ryan, Yaz and Graham ‘will not exist’ if Percy’s writings after June 1816 are erased from history, their world would indeed be detectably different if they were. As she insists, ‘Words matter.” 2 Mulhallen, Jacqueline, ‘For the Many, Not the Few: Jeremy Corbyn and Percy Bysshe Shelley’. 3 Londoner, The, ‘Londoner’s Diary: Jeremy Corbyn’s Romantic Notions Traced Back to Percy Shelley’; Shelley P, Selected Poems and Prose, p368.
The fourth chapter, “‘Something to Awaken Thrilling Horror'”, looks at the Gothic in Doctor Who. invoking Buffy and several previous Black Archives.
The fifth chapter, “‘That Writing Thing'”, looks at the parallels between Ashad and the monster in Frankenstein, and tries to illuminate this with the concepts of creation and parenthood.
The sixth and last chapter, “‘This World Doesn’t End in 1816′”, looks at darkness, light and the apocalypse in this story and in Chibnall-era Doctor Who.
Appendices illustrate the family trees of the Byrons, Godwin and Shelleys, and the historical timeline of events.
It will be apparent that I didn’t get as much out of this Black Archive as I have from some in the series. I don’t feel that the story can quite bear the analytical weight that is placed on it here, and I’m not comfortable with an interpretation that suggests that a deep knowledge of the shifting relationships in the Byron/Shelley/Clairmont household is necessary for a full appreciation of the story. But others may find it more useful. You can get it here.
When I first watched Invasion of the Dinosaurs in 2007, I wrote:
Notoriously, the first episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs exists only in black and white, while the other five are in colour (it would all have been in colour when shown in January/February 1974). Also notoriously, the actual dinosaurs themselves are absolutely terrible as special effects. There are no two ways about it: they are embarrassing puppets pasted onto their scenes by unconvincing CSO.
If you can ignore the awfulness of the dinosaurs, it’s not such a bad story; like many Pertwee tales, it is a bit too long, but the two basic bits of plot – conspiracy at the highest levels of government to Take Over/Destroy England, and the people who think they are on a spaceship to colonise the nearest star – are both rather good and well enough worked out, with their motives a bit of a reprise of The Green Death but with the environmentalists now the bad guys. The cliff-hanger where Sarah is told that she’s been in space for three months, and the scene where she proves she isn’t by walking out of the airlock, are both real jewels.
The main plot twist involving the regular cast, however, is a slightly different matter. Captain Yates, the Brigadier’s deputy since Terror of the Autons, turns out to be in league with the bad guys, yet can’t quite bring himself to do the Doctor harm. The scene where we discover his betrayal is handled with no dramatic tension whatever, and his motivations are not really explored at all. The Brigadier and Benton get all the good lines, but there’s interesting narrative tension among the villains as well.
If it hadn’t been for the dinosaurs, this would probably be remembered as one of the great Pertwee stories despite the not-quite-connected plot. As it is, you just have to close your eyes when they are on-screen; but it’s still way ahead of, say, The Mutants. (I wonder if an audio version of this, with linking narrative by Elisabeth Sladen or Nicholas Courtney, might work a bit better?)
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
Invasion of the Dinosaurs was Malcolm Hulke’s last story for Doctor Who, and it must be said that with the rather central exception of the dinosaurs it is rather good. It is a shame about the dinosaurs, especially the tyrannosaurus / brontosaurus fight in episode 6 which is a real low point. The assembly of talent among the guest cast is excellent – Martin Jarvis, Peter Miles, Carmen Silvera, John Bennett, Noel Johnson, all had been on Who before and/or would be again, and all take it seriously (I guess they couldn’t see the dinosaurs for the most part).
Hulke takes it seriously too; his sympathies are of course with the New Earth folks, but his message is one of working for revolution and change within the system. Mike Yates’ treachery is the most interesting thing that has been done with a regular character since Katarina and Sara were killed off. It’s a shame that Richard Franklin never quite rises to the challenge, but it twists Hulke’s narrative from being a relatively safe tale of rooting out the dodgy bits of the establishment to a nasty one where your own household may turn against you.
Sarah and the Doctor are awfully cuddly now, especially in their exchange about Florana at the end! NB that this is the second story in a row about bad guys using time travel to transport their innocent pawns between different periods of Earth history.
All the above points occurred to me again as I rewatched it this time. I would also add that the London setting is used effectively, especially in the devastated and empty street scenes of the first couple of episodes, and the sense of enclosure and subterfuge in the Minister’s office later on. (Though the starship passengers look like real idiots for not smelling a rat sooner.) And Elisabeth Sladen is on particularly good form.
I knew Hulke’s novelisation (of his own script) well as a kid. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
‘The signal’s very faint, sir.’ The radio operator turned up the volume control on his console to ‘full’. ‘It’s no good, sir. They’ve faded out altogether.’
When I reread it in 2008 I wrote:
I am not sure if this is the best of this run of novels (and I’m certain it’s not the best of the Season 11 novels, as Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders clearly takes that trophy) but it is certainly the most interesting. As commenters to my last entry noted, it starts with a lovely vignette of a Scot in London for the football who becomes a victim of the dinosaurs; there are other little bits of depth added as well, Professor Whitaker becoming very camp, and a couple of odd extra details – the Doctor is described as having “a mop of curly hair” (shurely shome mishtake?) and he talks about the Mary Celeste again as he did in Doctor Who and the Sea Devils. Also, of course, the book loses the appalling visual effects of the original programme – these dinosaurs are flesh and blood, not rubber!
Yet at the same time it is a bit too over-earnest, not quite as mature as Hulke’s better novels (Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters and Doctor Who and the Green Death), so it doesn’t quite get its fourth star from me.
It is interesting that both this and the previous story are about the bad guys shunting people (and in this case dinosaurs) between the present and the past.
The viewpoint character in the opening chapter is from Glasgow, a point I missed when compiling my list of mentions of the city in Doctor Who last month. One other detail added by Hulke for the novelisation is that Butler, the character played by Martin Jarvis, has a large facial scar, and is also made more complex, doubting the wisdom of the grand plan at an earlier stage. You can get it here.
Jon Arnold, who has previously delivered solid analysis of Rose, Scream of the Shalka and The Eleventh Hour in the Black Archive series, has delivered another decent and readable piece of work here.
A short introduction reflects on the context of the story, with the end of the Pertwee era coinciding with unusual political instability in the UK.
The first chapter, “London Falling”, looks at the way in which London has been portrayed in Doctor Who overall, especially in this story.
The second chapter, “The Politics of the Dinosaurs”. looks in detail at the political disarray of early 1970s Britain and its reflections in Doctor Who.
The third chapter, “The Golden Age”, looks at similar iterations of the Golden Age narrative, including the 2005 reality TV show Space Cadets and Douglas Adams’ Golgafrinchams. The second paragraph, with quote and footnotes, is:
The earliest known mention of a golden age occurs in Hesiod’s poem Works and Days (c700 BCE). In this poem, the author outlined his five Ages of Man: the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, the heroic age and the iron age, with the last of these being Hesiod’s own time4. The names of Hesiod’s ages are derived from the materials from which he believed Zeus constructed humanity (with the heroic age being one of demigods, perhaps an early indication that Hesiod’s metaphor did not quite cover the scheme of society he wished to use – an early example of golden ages being a let-down). The conception of the golden age as an idealised lost nirvana is clear from his description:
“The race of men that the immortals who dwell on Olympus made first of all was of gold […] they lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil and misery. Wretched old age did not affect them either, but with hands and feet ever unchanged they enjoyed themselves in feasting, beyond all ills, and they died as if overcome by sleep. All good things were theirs, and the grain-giving soil bore its fruits of its own accord in unstinted plenty, while they at their leisure harvested their fields in contentment amid abundance.’5
4 Believed to be around the last third of the eighth century BCE. West, ML, ed, Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, p10. 5 Hesiod, Works and Days, p87.
The fourth and longest chapter, “The Immortal Hulke”, looks at the career and beliefs of Malcolm Hulke, who of course was a Communist at one point in his life and also left a legacy of writing about television. It does not explain Hulke’s obsession with reptiles.
The first of three appendices, “20 Years Before Jurassic Park“, makes a case that the dinosaurs are not really all that awful by 1970s standards. It’s difficult to make this a very strong case, hwoever.
The second appendix, “KKLAK!”, looks in detail at the changes Hulke made to the story when adapting it as a novel.
The third appendix, “‘Ullo Jon! Got a New Motor?'” looks at the origin and fate of the Whomobile.
I would have liked to read some analysis of one more topic – the treachery of Mike Yates, which is briefly referred to in passing, but which as I said earlier was the most interesting thing that has been done with a regular character since Katarina and Sara were killed off eight years earlier.
Apart from that, it’s generally a satisfactory and sympathetic piece of work, looking at a flawed but fondly remembered story and explaining where it came from. Normally I like to get a bit more of the behind-the-scenes gossip, but I’m happy with what we get here.
You wait five years for a new Doctor, and then two of them come along one after the other…
While we recover from the Fifteenth Doctor’s proper debut yesterday, you can relive the Fourteenth Doctor’s brief tenure in the three novelisations of his three stories, The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle, each published electronically a few days after the respective episodes were shown, and available in paper form next month. Spoilers: One of them is likely to be my Doctor Who book of the year when I do my roundup of my 2023 reading on Sunday. I’ve also had a listen to a relevant Big Finish audio adaptation.
Best thing to do, Doctor, he thought, is not get caught.
This is a good start to the new regime. (One of my personal complaints about the Chibnall era is that little attention was paid to the spinoff publications.) As well as faithfully transferring the on-screen action to the page, we get more characterisation for the minor characters, especially Sylvia and Rose, and some delightful tips of the hat to the comic strip on which the story was based – the steelworks is called Millson Wagner, in a tribute to the original writers, and the original new companion, Sharon, makes an offstage appearance as Fudge’s friend. Basically it’s what you want from a novelisation. You can get it here.
The Fourteenth Doctor TV story was not in fact the first adaptation of the original Star Beast comic. In 2019 Big Finish released audio versions of this and The Iron Legion, the first of the Doctor Who magazine strips, both starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, and for completeness I listened to both. They are quite long; The Iron Legion is almost two hours, The Star Beast 1h49m, and then there’s an hour of behind-the-scenes, and the material isn’t quite strong enough to bear the weight of it. But it is fun enough, a look at two old stories from a new angle, with some tidying up of loose ends in the plots.
NB in particular from The Iron Legion, Christine Kavanagh (who had a small part in The Diplomat) as June / Magog, the lead baddy, and Big Finish regulars Toby Longworth and Joseph Kloska as the robot Vesuvius and Morris; and from The Star Beast, Rhianne Starbuck as Sharon (she seems to have paused her acting career, which is a shame), Bethan Dixon Bate as Beep the Meep, and in a surprise twist, 1970s news reader Angela Rippon as herself. You can get it here.
There was no indication anything had been disturbed. The hover-buggy remained where they’d parked it; nothing had fallen over; nothing had become detached from the walls or roof and crashed to the ground.
Wild Blue Yonder was such a visual story, depending both on superb special effects and on twists in the plot, that the book version needs to be either a faithful screen-to-page adaptation or to take a completely different approach. Morris has (perhaps sensibly) gone for the first option, and the result is a workmanlike book that completists like me will want to have, but won’t be a gateway drug for anyone else. You can get it here.
It’s no secret that I rate James Goss as one of the best Doctor Who writers currently in business (eg here, here and here), so I awaited his novelisation of The Giggle with eager anticipation. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Move 3”) is:
London burned. Flames poked out of windows. People stood on roofs, howling. Cars smashed into each other over and over. Double-decker buses lay toppled in the streets, people thronged the bridges, sometimes diving off, sometimes falling off, sometimes pushed off. She watched two boats down there in the Thames, playing a slow and stupid game of chicken. Neither boat blinked.
I have to say that my high expectations were more than exceeded. Goss tells the story from the perspective of the Toymaker (first-person Doctor Who books are very rare and not always successful), smooths off the edges, throws in some extra pinches of emotion and also some shifts of genre and format – at one point the book becomes a choose-your-own-adventure for Donna, and there are other puzzles throughout. I suspect that the paper version will be even nicer and it’s the only one of the three that I plan to get in hard copy. It’s a real tour de force, and you can get it here. I enjoyed this so much that I made it my very first post on Threads:
I might just squee for a bit, rather non-verbally, but basically once again I loved this. The grownups are back in charge. Gatwa and Gibson are a great pair. The alternate timeline gimmick has been done much worse and more didactically in Who,and elsewhere. Not totally wild about the goblins, but again we have had much worse. And I don’t think we’ve ever had the Doctor actually singing on TV? And what of Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood – does she really not know the TARDIS at the start, or is she just making that up – have the events of the story changed her, or has she just changed her story?
Seriously though, I took an interest in the plotline about DNA testing, not least because I myself was once able to identify a foundling’s parents through DNA connections (mother then father). For any white person of British and/or Irish descent, there will be loads of connections in the various databases, perhaps not close ones, but they will be there. So we deduce that there’s something very odd about Ruby’s background. But then, the days of relatively normal backgrounds for Doctor Who companions have come and gone, I think.
The culmination of the series of IDW Tenth Doctor comic albums that I’ve been reading since March, here all the various companion plotlines come together and there is a very satisfactory ending to the character arc for Gabby Gonzalez, the comics-only companion from New York. Really this whole series deserves the same recognition that the early DWM strips have; it’s beautifully done. It was especially evocative to read it at the same time as the Doctor / Donna story unfolded on TV. You can get it here.
This was the first book that I finished reading in December, so I’m three weeks off more or less. This gap will probably only widen over the break!
So, unabashed squee from me for the second and third of the Fourteenth Doctor’s three episodes. A real feeling that the grownups are back in charge, wanting to make a show that is fun to watch and accessible, while also being much less shy about its past than it was in 2005. (It was not until Christmas 2006, in Catherine Tate’s first episode, that the word “Gallifrey” was even mentioned.)
I watch Wild Blue Yonder with a couple of fellow fans in the USA last weekend, and was really impressed at taking a fairly simple story (which has been done many times before, including by RTD in what I still think is his best single episode, Midnight) and making it come alive again. It’s rare to have a Doctor Who story that depends so much on the principals, though of course it was first done in The Edge of Destruction in 1964. The special effects show the money that Disney has thrown at it. The Isaac Newton bit was sheer humour, combined with a poke in the eye for bigots by casting a non-white actor in the role, but I don’t see any harm in either of those objectives. And of course lovely and emotional to see Bernard Cribbins again at the end.
The Giggle brought back the Celestial Toymaker, from a story shown in 1966 of which only one episode survived, for a grand confrontation that was suitably climactic. I thought the scenes of the Toymaker creating havoc inside UNIT came close to missing the mark, with comedy violence against women characters and a rather peculiar reference to American Beauty, but otherwise I really loved it.
Catherine Tate got a bit less to do here, apart from a great lost-in-corridors scene, but that’s because we were also introduced to Ncuti Gatwa a bit earlier than most of us had anticipated, with him emerging from David Tennant’s body wearing half his clothes (a gag also used in James Hadley Chase’s Miss Shumway Waves a Wand) and then joining forces with Tennant to defeat the villain – in a simple game of Catch, though that is very well filmed. Neil Patrick Harris was great too; of course real Germans don’t talk anything like that, the whole point is that the shop-keeper aspect of the Toymaker is a fake.
Some sensitive souls have complained that one of the central messages, that people are too often unkind on social media and it would be a bad world if we did this to each other in real life, suggests that it’s wrong to speak your mind frankly. Personally I think it’s reasonable to regret that so much public discourse is polarised these days, and also to acknowledge that RTD has been targeted for grossly unfair online criticism for his Doctor Who work since at least 2005, and you can’t expect that not to sting. I also thought the subtle commentary on television as a force for barbarism was nicely subversive of the very medium we were watching.
The return of UNIT (in a much nicer building than the one that got blown up last year) was not a huge surprise; some were surprised by the return of Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush. I was not. Why not? Because Mel was the only other character present at the final regeneration of Old Who, when the Sixth Doctor was transformed into the Seventh Doctor by BBC internal politics. Having her witness the regeneration from Fourteenth Doctor to Fifteenth Doctor confirms the message that we are saying goodbye to the first era of New Who and moving on to something new.
And I must say that the idea of the Fourteenth Doctor, representing all his predecessors, can settle down to a nice retirement with friends after sixty years, is tremendously moving for those of us who are also closer to sixty than to our youth. Perhaps something got in my eye at the end there. Anyway, I loved it.
Afterwards F and I rewatched the final episode of The Celestial Toymaker. The lore is that The producer of the day (John Wiles) had actually planned to make this what we would now call the first ever regeneration story. The First Doctor spends the second and third episodes invisible as a punishment by the Toymaker (and to accommodate William Hartnell’s holiday schedule); the idea was that when he returned to visibility it would be in a different body. But the BBC higher-ups moved to prevent this, the producer resigned and William Hartnell got another six months in the role.
The episode is manifestly made on a much smaller budget than any 21st century Doctor Who, and the pace is glacial. But the moments of confrontation between Hartnell and Michael Gough, playing the Toymaker, are well done, and the Doctor’s dilemma of how to play the final move in a game that will destroy their pocket universe when it ends is a good plot device (recycled in The Three Doctors and elsewhere). And we have this prophetic exchange at the end:
As Elizabeth Sandifer has written, this is a very problematic story (though see also here), and it was interesting to see it being reinvented in a very different way last night.
It isn’t over for the Fourteenth Doctor as far as this blog is concerned; I have three novelisations and a comic strip to report back on in due course. But that will do for now.
This afternoon I hunted down my very dusty copy of The Iron Legion and refamiliarised myself with the story of Beep the Meep, as originally told in 1980. Reaction on social media ranged from “That’s an impressive artistic team” to “I spent 12p out of my 50p pocket money on that”.
It a great story, with the first ever non-white companion becoming part of the Doctor’s adventures. I was not living in the UK when it was first published in the spring of 1980, but I must have caught up with it pretty soon, at the latest when it was republished in 1984. So I’ve been wondering how Beep the Meep could be put on screen for almost forty years. I was glad to see about 60% of it transferred to tonight’s story.
Stunned to see just how much you would need to pay for a second-hand copy of The Iron Legion, but you can try and get one here.
I also had a listen while out at the shops a bit later to the 2002 Big Finish audio The Ratings War, by Steve Lyons, which brings back Beep the Meep as a sinister broadcasting magnate and has a lot of sly references to the state of Doctor Who at the time, delivered pointedly by Colin Baker. The central theme was used for a couple of TV Ninth Doctor stories a couple of years later, but it’s still worth a listen to get a sense of where things were at the time, and it’s actually available for free from Big Finish here.
So, wasn’t tonight’s episode brilliant? Tennant and Tate back on form, resolving some of the dangling plot points from 2010, incorporating almost all of the good bits from the 1980 comic strip, and with some suitable reflections on who the Doctor is, and what it means to be human in all our forms. (The coffee bit at the end was just a bit silly, but I forgive it, just because). I’m really hopeful for a new surge of consistent quality for the next two weeks, and beyond. The music was good too. But yeah, I loved it.
Edited to add: Just watched the behind the scenes video. Real lump in the throat to see Dave Gibbons and Pat Mills reacting to a 40-year-old story hitting the screen.
For the 60th anniversary, we have been given a slightly weird thing: a 24-part story featuring a time-travelling assassin called Doom, in which the Doctor figures only occasionally, told across various media with, frankly, varying degrees of success. The two big problems are that murder isn’t actually all that funny a topic, so it’s awkward to find the tone for a set of funny stories about assassination; and that Doom actually isn’t a very good assassin, in that all of her missions seem to end in failure.
Hour One, by James Goss (online story) – third paragraph:
“I’m dying.”
As my regular reader knows, I’m normally a huge fan of James Goss’s writing, but I’m afraid that this first chapter made very little sense to me. You can read it here for free.
Four Hours of Doom’s Day, by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, Mike Summers and Roger Langridge (comic strip supplement to DWM #592) – second frame of third story:
Again, I normally enjoy Jacqueline Rayner’s prose, and again, I felt that this was far too rushed; the four stories have only 16 pages between them, and the first has only two. We get an appearance from the Sixth Doctor, and separately we also get Jo Grant, River Song, Cybermen and Nestenes. But there’s really not much there.
A Doctor in the House? by Jody Houser, art by Roberta Ingranata, Warnia K. Sahadewa, Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (Titan comics) – second frame of third story:
Given a bit more space to breathe in – 64 pages across the four stories – I enjoyed this much more; also there’s a nice consistency in that Missy appears in each of the four, creating a fun dynamic with our heroine, and the Twelfth Doctor turns up in the last of them. It’s not yet out as a single volume but you can get the two issues here and here.
AI am the Doctor, by Mario M. Mentasti (video game)
I downloaded the Lost in Time videogame purely so that I could get to this installment of the Doom’s Day story. It is an exceptionally dull game, where you don’t have to do much except poke at the screen to score points, interrupted by occasional bits of plot. If you play the game for long enough, you get to the two Doom-related bits. I poked my way through to the first of these, realised that I had not absorbed any of the plot, closed the game down and have not started it up again.
Extraction Point, by M.G. Harris (novel) – second paragraph of third section:
Huh, cave art. Didn’t expect that.
Four more stories in which the Ninth Doctor appears briefly in the first and the Second Doctor plays a larger role in the last. (There is a confusing misprint on page 220: “The Doctor was already lowering herself into the elevator” which from context should clearly be “himself”.) It’s Harris’s first contribution to Who, and as with some of the other Doom’s Day components I found it a bit rushed. Still, interesting use of shape-changing aliens – the Kraals and Slitheen do have that in common. You can get it here.
Wrong Place at the Right Time, by Garner Haines (video game)
As mentioned above, I lost patience with the Lost in Time game, which this is part of, and did not get to this bit.
Four from Doom’s Day, by Darren Jones (audiobooks)
Four more stories, of which my favourite was the first, read by Sooz Kempener (who also reads the last of the four) and involving Ian and Barbara on a Mediterranean cruise. The Twelfth Doctor shows up in the last of them. You can get them here.
Dying Hours, by Jacqueline Rayner, Robert Valentine, Simon Clark and Lizzie Hopley (Big Finish audio plays)
These are the only parts of Doom’s Day that actually feature actor Sooz Kempener in the title role, along with Becky Wright as her controller Terri. Probably each of the audio plays took more combined creative effort from all the the professionals involved than any of the other segments, and it certainly pays off; you can’t rush an hour-long story with real actors into two pages of text. Even so, the four plays have various levels of success; the one that worked best for me was the last, The Crowd by Lizzie Hopley, which brings Doom into contact with the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard (a welcome return from India Fisher) at the scene of the murder of Thomas Becket. You can get it here.
Out of Time, by James Goss (online story – third paragraph:
The Doctor.
Actually this is short, funny and to the point; the First Doctor shows up and sorts everything out, though in such a way that, once you pause for thought, you slightly wonder if it all really mattered that much in the first place. You can read it for free here.
And finally, there’s a game called Doom’s Minute on the BBC website. It took me a while to work out how to play it, and it’s not all that exciting, but you can play it here.
I can see why the BBC decided to try and do a multiplatform story – it’s a good idea to try and draw those who may not have been into all of the available varieties of media together. Sooz Kempener is a great performer and it’s a shame that we only actually get her in the audio plays towards the end. But this honestly felt rather rushed in places; the bits that worked best for me – the Big Finish audios and the Titan comics – were probably the ones that took the most energy and creativity, and it shows.
Happy 60th birthday, Doctor Who! This week, I’ve been blogging Doctor Who books, and here’s another one.
The first New Who episode with a Dalek was shown the Saturday before the 2005 UK election; I was blogging a lot about New Who at the time, and celebrated the Radio Times cover:
That was excellent. An existential Dalek, no less! The back-story of the Time War comes into clearer focus. The mutant inside was, as put it, “suitably squamous and rugose, not to mention dripping with mucus”. The three-way relationship between the Doctor, Rose and the Dalek. (Oh yeah, and Adam. Who is a bit pretty.)
Coming back to it now, I felt that Corey Johnson as Van Statten is perhaps a little underwhelming, but the rest is still great. We know a bit more now about Eccleston’s personal demons, and it deepens my appreciation of his performance.
The second sentence of the third chapter of Robert Shearman’s novelisation of his own story is:
It might be thought that they had been paired deliberately as comic contrast. But they hadn’t. Van Statten didn’t have that sort of sense of humour. And now as he swept into the Cage operations room, they both snapped to attention and saluted. They knew that their boss wouldn’t acknowledge them, that he probably wouldn’t even notice they were there – but it was the correct form of the thing. If they were surprised that he’d brought the intruder with them they didn’t show it. They were paid not to be surprised.
Great novelisation of one of the great New Who episodes. You have seen the show, here’s the writer’s cut, as it were, giving new background to a number of the characters, smoothing out a couple of plot kinks, with combination of tight-third for Rose interspersed with notes from the omniscient narrator explaining what was happening. We lose a couple of the good lines (“He’s a bit pretty” / “I hadn’t noticed”) but we get a lot more in other areas. Well worth adding to the collection. You can get it here.
Coming to it again just after rewatching the TV episode, I noticed several significant points that I should have remarked on first time around. Goddard is actually an FBI plant, and takes over operations from Van Statten a bit earlier (which makes sense). We get a lot more about everyone’s background, including the security guards. Adam’s personal weapons cache has been built up by him in case he might need to shoot his way out. It’s very satisfactory.
I am in a mood of tracing roots of stories at the moment, so I listened again to Shearman’s earlier Big Finish play, Jubilee, which is credited on screen as the basis for Dalek. It was the 40th Big Finish audio, produced in time for the 40th anniversary of the show in 2003. When I first listened to it in 2007, I wrote:
Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).
I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever. You can get it here.
Billy Seguire has delivered an excellent analysis of the story and everything around it in this Black Archive. It has nine chapters and an interview with Robert Shearman, so I’m afraid I will run through them fairly quickly, while still recommending the book to the interested reader.
The first chapter, “‘And Now I Know Your Name’”, looks at the significance of the epsiode’s one-word title and the way in which Daleks can be named; the Dalek of the episode is referred to subsequently as “Metaltron”.
The second chapter, “The Myth of the Great Curator”, looks at museums in Doctor Who; there are plenty of them.
The third chapter, “‘That’s What They Called It the Last Time’”, looks at the evolution of the story from Jubilee to the TV story and then to the novel. Its (long) second paragraph is:
Words like ‘adaptation’, ‘remake’, and ‘reboot’ are all used to describe a work that is drawing on a past version of itself. ‘Drawing’ is a loaded word in this context, one which can apply either to what an adaptation takes, as in drawing water from a well, or what it defaces, such as drawing a shape on a blackboard. Both meanings apply to the concept of adaptation through the way the past and future versions interact. In the case of Jubilee, becoming ‘the story that became Dalek’ breaks it down to those elements which were carried forward and removes contextual factors like the anniversary nature of the story, or public perception of the sixth Doctor, from consideration. In a sense, this applies to any progression of history. Our present circumstances come into play when interpreting the past in a way that wouldn’t have applied to contemporary analysis. History requires perspective. Yet adaptations are unique in that they allow us to bridge, and affect our understanding of, two distinct periods through direct contrast. There’s a continuing presence of the original in an adaptation that links it to the past work. There is also a way in which the original is now affected. When someone says that a revived work ‘ruined their childhood’, what they really mean is that the new work has infiltrated their perception of the original, that the elements that made it work were removed. This is particularly true in ongoing works, such as the Star Wars franchise, where new entries are made to fit into various states of canon or validity. An adaptation is different from a sequel because they tell the same story. Some elements are bound to contradict, meaning whichever version becomes the prime text often directly overwrites the original.
The fourth chapter, “‘And When I Close My Eyes’”, looks at the story as a portrayalof consflict-related trauma in the context of Abu Ghraib and the conflicts of the early 21st century.
The fifth chapter, “‘And You Made Me Better’”, looks at the character of Rose as a transformative agent for the Doctor (and the Dalek).
The sixth chapter, “Who Owns the Internet?”, looks at the portrayal of the online world in the story, which came just before the growth of social media. (Van Statten’s original name was “Will Fences”, but this is obviously too close to Bill Gates.)
The seventh chapter, “The Dalek Surprise Party”, looks at how Joe Ahearne’s direction and Murray Gold’s music maintain our attention.
The eighth and longest chapter, “In the Absence of God”, makes a convincing case that the Daleks tell us something important about religion and belief. A couple of previous Black Archives have made the mistake of banging on about theology too much, and this seems to me much better-judged.
The ninth chapter, “‘Why Don’t You Just Die?’”, looks at the tricky topic of how suicide is (and can be) portrayed in Doctor Who.
An appendix includes an interview with Robert Shearman, with some interesting reflections on the creative process.
The scene which I’m in some ways happiest with, just because I just think it’s got the best bit of writing in it, is the scene where Chris [Eccleston] gets really angry and goes off about van Statten dragging the stars down. That got very nearly cut. After being filmed, Joe Ahearne said to me, ‘You know, I don’t think we need that.’ I said, ‘Could we keep it?’ And he asked why and I said, rather painfully, ‘It’s just the bit I like the most.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, all right.’ I mean, bless his heart because that’s not his job, and you don’t need it. You don’t. But it’s still a scene which, when I watch Dalek, I remember writing that bit and being quite proud of it. I’m really pleased that it survives.
And unusually there is an online supplement, a chapter that didn’t fit into the book, looking at the online extras surrounding the 2005 relaunch in general and Dalek in particular, including a game where you actually play the Dalek trying to escape and finish by exterminating the Doctor!
A solid and interesting piece of analysis which deepened my appreciation for a favourite story. You can get it here.
I think I missed the first three episodes of The Hand of Fear in October 1976 – I don’t know what would have taken nine-year-old me out of the house on those Saturday weekends, though I note that my grandfather died suddenly the night the second episode was shown, which must have led to some family disruption the following week.
However I vividly remember the fourth episode, with the barren, abandoned planetscape of Kastria, Eldrad shockingly crushed and then transformed from woman to man, and then the abrupt departure of Sarah Jane Smith, after three and a half years in the TARDIS. I enjoyed it a lot at the age of nine, even without having seen the story that got us there.
This may not be the greatest of stories – I rather missed UNIT being able to let the Doctor take control of the quarry and the nuclear plant – but it is still rather fun. In particular, it’s unusual for the Doctor to be so thoroughly hoodwinked by the bad guy (or gal in this case), and I rather liked the setting of Kastria. Of course, everyone remembers this for Sarah’s departure, but I could entirely sympathise with her fury at getting hypnotised yet again (I haven’t counted, but it must have been roughly the fourth time in five stories).
The Hand of Fear is two decent but not terribly memorable stories joined together – the first two episodes being the Nunton nuclear plant invaded by an alien, and the second two being the Destiny of Kastria once Eldrad arises. I remember first time around being really shocked by the moment the female Eldrad is apparently crushed to death. Most of the story is however fairly unremarkable; what makes it linger in the memory is of course Sarah Jane’s farewell, scripted on the spot by Baker and Sladen – I found I had something in my eye while watching it.
Maybe I was just in a good mood – if memory serves me right, I watched it on the way home from Oslo – but I enjoyed it a lot this time round. Out of sequence, I did not mind the absence of UNIT so much; I did like the awful horror of the power station, with the director’s tense farewell phone call to his family; and Judith Parris really steals the show as the first version of Eldrad. Having said which, Elisabeth Sladen is on top form here, and Sarah really does get one of the best farewells of any of the classic companions, perhaps only Susan and Jo are in the same league. There’s a nice piece about the story from 2011 in the Guardian.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
Tom Abbott was being surprisingly co-operative. At first the Doctor’s reception had been rather hostile, but his insistence that no one blamed Abbott for the accident and that Sarah was comparatively unhurt, and above all his production of a set of impressive credentials from some secret Government establishment called UNIT, had all combined to put Abbott in a more friendly frame of mind. He had even agreed to move the old blue police box, in which the Doctor stored his equipment, to a safe part of the quarry, and look after it until the Doctor had time to arrange for its removal.
A pretty standard retelling of the TV original, without much added or taken away. The story line seemed slightly clearer on paper, but maybe I just was not concentrating sufficiently when I watched it. On the other hand, Dicks does not quite do justice to Sarah Jane’s farewell scene.
I think that’s not quite fair; as the co-creator of the UNIT years, Dicks does add a bit more material to link The Hand of Fear with continuity. But basically this is a book to reassure you that you can re-experience the TV serial, in an age before video recorders. You can get it here.
It did strike me that the cover, by Roy Knipe, has Sarah not in the Andy Pandy suit that she wears on screen, but in what is frankly a much more sensible blue outfit, though with the same red top and headscarf.
Left: book cover (scanned from my own much-loved copy, hence creases); right: TV series
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought; so I went back and re-listened to the 2013 Big Finish story Eldrad Must Die!, which I consumed shortly after its release but never got around to writing up here. It’s by Marc Platt, featuring the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough, and I’m afraid it’s not all that brilliant; poor old Turlough gets possessed as usual, and Stephen Thorne shows up as the male Eldrad and shouts. There’s a nod also to J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World. You can get it here.
More intriguingly, shortly before his death in 2021, Bob Baker (who with Dave Martin wrote the original story) published a sequel, Eldrad Must Live!, through Cutaway Comics, illustrated by Stephen B. Scott, Andrew Orton and Colin Brockhurst. This is the second frame of the third page:
As you can see they’ve caught Glyn Houston’s portrayal of the director rather well. It seems that Eldrad’s traces were not completely removed from the nuclear reactor, with predictable consequences, and a mysterious woman supposedly from the authorities shows up; however I’m afraid that the comic ends in mid-story, promising that it will be picked up in Cutaway Comics’ main sequence of Gods and Monsters; and this has not yet happened as far as I know. But you can get it here. I got only the PDF rather than the physical version, which comes with extras.
Simon Bucher-Jones has produced a really good Black Archive on this story, considering mainly the horror tropes. It’s quite long but has only four chapters.
The first and longest chapter, “Why Are Hands So Significant?”, looks at the history of the hand in art from the stone age onwards, and at the precedents for detached hands in horror films, looking at the obvious Addams Family, The Beast with Five Fingers and Carry On Screaming, but also a 1963 B-Movie called The Crawling Hand which features a detached body part from a spaceship explosion.
The second chapter, “‘Eldrad Must Live’: Three Types of Fear in The Hand of Fear“, points out that the hand itself doesn’t strangle anyone and isn’t bloodied; so why is it scary? Or even, is it scary? Bucher-Jones diverts via the Flixborough disaster to considering the story’s plot structure and how the narrative beats function. He’s not completely certain that it all works, but I’m more confident that it does.
The third chapter, “The Thing from the Aeons: Fossil Horror and The Shadow Out of Time“, looks at how ancient figures coming back to life are treated in Doctor Who, linking Eldrad with Omega, Davros and Rassilon. Its second paragraph is:
We discussed in Chapter 1 why the hand is a potent image in horror and fear, and in Chapter 2 how the ‘idea’ of Eldrad adds or transcends the physicality of that horror, being presented as a dark religion that afflicts and repurposes the mind, but there is a further aspect of the horror in The Hand of Fear in the first episode, which we have not yet touched on.
The fourth chapter, “Gender (and Other) Issues in The Hand of Fear“, briefly considers a) the fact that Judith Parrish’s female Eldrad is much better than Stephen Thorne’s male version; b) how the Hand could have landed relatively undamaged; c) the morality of the Doctor’s disposal of Eldrad; and d) the perfection of the final scene with Sarah’s departure.
An appendix, “Kastria and the Kastrians”, considers the difficulties of locating Kastria and of the Kastrians’ biology.
It’s a rare case among the Black Archives where I think I like the story more than the writer does, but in any case he does a good job and you can get it here.
David Fisher’s novelisation of his 1978 Doctor Who story, The Androids of Tara, has recently been published in paper form (it had been around as an audiobook for ages). It is a story which draws very strongly on the 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope,so I thought I should go back to the beginning and re-read that as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Prisoner of Zenda is:
I took an early luncheon, and, having bidden my kind entertainers farewell, promising to return to them on my way home, I set out to climb the hill that led to the Castle, and thence to the forest of Zenda. Half an hour’s leisurely walking brought me to the Castle. It had been a fortress in old days, and the ancient keep was still in good preservation and broad moat, which ran all round the old buildings, was a handsome modern chateau, erected by the last king, and now forming the country residence of the Duke of Strelsau. The old and the new portions were connected by a drawbridge, and this indirect mode of access formed the only passage between the old building and the outer world; but leading to the modern chateau there was a broad and handsome avenue. It was an ideal residence: when “Black Michael” desired company, he could dwell in his chateau; if a fit of misanthropy seized him, he had merely to cross the bridge and draw it up after him (it ran on rollers), and nothing short of a regiment and a train of artillery could fetch him out. I went on my way, glad that poor Black Michael, though he could not have the throne or the princess, had, at least, as fine a residence as any prince in Europe.
In case you don’t know, the story concerns one Rudolf Rassendyll, a minor English aristocrat, who visits the central European kingdom of Ruritania only to discover that he is an exact double of the new king. The new king gets drugged and kidnapped by his half-brother, who is scheming to take the throne, and Rudolf is co-opted to pretend to be the monarch, through the coronation, and courting the lovely princess Flavia. There’s lots of exciting sword-fighting and derring-do, especially around the castle of Zenda where the real king is being held, and the half-brother’s henchmen include an evil Belgian. It’s a slightly deeper book than most readers may think, with reflections on dynastic duty and honour, and it’s a cracking good and short read. You can get it here.
I remember hugely enjoying The Androids of Tara when it was first broadcast in later 1978; I would have been eleven. When I came back to it in 2008, having read The Prisoner of Zenda in the meantime, I wrote:
Almost all of The Androids of Tara is basically a lift from The Prisoner of Zenda – Romana actually finds the fourth segment of the Key to Time, the ostensible point of the plot, in the first episode while the Doctor is off fishing. But it is all great fun – Mary Tamm gorgeous as ever in all her parts (ie all her roles), the villainous count yelling “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!”
I noticed that Declan Mulholland, playing the Count’s sidekick Till, did so with a marked Ulster accent. I checked back on his one previous appearance in Doctor Who, in The Sea Devils, but his character is too busy dying in agony to really display much of an accent there.
When I came back to it in 2011 for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Androids of Tara is one of the most shamelessly derivative Who stories ever, so obviously ripped off from The Prisoner of Zenda that apparently even some of the lines are the same. But it’s done with great style and affection, with particularly the guest cast enthusiastically in it – most especially Peter Jeffrey’s evil Count Grendel, but the others as well (and a special shout-out for Declan Mulholland’s Ulster/Mummerset accent as Till). In a season where every story is a quest for a segment, it’s refreshing to have the segment found in the first ten minutes and then get on with the planetary intrigue. Mary Tamm doesn’t have to do much as Princess Strella, which again is a sign of the times.
One minor casting point is that this is the last of Cyril Shapps’ four appearances in Doctor Who, playing the Archimandrite this time, and the only occasion on which his character is not killed off.
On reflection, the story’s relationship with The Prisoner of Zenda is a little more complex than I said in either of my previous write-ups. The Doctor and Romana land in the middle of a Zenda-like plot, but take it in some different directions (and some similar). Rather than the central character being the King’s double, it is his sidekick who is the princess’s double; but the doubles double up thanks to the android theme, with Mary Tamm playing four different roles in the end. Several of the set-piece scenes are indeed lifted directly from Anthony Hope, but with variations – the drugged drink combines two slightly different events from the book; K9 intervenes directly to assist both getting into the Pavilion and getting out of the castle. (In fact we see more aggressive action from K9 here than usual.) Contra what is sometimes asserted, I don’t think any of David Fisher’s lines is a direct lift from Anthony Hope. But it is recognisably the same story, rewritten to have the Doctor, Romana, K9 and android duplicates.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation is:
‘Castle Gracht, my dear,’ said Count Grendel proudly. ‘Ancient home of the Grendels of Gracht.’
It is delightful that we now have Fisher’s own version of the story, filled out in a number of directions. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The reason for this was that Madame Lamia had become interested in the crystal that the stranger had been found with. Lamia had broken two diamond-tipped drills on it and not even scratched the surface. Yet this strange woman, who was the spitting image of Princess Strella, kept insisting it was quartz. But it was like no quartz that Madame Lamia had ever seen. However, her concentration was shattered by the Count’s entrance at full gallop roaring like an angry bull.
As previously mentioned, this is actually the 2022 print version of a 2012 audiobook, slightly adapted for the page (as Steve Cole explains in an endnote). It is thoroughly satisfying. The social structure and recent history of Tara are explained in depth, if still not completely believably, and it’s very clear that the relationship between Count Grendel and his engineer Madame Lamia is sexually as well as economically exploitative. The whole thing feels very much bulked up rather than padded out, and I’m very glad that the BBC asked Fisher to have another go at it before it was too late. You can get it here.
For fun I went and reread Paul Cornell’s sequel, “The Trials of Tara”, which you can find in Decalog 2: Lost Property, a 1995 anthology of short stories which you can get here. I didn’t especially call attention to this story when I first read the book, but it’s an entertaining mashup of the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield returning to Tara to find that things have gone wrong in their absence, with that notorious android, the Candyman, also turning up, and the whole thing told in (more or less) iambic pentameter as a stage script, with elements of pantomime (Benny cross-dresses, the villains are appropriately villainous). The third scene opens as follows:
Scene 3. Another clearing, with TARDIS
Enter the Doctor and Bernice.
Doctor: This is the sweet and charming planet Tara. Home to android smiths. And nobles. On which I own a field or two of land Having earned it. In royal serrvice. My intent is to visit my old friend Prince Reynart, and his princess bride Strella, Who did resemble my friend Romana.
It’s actually really amusing, and I should have paid more attention on first reading it; it was a nice chaser to the three books. I don’t know of any other Taran spinoff fiction.
(This week is going to be all Doctor Who blog posts. You have been warned.)
First and second frames of third part:
I’m getting to the end of the Titan Comics series about the Tenth Doctor, with companions Gabby and Cindy from New York and also Noob, an incarnation of the Osiran deity Anubis; just one more to go after this.
I thought this was rather good; the Doctor leaves his companions in 2009 Willesden, where they befriend Sarah Jane Smith, and they separately explore a kind of meditation on the Doctor / companion relationship, with some lovely art and a couple more cameos from other characters from the TV series. You can get it here.
