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Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #51 – Original Sin by Andy Lane

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#39
Original Sin
By Andy Lane

Well that was a stone cold belter, wasn’t it?
Forgive the haste.  Sometimes I like to build up to that – since it’s a rare-ish occurrence, maybe it’s worth a bit of ceremony – but it can be such a relief to sit back and enjoy reading that I just want to get on with it.  So: yep.  Original Sin is One Of The Good Ones.  Thanks for reading!
Perhaps it’s not surprising, as Andy Lane is hardly new to all this.  There’s a confident spring in his step that no doubt comes with experience.  Yes, there’s a Prologue – it’s the law! – but you can forget any wiffly metaphysical guff.  Lane begins breathlessly with the tail-end of another adventure, one that leads directly into Original Sin.  I love stories that forgo the obvious “Arrive, ask questions, investigate” rigmarole, and this is a great way to circumvent it.
The prologue also displays some of the book’s overall strengths, things it generally shares with Lucifer Rising(co-written by Lane): world building and plot, working together.  Writers often get bogged down in one or the other, and both create their own challenges all by themselves.  The Menagerie came up with an interesting setting filled with lots of different life forms, but it couldn’t quite carve them out from each other or make them live.  Original Sin introduces us right away to the Hith, a lizard-like species with unusually poetic names like Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone, a permanent reminder to other species of what happened to them.  This one has been shot, and whispers (Hitchcock-style) a gloomy pronouncement to Bernice about the fate of Earth.  Right away we’ve got an unusual species (whom we’ll see a lot more of) and something pressing to attend to on Earth.  Both these things get progressively more interesting.
The Earth Empire is prospering, but that really depends what species you are.  Lane takes a pessimistic (though perhaps not Transit pessimistic) view of our future, where humans have “offered assistance” to countless planets including Hithis, so in other words taken over, turfed them out and stolen their technology.  A current of xenophobia runs through humanity, even among the “nice” ones, as they regard displaced aliens (e.g. the Hith) as lowly or disgusting.  A Hith named Powerless Friendless allows us to explore this idea further, particularly as he lives in the Undertown.  Earth is divided into the prosperous and everyone else, which in itself isn’t a very original concept, but it mixes with Lane’s climate of speciesism to make something new.  The humans, ever self-loathing, have taken to “body beppling”: a means of transforming into anything they can think of, which is all the cosmetic rage.  This adds yet another dimension to the strange, sad cloud of conflict that surrounds this story, all of which explodes because of the plot, which involves a series of random and unprovoked murders that snowball into riots.  There it is again: a rich seam of world-building which you could almost take for granted, since it’s colourful and interesting, only the plot then finds a use for all of it.
Admittedly it’s a simple-ish plot, but there’s nothing wrong with that so long as it’s well executed.  A good murder mystery can be as satisfyingly simple or complicated as you make it, and the trail of death is not just unpleasantly memorable (as Lane must find new ways for people to dispose of each other) but also poignant, as the deaths have consequences, both personal and on a larger scale.  We do not, admittedly, see the full effect of the Earth Empire tearing itself to pieces – though there are newscasts that give a flavour of it at the start of each chapter – but this is ultimately one story that impacts on those wider issues, and it makes sense to keep our focus there.  Focus is another of those things that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Speaking of personal consequences, then: Powerless Friendless is as cheery as his name suggests, but we have no difficulty in getting inside his slug-like skin, or feeling the scorn of almost everyone around him.  Perhaps more familiar to passing readers are a couple of law-enforcing Adjudicators named Chris and Roz (or in the latter case, Forrester) who are not only investigating the murders, but growing more aware of deception in their peers.  Forrester (I don’t really feel right calling her Roz – mind you, I’m still sticking with “Bernice” over “Benny”, as I don’t like the automatic masculinisation of companion names) is fighting her own personal battles as she copes with a new partner, having lost her previous one and mentor in unhappy circumstances.  Again, this is not brand new territory – you can see Lane’s keenness for pop culture in his references, which go beyond Doctor Who into adamantium and planets named Riggs and Murtaugh! – but it’s executed cleverly, drip-feeding us information over the course of the book.  Forrester runs the risk of being a tough, no-nonsense cliché, but there’s enough self-loathing (to do with her privileged upbringing) and begrudging humour to make her more.  Her long-suffering dialogue with the enthusiastic and adorable Chris is worth the price of admission.  “Hey!” said Cwej suddenly.  Bernice turned back to face him and Forrester.  “I've got an idea!”  “Treat it gently,” Forrester murmured, “it's in a strange place.”  She’ll fit right in with Bernice.  I’ll wait and see with Chris: he’s sweet and funny, but he’s got “write as a moron” written all over him.  The joke about his surname, which looks like Cwej but should be pronounced Shvey but he sticks with Cwej because it’s easier for everyone, takes so long to explain that it isn’t particularly funny.
Surprisingly, for a story gagging to show off world-shaking ideas and grisly murders, it’s also got character development for the regulars.  Bernice, mostly in terms of sympathy.  There are some clever reflections on her life with the Doctor, and how she constantly wants to A) get back in the TARDIS and B) get out of the damn thing, which make us aware that for a box that’s bigger on the inside, it’s still a box.  In the main though, she’s mostly there to field the plight of Homeless Forsaken (whose death starts it all) and Powerless Friendless, to whom she obviously feels an obligation.  There’s still plenty of delightful Bernice stuff, and her scenes with the Doctor (until, inevitably, they take separate paths) only make me more confident that these two belong together, and any writer not revelling in that is on the wrong bus.
Much more thoughtful, and perhaps more disturbing, is what this says about the Doctor.  You might not expect another book to delve into his thoughts straight after Human Nature, which was surely the definitive book on the subject.  But Original Sin shows there’s still plenty to needle at.  The Doctor, for all his whimsy and heroism, is quick to scoop out the brain of a dead man to examine the cause of his insanity.  In his fearful moments, which the plot provides in abundance and without cheating, he thinks darkly of the Valeyard and when he’s close to death, his eighth incarnation “waiting to take over”.  It’s his conversations with a psychopath, Professor Pryce, that provide the most sobering look: Pryce believes there is no truly solid argument against murder other than we do not want to be murdered, and realising that people can easily condemn and rationalise murder in the same breath, the Doctor sees sense in that.  He must prevent it simply because it’s what he believes is right.  He applies the same logic to time travel nearer the end, when another villain holds a mirror up to him; he is Time’s Champion for no particular reason, it’s just his lot.  It can be cool to mythologise the Doctor, but it’s refreshing to peel it back and show a guy just doing what he can, and must.
If you don’t know who the villain is lurking in Original Sin, well done; I wasn’t able to avoid it.  Fortunately, knowing does not take much away from the book, although it’s surely more fun not to know.  There is simply reams of other stuff to enjoy, and plenty of story to follow, leaving the late reveal of [redacted] more a treat than a vital ingredient.  The handling of said character (oh, all right, it’s wee Jimmy Krankie) is relished and doesn’t trample on the previous stuff, although a good deal of retcon is involved, turning them into a shadowy menace behind numerous other stories as well.  If you are a fan of their earlier appearance(s), I doubt you’ll be disappointed.  If you do know it’s them, be aware it’s not the all-singing, all-dancing Wee Jimmy Krankie Show as the reveal is a last-act thing.
On top of all the other spectacular (and yet focused, plot-driven) stuff going on, this is of course an introduction for new companions.  The Doctor pats the TARDIS and says it’ll be just like old times.  I have no idea how this will affect the dynamic, but they’re interesting and fun, and it doesn’t appear they’ll get in Bernice’s way, so I’m all for it.  Original Sin doesn’t read like a typical introductory story, with the twosome barely meeting the Doctor throughout, but there’s a lot to be said for doing things differently.  Whether or not they were always intended to depart in the TARDIS, they arrive in a rich story you’re likely to read compulsively.  It’s not as dazzlingly unusual as something like Human Nature, but what it does, it does in relentless style.
8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #50 – The Menagerie by Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#10
The Menagerie
By Martin Day

Ah, sweet completeness.  Better late than never, the Missing Adventures have added the Second Doctor to their ranks.  If I can be a box-ticking, list-making nerdlinger for a moment (quiet, you), it’s nice to have got a book in for every Doctor just as this marathon reaches its halfway point.  That’s everyone now.  Ahhh.

Martin Day’s first novel (yes, it’s obvious) does a good job with this Doctor, which isn’t something to take for granted.  He often takes the time to inject a bit of fussiness or irreverence, both integral to Patrick Troughton’s take on the character.  At one point he is contrasted (perhaps too literally) against the First Doctor, as he lacks that immediate sense of authority, though he generally makes up for it later.  There’s a scruffy anti-establishment quality to him that’s just delightful; my favourite bit was the Doctor’s theory on convincing people that you have already paid for your drinks.  When he tries putting this into practice to convince a guard he has paid his fine (with perhaps what he imagines is the authoritative clout of a Jedi mind trick), it goes belly up instantly.  Few Doctors fail quite so charmingly as this one.
Day is also adept and thoughtful when writing Jamie.  Finding himself in a technologically primitive age, Jamie feels in his element for once.  The unnamed city is “like real life” to him, with dull-witted guards reminding him of Redcoats; conversely his wealth of experience with the Doctor allows him to think a few steps ahead.  Another perfectly apt moment is when Jamie accompanies Zoe in a hover vehicle, nodding and agreeing matter-of-factly as she explains things he can’t possibly grasp, and delighting in the responsibility of pressing a button.  That refusal to be outwitted by different technologies, even when he’s just pretending not to be, is one of the reasons the character is so popular.  Doctor Who often (unwittingly?) takes the stance that people from the past are intrinsically thicker than us; it’s something Rose is rightly derided for in The Unquiet Dead, but that’s generally the way it goes, with Jamie being a smart, inquisitive exception.  Leela is another.  (There are no Missing Adventures with Leela.  For shame!)
Zoe is the least impressive of the three, perhaps because putting her in a primitive context doesn’t create the opportunities for her that it does for Jamie.  There are just fewer ways for her to put her brain into action, although she is able to trick a dangerous alien and save a few lives.  Once the story stumbles onto some higher technology, then it’s effectively Zoe Time; her photographic memory makes a return appearance.  Overall this is the colder, more analytical side of Zoe, with her more ebullient side (perhaps best evidenced when she talks a computer to death in The Invasion) a no-show.  You would think The Menageriecould provide some emotional stuff for her, as she finds herself being sold into slavery, but she remains utterly pragmatic about it and circumstances get her out of it anyway.  Besides which, this isn’t a very emotional book.
It’s not a new thing to use sci-fi as an excuse to write a fantasy novel, and that’s effectively what The Mengerie does.  Martin Day creates an interesting setting at least, swirling his primitive (nameless) town in fog and drizzle, adding a few dashes of technology (aka a power plant) and something dangerous underneath (the menagerie of the title); I didn’t have trouble picturing it, but the underlying conflict of technology vs fear of progress never amounts to more than some people wailing doomfully about the evils of science, over and over.  You can be sure they’ll shut up or get over it by the book’s end.  Besides which, finding high technology in an otherwise primitive society is not going to win points for originality.  It’d be a turn up for the books if there wasn’t any.
The story gets off to a perfunctory start, splitting the TARDIS trio up more or less at random when a pub is raided by the “Knights of Kuabris”, technology-fearing rulers of the place.  The Doctor and Jamie both fall into an investigation of the menagerie beneath the town, but there isn’t much driving them to it besides circumstance and vague curiosity.  As for Zoe’s aforementioned slavery, dumb luck strikes again.  She ends up working in a travelling freak show (and not, praise be, as a prostitute) before an attack by a ravening monster forces the survivors back where they started, including her.  There are a few examples of business occurring just to make it all last a bit longer, like a dangerous encounter for Jamie followed by some memory loss.  Why does he forget?  So he can remember it later on, I guess.  The story rumbles on, with some action set-pieces especially near the end, but there’s little wind in its sails.
The book’s greatest strength is the regular characters, and by a considerable distance.  Nowhere else is the studied nuance of the Doctor spending a few moments fumbling through his pockets before finding something useful, or Jamie nodding thoughtfully at some technobabble.  The rest of the cast don’t have an idiosyncrasy between them.  Defrabax is an old wizard with secrets; Cosmae is his impressionable ward; Kaquaan is Cosmae’s would-be girlfriend, and local prostitute; Zaitabor is the leader of the Knights, a ranting fanatic at the centre of the trouble; Himesor, Araboam and Oiquaquil are other Knights; Diseaeda runs a travelling freakshow (and owns Zoe briefly); Reisaz and Raitak are conjoined twins that work there; there’s also a golem-esque homunculus and various Web Planet-esque races living beneath the town, all with equally weird names.  Reading tedious and difficult lines like “I want you to warn the Dugraqs and the Rocarbies about the Mecrim”, I wondered if Day comes up with names by attacking his keyboard at random.  Repeating the names all the time does nothing to breed familiarity, or add colour.  Everyone just seems very fond of reciting them.
As is often the case with first novels, there’s little authorial voice here.  Day’s denizens sound like generic fantasy archetypes, with some unnecessary attention given to the prostitute side of things (with one of the guards giving Kaquaan’s breasts a thorough groping, and numerous others calling her “slut” and suchlike).  It adds determination to the headstrong young woman, but combined with some occasionally broad language, I wondered how much the Virgin editors were bothered that kids read these books.  Certainly this stuff wouldn’t find its way into 1960s Doctor Who.  When the time comes to let his monsters have at one another, Day then falls into the habit of turning the gore up to 11, simply because he can: limbs and viscera fly, yet again pushing the Missing Adventure remit awkwardly to one side.  It’s not as if I want books that are identical to the TV stories, or I wouldn’t bother reading them; I’ve got videos and DVDs for that.  But it stretches disbelief that all the sex and swearwords just happened to occur between episodes.  And why beat around the bush: hitting the Sex And Violence button at all where it wouldn’t ordinarily be hit is schlocky.  At least Dancing The Code made a point of it.
The Menagerie is mostly just indifferent and dull, failing to make its various alien/monster races worth the effort of distinguishing them.  Some have quirks, like one bunch that doesn’t use individual names, or another with an odd speech pattern, but it’s work to add this stuff up.  The plot progresses mostly with a lot of thankless question/answer “dialogue” no matter who’s talking.  It more or less holds together, but by the end it runs the risk of ruining one of the good things about the book: the Doctor’s plan involves murdering a (dangerous) species wholesale, just as Zoe earlier rescued some people by (inadvertently?) sacrificing a harmless animal.  A more seasoned writer might comment on this seemingly befuddled Doctor apparently having a cold heart, but this is all just random action stapled to otherwise pleasant characters.

The Menagerie is fan writing.  Yes, these books all are to an extent, but there’s a difference between recreating familiar things and creating new people, worlds and stories for them, and this book clearly doesn’t have the skill for both.
5/10

NB:  Another blog-week bites the dust.  See you again for 51-55, beginning with Andy Lane’s Original Sin...

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #49 – Human Nature by Paul Cornell

Doctor Who: The New Adventures#38Human NatureBy Paul Cornell
I know it’s obvious, but my favourite thing about the Seasons Cycle – Paul Cornell’s four loosely themed Doctor Who books – is the way they end, each with more or less the same sentence.  Yes, as sentences go it’s sugary sweet, but I’m a sucker for an ending that makes me smile.  I still revisit the final page of Revelation because, well, look at it:
“‘I don’t know if I can reach the vicarage, I’m so tired…’   ‘Then sleep here,’ Saul murmured.  ‘I will keep you warm.’   Trelaw curled up in a pew, pulled over a prayer mat for a pillow, and closed his eyes.   ‘Goodnight, Saul.’   ‘Goodnight.  All is quiet.  Sleep with pleasant dreams…’   And, smiling, the reverend did so.   Long ago in an English winter.”
The seasons theme was a clever and low-key way of putting these trademarked characters in different lights, testing who they are and what they want.  It worked brilliantly two out of three times; even Cornell didn’t seem sure what he was going for in No Future.  (I’d guess an anniversary piss-up.)  Well, nuts to that.  Human Nature shears away No Future’s clumsy fan-bait and tries to do something meaningful again, and along with Revelation and Love And War it’s utterly accessible as well.  The whole novel seems to occupy the same reassuring, Christmassy space as its familiar final sentence.  No wonder people loved it.
A plot summary might be redundant, since it’s such a popular book that it warranted an equally popular New Who episode.  (To date the only Doctor Who novel to make the leap, which seems incredible.)  Ah well, since we’re here: the Doctor takes a very unusual holiday in 1914, from himself as much as from the universe, and becomes a human called John Smith.  He’s a school teacher, and a very different man who remembers another (fictional) life.  Bernice watches over him, quietly appreciating the rest after recent ordeals; the Doctor’s mind and essence are in a Pod, waiting.  The aliens who made this possible turn up, as they had ulterior motives all along.  They find the Doctor becoming a little too fond of human life.
It’s often the way of New Adventures that the Doctor and co. need to recover from some awful ordeal.  (Which tells you what sort of books we’re dealing with!)  This time, much of the focus is on Bernice losing Guy de Carnac, perhaps to his death.  Sanctuary wasn’t a novel I loved but the ending worked, as did the Doctor and Bernice’s weary yet civilised reaction to it.  (He could take her back to find out if Guy made it, but then she’d know, wouldn’t she?)  This is all good fodder for Cornell, and not for the first time: if you recall, Love And War followed a similar event with Ace being torn away from her new flame, only to put her through it all again with Jan.  Yes, stacking these two next to each other created two reasons for Ace to leave, but to virtually replicate that ending straight away was unfortunate, as it made Nightshade look like a dry run.  No such awkwardness here: Bernice sincerely needs the rest and Cornell lets her have it, even when aliens are rampaging and other things remind her of what she’s lost.  Bernice often pulls the narrative into diary entries, remembering Guy, but she is always moving forward, always her irreverent self until a poignant moment when she screams that no one else will die.  I love inter-novel continuity done right.  When the Doctor (such as he is) needs to remember an unpleasant event, Cornell has plenty of other authors’ work to draw from.  (So it’s hello again, Warlock.)  In the end, he is more comfortable with who he is.
It’s here we find one of the big divergences between the book and the adaptation.  (And okay, a word on the TV adaptation – which for simplicity’s sake I’ll call The Family Of Blood, and which I reviewed here.  I wish I didn’t need to compare the two, as it’s unfair on the book.  The book was first, the book is how it goes.  But I can’t help coming to this the wrong way round, and I won’t be the only one what with the recent History Collection reprint.  The TV episode was on my mind as I read the book.  I think it’s interesting to note what was kept in and what was changed so, as discreetly as possible, I will observe the differences.)  In The Family Of Blood, the plot is serendipitous: the Doctor encounters some aliens and desperately needs to hide from them, so he uses (as a last resort) the Chameleon Arch to become human.  This says something about his effect on other people – touching their lives, unable to be close to them, leaving destruction in his wake – and the New Who Doctor’s tendency to be a force of nature.
In Human Nature, the Doctor is much more deliberate.  He wantsto be human for a while.  The aliens in question (the Aubertides) are selling that technology and, in something of a lapse of judgement, the Doctor takes them up on it, but he’d go through with this whether or not they turned out to be bad guys.  (I wonder if the first version of the story, which apparently needed Kate Orman to kick it, left out the bad guys.)  After so many dark times, it’s a way to step aside from himself and see what really makes him the Doctor.  Is he a dark, manipulating force – a bully – or a good guy?  He will remember it all afterwards, because “‘What would be the point otherwise?’”  Much is revealed by Smith and how he acts, most of it good.  But then, befitting the New Adventures Doctor, this is still a form of game-playing, with John Smith as the chess piece.  He may be a part of the Doctor but he’s still being used; despite his very private tears in the TARDIS at the end, or possibly even evidenced by them, it’s worth wondering how much the Doctor has really learned from all this.
Smith himself is very different in the two versions.  In The Family Of Blood he’s a prim, sort-of-nice gentleman who’s more than happy to uphold all school traditions, such as flogging.  He resents the idea that he is the Doctor and his moment of heroism – becoming the Time Lord again – is entirely coerced by Joan Redfern, off-screen.  In Human Nature he’s so like the Doctor that I had to remind myself it isn’t supposed to be a secret.  He comes out with malapropisms, performs magic tricks, keeps his accent.  He’s an altogether sweet man, and when faced with the school tradition of punishment he circumvents it by offering a soft pink slipper instead of a shoe.  He likes to sneak into other teachers’ lessons and challenge – no, he interferes with their teaching methods.  He challenges the schoolboys’ sense of morality during a heated lecture about Boudicca, and though he at one point feeds ammunition to a boy’s Vickers gun, he is soon utterly horrified by it and seeks a more Doctorly way out.  He accepts that the Doctor is real when he’s heard enough, and wants to learn from him.  Then he chooses his fate, whether or not the Doctor really decided it for him, because it will save Joan’s life.  The Doctor and Smith both love deeply but in different ways.  Smith will save Joan, the Doctor would only worry about the world.
Smith is an intriguing spin on the Doctor, essentially the same man but always missing something.  Sometimes literally, like his “perplexed search for a non-existent hat”, or the bit where he “glared at a pair of juggling balls he’d pulled from the case, threw them up in the air, tangled his arms and missed catching them.”  At one point he sees a dangerous event unfold, squirms and says “‘I feel like I should do something.’”  Control and the will to act are missing ingredients; he loves Joan, so he’d rather spend time with her than fight the alien menace.  That’s another thing changed in The Family Of Blood, where 90 minutes is all you’re getting, so the romance is more or less curtailed by the aliens’ arrival, and the tragedy is that it never really got off the ground.  The novel has no such constraint, so it lets them get on with it, lets him have his own priorities for a while, even lets them get engaged.  On a fundamental level, this carves out a bigger difference between Smith and Doctor.
Of course I can’t blame The Family Of Blood for hurrying things up, or even for making John Smith such a comparatively weaselly proposition: I consider the Tenth Doctor the most human Time Lord even without his magic fob watch, and (TV) Smith’s utter refusal to believe in the Doctor, and his fear of disappearing, fit the then-Doctor’s zest for life.  Just look at Tennant’s finale; that was in him all along.  In book form, this whole thing began as a rest for the Doctor – Smith – and he means to enjoy it.  The character has more shades, the romance has more time.
That’s one area where the book trounces the adaptation: Joan.  We know this isn’t going to work out for the same reason the Doctor isn’t going to drop dead of a heart attack or get a permanent job in a shop somewhere, but Joan is an altogether brighter person on the page.  On TV, not so much: she’s prim and austere, she needs more thawing than we’ve time for, and the presence of Martha puts up a wall of contemporary racism which makes it a bit too easy to want this to fail.  In print, an off-colour joke leads Bernice to call her a “wrinkly racist,” and of course she dislikes her on principle because she doesn’t want her designated driver to strand her in 1914, but in time Bernice accepts that the two might be happy together, and she’s right.  Joan is ebullient, passionate and giddy to have found John, and they’re very sweet together.  It’s all the more harrowing not just that this cannot ever work, but that the Doctor – post-Smith – would simply bugger off in the TARDIS without telling her Smith was no more.  Again I wondered if he had learned so very much.  Bernice rightly puts her foot down and makes him tell her.  His matter-of-factness, somewhat patronising, does make you momentarily miss Smith.  Alas, all that’s just something he can’t have, or you wouldn’t have Doctor Who.
Despite the above, Human Nature isn’t a gloomy treatise on what the Doctor is.  All that stuff is sprinkled into the (rather concise) story with wit.  Despite the oncoming misery of war, which a few characters become sadly aware of and which adds to the theme of joining a fight when you’re needed (but y’know, it’s okay to conscientiously object), it’s actually a light and enjoyable read.  Everyone seems to be as witty as Bernice Summerfield – and that’s a dangerous line, which has blurred some Terry Pratchett novels for me so that everyone in them is such a comedian they might as well be one wizard talking to himself.  Human Nature keeps a note of sadness and horror befitting Doctor Whoeven when it’s fun.  The Aubertides can be cutting and witty, but they still commit horrible murders, and acts that seem normal to them but are outwardly revolting.  Conversely, even when war hangs over them all and we learn specific awful things about their future, it turns out nothing is completely pre-ordained for these characters and there’s always a bit of hope.  This is definitely one of the things I love about Cornell’s better books: they push Doctor Who to dramatic and unhappy places, but they never settle for that or wallow in it.  Like Bernice, they move forward.
And oh, Bernice.  Now, hand on my heart, I do think she’s a little too unflappable in this, although that “No one else dies!” moment does redress it a bit, as does her gradual weakening to the idea of Smith and Joan.  I’m still waiting for the effervescent front to fall away completely just once, but this will do for now.  She’s wonderful, heroic, acid-witty, and if you’re worried that the setup keeps her and the Doctor apart, forget it: she’s Smith’s “niece” and they meet for lunch every day.  I don’t think they’ve ever spent this much time together, and he’s not even him!  So obviously I love this.  From the Doctor’s consideration at the end of Sanctuary, to his utter reliance on her here, we seem to be building proper bridges between them at last.  (Let’s face it, if you can’t count on her creator for that, who can you count on?)
The rest of the cast are pleasantly colourful: bullyish headmaster Rocastle becomes a hero, lunk-headed school captain Hutchinson doesn’t, a polyamorous teacher named Alexander begins as a bit of a wag and ends up having some of the most emotional scenes in the book, and Tim, the-boy-who-steals-the-Doctor’s-brain, gets to live out some Doctorly traits as he discovers his own personality.  This makes more sense than it did on TV, where Thomas Sangster nicked the fob watch because “the time wasn’t right”, except there was no real reason for it and people just kept dying until he returned it.  Here the Doctor intends to experience his holiday, so he can wait.  Tim’s journey, “regenerating” after a cruel prank kills him and also becoming precognitive, leads him to realise he’s like the Doctor in a different way; when the war comes, he joins the Red Cross.  It’s another interesting spin on who the Doctor is.
One area that I do feel The Family Of Blood improved on, or at least came up with another interesting spin on, is the Aubertides.  A family of shape-changers from an otherwise peaceful species, they have dreams of conquest which a Time Lord system will grant them.  And this is perfectly fine for what it is, but on television – where the march of minutes meant they had to trim away everything non-essential – they’re a lot simpler.  There’s only four of them (to the novel’s six), and they mirror a family unit with more creepy exactness.  They also have no specific plan to rule the universe, just a desire to live.  Even in the novel it’s said that they do not live long, but it’s not the sole basis for what they do.  There’s something very beautiful about making that their mission.  They want the Doctor because he lives so long and they don’t, and John Smith – the let’s face it, wimpy version – in a roundabout way wants the same thing.  It’s a wonderfully succinct bit of theme, and it adds a sadness to an otherwise horrifying bunch of bad guys.  But hey, The Family Of Blood also has that dappy bit about the Doctor being like fire, ice, lollipops and jam sandwiches, so y’know, swings and roundabouts.
The books haven’t done anything very interesting for a while now, and things have been getting grim.  It’s a relief to take stock, just as the Doctor does, with a relatively bite-sized plot (with fannish touches like a heat-shield!) and a story that says something.  Once again we’re at a turning point, excitedly looking ahead.  Certainly I am; this is the most (relatively) famous book for a while now, and I’m looking forward to lifting the weight of expectation next time.  I’m still not certain how I rate Human Nature because my head’s buzzing with another version of it and with its own reputation, but it’s obviously something special, and it deserves to be so thought about afterwards.
9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #48 – Dancing The Code by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#9
Dancing The Code
By Paul Leonard

Oh cool, Paul Leonard’s back.  His first Missing Adventure gave us a fully rounded alien civilisation; it was about the end of their world and, rather poetically, about death in general.  Venusian Lullaby wasn’t perfect, but it made a hell of an impression.  I’d be lying if I said I had any idea what to expect from him next.

I definitely wouldn’t have guessed “Pertwee-era action movie”, not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Then again, the author has said (over on Terminus Reviews) that he isn’t really a Doctor Who fan, but that he did watch the Pertwee years.  I can well believe it.  (At least the bit about Pertwee.  Writing more than one Doctor Who ought to make you a fan by default.)  Dancing The Code is authentic, even to the point of nostalgia for that particular era.
By now, the Doctor had got his TARDIS working and was losing interest in threats to home and hearth.  UNIT were old and increasingly distant friends, showing little of the militaristic grit we saw in Season Seven; the Brigadier in particular seemed permanently bemused, sadly living up to the Doctor’s complaints about his intelligence.  Jo had been to outer space several months in a row, so naturally she was about to leave the show forever.
There’s an opportunity for growth here, and Leonard doesn’t miss it.  Rather like Venusian Lullaby, which looked at the emotional void left by Susan and how it affected her friends and grandfather, Dancing The Code adds substance to Jo’s impending departure.  It also gives the “UNIT family” a last hoorah, ditching that cuddly befuddlement and making them, or at least their job, considerably more dangerous.  The Brigadier at one point observes that he knows the number for the morgue off by heart.
Kebiria is a (made-up) nation torn apart by civil war, and if that’s not bad enough there are aliens in their midst.  A British journalist sees a horrific, bloated copy of a UNIT soldier as it dies, and summons Mike Yates and co. to investigate.  The aliens fit the legend of Al Harwaz, mysterious beings who will give you what you ask for, which obviously turns out doomier than expected.  Meanwhile, the Doctor has mocked up a prognosticating device that shows (with complete accuracy) the Brigadier shooting him and Jo dead.  He sees only one way out of this: stay the heck away from Jo and the Brigadier.  He zips off in the TARDIS until he’s needed, and Jo goes to Kebiria.
She’s immediately arrested for no particular reason.  No problem for Jo, whose escapology skills exist for just such an occasion.  Her enthusiasm for tricking her captors and bopping them over the head looks positively insane to Catriona, her fellow captive (the journalist), but moments later when things have escalated and people are dead, those antics look unbelievable and childlike.  Companions rarely see such a brutal shift in their perspective; it’s almost cruel.
Not for the first time, we have a Doctor Who book that uses violence in ways you’d never see on television.  Here, though, that escalation is part of the story.  Jo is well used to marauding aliens, blobby things with tentacles and ray guns.  She’s seen people die, but there was always something unreal about it.  (Well, it’s Doctor Who!)  In Dancing The Code Jo sees people murdering people, the horrible consequences of war, and she begins to feel that she could do more to help.  That by no means is a clear transition to The Green Death, where an interest in the environment and a romantic development will push her away for good, but it adds to that process.  It’s a relief to provide an actual reason for gratuitous violence in a family show, besides the obvious lack of a watershed and novel-writing fandom’s itchy trigger finger.
And the violence isn’t celebrated – there’s a theme of guilt about it.  Jo witnesses violence and horror, she feels complicit, even ignorant for having to be woken up like this.  By the end of the book, when it’s possible she might be an alien copy, she’s quick to suggest Mike Yates should put her out of her misery.  Catriona is the one who shoots a guard (or guards?) dead, and things only get worse for her until – trapped in the alien ship and mutated almost beyond recognition – she decides it is “time to pay”, and gives her life to save Jo.  Benari, Prime Minister of Kebiria, has committed atrocities not limited to the deaths of children, and used the aliens for his own ends, so he suffers a pretty brutal execution.  His executioner, Vincent, enjoys it a little too much, so he dies too later on.  Meanwhile the Brigadier is haunted by the idea that he will kill his friends; in some wonderful character writing, Leonard has him lock his gun away and bin the key, hoping it will at least delay him long enough to come to his senses.  (Of course the Brigadier is innocent, so no comeuppance is needed.)
As for the aliens, the improbably-named Xarax, they’re surprisingly innocent.  More like “tools” than living things, they can imitate anything and follow instructions, only they can’t work out pernickety things like which humans they should kill and which they shouldn’t.  Humans, this book seems to say, are the real problem here.
Where is the Doctor in all this?  Well, even apart from his mysterious TARDIS jaunt (which could be a novel in itself), he’s a little on the side-lines.  He’s still very Pertwee in this, with a love of gadgets, technobabble and vehicles; the Brigadier has to endure the passenger seat not just on the road with him, but in a loop-de-looping jet-plane!  The Doctor argues for a non-military solution to the Xarax, and naturally fails because humans are the worst.  He’s integral to the plot, stumbling on the solution in the closing chapters (as always), and yet he doesn’t seem to be in it very much.  This serendipitously fits with what Jo is going through.  (In The Green Death her interests are already diverging from the Doctor’s, as if they’ve been spending time apart.)  It’s a well-written Doctor, though I’m not 100% sure about his plan to avoid his and Jo’s deaths by simply avoiding the future.  Part of me thinks he’d be morally and intellectually outraged by that; another part thinks “get away in the TARDIS” is about as Pertwee as it gets.
Despite all the above, Dancing The Code isn’t exactly a character study.  The focus is on action, especially towards the end as Kebiria is torn apart by Xarax and doubles of Jo and the Doctor kill almost comical numbers of UNIT soldiers at home.  It’s hardly a chore to read, with Leonard commanding a decent pace and keeping the chapters nice and short.  (I know I complain about short sections, but that’s different.  These chapter breaks give a lovely sense of progress, rather than a frequent disorientating change of scenery.)  A lot of the novel rests on the Xarax, however, and in a surprising twist Leonard doesn’t develop them in great detail.
Apart from their general insectoid nuttiness, they’re more like the Sou(ou)shi than the Venusians, i.e. a strangely blank force that feeds on your worst impulses.  Also like the Sou(ou)shi, they’re hard to picture*, interchangeable and just a bit dull.  (*Yes, there’s a “helicopter” one on the front cover, looking so much like a giant scorpion and with such nearly-invisible propellers that I kept wondering why people kept mistaking them for helicopters.  But they’re not wholly representative, if I understood correctly; the rest seem mostly to be blobby, and have lots of mandibles?)  They also raised a couple of questions which I didn’t spot the answers to: I never got how they are able to copy people they’ve never met (such as the long-suffering Sergeant Osgood); I never figured out what “dancing the code” was actually in aid of; and I wasn’t sure what happened to Jo at the end.  One minute she seemed pretty sure she was a copy of herself, bleeding what appears to be Xarax material and not human blood, but presumably she isn’t?  Apart from the nitpicks (which I’m sure are just me missing a bit – do let me know!), there is something a little too familiar and Pertwee era-ish about alien copies taking over; once it’s apparent that’s where the plot is going, my enthusiasm sunk a bit.
The writing is reassuringly thoughtful, though it becomes mostly a catalogue of action as it goes along.  There’s a neat use of inner monologues, bursting into the prose Stephen-King-style at first just for Catriona, and eventually for others including Jo.  It ends on a bravely incomplete yet satisfying note, with the Doctor suggesting they leave the Kebirians to sort out their own mess, and Jo saying “We’ve got to do something.”  Jo is growing up; not coincidentally, this puts a fork in the road between her and the Doctor.
Reading this back, I’ve talked myself around a bit.  I didn’t really love Dancing The Code as I read it; there was much to enjoy about it, but the plot isn’t deep or original.  It’s mostly there to prop up some interesting themes, and the end result looks at the Pertwee era in ways both typical and strangely offbeat.  It’s honestly a struggle to remember some of the story beats now it’s over, but despite everything it leaves a meaningful impression.  That’s fast becoming Paul Leonard’s trademark.
7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #47 – Sanctuary by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The New Adventures#37SanctuaryBy David A. McIntee
Happy David A. McIntee History Day, everybody!  As ever we’re celebrating with a novel set in a historical period, reliably groaning with terminology most of us won’t know from Adam.  (Ha ha, you ignoramus!)  This is of course preceded by the customary You Won’t Believe How Much Research I’ve Done foreword, because there’s a terrifying possibility that we won’t notice otherwise.  And the cherry on top: Sanctuary doesn’t contain any zombies, aliens or megalomaniacs from space.  This is 100% historical.  My god, he must have been over the ruddy moon.
Of course the tricky thing about historical stories, apart from potentially losing your sci-fi-addicted audience, is that they may not know this particular bit of history.  And in this case, I don’t.  I’ve seen (more or less) The Crusade, the First Doctor story set about 50 years before this one and in a different country.  But I had no idea about the Roc, or exactly which religions were disagreeing with one another here.  Some of the antagonists in Sanctuary are only religious when it suits them, which adds a satisfying moral greyness but also makes it more confusing to the layman.
Probably the nastiest of them is Guzman, a slithery creature who falls between evangelical monster, congratulating himself on giving his heretical uncle “the correct sort of help” (a.k.a. cleansing flames), and power-hungry despot keen to off his competition, Louis De Citreaux.  Their power games bring the book to an early peak, a grisly yet satisfying attack on some Church troops made to look like the other side did it.  When there’s action in Sanctuary, it is all like that: limbs lopped off, bowels spilling, blood geysers and crunchy splats.  The New Adventures don’t have the same (supposed) constraints as the Missing ones, but even so, bloody hell, he lays it on a bit thick.
Given that it’s a historical story set entirely around a real event (presumably?), the author can’t interject much plot, so the action comes in handy to shake it up.  Guzman and co. are trying to invade the Roc, a sanctuary for supposed heretics with a hidden entrance.  There’s a spy on the inside feeding them info; Guy de Carnac, an ex-crusader with no particular allegiance, falls in with the heretics (after an unsurprisingly violent escape from Guzman), and the Doctor and Bernice soon show up as well, having suffered a random TARDIS malfunction that means they must stay out of the ship for a while.  (Is that necessary?  They’re rarely determined to get back in the ship until the story’s finished anyway, and the TARDIS seemingly malfunctions in every ruddy book.  This particular malfunction is nearly identical to the one in Blood Heat.  It’s probably just an excuse for McIntee to use the “jade pagoda”, a.k.a. the TARDIS’s disappointingly TARDIS-like escape pod from Iceberg.)  Anyway, Bernice winds up with the heretics, the Doctor goes unwittingly undercover with Guzman et al.  They reunite so easily later on, causing much irritation for the Doctor whose investigations weren’t finished yet, that it feels like we’ve just been marking time.  As often happens, I’ve forgotten much of the middle of the book, from de Carnac’s ludicrously slicey-and-dicey escape to the Doctor’s rescue.
If I was ever worried that it was just me, I need only look at the blurb, which (understandably) pushes the limits of accuracy to sell the thing.  Take the Doctor’s brutal line to Bernice: “‘The wench’s mind is addled,’ he said.  ‘Arrest her before she spreads her ungodly heresy.’”  That’s not the oh-my-god twist it appears to be, it’s just him making a scene so she can escape.  As for the Doctor beginning “a murder investigation in a besieged castle”, you must be kidding – the first murder is on page 188, two thirds in!  By then it’s a little late to shift the focus onto an ancient relic people will kill for (which, I presume, also has a real place in history), but what the hell, it’s that or everyone in the Roc just patiently waits for death.
Regarding the historical tragedy at the book’s core, surprisingly little time is spent debating whether it can be averted.  We’ve heard that song and dance before, I suppose; the Doctor’s certainly over it, and it doesn’t seem much on the mind of Bernice.  (Incidentally, if you’re ignorant of a particular bit of history, it’s surprisingly unhelpful to stroll around it with a Time Lord and an archaeologist, who if anything won’t need to explain it to one another!)  A truce is pretty soon called between the two sides, although it seems an open secret that it won’t hold; the heretics are more or less resigned to their fate, almost as if they read to the end, and the other lot just sit and wait.  It’s all strangely civilised, when it isn’t raining limbs, lacking the impending horror of The Massacre or the grand tragedy of The Aztecs.  The characters are numerous, but rather colourless; I often thought about The Crusade, which I know best from its absolutely incredible William Russell-read audiobook, with its rich story and much more memorable rabble.
Probably the most rounded person here is de Carnac, largely because of his romance with Bernice.  McIntee writes a Bernice love story without the book falling down around his ears, and this builds to an evocative and thrilling finale: they can’t be together, we know this, so a wounded Guy spends his last scene chopping de Citreaux’s men to bits to give Bernice time to escape.  The Doctor offers her the chance to check the area later on for any sign he escaped, or otherwise his remains, but she’d rather live on in hope, clinging to the possibility he escaped.  It’s not as affecting as the First Doctor clutching Cameca’s brooch in a last, desperate bid to remember her, and then piloting the TARDIS alone and in silence, but it’s a damn good try.  (Said brooch is in all of McIntee’s books so far, doubtless not a coincidence.)
Of course the trouble with the romance is that it’s with Guy de Carnac, who – high point of the cast or not – is still a fantasy archetype.  McIntee apparently envisaged him as Gabriel Byrne, but a medieval Liam Neeson may have been more appropriate, or Aragorn on steroids, or Lancelot from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail.  He has a troubled past, and inevitably flashbacks, but of dimensions he has few.  Bernice’s keenness to add him to the TARDIS roster left me frowning, not so much at what she was thinking as what McIntee was.  Then again, we’ve lost Ace; things aren’t going to blow themselves up, are they?
Ah yes, Ace.  Do you miss her?  I get the impression McIntee does, referring to her quite often and even giving the Doctor the facetious line, “‘Come back Ace, all is forgiven.’”  I’ve made my feelings pretty clear on this in past reviews – I like Ace, but we’re done there – and anything standing in the way of Doctor-Bernice chumship gets on my nerves.  Sure enough, McIntee writes Bernice with all the snark you’d want, and the Doctor in perhaps a more resigned and grave mood than usual, even contemplating history-stabilising murder on occasion, though still with the odd reassuringly McCoyish moment.  (He makes a man appear dead and gets his cell unlocked so he can escape; later, there’s an amusingly slapstick recreation of a murder scene.)  But they don’t bond much.  The Doctor seems oddly aloof to Bernice’s wit, and though he recognises her heartbreak at the end, and even makes that rather touching offer to stick around and look for de Carnac, his hearts aren’t in it as they would be with you-know-who.  He also says the TARDIS seems “‘a little empty these days’”, which annoys me for obvious reasons.  (It’s not empty.  SHE’S RIGHT THERE.)
In many of the reviews I’ve seen, Sanctuary is spoken of as a character-builder for Bernice.  Certainly we spend time with her, and spend time in general, mercifully dispensing with the hideously frantic pacing of the last few books.  (Mind you, there isn’t much plot to fill the vacuum.  Here, have some historical words I’ve found…)  Although she gets an experience comparable to Ace’s in Nightshade, where she had her ill-fated romance with Robin – so it’s an experience much more convincing than the one in Nightshade, then – it doesn’t tell us a great deal about her that we don’t already know.  McIntee gleefully recalls Bernice’s past, including some vivid flashbacks and surprisingly blatant Dalek mentions.  (I’m never sure what they can get away with!)  It’s difficult to separate the author’s interest in back-story from a distinctly growing Gary Russellness, however.  There are references-a-go-go, with the Doctor and Bernice improbably recalling the last two McIntee books in particular (!), as well as other books (The Crystal Bucephalus), barely related TV stories (The King’s Demons), and even a smattering of very conspicuous Star Trek nods, such as M-class planets and hyposprays.  He’s clearly a writer in love with details and ephemera, or he wouldn’t dare you to go and look up “colon” and “machicolation”, but he’s too keen to sprinkle them everywhere, and often lets his flowery, adjective-obsessed sentences outstay their welcome.  (Though never, thank god, to a Barry Letts extent.)  Even the action is a mixed blessing, as I often lost count of the soldiers gleefully piling into the Guy de Carnac murder blender.
Sanctuary has a fairly straightforward job to do with its they’re-all-doomed history lesson, but I never felt like the points were very clearly made; meanwhile the action helps resuscitate an ultimately thin story.  But it’s often evocative, and it gives its two regulars plenty of natty moments.  Once again David A McIntee shows a lot of flair sometimes, but there’s still that nagging empty sensation that left me picking away at the book for weeks rather than haring through it.  I’d still welcome more pure historicals, though with some degree of laziness I might hope for a period of history I recognise.
6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #46 – Time Of Your Life by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#8
Time Of Your Life
By Steve Lyons

Hooray!  One of the writers I’ve been going on about since I read their first book has returned!  The prodigal Conundrum-er himself, Steve Lyons, who somehow wrote a book within a book that poked holes in the fourth wall and was actually fun to read, is here to rescue me from my the-books-aren’t-all-that-great-at-the-moment doldrums!  Steve, it’s been too long!

Uh, Steve?  Steve, old buddy?  You seem to still be walking past and yep, he left me here.  Time Of Your Life is, heavy sigh, not that great.  And that is, heavier sigh, putting it nicely.

I didn’t make a great many notes reading this one, so let’s just wing it: we find the Sixth Doctor alone on Torrok, a dusty and miserable world in the totalitarian grip of television.  He’s a hermit, deliberately ignoring the subtle orders of his people and refusing to do anything that might lead him to the future he saw in The Trial Of A Timelord, aka his malevolent future self, The Valeyard.  His memories are hazy, but he knows he’ll meet a chirpy computer programmer called Mel, and that’s the first step on that path, so everyone he meets gets the third degree about that.  You’re not called Mel, are you?  (Heck, forget the Valeyard, knowing you’re going to meet Mel is enough to maroon you in a yurt.)  His earnest attempt to avoid his own future is rather affecting, albeit brief, and it’s the kind of unseen extra dimension the Missing Adventures ought to specialise in.  It works especially well when you know what an ignoble end he’s got to look forward to regardless, and there’s a dollop of irony in the fact that this world, with its sinister regime begging to be toppled and its quirkily-named gangs of murderous youths, feels very much like an adventure for his next incarnation.

But adventure has a way of finding him, and soon the Doctor is dodging murderous robots with Angela, a slightly troubled young woman who’s only just seen the world outside her living room.  Giving up the ghost, almost as if he’s tired of the author glaring at him to get on with it, the Doctor takes Angela to investigate the Network, a space station where all the troublesome telly comes from.  He leaves Angela on her own for a bit in an adjacent spaceship, quietly trying to keep her out of the firing line (but spoiler alert, dropping her in it), and then he’s strolling around the Network, bumping into actors and whatnot.

And it’s around here, much less than 100 pages in, that Time Of Your Life pretty much lost me.  Now past the (familiar) promise of an oppressed world the Doctor can turn upside down, we’re off on a series of events, most of them so randomly interconnected they’d make Douglas Adams blush.  You’ve got robots from an obvious Doctor Who stand-in (Timeriders) politely running amok; computers not working in various ways; a stressed actor being replaced by a hologram and promptly murdering his partner’s lover; a loathed TV personality feeling out of his depth; various TV shows, including the virtual-reality-ish Death Hunt 3000, running quite well or disastrously, not that you’d spot the difference; the titular Time Of Your Life show which is probably very important but, in all honesty, I never differentiated from Death Hunt 3000; a kind of bigger-on-the-inside technology that is perhaps some sort of echo of the Miniscope in Carnival Of Monsters, I don’t know, but it’s the thing that’s got the Time Lords riled; various larger-than-life characters, some of which are obvious stand-ins for people Doctor Who fans would recognise instantly; and an enormous number of names yomping around that can only dream of being actual, fully-fledged characters.  Oh, and there’s some sort of intelligent computer programme out to kill everybody (probably should have mentioned that earlier), and killer cyborgs, and a psychic gun.  And somewhere in that lot is the Doctor.  Presumably.

Reading New Adventures and Missing Adventures next to each other, it’s tempting to draw parallels and see patterns (that aren’t there, yes, thank you, inner Paul McGann), such as the handling of alien life in St. Anthony’s Fire followed by the same thing in Venusian Lullaby.  A less flattering parallel occurs here, as Time Of Your Life commits the same really annoying error of judgement as Infinite Requiem: nothing but short sequences, one after another, never building to anything.  I think they’re my new pet hate.  Forget pretentious prologues – at least those are over in a couple of pages.  With this kind of caffeinated stoppy-starty channel-hopping, you’re never able to get a feel for anything.

(NB: During one of my regular book chats with my housemate – where she says things like “Oh please god tell me you’re reading something else” and “Wait, you’ve read how many?!” – she pointed out that this is just how television is sometimes edited.  If you’re feeling very kind, this is pretty much how the show looked in the mid-’80s under Eric Saward, with huge supporting casts dying horribly in quick cuts.  So maybe Time Of Your Life is a very specific, What If Colin And Eric Never Left homage?  Hmm.  I want it to be doing a thing on that level, and yet Infinite Requiem did relentless quick-cutting beforehand, and that wasn’t the first book to do it.  So more likely this is just a misunderstanding about how to write Doctor Who when it isn’t on the telly.  Alas.)

The characters are the main casualties in Lyons’s Attack Of The Paragraph Breaks.  There’s an entire band of Timeriders fans coming and going in this, and every single time they appeared their names were new to me.  Oh, Roderick said something?  Well who’s he when he’s at home?  Not that the “A” characters have a lot more going for them.  Raymond Day is the rather pitiable focus for some of it: a past-it soap actor with the aforementioned spousal difficulties, he spends much of his time fretting about a body under his bed.  He’s full of himself and the body thing is mildly amusing, but so what?  Miriam Walker is a wince-inducingly obvious Mary Whitehouse proxy, dividing her time between trying to get all of television cancelled and hitting people with an umbrella.  Giselle is the Michael-Grade-paraphrasing TV controller, who is ostensibly the “real” controller’s assistant in a wheeze that never really goes anywhere, and she poses some sort of villainy from her control centre.  Anjor is a Death Hunt 3000 champion, so adept at killing people that it only takes seconds, and he has zero interest in his winnings.  And so on.  I could list characters all day and I still wouldn’t know what most of them were for.  There’s Grant Markham, I suppose: a likeably anonymous tech guy who is scooped into a TV show (I think) involving a giant monster fighting a robot (well, it’s something for the front cover), and he ends up wheedling his way into the TARDIS.  He’s very good at computer stuff, and at one point he is literally tasked with making the tea.  He’s definitely more inoffensive than Mel, but the Doctor could just as easily have left him behind.

There is a good-ish idea buried under all the muchness, about a kind of technological life that only wants to grow but ends up taking lives in the process.  Ben Aaronivitch already had a go at this in Transit, a visceral yet flawed book that didn’t care if you could tune into its imagination.  It also, saints be praised, built a bit of tension along the way: the wait for and horrifying execution of that subway disaster is still stuck in my head.  There’s nothing like that in Time Of Your Life, where the violence is as random as it is endless.

Okay, but Steve Lyons is parodying television violence, right?  I mean, it seems obvious – but that’s too obvious for a Doctor whose most popular story is the one satirising video nasties, isn’t it?  Then again, having Mary Whitehouse marching around the set screeching about what is acceptable for young viewers, before unleashing her inner Steven Segal during a melee (?!?) must add… something to set it apart?  I don’t know.  There’s a puncturing air of silliness about all of it, though some of that is possibly just me looking for more of it after Conundrum, but it’s set to such a confused pace that it never lands on anything genuinely funny or meaningful.  It’s rushed and it’s a mess.

The malfunctioning space station is too random and silly to worry you, the stuff about putting the Doctor in Death Hunt 3000 (and Time Of Your Life?) is an obvious idea that occurs surprisingly late, and the actual plot about the “datavore” feels like it’s butting in from another book, but it’s at least rather interesting when the book finally gives it some attention.  Then when all that gets wrapped up we carry on killing people en masse in the epilogue, with some characters pausing (unwisely) to remark that these deaths are even more pointless.  Is this the reason for all those superfluous characters?  Cannon fodder?  It he making a point?  Either way, it’s disappointing and absolutely bloody wearying to just keep offing people when the major threat is over.

I felt much like this reading Infinite Requiem, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s just me.  (Or if I’m still residually annoyed from the last one.)  It’s been a long time (24 books!) since I awarded more than 7/10 to something – go on, guess which book it was – and it’s entirely possible I’m getting harder to impress.  I ought to cut the author some slack since I know I can like his work, and there are lots of interesting things to chew on here: the Doctor’s unease about his future, the artificial life thing, the (ahem) TV satire.  It’s hard to tell if the book’s irritating rhythm is all that’s throwing it off.  Somehow, I doubt it.  We occasionally return to the Doctor’s future fear, for example, with as much pomp and circumstance as bunging it in an advert break.  It’s not a theme, it’s a bit.

It seems foolish to hate Time Of Your Life since there’s a chance I just missed the bit that made it work.  But it was yet another chore to get through, however I or that dang-blasted pace chop it up.  Into innumerable bloody bits, deliberately or otherwise.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Books #46 – Time Of Your Life by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#8
Time Of Your Life
By Steve Lyons

Hooray!  One of the writers I’ve been going on about since I read their first book has returned!  The prodigal Conundrum-er himself, Steve Lyons, who somehow wrote a book within a book that poked holes in the fourth wall and was actually fun to read, is here to rescue me from my the-books-aren’t-all-that-great-at-the-moment doldrums!  Steve, it’s been too long!

Uh, Steve?  Steve, old buddy?  You seem to still be walking past and yep, he left me here.  Time Of Your Life is, heavy sigh, not that great.  And that is, heavier sigh, putting it nicely.

I didn’t make a great many notes reading this one, so let’s just wing it: we find the Sixth Doctor alone on Torrok, a dusty and miserable world in the totalitarian grip of television.  He’s a hermit, deliberately ignoring the subtle orders of his people and refusing to do anything that might lead him to the future he saw in The Trial Of A Timelord, aka his malevolent future self, The Valeyard.  His memories are hazy, but he knows he’ll meet a chirpy computer programmer called Mel, and that’s the first step on that path, so everyone he meets gets the third degree about that.  You’re not called Mel, are you?  (Heck, forget the Valeyard, knowing you’re going to meet Mel is enough to maroon you in a yurt.)  His earnest attempt to avoid his own future is rather affecting, albeit brief, and it’s the kind of unseen extra dimension the Missing Adventures ought to specialise in.  It works especially well when you know what an ignoble end he’s got to look forward to regardless, and there’s a dollop of irony in the fact that this world, with its sinister regime begging to be toppled and its quirkily-named gangs of murderous youths, feels very much like an adventure for his next incarnation.

But adventure has a way of finding him, and soon the Doctor is dodging murderous robots with Angela, a slightly troubled young woman who’s only just seen the world outside her living room.  Giving up the ghost, almost as if he’s tired of the author glaring at him to get on with it, the Doctor takes Angela to investigate the Network, a space station where all the troublesome telly comes from.  He leaves Angela on her own for a bit in an adjacent spaceship, quietly trying to keep her out of the firing line (but spoiler alert, dropping her in it), and then he’s strolling around the Network, bumping into actors and whatnot.

And it’s around here, much less than 100 pages in, that Time Of Your Life pretty much lost me.  Now past the (familiar) promise of an oppressed world the Doctor can turn upside down, we’re off on a series of events, most of them so randomly interconnected they’d make Douglas Adams blush.  You’ve got robots from an obvious Doctor Who stand-in (Timeriders) politely running amok; computers not working in various ways; a stressed actor being replaced by a hologram and promptly murdering his partner’s lover; a loathed TV personality feeling out of his depth; various TV shows, including the virtual-reality-ish Death Hunt 3000, running quite well or disastrously, not that you’d spot the difference; the titular Time Of Your Life show which is probably very important but, in all honesty, I never differentiated from Death Hunt 3000; a kind of bigger-on-the-inside technology that is perhaps some sort of echo of the Miniscope in Carnival Of Monsters, I don’t know, but it’s the thing that’s got the Time Lords riled; various larger-than-life characters, some of which are obvious stand-ins for people Doctor Who fans would recognise instantly; and an enormous number of names yomping around that can only dream of being actual, fully-fledged characters.  Oh, and there’s some sort of intelligent computer programme out to kill everybody (probably should have mentioned that earlier), and killer cyborgs, and a psychic gun.  And somewhere in that lot is the Doctor.  Presumably.

Reading New Adventures and Missing Adventures next to each other, it’s tempting to draw parallels and see patterns (that aren’t there, yes, thank you, inner Paul McGann), such as the handling of alien life in St. Anthony’s Fire followed by the same thing in Venusian Lullaby.  A less flattering parallel occurs here, as Time Of Your Life commits the same really annoying error of judgement as Infinite Requiem: nothing but short sequences, one after another, never building to anything.  I think they’re my new pet hate.  Forget pretentious prologues – at least those are over in a couple of pages.  With this kind of caffeinated stoppy-starty channel-hopping, you’re never able to get a feel for anything.

(NB: During one of my regular book chats with my housemate – where she says things like “Oh please god tell me you’re reading something else” and “Wait, you’ve read how many?!” – she pointed out that this is just how television is sometimes edited.  If you’re feeling very kind, this is pretty much how the show looked in the mid-’80s under Eric Saward, with huge supporting casts dying horribly in quick cuts.  So maybe Time Of Your Life is a very specific, What If Colin And Eric Never Left homage?  Hmm.  I want it to be doing a thing on that level, and yet Infinite Requiem did relentless quick-cutting beforehand, and that wasn’t the first book to do it.  So more likely this is just a misunderstanding about how to write Doctor Who when it isn’t on the telly.  Alas.)

The characters are the main casualties in Lyons’s Attack Of The Paragraph Breaks.  There’s an entire band of Timeriders fans coming and going in this, and every single time they appeared their names were new to me.  Oh, Roderick said something?  Well who’s he when he’s at home?  Not that the “A” characters have a lot more going for them.  Raymond Day is the rather pitiable focus for some of it: a past-it soap actor with the aforementioned spousal difficulties, he spends much of his time fretting about a body under his bed.  He’s full of himself and the body thing is mildly amusing, but so what?  Miriam Walker is a wince-inducingly obvious Mary Whitehouse proxy, dividing her time between trying to get all of television cancelled and hitting people with an umbrella.  Giselle is the Michael-Grade-paraphrasing TV controller, who is ostensibly the “real” controller’s assistant in a wheeze that never really goes anywhere, and she poses some sort of villainy from her control centre.  Anjor is a Death Hunt 3000 champion, so adept at killing people that it only takes seconds, and he has zero interest in his winnings.  And so on.  I could list characters all day and I still wouldn’t know what most of them were for.  There’s Grant Markham, I suppose: a likeably anonymous tech guy who is scooped into a TV show (I think) involving a giant monster fighting a robot (well, it’s something for the front cover), and he ends up wheedling his way into the TARDIS.  He’s very good at computer stuff, and at one point he is literally tasked with making the tea.  He’s definitely more inoffensive than Mel, but the Doctor could just as easily have left him behind.

There is a good-ish idea buried under all the muchness, about a kind of technological life that only wants to grow but ends up taking lives in the process.  Ben Aaronivitch already had a go at this in Transit, a visceral yet flawed book that didn’t care if you could tune into its imagination.  It also, saints be praised, built a bit of tension along the way: the wait for and horrifying execution of that subway disaster is still stuck in my head.  There’s nothing like that in Time Of Your Life, where the violence is as random as it is endless.

Okay, but Steve Lyons is parodying television violence, right?  I mean, it seems obvious – but that’s too obvious for a Doctor whose most popular story is the one satirising video nasties, isn’t it?  Then again, having Mary Whitehouse marching around the set screeching about what is acceptable for young viewers, before unleashing her inner Steven Segal during a melee (?!?) must add… something to set it apart?  I don’t know.  There’s a puncturing air of silliness about all of it, though some of that is possibly just me looking for more of it after Conundrum, but it’s set to such a confused pace that it never lands on anything genuinely funny or meaningful.  It’s rushed and it’s a mess.

The malfunctioning space station is too random and silly to worry you, the stuff about putting the Doctor in Death Hunt 3000 (and Time Of Your Life?) is an obvious idea that occurs surprisingly late, and the actual plot about the “datavore” feels like it’s butting in from another book, but it’s at least rather interesting when the book finally gives it some attention.  Then when all that gets wrapped up we carry on killing people en masse in the epilogue, with some characters pausing (unwisely) to remark that these deaths are even more pointless.  Is this the reason for all those superfluous characters?  Cannon fodder?  It he making a point?  Either way, it’s disappointing and absolutely bloody wearying to just keep offing people when the major threat is over.

I felt much like this reading Infinite Requiem, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s just me.  (Or if I’m still residually annoyed from the last one.)  It’s been a long time (24 books!) since I awarded more than 7/10 to something – go on, guess which book it was – and it’s entirely possible I’m getting harder to impress.  I ought to cut the author some slack since I know I can like his work, and there are lots of interesting things to chew on here: the Doctor’s unease about his future, the artificial life thing, the (ahem) TV satire.  It’s hard to tell if the book’s irritating rhythm is all that’s throwing it off.  Somehow, I doubt it.  We occasionally return to the Doctor’s future fear, for example, with as much pomp and circumstance as bunging it in an advert break.  It’s not a theme, it’s a bit.

It seems foolish to hate Time Of Your Life since there’s a chance I just missed the bit that made it work.  But it was yet another chore to get through, however I or that dang-blasted pace chop it up.  Into innumerable bloody bits, deliberately or otherwise.

4/10

The Spoilers Of War

Doctor Who
World Enough And Time and The Doctor Falls
Series Ten, Episodes Eleven and Twelve


How do you feel about spoilers?

If you’re Steven Moffat – let’s face it, statistically unlikely! – you’re on record as not being a fan of them.  He did his nut when someone leaked the Doctor’s “regeneration” at the start of Series Six, and urged said fan to go and be a fan of something else; more recently, when the Series Ten trailer came along he suggested journalists close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears at the end.  Much of his era has been defined by surprises, regardless of whether they’re worth the wait, and not parading them around in advance is sort of the main ingredient of that.

So it can’t have been his idea to tell everybody that the Mondas (aka original) Cybermen were coming back, as well as John Simm as the Master.  Sure, ratings are down this year (taking a year off probably didn’t help), and a juicy morsel such as that might get a few more bums on seats.  Ye Olde Cybermen?  Cool.  The old Master?  Double cool, provided he isn’t still acting like a cartoon character.  All of this would be fine (sort of) if knowing about them had been the plan from the start, but when you watch World Enough And Time it clearly wasn’t.  These things are twists, and the BBC has meticulously removed any shock value from them.


Sur...prise?Whatever could be going on in this creepy hospital?  Cybermen, innit.  Who is that mysterious man that for some reason has a prosthetic nose and is forcing an accent?  Well, John Simm is back this week, and he’s a bit like John Simm now that you mention it, so… that’ll be the Master then.  Tada?  Simm has already lamented this in Doctor Who Magazine: nobody recognised him on set, and it would have been a huge, exciting moment for the show when he pulled off his mask at the end.  Instead it isn’t.  (Okay, some papers were already leaking the news, but so what?  It’s inconvenient, but it’s not as inyerface as the BBCsounding the spoiler horn in the press, then in the launch trailer, and then in the sodding Next Time trailer the week before.  If you remained unspoiled, it was despite their efforts.)

As for whether we would have guessed all this beforehand, with a few blissfully lucky exceptions we’ll simply never know: through the magic of spoilers, the BBC has transported you directly to your second viewing of the episode.  Did they get more bums on seats?  If so, said bums were rewarded with a lethargic 45 minute wait to catch up with the Next Time trailer.  Well done, geniuses.

The question now becomes what else there is to enjoy besides the twists.  World Enough And Time begins intriguingly enough, with Missy and her plucky companions (Bill and Nardole) arriving on a 400 mile long spaceship next to a black hole.  It’s a trial run for Missy, learning to do what the Doctor would do.  Although back up, I’ve missed a spot: it really begins with a flash-forward to the Doctor regenerating.  O RLY?  Only a couple of episodes after faking this for a laugh, a whole week before the end of the series, they’ve got to know only the amoeba-brained among us will think they’re going to see a full regeneration.  So what’s the point teasing it?  If they’ve cried wolf once, what’s to stop them doing it again and hanging on until Christmas?  If there was any chance of a new Doctor a.s.a.p., do you think the BBC would have any hesitation in telling us exactly what to expect?

Best just stick it in the bin and get back to Missy.  This bit, with the Doctor listening in and offering annoyed commentary, is quite fun, with a pretty big caveat.  Missy calls herself “Doctor Who” instead of “the Doctor”.  Ho ho and everything, moving on – but it doesn’t end there.  Bill questions it.  Tee hee, that’s enough now – nope, Missy defends it, says it’s his real name, i.e. he made it up to sound mysterious and dropped the “Who” later as it’s too on the nose.  Ha… ha?  And the Doctor says she’s kidding.  Phew, we’re done.  And then he later adopts it anyway.  Jesus.  All caught up?  That’s not a joke, it’s a relay race.  Making Doctor Who characters say “Doctor who?” is one of the campest gags in the show, and it’s bad enough when it’s just a one-two punch.  I’m pretty sure this took years.

And speaking of time dilation, parking next to a black hole has the unfortunate side effect of making time at the top go a lot slower than time at the bottom.  Fortunately the ship is pulling away very slowly, but the Doctor and co. don’t have time to offer assistance, as the moment Bill’s lifesigns are detected a mysterious something comes up in a very fast lift.  (They must be fast enough to liquefy you to get up there in good time.  Ouch!)   The non-human ship’s custodian shoots her in a panic, evidently fed up of the Doctor’s “you will wonder who I am and why I came here” grandstanding – fair enough, that stuff makes me want to shoot someone.  Shooting Bill is a bit useless now the lift is already here, but that’s panic for you.  Bill is taken away to be “repaired”.  I wonder how that’ll go?

He needed a disguise, he enjoys The Hobbit dwarf cosplay.  What of it?Around here we’re treated to some zingy back-and-forth flashbacks, as the Doctor plans this little jaunt with Bill beforehand, and admits how badly he wants Missy to be good.  This sort of zig-zagging is in Steven Moffat’s fossil record by now, but it’s well done, offering a bit of breathing room in a rather cramped and short-on-plot episode, and highlighting the friendship of the Doctor and the Master and what it means.  Unfortunately Moffat can’t resist showing off, so he does add the phrase “man crush”.  (Gosh, how incredibly hip and down with da kids he is!)  In the present, the Doctor’s job is to distract the panicky blue dude long enough to get into a lift and reach Bill.  Bill’s job is to wait for him, which she does for ten years.  And did someone mention Moffat’s fossil record?  Yeah, Companions Who Wait is in there too, along with ticking off years in seconds.  Kind of loses its shock value when you keep doing it, so we’ll have to make Bill’s situation worse.  She ends up working in a creepy hospital with a mysterious bearded gentleman – he looks a bit odd, I wonder if that’s important?  It turns out the people here aren’t just living quicker, they’re dying; of what, I didn’t entirely catch, but they’re being “converted” so they can survive.  Survive what, exactly?  Ah, who cares, are they Cybermen yet?

The hospital stuff is suitably eerie, with faceless patients only able to croak words like “pain” electronically, and the “nurses” doing nothing more than turn down the volume.  It’s a big ask that Bill does nothing of note for ten years, and as far as we know her beardy chum Mr Razor doesn’t do anything either, but it’s suitably sad that she has to wait all that time, and sadder how it all turns out.  Eventually the Doctor and co. secure a lift, so Razor ushers her into medical theatre.  Surprise, he was planning to turn her into a Cyberman all along!  What a… masterful rotter he is.

Okay, so the Master is unveiled and meets Missy, who apparently switches sides.  (Hmm.)  Bill is now a Cyberman.  Behold, the sum total of the episode: a mixture of stuff you already knew and stuff you could put together like Duplo blocks, and we got here via the Moffat trope of a story that progresses years and hardly at all in the same go.  With three big reveals it really ought to pack a punch.  Instead it musters a pretty good pat.  Kudos to John Simm for investing Mr Razor with an eccentric air of the sinister; I like that the Master has gone back to wearing disguises, although ten years is a long con even for him.  When it comes to mask-off time he relishes the opportunity to be properly nasty, even if it’s not the surprise it should be; there are no more scenes of him laughinghis head off, thank god.  Rubbing in how this is “the genesis of the Cybermen” is a bit on the nose, but hey, at least it’s not the “Doctor Who” joke again.  And we’re off to the next episode.

There aren't even any snarks to make.
Michelle Gomez has great material.  At last.  And it's glorious.The Doctor Falls starts off with a sudden change of scenery, which you won’t expect if you’ve never seen a Moffat two-parter before; ditto back-filling the information to get us to that point, since it’s slightly more interesting than doing everything in order.  (It just isn’t a new way of doing Doctor Who.)  Simm and Gomez are a delight together, the former toning it down (at last) in a black suit and goatee, the latter, well… come back, Missy, all is forgiven.  There are moments when Missy says she’s on the Doctor’s side and seems to be in actual pain trying to figure out if she means it.  Missy’s soul has been the real arc of Series Ten, and that could be a very cheesy development, except we’ve got Michelle Gomez.  Watching her imprint out of habit on Simm and then evil it up, only to wobble back uncertainly when she’s with the Doctor, is (ahem) a masterclass.  She steals every scene, which is all the more impressive considering who this Doctor is.  Meanwhile he’sdoing more of that tiresome grandstanding that you’ll either love or hate: “You know the stories.  There’s only ever been one way to stop that many Cybermen.  ME.”  Oh, sign an autograph to yourself and be done with it.  I’m sick of this particular record.

Battle lines are drawn soon after: having turned the Cybermen against the Master(s) and ensured their begrudging co-operation, and then escaped to floor 507 of the spaceship, they know the Cybermen are coming and must stop them.  They can’t get to the bridge (and the TARDIS) because by the time they do, the Cybermen will have had “thousands of years to figure out how to stop them”.  That’s bollocks really – if you all get in lifts, which are designed to get you up there really quick, the Cybermen will still need to go faster than them to catch you, and it’ll still be harder for them to catch up the closer they get.  But you probably knew the whole “slow/quick time” thing would be a strictly “good idea on paper” affair, so save yourself the bother of thinking about it.  The rest of the episode is, like a lot of Moffat finales, mostly talking.  And those are the best bits.

Bill is a Cyberman now.  She still sees herself as she was – the Doctor pegs this on her ability to keep her mind during the Monk occupation, but let’s face it, it’s probably just habit after Cyber-Danny and Dalek-Oswin.  Pearl Mackie is fantastic though, keeping just enough mechanical body language to suggest something isn’t right, and otherwise only just keeping it together.  Yes, it’s a bit of an eyeroll that as soon as we’ve brought the Mondasian Cybermen back we make one of them “nice”, but it’s an excuse for some very compelling scenes with her and the Doctor.  And whoever the guy is in the baggy robot suit; it sounds like a snark, but there’s something quite affecting about a Cyberman impassively holding a rescue ship in place so the Doctor can get on.

The Doctor is doing his best under impossible circumstances, as is Peter Capaldi in some ways.  There’s no real “win” here as he can’t get back to the TARDIS (hush, we’ve decided he can’t, shut up, shut up I said), so there’s many an impassioned moment as he rallies the (totally interchangeable) people of Floor 507, not to mention the Masters.  He really relies on Nardole to repel the Cybermen, mostly using vaguely explained explosions, before relying on him to take care of the survivors on a different floor.  He’s also got a regeneration on the go, and is keeping it down like a bad burp.  Not enough is made of this; annoyingly, when Bill sees him do the glow-hands, she doesn’t remember seeing it in The Lie Of The Land, which might actually have put that bloody stupid moment to some use.  By the end of the episode he’s alone in the TARDIS, regenerating-and-talking-to-himself-a-go-go, where he decides he never wants to change again.  Which… is fair enough, I suppose, but isn’t really seeded in the episode.  Is he depressed because in the end, Missy didn’t stick around?  Is he just knackered?  Bored of trying on new trousers?  On the available evidence, it seems like a random-ish repeat of David Tennant’s last days, crammed into one slightly awkward scene at the end.  I imagine the Christmas Special will shape it up, but thus far there’s a slightly forced bit of emoting going on where there probably ought to be a full blown regeneration.

"WE ARE OFF TO SEE THE WIZ-ARD.
THE WON-DERFUL WIZ-ARD OF OZ."Fair’s fair: the Doctor is often enriched by the quality of his enemies, but he’s up against the Cybermen in all their boring glory.  And for all his impassioned speeches (Twelve’s trademark at this point), he defeats them with explosions.  Kind of sells his apparent all-encompassing “kindness” short, doesn’t it?  He spends all this time with Bill, a Cyberman, only to happily kaboom the rest of them.  (She’s off doing… something in the middle of all that.  Deleted scene?)  It’s not just incredibly dull to make all the nasty things go bang in place of a clever solution – and no, having the Doctor admit he has no plan doesn’t put a plaster on it – it’s also continuing that very odd Series Ten trope of the Doctor answering threats with explosions.  There’s even a bit where he helps blow up a Cyberman by zapping it with the sonic.  Oh, so it’s a straight up laser gun now?

Speaking of Cybermen.  Oy.  I’ve often moaned that they’re basically less interesting, standy-uppy Daleks, and here – with the goldmine opportunity of bringing back proper creepy Cybermen and going back to their roots – Moffat and co. simply default to that again.  Worse: the Mondas Cybermen, with their almost daringly clumsy costumes and odd sing-song voices, do exactly the same “You will be upgraded”, stomping, zapping and flyingshite as their daft New Whocounterparts.  Thanks to Bill, you can add crying to the list.  (Not to be outdone, the Cybusmen are still clenching their fists and going hilariously OTT on the stomping, in case you forgot how funny they were.  Boing!  Boing!  One of them looks like he’s skipping off to market.)  After Bill, no one is converted on screen; all the Cybermen are is a stomping menace that needs to be exploded.  Despite all the effort of bringing them back and that laborious reference to the “genesis of the Cybermen”, this still isn’t in the same league as Spare Parts.  (Which you can hear for 99p here.  Go on, it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.)  With luck, the next era of the show might figure out what to do with them.  Failing that, put them away.

For now, we can at least put something away.  Could this be the end of the Master?  Amid all the waiting (and later, exploding) there are two Masters on the periphery: they don’t do much, which might be a tad disappointing if (for some reason!) you’ve been aware of this team-up for months.  But there’s plenty of interesting stuff going on here, as Missy tussles with her conscience and the Master becomes more affronted.  Gomez does amazing work with just a half-seen glance, a frustrated grimace, or a phonier-than-usual smile, and manages to humanise an at times ridiculous character without breaking it.  When it comes time to escape with Simm to their TARDIS, she makes her choice, stabbing him and sending him on his way to become someone else.  She will stay with the Doctor.  Incensed, Simm kills her.  She dies a better person; he disappears laughing that his final end is to shoot himself in the back.  And really, this is how it should be.  You probably can’t fully redeem the Master without it seeming too easy (after all these years), or just plain cheesy.  Having Simm on hand accentuates that.  But it is still, as Missy says, where this has been going forever; Roger Delgado’s Master would have gone out this way if real life tragedy hadn’t intervened.  The Master gets his/her perfect ending without over-egging it, and the door is left open for more Simm, or even more Masters filling the gap.  Gomez gets the material she always deserved and a stagnant character grows; Simm gets to go in a direction other than random, and revels in the Master’s worst excesses, also getting a brilliant exit that works far better than The End Of Time.  In a somewhat laboured story, this is the bit they get most perfectly right.  And the Doctor goes on his way knowing nothing about it.  It’s perfect and dark.

Savour it, because there’s bollocks incoming.  Emerging from the chaos, Cyber-Bill finds the dead-ish Doctor and weeps.  And – here it comes, stomping its bollocksy stomp! – Heather the puddle girl returns, summoned by Bill’s tears.  (Yes, the tears thing was set up previously, but I doubt it’s the first time Bill’s cried, and also, urgh.)  Heather was a shadow of herself in The Pilot, a screaming mechanical husk that dimly remembered a fascination with Bill, all of which leant their brief romance a bit of tragedy; she’s (somehow) a full person again now, with the power to make Bill human again (of course) and, I suspect, do whatever a script might throw at her.  Bill and Heather then zoom off around the cosmos, which ought to sound familiar, since it’s how Clara left the show.  This is only moments after she gives the Doctor a restorative (magic) tear that will shortly wake him up.  Now, I like Bill, Pearl Mackie’s great, and I’m not enough of a bastard to long for an unhappy ending here, but yeesh: the degree of magic wand make-it-all-nice-again contained in these final minutes borders on parody.  I guess it depends on whether you’ve built up a tolerance by now.  Here’s a test: isn’t there something just a wee bit hilarious about Bill and Heather having conversations over the Doctor’s splayed out corpse?

The original, you might say.And… we’re done.  Almost.  Because we’ve got to revisit that totally-gonna-happen regeneration from last week, haven’t we?  Cut to the South Pole, where he switches his regen off again (oh) and a spoiler the BBC didn’t foghorn rears its head at last: David Bradley is the First Doctor, for real this time.  (I heard about this one in advance, despite the Beeb’s restraint.  Ah well, it’s still a “WHAT?” moment.)  Bradley still doesn’t strike me as Hartnellesque in any particular way, but we’ll see how it goes.  It’s not as if he’s the first Hartnell stand-in, and they’ll never be him.

Another finale down – his last one ever.  Huh.  It’s certainly not his worst, eschewing tedious arc-answering questions that tend to result in disappointment with, I’ll be damned, a satisfying one for a change.  I guess it helps if your giant questions aren’t about the one character who never changes – and he, naggingly enough, doesn’t quite sell his big development, though Capaldi is could-do-this-in-his-sleep brilliant throughout.  The story doesn’t do much else that you haven’t seen before: the Doctor’s vigil on Floor 507 is a lot like him looking after the town of Christmas; Bill’s fate is quite a bit like Clara’s, with added fairydust; and there are still the requisite “Wait, what?” holes, like whether the ship is going to escape the black hole (since it was a distress call that started it), whether the Cybermen are going to get Nardole and co., whether the Doctor will ultimately go back to save them, and why Super Heather couldn’t just rescue everybody or fix the Doctor.  You can hope these bits will be tied up at Christmas, just as you can hope the Monks are coming back to justify their naff ending.  Personally, after the miracle of Missy, ditching all her goofy comedy bullshit and rounding off the Master’s often disastrous story with something like elegance, I suspect one impossible thing is all we’re getting.  This late in the game, that’s a win.

Light Entertainment

Doctor WhoThe Eaters Of LightSeries Ten, Episode Ten

This episode is brought to you by Rona Munro.  Rona Munro!  Okay, so the only things I know about her are a) she’s Scottish and b) she wrote Survival, the last ever Classic Who story transmitted.  But I’m still excited.  Not only is she the writer who inadvertently saw out the old show (in style – Survival’s great), she’s also the first Ye Olde writer to return to Doctor Who since it came back.  (Meanwhile Mark Gatiss has written for it nine times.  Answer the door and let that sink in.)
It’s exciting because there’s a chance for something different.  That’s entirely self-driven hype and not Rona Munro’s fault, by the way: she hasn’t promised to reinvent Doctor Who or anything.  But I still went into this one hoping for a different flavour.  The title also suggests a story that’s somehow intangible, and maybe not as by-the-numbers as we’re used to.  Ah well, cancel the drumroll: The Eaters Of Light is pretty much like most other New Who, same sort of good bits, same sort of bad.  And fair enough: the average, oblivious, not-daftly-self-hyped viewer wouldn’t be the least surprised.
Average, oblivious, not-daftly-self-hyped viewer:
"Oh look, talking crows.  I am unsurprised."The Doctor and Bill disagree about history.  (She read a book once and got an A* on an essay; the Doctor is a 2,000 year old time traveller.  No offence, but I think most of us are betting on angry-eyebrows.)  Bill believes the Roman Ninth Legion left Pictish Scotland in one piece, the Doctor thinks they all died.  Turns out they’re both sort of right, as an unknown horror from beyond space™ was unleashed by the Picts to devour the invading Romans.  A few Romans escaped.  They will need to work together to defeat the beastie.
I didn’t mean to scoop the entire plot into a couple of sentences, but… damn, there it is.  Of twists and turns, there are decidedly few.  So let’s talk about the people in it.
The Picts are mostly children now, as their parents and families were slaughtered by the Romans.  One of them (the “Gatekeeper”) has the dubious honour of keeping the Eater Of Light at bay.  One of these dog-like creatures arrives every 60-70 years and one warrior is chosen to stop it.  The latest, Kar, sees the Romans advancing and figures she has a secret weapon, so she lets it out, but the Eater can’t be stopped.  It eats the light from people, although we don’t generate light so… yeah, I don’t really know what it’s eating, but it sounds cool.  Rebecca Benson is wonderfully intense as Kar, particularly when she needs to make a heroic sacrifice at the end and says goodbye to her brother, wet eyed and just awkwardly hopping from foot to foot.
The Romans are mostly children too, as their commanding officers are all beast-kibble.  They’re a fairly charming lot and it’s not their fault their job is to show up and quash uncooperative Picts; they did run away.  There’s also an amusing scene where Bill rebuffs an advance by saying she’s gay, and quickly realises how quaint that sounds to Ancient Romans.  (Okay, this is inevitably a bit forced, as Bill quite often seems to correct people about her orientation.  Some kinds of Who fans are outraged by the gay thing full stop, so mentioning it again here is probably going to cause rage fits.  Poor things.  I think the scene works because of the rejoinder offered by the Romans.  If you’re mad that Bill keeps bringing it up, by all means try to figure out how else to represent gay people on TV when they’re not dating, and write to the BBC.)
There isn’t much else going on except Romans (avec Bill) and Picts (plus the Doctor and Nardole) surviving the beast, then meeting up and figuring out a way to stop it.  The monster isn’t much to write home about either: it looks like something from Avatar, a.k.a. a big dog with random tentacles on its face.  It’s a properly monsterish monster so it doesn’t speak, meaning it’s up to everybody else to figure it out and talk about it, which they do at length, the Romans in a cave and the Picts in their huts.  The monster seems happy enough to gambol about outside and wait, apparently doing stuff like recharging in the daylight (unseen) and causing the days to get darker (hard to tell from a production standpoint).  It’s not a very otherworldly menace, which sells that interesting title short.  It could just as easily be a panther that feeds on all the water in our bodies, or a llama that eats limbs.  Either way, it’s just a thing on the rampage.  The Doctor and everybody else furiously (and at times unconvincingly) join the dots about what it wants and how to stop it.  They tend to luck out.
Peter Capaldi is enjoyably (if excessively?) abrasive towards the Picts, encouraging them to “grow up” and fight the beast; he has some of his most crotchety moments since Series Eight here, loudly moaning about his lack of patience and mocking Kar for fighting the beast on her own.  There’s some nice “Grow up and work together!” stuff with the Romans and Picts; his Doctor has played that drum before, and he’s good at it.  He does get a bit nicer towards the end when it comes to his (bizarre) plan to save the day.  More anon.
Bill's argument is "Where are all the bodies?"
Um.  Tada.Bill apparently hasn’t noticed the TARDIS language translator until now, but to her credit she figures it out by herself; an aptness for sci-fi is one of the things I like about her and I’m happy to see that in action again.  The whole plot starts because she’s confident about what she knows, which is lovely.  It’s still not a brilliant story for her, although Munro deftly has her sudden “TARDIS translator” realisation work for the plot, uniting Picts and Romans.  (Mind you, up to now that’s not how the translator works.  You don’t just pick it up, you need to travel through time.)  Besides that she’s just chummy with the Romans, and briefly gets infected with “beast slime”.  (This is mentioned a few times but doesn’t seem to inconvenience her.  She faints once and completely recovers with a bit of sun.)  Meanwhile, Nardole does what he always does: hopefully raise a smile on the sidelines.  Shrug.  Not exactly vital, is he?

The episode’s so economical (and short – 42 minutes with Next Time trailer) it’s hard to find things to get excited about, or even say about it.  Oh no, the Doctor is missing for days, because time moves faster inside the gate!  Oh well, Nardole and co. waited outside.  Oh no, the Doctor has lost Bill!  Never mind, she finds her way back.  Oh no, Bill’s got beast slime on her!  Open a window, bob’s your uncle.  Oh no, we need to defeat the beast!  Well… the Picts have been managing that for centuries, how hard can it be?  Cue the resolution, and open a can of hmmmm.
The Picts send somebody in every 60-70 years (outside time), arm them with a magic-rock-magnifying-glass (no idea how they came up with those or where the Doctor gets loads more from at the end), and use “poisoned” light to force the beast back inside.  This evidently works, but the Doctor decides he’ll need to stay behind and keep the beasts out for all eternity, as he’ll live long enough to do so.  But if the Picts are happy to keep sending people in at each interval, and they’re handy enough to repel the beasts each time, why not just keep doing that?  Why does the Doctor, or anyone need to stay in there full-time?  Couldn’t he stop by every 60 years with his magic rock?  What difference, really, does the time difference make to all this?
Nevertheless he is absolutely bloody adamantabout this, and the Picts and Romans have to gang up to stop him.  In his place, they then march inside the portal – to do what, though?  Inside there are countless Eaters of Light swimming around in… space?  Water?  Space-water?  Is there an atmosphere?  There’s nothing to say humans could live inside there, let alone give any beasties what for.  Later, the Doctor refers to them as if they’re still fighting in slow-time.  That’s a guess, and much good it’ll do Scotland or the world: 60 years is still going to mean about a week in blue goo for them, and the portal’s still going to open again on schedule next time.
Or is it?  As the Picts and Romans march inside (together; ah, bless), rocks start falling all over the place.  Then it’s left to Nardole – Nardole! – to explain that too many people have gone through it now and the place is “unstable”.  We hastily cut to outside the cairn, and they’re sealing it up with rocks.  So is it closed for good now?  The cairn is gone when we cut to the present day in the scenes bookending the episode, so… probably?  Honestly, it’d be much simpler if somebody guessed that sending too many people through would close the portal and sort everything out and that was the plan; it would mean a group sacrificing themselves, but it would lead to exactly the same ending.  Okay, there isn’t any information to support it, but Nardole quite happily guesses that’s what happened anyway, just as the Doctor decides that the monsters will break out en masse and eat the sun, and that the beast “homes in on sound”, based on absolutely sod all.  One more stab in the dark wouldn’t hurt.  As it is, the solution to the problem comes by complete serendipity, and is barely remarked upon.  And come to think of it, why the hell isn’t darkness considered as a form of defence?
Despite the wealth of irritating leftover questions, the episode bumbles along quite amiably.  It’s directed by one of Doctor Who’s more creative hands, Charles Palmer, but the setting isn’t as varied as Human Nature, nor the story as kinetic as Smith & Jones, so there’s not much to wring out of it.  (Even so, the monster could do with more than just “blue-screen monster vision” and trundling unflatteringly towards us in long shot.)  There are plenty of natty moments, like the Doctor using exploding popcorn to escape the Picts, and there are bits I don’t much like that others might.  Crows can apparently talk, mankind just forgot how to listen, so they’re all just sulking.  Which is very… shmoo.  (Except it then turns out the birds are still talking to us, but they’re saying “Kar” over and over.  Really?  Not a lot of interesting developments in crow world, are there?)
At last, Missy hears the magic Pict music that transcends time.
She is moved.  Which is more than I was.  It's like a bloody ringtone.Bizarrely (but, y’know, second week running), the best bit of the episode is the bit with Missy in.  After Nardole laboriously and pointlessly tells the Doctor he needs to get back to the Vault – and yeah, hang on, about that?  They’re in a time machine.  They can arrive the minute they left.  Nardole knows this, they all do.  And even when the Doctor’s on Earth, he’s hardly ever sat outside the damn Vault anyway.  And last week – oh, this bit’s annoying – last bloody week it was Nardole who let Missy out of the Vault to save everyone.  And now he’s moaning at the Doctor to get back to work!  Unbelievable.  Anyway: once Nardole and Bill are finished whingeing at the Doctor to get back – no, really, what’s the rush?  Haven’t we established Missy isn’t in there because of teh homicides, but because of a cheeky loophole to avoid killing her?  What’s the point in the Vault any more?  She’s been out now, so any 1,000-year rule is broken.  If there’s an alarm to alert those assassin people, who presumably all this is for, it must have gone off by now.
Look, give over, will you?  Right.  Once Nardole and Bill shut the hell up about the Vault, it turns out the Doctor let her out and is keeping her on staff in the TARDIS.  She can’t get out because she’s bio-locked out of the controls – except hang on, didn’t she pilot it last week?  That’s why he let her out again!  GOD DAMN IT.  What I’m trying to say is, Michelle Gomez is fabulous here, relishing the unease from Nardole and Bill and then, privately with the Doctor, weeping at the thought of those dead Picts.  Yes, I know: this is Steven Moffat (via proxy) asking us to believe the Master might finally turn good.  Just as we were asked to believe the Doctor might die, or might not be a good man, or might reveal his name.  Yeah but this time?  Do me a favour.  No one further up the evolutionary chain than an amoeba should seriously entertain this, but Michelle Gomez and Peter Capaldi still make it bloody gripping to watch.  That’s practically alchemy, and I’m a bit in awe.
Let’s face it, that stuff’s probably written by Moffat anyway, so: back to The Eaters Of Light.  It’s… harmless.  It’s nice to have a historical episode without a famous person in it, and focusing on a bit of history I’m not too familiar with.  Still, it’s not like I learned anything: this is definitely history of the For Dummies variety, and my heart sank a bit when the Doctor pronounced that the threat was really “alien”, like that’s in any way unusual.  I’d love an episode that shook off some of those constraints, and either had something properly weird happening or just dropped us in history and let, y’know, stories happen.  But they’re not going to rock the boat this close to the end and Rona Munro isn’t magic, so I probably shouldn’t look at it through that lens.  It isn’t going to massively remind you of the Classic series and it won’t exactly rescue the New one.  Yet again, it’s fine, it’ll do.
NB: A quick word on spoilers.  That word is urgh.  I know the BBC are desperate to get bums on seats, and also to out-fox the spoiler bastards on the internet, and have already ruined this in general, but did they have to put both finale villains in the Next Time trailer?  Yes, we all know they’ll show up eventually, in the last episode at least, but couldn’t we have a little suspension of disbelief in tact?  How good can an episode be when you know, a week in advance, you’ll have to act surprised?

Mission To Mehs

Doctor WhoEmpress Of MarsSeries Ten, Episode Nine

Good morning, world!  Isn’t it a beautiful day?
Okay, so Doctor Who is following its almost impressively awful resolution to a three-parter about omnipotent Monks... with a Mark Gatiss episode.  That’s not a cause for celebration by any means.  But consider: when Steven Moffat dives out of his office window to freedom in just a few months, it’s entirely possible that his best friend will follow.  This could be the last Mark Gatiss episode ever!  Break out the confetti, hire a mariachi band!  Viva life!
*scans script, sees "This isn't over!" and "You'll regret this!" among his lines*
Oh hi Mark.I’ve said it all before, but he keeps coming back so it all still applies.  I’m sure he’s lovely, he’s a very entertaining actor and he clearly loves the show, but like a lot of fan-fiction, loving it and being good at making it are different things.  He loves musty old episodes of Doctor Who so, god as his witness, he will make less-good versions of them.  He’s also got a keen interest in history, and almost no aptitude for bringing it to life.  And here we go again.  Ah well: Empress Of Mars does at least staple together Mark’s Favourite Doctor Who Stuff (Ice Warriors, Tomb Of The Cybermen) and Mark’s Favourite Historical Era (Victoriaaaanaaaa), creating something that’s sort of new.  Plus it might be his last one.  So, big smiles, forgiving mood, off we go.
We begin at NASA in the modern day: a centuries-old message can be seen on the surface of Mars, and the Doctor and co. happen to be present to find that out.  The scene only exists to point the Doctor back in time to 1881, which is a somewhat redundant, but hey, rather Moffaty way to kick things off.  Shortly after their arrival, Nardole is whisked back to Earth by the TARDIS, for reasons that will… okay, hold that thought.  Sans Nardole and TARDIS, we quickly find the episode’s trump card: there are Ice Warriors (of course), and Victorian soldiers on Mars.  Even better, despite assuming the latter are on the offensive, it appears they’re all working together.  The Doctor’s assumptions and ours take a step back, which is bloody rare in a Mark Gatiss episode.  It’s looking good so far.  Who doesn’t love a steampunk astronaut?
The humans found a lone Ice Warrior (nicknaming him “Friday”) in a crashed ship and came back with him to Mars, promised riches on arrival.  This puts the Doctor in an awkward position: Friday is obviously leading them down the garden path, but the humans are also technically invaders.  Where do his loyalties lie?  This could be very interesting, and so could that thing about the TARDIS.  But remember who we’re dealing with.
Pretty soon a tomb is discovered, and an especially sticky-fingered idiot presses the wrong thing and awakens an Ice Warrior.  Sigh; this isn’t the first time Gatiss has added a greedy dimwit just to get the plot rolling, and the last time he did it was also an Ice Warrior episode.  (In Cold War, another absolute moron seemingly gets bored waiting for the title sequence, so he blow-torches a frozen Ice Warrior.  D’oh!)  The whole scene is a groan-worthy reminder of how Gatiss handles period pieces, i.e. with all the stock stereotypes he can muster.  It’s “ruddy” this and “what!” that; when a lowly officer whines that he didn’t get any tea, his Sarge says “RHIP!”  Oh dear, are they going to spell that out?  “Rank Has Its Privileges!”  Of course they are.  (Oh, and no prizes for guessing Sarge has been slipped a mickey.)
It may seem like news to, ahem, someone, but people were fully rounded people back in the good old days, not just a bunch of archetypes.  Nonetheless, the greedy one in this exists to move the plot along and then die; the weary commanding officer exists to have his Dark Secret revealed (he’s a coward!), then heroically restore his honour (he’s not a coward any more!); the other stock Gatiss figure, the Slippery Officer Only Out For Himself (see Cold War again), exists to pointlessly impede the Doctor and co. (to make the episode longer), expose his commander (because he’s nasty like that), ironically turn out to be a coward as well (duh) and then get what’s coming to him.  As for the lowly grunt who spends a minute or so going on about his lovely fiancé, and how he can’t wait to get home, get married and pick daffodils, to borrow a line from Holly: they’ll need something to grit the path with.  There isn’t a third dimension in the house.  (Or much resolution: the CO leaves with the Ice Warriors at the end, but there’s no mention of where the rest are going.) 
Officer Thievey Movetheplot, reporting for duty!Still, we’ve got the Ice Warriors.  Virtually ignored by modern Who (and come to think of it, most of classic Who as well), the problem with them is that we’ve already seen them in two different lights, so what’s left?  They were evil, then they weren’t.  They certainly look fantastic, unless you show us the silly face-hugger thing that lives inside which, thank Christ, this episode doesn’t.  (For balance, like the Cybermen, they’ve randomly changed their attack method: now they shrink you into a bouncing corpse ball.  If you found this horrifying rather than hilarious, well done you.)  Their various codes of honour add a pleasantly balanced dimension to them, and the script at least tries to add a bit of diversity on top.  Friday is determined to resurrect his people, but prefers not to murder the humans who brought him here.  He’s quite nice, really.  The rest of them… well, they could be a bunch of sentry guns for all their input, but we can’t give lines to everybody, can we?  (Let’s just be grateful that Nick Briggs doesn’t seem to be doing Every Monster Voice Ever this week.  Did they send him out for chips and lock the door?)
Probably the only New Thing here, besides the fusion of Jules Verne and Ice Warriors (and the scrunchy-kill-gun), is the Empress of the title.  Gatiss promised a new kind of Ice Warrior, and he has delivered… a female Ice Warrior!  Not much is added to the mythos of Mars, besides confirming that there are two genders at work.  Small universe, huh?  The Empress’s dialogue invites aggressive scenery chewing and that’s dutifully what we get from poor Adele Lynch.  I had flashbacks to the Racnoss; dear god, no thank you.
Frustratingly, the episode gets less interesting when the Ice Warriors wake up.  (Not least because the director shows them emerging after newly-woken Ice Warriors are seen stomping around.)  What of the Doctor’s dilemma, and where his loyalties lie?  Turns out it’s not that important: the soldiers act aggressively, the Ice Warriors react badly, he’s unable to broker peace, there is much running and shouting, the twatty officer sticks him and Bill in a cell.  Thanks to the now heroic commanding officer (who dispatches Twatty in a manner awkwardly akin to Del Boy falling through a bar), as well as Friday The Lovely Ice Warrior, humans and Martians sort out peace all by themselves.  No wonder the TARDIS buggered off.
Oh, and about that: Nardole panics and lets Missy out of the Vault.  Contrary to expectations, she actually helps him get back to Mars.  This could be brilliant: the sardonic, but still ultimately comic relief Nardole would absolutely wilt next to Missy.  Imagine!  But this stuff is almost entirely off-screen.  Of explanations for the TARDIS’s behaviour, there are none; it’s all just setup for next week.  I hope.  The way they’ve handled the Vault plot, bungling the reveal of who’s inside it by not bothering to have a scene where they throw the doors open and show us, I wouldn’t be surprised if Missy was back inside and no more said about it.
"Terrific.  Now it looks like a penis on a screen."*
*Joke for the people who know who this is.I said I’d be positive and forgiving and, well, obviously didn’t meanit, so let’s try harder: unlike Sleep No More and Robot Of Sherwood, Empress Of Mars executes its premise without fundamentally cocking it up.  (Robot presents a cliché version of Robin Hood, shrugs and says it’s accurate; Sleep is a found footage movie with linking narration.)  There’s something very bonkers and fun about Victorians on Mars.  The Ice Warriors really do look fabulous.  I don’t think they’re as interesting as some might like to think – they have more moods than a Dalek and are less intractable than a Sontaran, and that’s about it – but it’s nice to have aliens that don’t get conveniently wiped out at the end.  I’m also not convinced Empress cracks the case for having them back on the regular, but then it doesn’t really try, merrily setting them on a course for The Curse Of Peladon and sealing that continuity gap.  (Look it up; it’s better than this one.)  The cameo from Alpha Centauri is a nice treat for fans of ’70s Who, although it’s shot and scored as if more than a fraction of the audience is going to know who the hell that is.  Best of luck with that.
Top of the list of positives – no prizes at all for guessing – is Peter Capaldi.  This script is utter fodder for the Doctor, down to his Silurians-esque quest to broker peace, but he lifts it up at every opportunity.  The scene where he weasels information out of the Victorians is hilariously deft, and he sells stuff like “the creature within is at one with its carapace” like Tom Baker on his best day.  Conversely, Bill asks some fairly dippy questions and makes movie references; I suspect it’s a case of “I don’t know what the new companion will be like, but I’m sure the actor can fill it in later,” and it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.  The Empress thinks highly of Bill literally because she’s also a woman.  Fascinating character work there.
It sticks together well enough, and it’s far less appalling than last week’s.  But it’s also not a script you’d rescue from an office fire.  On balance, after Sleep No More, that’s still a win.  Now cross your fingers.