Blackpool Revisited, by John Collier

Posted on 6 February 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

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).

Doctor Who: A Fairytale Life, by Lilah Sturges, Kelly Yates and Brian Shearer

Posted on 25 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third part:

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.

Emotional Chemistry, by Simon Forward

Posted on 18 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

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.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard

Posted on 9 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold (and Malcolm Hulke)

Posted on 28 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Anyway, you can get it here.

The Fourteenth Doctor novelisations: The Star Beast (Gary Russell), Wild Blue Yonder (Mark Morris), The Giggle (James Goss)

Posted on 26 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast is Gary Russell’s second novelisation of a Doctor Who TV story, his first being of the TV Movie from 1996, 27 years ago. (He also did four Sarah Jane novelisations, and much else.) The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

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.

The novelisation of Wild Blue Yonder is by Marc Morris, who has done a bunch of other Doctor Who books and plays, some of which I liked more than others. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Brate”) is:

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:

Post by @nwbrux

View on Threads

So, a good closing out of the brief Fourteenth Doctor era. (Though I haven’t yet read the DWM comic strip.)

The Church on Ruby Road

Posted on 25 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al

Posted on 21 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame from third part:

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!

Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle; the Fourteenth Doctor ends. (And the Celestial Toymaker)

Posted on 10 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast

Posted on 25 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Doom’s Day: 24 Doctor Who stories in different media, of which less than half feature the Doctor

Posted on 24 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

Dalek, by Billy Seguire (and Robert Shearman)

Posted on 23 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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:

I hugely enjoyed the actual episode:

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.)

I’ve watched it a couple of times since, including the lockdown group watch in 2020, and enjoyed it every time.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1255921442488754183

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.

When I first read it two years ago, I wrote:

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.

The Hand of Fear (TV, novelisation, Black Archive); also, Eldrad Must Die!; also, Eldrad Must Live!

Posted on 22 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

When I rewatched it in 2008, I wrote:

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).

For my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:

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.

When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:

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.

The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope; The Androids of Tara, by Terrance Dicks and David Fisher; and a play by Paul Cornell

Posted on 21 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.’

When I reread this in 2008, I wrote:

Another standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment.

Not much more to say. You can get it here.

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.

Facing Fate: Vortex Butterflies, by Nick Abadzis et al

Posted on 20 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

(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.

Doctor Who novels, as recommended on LibraryThing and Goodreads, part 2

Posted on 19 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

See previous post covering the Sarah Jane books, also Class, the three Companions novels, Missing Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, and the Sixth, Thirteenth, Fifth, Eighth and Twelfth Doctor books.

Seventh Doctor novelisations and New Adventures

The top Seventh Doctor book on Goodreads is the second in the series of 74 New Adventures published by Virgin during the Wilderness Years, starting with Seven and Ace and expanding to include other companions, notably Bernice Summerfield. Timewyrm: Exodus shows veteran Terrance Dicks on especially good form, taking the Doctor and Ace to a Hitler Won timeline in the early 1950s. You can get it here.

The top New Adventure on Goodreads is Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, still the only novel on which a TV adventure for a later Doctor was based. You can get it here.

My own favourite of the New Adventures is the Sherlock Holmes / Cthulhu mashup All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane. You can get it here.

The top Seventh Doctor novelisation on both LibraryThing and Goodreads is Ben Aaronovitch’s adaptation of his TV story Remembrance of the Daleks. You can get it here. My own favourite is Doctor Who: Dragonfire, by Ian Briggs, which you can get here.

Third Doctor

The top Third Doctor book on LibraryThing is Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Day of the Daleks, definitely one of his better books, in which freedom fighters from the future attempt to infiltrate the present day to cause a strategic assassination. The book was one that I pored over as a kid, and inevitably when I watched the original TV story I was disappointed. You can get it here.

My favourite Third Doctor novelisation is Malcolm Hulke’s treatment of his own script for Jo Grant’s last story, The Green Death, which you can get here.

The top Third Doctor novel on Goodreads is from the BBC’s Past Doctor Adventures, Last of the Gadarene by Mark Gatiss (one of the few people who has both appeared in the show and written for it). It’s a story set in the UNIT era with aliens infiltrating a village fete. You can get it here.

Second Doctor

The top Second Doctor novel on Goodreads is a 2012 book by renowned hard sf author Stephen Baxter, probably the most prominent writer to top any of these individual categories for sole authorship of a novel (but see below for short fiction and joint authorship). The Wheel of Ice takes the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to a human colony in the outer solar system, a classic Troughton-era base under siege, with added marital discord and stroppy teenagers. There are ancient, weird aliens, and a mystery stretching across millions of years, which entirely convince the reader that this is a Stephen Baxter novel. There are also various pleasing references both to Who continuity and to Baxter’s other work, none of them crucial to enjoying the book, which is also probably my favourite Second Doctor book. You can get it here.

(Though I must point out that “The Wearing of the Green” is not a Jacobite tune. Wrong island, and more than half a century out.)

The top Second Doctor book on LibraryThing is the first Troughton-era novelisation published, Doctor Who and the Cybermen, adapting the TV story The Moonbase. I don’t rate it as highly as The Wheel of Ice, but you can get it here.

50th anniversary e-shorts

I have been tweaking these individual categories for each Doctor to look at novels only, because in most cases the numbers are hugely distorted by the short stories published individually and electronically by Puffin in 2013 for the 50th anniversary, many of which are more popular than any of the novels featuring those Doctors. At the top of that list, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is the one that came out the week of the anniversary itself, ten years ago this month – Nothing O’Clock by Neil Gaiman, which takes the Eleventh Doctor and Amy to a creepy house with shades of Coraline and Sandman. I like it a lot too, and you can get it here.

The other one I particularly liked in this sequence was Michael Scott’s Second Doctor story The Nameless City, which nicely salutes the Cthulhu mythos. You can get it here, and you can get a collection of all of the stories (now increased to 13) here.

War Doctor

There is one novel featuring the War Doctor, as played by John Hurt; it is Engines of War by George Mann. I didn’t find it much to my own taste, but you can get it here. The Big Finish War Doctor series is much better.

First Doctor

The first and (IMHO) the best of all the old Target novelisations is also top of both the LibraryThing and Goodreads charts: originally published in 1964 as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, now generally just known as Doctor Who and the Daleks, the novelisation of the second broadcast Doctor Who TV story, and the one which made the show such a success; later also made into a cinema film starring Peter Cushing.

David Whitaker, who adapted the book from Terry Nation’s script, rewrote it as if it was the very first of the Doctor’s adventures, told entirely from the point of view of Ian Chesterton, a teacher who becomes the Doctor’s companion along with granddaughter Susan and her tutor Barbara. There’s lots of lovely extra detail given to the story of the Daleks and Thals on Skaro, and the Daleks themselves are more interesting than they have often been since. It’s a firm favourite of mine, and you can get it here.

Torchwood

There are 19 original Torchwood novels, and most of them are pretty good. Top of the charts for both LibraryThing and Goodreads is the first in the sequence, Another Life by Peter Anghelides. There is lots of good Torchwood stuff, a body-hopping alien, a spaceship which endangers Cardiff, a former lover of one of the team (Owen in this case), all against a gloomy backdrop of awful weather littered with variously dead bodies. I like it too and you can get it here.

Having said that, my personal favourite of the Torchwood books is the much later First Born by James Goss, who I find one of the best Whoniverse writers currently working. It’s a kind of prequel to Miracle Day, with Gwen and Rhys in hiding, and weird children being weird. You can get it here.

Eleventh Doctor

The top Eleventh Doctor novel on Goodreads is Touched by an Angel, by Jonathan Morris. It is a story of car crashes and mixed-up timelines with the addition of the Weeping Angels, who both create the possibility of temporal paradox and hope to feed off it. Morris does a beautiful job of conveying the history of the relationship between the car crash victim and her husband which is central to the narrative, and the Angels also come across superbly. It also has the Doctor, Rory and Amy. You can get it here.

The top Eleventh Doctor book on LibraryThing is The Silent Stars Go By, by Dan Abnett, which is also my favourite of the original novels, a Christmassy story of a generations-long terraforming plan. You can get it here. But I like Steven Moffat’s novelisation of the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, even more; you can get it here.

Ninth Doctor

The third highest rated Doctor Who book on LibraryThing, and fourth highest on Goodreads, and top Ninth Doctor book on both systems, is Gareth Roberts’ Only Human, which I think benefited from being one of three released in September 2005, when people were starting to get thirsty for new Who material.

It is largely set in Bromley, where the Doctor and Rose get involved with Neanderthals, local homo sapiens, and humans who have travelled there from the far future, all under threat from ambitious monsters and monstrous ambition. Meanwhile, in the early 21st century, Jack Harkness is helping a displaced Neanderthal settle into contemporary Bromley. There is a certain amount of playing the situation for laughs, but also a bit of exploration of what it is that makes us human. You can get it here.

It’s my own favourite Ninth Doctor novel too, and it’s a shame that the author himself has turned out to be an intolerant bigot.

Fourth Doctor

The top Fourth Doctor book by ownership, and second highest of all Doctor Who books, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is another by Gareth Roberts, his 2012 novelisation of the unshown Fourth Doctor TV story Shada from Douglas’ Adams script featuroing the Doctor, Romana, K9 and Cambridge and an ancient Time Lord secret.

I enjoyed it; I wrote at the time that Roberts had teased out threads of narrative left him by Adams, thickened them up and knitted them into a warm colourful and much longer scarf of story. The means and motivation of Skagra and Salyavin are fully explained. In addition, we have the extra romantic depth we had always hoped must be there between Clare and Chris, nicely contrasted with the relationship between the Doctor and Romana. You can get it here.

I must add that I enjoyed even more the novelisation of another Douglas Adams script, The Pirate Planet, this time by James Goss (who is one of my favourite Who writers anyway) which you can get here; and I retain affection for Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, which you can get here, and which is the top traditional novelisation on Goodreads; and his Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, the top traditional novelisation on LibraryThing, which you can get here.

Tenth Doctor: The Winner

The top Doctor Who book by ownership, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is Jacqueline Rayner’s The Stone Rose. It was the very first Tenth Doctor novel to be published, in April 2006 just before the start of Series 2, and was then republished in 2015 which will have given it an extra boost.

It features the Tenth Doctor and Rose with Micky and Jackie, sorting out the mystery of a statue of Rose dating from Roman times in the British Museum. Solving the mystery takes a certain amount of timewarping, mostly during the reign of Hadrian, and dealing with an advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. You can get it here.

My own favourite Tenth Doctor novel is Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell, with the Doctor, Donna, Wilf and an old enemy in contemporary London. You can get it here.

Conclusion

I hope that this has been interesting, and will encourage you to look out for more Doctor Who books by more writers. The late great Terrance Dicks has the most books by far on my lists, but I’ll always look out for more by James Goss, Steve Cole, Paul Cornell, Justin Richards and Jacqueline Rayner; and indeed most of the others. The core of Doctor Who will always be TV dramas, but books, audios, games and especially comics (not mentioned here) have a venerable history with the franchise as well. Go, and enjoy them.

Doctor Who novels, as recommended on LibraryThing and Goodreads, part 1

Posted on 18 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

It may not have escaped your notice that the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who is in a few days. This blog is primarily a book blog, so I’ve done a bit of analysis of which Doctor Who books are particularly well known on the two main online book catalogue sites – LibraryThing and Goodreads. Personally I remain a LibraryThing loyalist, but I have to recognise the reality that Goodreads’ user base is at least an order of magnitude higher. I’ve looked at the statistics of the various series of Doctor Who books on LibraryThing and Goodreads, splitting differences by multiplying together the number of owners of the book registered on LibraryThing, and the number of Goodreads users who have rated it (Goodreads also allows you to see the number of users who say they own the book, but it’s trickier to get to). In a fair number of cases, the same book comes out on top, but there are differences as well, and in every category I’m also giving my own personal favourite, which is usually different again.

A lot of western Whovians are unaware of the full variety of the runs of novels and other written fiction related to the show, but I was struck by how much the New Who books matter to the Chinese fans who I met in Chengdu. Here I’m listing the most obscure categories first, and the most widely owned and rated book of all Doctor Who literature (which is the same on both systems) at the end. What book is that? You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see, because this post got too long for one day…

The Sarah Jane Adventures

The much-missed Elisabeth Sladen starred in three and a half series of the spinoff Sarah Jane Adventures before her untimely death in 2012. The BBC took an interesting approach to linked publications: some of the SJA episodes, especially from the early seasons, were novelised from the scripts; but there were also a number of stories released only as audiobooks, and it is the second one of these, The Glittering Storm by Stephen Cole, that has the top rating on Goodreads and on the two systems combined.

Like most of the Sarah Jane Adventures, it’s about alien intrusions into our world, this time featuring respectable ladies engaging in burglary. It was the second of the audios to come out and must have benefited from marketing to the Goodreads audience demographic. You can get it here, but it’s not my favourite among the audios (which are generally one of the better is least well-known series of Who publications); I recommend The Thirteenth Stone, by Justin Richards, and Deadly Download, by Jason Arnopp.

The most popular of the novelisations on LibraryThing, and on the two systems combined, is the very first, Invasion of the Bane, written by veteran Who writer Terrance Dicks, who was the script editor for the show during the Pertwee years in the early 1970s. It’s a straightforward screen-to-page exercise, with the character who was axed after the pilot episode somewhat underplayed in the book. You can get it here. Often the first in a sequence of books bubbles to the top of reader ratings.

The top novelisation on Goodreads is the last of them, Death of the Doctor, by Gary Russell, which features a guest appearance from Matt Smith’s character and also from Katy Manning’s Jo Grant/Jo Jones. Again, multi-Doctor stories, which this almost is, tend to do well, as we shall see. You can get it here.

My own favourite is the late great Rupert Laight’s novelisation of the first regular episode, Revenge of the Slitheen. You can get it here.

Class

The 2016 spinoff Class, set in Coal Hill school where the show started in 1963 (and where the Twelfth Doctor later worked as a janitor) ran for only eight episodes, but had three spinoff novels as well, and a fair number of Big Finish audios reuniting some or all of the TV cast. Of the three novels, the top-ranked on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Stone House, by A.K. Benedict, a fairly straightforward haunted-house story that I think has a slightly better cover than the other two and maybe enjoyed greater sales. You can get it here.

My own favourite of the three was the first, a social media tale called What She Does Next Will Astound You, by James Goss, who is one of my favourite Who writers, always delivering really good quality stories, but has never written for TV. You can get it here. (The third book is Joyride, by Guy Adams. Complete the set if you like.)

The Companions of Doctor Who

Another long-forgotten set of three spinoff books still has more traction than either the Sarah Jane stories or the Class novelisations: they were published in 1986 and 1987, and feature recently departed companions from the TV show without the Doctor. The top novel of the three on LibraryThing, in second place on Goodreads by a hair, is Harry Sullivan’s War by Ian Marter, who as an actor had actually played Harry Sullivan in the first Tom Baker season and wrote a number of novelisations for Doctor Who and other franchises. I wasn’t wowed, but you can get it here.

Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, by Tony Attwood, is a shade ahead of the other two on LibraryThing, probably because it was the first published. Turlough ends up at the centre of a galactic conspiracy where the villain’s name is Rehctaht, which tells you all you need to know. You can get it here.

Surprisingly the novelisation of an actual TV story, K9 and Company by Terence Dudley, fails to score top place on either system; I think it’s much the best of the three, and you can get it here.

Sixth Doctor

The top Sixth Doctor novel on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is one of the BBC-published Past Doctor Adventures from 1999, reissued with a new cover in 2013: Players by the veteran Terrance Dicks. He has the Sixth Doctor and Peri encountering Winston Churchill at various points in his career, with a look-in from the Second Doctor and Jamie. It’s the first of three books by Dicks featuring the Players, the other two being Endgame (Eighth Doctor) and World Game (Second Doctor). You can get it here.

The top Sixth Doctor novelisation on both LibraryThing and Goodreads is also my own favourite Sixth Doctor book, the novelisation of The Two Doctors, by Robert Holmes. You can get it here. If I am not allowed a multi-Doctor story, I’ll take the Telos novella Shell Shock by Simon A. Forward, which you can get here.

Thirteenth Doctor

One of my personal frustrations with the Chibnall era is that little attention was paid to spinoff material beyond the TV programme itself. The last few Doctor Who annuals are by far the least impressive in sixty years. There are a grand total of ten books featuring the Thirteenth Doctor; there are thirty-two featuring the Sixth. She has been the least well served of any of the Doctor’s incarnations.

LibraryThing users, Goodreads users and I myself all agree that the top of the ten is Juno Dawson’s The Good Doctor, in which the Doctor and friends return to a world centuries after their adventure there, to discover that their first visit has become the founding myth of the dominant oppressive religious cult, with Graham remembered as the Doctor, the Doctor herself largely forgotten, and their own past used to justify slavery. It is very well done and packs a lot of action and thought into 227 pages. You can get it here.

Missing Adventures

Virgin published 34 Missing Adventures of Doctor Who between 1994 and 199. These were the first original novels featuring a Doctor other than the current incarnation (at the time Sylverster McCoy’s Seven), during the period when Virgin also had the New Adventures franchise (which we’ll get to in due course). The first published of these is also top by a decent margin on both Goodreads and LibraryThing; Goth Opera by Paul Cornell (who we’ll meet again), a sort of sequel to the Fourth Doctor TV story State of Decay involving the Fifth Doctor, Tegan Nyssa, Romana, vampires and cricket in Australia. You can get it here.

As is often the case, I differ from the conventional wisdom, and my own favourite of the Missing Adventures is Evolution by John Peel, a glorious Victorian romp featuring the young Arthur Conan Doyle and an even younger Rudyard Kipling, combined with affectionate references to Horror of Fang Rock and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. You can get it here.

Fifth Doctor

The top novel on both Goodreads and LibraryThing set during the Fifth Doctor era is one of a number of multi-Doctor stories that will be on this list, Doctor Who: The Five Doctors, Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of the 20th anniversary TV show in 1983 (which he also wrote). In case you have forgotten, the Fifth, Second, Third and an ersatz First Doctor join forces to defeat various baddies on Gallifrey. It was all pulled together rapidly, and if memory serves correctly was actually published before the TV episode was broadcast. You can get it here, and rather cheaper here as part of the new Terrance Dicks collection.

Purists may grumble that they want to know which novel featuring only the Fifth Doctor is top. On Goodreads, it’s the novelisation of his first story, Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by the TV story’s writer Christopher H. Bidmead, which you can get here; on LibraryThing, it’s Goth Opera, already described.

Personally my favourite Fifth Doctor novel is The Sands of Time by Justin Richards, a sequel to Pyramids of Mars with a nod also to Black Orchid. You can get it here.

Eighth Doctor Adventures

The BBC published no less than 73 Eighth Doctor novels between 1996 and 2005, and on Goodreads the most-rated of them is the very first, The Eight Doctors, once again by Terrance Dicks, which sets up the character and new companion Sam for many future adventures. You can get it here. If again you complain that you’re not counting multi-Doctor stories, the next on Gooreads is the second Eighth Doctor novel, Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, which again brings back the vampires to contemporary San Francisco. You can get it here.

The top Eighth Doctor Adventure on LibraryThing is EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner, which features a murderous amusement park, lots of mad alien stuff and entertaining misinterpretations of Earth history. I enjoyed it and you can get it here.

None of the Eighth Doctor novels is a standout favourite for me as with some of the other categories, but I want to call your attention to Escape Velocity by Colin Brake, set largely in Brussels and featuring the Atomium on the front cover; at one point the Doctor and friends run past the building where I worked between 2008 and 2014. You can get it here.

Past Doctor Adventures

At the same time as the BBC were publishing the Eighth Doctor Adventures, they brought out an even longer series of novels featuring the first seven Doctors. Top of these on Goodreads is Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole, taking the First Doctor, Ben and Polly to an asteroid where there is also a sequence of mysterious murders taking place. Cards on the table: I personally didn’t much like this one, but you can get it here.

I liked much more the top novel of this sequence with LibraryThing readers, Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris, which successfully channels the glory days of the Tom Baker / Lalla Ward relationship. You can get it here.

Again, I don’t have a standout favourite from this run, but I’d call your attention to another First Doctor novel and another Fourth Doctor novel. Salvation by Steve Lyons brings the Doctor, Steven and Dodo to New York where they encounter angels and Dodo’s accent gets changed. You can get it here. Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore brings the Doctor and Leela to Rapa Nui / Easter Island and asks some interesting questions about colonialism. You can get it here.

Twelfth Doctor

Goodreads and LibraryThing users concur in that the most popular Twelfth Doctor book on both systems is Silhouette, by Justin Richards. His name has already been mentioned, but I want to emphasise that he has written more Doctor Who books than anyone except the late Terrance Dicks, and I think may well overhaul him if given a chance by the BBC. This particular novel is a fun reunion of the Doctor and Clara with the Paternoster Gang (Madam Vastra, Jenny and Strax) investigating a peculiar series of murders. (I’m noticing that this is a trope that pops up more than once in popular Who novels; and indeed TV stories.) You can get it here.

I too enjoyed it, but I’m also going to call your attention to Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light, Rona Munro’s novelisation of her own TV story, which gives the characters and setting (Roman era Scotland, menaced by a transdimensional alien) a lot more detail. You can get it here.

Tomorrow we’ll cover the Seventh, Second, First, Eleventh, Ninth, Fourth and Tenth Doctors, with a side order of Torchwood, the War Doctor and the 50th Anniversary short stories.

The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, by James F. McGrath

Posted on 9 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

This was the closing story of Jodie Whittaker’s first season as the Doctor. On first watching, I’m afraid that I was unforgiving.

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos: (See also Matt Hills at DWR, Matthew Kilburn at STT)
It’s not unusual for Doctor Who to muff the final story of the year, both in Old Who (The Time Monster in 1972, The Armageddon Factor in 1979) and New Who (Last of the Time Lords in 2007, Dark Water/Death in Heaven in 2014; not to mention End of Days, the appalling last episode of the first season of Torchwood, also in 2007). It’s still disappointing when it happens, though, and I felt that the final episode had a particularly complex setup (the Ux requiring considerable suspension of disbelief) which then failed to pay off emotionally or even dramatically – it seemed rather bathetic to lock the villain in a box from which the next space tourist will surely release him. Bradley Walsh’s Graham did get a bit of closure, but at the end of it all I didn’t really feel I understood the point of the whole journey. Maybe things will become clearer on New Year’s Day.

I rewatched it again for this post, and felt even less engaged, taking it on its own rather than as the last in a sequence of ten episodes. I could not really get into the plot; and to take a small but important point, the lighting of the whole story was dim and dull, as if we weren’t really expected to pay much attention.

When Twitter user @Heraldofcreatio ran a poll to rank all 296 Doctor Who episodes to that date, The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos ranked dead last, behind even The Twin Dilemma. I think that is a little unfair – there are several stories that I like less from both Old and New Who. But I rank it pretty low.

#DoctorWhoRankings

#296 The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos

It seems the worst crime you can commit in DW fandom is deliver an anti-climax there are many wrong turns here and many story elements felt they had been done better before but is it the worst ever episode? You think so… pic.twitter.com/ZrzrecNNYS
— Herald of Creation (@Heraldofcreatio) July 19, 2021

James F. McGrath is a theologian, and has chosen to take this Black archive as an opportunity to grind some personal axes against the yielding structure of a not very good Doctor Who episode. The result, as sometimes (but rarely) happens, is a book constructed to defend a not terribly good story by linking it to the writer’s personal interests. McGrath argues that The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos is making some terribly important theological points; I would feel more kindly towards the book if he admitted that it does not make them terribly well. (You’ll have deduced that this is not my favourite Black Archive.)

A longer than usual introduction places The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos as the final story in the Thirteenth Doctor’s first season.

The first substantial chapter, “What’s in a Name?”, asks whether it’s “the planet Ranskoor av Kolos” or “the planet of Ranskoor av Kolos”, and wonders how the Ux actually relate to it.

The second chapter, “The Ux’s (Misplaced) Faith”, tries to disentangle what the Ux understand by a Creator and how that relates to Tzim-Sha.

The third chapter, “Tzim-Sha’s (Delusions of) Godhood”, looks at whether or not Tzim-Sha is a god. Its second paragraph is:

By the time Tzim-Sha and the Doctor meet again after a period of thousands of years, Tzim-Sha has had ample opportunity to develop a plan for revenge and to become powerful. He tells the Doctor, ‘You have made me a god’, in a manner that may be intended to taunt, but also seems to reflect a genuine belief. Previously, we considered the basis for the Doctor’s insistence that Tzim-Sha is a false god. Here we can approach the matter from the other side and explore what framework would allow a particular being to think of themself, and be thought of by others, as a ‘god’. The category of ‘god’ has traditionally encompassed entities that are similar to what Doctor Who depicts as powerful alien entities. It is a lack of familiarity with humanity’s many polytheistic traditions that probably accounts for the facile dismissal of the notion that ‘god’ could be an accurate label for such entities. Divinity has historically been defined in terms of power in many cultures, and that attribute is to the fore here², as evinced in Tzim-Sha’s words:

‘It has taken thousands of years. Every fragment of scientific understanding the Stenza ever possessed, allied to the impossible power of the Ux. You will see, Doctor. I must be a god. I have the powers of one… This shrine is the weapon. The Ux worked so hard to keep me alive. And they’re right to worship me. I am unstoppable…’

² On power and divinity see Smuts, Aaron, ‘The Little People’; Litwa, M David, Iesus Deus, pp58, 80.

The fourth chapter, “The Doctor’s (Flexible) Creeds”, looks at the Doctor’s own ethical framework when challenged by a Creator figure.

The fifth chapter, “Graham’s Devotion (to Grace)”, looks further at the Doctor’s ethical framework for dealing out judgement (to Tzim-Sha, the Daleks, the Family of Blood, etc).

The brief conclusion, “Travel Hopefully”, is succinct enough and true enough to the rest of the book to be worth quoting in full:

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos provides wonderful food for thought. The Doctor’s experience as a student and as an educator has sometimes briefly come to the fore in the plot of previous episodes. Here, however, we actually see the Doctor’s core convictions and pedagogical strategies articulated, exposed, and tested in a far more explicit and sustained manner than is typical. The episode thus provides a wonderful starting point either for wrestling with contemporary issues in the real world using Doctor Who as a base, or for exploring faith and morals in this fictional universe, which may or may not be in some sense ‘divine’ in the perception of at least some of those who inhabit it. To end with some sort of definitive summary or answer would be at odds with the ending of the episode. Indeed, it would clash with it in an extremely jarring manner. This study of major themes in the episode – such as faith, godhood, family, ethics, and power – does not grasp everything the episode has to offer for careful viewers. It points to important questions and invites you on a journey.

Keep looking. Travel hopefully. Doctor Who will surprise you… constantly.

Completists will want this, and perhaps those who want to find links between Doctor Who and theology as well, but I felt that it stretched its analysis rather further than the material warranted.

Earthshock, by Eric Saward, Ian Marter and Brian J. Robb

Posted on 7 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I vividly remember watching Earthshock on first broadcast in 1982, at the age of fourteen, and, like many viewers, being pleasantly thrilled by the appearance of the Cybermen in the first episode, and then traumatised by the demise of Adric in the last. This was only a few months after Blake’s 7 ended with the entire team being mown down by the bad guys. BBC science fiction was getting brutal. (It always had been, but it was possible to pretend otherwise.)

When I rewatched it for the first time in 25 years in 2007, I wrote:

As it happens I’ve just been reading Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles on the first two Cyberman stories, The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, and it’s interesting that Cyberman stories seem particularly lacking on plot plausibility or scientific credibility (particularly as the scientific credentials of their co-creator Kit Pedler were widely touted by the BBC). I think the Cybermen are particularly naff here (but I haven’t seen Silver Nemesis, so there may be worse in store for me). Their plan makes no sense at all, they are less strong than their android slaves, and their failure to shoot all their enemies when they have the chance is totally illogical. In addition the Cyber-controller comes very close to displaying emotions (“Excellent!”).

Another annoying thing about the story is the way in which the troopers and scientists all merrily crowd into the TARDIS, which has normally been the private space of the Doctor and companions (indeed, we see Adric’s own teenage private space in the first episode – he likes decorating it a lot more than Susan did). Once Cybermen start wandering all round the TARDIS shooting people (like the unfortunate Professor Kyle, played by Clare Clifford who was later to try and seduce Anna/Daniela Nardini in This Life – and wouldn’t you?) it almost feels like just deserts for being over-hospitable to armed earthlings. Earlier Doctors would never have allowed it. (When Salamander violates TARDIS sanctity in The Enemy of the World, he gets sucked into the vortex.)

One good thing about the story, and a striking contrast with The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, is the number of women in leadership roles – Professor Kyle, Beryl Reid as starship captain, plus numerous others. And unlike some commentators I thought both Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton turned in good performances in their roles.

I remember at the time, when the first episode was broadcast, being slightly startled by Adric suddenly developing a personality after a year and a half of appearing without one. Of course this was build-up to him being killed off in the last episode, and that sequence, the credits being rolled in silence over a picture of his gold star for mathematical excellence, is still effective now; shame they didn’t spend more time on building up the character over the previous months.

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

Earthshock is a different matter [to Black Orchid]. It has brilliant bits and terrible bits. The bits I don’t like: the adolescent spat between Adric and the Doctor, a bolted on bit of inconsistent characterisation to make us feel more interested in Adric before he dies; the androids, which make no sense; the Cybermen’s plan, which makes no sense at all (though that at least is traditional for Cyber-stories); the Cyber-Controller’s emotional glee; the Tardis becoming not only a taxi but a battleground, which runs against all the history of pre-JNT Who. (I’m glad that New Who has kept it as a place of refuge on the whole.)

But there are a couple of brilliant bits as well. The Cybermen’s watching of clips from The Tenth Planet, The Wheel in Space and Revenge of the Cybermen is actually rather reassuring that this is still Doctor Who, despite the full turnover of cast in the last year or so and the new style of the JNT era, and equally reassuring that these Cybermen (despite the personal peculiarities of the Cyber-Controller) are the same as the ones we saw before – this is the first returning villain who actually looks the same as last time they appeared since Destiny of the Daleks two years ago (the Master doesn’t count). It may be a new-look show but it is still our show.

The other brilliant bit is the killing off of Adric. Purely in dramatic and strategic terms, it’s a masterstroke; this may still be our show, but we shouldn’t think it is safe any more. One of the weaknesses of the end of the first (but not the second or third) series of Torchwood was that we rather felt that the regular characters who were killed would probably come back, and to be honest I feel that way a bit about the current Who season; but from this day on one could never feel that about Old Who. Yes, of course we’d been there before in The Daleks’ Master Plan; but one can’t really call Sara Kingdom or Katarina (and I’d argue for Bret Vyon to be in the same category) long-established characters, and anyway that story had been broadcast before many first-time watchers of Earthshock (myself included) were even born. One can forgive Earthshock a lot for its dramatic success of killing Adric.

Poor old Adric, anyway. At the time I didn’t deeply dislike him, but there was certainly a feeling that the Tardis was too full – I had never seen the older stories with more than two companions, and the dynamics were unfamiliar to me, and frankly not all that well worked out. It got a bit tedious that in a majority of his stories, Adric appears to defect to the bad guys, particularly since Waterhouse’s acting abilities really weren’t up to it, but with three companions there’s not a lot else for them to do. He does have one or two good moments – his awe of Tom Baker in Logopolis (definitely not reciprocated) and his final words (which only on this time of watching did I realise referred to his inability to return home). But he will be well down most people’s list of memorable companions, apart from the manner of his passing. (I do recommend the Big Finish audio, The Boy That Time Forgot, where Andrew Sachs plays an older insane Adric who is taking over the Earth with mutant scorpions. Peter Davsion comments, “So imagine my surprise when I saw that they had brought Adric back, only this time he is being played by … an actor!”)

Rewatching it this time, I did feel a real thrill when the archive footage of previous Doctors was shown, and the ending retains its tension even if you know what is going to happen. But I was even more annoyed than on three previous viewings by the Tardis’s role as killing ground, and by the narrative disconnection; what the heck are the Cybermen doing in the space freighter in the first place? Still, the two high points do outweigh the negatives. Just.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation, by Ian “Harry Sullivan” Marter, is:

The Doctor stopped in the entrance. ‘Wait. I have a feeling we shouldn’t go any further,’ he warned them.

I did a long piece on Ian Marter’s novelisations for Strange Horizons long ago, and said this about Doctor Who – Earthshock:

The 1982 Fifth Doctor story Earthshock famously, shockingly, killed off the Doctor’s companion Adric in battle with the Cybermen. While the descriptions in early chapters of people being melted into puddles of liquid by androids seem like yet another gruesome addition of detail by Marter, in fact for once his novelization, published in 1983, stuck pretty closely to the original broadcast version—indeed more so than for any of his other novelizations. Unfortunately this does also emphasise the numerous flaws in the plot—not, of course, Marter’s fault but among many crimes which must be laid at the door of the television script’s author, Eric Saward. Why are the Cybermen hiding on the spaceship? Why aren’t their weapons as good as their androids’? How did they get the bomb onto Earth in the first place? Faced with this material, Marter did a barely adequate job of the novelization.

Rereading it, I found no reason to vary my opinion. Marter did a couple of very good novelisations, but this was not one of them. The cover is a photo still of the Doctor about to shoot something, which grates for several reasons. You can get it here.

The other important and relevant source that I have read since 2011 is Matthew Waterhouse’s autobiography, Blue Box Boy, where he is frank about the reasons he was written out.

The Black Archive on Earthshock, by Brian J. Robb, has only three chapters, but they are long and it is one of the longer books in the sequence.

The first chapter, “Everyone Loves Adric”, looks at how the character evolved, rose and fell, with brief reflection on other teen genius characters (eg Wesley Crusher), and plenty of detail on the strategic choices made by the production team and the reasons for them, starting from Tom Baker’s last season.

The second chapter, “The Saward Imperative”, looks at the specific roles of writer Eric Saward and director Peter Grimwade in writing the story, and considers Saward’s attempt to be true to previous Cyberman stories and Grimwade’s directing technique (good with lighting, less good with actors). The Christopher Priest affair is touched on, but I have heard all about that from a more reliable source. (This is the chapter that deals most with the actual topic of the book.)

The third and longest chapter, “Nostalgia and Cynicism”, looks at the success of Earthshock at the time, but also at how the wrong lessons were learned from it, empowering Nathan-Turner and Award to delve back into the show’s history as it went forward, which in the end killed a lot of the potential creativity. Its second full paragraph is:

There can be little argument that whatever other failings John Nathan-Turner may have had, he was a showman who understood publicity and the various ways to bring much-needed attention to an almost 20-year-old programme. His instinct for ‘gimmicks’, whether in casting (Beryl Reid) or the individual elements (Cybermen) that could make up a Doctor Who story, was unsurpassed. He was willing to take a chance on talent and to develop the skills of actors, writers, and script editors, although perhaps not always successfully. In Saward, Nathan-Turner found the creative talent that would define much of his period in the job and reshape the programme – for good and bad – for the 1980s.

This is not just a book about Earthshock, but a guide to the trajectory of the whole Nathan-Turner / Saward era, and it works very well. You can get it here.

About Time 9, by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail

Posted on 3 November 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Firsts and Lasts It’s the end of a trilogy of stories set in the same time-period (as per X3.3, “Gridlock” last year), with the forty-second story getting another visit after X2.8, “The Impossible Planet”, and X3.7, “42”. The ood aren’t afflicted by any ultimate-source-of-all-evil this time, so we have our first recurring friendly aliens since the show’s return.

Second paragraph of sidebar essay to third chapter:

For those of us raised on 1970s Doctor Who, where the conditions of a world fed into the story-telling right from the start, obvious mismatches such as this can be distracting. Take a relatively simple tale such as “The Mutants” (9.4) or “The Caves of Androzani” (21.6), where the basic knowledge every child had picked up from the Moon landings or news items about pollution was deployed in a conceptually exciting and intriguing way (regardless of the execution), then compare it to The Mill’s persistent inability to get phases of the Moon right, and you’ll see why experienced viewers get a little peeved.

Latest in the magisterial set of books about Doctor Who (I have previously read volumes 1, 2, 3, 3 (revised), 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8), this covers Series 4 of New Who, the season with the Tenth Doctor and Donna, and also the 2009 special, with a side order of the Proms concert Music of the Spheres, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith and the animated Dreamland story. This actually came out in 2019, but I only got it in August, and with David Tennant and Donna Noble about to return to our screens, it’s a timely read.

As usual, there is lovely detailed analysis of each story, including all the sections familiar from past volumes plus a new one, “English Lessons”, explaining cultural allusions which may not be as clear to the non-UKanian reader. None of these stories has yet been covered by the Black Archives, so you can’t really compare and contrast, but I feel comfortable that the two series are doing different things and both doing them well. In particular, the chapters on Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, Midnight and The End of Time were very good.

I’m sorry to say that I did not feel the same way about the sidebar essays accompanying the analysis of each story. There are two standout pieces in the middle of the book, one on the history of the online spinoffs of the show, and one asking “Why Can’t Anyone Just Die?” in the Moffat version of the show, a valid question answered in forensic detail. But in general the companion essays seemed to me a notch or two below the very high standards set in previous volumes, most of them dedicated to exploring obscure rabbit-holes of continuity which I find it difficult to care about.

However, it’s comprehensive on the actual episodes, and the Black Archives you would get for the same price would cover a fraction of the material. So I would still recommend it to the analytical fan, just not as highly as some of the earlier volumes. You can get it here.

Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al

Posted on 28 October 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of the third of the four issues collected here:

Two two-part stories here, the first being the titular “Breakfast at Tyranny’s”, where the Doctor with companions Gabby, Cindy and the deity Anubis are held captive with their memories being harvested; and a more exciting second half, “Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, set in ancient China with Nestenes. The art here is not always up the usual standards, I’m sorry to say. You can get it here.

Chengdu Worldcon 1: Doctor Who in China

Posted on 26 October 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Before I start: Hooray! New Doctor Who episodes on 25 November, 2 December and 9 December!!!!!

I’ve been pondering how best to write up my experiences at Chengdu WorldCon last week. In summary, it was an amazing experience; tremendous hospitality from our Chinese hosts, a chance to engage with an ancient culture, and I saw the pandas.

Most convention reports just go chronologically through the two, or three, or four, or five days of the convention. I’ve decided to take a more thematic approach, looking at some of the things I really liked in a bit more detail.

Many aspects of Chengdu Worldcon were great fun. I will write about the things I especially enjoyed: the pandas, the set-piece events, and the friends I made along the way. (I enjoyed the WSFS Business Meeting even less than usual, so I won’t write about that.)

The thing that gave me the most unexpected joy was the love for Doctor Who shown by the Chinese fans. I have to give huge credit here to Yan Ru, 晏如, an ~~English~~ Chinese teacher from Wuhan, who may well be the leading Doctor Who fan in China. We had made contact before the convention, and had a lot of conversations about our shared passion.

Yan Ru invited me to participate in the Chengdu Worldcon panel on “Doctor Who in China” (in Chinese « 神秘博士 » 在中国 ) along with English fan Joseph B, and three other Chinese speakers. Joseph and I were I think the only non-Chinese participants in the room, which was packed.

The panel started with a joyous chant of the Doctor Who theme tune – all Doctor Who panels should start like that! – and a translator whispered to Joseph and me in English, as the other panelists and the audience engaged in intense discussions in Chinese. We spoke in English, and most people seemed to understand perfectly well (and those who didn’t were tolerant). I should add that a lot of the Chengdu Worldcon panels had simultaneous translation, but in this case, probably because Joseph and I were last-minute additions, that didn’t happen. There are some brilliant photos here from #154 to #322 – I especially like that they concentrate on my upper body rather than my tummy – here are two good ones.

With six of us on the panel, and only an hour, we only answered three questions. Not very surprisingly, the first two were 1) Who is your favourite Doctor? (a lot of love for Christopher Ecclestone in China) and 2) What does Doctor Who mean to you?; but slightly more surprisingly the last question was 3) what is your favourite Doctor Who book?

The Doctor Who books appear to be relatively bigger ~~on the inside~~ in China than in Europe or the USA. Yan Ru was running a Doctor Who stall (along with everything else) and sold out of the books on the second last day of the convention. I should say also that the main shopping area of the convention was graced by a large TARDIS, beside a screen showing the current Doctor Who trailer on continuous loop. It too sold out by the last day.

I had been assigned a young volunteer to keep me straight in the unfamiliar world of the convention, a young local student of English and French, who made sure that I went to all of the places I was supposed to go to on time, and also sorted out my phone issues and located my lost laundry.

As a parting present, I got her a signed copy of Yan Ru’s translation of Jac Rayner’s Ninth Doctor Novel Winner Takes All (and a cuddly panda). She seemed very pleased.

I’m glad to say that Yan Ru got home to Wuhan and discovered that she had been promoted at work, in recognition of her translating Who-ology and Winner Takes All into Chinese. She also received the prize for the best Chengdu Worldcon fan party for the Doctor Who party on the Friday night (which I missed for reasons which will be explained). More power to her.

I normally set my blog posts to go live after my working hours, but for this and the other Chengdu reports I’m setting then for lunchtime in Brussels, so that my Chinese friends can read them in the early evening.

The Night of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith, Alasdair Stuart and Steven Moffat

Posted on 23 October 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, back in November 2013, I was having a dull Thursday afternoon in the office when my social media started pinging with news of a new short Doctor Who story on Youtube. I fired up the link and watched it; and watched it again. I don’t think that you can ever recreate the impact of Paul McGann, 18 seconds in, saying “I’m a Doctor – but probably not the one you were expecting.”

The continuity issues raised by precisely which companions were mentioned led me into completely inaccurate speculation about the plot of The Day of the Doctor.

That evening, still excited, I was reading through Big Finish’s online magazine and unthinkingly tweeted the final paragraph of their interview with Tom Baker, which turned into my most retweeted tweet ever (to the point that Buzzfeed ranked it ninth in their list of 16 pictures we can probably stop tweeting in 2014).

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/401103755825147905

Nine days later, we drove to Germany for the showing of The Day of the Doctor in a cinema near Cologne. I wrote:

The cinema is part of the massive Hürth Park shopping complex, and we found food without difficulty at their in-house restaurant. They were showing [The] Day of the Doctor in three different screens, and ours, which was the emptiest when I booked it, was full on the night, so I guess that all three sold out. Sitting beside me were three young women speaking Russian to each other, who gasped with appropriate appreciation in all the right fannish places(such as “Bad Wolf” and “I don’t want to go”). I wondered how far they had come to watch it. Probably not as far as us on the night, anyway.

We cinemagoers also got a lecture from Dan Starkey as Strax about cinema etiquette, showing unfortunates who had been arrested by the Sontarans for using their mobile phones or for trying to record the event, but also rejoicing in the eating of popcorn; followed by Matt Smith and David Tennant demonstrating the 3D while bantering with each other. (It’s perhaps a little regrettable that the 3D glasses were not returnable, at least not where we are; I can’t imagine that we’ll ever use them again.)

And then on with the main feature. Well, I liked it a lot. As everyone has been saying, John Hurt slipped into the part of the missing incarnation utterly smoothly, and in just the right way, portraying a veteran in his own incarnation aware that there would be others to come, and mocking the future Doctors very effectively. I was also relieved that Tennant dialled it down a bit; I felt he sometimes pushed too far in his own stories. And Smith seemed totally energised by the experience, though he must have already decided to go when it was being made.

I was actually glad that Billie Piper didn’t play Rose again (and delighted with the way the script covered that); she actually does well when she gets decent material to work with. Jenna Coleman is a delight. I liked the UNIT subplot (Yay, Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver!) more than the Elizabethan subplot, but enjoyed both (Joanna Page excellent, if improbable, and softening one of the stupider lines from The End of Time). I remembered the Zygons fondly, and indeed rewatched Terror of the Zygons last weekend to refresh myself; the negotiating the deal moment was perhaps a bit contrived in plot terms, but theoretically sound from the diplomatic perspective. And the shedding of the Time War baggage, both in terms of plot and in terms of liberating the Doctor from what we now know was more than just survivor’s guilt, and possible reintroduction of the Time Lords and Gallifrey is excellent for the future of the show’s storylines.

Not to mention the fan service:

A terrific way of including the former Doctors
(who did Harnell’s voice, by the way?)

Just one look from his eyes, but
already we know it will be different.

I was spoilered for this, which is probably
just as well as I don’t think I could
have remained dignified otherwise.

In the global scheme of things, this was one of Moffat’s better Event episodes and probably the best anniversary special. (I know that Moffat has declared that there is only one previous anniversary special, The Five Doctors; he is entitled to his opinion, but I definitely count The Three Doctors, Silver Nemesis, Dimensions in Time and Zagreus, plus perhaps one or two others.) He has always been good at witty banter, and at identity confusion; he hasn’t always been as good at fitting these things to the frame of a wider show, but he did it this time, and I’m a happy fan.

I rewatched both Night and Day of the Doctor in preparation for writing this post, and they both held up really well. The Night of the Doctor packs so much into six and a half minutes. The plot threads of The Day of the Doctor just about tie up properly (this is one of Moffat’s skills). It’s all great fun and rekindled my enthusiasm.

It’s a little sad that there isn’t quite the atmosphere around the 60th anniversary as there was for the 50th, but it’s understandable why; in 2013 we had the first significant milepost since the 2005 reboot, and the show was on a high; but the Chibnall years did not reach the same level of public interest. It should also be said that I’ve heard from sources involved with the production that some at the BBC felt that 2013 went too far, with An Adventure in Space and Time, The Five-ish Doctors Rebooted, and the awful After-party alongside the actual specials. I’m sure that there will be extras around the anniversary this year, but not as many as ten years ago. (Dismayed by the rumours that the next episode will be shown on 11 November, as I will be out of town that day.)

Stephen Moffat’s novelisation, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, actually covers both Night and Day. The second paragraph of the third chapter (numbered Chapter 1) is:

‘He’s here,’ I said, keeping tight rein on the panic levels in my voice. ‘I can hear him, moving about. He’s in Time Vault Zero. The Doctor is in Time Vault Zero.’

The second paragraph of the seventh chapter (numbered Chapter 3) is:

I am writing this account so that perhaps, finally, I can leave it behind.

When it came out in 2018, simultaneously with three other New Who novelisations, I wrote:

Steven Moffat is, oddly enough, the one writer of the four new novelisations who had not previously written a Doctor Who novel. Yep, his previous written Who prose, despite his being the show-runner for the whole of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor eras, and having generated screenplay for more Doctors than any other writer (even if you don’t count the extra five in The Curse of Fatal Death), amounts to only a few short stories, starting with “Continuity Errors” in the 1996 collection Decalog 3: Consequences, and going on to “What I Did In My Christmas Holidays – By Sally Sparrow“, the short story from the 2006 Annual that became the TV episode Blink.

Of course, I really enjoyed the 2013 50th anniversary special, which in retrospect we now see as a last salute to the Tennant era from almost the end of the Smith era. And I am glad to report that this is by far the best of the four new Doctor Who novels published last month. Moffat has veered further from the script than any of the other writers; the chapters are told by alternating narrators, in non-sequential numbers, interspersed with reports from other characters (Chapter Nine, significantly, is missing); the basics of the storyline (starting with the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration, and ending with the Curator) remain the same, but the transmission to the printed page has been done in a very different way. And there are some lovely shout-outs to odd bits of continuity – Peter Cushing’s Doctor is canonicalised; there is a desperate attempt to explain the black and white era. In general, it’s just good fun, and it feels like the process of writing the book was much more enjoyable for the author than was notoriously the case with the original script. If you are a Who fan, you should get it here.

I stand by that. Several more novelisations down the line, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor remains the best of them – so far.

The 49th and 50th Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who are on The Night of the Doctor, which is James Cooray Smith’s fourth in the series, and Day of the Doctor, by the appropriately named Alasdair Stuart, who I also know as a Hugo finalist and commentator on sf and fandom. To jump to the end, they are both very good and enhanced my appreciation still further for two stories that I already liked a lot.

James Cooray Smith’s monograph on Night is only 73 pages long, but that’s roughly 11 pages per minute of script; compare the volumes on the seven-part stories that are barely a page per minute! There’s a lot to say about these short few scenes, of course, and Smith says most of it.

The first chapter, ‘I’m a Doctor, but probably not the one you were expecting’, reminds us (as if we needed to be reminded) of the excitement around the 50th anniversary and the surprise launch of the mini-episode; and looks at the returns of past Doctors (which turns out to be an even more timely topic in 2023).

The second and longest chapter, ‘What if I get bored? I need a television’, debates whether or not Night counts as TV Doctor Who, looking at other edge cases, of which there are a lot more than you might have thought.

The third chapter, ‘The universe stands on the brink’, looks briefly at the origins of the War Doctor. Its second paragraph is

This assumption, however, fits rather less well with other aspects of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and the possible discontinuities that result are worth consideration for what they imply about the story and its relationship with The Day of the Doctor, particularly with regards to how much time passes between them. In ‘The Night of the Doctor’, Ohila describes the perilous situation in which the universe finds itself at this point in the Last Great Time War in very stark terms, saying that ‘The war between the Daleks and the Time Lords threatens all reality. You are the only hope left,’ and later insisting that, ‘The universe stands on the brink. Will you let it fall?’

The fourth chapter, ‘What do you need now?’, looks further at the concept of the War Doctor.

The fifth chapter, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any need for a Doctor any more’, looks at the Time War and the character of Cass.

The sixth chapter, ‘Physician, heal thyself’, looks at the last words of various Doctors and at the Doctor as Jesus.

The seventh chapter, ‘Doctor no more’, looks at how the episode fits into the wider Steven Moffat’s wider concept of who and what the Doctor is.

It’s a little cheeky of the publishers to offer this slim volume at the same price as others in the series which are almost three times as long, but the completist will want it, need it and enjoy it anyway. You can get it here.

Alasdair Stuart’s The Day of the Doctor is twice as long. It starts with an introduction, setting out the author’s stall: this is a story involving metafiction and death, and combining Old and New Who. Usually I write my own chapter summaries, but in this case the author has done it for me so I will lazily cut and paste, inserting the chapter titles:

The first chapter [“The Doctor Can See You Now”] looks in more detail at the concept of postmodernism and Who’s own unique flavour of it. Fans of a certain stripe will probably be thinking the word ‘discontinuity’ and they are not wrong.

The second chapter [“The Barn at the End and the Barn at the Start”] talks about the barn, what it represents to the show and also, crucially, the fictional spaces it allows the show to step into. It’s also going to look at the concept of postmodern and metafiction and what that, and 1970s BBC Shakespeare adaptations, have to do with Doctor Who.

The third chapter [“A Man Goes to War”] looks at the War Doctor. He’s arguably the most important incarnation of the Doctor and also one of the least well known. Here we’re also going to explore the idea that each one of these incarnations represents an era of the character.

Just interrupting to say that the second paragraph of the third chapter is:

But before all that, we need to talk about Christopher Eccleston.

Going back to the chapter summaries:

The fourth chapter [“The Man Who Regrets”] turns the attention to the 10th Doctor. Poster boy for the series’ triumphant return! Big-haired righter of wrongs! Lonely god and occasional near mass murderer. He’s also the representation of the show’s past, which is an odd, interesting thing for him to be.

The fifth chapter [“The Man Who Forgets”] focuses on the 11th Doctor and how this is a story which is a prelude to his final bow in The Time of the Doctor (2013) and how it sets up the future of the show. A future which is far more introspective, for both Doctor and Daleks, than it first seems.

The sixth chapter [“Impossibilities, Moments, Revolutionaries and Evolutions”] examines Clara, the Moment, Kate Stewart and Osgood and why the future of the show is carefully, subtly encoded into those four women.

Finally, [in te seventh chapter, “Midlife Crisis of the Daleks”] we take a look at the Daleks and how The Day of the Doctor is a fictional structure through which the past, present and future of both the Doctor and his nemeses are examined and defined.

There’s also an appendix looking at how the 2020 story The Timeless Children affects our understanding of Day of the Doctor now, including also the “Morbius Doctors”.

This is all good, meaty stuff, well worth adding to the thinking fan’s shelves, and you can get it here.

War of Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al

Posted on 3 October 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame from third part:

Really good climax to a multi-volume Tenth Doctor story, involving the Osirans and all the recurring characters from the previous installments of this sequence. Also includes a less impressive story bringing the Tenth Doctor to London to meet his previous companions (or are they). You can get it here.

The Daleks, ed. Marcus Hearn

Posted on 27 September 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story:

This is a collection of the Dalek comic strips from the magazine TV Century 21, published between 1965 and 1967, a page a week about everyone’s favourite evil metallic pepperpots and the obstacles that get thrown up in their plans to dominate the universe. I found it an unexpected pleasure. There are about a dozen storylines across the run, each reasonably self-contained in the structure of needing each page to have a beginning, middle and end. There are not a lot of women – a slave princess in an early story, a little girl who gets into trouble in a later one – but there aren’t in fact a lot of humans, as the main dynamic in the stories is between the Daleks themselves.

There’s also a dozen pages of introduction setting the scene for the series and printing a 1986 interview with one of the main artists. The only two women mentioned are both fictional – Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds and Maria from Metropolis, but no doubt this reflects the reality.

I must say that this greatly exceeded my expectations, and it seems a lot more mature than the contemporary First and Second Doctor strips that I have seen. Hugely recommended. Sadly it’s out of print, but I’d keep an eye out for it if I were you.

This was my top unread English-language comic. Next on that pile is Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al.

Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski

Posted on 15 September 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

A Black Archive on the recently concluded 13th Doctor era, like Kerblam! looking at one of the more unsatisfactory Chibnall/Whittaker stories. After it was first broadcast, I wrote:

A very obvious riff on The Green Death, my favourite Third Doctor story, which also had some great return-to-Sheffield characterisation moments, and really impressive special effects, but completely muffed the ending. (What happens to the bad guy? Is it really more compassionate to lock the spiders up until they die?)

Rewatching it this time, all the same points occurred to me; the other thing is that the production was very obviously saving money by not having many extras – I mean, what American billionaire would go anywhere without at least half a dozen aides?

Some Black Archive books on similarly problematic stories try gamely to make us see the best in them. Sam Maleski here is frank about Arachnids‘ shortcomings as well as its thematic beats, and doesn’t go on too long about either, turning in a decent analysis of an inferior script.

The first (and longest) chapter, “Doctor Who and the Spiders from Sheffield”, starts by admitting that the story begins and ends on very different notes, but then goes into an in-depth analysis of giant spiders (and other creepy-crawlies) in science fiction film and in Doctor Who in particular. He omits Adrian Tchaikovsky, but he’s not really looking at print.

The second chapter (almost as long), “Yorkshire Gothis”, looks at the ways in which the story is Gothic – a theme in several of the Black Archives I have read recently – and at the importance fo the setting in Yorkshire, and of the shadow of Donald Trump.

The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Muddled Politics”, is:

But while the aesthetics of the episode are deeply and incandescently political, it seems rather unclear as to what course the characters, and by extension the viewers, should pursue as a response. It’s an episode marred by contradictions: these sometimes enrich its text, and other times simply prove frustrating. In order to demonstrate this, this chapter focuses on three focal points that the episode uses to signal its political nature: science, minority identities and the influence of political music.

It looks at how the story opens up, and then basically squanders, engagement with the politics of science, race and gender, and music. These points are particularly well made.

The fourth and final chapter, “Absence, or Clearing the Cobwebs”, argues that even though the story fails to answer a lot of the interesting questions it raises (including also what “family” means, for the Doctor and for us), that should not stop us from thinking further about them.

Sam Maleski took on a tricky assignment here, and I think did a good job as far as that can be done. You can get it here.

The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier (and David Fisher, and Terrance Dicks)

Posted on 8 September 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I remember watching and hugely enjoying The Stones of Blood when it was first broadcast in 1978. I’ve come back to it several times and it retains its charm. When I came back to it in 2008, I wrote:

The Stones of Blood was one that I remembered fondly from first time round, and I liked it again on re-watching three decades later. Perhaps, now that puberty is behind me rather than yet to come, I appreciate Mary Tamm’s costumes as Romana all the more. But of course I also have a fascination with megaliths, and this is the only broadcast story that really uses them (though see also the SJA story The Thirteenth Stone). And of the three stories featuring an ancient cult in England within a few years of 1980, this is the only one that really pulls it off well (the other two being Image of the Fendahl and K9 and Company).

When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

We are back on firmer ground [after The Pirate Planet] with The Stones of Blood. This just shows the difference that a decent plot (as opposed to a decent script, which Adams was capable of doing) and good casting and direction can make, though unfortunately we are now slipping into Romana as screamy girl rather than smart aleck, which is a shame, especially as the story has two excellent female leads in Beatrix Lehmann and Susan Engel. (I must also add that the viewing experience on DVD is greatly enhanced by the extras, which include a documentary with Mary Tamm exploring the Rollright Stones where it was filmed.)

It’s a story of two halves, Satanic cults (as previously seen in Image of the Fendahl and The Masque of Mandragora) and then the abandoned prison spaceship with the ruthlessly homicidal justice machines. The story wobbles a bit at times – Beatrix Lehmann, who died a few months after filming, is notably shaky on some of her lines – but stays just the right side of the quality divide. The location filming around the stones is particularly memorable, (including particularly K9 on one of his few field outings) and well blended in with the studio scenes. I am really looking forward to the new novelisation by David Fisher, the author of the original script; the original Terrance Dicks novelisation is workmanlike but not terribly memorable, but Fisher’s two previous novelisations of his own stories – The Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive – are particularly good, among the best Fourth Doctor books and certainly better than the TV originals.

Rewatching it again, I liked it a bit more if anything; it clearly too Beatrix Lehmann a couple of scenes to get comfortable with the situation but once she gets in the swing, she is great. And the monstrous Ogri are depicted as pretty horrifying even though we see very little of what they actually do to people (apart from the unfortunate lady camper). I also liked the clues that the segment is around somewhere nearby, which I picked up on more than on previous watches.

Unusually, though not uniquely, there are two different Target novelisations of the story, the first being a rather workmanlike effort by Terrance Dicks. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Romana straightened up, releasing her end of the tape. A sudden loud cawing sound made her jump. A big black bird was perched on the stone above her head. Romana jumped back. ‘What’s that?’

A longer novelisation by the story’s original author, David Fisher, was released on audio a few years back and is now available in book form. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

The figures pushed back their hoods, revealing themselves to be Mr de Vries, a plump man sporting a wisp of a beard on his chin, and Martha Vickers, a middle-aged lady with the face of a discontented bulldog. She was a resident of the nearby village of Bodcombe Parva, and a member of the local Women’s Institute. Her fellow members would have been astonished to see her there, because she was known to be non-religious and only sang ‘Jerusalem’ under protest. In fact, ever since meeting Mr de Vries a couple of years ago, she had been a pillar of his Druid circle, gradually initiated into the inner mysteries of the BIDS. She used to hunt in her younger days, and unlike some of the other group members was not disturbed by the sight of blood. Hence her presence at all the sacrifices.

I wrote up both novelisations when the audio of Fisher’s version came out in 2011:

Earlier this year the BBC released a new novelisation of an Old Who story – David Fisher, who wrote the original TV story The Stones of Blood, has now converted it not to a print novel but to audiobook format, read with great gusto by Susan Engel (who played the villain of the piece on screen) with John Leeson doing K9’s lines. I had been looking forward to this with hopeful enthusiasm, as Fisher’s novelisations of his other two stories are among the best of the Target range.

I am very glad to say that I was not disappointed. The audio is about twice as long as the original series (four hour-long CDs), and Fisher has bulked out the material with lots more character background and atmosphere than was possible on screen – the full story of the campers gruesomely slain by the Ogri, for example, and various brazen but humorous infodumps. There are lots of decent sound effects as well. Very highly recommended.

I also went back and reread Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of the story for comparison. It must be a lot shorter than Fisher’s new text. I noted of it three years ago that it is “a standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story” and I found no reason to change my views. I did think Dicks handled the climax of the story with some finesse, but the rest it pretty thin.

The print version is topped and tailed by some lovely personal reminiscences about Fisher by his son Nick Fisher and by the BBC Audio commissioning editor Michael Stevens. It remains a good read.

As my regular reader knows, I myself am pretty interested in megalithic sites and in their mythology. Katrin Thier, the author of this monograph, apparently shares my interest and has given us a good chunky read with no less than seven chapters, not counting introduction and afterword. There’s plenty to say about this story and where it fits in British popular culture.

An introduction sets out Thier’s stall, reviewing the previous careers of writer, director and guest cast and describing the ‘folk horror’ and Gothic modes, and making a link to Irish independence,

Chapter 1, “The Stones”, starts with the bold proposition that “the main guest stars in The Stones of Blood are the King’s Men at Little Rollright in Oxfordshire, playing the Nine Travellers.” Thier reviews the cult of medievalism, especially around the Rollright Stones themselves, and looks at the origin of the Ogri.

Chapter 2, “The Druids”, reviews what is really known about the Druids and the Gorsedds.

Chapter 3, “Megalithic Afterlives”, looks at the scientific investigation of megalithic monuments and how it has been reflected in popular culture (including The Goodies episode “Wacky Wales”, which features Jon Pertwee as a homicidal cultist). Its second paragraph is:

When the Doctor explains to Romana that the circle is a ‘megalithic temple-cum-observatory’, he expresses an interpretation widespread in the 1970s, suggesting that the prehistoric builders of these monuments were not simple undeveloped countryfolk, but were in fact highly sophisticated, maintaining a class of scientists to rival those of the ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The evidence for this was seen in the way many of these monuments seemed to be laid out to allow astronomical calculations. The study of this idea now called archaeo-astronomy (although ‘astro-archaeology’ is also sometimes found, reflecting the different emphasis assumed by different scholars). The idea arose partly out of the well-established observations that some of the major monuments interact with points on the sun’s annual circuit, especially the solstices, and a simple explanation for this is that the monument points to the event it is used to celebrate.

Chapter 4, “The Women”, explores the fact that the two main guest stars are women and that Romana rather than the Doctor carries a lot of the plot. This ties into Graves and Mallory, of course. A nice note – although on screen, Beatrix Lehmann is older than Susan Engel who in turn is older than Mary Tamm, Professor Rumford is the youngest of the three characters, a mere 70ish, whereas Romana is in the first half of her second century and Cessair of Diplos is thousands of years old. (Cessair is a genuine if obscure Celtic figure, but should of course be pronounced with a hard ‘c’.)

Chapter 5, “‘To Wit, a Celtic Goddess'”, looks more deeply at the goddesses – the Morrigan, Nemetona, the Cailleach, Ceridwen and the origin of the Great Seal.

Chapter 6, “Mere Mortals”, looks at the origins of Vivien Fay / Cessair’s other identities. I love this coincidence: the site of the Nine Travellers was supposedly owned at one time by the Little Sisters of St Gudula. St Gudula of course is the patron saint of Brussels, but is also the name of a key character in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, who in the BBC’s 1966 TV adaptation was played by… Beatrix Lehmann!

Chapter 7, “Leaving Earth”, looks at hyperspace, slightly jarring with the themes of the previous six chapters (as indeed the hyperspace parts of the story jar with the rest).

An afterword, “Reithian Gothic?”, points out that the story is really quite informative about megalithic sites and lore, and would have sent the curious viewer off to find out more. It certainly fed my own interest, both on first watching at eleven and since.

This is a good analysis of a good story, even if it’s light on the production details which I usually enjoy hearing about. You can get it here.

Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness

Posted on 5 September 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Clara was twenty-eight years old and, for the past few years, she’d been mixed up with a suspicious gentleman in a blue box who hopped periodically into her life and caused varying degrees of chaos.

I did not write up the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion at the time of broadcast, though I did note that it was my favourite two-part story of Series 9 (though my favourite Capaldi story remains Heaven Sent, also from Series 9). I enjoyed it – there’s some necessary preachiness about the Other, and immigration and terrorism, some very good skullduggery by villains who can look just like you, and some excellent horror in everyday life. The scene of the plane being brought down by a hand-held missile is a bit too close to the bone for me; several friends of friends died when the Russians destroyed MH-17 in a similar way.

The novelisation is a good competent screen-to-page job, adding a bit more background about the Zygon Bonnie (who used to have a boyfriend called Clyde, who looked like Danny Pink). There are a couple of footnotes citing other DW novelisations, including one quoting a books called The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, for which you will search bookshops in vain. At my reading pace it’s quicker to read the novelisation than rewatch the story, and it’s well enough done. You can get it here.

The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell

Posted on 29 August 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Surprise stopped Anne midway across the living room. Granted the room wasn’t huge, but a pair of two-seater sofas, separate miss-matched chairs, a coffee table, sideboard and bookcase, left plenty of room to walk between the furniture. A sense of Madeleine’s apology extending far beyond the limits of her home unsettled Anne, though she struggled to understand why. Before she could enquire, Madeleine pushed them into a whirlwind tour, cutting their greeting short.

Second in the Bloodlines sub-series of Lethbridge-Stewart books, in which Anne Travers and her husband Bill visit France to investigate sinister gangs-on and body-horror in a laboratory. The story is decently enough told, but the connection with Doctor Who so weak that I think I may clear this sequence from my reading list in future. You can get it here.

Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis, Giorgia Sposito, Eleonora Carlini and Arianna Florean

Posted on 22 August 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story (“The Long Con”):

More adventures of the Tenth Doctor with comics-only companions Gabby Gonzalez and Cindy Wu. The first of the three stories here features another sound monster taking advantage of the Jazz era in New Orleans; the second is the opening part of the conclusive adventure in this sequence of comics, bringing back the Osirans and Sutekh; and the third is a neat little multi-Doctor adventure with Ten, Eleven and Twelve. I am consistently impressed by the quality of this series, though it has now reached the stage where you’d need to have been reading it from the beginning. You can get this volume here.

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Tag Archives: doctor who

Blackpool Revisited, by John Collier

Doctor Who: A Fairytale Life, by Lilah Sturges, Kelly Yates and Brian Shearer

Emotional Chemistry, by Simon Forward

The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard

Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold (and Malcolm Hulke)

The Fourteenth Doctor novelisations: The Star Beast (Gary Russell), Wild Blue Yonder (Mark Morris), The Giggle (James Goss)

The Church on Ruby Road

Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al

Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle; the Fourteenth Doctor ends. (And the Celestial Toymaker)

Doctor Who: The Star Beast

Doom’s Day: 24 Doctor Who stories in different media, of which less than half feature the Doctor

Dalek, by Billy Seguire (and Robert Shearman)

The Hand of Fear (TV, novelisation, Black Archive); also, Eldrad Must Die!; also, Eldrad Must Live!

The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope; The Androids of Tara, by Terrance Dicks and David Fisher; and a play by Paul Cornell

Facing Fate: Vortex Butterflies, by Nick Abadzis et al

Doctor Who novels, as recommended on LibraryThing and Goodreads, part 2

Doctor Who novels, as recommended on LibraryThing and Goodreads, part 1

The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, by James F. McGrath

Earthshock, by Eric Saward, Ian Marter and Brian J. Robb

About Time 9, by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail

Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al

Chengdu Worldcon 1: Doctor Who in China

The Night of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith, Alasdair Stuart and Steven Moffat

War of Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al

The Daleks, ed. Marcus Hearn

Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski

The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier (and David Fisher, and Terrance Dicks)

Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness

The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell

Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis, Giorgia Sposito, Eleonora Carlini and Arianna Florean