Defending the Historicals by Mekel Rogers 10/4/04
In a sense, every Doctor Who story that doesn't take place in the Gallifreian present is a historical since someone's future is someone else's past. However, for the sake of sanity, let's define a historical as any story that is set on Earth in a time period before the date in which the adventure was aired/released. These adventures can be basically divided into two groups.
The first of these is the "pure historical". These are adventures in which there are absolutely no science fiction elements to the story other than the TARDIS and its crew. The main function of many pure historicals is to immerse the time travelers in a historical society or situation from which they must escape without altering history, or prevent an incorrect version of history from coming into being. Sometimes this concept is treated seriously (Marco Polo, The Aztecs), sometimes with more humor (The Romans, The Highlanders).
The second grouping of stories is the "pseudo historical". These are essentially science fiction stories that take place in a historical setting. Adventures such as: The Time Warrior, Masque of Mandragora, Talons of Weng-Chiang, and The Visitation are examples of this genre.
Over the years there has been much criticism of historical stories by writers and viewers alike. They claim historicals are dull, lacking in mystery, and ultimately pointless since the Doctor cannot change anything.
I disagree.
Historicals have more atmosphere, ambiance, and charm than other stories. There is usually more location work which adds to the production values and believability of the adventure, and the stories come off as far less dated than the futuristic adventures that tried to predict what the 1990s would look like back in 1966.
Historicals show interaction between "real" people rather than poorly realized green blobby monsters and cliched mad scientists. They explore the human condition to help us better understand our own frailties and weaknesses. Most of all, historicals teach us about our past, and how to learn from it.
Ultimately, historicals are not about how the characters change history, they are about how history changes the characters. As such, they address more effectively than any other type of story the most important conflict of all: the conflict with oneself.
Those of you who love historicals are nodding in agreement right now. Those who don't.......to each his own, but please don't dismiss them. Try them again. They are worthy of our attention.
Here are some great places to start:
Marco Polo (pure)
The Aztecs (pure)
The Witch Hunters (pure)
The Romans (pure)
The Crusade (pure)
The Time Warrior (pseudo)
Pyramids of Mars (pseudo)
Masque of Mandragora (pseudo)
Talons of Weng-Chiang (pseudo)
The Visitation (pseudo)
Black Orchid (pure)
The Marian Conspiracy (pure)
The Fires of Vulcan (pure)
What the F***ing F*** is With F***ing Fandom? by John Seavey 12/4/04
A Calm and Rational Article on the Books, the Audios, and the TV Series
So all right, we can take the question as read, since it's the title, and for those of you who don't know what the asterisks are replacing, go ask your mother. (Actually, I'd thank you if you don't.) But it's a question worth asking, with asterisks or without. Why does fandom feel the need to factionalize?
Now of course, I don't mean you. I certainly don't mean you personally, because I know you'd never do such a thing. I'm talking about everyone else, so you should all just calm down and not hold it against me when I basically proceed to castigate all fandom as being a bunch of screaming ninnies who get so caught up in defending their idiosyncratic corner of the series that they personally love that they can't appreciate anything good when it comes their way. That's all fandom except for you.
At first, it was nice and simple. We had the TV series. Everyone knew it, everyone loved it, and there was no divisiveness at all about what was and wasn't proper Doctor Who. Then the second episode aired, and suddenly pandemonium reigned. With each juncture at the history of Doctor Who, be it a new actor, a new companion, a new producer (stand up Gareth Roberts, who tried to invalidate the entire JNT era), or a new medium, everyone has to slag off everyone else's part of Doctor Who as not proper. We get audio fans saying that the books are crap. We get books fans saying that the audios fans are a bunch of suck-ups because they like the series more if it's got actors reading it off. We get book and audio fans who are getting all shirty because the TV series is coming out, and people are getting interested in that like mindless sheep when they could be reading the books/listening to the audios. We get fans, in short, being fans.
Well, stop it. I'm going to articulate the feeling that I think a lot of fans are secretly thinking, and it's this: I'm looking forward to the TV series because I think it'll be good, and because I really enjoy Doctor Who. I'm not looking forward to it for "mainstream respectability", I don't feel bad that they're not openly acknowledging their debt to the audios/books/board-games/Dalek Annuals, I could give a flying toss about what the "long-term future of the series" will be. I like Doctor Who. I've heard rumors that this new TV series will be about it in some way. That's the same reason I like the books, that's the same reason I like the audios, that's the same reason I liked the TV show (except for the Troughton era, which has done nothing for me. I mean, they say it was a real tragedy it was erased, but have you seen The Seeds of Death? Tragedy they didn't erase a part or two from the middle of that -- thing moves like chilled molasses. But I digress.)
The point is -- it is possible, perhaps even desirable, to enjoy all of the series. You can like the books without hating the audios. You can like the audios without hating the new series. It is possible to like both the new series and the old. There is no need to get defensive, angry, or factionalized about Doctor Who because it's all good, because the central concept of a wise traveler who can go anywhere, anytime, and fights monsters using his wit and wisdom instead of a big gun is timeless, versatile, and can support forty more years of story-telling in any medium you care to name. It is possible to love Doctor Who, full stop, because it's all amazingly great stuff!
Except of course for The Ghosts of N-Space. Don't know what they were thinking there.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Thrilled Not Chilled by Andrew Wixon 20/4/04
Oh dear - I scent blood on the wind. Well, maybe not quite, but it seems that even the hallowed halls of the DWRG seem to be on the verge of succumbing to the current epidemic of Pre-New Series Mania. Joe Ford writes a piece about how wonderful it's going to be. Some idiot replies with a thing on why he's worried about it. And Rob Matthews weighs in saying he's sick of hearing about it and isn't really that bothered either way.
Well, sorry, Rob, but your piece really made me think, and that's a rare enough occurence to warrant recording. As far as I know, I have no great insights or revelations to offer on this topic, so don't bother skimming down in search of them - this is just going to be a bit of a ramble on the topic of what the prospect of a new series means to people, and whether it's really as important as all that...
I'm (ahem) in my thirties, and not far off what's apparently the average age for DW fans, according to the most recent poll I read. Dr Who was a live, going concern of a TV show for the first half of my life. So that, for me, is The World As It Should Be. The revival of the series is, if you like, a return to a more correct order of things (ooh, listen to me - I'll be filling central London with crap model dinosaurs next).
And as Rob says in his piece, I will happily stick my hand up and say that for me 'proper' Dr Who is the stuff on the telly. Not that I didn't collect and get excited over the Virgin books, or that I don't collect and love the Big Finish audios, but I suppose that for me they were always a substitute for proper Who. As readers of my collected works on this site (yes, I sound so pompous you're just dying to brain me with a cricket bat, aren't you?) will no doubt have picked up, over the last few years I really became convinced the show was never coming back, so it isn't as if I saw them as just a lifeline or a put-me-on until the good times rolled once more. It's just that if you say the words 'Doctor Who' to me, once I stop fibrillating I think of a TV series - and as a result anything with those words on it that isn't a TV series is never going to be quite up to scratch.
I was going to say that one's attitude to this is probably shaped by one's age and when one came into fandom - if you're under the age of twenty, it's highly unlikely you discovered the show on its original transmission, as a going concern, and as a result you're less likely to perceive the books, etc, as an inferior replacement for the new TV episodes suddenly not being made. But the most eloquently excited person I've yet encountered is Mr Joe Ford - and reading between the lines of Joe's work, I get the impression he's not long out of his teens, so maybe I'm wrong. Joe is also passionate about the BBC books, so it can't be that he's another member of the 'anything-not-on-TV-is-inevitably-second-best' camp.
It occurs to me that, as everyone here is ostensibly a Dr Who fan, by our standards manic euphoria is a perfectly understandable response to news of the revival, and Rob's own indifference is in fact the anomaly. Rob's own reasons for not getting worked up are, well, reasonable - striking a balance between 'bold new style' and 'retro nostalgia' will be hellishly difficult for Rusty and the gang, and parallels with the Star Wars revival are, I suppose, justified.
His point that one new series will never be able to match up to the body of the DW legend is interesting. It may be the case for us fans, but for normal people? I'm not sure. I've heard similar comments made re the Bond franchise - that each new movie inevitably suffers on release because subconsciously we compare it to the best bits of all the previous movies we've seen countless times on Christmas afternoons. But I don't think it's an exact analogy - we're talking about 20 movies in the case of Bond, which are easily digestible and pretty easy to distinguish - unlike DW, which is around 160 mostly movie-length stories, the vast majority of which have never been repeated on a mainstream channel, and almost never in prime time. For the general public, their conception of DW is much vaguer and thus more forgiving than ours. And for a big chunk of the new audience, DW will be a brand new series (maybe that idea of a repeat run trailing the new season is a bad idea after all...). In any case, the Bond franchise is a continuing success, so it can't be that serious a problem for them.
It isn't even as if Rob is the only one with forebodings about the project (I've been known to air a few myself). And he does have sensible things to say about how the perfect, shining new series we're all plotting, shooting and editing in our heads is undoubtedly going to make whatever eventually emerges from Cardiff a bit of a disappointment by comparison (a condition known to me as 'McGann TV movie syndrome', or, in a more recent variant, 'Return of the King-itis').
And yet most of us still get twitchy with each new revelation about Shearman, Collins, reclinations, Cornell, balconies and the colour blue. I doubt we can help it. We're Dr Who fans. We love the thing so much we write these reviews, try to reconcile the UNIT dating, make pilgrimages to lavatories in Tooting Bec, and do other insane fan stuff, because it's coded into our DNA. We treat the return of the TV series as an unalloyed good, a Holy Grail, despite all the good stuff put out in other media since 1990. Why?
Well, several answers occur to me. The obvious one is that 'Dr Who is fundamentally a TV series' and thus its return to TV is, as I mentioned up the page, undoubtedly good news for Dr Who as an ongoing phenomenon. However, this is actually an arguably selfish argument - it's good news for Dr Who, and thus also for the likes of us who fixate upon it, but is the return of the show a good thing objectively - is it good news for British TV, for British culture, for the audiences who will soon (re)discover our programme but couldn't really care less right now?
Rob makes a good point on how the mainstream, overground success of any new series would be a vindication for we long-term fans. 'We were right all along, it is as good as we've always said it was.' If it does come to pass, it'll be sweet - trust me, I was there in 1988 when Remembrance suddenly made the series playground-gossip-worthy again, and it felt good to be the one people turned to to ask their questions about Dalek politics, and express their new-found appreciation of the show. But, once again, this is a fairly selfish reason for wanting the show to come back and getting excited when it does.
In fact the only objective and unselfish reason I can think of for wanting the show to come back is that it's a good show. Not good as in well-written or well-acted or well-directed, because God knows it was never 100% consistent in any of those areas, but morally good. Virtuous, in fact. Hit me if I start saying 'never cruel or cowardly' but I think it's great that there's going to be a show of such warmth and wit and humanism on our screens again, saying important things about compassion and the power of individuals to make a difference, and the dangers of surrendering control of your life to a machine of any kind. These are important things, too seldom said on British TV these days.
I like to think that that's why I, at least, am pleased that the show is breaking out of the book and audio ghetto it's been in, and returning as a mass-audience entertainment. Yet also worried, of course - worried that the new Dr Who won't have the same values and morality bound into it as the old version. We'll have to see.
So no, a new series isn't 'essential', whatever that means - certainly not for us fans, because as Rob points out we have books, CDs, and a dozen other new ways of getting DW into our lives. But at the risk of sounding condescending to a monstrous degree, we shouldn't begrudge the show going back out into the wider mainstream culture where it was originated, even if it does mean losing some of the richness and texture it's acquired over the last decade or so. At worst, Dr Who made millions of people laugh. And at best, it thrilled them, made them feel and think and care. The chance that it might be able to do that all over again is, I hope, at least part of the reason why we're all getting so excited.
The PDA quick guide by Joe Ford 9/6/04
Haven't got a lot of money? Only dip into the Doctor Who book range when your interest is piqued? Far more interested in the continuing adventures of the 8th Doctor that can go in any direction? Then never fear, here is a thoroughly dispensable (and I say that in case I recommend a book that you loathe!) to what's hot and what's not in the mixed bag that is the Past Doctor Range...
The Devil Goblins from Neptune: A less assured debut for the range than Goth Opera was for the Missing Adventures but this still works on a lot of levels. It is season seven through and through with politics and fights and a heavy presence from UNIT. The 3rd Doctor and Liz are captured well especially the former's longing to be out amongst the stars. Finn Clark rightly points out that the plot is extremely light but it is packed full of incidentals that will pass the time. Stupid title though: 7/10
The Murder Game: More of the same basically, a competent, well-written story that crosses several genres (from murder mystery to alien incursion to techno thriller) and contains a long ignored but potentially fascinating duo (Ben and Polly). It feels like Doctor Who through and through right down to the dodgy looking monsters that plague the cover. There are some very funny bits (the Doctor in drag again!) and the last third is page-turning stuff: 7/10
The Ultimate Treasure: Laden with bland prose, dull puzzles and a predictably boring fifth Doctor this is not a good book. It tries to be surreal and clever but simply reminds of better attempts at this sort of thing (Pyramids of Mars, Death to the Daleks) and features the worst take on Peri until Warmonger. Even the return of an old companion is rubbish: 3/10
Business Unusual: Hmm, it does have the words Gary Russell on the cover and yet manages to remain a bubbly and likable read despite that. Of course it is choking on fanwank and spends too much time setting things up that the TV series should already have sorted. The sixth Doctor is beautifully recreated as a character of fun but his foreknowledge from the trial gives him that edge we expect. It's not great literature but it's entertaining Doctor Who: 7/10
Illegal Alien: My mate thinks this is a great book, doing lots of Who-ey things like putting the Cybermen in London during the blitz. He says that it has a good atmosphere and uses Ace and the Doc effectively. I recommend you read this before you embark on Loving the Alien because it introduces characters and idea that flower in that novel. I never made time for this so Loving was an incoherent mess for me. On my mate's opinion: 8/10
The Roundheads: I should love this. It is a historical in the Smugglers/Highlanders vein, there is some fruity dialogue and colourful characters that Mark Gatiss could write in his sleep and once again gives often ignored companions Polly and Ben a decent role in the action. And yet it drags on a bit, peppered with beautiful prose but unable to create any momentum. And the Doctor is practically ignored, a symptom of the myth that Troughton was hard to capture in print. A little dull to be honest: 5/10
The Face of the Enemy: The first classic of the range and a book that fires on all cylinders. It recreates the Pertwee era seamlessly by overloading the reader with characters that appeared in the first few seasons, takes a trip to the parallel universe in Inferno and has the best ever interpretation of the Master in print. Two of my favourites, Ian and Barbara are given an update (and blissfully married!) and for a Doctor-less novel this works a hell of a lot better than the previous six with him in the range, his influence is ever present through the capabilities of his companions. Add in some gripping action scenes and you're on to a winner. In my unworthy opinion McIntee's best book yet: 9/10
Eye of Heaven: Jim Mortimore takes the easiest route to writing a Doctor Who masterpiece, a book written in the first person narrative from the point of view of savage Leela. Through her eyes we see this epic tale of sea life and aliens come alive with vigour and intensity, it is full of beautiful observations that could not come from any other character. Again, Mortimore's best and one of the best PDA's you're likely to read because it forgets it is Doctor Who and gets on with telling a bloody good story: 10/10
The Witch Hunters: Simple and glorious, a Hartnell historical that plays by the rules and explores a tragic event in history and exploits it for all the drama it can. The prose is nothing special but the story itself is gripping, Susan is used better than ever before and the climax will leave you in tears. Most of the extra characters are disgracefully horrible and act in fashion you would only expect from fascist aliens and it will open your eyes considerably to see just how barbaric the human race could be: 9/10
The Hollow Men: There is one scene in this book that shocked my young mind more than any other. Whilst the story deals with the clever and chilling ideas of homicidal scarecrows and a poisoned water supply it was the very real life hanging of one character, her father discovering her in a police cell, that frightened me. Topping and Day work together seamlessly, their prose is light but evocative, their characters bright and memorable and the threat very real. It is another bloody good book: 8/10
Catastrophea: Argh, and it was going so well! I must admit in my adult years I am not the greatest Terrance Dicks fan which may seem ungrateful considering he lit up my teenage years with all those marvellous Target books. Traditional/light/effortless/shallow... all of these apply to practically every book he has written and this no exception. It's fun and readable but you will have forgotten about within hours of putting it down: 5/10
Mission: Impractical: A huge comedown from McIntee's previous work and a book that has the nerve to tell the readers that it was merely an excuse for the writer to wind down after his earlier, torturously dramatic works. Two fluffy books in a row is mistimed and not even Frobisher, one the best ever companions, can lift the story which is just Oceans' Eleven in space without any of the twists. Insultingly, the prose is childishly simple and the feeling is of a writer that is not trying: 4/10
Zeta Major: The schizophrenic Simon Messingham, capable of brilliance and trash. This leans towards the former and is full of the writer's love of narrative tricks. It is an involving political thriller with some fun continuity and another brutal transformation into a slavering beast for Nyssa (poor cow!). Too many characters and a weak ending knock off a few points: 7/10
Dreams of Empire: Troughton is captured devilishly well, rushing about, improvising, emotional and most of incredibly silly. A season five base under siege story is not first on my list of must-reads but Richards pulls it off with incredible style constructing a story that is filled with shocks. The introduction of some super-cool androids lifts the middle sections and the feeling of desperation in the claustrophobic setting is extremely evocative of the era. Snap it up, 2nd Doctor books of this calibre are quite rare: 8/10
Last Man Running: A scriptwriter turned novelist? Not the most promising of transitions either despite the potential of Chris Boucher writing for Leela again. As you would expect it is crowded with dialogue and light on prose and hindered by some unlikable characters and a Swiss cheese plot. I have the feeling this would have worked well on screen with some charismatic performances: 4/10
Matrix: A fascinating setting, a clever plot, the return of a promising character who proves the ideal adversary for the manipulative seventh Doctor... so why does this book fail to engage? I blame the writing, Perry and Tucker are clearly talented men but it always feels like mixed styles, a fast paced, action based prose style combined with a more reflective, character style. The book switches pace so much and there is quite a bit to concentrate on, it feels a little amateurish all told: 5/10
The Infinity Doctors: Heavy continuity would usually suggest a lazy writer, using old characters and aliens to appease the fans but it is the crux of why this is such a perfect book. Gallifreyan history, Sontaran, Rutans, the Master, the Doctor, all are given a thorough examination in this epic thriller that feels like a proper SF book and not some Who spinoff. The writing is pure Parkin, riding emotions and capturing surroundings with rare beauty. It is so good it doesn't feel the need to confirm which Doctor is present, content with his identity as a whole: 10/10
Salvation: Much underrated and NEEDED as a background filler for Dodo and further examination of Steven, one of the most interesting companions of the bunch. The fact that there is a poignant story of the power of God(s) beneath that is just a bonus. Steve Lyons is rather good at these therapy stories, there is a lot of internal thought in this book but it just serves to flesh out the characters further and mark this out as one of the most thoughtful PDAs: 8/10
The Wages of Sin: Another McIntee work that is passable but pales in comparison with his superlative Face of the Enemy. The first few chapters are terribly written, McIntee strings together all sorts of strange similes and metaphors that distract and annoy and should have been dealt with at the editing stage. Liz and Jo don't really work as a pair but this was a forced restriction and I think everyone aggress this would have worked better as the Hartnell historical it was intended to be. Rasputin is a character I have longed for the Doctor to meet and he is swathed in shades of grey, easily the best thing about this underwhelming effort: 5/10
Deep Blue: Just awful, the words fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough should be enough to put you off. But if you are (strangely) a fan of this horrid trio you will find little chemistry here, just three self-involved ciphers (ahem). As a horror story is fails because it sticks too rigorously to the cliches and despite some nice writing there is little tension or shivers you would expect from such a tale. The cod companion romance hits a new low: 2/10
Players: Enjoyable certainly and terrific fun to see the sixth Doctor rubbing shoulders with some of the great heads of history. Peri is given some room to shop and joke and generally behave like a real person. Much like the EDA Endgame (which also features the Players) it is the shallow way it looks at history that disappoints, reducing the factual events that take place here to little more than a comic strip. I'm not saying Doctor Who shouldn't be fun but this jolly adventuring look at history just isn't my cup of tea: 6/10
Millennium Shock: For a book that was written in three weeks this is a superb achievement and another medal on Richard's uniform. The weapon that targets its victims through technology is rather frightening and leads to a lot of trouble for the beautifully written Harry Sullivan. I hate to keep going on about this but the fourth Doctor gets to drive a tank through the streets of the London! It's twist-a-palooza and considering it's a sequel to a barely remembered Missing Adventure it can hold its head quite high: 8/10
Storm Harvest: The best Tucker/Perry combo of the lot and one that exploits the season 26 atmosphere of real characters in extraordinary circumstances. I think it works better as a book than it would have on screen because we get closer to the characters and the Krill demand spectacular realisation. Seaside Doctor Who stories tend to be a lot of fun (except Deep Blue of course) and this has the added Jaws style effect of the Krill who are bloody scary and worthy of a return visit: 8/10
The Final Sanction: Hardly a barrel of laughs and only five books after Steve Lyons' last effort you might think he would start to lack focus but nothing could be further than the truth. This remains a brutal and at times agonisingly realistic tale of war in space with Lyons' Selachians fleshed out much more effectively than their debut appearance. There is a strong role for Zoe and it is gripping to see the 2nd Doctor in a tale that he would be offensive for him to play the clown. One chapter stands out, told from the dying eyes of a Selachian on the battlefield, it will haunt you: 8/10
City at World's End: Wonderful title for a book that has achieved the infamous status of being loved and loathed in equal measure. I'm in the pro section; Bulis raises his game to produce a book that gets the Hartnell regulars spot on and there are a lot of fun mysteries that propel you forwards for answers. Okay so the big twist is implausible to say the least but remains entirely in character for a society that epitomises corruption: 8/10
Divided Loyalties: Dear Gary Russell, does he really have a clue what he is writing? You would think that somebody so well educated in Doctor Who would understand just what the fans want but instead he writes stories for himself, childish, weighted with continuity and lacking even the slightest familiarity to the regulars he is trying to capture. He uses Adric? Adric! Is it any wonder this book is pants? What's worse he soils the memory of the great Celestial Toymaker. Flashbacks to the Doctor on Gallifrey should be magical but instead complicate the very simple premise of the series: 2/10
Corpse Marker: A decent stab at a sequel for Robots of Death with the survivors from that story effortlessly drawn again so many years later. Poul's Robophobia remains as scary as it was on the telly and his hallucinations provide some top scare moments. What surprises is the ill use of Leela who seems a parody of herself with little of the intelligence she clearly expresses, just acting like a violent monster without any of the light relief seems wildly out of character (after Eye of Heaven I am biased). Still he captures Doc 4 beautifully with lots of funny lines for him. Overall, page turning stuff, plot surprises and textured characters could lead you to think this a Justin Richards book: 7/10
Last of the Gaderene: Some of you will love this. If you like your Doctor Who fiction to feel precisely like it did on the telly then this is the book for you. I personally believe that the novels have the capacity to delve deeper and blatant cliched storytelling is a waste of time. This evokes the Pertwee era beautifully, so well it bores after a few chapters. It's a story we've seen a million times before, UNIT, the Master, stupid Brigadier... Gatiss has an eye for chucklesome dialogue but aside from this there is little of note: 4/10
Tomb of Valdemar: Deliciously dark and layered, this is one of those rare Doctor Who books that starts out terribly (the first few chapters are numbingly bad) but improves tenfold so that at the climax you are enthralled. The characters who at first seem one dimensional show tremendous growth (indeed Miranda Pelham and Huvan are two of the most sympathetic characters I have read) and the book manages to scare simply through atmosphere alone. Messingham's best by miles, the final twist revealing who the narrator is is the icing on the cake: 9/10
Verdigris: A blissful little novel that Margs uses to playfully poke fun at the Doctor Who universe. A certain group of fans think this is the worst depth Doctor Who can plummet to but I think they just don't know how to take the mickey out of themselves. The plot is totally unpredictable and seems to shoot of at random intervals in a new direction, creating what seems to be major complications but Margs wonderfully ties it all up by the simplest of means. Gorgeous characters and very creative: 9/10
Grave Matter: Richards in spook mode and adjusting his direct prose accordingly. There are some wonderful passages in this book, especially the delicious chapter where Peri is assaulted by all number of zombie animals. There's lashings of gothic atmosphere and another bubbly take on the sixth Doctor, if this wasn't so steeped in mood I would be harsher on its traditional nature. Great twists again, Richards is the master of hiding his true intentions: 8/10
Heart of TARDIS: Oh my bloody God. What is this nonsense? Rob Matthews and I will row forever about the Romana on screen and the bitch in these pages... I feel it is truthful rendition, he doesn't. If only that was all that was wrong with this, a book with a plot that barely finds time to begin it prevaricates so long, that wastes the potential magical 2nd and 4th Doctor's meeting, that remains deathly dull throughout despite some humour. Dave Stone sinks to an all time low: 1/10
Prime Time: Hmm, Vengeance on Varos parallels are inevitable but this actually manages to surpass the examination of media-controlled violence. It isn't the best-written book in he world, it is remarkably short and Tucker seems to have trained at the Terrance Dicks School of Writing. But the plot is continually surprising right up to the shock ending and for once the return of the Master is welcome and touches on a homicidal lust the Doctor feels for his enemy. Shame the cover is bloody awful: 7/10
Imperial Moon: Average fare, Bulis achieves the impossible and writes an engaging fifth Doctor but there is little else of note. Some people claim this is has the feel of a genuine Verne-ish adventure but I found the cliches piling up, the ending a damp squib and Turlough's failed romance rather embarrassing: 4/10
Festival of Death: Clever narrative construction and a superb evocation of season seventeen lift this book above its contempories considerably. Newcomer Jonathon Morris has written a clever and involving tale, one that uses time travel ingeniously and for good comic effect as the Doctor arrives and realises he has already been there and saved the day. Fun characters and witty dialogue make this pleasure to read: 9/10
Independence Day: Astonishingly badly written and featuring an ineffectual seventh Doctor. As you would expect from the editor of the New Adventures it features sex and drugs out of context and lacks one character that you can identify with. Even the cover is bollocks: 2/10
King of Terror: Another failure and proof, I think, that Justin Richards (editor) was concentrating far more on the eighth Doctor books of this period. Keith Topping needs some lessons in English literature as some of the punctuation in this book sucks, nothing to do with the story itself but it does distract you. It almost seems to want to contradict established continuity and when you have to go to these lengths to stick to the rules you have to wonder why the author bothered. Oh and it's got Tegan and Turlough in it: 3/10
The Quantum Archangel: Rarely has a book, any book not just a Doctor Who book been this appallingly written. It is confusing and annoying, continuity obsessed and mischaracterised. They keep using Craig Hinton and he never delivers, this is his worst offender yet because it fucks with the sixth Doctor and Mel, tries to drive a wedge between the one companion the Doctor actually got on with in the 80's. Oh and it's a sequel to the The Time Monster. Says it all really: 0/10
Bunker Soldiers: Excellent. Pushing Steven to centre stage again is a bloody good idea and his realistic and no nonsense point of view makes this a refreshingly unpretentious read. Martin Day has come on in leaps and bounds and this is his best yet, a gripping Hartnell historical which takes the simple premise of the TARDIS being out of bounds and a big fight on its way and squeezes all the tension out of it. The first Doctor is magical and perfectly accurate and even Dodo comes off well: 9/10
Rags: Signs that the PDAs are pulling themselves out of their rut and this debut novel by top writer Mick Lewis is exactly the sort of experimental material they should be exploring all the time. This is a nasty book, one that takes the Pertwee era and fills it full of loathing and death and it remains compelling throughout. It is rare for so many people to die for so little reason and the blood weeps from the pages, no wonder there was an outcry from fans for this sort of thing to never happen again. Jo is a bitter, twisted creature of self-loathing, hell she is more fun that way!: 8/10
The Shadow in the Glass: The Brigadier gets to meet Hitler! How fascinating to see these polar opposites together. A delicious documentary style look at the second world war and a breathless action story too. A solo sixth Doctor rocks with new companion Claire and her tragic death at the book's conclusion provides the ultimate lump in the throat moment for the book range. Not only stormingly written and jammed full of twists but written in a hurry to replace a Gary Russell book (phew!): 9/10
Asylum: Underrated, purely because Darvill-Evans manages to write so gorgeously here and fails so spectacularly elsewhere. The locations are captured with rare beauty and the characters given real depth. Because of this there is little plot or development of the story and it does tend to stagnate after a while. Read this in short chunks and let the glorious prose wash over you and forget about the silly pairing of the fourth Doctor with Nyssa: 7/10
Superior Beings: This book is the fifth Doctor. Kind of likable in a friendly uncle sort of way but not somebody you would want to spend any time with for long because he doesn't have anything interesting to say. Nick Walters is a good writer as demonstrated elsewhere but this is not one of his better efforts, the characters act stupidly, especially light headed Peri and the aliens fail to grab you. Maybe the sun got to their heads: 5/10
Byzantium!: Argh! What is this? How can anybody get the Hartnell regulars so totally wrong? The dialogue for Ian and Vicki is so uncharacteristic you have to wonder if Keith Topping has seen any Hartnell Who! The book itself is harmless, occasionally amusing (the Romans are so horrible to each other you have to laugh) and occasionally annoying (so many punctuation mistakes!). It is cliched as hell but goofy fun ruined considerably by 'pen and inks' Ian: 4/10
Bullet Time: Gripping and urgent and muddying the waters when it comes to the death of Sarah Jane Smith, this lacks anything definitively Who-ish to draw in the casual punter. It's more like a Jackie Chan film and McIntee indulges himself with more endless violence. The seventh Doctor's presence is intriguing: 6/10
Psi-ence Fiction: Oh dear. Dialogue heavy, obvious characterisation... it has to be Chris Boucher! There is nothing that annoys me more in horror films/books than stupid kids that do stupid things that get them killed. This book is full of them, all of which are insulting parodies of what adults expect kids to be like. The identity of the baddie is obvious you have to wonder if the twist is whether it isn't him: 2/10
Dying in the Sun: I have never read this book but my dear pal Rob Matthews has. He has regularly led me to believe by his rantings against it that it is like being strung up by your privates over a pool of mercury. I happen to value his opinion enormously so here is my rating: 2/10
Instruments of Darkness: Just when you though it couldn't get any worse... Gary Russell shows up! Actually this is kind of fun for Mr Russell featuring the first appearance of top audio companion Evelyn Smythe. The exploration of her split with the Doctor sort of overshadows the real plot of this story that brings together all sorts of loose ends from old Gary Russell books (Whoopedido!). There is a sweet gay romance somewhere in the dreck and the shock identity of an old companion at the book's climax: 5/10
Relative Dementias: Mark Michalowski I could kiss you all over! Finally a readable book! One that has an honest to God plot! Sympathetic characters! Millions of good twists! I love Scotland to pieces and this draws on the atmosphere of that gorgeous land, it is the perfect place to stage this poignant story of senility. It is the best we have seen of Doc 7 and Ace for ages, they both seem rather refreshing in this writer's capable hands: 8/10
Drift: The sumptuous cover gives way to a slow but thoughtful tale. It does seems a little jarring to have such a heavy military presence in the book, especially when the warmer character moments impress more but the mysterious White Shadow organisation are still a fun innovation. It's another Doctor and Leela book but their presence is rarely felt thanks to the huge supporting cast (although admittedly they are a fine compensation). My mate Matt who hates the books loved this: 6/10
Palace of the Red Sun: Harmless but rather enjoyable simply because it never feels that important. Bulis manages to get the holiday atmosphere just right and the book features some charming characters and ideas. I loved the scenes with the Doctor and the robot and Peri gets to be in charge a lot. The ending is pointlessly dramatic considering the rest of the book doesn't bother with silly things like tension or drama. Still, miles better than much of what has come before for a while: 7/10
Amorality Tale: Good stuff and using the often ignored 3rd Doctor and Sarah combination well. This tale of alien fog has a rather marvellous setting that gets to use all sorts of mindless thugs like Tommy Ramsey and Brick to propel the story onwards full of gang violence. The prose may be simple but the feeling of time running out for the third Doctor leaves a lump in the throat. David Bishop writes a massacre of a climax that will leave you impressed: 8/10
Warmonger: There have been very few Doctor Who books that have gotten everything so very wrong you have to wonder if Terrance Dicks' name alone means he gets a slot in the books because the quality here is being bled away into the eighth Doctor books. Insulting prose, woeful mischaracterization, a prequel of a story that doesn't need one, crappy characters, plod, plod, plodding plot, awful cover... plus (and I know I keep mentioning it) horrid references to rape: 0/10
Ten Little Aliens: A topping little mystery story told in a macho SF environment. God bless Stephen Cole, he can still write at least! At first it appear this is all about atmosphere, having a very Aliens feel (which itself is a masterpiece in atmosphere) but there is a rather clever plot too that manages to surprise with some good character twists. Doc 1 holds his own amongst all the bullies and companions Polly and Ben (in a canonically impossible story... good! About time somebody ignored the rules!) get some healthy development. I love the choose your own adventure chapter, makes you wonder how cool it would have been for the whole book to be like this: 8/10
Combat Rock: Mick Lewis... what do you expect? Blood and guts and death on an inconceivable scale? Of course! Who would you naturally plant into this story of island cannibals? The second Doctor of course... who is beautifully treated to his best interpretation yet, jumpy and embarrassed. The prose is quite beautiful and might blind you into thinking the plot is fast moving but in truth it wobbles along revelling in pain before spewing out twists you didn't know it was setting up. The scenery comes alive: 7/10
The Suns of Caresh: I am biased because the ending to this book sucks, a terribly dull scientific lecture on a planet that is hardly featured to that point. The first two thirds are excellent however, the very involving romance with Simon Haldane (nerd spectacular!) and Troy Game, the gripping crash landing of the TARDIS, the exploration of the creepy alien ship... Paul Saint has assembled some clever SF ideas and whips up an engaging 3rd Doctor tale. Damn that ending otherwise it would be the best since Festival of Death: 7/10
Heritage: Strangely popular for a book that does sod all throughout. Okay so there is the death of Mel sensitively handled but in order to reach this development you have to wade through the first hundred pages of repetitive prose and wretched internal dialogue that reminds of the worst of the New Adventures. For a book that flirts with incest, assassination and killer dolphins this is an extremely dull book that favours its drab and character-less setting over the plot. Oh and the seventh Doctor is waay moody: 2/10
Fear of the Dark: A sweet little horror tale that admittedly hauls the cliches at you full pelt but unlike Deep Blue manages to surprise occasionally with some huge set pieces (the Blood hunter and the ship crashing are both spectacular moments). Tegan is damn likable throughout and the book deals sympathetically with her reintegration into the TARDIS. Loved space bitch Stoker and her almost romance. Above average prose for Baxendale makes this a decent, if predictable read: 7/10
Blue Box: Welcome home Kate Orman! An A list EDA writer provides the best novel in the PDA range for AGES. Gripping told in the journalistic first person style of Chick Peters, it tells of the road trip across America with the sixth Doctor and Peri on the trail of alien technology. Graceful writing and an excellent exploration of the abusive Doc 6/Peri relationship provide good reasons to read this but super bitch Sarah Swan, the best novel baddie for an age, makes it essential: 9/10
Loving the Alien: Incredibly confusing book that makes the mistake of assuming that everybody has read Illegal Alien. Some of us haven't and couldn't give a toss who Cody McBride is. The very intriguing idea of Ace dying before her time is wasted on a novel that tries to do too much and is annoyingly placed in a period where the EDAs were already dealing with alternative universes and the idea transferring to this series feeling like serious overkill. Again the two authors' prose feels clunky and there is a cast of hundreds. Still top marks for the end of episode two: 4/10
Colony of Lies: Inoffensive but hardly memorable: 4/10
Wolfsbane: A book that uses Harry Sullivan better than any other and stands up to repeated readings. Jac Rayner has an eye of detail like no other and fills the book with magical events that dismiss the view that all magic in Who is based on science. Don't stop to think how absurd the baddies are; enjoy the laugh out loud material and the bubbly dialogue. Another superb chapter in the Caught on Earth arc: 9/10
Deadly Reunion: Perfect for capturing the Pertwee era but unlike Last of the Gaderene it bothers to include some genuinely original material, in this case the hundred-page prelude in the Brigadier's past where he comes face to face with the Greek Gods. The second half is an exercise in nostalgia and easily the best thing Terrance Dicks has written in yonks, he actually takes the time to enjoy his characters and includes lots of fun bonuses for fans of the era: 8/10
Empire of Death: Bloody good and achieving the rare position of being the third PDA in a row to stand up to scrutiny, we haven't had that in a while. Finally Nyssa gets to shine in a book where she isn't subjected to torture and we get some fascinating insights into this usually quiet character. A smashing Victorian chiller, one that bothers to concentrate on its characters to create chills, especially the creepy medium James Lees. Queen Victoria makes a top companion: 9/10
Postmodernism in Doctor Who by Mike Morris 13/6/04
Okay, having seen the title I'm pretty sure that there are all of three people reading by now. But what the hell; it's a topic that's been nagging away at me for a while. It comes from a few things; the way that "Post-Modern" is bandied about far too much in the context of Who, the fact that contemporary culture is swimming in postmodernism these days, the upcoming new series which will - inevitably, I think - be taking on a lot of those Post-Modern traits. And I thought there were two big questions worth asking. Firstly: When has Doctor Who been Post-Modern? Second, and maybe more importantly: Should Doctor Who be Post-Modern?
Now, I read a review on this site, which mentioned Lance Parkin having a cut at this already in DWM, and I haven't read that. Still, Parkin's definition of Post-Modernism (according to whatever review I read) was, erm, not really what Post-Modernism is. Which is understandable, as in SF circles "Post-Modern" seems to have come to mean winks to the audience, overt referencing of other material, and a playful attitude towards the text generally. Now, those things are symptoms of Post-Modernism, yes, but they don't have to be post-modern and they aren't at the core of what it is. The Hinchcliffe era, for example, very obviously references Hammer movies, but not in a post-modern way.
So it's definition time. And again, someone's got there before me. Rob Matthews has discussed this in his review of The Year of Intelligent Tigers (or at least, what he claimed was a review of The Year of Intelligent Tigers), so you should probably go and have a look at that. I'll wait.
Dum-de-dum-de-dum...
Okay. Now, I should probably bow to Rob's superior knowledge in topics like this, but I'm going to put my hand up and say that I don't quite agree with him there either. I have studied theories of modernism and post-modernism, although it was in an architectural context, so this is all open to correction; but essentially I think it's an idea that applies to all areas of culture anyway. Essentially, Rob's right on. Modernism came along, blew most things apart and said that a dogmatic I'm-right-and-everyone-else-is-wrong, there-are-rules-you-know attitude produces nothing of value. Two apparently different ideas can be equally valid, and dialectic and argument should occur to refine them. Again, if you look at nineteenth century English fiction (and given that schools in England and Ireland shove the crap down your throat, it's hard not to), you'll see what things were like beforehand. Read Silas Marner, for example (or on second thoughts don't because it's incredibly boring), and you'll find that it pretty much has two messages; Church of England is better than Presbyterian communes, and being a miser is bad. Now, there's no-one who pops up and says, well, I like being a Presbyterian and sod the CofE. There isn't any discussion. What we're given, essentially, is dogma.
However, when Rob says that Post-Modernism isn't wildly different from Modernism, I have to disagree. Philosophically they are intrinsically opposed. You see, in spite of the "different ideas" line, Modernism (and "Modern" shouldn't be confused with "contemporary", by the way. It was a distinct movement which grew in the early part of the twentieth century) does believe in a real, impartial truth. While two opposing arguments may both be valid, what Modernism holds is that they're facets of a greater truth; essentially, that the truth is Out There and can be arrived at. And the theory goes that we get closer to the truth by discussion and refinement of different ideas, and - generally - by eliminating what is irrelevant and finding what is common between them. If an idea cannot be justified by argument, then it's not an idea, it's a dogma and it's worthless. This is why Modern architecture, for example, tend to be white walls and cubes and simplicity; because Modernism is about removing irrelevancies to arrive at a core of truth.
What frustrates Modern thinkers is that it's a bit difficult to do that in practice. There are so many opinions and arguments in the world, many of which are incredibly difficult to refine or distil, that arriving at the ultimate truth is impossible. So, as Rob says, Modern fiction tends to be a bit depressing, because it's about the argument rather than the product, and the argument's practically impossible to conclude. Dammit, what is the truth? Why can't I work it out? Kafka (ooh I love him) tends to write like this; a main character searching desperately for the centre of a near-incomprehensible world, and just becoming too confused by the profusion of arguments and ideas that he has to negotiate. Just as Modern thinkers, frustratingly, can't really work out what the ultimate, impartial truth is. Still, even if K can't reach it, there is a Castle, Out There. So it isn't quite the nihilism it threatens to be.
Post-Modernism is a reaction to this depressing reality; it simply says that there is no truth, just opinion. There is no right and wrong, so just enjoy the debate. It can be playful and fun because, essentially, the debate doesn't really matter as there's no real answer. So although the arguments are the same, the attitude is different and the philosophy is fundamentally opposed. Post-Modernism was a huge jolt to society generally and remains a predominant philosophy, even if its results are varied. Post-Modern architecture is almost always appalling, for example, while in cinema and television it's a mixed blessing that can go either way, and in literature it's generally a positive thing. Essentially, a post-modern novel can present questions but no answers in a way that Modern novels can't, not without being bloody depressing anyway.
Okay, I'm almost at the point of talking about Doctor Who, honest!
Twentieth-century Modern novels do tend to be a bit depressing, but as I said, they tend to be about the overall argument. Modern architecture, though, is very much about creating a clear, complete entity that works within itself, and it's optimistic and exhilarating and exciting. And going back to literature, some of the most Modern works are centuries old. Folk-tales are incredibly Modern, because they tend to be short, sharp and pared-down (due to them being passed on orally over generations, which means only the important bits survive). They're simple and elegant and within themselves they are perfectly justified. In this century - sorry, the last century - lots of short pulp novels have Modern traits. Whodunnits, for example, which are all about the truth being arrived at through discussion. Or Calvino's Our Ancestors trilogy, which is essentially three modern fairy-tales and is very beautiful.
Doctor Who (hooray!) as seen on television is something quite close to a contemporary fairy-tale. And I'll put my head on the block here and say that it is a fundamentally Modern programme, and that's what makes it so great. It's Modern in it's expression; it tends to be based on speed, simplicity and economy, it's about annunciating ideas clearly, it's about justifying its locations and its plots through its text. More importantly, it's usually Modern in its philosophy. This is about a guy who goes around fighting for what's right; it has very clear moral ideas. Post-Modern thinking holds that there is no right or wrong, there's just opinion, which really is alien to Doctor Who's philosophy. I mean, yes, freedom of expression and all that, and Modernism doesn't mean that people aren't entitled to their viewpoint; but Modernism means that you can say of something that "this is crap", while Post-Modern limits you to "I don't like it." And it's been said about the Doctor that he is a figure who is defined by his courage to say, "You are wrong." Which is a Modern statement.
This means that, for the overwhelming majority of Doctor Who, there's very little Post-Modernism in philosophy or expression. Post-Modern expression is where nods-and-winks come in. Because it's all about enjoying the argument, it assumes a literacy on the part of its audience and uses elements, not as things in themselves, but as signifiers of other arguments. Now, because Doctor Who is about telling convincing stories, it doesn't really do this sort of thing, and apart from a brief period it certainly doesn't go for it wholeheartedly. But there are exceptions.
Carnival of Monsters would be an example. There are numerous little touches, such as Vorg's "our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse - nothing serious, nothing political", which is a nudge to the audience that this story is a comment on Doctor Who's production. Really, though, it doesn't depend on the audience getting the joke, in much the same way as The Brain of Morbius reworks Frankenstein but doesn't need us to recognise where it comes from. That's Modern, is that, just as Villa Savoye adapts the Parthenon but doesn't expect us to recognise the fact - it wants us to think it's entirely new. It's the difference between reinterpreting and referencing.
Right, I won't mention architecture again. Promise.
Inter Minor, though, is different. Kalik, Orum and Pletrac are obviously there to represent bureaucrats and political wrangling, and the script goes to great effort to make us get the joke. They're grey, to show how boring they are. They're bald, to conform to our archetypical image of bureaucrats. Their dialogue is very overtly like political gobbledygook of our time. What makes this post-modern is that we need to be in on the joke to enjoy it. Viewing Inter Minor without its obvious subtexts, it doesn't make sense. No matter what species we're talking about, important politicians would not be that gormless, and they wouldn't hang around spaceports. Coups are not planned in two minutes, standing around on corners. No one really talks like that. Entire species would not suffer from pattern baldness. Unless you're aware of the joke, Inter Minor is bloody stupid, so great efforts are made to make sure we get it. And another Robert Holmes script, The Sunmakers, works in pretty much the same way. Inter Minor and Pluto aren't supposed to be real environments, just signposts to the real joke.
Anyone who's read my review of The Sunmakers will know what I think of that story, and I'm not wildly keen on the Inter Minor segments of Carnival of Monsters either. Really, it depends on how good the joke is; I don't think the "bureaucracy" joke in Carnival of Monsters is particularly funny, and the "taxman" joke in The Sunmakers is one I fundamentally disagree with. The real damage, though, is that these Post-Modern touches sit awkwardly in a generally Modern series. They're laid on with a trowel, and Post-Modernism does rely on subtlety and skill to work well. In Who, it comes across as self-indulgent, and because the programme works so hard to establish plausibility it's annoying to undercut it like that.
Besides, while we might argue that these things are Post-Modern now, I don't think they were really intended as such at the time. They're just... well, a bit cosy and crap. This also applies to the novels, where a lot of authors think they're being brilliantly Post-Modern, but really they're just being very childishly Post-Modern. Post-Modernism needs to be clever to work, but it's a mistake to think it's inherently clever in itself. In fact, it's often very stupid and annoying.
The only time that the televised series was really, seriously, Post-Modern, was during the Cartmel era. And we see the benefits of someone really understanding what it was all about - but also, I think, what some of the problems are.
In my review of Ghost Light, I've already spoken about this as one of very few Doctor Who stories where the narrative is genuinely Post-Modern. It's full of signifiers and references to a wider debate, and relies on them to work. Reverend Matthews, for example, isn't really supposed to be a character in himself; rather, he's a signifier of the political power of the Church, and we're expected to know that. Really, I've gone about this in my review anyway, but I will say that it's comfortably the most successful example of Post-Modernism in the context of the programme. Still, the Cartmel-era as a whole tends to be far more Post-Modern than the rest of Doctor Who generally. It's there in the way that, say, we know that Commander Millington is there to - at least partly - represent Hitler, and Doctor Judson is supposed to be Alan Turing. And there's the looser attitude to plotting, with the stories being much less linear, much denser, and leaving far more questions unanswered. As a whole, they tend to ask more of the viewer in terms of putting the pieces together. That's Post-Modern, is that.
What shouldn't be forgotten, though, is that a lot of fans don't like the McCoy era. That's obviously a bit of a simplistic point, but it's a valid one. It's not fair to say people as intelligent as Terrence Keenan don't like the McCoy era just because it's different and they're too stupid to get it. Thing is, although I don't agree with Terrence's criticism of The Curse of Fenric, I can see why he might not like it. It can easily be seen as preachy and portentous, and getting away from the principles of storytelling for the sake of storytelling that makes Doctor Who such a joy. Not that this isn't valid, not that I want to fall into that "Doctor Who is all about X or Y" trap (because it's dogma!). Still, a friend of mine hates the era because he describes it as clumsy. "I can see the joins," is the best way he puts it. Because the stories are - deliberately - not completely naturalistic, they can be cliched and not establish the suspension of disbelief that a programme like Doctor Who needs. And something else; when it doesn't quite work, as in Silver Nemesis and Battlefield, it really does go tits-up.
What has remained constant, though, is that the philosophy remains Modern, a choice of right or wrong, sometimes with - in the New Adventures especially - a debate as to why a particular type of action is the right one. The New Adventures are frequently a bit Post-Modern in their expression and their narrative, chiefly because they're largely written by McCoy-era fans. And they're rather more comfortable with it too, because I think Post-Modernism works better in literature. Still, it's not rigorous; I don't think that NA writers were serious students of Post-Modernism in the way that Andrew Cartmel is, and I would still say that a lot of NA's aren't very well written. There are too many cuts, too many brief passages, too much philosophising and not enough basics. Bad Post-Modern theory again, because the writers still thought that Terrance Dick's "wheezing, groaning" joke was what Post-Modern meant.
I think that really, there are only two Who writers who could genuinely claim to be Post-Modern and they're both BBC Books boys. One is Paul Magrs. The other is Lawrence Miles.
And yet, I'm not sure these two are wildly good at using it either. Paul Magrs is by far the more comfortable of the two with it, and his fascinating discussions of "layers of reality" underpin much of his books and are a rare example of Post-Modern thinking sitting beautifully into the overall context of the show. Look at the sideline universe in The Blue Angel; it's gorgeous. Or the device of Sally writing the story that runs alongside the other, and the way that the novel never tells us which reality is real, how to interpret the contradictions, how to make sense of the confusion. In fact we're supposed to enjoy the confusion. And it really is wonderfully challenging.
But even someone as clever as Magrs uses Post-Modernism as a dull excuse for laziness, bad plotting and bad jokes. It comes back to what I find hateful about Post-Modern thinking; nothing's right, nothing's wrong, nothing's good or bad. There's just opinion, criticism has no meaning, nothing really matters. Sometimes I feel like that woman from when Ali G took the piss out of those environmentalists, jumping up and down and shouting "This is serious, you wanker!" But, dammit... this is serious, you wanker. Magrs' outlook can mean that the referencing becomes more important than the reference; that cleverness matters more than heart. It makes some of his work smart-arsed, tedious, and indulgent.
Lawrence Miles is the other candidate, but he's much less comfortable with the implications. Initially, his philosophy appears to be extremely Post-Modern. Look at the lines he comes up with in Interference - that there's no right or wrong, just politics. That there are no absolutes, just the media. That book, like Alien Bodies to a lesser extent, is all about junking Doctor Who's moral absolutes. As witnessed with the Doctor's conversations with Badar in the cell, where he's attacked with the inconsistencies of what he does and what's forced upon us is that the Doctor's moral code is spurious - there is no right, no wrong, no morality.
But us fans weren't happy with this, because it just doesn't feel right within the Doctor Who universe. Dammit, we need that morality. What's far more telling, though, is that Lawrence Miles doesn't like it either. I think that, when fans said how mean it was of Loz to attack the Doctor in this way, they were missing the point a bit. I think Miles wanted the Doctor to find a rationale, a reason, an argument, and that's what the Badar chapters were about - but, to Loz's horror, the best he can do to justify why-Varos-and-not-earth are unconvincing, technobabble conclusions. Badar is the classic Modern thinker, desperate for clear reasons and rules for the Doctor's stories. So when the Doctor comes up with that "there's just politics" line at the end, it's not that the reader is supposed to say "oh great, it makes sense now, there's just politics! Brilliant!" We're clearly supposed to be horrified by this conclusion. Really, Miles isn't celebrating the joy of so many different truths; in fact, he's disgusted that he can't work out what the truth is.
And that ain't Post-Modern. That's Modern.
Okay, now that we've come full circle, I'll conclude. Question 1 was "Has Doctor Who been Post-Modern," and I would say the answer is "Not much." As for "Should Doctor Who be Post-Modern?" Well, I wouldn't say that it can't be Post-Modern... but I would say that it's much better at being Modern.
What makes me worry for the new series is that, these days, contemporary culture (and SF in particular) is firmly gripped by Post-Modern thinking. It's all bloody referencing. And while Post-Modernism can be liberating and marvellous (Spaced, for example, is one of my favourite comedies of all time), I don't think SF does it well. It tends to use it as an excuse for stupid ideas and bad tongue-in-cheek jokes that keep getting spammed to my inbox; they bomb when Buffy gets clever-clever, they're not funny in Smallville, they're boring whenever the latest SF programme decides to do a fucking musical, they're tragically uncomic whenever a new show gives us a bunch of Dawson's Creek teenagers taking on silly villains in a bout of shiny plastic winks. What's happened is that SF believes it can joke its way out of its own laziness, while stonkingly brilliant straightforward films/programmes that treat their subject seriously like Cube and 28 Days Later aren't that common any more. Even more worrying, the slack is filled up with boring sub-Ally McBeal shite about relationships.
The telling point, though, is that 28 Days Later and Cube both found hugely devoted audiences. I think there's a thirst out there for real, Modern storytelling. So lets hope that Doctor Who ignores the nostalgia brigade, the oh-it's-just-a-bit-of-fun theories, and steers clear of all those tacky little traps. I think Modernism was the key to Doctor Who's magic, and if it comes back as a genuinely Modern programme, the audience will reward it.
Rose and how the new series could be so wonderful by Paul Harries 4/7/04
I keep hearing the tabloid papers saying that, in the new series, Rose is going to be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer type of character, that she will take no nonsense from the enemies and that she and the Doctor are going to have a romance. I'm hoping this is all newspaper speculation, because if this is true, then the series will fail, and fail badly.
Regarding the "Buffy" comparisons, I'm wondering if some people are not willing to take the new series on it's own terms, rather than comparing it to a teen supernatural drama. Are these people so eager to prove that Doctor Who is worth watching, that it has to have the same elements that other programs have (as an aside, the few episodes of "Buffy" I have seen, I found the character of Willow to be more interesting. Shy, intelligent, capable of courage when necessary and very friendly and reliable. She would be a better companion than the morose, spoil and tarty Buffy Summers. This is my humble opinion. Please don't write in.) I know Doctor Who "borrowed" from other sources in the past, but they also paid homage to them.
I am a little concerned about the casting of Billie Piper as Rose, but in all honestly, who else is there? There seems to be so few strong actresses coming through, if you REALLY think about it, as so many of them (or the people casting them) seem to think that being pretty is all they need, as well as appearing to have huge personality disorders. I'm trying not to be worried about the casting, as long as the character is likeable and she has a good bond with Christopher Ecclestone.
Let's make Rose a good female role model, as there are none on TV these days (I'm willing to be corrected). The recent Scream of the Shalka got the character of the companion as close as prefect I've ever seen it. Bored, wanting a change in her life, responding to alien threats in a real manner and jumping at the chance to travel the universe, despite being aware of the dangers, and getting on with and accepting the Doctor. THAT's my idea of a companion.
There seems to be a few people who want everything safe and recognisable. Are we, as TV viewers so cowardly in what we watch? Don't we want some escapism, rather than have all of life's woes and dull points constantly thrown in our faces? I barely watch TV these days because it's all so boring.
I keep hearing the term that "science fiction audiences these days are so sophisticated". What rubbish. Well, the effects these day are, but everything else has gone downhill, from the sloppy plotting, to the beautiful but in my opinion, lazy actors. Which do people really prefer, the Star Wars originals to the prequels? Randall and Hopkirk past or present? The Ray Harryhausen stop motion adventures, with painstaking animation, or the Matrix sequels, with lazy plots compensating for "gee wiz" SFX. I know which audience is more sophisticated, and it's not today's spoon-fed generation. Doctor Who will be compared unfavourably to it's past. I just hope that the new series will be worth remembering in 40 years time. That is always the mark of true quality.
As long as the stories and characters are interesting, as long as the series stays as far away from the soap mentality and is a lot of fun, it will succeed.
The importance of the label "Classic" by Antony Tomlinson 9/8/04
Some people say that it does not matter which Doctor Who stories are regarded as "classics" and which are not - we all find what we like in individual Doctor Who stories (and these stories all have their own merits). Thus, whether "fan opinion" holds a story to have the mythical status of a "classic" or not is not really an important issue (for instance, see Jonathan Martin's review of The Talons of Weng-Chiang).
Unfortunately this is garbage. The question of which stories are regarded as "classic" has huge practical import within the world of Doctor Who. It affects all kinds of things which matter to our enjoyment of the series. For instance, the question of which stories should be regarded as classics has an influence on which are released first on DVD/CD (and possibly which DVD releases see the most effort put into their production). Thus, the reason we can buy a copy of The Curse of Fenric on DVD, and not The Happiness Patrol, is because the former is regarded as a classic. This is true, even though some (myself included) regarded the latter as a far superior (see my list of the Top Ten Seventh Doctor stories).
The notion that certain stories are classics has effects on other releases too. For instance, one could once buy large coffee table books called The Hinchcliffe Years and The Harper Classics. These books chose to look at particular periods of the show in detail, and chose these periods because the stories involved were, at the time, regarded as classics. Had a different set of stories been regarded as classics at that point in time, however, we may instead have seen the release of books called 'The Letts Classics' or the 'The Lambert Years' (which may have been more interesting).
Most importantly, however, the question of which stories are regarded as classics has an effect on new Doctor Who. For instance, in the 1980s, Doctor Who looked back to the Troughton and Pertwee eras as supplying the bulk of Doctor Who's "classics" - stories like The Sea Devils, Tomb of the Cybermen and The Daemons. This prompted programme-makers to try to replicate the monster-filled thrills and themes of that era - leading to the creation of disasters like Warriors of the Deep, Attack of the Cybermen and Battlefield.
In the early 1990s, on the other hand, Remembrance of the Daleks and Ghost Light were regarded as the latest "classics", and these informed writers as to how the New Adventures should be written - dark, politically correct, nerdy and often incoherent sci-fi. In the mid-1990s, however, "fun" Tom Baker stories like City of Death and Shada seemed to be increasingly regarded as classics, and this helped lead to the more light-hearted tone of the Missing Adventures and earlier BBC books (as well as the TV Movie, possibly). By the late 1990s, Hartnell stories like The Crusaders and The Massacre had come to be regarded as "classics", and this led to the increased importance of the historicals (and serious drama in general) in Big Finish's new range of audio plays.
Thus, as a new series rears its head, each fan has reason to push for his own view of what counts as a classic Doctor Who story. For this "common wisdom" as to what is classic must inevitably have an effect on the makers of the new series, as they try to work out what Doctor Who is all about, and what has worked in the past.
At present, of course, a classic is regarded as pretty much anything in Season 7, anything written by Douglas Adams/Robert Holmes (excluding his Second Doctor stories), anything set in the Victorian era and anything which features a speech by the Doctor as to the importance of our tiny human lives. For those of us who find this view of a "classic" restrictive however, we at least have the DWRG to put forward our own views as to what should be regarded as 'classic'.
And perhaps someone out there will listen to our views. Who knows, perhaps this will help prevent new Doctor Who, in whatever format, becoming a stale rehash of stories that are praised beyond their merits, and which offer only one vision of a series which can actually do so much more. Thus, in arguing that some stories are classics and others are not, reviewers are not merely being anally retentive. Rather, they are doing their duty to the series.
Doctor Who as fiction by Rob Matthews 18/8/04
'Spin-off': such a derogatory term. After all, the Earth 'spun off' from the sun, and few of us think any the less of it for that...
Of late, a combination of factors have conspired to get me mulling over the subject of Who fiction.
Firstly, fan reaction to news of the upcoming TV series reinforced an existing belief of mine that very few of us find the books we've been reading since the demise of the original show to be a wholly satisfactory form for Doctor Who; it's plain enough to me that if we did consider the New/Missing Adventures and the BBC Eighth- and Past Doctor books as being of equal merit to the TV series, the announcement of new Who on television would not have occasioned the pants-wetting euphoria that it has. May be naive of me, us fans being what we are, but I must admit to being taken aback by the sheer pitch of that euphoria, and how easily fans appeared to forget that Doctor Who had still been with us in other media from more or less the moment the original TV series was 'rested' anyway. I think I had a sudden realisation - perhaps a mistaken one - that when we were all saying not so long back how wonderful the books were, and how they could do stuff and go places that the TV series couldn't, and how both they and the Big Finish audio plays had produced some of the best Doctor Who stories there are and spoiled us for any future TV series - it suddenly appeared to me that I was the only one who'd actually meant that stuff; everyone else was just making the best of what they saw as a bad deal. Additionally I thought it was unfair that the new TV series would most likely be credited with 'revolutionising' Doctor Who, when in fact it's been quietly evolving for a decade and a half, something which deserves a bit of recognition.
When I attempted to point this out on the site, I was genuinely surprised to discover shortly afterward that someone had - apparently - taken my championing of the books as some kind of anti-every other media statement. Now, it most definitely wasn't that - it was, rather, an attempt to point out that we shouldn't be so blinded by the television screen as to forget that oodles of great Doctor Who stories have been produced away from it.
Listen, I'd love the new television series to be a success. Because I love Doctor Who. And in fact, cover versions of Spearhead From Space, resurrected Daleks and Billie Piper aside, I think it's going to be great. There are so many talented people involved that it's damn near got to be. I have expressed some pessimistic views about its chances of gaining that success, though, and it's been brought to my attention lately that some of the people who read my little rant misread it somewhat; my objective beliefs about what I saw as the probable fate of the series were interpreted as a desire on my part to see it fail. So to clarify - I don't wish that at all. But I do think it's likely to happen. I've always thought Doctor Who is fantastic, but the general public never really has. Why should that suddenly change now? (much as we'd like it to!)
Since my argument was misread that way, however - and by more than one reader -, I got the impression that there must be a certain amount of hostility out there in fandom towards people valuing the books 'too much' - my argument that they should be valued as much as the TV series appeared to be taken as a suggestion they were better than the TV series, my defence of one thing interpreted as an attack on another. I do tend to ramble on, of course, so I can see how a skim-read might have produced some fearful misinterpretations... still, and though I hate to look this arrogant, I did work damn hard at making myself clear on that piece, and I honestly believe that anyone who read it with an objective eye would be able to see what I was getting at. I do think fans too strongly covet a mainstream 'stamp of approval'. That doesn't mean I would not like Doctor Who to achieve mainstream success again - it'd be nice to get these stories for (almost) free for a change, and to get back into that format after so long -, it's just that I don't think it matters either way: the stories will go on regardless and that for me is what matters most.
Next Andrew Wixon posted a thoughtful and highly persuasive response to said rant, in which, as part of his setting-out of terms, he stated that as Doctor Who was to his mind first and foremost a television series, new Who stories in any other media were inevitably a less exciting prospect than new Who stories on TV. I don't agree with Andrew, but I respect his opinion, and suspect it may be quite representative.
(well, obviously, since his unequivocal statement about the superiority of TV Who provoked zero response on the site; yet my argument that fans should give the books the same credit as the TV series was taken as some form of 'TV-or-books?!!' ultimatum)
Additionally, I've recently been having a couple of e-mail chats with a fella who's just embarked upon Who fiction, and during the course of our discussions he's displayed some hostility towards the idea of people saying that Doctor Who 'grew up' in the books - again, positive comment on the book ranges being taken almost instinctively as attacks on the TV series. This got me thinking too - it does seem to me that us fans have a strong capacity for creating unnecessary structures of opposition - an 'If you're for this, you're against that' mindset which isn't conducive to good debate.
Then, most recent of all, after I brought the subject up again on the site, (I know, I know, dog with a bone - but, you know, we are all here to discuss these things, and there's nothing more frustrating than having your position misunderstood by people who people who appear to in fact agree with you)... and shortly afterward Mike Morris has had some wise and wonderful things to say to me about it. As usual when Mike Morris says wise and wonderful things, I was prompted to get my thinking cap back on and refine my ideas on the subject that bit more.
It occurs to me that as fans, so far as I'm aware anyway, we don't often examine what Who fiction is, or can be; what parameters it operates within and what it can and can't do. We have a sense of its aims and limits but we rarely voice them - typically the matter will only come up when there's a complaint of the 'This violence/swearing/representation of homosexuality would never have happened in the TV series' type. Course, that's an indicator of a fundamental belief about these books: that their function is essentially to replicate the TV series.
This raises some issues. Coz, you know, books and television are different.
So, just to make myself clear once more, and outline my position in coming to these books: I don't believe there's any innately superior form of Doctor Who. I grew up with it as a television series - bits and pieces of Full Circle, The Keeper of Traken and Castrovalva are amongst my very earliest memories actually -, but lost my obsessive interest in it probably about a year or two after the final series aired, having entered adolescence, become all moody, and gotten into other things. Rediscovering it in my early twenties, my interest was triggered first by nostalgia, then by the realisation that the show was just too damn good to be thought about in merely nostalgic terms; and that I in fact identified with it far more profoundly as an adult than I ever had as a kid. Finally, the discovery that it was still going in the form of books - and, I found later, audio plays - ensured my continuing interest in the thing as an ongoing property. To me the most important story in Doctor Who is always the next one - and for as long as I've been a fan, there's always been a plentiful supply of 'next ones' to choose from.
I say 'the next one' because for me one of the greatest things Doctor Who has going for it is the enormous potential bound up in its really very simple concept - a mysterious alien man exploring time and space and helping people and places change forthe better.
For clarity, let's discuss this at first purely in terms of the television series: (yes, I'll concede that in terms of inception and chronology that is the 'prime' Doctor Who, it's where the property was born - Jesus, can I say this again: Who on television is brilliant)
I've just mentioned the concept. A massively important supporting factor in its successful realisation is the sheer individuality, what some would term 'eccentricity', that comes into play. Doctor Who not only has a strong and resilient central idea, but also a strong sense of its own personality. This comes through in writing, casting and in performance, and is to my mind what makes it great. As you may infer, I like Doctor Who because I like storytelling. But the storytelling I like is the kind that surprises me - unpredictable, individual non-formulaic storytelling; not boring reassuring whodunnits, or dramas where middle class people sitting about in living rooms moaning about nowt. I like stories that are one of a kind, that don't play it safe and predictable, and that play by their own rules. I like to see stories that I feel I haven't seen before - and even if the series itself doesn't always live up to its own grand potential, even if it does steal ideas from other texts left, right and centre, it still displays far, far more invention than a comfortable ninety per cent of the other shows on TV put together. At its very best it stimulates the imagination and - borrowing Andrew's phrase - makes people think and care. The 'caring' part is just as important as the thinking - the best Doctor Who stories have a real, considered and fundamentally empathetic sense of compassionate morality which nothing else on British television comes close to matching. And, vitally important, the show has a sense of humour, a sense of fun, and is able to laugh at itself. The combination of these things puts it in quite a different class from any of the other sci-fi/fantasy shows that tend to get cited as its peers - that humility being one of its most attractive qualities.
That's the TV series. You know, in a nutshell. From one perspective. So what particular qualities do Doctor Who books need to have? And what makes them worthwhile?
Well, first of all, just to to be successful as Doctor Who they need to emulate all the qualities mentioned above - all except the acting of course; in this case the 'writing' factor swells in importance by comparison with collaborative product like television. These books need to have a personality, a tone recognisable as that of the TV series. This itself is by no means a big constraint, however, since that is one very big and ever-evolving personality, one which encompasses stories as disparate as The Chase, The Curse of Fenric, The Stones of Blood, The Caves of Androzani, The Three Doctors and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. At its best Who is adventurous and outward-looking too, its horizons free to expand whatever new form it takes. There are limits, but generally we only know what these are when a story crosses them. And even then it's not clear-cut, since what one fan will see as stepping over the mark, another may not see as a transgression at all! But certainly you couldn't ditch the show's moral impulse or its questioning attitude. All Doctor Who stories are at root morality plays. The Doctor must go into a bad or compromised situation and change it for the better, or at least try to. That's about as basic an essentialist view I can come up with.
Obviously, books have an ability to tell the imaginative off-the-wall stories in which Who specialises without the budget limitations that can impede their realisation on screen. A Who novel can be larger in scale, more expansive than a Who television serial. This extends the number of characters and locales used, to depth of characterisation, to a freer treatment of time, and so on.
Next, the ability to go into a lot more detail, and to make use of the fact that, unlike a one-shot television story where any complicated plot details need to be continually clarified or restated - for example, with week-long breaks between episodes, something in the manner of contrived plot summary or info dump will often be necessary -, a book can rely on the reader's ability to flip about, skip back and re-read bits at will. It's freed up to tell more complex and involved stories.
Additionally, there's the implied age of readership. No longer a TV show aimed specifically at a 'family audience', Doctor Who fiction can make use of a wider and more adult frame of reference - identification points for readers who in most cases are not children anymore. Well, at least in not in the age sense, hoho. This shouldn't be taken as cart blanche for a bunch of sex, drink and swearing, but the occasional mention of such things does help make a narrative world believable to an adult reader. It prevents the sense of campiness that can arise from a kids's show studiously attempting to ignore them.
There's a point to be made on this issue. Some complain about pretentious attempts to be 'adult' - in the negative sense of trying to be 'cooler and harder' than you actually are, I think - and, fair enough, in retrospect the glee taken by some of the NA writers in Bernice Summerfield's binge-drinking suggests a distinctly adolescent idea of what constitutes being 'adult'. But it's worth bearing in mind, considering that objections to this sort of thing are essentially objections to gratuity, that it would be just as gratuitous to deliberately ignore these elements of life when you no longer have to. I don't have any problem with a character in a Doctor Who novel saying 'Shit!' or something, for example, because plainly and simply, that is something that people say. And it is in fact the television series that's going out of its way in avoiding having people say things like that - but that avoidance is a custom we're so, erm, accustomed to that we don't really notice it. Generally it seems to me that objections to swearing etc. in Who novels are based at root on an argument that 'I wouldn't like this to have happened in a Saturday teatime kids' show'. This again reflecting a basic belief that Who books are a replacement for a TV series and hence shouldn't cross the limits that TV series would have had to work within.
However, this implies that a 'continuation' of Doctor Who in other media should replicate not only the basic character of the show, but also the constraints placed on it by timeslots, pre-watershed broadcasting regulations and so on. That it should be a kids show in the form of a book. This can in fact work, but even in its finest form - like David Whitaker's lovingly crafted reinventions of TV stories as true children's literature -, this model would be unsatisfactory.
Unsatisfactory - that needs clarifying: better to say I would find it unsatisfactory. I need to feel that a book is addressing the me who's here right now, not a younger version of myself. But I don't think I'm alone amongst Doctor Who readers in that, and it's a fair enough assumption to work with.
In my own opinion what really makes Who fiction worthwhile is its ability to free that great basic concept I mentioned from its 'kid show' shackles. There is afer all nothing innately childlike in this concept - it's not a story about children, like the Famous Five or Harry Potter series, and its philosophical oulook is flexible and rigorously intelligent rather than preachy and domineering. It can, in short, be written as well for a specifically adult audience as a family one. On these terms original Who fiction is innately a 'niche' product because it's something actively sought out and paid for by people with a genuine love for Doctor Who, not something chanced upon and watched in varying levels of absorption by a mixture of fans and people who just happen to have tuned in. Unless you're actually ashamed of your love for Doctor Who, this 'niche' aspect is not a negative point. Theoretically, Who fiction is for adults - this by default; all the children who watched the show in its original run are grown up by now -, and need not compromise on anything for the sake of the kids.
The loophole in this theory would seem to be that the TV show did not talk down to the kids anyway - if, for example, the children in the audience didn't specifically understand the 'certain kindnesses' that Count Grendel had shown to whatsername, they'd at least have had an inkling that it was something to do with kissing (which is true!); and even if they didn't specifically wonder which one of Marco and Guiliano got on top, they'd at least have got that they were bestest bestest friends (which is true!).
Nevertheless, the books have been able to go more deeply into matters only represented symbolically on screen. Ian Briggs had to represent Doctor Judson's homosexuality via a cripple metaphor in The Curse of Fenric (not as offensive as it sounds), whereas in The Turing Test Alan Turing's could be discussed outright. Companion characters couldn't have 'romances' on screen because that's what they always came out as - forced, icky stuff; also because the direction was generally geared toward telling action-adventures stories, and was rarely tuned to emotional nuance. Whereas, because emotional depth can be woven more easily and subtly into a written narrative, sex, relationships and randiness can be layered into the books without their being intrusive or awkward.
I say can be; let me just acknowledge that very often these things are awkward and intrusive, depending on the skill of the writer. Steve Cole, for example, has an ability to make S&M and prostitution seem like a perfectly routine component of a Doctor Who story, and Kate Orman can perfectly (under)write romantic longing. Whereas Terrance Dicks's rape references make us curl up in embarrassment, and Russell T Davies having Chris Cwej hump a bloke just feels like wish fulfilment.
However, though the constraints on book-Who are less constrictive than those on TV-Who, it's clear that constraints do remain in place. Largely these are determined by marketing factors, as well as loyalty to certain consensus-views of the TV series.
Mike Morris pointed out to me that he sees the Who books more as 'an extrapolation of The TV series than an independent extension of it', and it's easy to see what he means - the Virgin New Adventures, for example, were clearly aimed at an audience who'd enjoyed the Seventh Doctor and Ace on television, and who were keen on Andrew Cartmel's particular approach to script-editing the show. Hence the bulk of that range was made up of bigger-scale reworkings and remakes of elements from the latter couple of television seasons. If the 'Cartmel vision' seemed to become distorted during this process, it's probably because it wasn't a particularly meticulous vision in the first place. The spirit of those latter seasons was more or less adhered to throughout the entire run, though as is wont to happen, the series managed to develop a particular tone of its own too, one that won it fervent admirers and blood-spittin' haters (and even occasionally people who actually judged them objectively, book by book). What's interesting there is that the general paradigm was informed not by the full corpus of televised Doctor Who, but by a particular era of the show - that being the most recent one.
The BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, by contrast, have had a far less narrowly focused Who-view to draw on. Though technically a spin-off range from the BBC co-produced telemovie, the EDAs felt no need at all to derive a particular storytelling model from that failed effort (thank God!). Instead the EDAs were charged with maintaining the spirit of TV Doctor Who as a whole; with the most recent televised seasons having ended nearly a decade before, it was no longer a matter of directly following on from a recently interrupted TV series. The McCoy years had melded into the same amorphous 'past' as the Jon Pertwee years or the Graham Williams era, and were finally regarded as just one facet of Who's existence on TV. Paul McGann's face and the resurrected Pertwee-era logo were kept in order, I suppose, to main a sort of 'brand identity' for the property, but the format was loosened up somewhat from that of the New Adventures, and more obviously embraced the sheer variety manifest across the history of the TV series.
Doctor Who in book form, like Doctor Who on television, all too rarely lives up to its potential. I don't mean that as some big diss, it's just something that seems self-evident to me. Finn Clark's amusing description of the novel line as a sausage machine sounds about right, but I think the ratio of superb to average is more or less the same as it was with televised Who. Just to be clear though, you should bear in mind that when I'm discussing the qualities of the books, I am talking about the best ones - my subject here is after all what makes for successful Who fiction.
It should be evident from the discussion above that I see the books as operating very much within limits determined by consensus views of the TV series - as the man said, extrapolation; the implication would be that they are, then, a 'subsiduary' form of Who. The fact that the EDAs were forced to cling to the tiniest, scraggiest shred of TV Who to come along in the nineties (the McGann telemovie), and then build their house on barely any foundations at all, would seem to reinforce this.
But Mike Morris nudged me towards a clarification - he agreed with Andrew Wixon that TV was really Who's natural element, and pointed out that while he would cite, say, Caves of Androzani as great televsion, he would not cite Alien Bodies as great literature.
Then I realised - no, of course Who books, even at their best, are not great literature: what they are is great fiction. Just as - taking some of my own hobbyhorses as examples - the output of Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse and Elmore Leonard can be seen as great fiction without necessarily being great literature too.
The Doctor Who books are a form of genre fiction - not specifically the science fiction genre, mind you; rather 'Doctor Who' forms its own particular genre, with its own conventions.
What marks out the variety of fiction to which Doctor Who belongs from literature itself, is the very placing of those aforementioned limitations. Actually, this harks back to a different disagreement me and Mike Morris had about the distinction between art and storytelling re: Kinda & Snakedance. To expand on that a little here, it's my belief that art - in this context literature - is something one-off that creates, and operates according to, its own particular rules. By contrast, each book-format Doctor Who story, like each Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves story, is basically a link in a chain of stories about that character, each of those stories revolving around a completely fixed nexus of motifs and conventions - that is, operating according to rules that are already in place. Not that I'm so closeminded as to say storytelling can't also become 'art' (I think the difference I had with Mr M was more about terminology, to be honest) - just that we think some sausages are tastier than others.
Stability is the hallmark of genre and serial fiction.
The motifs and conventions of the Sherlock Holmes stories are 221b Baker Street, mysteries (obviously!) clues, references to monographs, tobacco in slippers, first-person narrative by Doctor Watson and so forth. Those of the PG Wodehouse stories are terrifying aunts, the prospect of engagement to some pestilence in female form, the Drones club, Jeeves getting his own way etc. In Doctor Who, it's the TARDIS, the Doctor, moral dilemmas, the farthest reaches of time and space, monsters, a compassionate impulse. It's a broader canvas certainly, but no less fixed.
But these constraints are, IMO, a good thing. Fixity is a lie, but an irrestistibly beautiful one. That the particular fixed-points of Who fiction are derived from the television series does not especially matter to the books themselves. What matters is that writers working within these limits can produce fiction as great as The Blue Angel, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, The Turing Test, The Crooked World and Eye of Heaven. They don't do it that often, but they've done it enough to prove how superb and satisfying DW fiction can be. The TV series has, if you like, birthed a child that's now all grown-up and self-sufficient. I think it would be perfectly possible at this point in time for a person to love Doctor Who without ever having seen the television series. And were it not so important to fan consensus that all Who stories, whatever their media, must conform to a greater continuity, a 'canon', it would certainly be possible for Doctor Who fiction to exist completely independently of the TV series.
So, though I accept that that wouldn't be commercially viable at present, and that in the range as it stands the 'extrapolation' function remains a major one (because that's probably what the majority of fans want), I do believe that original Doctor Who books - at their best - are a perfectly valid brand of fiction in their own right. As was the case with the TV series this is not due to the basic remit, but rather to the talent of the people contributing along the way.
Can Doctor Who ever be done as honest-to-goodness literature? It's possible but - some of my own wild claims to the contrary notwithstanding - I don't think it's been done yet. Even the most superb of the BBC-endorsed/published novels have at bottom 'just' been magnificent genre fiction.
But interestingly, though perhaps unsurprisingly given what I was saying about commercial dictates, the Who books that have gotten closest to being genuinely 'literary' are the unofficial, independently-published ones: Jim Mortimore's Campaign and Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go; both using the iconography and lore of Doctor Who in the service of original visions. But even then I think the Booker Prize is some way off.
Really though there's no actual need for Doctor Who to attempt to prove itself as literature. In my opinion, however, it has proven itself to be truly - if not consistently - great fiction.
Reality in Doctor Who by Joe Ford 13/9/04
I feel I have been something of a hypocrite and feel the need to correct myself. Before you do anything go and read Mike Morris' review of Deadline, I only read it this morning and already it is one of my favourite reviews on this site. You see Mike has this strange ability to make you look at Doctor Who in unexpected ways, that I accepted a long time ago when he began challenging much of the Doctor Who output I love but one thing I realised today is that Mike, the intellectual old bastard, has made me look at myself in a new light and about why I enjoy the show so much. That's a pretty profound opening for what I hope is a stimulating trip into the realms of reality in Doctor Who...
Mike says in his review that he feels Doctor Who should be able to go anywhere and do anything it chooses to, that there are no limits. I genuinely thought I shared his sentiments and indeed have mentioned as much in several of my reviews. I thought I was an extremely tolerant and flexible person when it came to the Doctor Who format, that I could accept The Happiness Patrol, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, The Crooked World and basically whatever it can throw at me no matter how oddball or scary.
But then as Mike so rightly points out I have also mentioned there are places that Doctor Who shouldn't go, such as the mock paedophile scene in Deadline and the woman having her baby "scraped" from her womb in Warlock. How on Earth can I champion the show's ultimate format and tuck away this nasty, violent side too? The answer is I can't... but let me try and explain why before I might have wanted to...
Let's take a look at Doctor Who on the telly... just how often could you say the show approached actual realism? Where you sit up in horror at the grotesque reminder of the evils of the world the way you might when a prostitute is viciously raped or a woman is attacked in her home by a masked stranger and brutally murdered (both come from various episodes of Cracker)? I think you'll find the answer is not many and the reason is because Doctor Who doesn't deal with reality as we know and when it does show violence it is always snuggled around with a good dollop of fantasy to make the experience less harrowing.
One of the more graphic examples of violence in Doctor Who comes in The Brain of Morbius when Solon pulls out his pistol and shoots Condo in the stomach, with blood splattering results. It sounds horrible doesn't it but when I watching it I am fully aware that it simulated violence and totally unbelievable. How often do you find mad scientists on storm lashed planets turning on their Neanderthal-ish servant who has turned violent because the arm his master took away from him is going to be used in a hotch potch body for a ranting brain in a glass? It's blatantly absurd, the entire situation so when Solon exposes his pistol and pulls the trigger you are fully aware that the fantasy element is wound up so tight it makes the violence... comfortable. Not acceptable, or easy to watch, but comfortable.
And there are loads more examples... Jobel being stabbed to death with a hypodermic needle in Revelation, disgusting yes but made comfortable by the fact that he is a fat, bald chauvinist and his executioner is equally over the top... as he descends the steps he hams up his death for every last second before his toupe falls off. The violence is once again snuggled away by the fantasy. Warlock being strangled to death in Pyramids of Mars is paralysingly well directed but as soon as you realise it is at the hands of a six-foot robotic mummy it loses its gravity somewhat.
Of course there have been moments in Doctor Who where all the fantasy is stripped aside and reality is thrown in your face full force but it is very rare. As I mentioned in my Mind of Evil review there is a terrifying gunfight between the UNIT and Mailer's thugs that stung me when I first saw it... after all it is not difficult to imagine something like this taking place in a prison near you. The lack of music, the close contact shooting, the dying screams... it's all very vivid and yet as brutal and as startling as it was it still didn't bother me as much as those moments from Deadline and Warlock.
Mike said something that really hit home, that explained to me why I could accept one but not the other:
"These things are more guidelines that naturally emerge from the fundamental of the character. Who is the Doctor? Well, ultimately he's someone who goes around fighting evil. We think murder is evil, so naturally the Doctor doesn't do it. This is because he has a respect for life, so he detests killing, so obviously he detests war. Which means he is a pacifist, which means he doesn't carry a gun, and that he doesn't go around thumping people. These aren't impartial rules, formed for their own sake; they are logical extrapolations of the character. However, they aren't hard-and-fast. If the Doctor really, really has to, he will kill someone, but he won't like doing it and he'll only do it as the last resort. Like anyone, he's a complex character, not a collection of abstractions. The Eighth Doctor will boot someone in the ribs because he's passionate, and because he's angry, and because it's a momentary urge of feeling."It was the last comment that really got me and the moment and me in Timeless when the Doctor loses his temper and cracks Basalt's ribs is another example of Doctor Who touching on reality. But throughout Timeless we see what slimy creep Basalt is and you really want something bad to happen to him so when the Doctor treats us all to that we have been waiting for no matter how shocking or brutal it is it seems much more tasteful than Deadline's stab at reality.
It all comes down to personal taste and what frightens you more, being kicked in the ribs would hurt you but it wouldn't really affect you for long. What Mike made me realise about Martin Bannister in Deadline is that his portrayal genuinely scared me. I can think of nothing more painful that reaching the end of you life with little to show for it, to be alienated from your family, to know that something so huge has been missing that it has screwed up your entire life. The reason I felt so uncomfortable with Deadline is because I am terrified of the mere possibility that I could turn out like Martin Bannister, where a simple moment of kindness to a child could be construed as a sexual act, where what people see as your greatest achievement in life is an embarrassment to you... God, how frightening is that folks?
And it's the same with Warlock... I have a lovely Scottish terrier called Jaime and he means the world to me... the thought of him being abused and tortured like the poor animals of that book chills me to the bone. Or one of my best friends having their baby "scraped" from the womb... I have come to realise that the moments of reality in Doctor Who that hit home, that populate your own nightmares, are the ones that I cannot handle.
I believe I am being a little naive to think that I can hide away in Doctor Who and all its comfortable simulated violence, a replacement world for the horrifying one I live in. Rapes, murders, miserable old men in retirement homes... these things exist and I now realise for Doctor Who to be truly unique reality should penetrate the Who universe. I don't like them, I don't like to hear about them, but tucking your head under the covers isn't going to make them go away. Perhaps the ultimate expression of reality in Doctor Who would see a man doing perverse, disgusting acts and actually getting away with it. As much as we all enjoy a soppy ending (oh shut up you at the back... I know you wept at the end of Love Actually!) it would be very brave to see vicious acts unpunished. Now I have come around to thinking this way the possibilities are endless!
It could be said that Deadline and Warlock are the pioneers of new Doctor Who, stories that have dared to strike back at cosy Doctor Who with a universe that is so frightening it lingers in the mind long after you've finished it. It's the same universe we live in now. It is a fresh, bold way of looking at a show we have enjoyed for forty years (well some of us came to it late) and it is thrilling to discover that Doctor Who can still shock and terrify me as much as it ever did. Personally I hope the new series has a turn at reality Who and doesn't smother all its violent acts in fantasy, I have a feeling an episode or two with genuine human terrors would do the series some good.
Thanks Mike for clearing up this long held debate in my head. I still don't like the stories in question but I can appreciate them and their contribution to the Doctor Who universe on a whole other level now.
And I've finally discovered a reality show I can stomach...
The Buffy Factor by Terrence Keenan 19/9/04
Doctor Who has always been like the Blob, when it comes to the stories it tells. Who has always been able to dive into different genres/conventions/areas, and run them through the Who sprocket holes. A look over 40 years has seen Who visit Farce, Hard Sci-fi, Fantasy, Magic Realism, Gothic Horror, Splattergore, old-fashioned Thrillers, Satire, etc. etc.
Who also is not afraid of raiding specific movies, TV shows, literature as well. It is one of the benefits of having no "defined" Who type of story.
So, what does have to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
It is inevitable that Who will take on some Buffy-like traits. Either because the writers creating the new episodes are fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or because the creative team will try to replicate in some way the "sucess" that Buffy has enjoyed. If new Who had come back to a regular series in the mid 1990's, you probably would have seen a connection to the big sci-fi hit of that time, The X-Files.
Many Who fans are Buffy fans, and when the new series was first announced, lots of them came out and said "It should be like Buffy."
But what about people like me who aren't? Who'd rather put a foot through their TV then subject themselves to the Buffy phenomenon?
Knowing that the new Who is going to have some sort of Buffy factor in it, I decided to suck it up and watch a large segment of the show (not just an episode or two) just to see if there was anything remotely good about the show.
Before I go on, I should say that I watch very little TV these days, except for baseball and the Simpsons. I'm also not a huge sci-fi fan either. And fantasy does nothing for me. So the idea of watching Buffy was a big slog for me, but with the determination of a true observer, I did what I needed to do.
So what did I learn?
Buffy does two thing well. The first is a mix of the mundane and the fantastical. The show manages to give a good balance between Buffy's normal life (High School, College, Dating, Friends/relationships) and her alter-ego's Heroic exploits. Personally, I went through the Hell of high school once and have little desire to revisit it again in my entertainment exploits, but Buffy does deserve kudoes for creating the right balance between worlds.
Buffy's other strong point is the Season Long arc. The creative team have made the effort to develop arcs that include character and plot development, and resolve in a satisfying and right fashion. They don't cheat on the endings. Doctor Who's attemps at arcs, in it's myriad of formats have mostly been disappointing, and in a couple of occasions, properly awful.
On the negative side:
The show has an obsession with Pop Culture references. Most of the episodes had usually three to five unfunny in-jokes or meaningless references to Pop Culture. To be honest, I'm to the point where I never want to hear another Pop Culture reference again.
The general idea of a world of Magic/Demons/Vampires and other occult bushwa. It does nothing for me, period, and mainly gets me angry. One of the things I got from my very first watchings of Who was that the show had a very skeptical, rational bent, which is something I related to instantly, being a skepitc meself. There was a recent trend in Who books that showed Magic to work, as well as delve into other New Age silliness with the Doctor giving a wink and a nod of approval. Frankly, it drove me crazy and is something that new Who should avoid like the plague.
But the biggest sin is the characterization of the villains. The characterization of the regulars in Buffy is all right, for the most part, despite lots of soap opera leanings and a bit too much angst for my tastes. The villains, however, are all cut from the same cloth. Look pretty, be sarcastic (without being funny) and most of all, be predicitble. Professor Zaroffs with good fashion tastes. I found them all to be annoying as piss, with the tie for worst being the "Evil Trio" and the Bimbo Goddess.
Now, I know that Buffy fans will no doubt won't agree with my assessment, and that is all right. You're allowed to disagree, just realize that it's nothing personal about you; it's just that I think Buffy sucks elephant schlong.
In terms of how Buffy might affect the New Who series, I do hope that it only takes the two good points about Buffy I mentioned and jettisons the rest.
One last point. It would be disturbing for a wonderfully British thing like Doctor Who to be influenced by a crappy American product like Buffy. And this is coming from a free born man of the USA. Among the big reason of why I loved Who in the first place was that it was British, and kept its Britishness throughout its long years.
And I hope that New Who will too.
The Eighth Doctor's companions by Joe Ford 4/10/04
It took two rather different but similarly themed voices to make me write this review and after Finn Clark's and Rob Matthews' recent dismissal of the regular line up of the 8th Doctor, Fitz and Trix as stale and painful. It got me thinking of all the companions the 8th Doctor has travelled with, the only Doctor to have fully manufactured companions by fans, for fans and just how effective they eventually turned out to be. For the record I disagree with these two powerhouse reviewers thoroughly, it only takes a look at the last three EDAs and their skilful use of character dynamics that make the latest team the most interesting and burgeoningly successful regular team yet. But that's for later in this review...
Stories: TV Movie only
Profession: Doctor
Appearance: Shoulder length auburn hair, blue eyes, tall and slim. Has a nice line in Scully-like overcoats!
Would be most likely to say: "Great I finally meet the right guy and he's from another planet!"
Effectiveness: 80%
Why...?: Like so few aspects of the TV Movie here was a definitively Who-ish character to befriend the Doctor, almost so normal in her outlook that she HAD to be dragged into the periless depths of his adventures. Admittedly she did kill him by performing major surgery that went horribly wrong but then she didn't know he was an alien and it did get rid of Sylvester McCoy's ham so let's not be too hard. Here was a woman who was going through some serious personal troubles, her boyfriend just leaving her so the attachment to the (admittedly) gorgeous new Doctor was inevitable. Caught up in a whirlwind of drama they even share a smooch, which is practically uncommented on these days but the ultimate sacrilege at the time (oh GROW UP!). Replete with a great sense of humour and a generosity of spirit she was the sort of woman you would want to travel the galaxy with and the Doctor's boyish plea with her to come with him at the end is all the more heartbreaking when she says no. It's a real shame she never got a second appearance... it would be an absolute joy if the 8th Doctor could meet up with her in The Gallifrey Chronicles, the final EDA, so we (and she) can see how far he has come from those naive beginnings.
Stories: The Eight Doctors - Interference (26 books)
Profession: Eternal do-gooder... there is no cause to small that this woman will not support!
Appearance: Short cropped blond hair, small diminutive build, lots of disapproving frowns! Generally wears annoying themed T-shirts for Gay Pride or Greenpeace or whatever cause she is into this week... not realising people who support these things don't actually prove it with their causal wear.
Would be most likely to say: "How dare the Doctor treat me like a child!"
Effectiveness: 30% (Most effective: Vampire Science, Seeing I, Interference. Least Effective: Beltempest, Demontage)
Why...?: I will admit Sam Jones did have a few supporters, if you pop over to Outpost Gallifrey every decade or so there will be a thread that bemoans "What was wrong with Sam Jones anyway?" where the thread starter has bravely put themselves in front of a firing squad by suggesting she was likable, rounded character. Erm, no, or at least not in this regular reader's eyes. I cannot think of a more annoying character spec than angst ridden teenager who uses the Doctor's adventures to grow up in... geez it was bad enough with Ace but now we have to go through all over again except without the charm of Sophie Aldred's performance as salvation. The biggest problem with Sam was her stubborn headedness, I could predict early in a book where she would differ in opinion to the Doctor and get all moralistic and betray him because of her firm beliefs. Sometimes her pre-pubescent personality would emerge and she would get all girlie over the (admittedly) succulent eighth Doctor, to the point of actually kissing him and running away for three books (and years!) rather than confronting her feelings like a rational adult and causing all sorts of problems.
It's rather a shame really because when Sam was written as a person rather than a set of morals she still was very interesting but at least she was bearable. Like Trix later in the range she was introduced with very little background information or personality. Unlike Trix this never really changed and the New Adventures fans were driven from the books in their droves as they were forced to endure 20-odd books of this smug, self satisfied cow who would bizarrely be chummy with the Doctor in one book (with some especially annoying escape attempt plans... who the hell memorises and numbers all the different escape attempts!!!?) and despises him in the next. This eternal inconsistency was finally rectified with the introduction of Fitz who Sam could actually have a genuine relationship with... but even that was sidelined in all but two books, as she shied away from his company most of the time and took the piss out of him the rest. A shame, an awkward romance could have spiced up her character a bit but in the end she was a failed experiment, one that never truly had a chance of working out, her explosive emotions mark her out as a drama queen but there was rarely any intelligence to balance it out.
Stories: The Taint - The Gallifrey Chronicles (a massive 49 books!)
Occupation: Garden shop assistant.
Appearance: Scruffy, stubbly, tramp-ish look. Wears a lot of jeans and T-shirts... the eternal LAD.
Would be most likely to say: "Is she single?"
Effectiveness: 90% (Most Effective: pick a story... but especially Frontier Worlds, Vanishing Point, Anachrophobia, Time Zero, Timeless, Halflife and The Tomorrow Windows. Least Effective: Fitz is pretty much writer proof but he is practically ignored in: The Shadows of Avalon, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Trading Futures and Camera Obscura)
Why...?: It should have been AWFUL. As an idea nestling in my sick brain the thought of the gentle eighth Doctor travelling with a right lad who would lust after the girls and rarely take care of his personal hygiene it would never, ever work. The fact is Fitz is one of THE most popular companions the Doctor has ever befriended and I absolutely love him to pieces. A recent poll on Outpost Gallifrey sees him drawing level with the ever-popular Bernice Summerfield and he didn't need an entire spin off series of books and audios to achieve that. The truth is Fitz IS practically writer proof and it is difficult to point at any book where he fails to work as the comic/dramatic foil for the Doctor. If the only criticism that you can point at him is that he has been around for too long then that is a successful character... I might have joined in with that crowd had his recent adventures not have portrayed him so beautifully. He is the Doctor's best friend in every sense of the word. He's seen the guy through the Faction Paradox, his amnesia, Sabbath and the timelines going all screwy. He has travelled with Sam, Compassion, Anji and Trix and had a very different relationship with each of them but through his charm alone he won them all over in the end (even that hybrid TARDIS).
The most appealing thing about Fitz is how he is convinced he is a loser and yet his heroism and devotion to the Doctor proves he is anything but. It is not hard to feel for a guy who is clumsy, prone to verbal diarrhoea and cannot hold a relationship down for five minutes. It is the fact that he is a flawed character that makes him so likable but flawed in a very different way to Sam because he is also loyal and obedient, realising more often than not that the Doctor is usually right. I don't mean to make him sound like a faithful puppy or anything and his delightfully rude sense of humour and ability to make friends no matter where they land also mark him out as great company. Fitz comes across as a real person to me, one who has adjusted to the weirdness in the universe but can still laugh out loud at the sight of a talking Walrus or boggle at the sight of floating hairy testicles.
His relationship with the Doctor is an interesting one and unusually it is probably the closest the Doctor has come to finding a "loving" companion. Fitz doesn't fancy the Doctor (besides the ickiness of that sort of plot he is a bona fide straight guy!) but he is remarkably close to the man and they have travelled around so much together now that they rely on each other more than either will admit. When Fitz says he loves the Doctor in The Book of the Still you can understand why the Doctor spent one hundred years searching for him.
Despite the occasional moment of overbearing laddishness (Timeless sees him teaming up with a similar character and the pair of them chat away like you imagine two FHM loving well 'ards would) Fitz is a rather gentle, thoughtful chap who sees the best in people and always wants to help. He's a really nice guy and that why he has remained so popular.
Stories: Interference - The Ancestor Cell (12 books)
Occupation: Compassion is actually a prototype War TARDIS... who saw that coming?
Appearance: Long red hair, voluminous breasts (if you believe Fitz), green eyes and very slender. Don't know what she tends to wear but she carts the Doctor and Fitz around inside her so I can imagine it's pretty resistant.
Most likely to say: "You're so soft Doctor"
Effectiveness: 70% (Most effective: Frontier Worlds. Least effective: Coldheart)
Why...?: It's a bit of pity really that Compassion came along when she did, during a transitory phase for the Doctor and for the editing staff of the books who were going for an out with the old and in with the new approach which left poor, flowering Compassion cut off before her prime. What's important though is that despite a few striking appearances the potential was there for her to be the ultimate eighth Doctor companion (other than Fitz of course) and she did manage to make a name for herself in just 12 books. There's hope for Trix yet!
Compassion was rather thrust upon the Doctor after a particularly harrowing adventure and thus begins a repetitive narrative involving the Doctor carting around people who don't really want to be there (see also Anji and at times Trix). This discordant relationship actually benefited the books immensely and gave the reader a reason to tune in other than the stories, for the first time since the EDAs began there was a genuinely compelling line up of regulars. The most important difference between Compassion and her replacements was that she had strength of will that frightened the Doctor and was willing to hurt people to make sure they survived their adventures. It was these moments where Compassion truly shine, sticking an axe in a particularly annoying character, attacking Fitz and the Doctor inside her when he tries to fit her with a randomiser.
What's more Compassion was essential to the running story of the books. Her mini arc was compelling to follow (unless you are incapable of accepting her as a TARDIS) from her blossoming into a TARDIS, to her being the Doctor's only source of travel, to being hunted down by the Time Lords so they can replicate more War TARDISes in their war with the Enemy. To have a companion so linked to the continuing story was a brave move that worked enough to get most readers back next month.
Unfortunately her limited appearances were wasted by authors who did not know what to do with her. The Blue Angel, Coldheart and The Space Age hardly feature her and it is only her arc turning points books that she really shines. Let's only hope when the EDAs are pushed into the PDAs that new Compassion books are first to be written.
Stories: Escape Velocity - Timeless (23 books)
Occupation: Stocks broker
Appearance: Asian, short black hair, pretty. Wears a lot of formal wear to begin with but realising the life of a Doctor Who companion soon gets more casual.
Most likely to say: "Take me home!"
Effectiveness: 90% (Most effective: EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, Trading Futures, Time Zero, Timeless. Least effective: Dark Progeny, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
Why...?: I am one of small majority that believes that the eighth Doctor adventures were never better than when they were fronted by the Doctor, Fitz and Anji. The mix of personalities was fresh and interesting and the character growth between them believable and consistent. Anji brought a great deal to the post Earth arc books, easily the most consistently excellent run of Doctor Who books we have ever had.
There is something remarkably vulnerable about Anji despite her outwardly courageous personality. Of course it was the loss of her boyfriend Dave that brought her to the Doctor's door and it took her a good while to deal with his death. The books often took a sensitive look at her grief, especially in EarthWorld and Hope where she finally has to accept the fact he has gone and no amount of cloning will change that.
Her precarious relationship with the Doctor was a blast to follow, with an argument around every corner. The new amnesiac Doctor, occasionally heartless and violent, is firmly criticized by Anji for all the right reasons and when these two get at it you know there will be a lot of intelligent things said. This clash of minds, Anji's cold logic versus the Doctor's unpredictability kept their relationship on its toes and despite themselves they get very close, the Doctor often relying on Anji as a slap of cold water in the face to the reality of the situation. Anji never understands why the Doctor won't just take her home but it is fairly obvious she has some healing to do before she says goodbye. That is his gift to her and she leaves in Timeless a changed woman, still businesslike but far more gentle and conscious of other people and their feelings.
What's more Anji could often give the bad guys a run for their money, taking on Sabbath, Baskerville and Silver... her mouth could be a powerful weapon sometimes.
Watch how she warms to the idea of time travel, watch how she loathes Fitz in EarthWorld and bursts into tears at the thought of his death in Time Zero, watch how she lights up each book with her fiery personality.
Anji is a babe. End of story. More books with her please.
Trix (or Beatrix Macmillan if we are being specific)
Stories: Time Zero - The Gallifrey Chronicles (15 books)
Occupation: Professional liar
Appearance: Anything she wants... she is naturally a cute blond with a slim body but she could look like anything one week to the next.
Most likely to say: "Who am I?"
Effectiveness: 80% (thus far... Most Effective: Halflife, The Tomorrow Windows. Least effective: The Domino Effect, Reckless Engineering)
Why...?: If it had not been for the last five EDAs my percentage for Trix would drop to about 30 because she had possibly the worst and most bizarre introduction for any companion in the history of the entire series. She appears in Time Zero as an associate of Sabbath but he soon dispenses of her and she sneaks on board the TARDIS and spends four or five books skulking in the shadows, appearing for one scene or so to frustrate the reader and is suddenly integrated into the team come Timeless without a single explanation! Extremely lazy editing there Mr Richards! However from Timeless onwards we are treated to a fascinating, multi-faceted character who you can only wish was introduced earlier...
You see Trix has a penchant for taking on other personalities during her adventures, to infiltrating any planet with her quick wits and resourcefulness. Great, the ideal companion surely? Then we realise it goes a lot deeper than that, Trix is so used to putting on layer upon layer over her original personality she doesn't even know who she is anymore. And EVEN WORSE is the fact that this is deliberate... she is hiding something deep and dark from her past, something she wont even admit to herself... better to hide behind fake personalities than confront the past... something she and the Doctor have in common...
Trix proves to be very useful in their adventures, talking herself out of trouble, having helpful sources on Earth to tie up loose ends (see Timeless) and her greediness for profit sees the Doctor using that as an incentive to get her helping. It is rare to have a companion who can take care of herself this well... at least on the surface, it is clear to the reader that Trix is far more disturbed and vulnerable than she will let on.
Come The Sleep of Reason the Doctor is still calling her his companion and Fitz his friend. How much of her trouble past he knows about is unclear but it is obvious he wants to try and help her through her troubles, he is fiercely protective of her even if he doesn't entirely trust her. Begging for her life in Halflife, asking her to sacrifice her much valued privacy in The Tomorrows Windows... they are going through a lot together and it is bringing them ever closer.
I can't wait to find out just what she is hiding... it'll be fascinating to go back and reading all her books again knowing. I think certain people are resistant to Trix because she fights against the role of the typical companion, not nessecarily fitting into what we recognise as Doctor Who but that is one of the reason I find her so compelling. I wouldn't call Trix a failed experiment but a character who is still flowering and will continue to do so until her last appearance.
Gender Identification: Images of Maleness in Doctor Who by Mike Heinrich 9/10/04
One of the accusations made fairly against our beloved little sci-fi/fantasy franchise over the course of the last forty years is the idea that the basic formula is, in its own way, terribly sexist. The common perception of the formula both as a television program and as a series of novels/audio dramas/comic strips is that the (male) Doctor travels about in time and/or space with his (typically female) companion fighting evil and righting wrongs (which is a laudable enough goal, you have to admit).
The inherent problem with this format when viewed as a sexual power dynamic is that it puts the authority, the knowledge, and the titular status in the hands of the Doctor - the 'male' figure - and relegates the female figure to secondary status, essentially being there to ask questions and scream a bit. If possible, while wearing tight outfits.
Now, as far as the tight outfits go, fair enough. Yep, that's a bit sexist. Tight outfits aside however, I think this explanation misses something fairly fundamental that we haven't really acknowledged about the format of the show. Something that I think goes much farther toward explaining why the stereotyping of femininity seems so occasionally glaring to us.
I believe that the reason why we see so clearly the stereotypes of 'how women act' in Doctor Who is because the show so rarely shows a corresponding male stereotype among its regulars.
Or to put it more simply, Peri seemed a bit more girl-y because at the end of the day, the Doctor just wasn't particularly man-ish.
To a large extent this was an unavoidable effect of the limitations of a family show that broadcast on Saturday evening.
After all, what are the sexist stereotypes of women in popular entertainment?
Someone who has sex with women and shoots a lot of people.
Oh, and has the occasional fistfight.
Um... no.
So, with those stereotypical characteristics of maleness just simply out of bounds for televised Doctor Who, we instead see an entirely different kind of character. A curiously sexless wanderer through time who believes in non-violence.
Now, this is actually an incredibly good thing. By being denied access to the stereotype of male behavior the show produced something entirely new and fascinating. Unfortunately, by remaining with the stereotypical image of 'women' on the other side of the equation we were left with something that at times showed itself as fundamentally imbalanced. And that imbalance showed itself all the more clearly by the fact that the show proved itself capable of doing better.
If there had, in 1963, been a societal taboo against women screaming for help and waiting for male assistance, I can't imagine what kind of fascinating companion archetype would have been created.
Now, clearly there have been periods during the shows run where this has rung more true than in others. Looking at the history of the show we can see why this is the case.
In 1963 the show began with a fundamental difference that made the archetypal 'male' characteristics kind of a moot point for the Doctor. And it was brilliant. By making the Doctor a grandfatherly figure they neatly dodged the entire issue. Of course he doesn't have sex or get in fist/gun fights. Nobody's GRANDFATHER gets in fist/gun fights. And of course, nobody's grandfather has ever ever had sex. Ever. The fact that you never saw such things in the Doctor's adventures made perfect sense as you wouldn't expect to find them to be a major part of the life of a grandfatherly figure. And if we all secretly assumed that Ian and Barbara periodically nipped off to that room with the groovy barcaloungers to have a quickie, well they weren't the title characters and polite people don't keep track of when their neighbors do that sort of thing anyway.
Susan was a non-issue (which is interesting in and of itself since her very existence seemed to confirm that the Doctor had in fact 'done the deed' on at least one occasion) because she was too young to be involved in the whole ugly 'sex' thing, plus she was a direct family member of the Doctor. Poof, all sexual tension completely eradicated.
It's also interesting to note that it was only during this period that the show dared to be realistic enough to show that the group actually needed to sleep somewhere. It was realism in the sense that once you accepted that they were traveling through time and space, you could make all realistic assumptions about how life would go on for those on board. (Just because we never saw a bathroom...) There were no unpleasant possibilities to raise their ugly little eyebrows at us, and so it was perfectly safe for the camera to wander into the bedroom, comfortable in the fact that nothing shocking would be going on.
And this dynamic basically held up through the Hartnell years. (Although interestingly enough I don't believe we ever saw the bedroom again after Steven joined. Dirty rascal, who knew what he might be up to in there)
When Troughton took over the role things changed a bit, but not dramatically. The role of the female screamer was in its salad days, but it was the sixties, and no one minded much back then. Troughton was obviously a younger 'type' than Hartnell's crotchety grandfather figure, but was still enough in the 'strange older uncle' category that he could be given a pass. I'd also point out how often Ben, Polly, Victoria, and Zoe were referred to as 'children', 'boy' or 'girl' at this stage - as though emphasizing the complete unthinkability of any sexual relationship in the crew. These were children on a lovely vacation with a charming sexless uncle, and we were all comfortable enough with that dynamic to have no problem with it.
And then we had the Brigadier. The single recurring figure in the history of the show who could arguably be referred to as 'stud.' Hell, we even saw that woman's hand pass him the phone. In my mind he picked her up at that state dinner and then never called her again. He may never have learned her last name. Or her first.
And lo and behold look what happened here, the moment an archetypal 'male' appeared on the scene. Suddenly we had Liz, a companion who came at least 'closer' to breaking the female stereotype than we ever had then or since. And then on the flip side we got Jo, the embodiment of the sexist cliche. And they completely got away with it because they were simultaneously presenting an image of the male cliche. It balanced, and therefore it worked, allowing for the cliche to be present without the implication that it stood for every woman, or conversely every man.
Of course, by this point Jon Pertwee's 'beloved uncle' figure might arguably have been wearing a bit thin, and the audience was beginning to reach the age where we start asking Mom and Dad, 'So, why IS Uncle still single?' only to receive their awkward shared glance as an answer.
And so we abandoned the kindly uncle paradigm and entered the Tom Baker years, where the answer wasn't that he was sexless because he was an uncle figure so much as that he was sexless because he was clearly completely insane.
And due solely to the fact that Tom clearly was completely insane it again completely worked. Look at that nice Sarah Jane traveling through the universe with that man who's clearly to far off his cracker to be trusted out there alone. Good for her. It worked so well in fact that they were able to add a little sexism into the mix, adding some risque costume choices and a 'stronger' female figure. (Of course here, like in so much other popular entertainment, 'stronger' translates to 'fights a lot'. You know, like a man.)
With Romana things got a bit tricky. Here was a woman who was not only the appropriate age, but also happened to be the right species for the Doctor to take out his etchings over the course of a quiet evening. The fact that Tom and Lalla were clearly in love for several of their later episodes only added to this creeping realization.
And we suddenly realized that it didn't matter that much.
We relaxed, got to see Romana's (now private) bedroom, and the coy hints just kept a'coming. We still never actually saw any evidence of sexual behavior, but we seemed to have made peace with the thought that it may very well have been going on. It wasn't relevant to their adventures, but who were we to judge if after saving the Leisure Hive they took a suite with in-room jacuzzi for the weekend? Hadn't they earned it? We had achieved that level of 'realism' that I talked about earlier, where - having accepted the premise of the show - we could imagine them as real people living within that world.
It all ended of course with the onset of JNT's controlling vision. Romana gone, and replaced by three companions, one male, one still consistently referred to as one of the 'children' (see Black Orchid) and one made deliberately adversarial specifically to remove the implied threat of sexual attraction between her and the Doctor.
But the big problem was that for the first time the casting of the Doctor simply didn't work in terms of removing all sexuality and maintaining an internal realism. Don't get me wrong; I have a lot of fondness for Peter Davison's era. I think he was a fantastic Doctor, and I'm happy to argue with anyone who disagrees.
But frankly, I can only think of one good reason why someone of Peter Davison's age who looks like Peter Davison would not have the occasional sexual liaison (if not long term relationship) with 'that special girl'. And it doesn't work any better in terms of Saturday teatime viewing for the whole family.
And so internal realism went completely out the window. Characters no longer wore 'clothes'; they wore their 'costume' for that season. Their one outfit that, come hell or high water, they wore every single day. We saw Tegan and Nyssa's (shared) bedroom. We saw Adric's bedroom. But the portrayal of them as actual bedrooms rather than 'oh for God's sake, does everything have to take place in the console room?' requires more suspension of disbelief than any of us have.
I mean, honestly. Just try to picture Tegan nipping back to that room for a good solid eight hours sleep (unless of course the plot requires that she lay down fully clothed to dream about the Mara). Try to picture Adric popping off to that room to change underwear.
On second thought, don't try to picture that. I apologize for that image.
The point is that, without a character driven excuse for us to understand the Doctor's sexlessness, the show was forced to adopt a completely different tone just to avoid the issue.
I pass over Turlough, who was as far from either a sexual being or a stereotype of masculinity as it was possible to be until the audios came along.
With the introduction of Peri things just got worse (as far as this issue was concerned). The tone became even more caricatured as we all desperately tried to convince ourselves that anyone would be able to travel the universe with Nicola Bryant in spandex and simply never have sex even occur to them. (Barring, again, that one very good reason)
To compensate Eric Saward began adding more of the other male stereotypes. Mercenaries, gun nuts, violent whack jobs of all descriptions, all burning off the extra testosterone that simply could not be given to the Doctor, nor could it be explained away. (I don't think that this was a conscious decision, by the way.)
And eventually the show went in a way back to the original formula. While it never shed the more caricatured tone completely it ended up with a 'mentor-figure' and 'surrogate daughter' in Sylvester McCoy and Ace. But by then society had grown up a bit. Ace might have been a surrogate daughter figure to the Doctor, but that didn't stop her from clearly being a sexual being. By the time the show's 26th season ended, Ace was clearly integrating sexuality into her character, setting the stage for the Virgin Novels and the floodgate of sex that they brought with them.
Of course they did also bring Chris Cwej...
The Bernice Summerfield CD range quick guide by Joe Ford 11/10/04
Someone said to me recently that they were astonished that dear old Benny has survived so long. He could not understand how a mere companion could have such life in her and could front a series that coincides with Doctor Who. But then he hasn't heard any of the stories! I'm gathering that the Benny series is popular enough to have achieved five seasons worth of CDs by now and several books and anthologies... along with the twenty odd books she had published under Virgin's name this ex-companion has sprung into a league all of her own. Re-invented time and again with new characters popping up and joining her crusade to drink the galaxy dry, the Bernice series now has a pretty full set of regulars to call on (Jason, Peter, Adrian, Braxiatel, Sophia, Bev) and the confidence exuded in the series as it ploughs on is nothing short of remarkable.
Even if you are not interested in buying the whole bunch just take a peek at this little list and select a few to listen to... I tell you half of them are more interesting than their Doctor Who counterparts and they are made with the same professionalism and fantastic performances.
Season One:
Oh No It Isn't!: How like this series to kick off with a comedy! Taking inspiration from the riotous Paul Cornell book the CD pulls off the whacky mixture of pantomime and danger brilliantly, the jokes coming thick and fast and a hilarious cast of dappy characters to enjoy. At the heart of it all is Lisa Bowerman's debut performance as Benny, confident, assured and very, very funny... as ever it is Benny's jaw-slacked reactions to the play's absurd events that provide the best humour. The production is great, Alistair Lock provides a suitably bouncy score to highlight the mischief and the overall feel is one of great fun. An assured beginning: 9/10
Beyond the Sun: Swapping comedy for character drama and that is what writer Matt Jones does best. This is probably the weakest story of season one but that is no great crime since the rest is of such a high standard but it still manages to emote beautifully throughout, Benny forced into the role of mother as she crash lands on an unknown planet with two inexperienced children, Emile and Tameka. The diary entries help to push the action along and there are some strikingly adult moments (especially concerning burgeoning homosexual Emile). A little slow but makes up for having such a fascinating back-story: 7/10
Walking to Babylon: Excellent. A lush production (with some astounding period music), bagfuls of witty lines (the opening scene with Benny and Jason is side splitting!) and a full and evocative exploration of Babylon seen through the eyes of the awestruck Benny and the time travelling John Lafayette. Elisabeth Sladen gives a addictive performance as Ninan and her liberation at the story's climax is a moment well worth waiting for. A touching romance for Benny and the story that reveals what a slimeball Jason Kane can be: 9/10
Birthright: Engaging as hell with a spooky pre-credits teaser that drags you right into the story this is another solid offering, particularly atmospheric thanks to its Victorian setting and horrific material. It splits Benny and Jason up well and gives them both excellent material, Jason in particular who has to make an agonising decision to save the day. There are a few slow, talky moments here and there but the story rattles along to a must end finish: 8/10
Just War: To some the ultimate Benny experience and surely enough this is a powerful piece of drama with Lisa Bowerman's best ever performance as the tortured and frightened Benny. This story of helplessness during the Second World War is all the more terrifying because Benny is no longer wisecracking, just very, very scared. The plot is rock solid but it is the emotional core that matters and the scenes of Benny being brutally tortured both physically and psychologically are heart breaking to endure. The ending with Benny and Jason reunited had me in tears. Outstanding drama: 10/10
Dragons' Wrath: What happened? I understand there were problems with the production of this one and it shows. The music is horribly intrusive; the sound FX drowns out the actors' voices and the plot itself is slow moving and predictable. Benny is pushed to the sidelines in favour of some pretty shallow secondary characters who never impress and Richard Franklin is wasted in the rather perfunctory role of the villain. Hard to get through: 3/10
Season Two:
The Secret of Cassandra: A very awkward production, which is exposed terribly by its single CD length and lack of depth. The new theme tune for the series "Adventure is my Game" is possibly the worst song I have ever heard and does not bode well for this series. The tiny cast and loud, invasive music distract you and Benny is hardly at her best, even when commenting on how complicated and boring things are (she is right!): 4/10
The Stone's Lament: The third poor production in a row and the point where I almost gave up on the series. It introduces Adrian Wall but Harry Myers' growling, snarling performance does not inspire much confidence and considering this consists of him, Benny and a rather lame villain there isn't much to enjoy at all. The story fails as a horror despite some loud special FX that try to shock and the plot (mad scientist falls for Benny) is incredibly cliched. Almost too boring to bear: 2/10
The Extinction Event: Much, much better and from the pen of Lance Parkin you can be assured of a strong characters and intelligent plotting. Introducing the fabulous Miles Richardson as Braxiatel, this story wisely sets up a moral dilemma for him and Benny to argue over and their heated debates are peppered with sparkling dialogue. The back story, the genocide of an entire race and one man's wish to avenge his people has the power that the previous three stories lacked and the memorable, downbeat ending proves this series does not always take the easy path: 8/10
The Skymines of Karthos: Seriously underrated, this deserves points just for hideously creepy voices of the Fireflies when they attack on masse. It's certainly a better script from David Bailey (The Secret of Cassandra) with some nice fireworks (Benny gets a companion in the form of the total prat Michael) and a story that keeps throwing up mysteries to solve (the Firefly hierarchy is totally alien and fascinating). Another average musical score drags this down somewhat: 7/10
Season Three:
The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy: What on earth is Paul Ebbs on? Like his book The Book of the Still this audio is an insane blend of messed up concepts (shoes coming to life and killing people!) and clever SF cliches (time rushing forwards and backwards to causes total anarchy). It will give you a big headache if you try and digest it all in one lump but it's a hilarious script, very entertaining as the Benny is whipped up into the nightmare-shopping trip from hell. A complicated climax leads to a highpoint of the Benny range.. Joggon's death by orgasm!: 8/10
The Green Eyed Monsters: Further proof that the Benny range has pulled itself out of the doldrums this story takes the rather awful idea of Adrian and Jason fighting over baby Peter and takes it to comic extremes. Benny meanwhile gets to have a skimpy adventure with an amusingly over the top villainess and utterly unaware that her son has been kidnapped and causing such fireworks between the men in her life. This is a good example of everything this series does well, good surprises, laughs and a genuine emotional core: 8/10
The Plague Herds of Excelis: Benny and Iris! Iris and Benny! Whatever way you look at it the intoxicating meeting of these two piss head adventuresses is divine, the two of them teaming up to unveil the secrets of Excelis. Stephen Cole has written a riotously funny story, which builds to a mammoth climax that ties together the Excelis series in a brilliantly dramatic fashion. Putrefying animal carcasses coming to life, a bloody good piss up, being put on display in a little cage for natives to poke at, fabulous bitch fights... all in day for Professor Bernice Summerfield: 9/10
Dance of the Dead: Stephen Cole is writing better for Benny than just about anyone and this is a superb follow up to the last story. It's a claustrophobic thriller that utilises the Ice Warriors perfectly, exploring a dark back-story between two ex lovers that hijack Benny and Grand Marshall Staac. The dialogue is sharp and electrifying, Lisa Bowerman and Matthew Brenher deserving much praise for their powerful performances. An atmosphere of despair and terror pervades: 9/10
The Mirror Effect: Startling revelations as the Benny cast are pulled together and forced to confront their fears (Benny wonders if she is a bad mother, Adrian and Jason fear losing Benny and Braxiatel fears letting her down). It's an emotional roller coaster that exposes how much tension there is between them and just how thought-out their character arcs are. If it wasn't for some overpowering echoey direction from Gary Russell this would score much higher but some of dialogue is lost in translation: 8/10
Season Four:
The Bellotron Incident: An average tale, livened up by a atmospheric production (snowy landscapes that will chill your bone!), that is saved from mediocrity by a brilliant last minute twist that changes your perception of the whole story. It's the first of a season of returning Doctor Who monsters and the creepy Rutans provide and excellent choice making this tale of who's-who far more entertaining then it really deserves: 7/10
The Draconian Rage: Who knew that Trevor Baxendale was capable of such a riveting drama after his diabolical Dark Flame Doctor Who story? Clearly reducing him to the length of one CD has succeeded in cutting away all the flabby padding because this is a sharply plotted tale, full drama and intruige and taking Benny on a torturous ride through Draconian politics. It never lets up and uses its economic cast well and has some uncomfortable moments deftly directed by Ed Salt. Add in a powerful confrontation between Benny and the Draconian Emperor in a climax that dares to use continuity to boost the drama and you have a winner: 9/10
The Poison Seas: Aargh! This series hasn't been this bad since season two! It's a tricky one to listen and not because of the plot and characters (both of which are cliched and dull) but because the Sea Devil voices and so hard to understand you have to keep re-playing scenes to keep up with developments. Deathly slow and failing to offer Benny any juicy lines this insomniac pleasing tale is only worth hearing because of the shock ending that reveals something is amiss on the Braxiatel collection: 3/10
Death and the Daleks: From the ridiculous to the sublime, this series goes from strength to strength with a stunning conclusion to the book Life During Wartime. What Paul Cornell has achieved here is nothing short of a miracle, writing a script that gives every Benny regular a moment to shine, contains twist after powerful twist, ties in loads of New Adventures references to please fans, keeps tension building until reaching an incredible conclusion and manages to poke fun at and bask in the terrifying power of the Daleks. The performances are top notch and it really feels as if the series is heading somewhere spectacular: 10/10
Season Five:
The Grel Escape: Utter madness from the pen of Jac Rayner and a lot of fun it is too. This is a total piss take of The Chase that works because there is clear affection for the original material, it takes you on a journey through a fabulous array of landscapes from Egypt to France and contains brilliant jokes at the expense of android doubles and terribly accented tourists. Gotta love the ending that sees Benny and co travelling on a spaceship again, out in the universe and causing mayhem: 8/10
2004, a year for the books in perspective by Joe Ford 24/1/05
Yes folks it's that time again... another year of Doctor Who fiction is over and this one has proven fraught with more changes than for a few years now, in particular the news that the Eighth Doctor range will be discontinued next year when the series returns to the television. You can already see the gears changing in that range, getting ready for The Gallifrey Chronicles, the fan pleasingly titled finale EDA to be written by Lance Parkin.
Following my method of looking at a varied number of opinions on this years output I should start straight away with Justin Richard's Sometime Never... the long awaited accumulation of the million arc threads that have been brewing for YEARS...
Sometime Never... by Justin Richards (EDA no 67): I have to agree with the (mostly) optimistic reaction to this than The Ancestor Cell, the last time the EDAs brought such a huge arc to a close. It is lingering at the bottom of the online polls, which is bizarre because the majority of reviews I have read have been extremely complimentary. It's a complicated book but considering the amount of plot threads it has to deal with that is predictable and pleasingly Justin doesn't let his obligations to the range get in the way of telling a fast-paced, excitingly plotted tale, one that continues to surprise and delight. It's true his prose isn't all that but then his prose has never been his strongest asset, his ability to suck you into a story has and on that level he is firing on all cylinders. Split into three equally good sections the story brilliantly explains away the mystery of the past three years and reveals the elusive enemies the Doctor has really been fighting. After a shaky alternative universe arc it is great that the climax satisfied even if the individual stories that preceded it didn't. The fate of Sabbath, the multiverse, the unseen enemy, the companion deaths that have plagued the latest PDAs... it's all dealt with rather superbly.
Verdict: A (Good characters, bland prose but a shockingly good story that compensates totally)
What the critics said:
"I haven't enjoyed an 8DA this much since...hmm, Time Zero." Finn Clark, DWRG
"This book is stupid, stupid, stupid." Mike Morris, DWRG
"You know the Doctor will win but, as ever, it's how that's much more
important and that the victory is tinged with tragedy that lifts Sometime Never... above the recent adventures."
Neil Corry, TV Zone (8/10)
"Did I mention that it's pretty good? I should do. It's only fair
after some of the criticism I have directed at this saga in recent months,
and there's a few words I'd now like to eat (though by no means all of
them)." Anthony Brown, Starburst (4/5)
"Sometime Never... is readable and
reasonably entertaining but provides a flat finish to the longest running
serial in the longest running science-fiction series in the world." Matt
Michael, DWM
"A miraculous achievement in tying up loose ends and making them into
a really good read." The Doctor Who review (5/5)
"With the release of 'Timeless', though,
things finally started to make a bit of sense, and 'Emotional Chemistry' will surely go down as an
absolute 8DA classic. 'Sometime Never...' rounds
off this winning trifecta in fine style, and is one of the must-read 8DAs.
It's up there with 'Alien Bodies,' 'Interference,' 'The Burning' and
'Father Time', and is a must-have addition to Your
Doctor Who Library. Finally, at long last, the 8DAs are
consistently showing what they can do." Marcus Salisbury, Outpost
Gallifrey
"There's some corridor-running. Worse, there's some technobabble-laden
corridor running. But overall, the whole exercise just lacks oomph. Not
only is it a poor resolution to a, frankly, terrible story-arc, it's not
even a decent book in its own right." Andrew McCaffrey, DWRG
"Sometime Never... certainly gets the year
off to a good, if slightly downbeat start, and as a climax to the Sabbath
arc its better than I think most of us can have hoped. As a novel in its
own right, it's gripping and entertaining, but contains enough twists,
turns and shocks to compel your attention." Noel Warham, The Asylum
The Scream of the Shalka by Paul Cornell: (Who knows what the hell this book is supposed to be... PDA? NDA? Unbound Adventure?): Where this book will fit in now the new series has been announced is a bit of a mystery but Paul Cornell's attempt at re-inventing Doctor Who for 2004 is still a great achievement. This may not be one of his polished character dramas but it isn't supposed to be, it's a quick, exciting read that introduces us to an intriguing new Doctor and companion and creates a spine tingling alien menace for him to fight. Despite the trappings of mobile phones and robotic Masters this is more like a REALLY good PDA, an old style Doctor Who story written in a snappy Target-style prose that is effortlessly readable. Early chapters are stilted thanks to introducing so many elements to a new audience but the second half of the book is a non-stop thrill ride.
Verdict: B plus (Shallow but fun, if the genuine 9DA's are half this engaging we'll be in for a treat!)
What the critics said:
"Cornell tries to couch his book in the post-Potter kid-lit idiom but
for the most part the prose feels very lively, resulting in a witty, fast
paced adventure that would be accessible and fresh to somebody whose first
Doctor Who story this was." Eddie Robson, SFX (4/5)
"Bizarrely, Scream of the Shalka, for that it's
rushed - and still very much in thrall of Dicks - works well in itself,
conveying its own particular of 'amiable' romp rather nicely." David
Darlington, TV Zone (7/10)
"It's a fast paced story, but it also has more depth and
characterisation than many regular Doctor Who books." Finn Clark,
DWRG
"The changes take a little getting used to, but they're very
intriguing and certainly succeed in giving Doctor Who a new lease
of life." David Bassom, Dreamwatch (8/10)
Empire of Death by David Bishop (PDA no 64): A damn good chiller that reads like a book for intelligent teenagers rather than for an adult audience. It focuses on the fifth Doctor with my personal favourite companion of his and gives them both a good examination, especially Nyssa who gets to shine in her own first person passages. Queen Victoria makes an excellent appearance as a stand-in companion and the book shines brightest when her commanding presence is guiding events. Some of the scenes are memorably frightening, especially those that concentrate on the scary kid James Lees and the discomforting answer to why the events took place, dead babies forming a conduit for aliens. A little tightening of the story would help perhaps but much more worthy than people have suggested, David Bishop continues to impress, well me at least.
Verdict: B plus (Disturbing character drama)
What the critics said:
"For the first time, this is a piece of prose Doctor Who that
has genuinely unsettled me." David Darlington, TV Zone (9/10)
"Once again Bishop displays ability but also a failure to focus it."
Eddie Robson, SFX (2/5)
"An enjoyable ghost story and much better than many of the stories the
5th Doctor got on television." Lawrence Conquest, Outpost Gallifrey.
"Sadly Bishop isn't quite good enough to escape the shadows of these
earlier and more engaging novels (Wolfsbane, Camera Obscura)." Matt Michael, DWM
Halflife by Mark Michaelowski (EDA no 68): A delightful read which bursts with good humour and energy and allows the 8th Doctor, Fitz and Trix to leave behind so much of the baggage that has dogged them in the recent arc. There are some excellent scenes in this book, ones that highlight the 8th Doctor range at its best, the bizarre nudity dream, the Doctor being offered his memories back, Trix's heart-stopping near death experience at the climax... Espero is an intriguing world, expertly set up by Michaelowski but it is just a shame that the politics aren't more central to the book. The secondary characters are very well drawn and the book reads very well thanks to a very loose plot that is peppered with loads of great jokes and character moments. The "must finish" climax tops off a nourishing book.
Verdict: A minus (A fresh start, hilarious and uplifting)
What the critics said:
"Certainly after the unremittingly grim tone which we have had to put
up with of late, this is a lighter but no less worthy novel which makes
for easy and captivating reading. I look forward to reading more about
this new TARDIS team and this new, hopefully back-to-normal, universe."
Noel Warham, The Asylum
"If you've left the series, Halflife provides
the perfect jumping on point in which to rejoin. There is much to
recommend the book." Neil Corry, TV Zone (7/10)
"(The buttock scene) might deflect attention to an often startling,
well crafted novel." Jason Arnopp, SFX (3/5)
"Halflife is the warmest, wittiest Doctor
Who story for a very long time. The real revelation is the author's
treatment of Trix as Halflife hints at an
intriguing backstory for the character" Matt Michael, DWM
"Mark Michaelowski sets up a fascinating situation, where human
colonists on an alien planet have to deal with a crashed alien spaceship,
and seem to have an inherent distrust and hostility towards all alien
life. There is no shortage of mysteries for us to unravel, and the author
deals out the solutions at a cleverly measured pace." The Doctor Who
review (4/5)
"A novel that deals with the Doctor's amnesia as if it was a new
concept and doesn't let it hinder the story it is trying to tell. Halflife is a fantastic read with adorable gay-esque
references and illusions and well rounded characterisations." Michael
Adams, Outpost Gallifrey
"I liked the underlying story of alien knick-knacks and various off
world powers, so the novel kept me happily reading." Finn Clark, DWRG
The Eleventh Tiger by David A. McIntee (PDA no 65): Astonishingly good and a return to form for McIntee who with his past three or four books has disappointed. It's an entertaining Hartnell historical that manages to be a bit more than that, offering some fabulous development of Ian and Barbara and explores Chinese culture with an eye for beauty. It has quite sedate pace despite some excellent fight scenes (the formidable first Doctor even gets his own kung-fu moment which is much, much better than it sounds) and takes its time to let us get close to the historical characters. Vicki is pretty dispensable but if you love your early Who you won't be disappointed by this stylish, colourful book.
Verdict: A (Uncomplicated but rewarding, you'll learn quite a lot from this)
What the critics said:
"The Eastern setting enables McIntee to make full use of the first
Doctor's contemplative side, casting him in the role of a wise master
given to philosophising on the nature of time, the universe and reality at
the drop of a bamboo hat. McIntee sensitively reinvents the early years."
Paul Kirkley, SFX (4/5)
"A substantial part of the enjoyment found in this book is due to its
measured pace, which sees the time travellers pausing to attempt to
understand, even enjoy this unfamiliar culture." David Darlington, TV Zone
(6/10)
"The Eleventh Tiger is a more focussed and
disciplined novel than McIntee has published in some time, and it's easily
his best novel for the BBC." Matt Michael, DWM
"The prose is simple and clear, a deliberate echo of Chinese folk
tales, and very readable." Finn Clark, DWRG
"For the most part The Eleventh Tiger is a
great success, and combines the best of the historicals with an added
ingredient of alien menace." Lawrence Conquest, Outpost Gallifrey.
The Tomorrow Windows by Jonathon Morris (EDA no 68): The most popular EDA in years and the book that has received rave reviews ever since it was published. It is exactly what we needed from the EDAs, a silly but thoughtful, scary but hilarious oddball story loaded with imagination and GREAT characters. The regulars are fantastic, Fitz and Trix continuing to surprise and the Doctor hasn't been this breathlessly heroic in a while. The dialogue will make you laugh your head off and the expanding plot is full of unexpected surprises and memorable locations. The powerhouse novel of the year surely.
Verdict: A plus (Whacky and irresistible, this is Doctor Who at its best)
What the critics said:
"Funny and frivolous without being trite, this is very good indeed."
Matt Michael, DWM
"Although there's temptation to view the ensuing micro-tales as short
stories which have been plucked from Development Hell and dusted down,
they're no less impressive for that, being shot through with clever
twists, jet black humour and intruige." Jason Arnopp, SFX (5/5)
"Morris pulls no punches and there's a constant threat that major
characters won't survive to the next page. Morris makes this a funny,
scary and witty tale of his own." Neil Corry, TV Zone (9/10)
"This is sure-fire poll winner and a timely reminder of what the range
can achieve when it strives to be something more than the norm." Noel
Warham, The Asylum
"It's bouncing with energy, like a puppy whose heard you say "walkies"
and about as hard to dislike." Finn Clark, Outpost Gallifrey
"It reflects society back at us and makes us laugh at our own follies.
But it also provides much needed light entertainment in the style of
Douglas Adams. Highly Recommended." Michael Adams, Outpost Gallifrey
"Speaking of the Doctor, his characterisation is superb. Magnificent.
Exceptional." Donald McCarthy, DWRG
SynthespiansTM by Craig Hinton (PDA no 66): Duck for cover ladies and gents, Craig Hinton has written another Doctor Who book! Actually this would probably have been better released last year in place of Loving the Alien because its unusual mix of camp and SF would have been the perfect remedy to the mid-year depression. I cannot believe this twisted and enjoyable tale is from the same man who gave us The Quantum Archangel, this time he gets the sixth Doctor PERFECT (he is hilariously rude to everyone in this book!), writes a mean Peri (a bitchy wild child), puts in his own engaging 2D cast and fills the book to bursting with some hysterical digs at our consumerist society. The book is about a deep as an episode of Star Trek: Voyager but infinitely more fun. Craig has finally delivered a book that leaves you with a huge grin on your face when you turn the back cover.
Verdict: B (A camp delight!)
What the critics said:
"Overall, Synthespians is far superior to
Hinton's recent books for the BBC. Though it's very annoying in parts and
suffers from a stupid denouement, it moves along well and is reasonably
entertaining." Matt Michael, DWM
"What an absolute corker, one of the best from the BBC in a very long
time... SynthespiansTM is Doctor Who's
plastic fantastic!" James Gent, Outpost Gallifrey
"It's difficult to decide whether this book is very dumb or very, very
smart indeed." Paul Kirkley, SFX (2/5)
"SynthespiansTM is harmless, frequently
amusing and diverting, and likely to find an audience... it's a reassuring
easy read albeit one from an author whose not one for shying away from
internal rhetoric or passages so purple they're damn close to indigo!"
David Darlington, TV Zone (5/10)
"By throwing the rulebook out of the window, Hinton has at last had
some success as a Doctor Who author, SynthespiansTM is not only better than Hinton's
previous efforts, it is simply marvellous." The Doctor Who review (4/5)
"It's a lame outing for the Autons and doesn't have any tension or
character drama or anything else to keep me interested." Finn Clark, DWRG
"Built on an excellent TARDIS duo, and playing on the setting which is
particularly well crafted, it can only be considered an overall success,
and an enjoyable novel to boot." Noel Warham, The Asylum.
"Total shite" Rob Matthews, to my e-mail inbox.
The Sleep of Reason by Martin Day (EDA no 69): Who would have thought the EDAs would still be going so strong after 69 books, this is an excellent experiment in narrative that pays of in spades, a chiller that wisely keeps the Doctor and his friends in the background and only has them seen through the eyes of other characters. As such it becomes a very good novel rather than a very good Doctor Who story, thriving on atmosphere (especially in the disturbing Victorian nuthouse scenes) and revelling in some of the most complex characterisation we have seen in a while. Laska's emotional journey drives the book but there are plenty more fascinating characters to read about. The climax again, is rather good, where the latter day asylum becomes trapped in the same ghastly situation as the Victorian one.
Verdict: A plus (Intimately well drawn and frightening, its another winner for the EDAs)
What the critics said:
"Filled with disturbing scenes and horrific images, The Sleep of Reason is one of the grimmer Eighth
Doctor books - an also one of the best recently. Encouraging us to see the
Doctor and his companions in a new light, shows that even after 60 novels,
the EDAs can still surprise." Matt Michael, DWM
"One of the most elegant Doctor Who books ever written. It's
hard to believe this is the same franchise that gave us Silver Nemesis." Paul Kirkley, SFX (5/5)
"It's a very interesting and worthwhile piece of work although the
near fatalism of the novel's ethos means it's not a story which one can
feel uplifted by." David Darlington, TV Zone (7/10)
"Astonishingly good, possibly up there in my top five 8DAs. What makes
this book special is it's writing." Finn Clark, DWRG
"When the Doctor, Fitz and Trix do get involved they are perfectly
written, and are the most likeable they have been for quite a while." The
Doctor Who Review (4/5)
"The book is very adult in its style - but this is handled so
sensitively, and everything strikes a realistic chord, that I was not
offended in any shape or form. Challenging and highly intriguing, in equal
measures, The Sleep of Reason has to be
classified as one of the boldest novels in the range." Richard Radcliffe,
DWRG (9/10)
The Algebra of Ice by Lloyd Rose (PDA no 67): You have to feel a little sorry for Lloyd Rose, not only does she have to follow up her two amazing EDAs from 2000 and 2002 but she also has fierce competition in the quality stakes from the likes of Martin Day and Jonathon Morris this year. To her credit she writes an absorbing tale, an intimate character drama with a gentle SF background. It's not as epic or as thrilling as her last two works but it isn't trying to be, just pay close attention to the dialogue and characterisation and you'll see she is as sharp as ever. The seventh Doctor is nailed perfectly, so is Ace (and who thought these characters had any mileage left in them?) but the real star of the book is Ethan. The book exists to tell his tale.
Verdict: A minus (Scaling down the plot to explore the characters, this is an engrossing experiment that pays off)
What the critics said:
"The novel transcends its problems and to become the most convincing
and absorbing PDA in some time." David Darlington, TV Zone (8/10)
"On the whole this novel achieves what all PDAs set out to do, to play
to the strengths of the eras they are trying to recapture." Starburst
magazine (4/5)
"The novel builds to a startling climax, and the reader never gets a
chance to get bored. Amazingly, she (Rose) not only finds a whole new
perspective to the over-used Seventh Doctor, but also does wonders with
Ace, eschewing the angst of the New Adventures and Big Finish audios, and
instead embracing the character as she appeared on television." (5/5)
"I'm going to stay clear of anything in future trying to be a New
Adventure-type story. I suppose none of us can like absolutely every type
of Doctor Who story." Richard Radcliffe, DWRG (5/10)
"The pure mathematics-as-threat-to-universe angle is exactly the sort
of territory Doctor Who should be exploiting in the sub atomic
age." Paul Kirkley, SFX (3/5)
"A rich character tale." Robert Muller, Dreamwatch (7/10)
"The Algebra of Ice is a well constructed
piece of writing. It uses tension, humor and plotting to its optimum level
with fascinating cameo characters the reader wants to keep reading about.
Where it falls short of being a brilliant novel is the characterization of
the Doctor." Michael Adams, Outpost Gallifrey
The Deadstone Memorial by Trevor Baxendale (EDA no 70): Another superb Eighth Doctor book and one that devotes its full attention to the magic of this incarnation. He enters Hazel, Cal and Jade's lives and transforms their lives into something much happier and brighter. It's a top-notch horror book too with plenty of scenes to make you squirm, Baxendale has improved in leaps and bounds with his writing and many of the scenes are startlingly vivid. Extra points for dealing with Fitz and Trix so well (never before has the TARDIS trio seemed more like a family), Trix especially seems more humane with every book.
Verdict: A (A dark, disturbing fantasy uplifted by some magical character moments)
What the critics said:
"The problem is, once the nature of the threat is explained to us, it
comes as no surprise, the plot lets the side down. Particularly when the
writing, characterisation and story - if we define that as how the plot
affects the characters - are otherwise so impressive." David Darlington,
TV Zone (6/10)
"A totally enchanting book this one. Every now and then a book comes
along that totally encapsulates what makes DW so brilliant - this
is one such book." Richard Radcliffe, DWRG (10/10)
"This is a dark, enthralling psychological thriller which is
particularly effective given its focus on the small family unit and the
effect of an evil influence on them. Rather than looking at the grand
scale of things, Baxendale wisely chooses to emphasise the personal nature
of this threat and it is remarkably easy to empathise with the victims."
Noel Warham, The Asylum
"You keep expecting Baxendale to confound expectations with an
unforeseen twist, but it never happens. Followers of the genre will find
this a disappointment, but fortunately the excellent characterisation and
creepy atmosphere ensure that there is plenty to enjoy." The Doctor Who
Review (3/5)
"All in all, while the first two-thirds may be a bit thin the wait is
worth it, and while there's nothing spectacularly clever going on here
this is ultimately a superior and very enjoyable adventure story, and
easily the best novel that Trevor Baxendale has yet written." Lawrence
Conquest, Outpost Gallifrey
"Baxendale successfully presents the reader with a Halloween ghost
story complete with dark woods, chill fogs, creepy old men in run down
cottages, gravestones, buried crypts, worms, mud and rats - even gypsies
and a secret passage! More like this please... " David Kelm, Outpost
Gallifrey
The Indestructible Man (PDA No 68): A surprise hit, this is the best PDA of the year and a marvellous way to round off this impressive run of books. Whilst I was expecting an embarrassing Gerry Anderson pastiche, Simon Messingham cleverly incorporates elements of Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 and asks some disturbing questions about the plausibility of there ideas. It gives Jamie and Zoe a chance to grow up and the second Doctor is captured to a T. A gripping thriller, don't let the colourful cover fool you into thinking this will be a light book, its dark tone and breakneck pace are what make it so readable.
Verdict: A (Subverting expectations in all the best ways)
What the critics said:
"One of the most impressive thing about this novel is the way in which
the author has looked at the various series which he has attempted to
evoke and twists them, effectively imagining the way in which the Earth
and the human race would react to such a set of circumstances." Noel
Warham, The Asylum
"Wow - a decent book by Trevor Baxendale followed by a decent book by
Simon Messingham - has the world gone stark staring mad? I have never seen
UFO, Thunderbirds, et al, so all those references you found so distracting
went straight over my head, and as a result I found the novel highly
enjoyable" Lawrence Conquest, Outpost Gallifrey.
"People criticised The Quantum Archangel for its
continuity references, and, at the time, I was blind to that criticism
because I was having so much fun writing it. I'm sure that Simon had fun
writing this. But if people were stumbling over the DW continuity
references in my book in the same way that I did over the Anderson ones in
this book, then I apologise and really do see the error of my ways." Craig
Hinton, Outpost Gallifrey
"Remarkable, nasty and cruel, this book isn't what you think it is. You may well not love this book, but you'll definitely be drawn in by an original take on two giants of Sixties television. Although, I bet Robert The Robot is spinning in his grave right now." BBC Website
WRITERS...
2004 has the distinction of being the first year in ages that has had no fresh writers; every single contribution has been by an old hand. What's more, rather than the D-Grade writers (copyright Finn Clark) that populated 2003 there have been some rather more exciting names turning up, Lloyd Rose, Mark Michalowski, Jonathon Morris, Paul Cornell... writers who have in the past delivered some great books and left me eager to see what they can offer this time around.
Suffice to say this move to relying on old writers has paid off and many of them have delivered some of their best work yet.
Whilst I wouldn't say Sometime Never... is Justin Richards' best achievement (indeed I think I prefer Time Zero and The Burning to this) but it was still a gripping page-turner, a twist-filled delight that wiped the slate clean on the EDAs so they could begin afresh. If he isn't getting better he is consistently good.
The real surprises this year were Craig Hinton and Trevor Baxendale, both of whom have been decidedly iffy in the past. The Deadstone Memorial was probably my second favourite EDA of the year and Baxendale's confident, triumphant writing has really come on in leaps and bounds. Hinton is the rotten egg of the Who fiction universe (in my eyes) but Synthespians proves that the author does have some talent in more comedic areas and even if he does talk down to his audience regularly (Rob!) it is still a readable and enjoyable piece, far exceeding the quality of his previous efforts.
I never doubted for a second that Morris, Martin Day, Rose and Cornell would triumph (and I have written them here in order of preference for their works this year) but it pleases me to see each of them still at the top of their game.
The Indestructible Man is easily on par with Tomb of Valdemar, Messingham's last book and miles better than The Infinity Race. He has cut down on distracting narrative tricks and the result is a far more smooth, clear novel. On writing alone, it's his best book yet.
David A. McIntee was another shock win, producing a terrific historical that reminds just how good he can be when he takes his time to write. Without writing three books a year McIntee has had the time to delve into Chinese culture and provide a stylish trip abroad for the Hartnell regulars.
David Bishop is still living in the shadow of Who Killed Kennedy, which is a crying shame because his books get better and better but still don't seem to impress the critics. Empire of Death and The Domino Effect were both hugely entertaining books but still lack the verve of his debut.
COVERS...
Extremely mixed and frankly I think I preferred those that fronted last year's books overall. In order of preference...
Sometime Never... : Very, very nice, a skeleton with burning red eyed, hand outstretched to grab the TARDIS from the space. A little bit camp, superbly menacing, it's probably the most thrilling cover in years.
The Algebra of Ice: What is it about snowy covers? They always seem so much more atmospheric than the others and the windswept desolation of the Swiss Alps captures the barren mood of the book perfectly.
The Indestructible Man: People HATE this cover don't they? So naturally I adored it... very Gerry Anderson-esque cover which doesn't quite fit the story, I loved the purple wigged Zoe who (cute as ever) is the first companion on a front cover in an AGE! Nice futuristic earth too!
The Eleventh Tiger: Very detailed, much like the book. Hartnell standing before a Chinese temple in a contemplative mood. Love the green...
The Sleep of Reason: Proving how effective these wraparound covers can be. Scary wolf peers out of the ruins of a mausoleum. It's almost photographic; you could almost believe the book was made out of stone.
Synthespians: God you should hear Craig Hinton whinging on about this cover at Outpost Gallifrey! Personally I prefer this version as it captures the camp colour of the book perfectly and it scared the heebie jeebies out of the BBC shop woman (whose name is Sally, we are on first name basis because I am in there every other day buying something new!) who couldn't unload the books fast enough!
The Tomorrow Windows: Hmm, now we're getting to the poorer stuff. An obvious drawing not captured very majestically (which this God-like figure certainly should be!). It does look shockingly like Brian Blessed though!
Halflife: Don't forget your radioactive screening glasses before you stare at this disturbingly bright picture of a flower.
Empire of Death: Gah! Davison in a mock Ambassadors of Death pose! How I hate those ugly yellow colours...
Scream of the Shalka: Spare me; these drawings could have been done by a four year old. It just exposes the amateurish style the online broadcast took, giving the designers of South Park a good name.
The Deadstone Memorial: Stock McGann, stock forest, this is nothing special (are Black Sheep getting bored?).
DOCTORS...
Yes! Yes! Yes! That's how to get the eighth Doctor right! Geez, last year he was this faceless loser who couldn't hold a universe together. He really was living up to his stereotype as the one who gets everything wrong. All five EDAs this year have highlighted why the eighth Doctor is so special to me, restoring so much of the enchantment and magnetism that he thrives on.
What's more there has been some very healthy development for the character, forget season 21 and the route it took with the fifth Doctor, this is how to portray a running character learning from his adventures. Sometime Never... sees him battle with his long term (mysterious) enemies and finally stand up for the universe and decide all this meddling has to STOP. It is fantastic to see him so active again, squaring up to Sabbath and Octan and restoring the multiverse thus ensuring the universe is as unpredictable and chaotic as he is. Then Halflife sensitively deals with the aftermath of this story, the death of Miranda and the long running issue of his lost memories. Once and for all the Doctor decides he is quite happy how he is and doesn't NEED those memories to complete him. You go guy! The Tomorrow Windows sees him having some fun, back out in the whacky universe trying to put right wrongs. The Sleep of Reason and The Deadstone Memorial see him once again taking a change of direction, possibly his most important to date. He finally realises what Anji was trying to tell him so often, that people are affected by his adventures and he actively decides to start dealing with the details as well as the big picture. The subsequent two stories see the Doctor in small-scale environments helping out only a few people and helping put their lives back together. These intimate tales expose the magical eighth Doctor at his finest, interacting with people, listening to their problems and making them laugh and allowing them to enjoy their lives again.
It helps that the PDA's have also had a rather good crack at each of their Doctors, whilst the fifth Doctor might seem a little quiet and unassuming in Empire of Death I would say that this is an honest portrayal of Peter Davison's performance. Still his turn as Queen Victoria's scientific advisor is gleefully funny! The (unbound) Ninth Doctor in Shalka is certainly enjoyable enough and I could well have looked forward to further adventures with him, I adored his mod-cons like a mobile phone and an android Master companion. Hinton restores that spiky humour and verbose wit of the sixth Doctor and he lights up Synthespians considerably and the second Doctor gets to be funny, serious and gentle, all in the same scene in Simon Messingham's impressive Indestructible Man.
Tying for most faithful interpretation would be the First and Seventh in Eleventh Tiger and Algebra of Ice. One is wise, inquisitive and active, the other manipulative, dangerous and broody and these polar opposites are utterly compelling to read about.
PROSE...
I have given up on waiting for a sumptuously written book from Craig Hinton; of all the writers this year he was the most undisciplined and childish. While this suits his fluffy comedy well, with lots of amusing backstabs at commercialism, his work still remains the weakest, professionally speaking.
On the other end of the scale there is Martin Day, whose prose impressed me the most in his hellish thriller. By filtering much of his work through his emotionally scarred characters the locations (a scary mental hospital) come to life with shocking realism. Equally wonderful are his diary extracts in the past, the reverend and asylum head providing an intimate look at the horrors of the past.
McIntee again surprised with some gorgeous writing in The Eleventh Tiger, he has toned down his style and writes in shorter, more precise sentences and as a result his work is much sharper and easy to visualise. None of these grandiose metaphors he was so fond of in the past!
Simon Messingham has his own unique prose style, which has made it hard for me to warm to his books in the past. He writes in short, fractured sentences. Just like this. Which can seem sharp. Like he can't be bothered. But it really worked in The Indestructible Man, heightening the tension and the pace.
Michaelowski is a dense writer; one of my friends is under the impression that he overwrites everything but I find his style very readable, he adds a lot of background colour and we haven't seen a world captured in this much detail since The Scarlet Empress.
Rose and Morris remain perfectly good at what they do. Morris imbues a lot of visual comedy into his books that compliments the hilarious dialogue and yet still captures his action with accelerating pace and nastiness. Rose probes her characters better than any other writer and sacrifices her plot here to concentrate closely on her bunch in The Algebra of Ice.
Baxendale and Cornell are about level pegging, the former scaling down his book to a small setting with a few characters and the latter setting his tale on a worldwide scale with a huge cast and they both seem suited to this approach. Baxendale is much, much better at the horrific material though and includes some gloriously tasteless moments.
Richards and Bishop still need to do some work on their style, it's very basic and unflattering to the plots. Richards in particular is capable of much better; his "he said, she said" prose for Sometime Never... is painfully similar to the Target novels (but geez can you imagine if this complicated book had been more thickly written?).
BADDIES
From best to worst in a rather unusual year for nasties...
Octan is one of my favourite bad guys ever simply because his motives are so selfless. Yes he wants to destroy the Earth and all of its history and that is an abominable crime but the simple fact that he is willing to throw his own life away too, that his death will be the defining factor in the survival of his race gives him a depth rare in the ranks of Doctor Who villains.
Stay out of the way of razor-fists Brett from The Algebra of Ice, what a piece of work he is! He beats the Doctor to a bloody pulp in one of the most brutal scenes in a while, I'm not sure why but the seventh Doctor having his face smashed in is especially harrowing. Probably because he is always so in control, a fist in the face is not something you can manipulate. Brett is a typical bully and his frightening ideals, that the human race does not deserve to exist (and therefore he is selling them out to the aliens) is another absorbing POV from this quiet tale.
Old Man Crawley in The Deadstone Memorial feeds kids to the alien monster he created under the earth. Enough said.
The Sleep of Reason features the hideous Sholem Luz creatures that it is hard to feel anything for since they don't make much of an appearance. However their presence is constantly felt as they drive men mad and cause them to abuse and kill and burn the bodies of their victims. Gross.
The Shalka were comic book villains but at least they were good comic book villains, big on possession, the ability all the good Doctor Who monsters have. I have always thought there was good potential for a Doctor Who monster that bursts from the ground and Cornell includes lots of memorable scenes to this effect. I love it when they start causing the chaos of a worldwide scale; for once the menace is not limited to a few fields in South East England.
Halflife, The Tomorrow Windows and Synthespians feature comic villains but they manage to be a lot of fun, if not especially memorable compared to those above. I loved Alinti, the Imperator's wife in Halflife, scheming and plotting to bump off her husband. She almost manages to be as bitchy as Matheson and Dominique Delacroix from Craig Hinton's novel but not quite. They take the lead position in camp villains, all kissy kissy one second and "Execute them!" the next.
Possession is also popular in The Eleventh Tiger and Empire of Death but the villains are easily the least impressive thing about both books. Characterisation and plot are far, far superior.
Whilst the Myloki are certainly memorable for their effect on Earth, the actual aliens get zero book space. We find out so little about them and that was my one complaint about The Indestructible Man.
WRAPPING UP...
What a year! I can't think of another year in Doctor Who fiction where I have pretty much loved every single book. The run of quality has been extraordinary, amazingly so considering how hotch potch last year's output was. The EDAs have finally stripped themselves of this arc nonsense and started having fun and the PDAs are delivering consistently good work, old writers delivering some of their best ever fiction.
It was the year when the Doctor restored chaos to the universe. The year he regenerated into Richard E Grant for one story. The year Nyssa came to terms with all the death around her. The year Fitz had naughty dreams about the Doctor. The year the first Doctor had a kung-fu fight. The year Ken Livingston exploded taking Tate Modern with him. The year the sixth Doctor took on the Autons (again). The year bodies were burnt in a British mental hospital to incubate an alien race. The year the seventh Doctor was made to account for destroying Skaro. The year the Doctor played Dad and helped a small family get their lives back together. The year Jamie and Zoe grew up and realised how much they love the Doctor.
It's been a hell of a ride; I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.
The Historicals by Joe Ford 9/2/05
I consider the historicals sole property of the Hartnell era despite one taking place in Troughtons early days and one leaping out of no-where in Davison's tenure. They are one of the major factors that define the Hartnell era, the willingness to explore not just other worlds but other times and mine the rich drama our past offers. It was one of Doctor Who's original guidelines to educate and entertain and the historicals are mostly fine examples of those principles.
It all starts with An Unearthly Child, the very first Doctor Who story. Popular myth will have you believe that the first episode of this story is the only one to treasure and that it sinks rapidly into boredom from the second episode onwards. True, the pilot episode is groundbreaking science-fiction but there is much of interest in the remaining episodes especially the raw and brutal look at life during 100,000 BC. The Doctor and company are practically unable to communicate with the caveman savages they meet (except in one brilliant scene where the Doctor exposes a murder by producing the knife with blood on it), their way of life so alien to what they (and we) recognise. The ability to produce fire is revealed to be the work of Ian and this secret is a dangerous one indeed, causing the leaders of camp to fight to the death over its power (to heat their people and cook their food and light their caves).
Episode four sees a vicious fight between Za and Kal with the four time travellers watching on in absolute terror. The two men snarl and claw at each other like a pair of crazed lions as they fight over who should rule. For Barbara, getting her first glimpse of the very history she taught at Coal Hill School, especially corpses strewn in the forest and her life in constant jeopardy, it is too much and she breaks down in the first of several top-notch dramatic scenes for her in the historicals.
It is the constant fear of never returning to the ship that makes this story so gripping. They haven't quite perfected the formula yet because the story is occasionally sluggish and padded but it is a good attempt at exploring a pivotal period of human history.
Next up comes Marco Polo, one of my personal favourites. Little or nothing has been known about this story for so long and within a year the soundtrack was released and even more unexpectedly the telesnaps were discovered. They confirmed what I already suspected, that this is a magical tale, full of suspense, horror, humour and everything else that makes the historicals so watchable.
At seven episodes long it should drag but it never does, the story follows Marco Polo's during his journey to Peking and switches locations each episode so there always some other more wondrous place to visit (and rather wonderfully we follow a map as their journey proceeds with Marco's voice over proclaiming where they are headed and how far they have come). Visit the glamorous palace of Kublai Khan in Shang-tu or get kidnapped by Bandits in the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes, get ambushed in the Bamboo forest or gaze in awe at the splendour of the way station at Cheng-Ping.
The story is mostly serious, dealing with the travellers unable to return to the ship and escape in perhaps its most fullest. Marco Polo decides to give the TARDIS to Kublai Khan as a present to the horror of the crew who cannot come to terms with the fact it will leave them stranded in 1289. There are many moments of top notch drama on the journey across the hazardous landscapes, the singing sands of the Gobi Desert prove terrifying as the storm traps Susan and Ping-Cho outside the tent and whips up around them, the noise like a hundred screams. Barbara again gets the most dramatically satisfying moment when she is kidnapped by Bandits and forced to watch whilst they compete with each other over who will slit her throat. And constantly the threat of the misguided Tegana falls over the travellers as he seeks to rid himself of the Doctor and co by whatever means necessary (one especially cruel cliff-hanger sees him stranding them in the Gobi desert without water whilst he drinks thirstily).
But there are some lighter moments too, especially at the climax where the Doctor, worn out from their long journey struggles along with the mighty Kublai Khan who happens to be a frail old tactician. I adore the scene where the Doctor plays Khan at backgammon and wins the entire wealth of Burma for one year!
The story is written to perfection, every line dripping with class. The regulars are all given something to do (even Susan, this being her best story because of her sweet relationship with Ping-Cho) and it is clear from the telesnaps no expense was spared on the production, which looks as lush as any other historical.
What's more you learn a great deal about Marco Polo, his journey and Chinese culture. It is a fascinating culture and well worth further exploration (see The Eleventh Tiger, the very book that led me back to Marco Polo in the first place).
The Aztecs is one of the most popular historicals because it is fortunate to exist in entirety, pictures and all! It paints an interesting picture of Aztec culture and takes the time show off the spiritual as well as the torturous side of their nature. As Susan so adeptly points out "Beauty and horror developing hand in hand", referring to Autloc the High Priest of knowledge and wisdom and Tlotoxol, the High Priest of sacrifice. How they lavish their chosen sacrifices to the rain God with whatever they desire, how they tell their women who to marry, how they treat their old folk with respect and kindness... these all go to help paint a colourful and informative picture of Aztec culture.
Can you guess who is flung into this way of life and fails to come to terms with their barbaric culture? Barbara of course, who is mistaken as the re-incarnation of the High Priest Yetaxa and attempts to change the Aztec way of life. This leads to some spectacular fireworks and one of the most important staples of these historicals, the Doctor's insistence that they cannot interfere with the course of history. The argument the Doctor and Barbara have over this is one of priceless moments of Hartnell Doctor Who, his pleading, her refusal, his anger, her calmness... it's riveting to watch and exploits the power of the historical to the full.
The story features a lavish production with some superb, detailed sets (and astonishingly good painted backdrops that are almost good enough to convince you that you are there) and stylish direction. The costumes and sound effects go a long to planting you in the 15th century. Special mention must go to Jackie Hill who takes Barbara to hell and back and convincingly portrays a woman desperate to change a way of life to protect a man's life.
Nobody seems to give a fig about The Reign of Terror which squats at the end of season one as if it is a bit inconsequential. To be fair it is, next to Marco Polo and The Aztecs it pales in comparison and has far too many distracting subplots to really get into the nitty gritty of the French revolution. On the plus side there are some smashing cliffhangers (the Doctor trapped in the burning house is a contender for the best of the season) and the story is awarded some rare location footage to give it a sense of scale but the tone of the story is all wrong. It is primarily a straight tale about the downfall of Robespierre and the rising of Napoleon but the story gets distracted with too many humorous asides such as the Doctor's escape from the roadside jailer and the scenes in the tailors shop. What doesn't help is that these silly bits are by far the best parts of the story with some hilarious dialogue and interplay, the serious bits all comes across a bit flat, deathly dull once you reach the last episode. Where the story does score some points is in its graphic nature, the show taking a few risks with its violence. Aside from that it is probably the least interesting historical of the Hartnell era.
Jumping across to The Romans and a story that I will defend to the hilt no matter what people say about it. Yes it is silly, yes it can be embarrassing in parts and yes it does feature frightening editing but it is still hugely entertaining, Doctor Who as an out and out comedy with only the barest of serious bits to get in the way of the fun.
The story delights in depicting Nero as a fat, bumbling, psychotic fool and Derek Francis delivers a memorable performance, chasing Barbara around for some hanky panky, dispatching a guard who did not fight hard enough and arranging for the Doctor to be eaten alive by the lions in the arena. It is great to be able to see a well-remembered historical event in the series and the Doctor's reaction to his own direct involvement in the burning of Rome is hilarious (outwardly outraged to be blame but as soon as Vicki's back is turned he giggles to himself with pleasure!). Some interesting facts are revealed, the court of Nero poisoning their way through life, slave trading, gladiatorial fighting...
But the story will be best remembered as the historical they managed to drag lots of laughs from, from Vicki's attempted assassination of Nero to Barbara smashing Ian over the head with the vase to the Doctor's silent lyre recital. The era seems perfectly suited for a little mockery and it is great to see the regulars let their hair down and have some real fun. William Hartnell is in his element and this is the story I point people to who say he is a duff Doctor; his comical timing is perfect.
I think I should reconsider my opinion of season two as The Crusade is another astonishing historical but so different from The Romans it is impossible to imagine them being made so close together. The Crusades are a lesser-known period of history but given the wealth of material on display here it must have been a fascinating time to live in. Much like The Aztecs the story makes the brave choice to portray all sides in the war between the British and the Saracens fairly. I like how both sides are seen through the eyes of their leaders, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin and how both themselves and their people are seen in good and bad light. It would have been so easy in the sixties to have taken a more racist path and portray the Saracens as evil but Saladin is seen as a careful and considerate man, kind to his prisoners and unable to despatch life lightly.
Doctor Who rarely reached such heights of drama as the scenes between Joanna and her brother in episode three, as she learns of his plan to marry her to the Saladin's brother Saphadin. Jean Marsh and Julian Glover deliver powerhouse performances, positively screaming out their dialogue, which is, as ever from the pen of David Whitaker, absolutely beautiful.
Barbara has her last chance to shine in a historical before she departs the series and is dragged off to the Saracen camp, kidnapped by El Akir, freed and on the run in the streets of Basra. She is taken is by a kind man who leaves her to the protect her daughter whilst he checks outside for guards. He leaves her a knife and makes her promise if the soldiers find them that she will kill her... it is this sort of uncompromising writing that exemplifies the historicals as Barbara stares at the knife as the guards draw near...
The Myth Makers is a funny old story, neither great nor awful but with snatches of both. Where it succeeds is in its portrayal of the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans and in its imaginative use of the famous Trojan Horse. The story has a reputation for being a comedy but it has always seemed a rather solemn affair to me, some impressive actors seem unwilling to compromise themselves for the more entertaining slant the script goes for. The departure of Vicki is very abrupt (and I have never thought the idea of a companion falling in love within the confines of one story to be very satisfying) but the promise of a historical companion in Katarina is an intriguing idea. Unfortunately it was never pursued as the producers chickened out during the next story and killed her off in a spectacular fashion (later companions Jamie and Victoria would prove how effective historical companions could be).
The Massacre on the other hand remains one of the very best Doctor Who stories for its brutal examination of the religious intolerance during the 16th century. The tone of the story is deadly straight but it works superbly as such, affording the series its last powerhouse drama for a while. This story of politics and prejudice portrays the Catholics in a very harsh light, the sinister Catherine de Medici hatching a plot to have all the French Protestants murdered and the Admiral de Coligny assassinated. This tough subject matter is dealt with bluntly by writer John Lucarotti with some powerful scenes of debate. The story leads up to an almighty climax as the Massacre draws near and the Doctor drags Steven back to the TARDIS leaving his newfound friends to their deaths. And in a tragic final twist he orders young Ann Chaplet back to her household to await the massacre, not able to take her with them despite Steven's protests.
The story takes an unfamiliar path (at this point in the show's history) to having the Doctor written out of the action and a character turn up soon after who looks just like him, the Abbot of Amboise. This frightening, silky voiced monster would appear to be the Doctor in disguise but in a shocking twist he is discovered dead in a gutter after failing to kill the Admiral. It must have been a terrific shock to viewers at the time to think the Doctor could be dead. The Doctor-light adventure affords Steven a chance to step into the limelight and he steals the show, his emotional reactions to history's injustice what makes the story so strong. Indeed the climax where he condemns the Doctor for allowing so many people to die just so history is kept on track is perhaps the best example of the historical genre. It is real lump in the throat stuff, compelling because it HAS to happen.
I seem to be one of a select few who really enjoy The Gunfighters and this is coming from a man who despises the genre in general when he was forced to watch so much macho posturing during his media course. The Gunfighters is the best western I have ever seen and yet it is probably the worst too. It has far too many appalling fake American accents, it is filmed in a studio (unthinkable for the genre) and is once again edited with little thought but fortunately it is a Doctor Who story as well as a western and that boosts it into the classic leagues. Unlike the other historicals this feels REALLY different, in tone and content to any other Doctor Who story and unlike The Reign of Terror it is riotously funny.
Whilst this is clearly on a budget and played for laughs Donald Cotton manages to still remind us of the core ingredients and style of a western; gunslingers, pretty singing girls, face-offs, outlaws, sherrifs, cowardly barmen and lots and lots of shooting! To see the Doctor, Steven and Dodo walk into a saloon bar is a delight and their entanglement in the mechanics of the conflict between the Earps and the Clantons works a treat, especially the poor Doctor who once again gets mistaken for a killer and keeps being given guns!
There's plenty of songs and laughter to be had with this story it pains me to report its poor reputation. It's a shame that Doctor Who lost its sense of trying new things when Troughton left, as this is an excellent example of the diversity of the show and of the historicals in particular.
The Smugglers probably the most entertaining historical which isn't trying to be a comedy or a straight drama but merely a fun diversion. It is a pirate drama, set in the seventeenth century and concerns a group of pirates searching for treasure and a local Cornish squire up to some smuggling mischief. The story is loaded with terrific lines and has an excellent pace, the characters spring alive thanks to some strong actors and the story leads to a satisfying conclusion seeing most of the pirates slaughtered by the militia.
Ben and Polly, contemporary sixties companions, help the story no end. Not only are they a lot of fun to be around, obviously in love and enjoying the chance to adventure but this being their first adventure in the past helps highlight the series' joyful ability to travel into the past and how wondrous these adventures can be. Hartnell is just one story away from leaving and yet is on wonderful form, rubbing shoulders with the horrid pirate captain, Pike.
It is the series' most extensive use of location filming yet and that helps to give the story a sense of reality, adding to the already plush production. The Smugglers is the historical most people tend to forget because it is only a bit fluff but the soundtrack is a real hoot and the telesnaps reveal a gorgeous looking story. Plus Ben gets his kit off too!
If you were to forget any story it would be The Highlanders, a real chore of a story to get through. A shame because the battle of Culloden is a rather interesting story (I spent a week in Scotland last year and visited the sight of the battle) but this story seems particularly humourless and drab, lacking The Smugglers' witty dialogue and pace.
You can almost understand why the production team abandoned the historicals after the reaction to this, Troughton still feeling his way into his role, Polly sidelined with the incredibly annoying Kirsty and Jamie failing to make a good impression in his first story. Ben is okay but hardly given anything to do.
Go watch Terror of the Zygons instead, it might not be a historical but it is by far the best Doctor Who story set in Scotland.
Black Orchid is the next historical and it occurs sixteen years after The Highlanders. Of course there are many trips into Earth's history in the intervening years but this is the one and only pure historical with no SF elements added that the series had to offer. Surprisingly for a fifth Doctor adventure it is excellent, unsurprisingly it did not lead to any more pure historicals thanks to a lacking script editor.
It is only a short two episode interlude between two blockbusting SF tales but it outshines either of them, concentrating on dialogue and characterisation over effects. It is an Agatha Christie style murder mystery with the Doctor as the prime suspect which is resolved in a dramatically satisfying way as a brotherly rivalry is revealed, one scarred from his expeditions abroad jealous of his brother's gorgeous wife-to-be.
The TARDIS crew (that's Adric, Tegan and Nyssa) are at their best; relaxing in the 1920's atmosphere and get to let their hair down at a luxurious costume ball. The production is typically lush for the BBC, their costume dramas proving the cream of the crop.
I am pleased to hear that historicals will crop up in the new series, as it is blatantly clear that they bring out the best in Doctor Who. Where the science-fiction stories date horribly thanks to the evolution of effects the historicals rely on clever plotting, strong dialogue and performances and these things will never be out of fashion.
Should you ever wonder why Doctor Who lasted in its early days I beg of you to go listen to Marco Polo or watch The Gunfighters (Simon watched this with me and adored it!), you really don't need to look to the sky for exciting stories. Our own past is full of terrifying, hilarious and educational tales. I hated history at school but thanks to Doctor Who I am pursuing a history course next year. Go figure.
Revolution Nine by Andrew Wixon 31/3/05
As I write this in the early evening of the last day of March, all the online places where those of our peculiar persuasion gather are (I understand) in uproar - shock, horror, dismay, outrage. Well, friends, I know it's terrible news and doesn't bode well for the future of our show, but there's no helping it now - the Christmas special's already officially commissioned and there's nothing we can do about it!
Oh, naughty me. That's obviously not what's got everyone het up. The issue at stake is, of course, who will be turning to camera at the end of said seasonal treat and wishing a merry Christmas to all of us at home, because it plainly isn't going to be Eccy (unless he's just disingenuously playing hardball, which strikes me as uncharacteristic of the man). The popular choice of replacement at the time of writing is David Tennant, which I can see working, but then again the fact that he is leading the list makes it rather unlikely it will actually turn out to be him (is it just my imagination or has the casting of the Doctor eerily mirrored the leadership of the UK Tory party since the late 1970s? Discuss). But anyway this isn't about the identity of Number Ten, just my reaction to the news - and I was probably much less upset than many people reading this site.
I should point out that - and here once again we are reminded of what a bizarre new media climate our show now inhabits - I was very impressed by Eccy's performance in the sole episode of his that I have seen. He's a very charismatic, well-considered, and extremely watchable Doctor (even if he occasionally seems to be modelling his performance on the 'Brilliant!' character from the Fast Show). He certainly challenges McGann for the title of Best Debut Performance. I would have liked to see him stay on for at least another year, or even the first third of season two. But having learned that he is off, I'm not surprised, nor am I particularly upset.
(But having said that, I hope - I desperately hope - that all the griping Eccy's departure has generated is simply a reaction to how good his performance was. Though I fear the worst and that at least one post along the lines of 'that's another regeneration wasted! He's only got three left now!' is befouling a bulletin board somewhere not far away, a response so moronic it almost beggars belief.)
First off, it's not as if the signs weren't there from the series' press launch. 'Equivocal' doesn't begin to describe Eccy's attitude to making the show in virtually every interview he's given. Particularly striking, for me, was the bit in the Project Who documentary where he was asked: are you with Doctor Who for the long haul? To which he responded (I paraphrase, not having a transcript) 'I've already done the long haul, this series has been a long haul.' Well, we can't say we weren't warned. The change from the cheerful way in which he talked about doing a play in the four months off he'd get each year (web interviews etc from early last summer) is marked. Why he's leaving doesn't really matter, but I think it's just that he underestimated the sheer bloody slog of doing a show this big. (Given that he partly took the role to shake off his image as a dour Northern luvvie, all this talk of him fearing typecasting doesn't ring true.) Whether this is due to Eccy's own commitment to the part, or inevitable given the nature of 21st century Who, it poses serious questions for the future of the show.
Losing our Doctor so soon into the series isn't an ideal situation - I suppose it's conceivable that it could have a negative impact on the viewing figures if people were reluctant to commit to a show with a leading man they know won't be there for long (hey, now we're getting shades of the UK Labour party's current situation). I suspect this wasn't news to the BBC; I reckon they've known for a bit, but it would have disastrous for the show's launch had Eccy announced his departure even before his debut episode had aired. (Though with a second series yet to be confirmed, there was no reason to make the announcement at all.) It wouldn't usually bode well for the show's long term future. But this is our show, a special show, with its own inbuilt mechanism to cope with this sort of upset. And it does have a long term future guaranteed - long term by modern TV standards, anyway. The fact that the BBC see Doctor Who as being bigger than its star names and have gone ahead with another run despite all this is tremendously reassuring to me.
Which brings me on to why I'm perhaps less upset than many others are. Imagine the dream scenario many might have - three or four solid years with Eccy and Rusty at the helm, pretty good ratings (tailing off a little with time, perhaps). But then they both decide to move on, they're both big names, both professionals rather than fans. Bereft of both its big names at the same time I would say the show's future would look considerably more wobbly than now will be the case. The other constant in every interview Eccy's given is that he (politely speaking) couldn't give a toss about being Doctor Who, he's on the show mainly because Rusty's written it, with the chance to change his image a somewhat distant second. He doesn't seem to have much affection for the show as an institution - the other weird quirk of his pre- and post-production interviews is the way his affection for the classic series (fan of Troughton, scared by the Sontareans, whatever they are, etc) has transmuted into rather brusque near-contempt (apparently you need a 'kitsch sensibility' to enjoy it and anyway Star Trek's better cos the walls stay still). Hopefully the new Doctor will be someone who wants to be Doctor Who rather than lead actor in a Rusty series, and thus happy to stick around if and when Rusty's career trajectory takes him to new places. Hopefully the new guy will be able to pace himself better and still do a good performance - or Rusty will be able to write the show so it's not quite so punishing for his star. Hopefully the old regenerative magic will persist and in ten years this will all be seen as just another strange quirk of Who's production history.
Yes, that's a lot to hope for, but I think we've got rather good at hoping over the last sixteen years. And, all things considered, I think we still have cause to be hopeful for the future.
Alternative seasons by Joe Ford 21/4/05
There are some people out there who would consider what I am about to do the ultimate heresy (you know who you are...) as they consider televised Doctor Who to be the ONLY source where the stories actually count. But I was thinking about the shocking number of books and audios that actually surpass many of the televised stories and how they would fit into seasons with no problems and make them a far more fulfilling experience. So join me now as I play alternative seasons, of which I have chosen because I happen to find them troublesome (you however may LOVE them) and have inserted stories that I have particularly enjoyed post televised Who (whereas you may loathe them...). Should you find my suggestions offensive then have a go yourself... I'd love to see what some of you come up with!
SEASON TWO
(This early season is under the mistaken impression that bigger is better as if to compete with the popularity of season one it has try so much harder. As such you get useless "epics" such as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Web Planet and The Chase and bizarre attempts to visualise grand concepts in other stories (the burning of Rome, giant insects, a Viking warfleet) which are doomed to embarrassment. In my new season two there is a heavy emphasis on the historicals because they seem to work far better than the SF stuff (and yet in season three the SF stories are absolutely stunning!) and include some hearty development for the regulars.)
SEASON NINE
(An ugly year for Doctor Who for sure. With only one story that entirely succeeds (Day of the Daleks) it seems that the production team that gave us season eight and would go on to provide the wonderful season ten took a holiday. The last three stories in particular have to go, so we'll just say the Master got away at the end of the second story of the season, okay?)
SEASON FIFTEEN
(Shame to lose The Sun Makers but in my spanking new season fifteen we are treated to a rather more serious affair. Obviously clunkers The Invisible Enemy and Underworld are executed... it was hard to choose between Corpse Marker and Drift but I opted for the former as a sequel to last year's classic would definitely lure viewers in. If this season had been made I fear it may have rivalled the Hinchcliffe seasons... however Leela's exit story must remain, what a shame)
SEASON TWENTY
(Aha! I have been waiting to get my grubby hands of this for years! And now I can pull in the audios too! Those celebrated classics Arc of Infinty, Terminus and The Kings Demons have said bye bye. Here we have a line up of stories that would have made Davison shine like the potentially superb Doctor he always was. Never before have such lengths gone to rid a season of stinkers... this might sound implausible but it could have worked and at least the stories would be more entertaining.)
SEASON TWENTY-TWO
(I actually rather enjoy this season but I'm not blind to its faults. It's gaudy, it's very eighties and it has little too much friction between its regulars. With just a small amount of tinkering I can develop the regulars much more plausibly and remove all the offending articles (you know who you are!))
The Best Thing On British Televison by Jamie Beckwith
Q: How can you watch Doctor Who? It's so boring!
A:
To my mind I genuinely think Doctor Who is the best thing on television at the moment.
There's nothing else quite like it. Where else can one week you be watching weird and wonderful aliens at the end of the world and the next be watching a Victorian period drama with Simon Callow and then the next watch a farce about farting politicians who turn out to be fat aliens with zips in their heads?
That's even before we get to the awesome morality play between a guy in a leather jacket and a hateful blob in a giant pepper pot.
Maybe these things aren't to everybody's taste, I'm not a big fan of sci-fi myself, and things like Stargate and Andromeda and Enterprise do nothing for me.
Doctor Who is different. It's about stories. Sometimes they're funny stories, sometimes they're serious and sometimes it is about pigs flying spaceships or shop dummies going on a murdering rampage.
Some of the episodes have been below par but even the worst offenders (the aforementioned farting aliens) have still at their essence been entertaining. It's not switch-your-brain-off drivel like Celebrity Wrestling or Britain's Worst Taxidermists, but it is 45 minutes of sit down on a Saturday night with your family and watch something fun.
One of the things that appealed to me about the old 25 min episodes of police serial The Bill was that it was a new story every week and if you didn't like one episode or you missed one episode it didn't really matter because there were two more that week and sometimes you'd have the CID investigating a gruesome murder, the next week it was credit card fraud, the next week you'd have joyriders and car chases and then the next week you'd have Reg Hollis pottering about annoying Mr. Conway by asking to plant a rosebush in the front of the police station. If you're not into police drama then you could easily skip The Bill, but if you were, each episode could be something different. We've had our fair share of gripping, exciting, action -filled episodes and they easily sit back to back with the slower paced, comedy episodes.
I haven't followed The Bill for more than six months now. When I was in the staff canteen the other day it was switched over to ITV and I just couldn't follow it. There were very few sympathetic characters, they did very little investigating of crime, indeed all they seemed to do was walk up and down corridors talking about their love lives.
Doctor Who, like The Bill of old, is something different every week. It doesn't try to do anything more than entertain, and sometimes it's gripping, sometimes it's funny and sometimes it gets it wrong and you've watched the same po-faced technobabble that turns me off from such shows as Stargate and Andromeda.
But at least it tries. It's like a breath of fresh air. These days TV is awash with sameness. Reality TV drenches the schedules with its dribble, the only thing that differentiates is this week's choice of so-called celebrities and the occasional novel spin (One week let's lock them in a house, next week let's put them in a jungle, the next week let them spend a day posing as a traffic warden). Soap opera clog the screens and once upon a time you used to either watch EastEnders or you watched Corrie. Now both soaps are identical to The Bill and to Hollyoaks and Emmerdale and Family Affairs and whatnot. That's not to say they're not entertaining, I usually watch Emmerdale when I have my dinner, but I imagine that if I watched Coronation Street and EastEnders and then Holby City all in a row in the one evening I'd really have just watched the same soap four times over.
I'm biased, I used to watch the original series of Doctor Who and I'm a fan. But as somebody who seeks to work in television, who's got a degree in such a subject I can champion Doctor Who as something different. People who used to scorn my enthusiasm for a tattered old BBC show from the 60s are now tuning in every week, to be dazzled, to be entertained, to be amused. They don't care like we do about Daleks and Time Lords and Adric and Meglos; they're just sitting down to watch something new every week. They're tuning in because they see names like Russell T. Davis, Mark Gattis and Steve Moffat attached to the credits. They're tuning in because to nick a slogan from another long running BBC serial, everybody's talking about it.
Despite the claims, and maybe I live in a bubble, I've very rarely heard people talking about who they think is gonna win Fame Academy or who they think is fit in the Big Brother house. But in recent weeks I've heard people talking about how they watched Doctor Who over the weekend and how much they enjoyed it.
If you find it boring then nothing I say is gonna change that. I wouldn't want to change that, it's not my place to impose my idea of great upon you.
But I do think you're missing out on something fun.
And that's a shame.
The New Series by Paul Williams 1/6/05
When I was a child I religously watched Doctor Who from 1981 onwards, nagging my parents to get me home so that I didn't miss an episode of The Visitation. As I grew older I got disillusioned with the McCoy era but continued watching and followed the Doctor's progess in novels and audios thereafter. The TV Movie was always going to be a false dawn, despite McGann's efforts, but I had high hopes of the new series. I was looking forward to seeing Doctor Who back at the top of the television ratings, in an industry that has declined dramatically in the last two decades. In fact, apart from football, I hadn't made a point of watching any programme for years until Rose came on.
Whilst that wasn't the best episode ever made, it was the best debut of any Doctor for over 30 years and it enterained a whole new audience. The End of the World was a brave step in a new direction, which failed. It introduced a plethora of interesting aliens but didn't explore them in detail, prefering to concentrate on the relationship between the Doctor and the Rose. I'm all in favour of character development, along the lines of Ace's improvement, but not at the expense of the story.
Because of other commitments I didn't watch another episode until The Long Game. Despite having a setting very similar to The End of the World this was much better, if a trite predictable. The villain was suberb, and indeed the acting on the whole has been good throughout the episodes which I have seen. I'd question the inclusion of the monster however, it would have been better for the editor to have been in control of the operation. I guess that was included for the kids.
Then came Father's Day. I found this extremely shallow and predictable and the Doctor's decision to show Rose her father's death was completely out of character. Also the monsters, as in the previous episodes, weren't properly explained. I was cringing at some of the scenes where Rose's Dad watches the car going round and just wanted him to get it over with quickly.
I was in the flat for the next two episodes but chose not to watch them. I find that rather worrying, after enduring Time and the Rani, Timelash and The Happiness Patrol. Maybe my expectations have grown as I've got older. Perhaps I'm just too cyncial about the quality of modern television and need something outstanding to reverse that. Or maybe I've just been unlucky in the stories I have watched. Dalek has received some excellent reviews on here and elsewhere.
Or perhaps I feel that the show is becoming more like a soap-opera, dipping into sentimental areas where it shouldn't go. 45 minutes isn't a long time to tell a good Doctor Who story and none of the classics of the past put the development of the Doctor and his companion ahead of the plot.
Maybe Rusell T Davies has got too involved, and that isn't a criticism. I think he's a fantastic writer and bringing the show back is a major achievement for which we should all be grateful especially in view of the audience figures. I'm just worried that there isn't the variety in this series, that individuals are standing out ahead of individual episodes because a close-knit team of writers are working within those parameters.
As far as I know I'm in next Saturday and might give episode 11 a chance. A last chance? I hope not.
Adric... Why Can't We Hear You? by Peter Niemeyer 22/9/05
I have to start this off by admitting that I liked Adric. I agree with much of the criticism leveled at the character... he was often an unpleasant snot towards Tegan, Nyssa, and the Doctor, and he often made some stupid decisions. But I think the original character (as seen during his time with Tom Baker) had great potential, and he suffered more from TARDIS crowding and an odd character alignment than he did from actually being an inherently flawed character. But, I am here to neither praise or bury him.
I'm here to ask the question "Where is Adric in the Big Finish audios"? Big Finish recently announced that Janet Fielding would be reprising the role of Tegan in an audio adventure in 2006. This means that, with the exception of Harry Sullivan and Kamelion (played respectively by the late Ian Marter and late Gerald Flood), we will now have had every television companion from 1974 forward (that's starting with Sarah Jane Smith and ending with Ace) come to Big Finish to reprise his or her role except for Matthew Waterhouse as Adric.
I'll admit that an Adric story is tricky, as Adric traveled either with the Fourth Doctor and/or Tegan, and both Tom Baker and Janet Fielding have resisted doing audio adventures in the past. But Big Finish has gotten around these sorts of issues in the past. Omega, Excelis Dawns, and the Fifth Doctor portion of The Sirens of Time all take place during Tegan's tenure on the TARDIS. I don't see the unavailability of fellow actors as a show-stopping impediment.
Some might ask the question "Why bother?" After all, Adric is an almost universally reviled companion. But then, the same was once said for Bonnie Langford's Mel, and Big Finish elevated her character to unexpected heights. I find it hard to believe that the same couldn't be done for Adric.
The Big Finish website makes no mention of Matthew Waterhouse or Adric. So who knows? Maybe Matthew Waterhouse has also declined the invitation to do audios. But I do find it one piece of 80s Doctor Who that hasn't been explored, and as one of the few fans of Adric, I would like to see him have his day in the sun.