The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve

Target novelisation Doctor Who - The Massacre

Author	John Lucarotti
Published	1987
ISBN	0 426 20297 X
First Edition Cover	Tony Masero

Back cover blurb: The TARDIS lands in Paris on 19 August 1572. Driven by scientific curiosity, the Doctor leaves Steven to meet and exchange views with the apothecary, Charles Preslin. Before he disappears, he warns Steven to stay out of 'mischief, religion and politics.' But in sixteenth-century Paris it is impossible to remain a mere observer, and Steven soon finds himself involved with a group of Huguenots. The Protestant minority of France is being threatened by the Catholic hierarchy, and danger stalks the Paris streets. As Steven tries to find his way back to the TARDIS he discovers that one of the main persecutors of the Huguenots appears to be - the Doctor.

• Notre Dame on Fire by Jason A. Miller

Notre Dame on Fire by Jason A. Miller 28/5/21

I first visited Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in August 2018. As I've mentioned in my review of the City of Death novelization, that was my first trip to Paris, and I spent much of it re-enacting City of Death. However, what I didn't mention at the time is that most of what I knew about Notre Dame first came from John Lucarotti's novelization of The Massacre. Growing up in a non-Catholic household in the States, I wasn't a student of medieval French architecture. But Lucarotti has the Doctor figure out exactly when the TARDIS has landed, based upon what Notre Dame looks like and what bridges cross over to the Ile de la Cite. That made a huge impression on me in 1987, that you could navigate the timelines just based on how one cathedral looked at one particular moment in time.

With the news of 14 April 2019 that Notre Dame was on fire, my immediate reaction was to go back on social media and repost my Notre Dame photos and videos from my August 2018 vacation. My delayed reaction was to reread the novelization, something I'd not done in years.

This was, at first, nearly a failed effort. The prose is much, much worse than I remembered. The first sentence of the prologue:

"The Doctor sat in the garden which always reminded him of the Garden of Peace when Steven, no, not Steven, his granddaughter, Susan, and that nice young couple, Barbara and Ian, had their adventure with the Aztec Indians aeons ago."

"The TARDIS landed with a jolt which almost threw the young astronaut Steven Taylor off balance but the Doctor did not seem to notice as he studied the parameters of the time/place orientation print-out on the central control panel of the time-machine."

Moving past the prose -- let's face it, outside of a limited group of authors (Dicks, Hulke, Marter, Grimwade, Bidmead), most of the writers hired by Target would have been lucky to shine Bulwer-Lytton's shoes -- no sentences after those two are nearly as bad. Cause they certainly couldn't be worse.

I've written extensively elsewhere on this site about how incredible The Massacre was on TV. It's a Doctor Who story that isn't. The Doctor is barely in it, and his dual role is barely that -- he has only three speaking scenes as the Abbot of Amboise, a tertiary character who serves more plot utility as a corpse than as a functioning person. Steven is lost in time in the 16th century, well-meaning but inept and ineffectual, not able to save any lives or even keep any friends. The Doctor makes no attempt at all to mitigate the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day... he merely flees, taking an infuriated Steven behind and picking up Dodo as a companion entirely by accident.

That's the story that was produced for TV, and it's really only the kind of tale you can tell once -- here, written by Donald Tosh, who was on his way out the door along with producer John Wiles, and who angrily tossed the aftermath of his show to a different production team. However, it's not the story that John Lucarotti thought he was telling. The novelization is Lucarotti's chance to tell his theory of what might have happened to the Doctor and Steven in August of 1572. Everything from Part Two onwards on TV diverged seriously from Lucarotti's vision, so very little of what you saw on TV went into the book. The novelization is a completely different tale with a completely different ending.

Per Lucarotti, the TARDIS lands in Paris in late summer 1572. Soon, the Doctor joins a plot hatched by Huguenot apothecaries, who exploit his uncanny resemblance to a Catholic priest in order to help destabilize the monarchy's evil schemes. Meanwhile, Steven, having been warned by the Doctor to stay out of "mischief, religion and politics" (a rich line not preserved for the TV broadcast), comes to the aide of a Protestant serving girl, and quickly joins in the same Huguenot counter-plot.

We get a lot of scenes from Steven Taylor's POV, one of the few novelizations to do this; we learn, for example, that he acted in Hamlet in his youth, and he helps unravel the Catholic's anti-Huguenot conspiracy when he overhears someone talking about "shriving time", a term he learned from Shakespeare. We also get an up-close look at the league of apothecaries, and their secret hideout in the extensive catacombs beneath Paris. The Doctor, in a meaty double role, really enjoys the heck out of pretending to be the evil Catholic priest.

While the massacre still happens on schedule, the Doctor and Steven manage to take the edge off the historic disaster. The TARDIS departs calmly, with Steven and the Doctor in fairly good spirits. In a prologue and epilogue, the Time Lords (featured anachronistically) gently grill the Doctor over his interference. Although she doesn't appear in the text, the arrival of new companion Dodo Chaplet is referenced, so you can still fit the book in with established continuity. As you close the book, you maybe even feel a little bit smarter.

Only... that's not how it happened on TV back in 1966. Not by a long shot.

The major change for the book is that the Doctor and the Abbot are two separate and distinct people. The Doctor works closely with the Huguenots to insert himself into gaps in the Abbot's busy ecclesiastical and political schedule, and to try and blunt the Catholics' scheming. The second major change is a character named Simon Duval, who barely registers on TV as the Abbot's aide; Duval mistakes the Doctor for the Abbot, and believes that Steven is an undercover Catholic spy -- a fact which Steven uses to his advantage.

At the climax of the book, the Doctor and the Abbot finally cross paths, in front of Duval. The Doctor out-impersonates the Abbot, and persuades Duval to slay the genuine article instead of himself, the impostor. You can see why this did not get preserved for TV. One, because producer Wiles wanted Hartnell gone from the show and certainly wouldn't have wanted to give him double duty; and, two, because the identical scene had already been played for comedy in Episode 5 of The Chase just a few months before. On TV, Duval only had one scene with the Abbot, and never interacted directly with Steven. In the book, Duval is central to the Doctor's victory; on TV, he's a peripheral figure.

Another major change is Steven's heroism. Steven in the book has theatrical training and fight skills. He works well with the two principal Huguenots, Gaston Lerans and Nicholas Muss. He does mistake the Abbot's corpse for the Doctor, as on TV, but is much more central to the plot and is much better at making friends and making his way around Paris.

The book has a pat, tidy ending. The Doctor opts to save the life of Anne and her family by using the Abbot's forged credentials to send them to the one part of France that would be safe from the Massacre. He gives an ecumenical speech to King Charles that doesn't avert the Massacre but does blunt its edge just a wee bit. He's firm in refusing to let Steven interfere with the established death of Admiral de Coligny... but does try to prevent the assassination attempt, anyway. On TV, the attempt is averted by a gust of wind rather than by William Hartnell. Clearly Lucarotti on the one hand, and Tosh/Wiles on the other hand, had very different ideas about the Doctor's role in the universe. Lucarotti sees him as a hero capable of bending the timelines. Tosh and Wiles saw him as a cipher who was incapable of even the heroism inchoate in a gust of wind.

In the book, the Doctor is rewarded by meeting Anne's distant descendant, Dodo, who is described as Anne's "spitting image", even though Anne in the book has auburn curls, a look never sported by Jackie Lane on TV. On TV, the Doctor sends Anne not to safety but to a house that was already under Catholic guard, moments before the Massacre itself began. In the book, the Massacre's architects -- the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, and her ally the Marshall de Tavannes -- are background characters who are frustrated by the Doctor's Abbot impersonation. On TV, de Medici and Tavannes are about as terrifying a pair of villains as Doctor Who gave us, and they end the story utterly triumphant, trading loft dialogue about heresy having no innocents, the wolves of Paris, Kings (the inept Charles) being recognized only by the power they wield and G-d having nothing to do with saving Huguenots.

The book features wine-dark dialogue, even if there's some truly awful prose. There's a travelogue of Paris, much time spent in the now-lamented Notre Dame and in the catacombs, and a bittersweet ending where the Doctor and Steven get to depart as friends, smiling in the face of adversity, having done at least a few good deeds. But the TV show is history as it really is -- ferocious and uncompromising, where a gust of wind can save a life, but the Doctor can't.