Gareth Rafferty's Blog, page 20

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #42 – The Romance Of Crime by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#6
The Romance Of Crime
By Gareth Roberts

At last!

I wouldn’t say that the Missing Adventures have been bad so far, but The Romance Of Crime is the first one you could slot where it’s supposed to go.  The characters, the setting and the style really go together.  No longer is there the feeling of a Doctor getting juggled at the last minute, or a baddie being dropped in by the editors, or another era peeking through the pages.  This is what the range was made for: it’s teatime, circa 1979.
And this isn’t my first visit.  Big Finish’s adaptation is sublime, and it came out before I decided to read the whole range, so I’ve already heard it two or three times.  The downside is that I already know the story, but after the initial déjà vu it was easy enough to imagine this was just a generously wordy Target novel.  The Romance Of Crime isn’t the first Doctor Who story I’ve rediscovered as a book, and it’s a lot of fun this way.

Right from the opening page, this feels like a lost TV story.  We begin on a miserable, bubbling world that could only be realised as a model shot; you can almost hear Dudley Simpson’s orchestra snoring sinisterly beneath.  After the startling discovery of a great many corpses, the action moves to the Rock Of Judgement, a travelling asteroid housing a prison – with, it must be said, not many inmates remaining.  Justice moves swiftly here, always in the general direction of a particle reversal chamber.  Their attitude to all this is summed up pretty well when a judge sentences a man to death and thinks inwardly, “It had been a long Thursday.”  Romance quickly fits into the sofa groove of 1979, with Douglas Adams as script editor and jolly comic dialogue under every rock.

Par for Gareth Roberts, you might say.  The Highest Science was full of blatant Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently devices, and Tragedy Day was just as interested in comedy (with, for my money, messier results).  The Romance Of Crime resists the temptation to indulge in a tissue of references, though I did clock an amusingly PG-rated spin on a famous K9-themed outtake.  After The Crystal Bucephalus, another book full of arch Adams nudge-winkery might have sent the range disappearing up its own orifice.  Instead we get on with a solid story, that happens to involve funny people and witty prose.
If you’re going to write a funny Doctor Who, you’ll probably be wanting Tom Baker.  One of the reasons this one feels so era-appropriate is that the wit comes organically from his character: his boggle-eyed irreverence is all there, as he bounces between amusingly blunt put-downs, bizarre observations and delightfully inane chatter.  Favourites include: “‘Well, that was interesting … in a tedious and incomprehensible sort of way.’”  /  “‘These belong to the usual occupant of this room, some judge person.  Probably away hanging people, somewhere.’”  /  “‘About to die?’ the Doctor said, indignant.  ‘I should hope not.  There are a number of interesting things I haven’t quite got round to yet.’”  After Evolution’s badly miscalculated psychopath, it’s good to have a recognisable Fourth Doctor.  Romance captures him so well, you’d think the notorious ad-libber himself had tinkered with it.  (And he would do so in the end.  For Big Finish, to pick one example, when he orders two glasses of water he specifies: “‘Neat!’”)
Romana is on glorious form as well, all haughty intelligence and withering tolerance of the Doctor.  “The Doctor fixed him with a manic stare.  ‘What, fade into the background, keep a low profile, listen out for vital clues, that sort of thing? … We do that sort of thing very well, don’t we, Romana?’  ‘Yes, I do, Doctor,’ she said and led the way out.”  Probably one of the reasons Season 17 was (at its best) funny is that these two in particular are so untouchable, nearly everything else might as well be farce to them.  You wouldn’t want DoctorWho to be like that all the time, but it makes a wonderful diversion.
Best of the rest is Menlove Stokes, the conceited, run-of-the-mill artist in residence, whose buffoonery is made delightful by his ridiculous verbiage.  “‘For no charge, I offer you, as I offer every wretched soul that finds his way to this, the darkest of all destinations, the opportunity to endure forever in my work … Your essence will endure long after your physical envelope has been snuffed from our miserable sphere.’”  /  “‘I have it, you’re from the arts committee, another of their wretched inspections.  Oddstock, isn’t it?  No, no, he’s dead, isn’t he, although how anybody could tell I don’t know.  You’re not that fool Mellenger, and you’re certainly not Sybilla Strang, as she’s a woman, just about…’”  /  “‘Ludicrous!  It’s my duty to warn you, I suppose.  Your talent stretches no further than your deluded imagination!’”

And the prose obligingly morphs to offer chuckles around him: “The fellow was frantically smoothing at his bald head with one hand, attending to hair that had disappeared long ago.”  /  “The butt of a standard issue blaster came down across the back of Stokes’s head.  All sixteen flabby stone of him slid heavily to the marble floor in much the same fashion as a badly designed building slips off a cliff.”  A few other characters raise a smile as well, particularly a condemned prisoner who responds to her imminent death with “‘Typical of you young people nowadays, it’s rush, rush, rush.’”  It all has that Season 17 air, with a whiff of Robert Holmes in its black humour.  A good vintage, despite The Horns Of Nimon.
As you can tell from glancing at the cover (and if you’ve somehow missed it, a chapter heading spoils them in advance), there are Ogrons as well.  What a treat – and just why didn’t the series make more of them, anyway?  Aggressive but loyal, dogged but utterly stupid, they tap into the same delightful vein of Aliens That Are A Pain But Aren’t Actually Evil that Douglas Adams would made his own.  Probably the best thing about Malcolm Hulke’s Frontier In Space novelisation was the stuff about their society, like how they worship monsters and pray for nothing more than them not eating Ogrons.  The Doctor’s attempt here to trick one into swapping a jelly baby for a rifle is a hoot; there’s a bit where one Ogron asks another, earnestly amid all this violence, if he had a nice journey down to a planet; and there’s this gem: “‘I will buy necklace for wife,’ said his mate.  ‘And a big stone.’  The first Ogron grunted his encouragement.  ‘Yes, it is good to have a big stone.’”  They might be mercenaries and they might not be good guys, but they’re people.  I love ’em.
Completing the main list of Comedy Stuff is Spiggot, who’s a bit like the flipside of Stokes.  Here is a 100% comedy character who, sadly, just doesn’t work.  Or he works too well, depending on your point of view.  A self-aggrandising, cliché-spewing caricature of a cop, always going on about how he plays by his own rules and gets results and “Angie and the kids” left him because of it, the text leaves us in zero doubt about whether we should be impressed.  “To emphasise his point, Spiggot attempted to click his fingers but failed.  Undaunted he continued.”  /  “Spiggot crushed another plastic cup.  Unfortunately, he had forgotten to drink all of the coffee that had been inside it and the scalding liquid splashed over his sweater.”  Naturally enough, everybody else hates Spiggot, either because he’s haphazardly interfering with their plans or just because he’s a bore.  Even K9 switches off his audio sensors.
And, well, I get it, but nevertheless Spiggot falls into that inevitable trap: irritating characters are irritating.  At least Stokes’s fustery demeanour leads to some amusing reactions, like his cringing infatuation with Romana, or his combustible hatred of his more talented protégé.  Spiggot is just one joke walking endlessly into a wall.  We get it, nobody likes you.  So sod off.  (Apparently he’s based on a TV character called Spender, played by Jimmy Nail.  I wouldn’t even have caught the reference at the time, let alone now, so I can’t comment on how good a spoof this is.  But as a creature in his own right, as many readers would view him, Spiggot’s just naff.)
The villains are a mixed bunch.  Xais is a disembodied human-hating mutant who can kill people with a glance (but is also, rather needlessly, super-strong).  She has an affecting back-story, largely missing from the Big Finish version, but even so she’s not the most complex of characters.  Kill all humans, huh?  So what else do you want to – oh right, that’s it.  And her accomplices, the Nisbett Brothers, are about as successful as Spiggot.  A very straightforward East End crime duo (in space), all their well-spoken thuggery and references to dear old mum feel completely old hat.  They’re a weak beer spoof of a spoof of the Kray Brothers.  Sure enough, Spiggot and the Nisbetts are rather flat in the audio version as well, as the actors flail inside these broad and boring caricatures.  Xais at least lends herself to a bit of scenery-chewing.  On the whole, you’ll be very grateful for the Ogrons.

If you’ve seen the Season 17 Rosetta Stone that is City Of Death, which obviously Gareth Roberts has (I’m guessing a few dozen times), you’ll know not everything can be hilarious: you need a straight man and some things at stake.  The Romance Of Crimehas plenty of time for a solid plot involving a murderous psychopath, a shadowy crime-lord, two unstable criminal brothers and… actually almost everyone in this is some kind of appalling criminal, regardless of the Rock Of Judgement’s inmate population.  As the story wears on it’s mostly a series of double-crosses between shady characters.  It’s satisfyingly action-packed and it ticks along, but it’s rather apparent that there are no innocent people at stake, or not for very long.  Margo, a troubled prison guard, ends up being a host for Xais, and while that’s very sad the story ultimately leaves her behind without much fuss.  Meanwhile the criminal mastermind working with Xais – oh why not, I’ll keep it a secret – is the requisite straight man, but he’s so surrounded by villains that he doesn’t have much impact.  They’re all diminished (especially Xais) for having the share the limelight.

There’s hardly an epilogue when the show’s over, besides a cursory “this is how it all turned out” courtesy of the history books and a return to the Doctor and Romana’s Monopoly game.  A good time is had, but it’s not a particularly thoughtful experience.  And that’s… fine, I guess.  This is meant to recreate an era, and I could well believe this story, with its delightful comedic moments and its occasionally duff ones, could have been made in 1979.  I can see why some have dismissed it as bringing nothing new to the series.  I’d contend that it’s nice to at least try to get the series right once in a while.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #41 – Warlock by Andrew Cartmel

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#34
Warlock
By Andrew Cartmel

Certain authors have reputations among fandom, perhaps for their use of continuity (Gary Russell), their mostly comic work (Gareth Roberts), or for advancing the range and what it can do (Paul Cornell).  If I had to pin something on Andrew Cartmel’s work, besides his obvious depth of interest in the Doctor and Ace (based on his years of experience with the TV show), it would be a kind of vivid unpleasantness.  Warhead was the first New Adventure to really embrace the darker aspects of Doctor Who, pushing the show away from kids and towards the forward-thinking, rebellious young adults Cartmel wanted to encourage to begin with.  It embraced cyberpunk and environmental issues in a well-plotted, exciting story, and I wasn’t really sure why some people had a problem with it; Cartmel’s prose was evocative, his world was engrossing, he understood his characters and the thing moved at a pace.  Yes, there was the odd disturbing dream sequence, certainly a few deaths, and the world he had constructed was utterly downbeat, but it was never excessive.  There was hope and there was victory.

But now I’ve read Warlock, which is presumably the one they were talking about.  You thought Warhead was unpleasant?  Bless.  Warhead is Cartmel delivering Christmas presents in full Santa outfit compared to this.  Warlock is a novel so determined to push boundaries of taste that at one point (if you’ve read it, perhaps you can guess) I wanted to throw the thing across the room.
On some level, it’s my fault.  I’ve decided to read all the New and Missing Adventures, the good, the bad and that other one, to get the full experience. And I will, but that means I will come across books which, in the ordinary run of things, I’d simply stop reading.  I’ve come close a few times due to sheer incomprehensible prose (Time’s Crucible, Strange England), and goodness knows these books can be boring and/or pointless, but – and I accept this is sheer personal taste – Warlock was too miserable for me.  I’m pretty sure some of it was utterly gratuitous as well.
Like Warhead, Warlock is ostensibly a soapbox.  That’s not to say it doesn’t have a plot, or that you should roll your eyes at its message, but it is about the message.  We’ve done the environment; now we’re onto the war on drugs, and clinical trials on animals.  These issues aren’t unrelated, since pharmaceuticals are a major reason for animal testing, but it still felt like Warlock was fighting two slightly random battles at once.
The title refers to a new drug on the market which causes some forms of telepathy.  (It does a few other things as the plot requires.)  You can probably guess why the Doctor is investigating it – and you will have to, as he doesn’t say so until the last 20 pages.  He dispatches Bernice to infiltrate IDEA, an American anti-drugs organisation.  Meanwhile Ace has fallen in with a couple of animal rights activists, Jack and Shell, both habitual warlock users, who are intent on taking down a local animal testing facility.  Some of the tests involve warlock.
The novel hops between the two stories, but only for a short time between Bernice and Ace.  Benny witnesses a drug bust gone awry, carried out in spectacular, if slightly protracted style by Cartmel.  (There’s a moment where the “spirit of warlock”, i.e. a sort of wind that is generated by its users, travels around the room searching for a narc.  If you can forgive me being mindful of the book’s length, this goes on a bit.)  Afterwards she’s only there to gather information on warlock, but IDEA suss her out almost immediately, rendering her useless.  Luckily she escapes back to the Doctor’s HQ, the infamous House On Allen Road.  Incredibly, this no doubt exciting sequence occurs between chapters.  And that’s basically it for Bernice.  Cartmel writes her well, but plot-wise, she’s phoning it in.  After her contribution the IDEA portion of Warlock follows Creed, a burnt-out cop working for them.
Ace has more to do, or at least a higher page-count.  Unwittingly captured by the people running the tests, Ace and her new friends find themselves victims of a warlock drug trial.  Their pets – notably Chick, a cat the Doctor delivered – are swept up as well, so they can be experimented on.  And it’s around here that you can probably guess why I had a hard time with it.  Am I against animal testing?  You bet.  So is Cartmel, or he wouldn’t devote so much energy to the suffering of animals, and the deliberate cruelty of their torturers.  (One of them, Tommy, is inevitably a psychopath.  There are probably a fair few in the trade.)  I’m 100% with the message he’s sending out here, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit through pages and pages of unspeakable things happening to animals.  If anything, I didn’t need it to be spelled out.
Animal cruelty was used as a random, clumsy signifier in St. Anthony’s Fire, whereas at least it’s making a point here, but wading through it is no easier for that.  It’s just morbid to linger on it, but it ought to at least warrant some poetic justice for the bad guys.  And yet, while Tommy and his equally awful sister do get offed, it’s curiously quick and/or off-screen.  Like Bernice’s escape from New York, it’s odd that the book chooses to skip its heroism and (however violent) closure, leaving its misery largely untouched.
To redress the balance, Cartmel’s prose is once again excellent and evocative.  He even shifts to the animals’ perspective, firstly to heighten the emotion of murdering them, and secondly to lay a bit of groundwork for one of warlock’s unexpected side-effects: Ace and co. escape their confines by transferring their minds to the animals.  Which would be a great, if somewhat twee way for the novel to go, if the animals then escaped.  Surprise, it’s no help at all.  One by one, it’s torture time, just the same as if they were being vivisected themselves.  Offing Tommy only makes it worse.
This is one of the reasons I got so mad at the book: it is utterly miserable, mixed with a sense of complete hopelessness.  It’s everywhere.  Bernice is off to investigate warlock with the Americans?  They will suss her out and assume she’s a traitor.  Ace is nipping off to help some new friends?  They will all be captured, including the pets, and quite possibly all of the above will die.  Vincent and Justine, characters from Warhead, come looking for the Doctor for help?  They’ll be captured by IDEA.  Justine goes on the run afterwards?  Oh, she’ll get randomly scooped up by a prostitution ring.  Why not?  And hey, since she’s pregnant, let’s have a crime boss immediately try to kill her baby.  Creed rescues her, so naturally, cherry on the top, she’ll be so grateful that she’ll chuck her marriage away on the spur of the moment and shag him.  Any more for any more?  (Since you ask, there’s a rape back-story in there, and yep, Chick gets killed.  That one seems inevitable given the book’s subject matter and the fact that they introduce Chick at all, but even so, god damn it.)
I read Warlock pretty quickly, and Andrew Cartmel’s rich writing is largely the reason for that, painting the emotions and back-stories of everyone here in a way that adds to the story.  But the main thrust of it for me was just trying to power through the really horrible stuff.  Since there is no let up, I read more than half of it in a day.  I just wanted it done.
Cartmel does have some interesting and worthwhile things to say.  I’m not convinced the War On Drugs stuff is exactly subtle: the drug dealers are violent psychopaths, whereas IDEA make no bones about their moral greyness and/or hiring of violent nutters.  Even the police hate them, and there’s a moment near the end where one of their key figures owns up to the whole thing just being a smokescreen to keep drugs illegal; it’s as close as the novel gets to just being a blog post, if it weren’t for said villain having his own Machiavellian reasons for IDEA.  (The drug itself is thoughtfully likened to a tree or a stream – alive, but not culpable.)  Similarly, the characters take down the invalidity of animal testing with aplomb: since an animal’s reactions can only ever give a suggestion of human behaviour, you’re basically torturing and killing them for a bunch of guesswork.  But whereas Warhead tied its ideas about the environment, and mankind’s complicity in its decline to a tight story, Warlock is a lot woollier in its plot work, progressing the story of Ace inches at a time, and keeping important stuff (like what warlock is, or who the shadowy Mrs Woodcott is) to the last minute.  Generous helpings of peril keep it moving, but when you stand back from it there isn't much actual progression in there.
Another obvious comparison to Warhead is the Doctor.  Once again he’s a shadowy figure that causes (sometimes bad) things to happen to achieve results.  The difference is that he’s barely in Warlock.  You might say similar of Warhead, but he was pulling the strings in the previous novel, with all of Ace’s actions coming from him.  His absence suggested influence, whereas he spends fully half of Warlock tinkering with computers at the house on Allen Road, instead of actively helping anybody.  If he’d bothered to help Shell and Jack, well, their story might have gone differently, and he’s got no idea where Ace has gone, just a sinking feeling when she’s been gone for a while.  I won’t know until the next novel, but perhaps this is all character development: his negligence leads her and others to a horrific ordeal, and it’s not her first.  But there’s no evidence of any ill feeling here, what with the time allotted, and he’s simply not in the book enough for it to feel like a big deal is being made.  The Doctor just ducks out of the narrative until it finds a use for him.  It’s a bit disappointing coming from Cartmel, who is justly thought to have a good understanding of these characters and their relationship.
What with keeping the truth about warlock (let me guess, it’s alien?) to a last-minute minimum, and keeping the Doctor and his companions apart, and putting quite a lot of the story on Creed and latterly Justine, I wondered if Warlock was a little too divorced from Doctor Who altogether.  Even with direct (and I admit, pretty neat) ties to a previous novel, and with the Doctor ultimately doing what he’s doing to right a wrong, it feels more like Andrew Cartmel’s Misery Soapbox Drama than actual Doctor Who.  There are still things to like about it, such as those Cartmellian action sequences that really put you in the middle of them, the depth of justifiable rage and argument in his views, and the way he subverts things like pace, so that the Doctor and co. have been staying at Allen Road for a year when we meet them, and Bernice’s drug bust is in full swing before we even know about her joining IDEA.  I’m still not sure the pace works, what with something having to give and that often being the bit I wanted to see.  On the whole, I don’t know why the book is this long.
I’m a bit torn over it.  Warlock is a well-written novel and it makes some good points.  It also tries much too hard to rub the reader’s face in it, and I have to object to that.  It’s not automatically a bad thing if your story is bleak and downbeat, or if bad things happen in it.  Certainly it adds pathos.  Nonetheless, I reserve the right to feel that when investing this much effort in a book, I shouldn’t feel like crap afterwards.
6/10

So I Married An Axe Murderer

Doctor WhoThe Husbands Of River Song2015 Christmas Special

It’s Chriiiiistmaaaaaaas!  (2015.)  A time to relax, and where Doctor Who is concerned, pretend the finale didn’t happen.
Put your feet up and forget about Clara, for starters.  No longer must the Doctor contend with a plucky Mary Sue, with her convoluted past and weird universal importance, her (apparent) obsession with him marked by that I-could-take-or-leave-you lack of any genuine interest.  No longer will he have someone running rings around him, doing everything he can only better, showing little respect for her supposed best friend and suggesting a writer that thinks the Doctor is some sort of runner-up prize.
So obviously the thing to do next is an episode about River Song.
This week, Peter Capaldi is me.What’s left to say about her?  (Well, indeed.  But here we are anyway.)  A time traveling relationship could have been fascinating for the Doctor, but just putting things in the wrong order isn’t enough: you need someone the Doctor would actually want to spend time with, who would mean even more to him than a companion.  And River isn’t that.  With all her Doctory bells and whistles (now including a “sonic trowel”, an “augmented lifespan” and a secret drinks locker in the TARDIS), she’s just another Mary Sue.  If time itself weren’t constantly sticking them together, he’d have very little reason to make her acquaintance.  Alex Kingston has always played it how it’s written, and fair enough.  Sadly she’s written as monumentally full-of-herself and clawingly desperate to be a fan-favourite.  Oh, and she’s a psychopath: a word Steven Moffat uses with all the wisdom and moderation of a toddler discovering a bag of poo, though thankfully he keeps the bag sealed this time.  (The Doctor is a psychopath too, remember?  Psychopaths are cool!)
So, having killed her in her second episode, then revealed her entire torturous back-story, and later As for the scene itself, new suit, sad expression, Singing Towers… yep, it sure is that thing they said it was.  What does it add?  There’s drama to be had, with River realising her time has come and the Doctor having to accept it too, even going so far as to say that Happy Ever After is just a lie we tell ourselves.  The trouble is this is Doctor Who, and anyone who saw the last episode knows what they’re like for this sort of thing, i.e. Steven Moffat is completely obsessed with killing his characters and simultaneously obsessed with not.  So of course River’s “last night” can actually go on for 24 years.  Here we go again, refusing to face consequences, pretending that a long and comfortable retirement with plenty of wiggle room is anything remotely bittersweet.  Boo ruddy hoo, enjoy your quarter of a decade with your feet up.  At this rate, we’ll probably return to find her in the Library, lightly snoring.  But oh well, a portion of fandom can tick off the Singing Towers now.  Worth it.
The journey to this moment is ostensibly one of River’s wacky adventures (set at Christmas) with the Doctor tagging along.  She somehow doesn’t spot that it’s him, as she’s only aware of the Doctors up to Matt Smith and apparently she can’t take a hint.  There is fun to be had, especially when the Doctor gets to “have a go” at reacting to the TARDIS for the first time – his theatrical amazement is an easy episode highlight.  But this is also a scene where River casually admits she steals the TARDIS whenever she wants: “I can take it, do whatever I want for as long as I like, pop it back a second later and he’ll never know.  He’s never noticed before.”  Oh, how I hate this, obviously.  Yet again we’re putting River above the Doctor, or rather putting the Doctor in a dunce cap.  It’s taking a character of unknowable mystique and catching him asleep on the lav.  And it’s really hard not to suspect that the reason for this superiority isn’t, deep down, just the laddish sitcom trope that River is a magical woman and the Doctor is one of us loveable, clumsy, haven’t-got-a-clue men.  That’s certainly how it’s written and played.  “Are you thinking?  Stop it, you’re a man, it looks weird.”  For Christ’s sake, Steven, if you want to write more Coupling then go away and do it.  Doctor Who isn’t Coupling.
There’s not much to say about the story itself leading up to that.  It’s all Christmas froth, aka stuff he’d probably turn down the rest of the year.  So we’ve got River being “married” to a warlord that’s just a human head in a robot suit; the head has a diamond in it, which is what River’s really after so she can return it to its real owners.  Ha, not really!  She’s stealing it to sell to some criminals, something she’s evidently excited about and proud of.  Lovely.  The criminals are the Shoal, those hollow-headed dudes who appeared a year later in The Return Of Dr Mysterio.  I had absolutely no memory of them when I saw that, which kind of makes sense after their less than scintillating one scene in this.
Oh, you lot again.  (Timey wimey.)
Once again: POCKETS.  You're getting goo on everything, FFS.Various other bits of flotsam include Matt Lucas as Nardole, who also showed up in the next special (after 2016’s slight lack of episodes) and he’s coming back for Series Ten.  So what’s he like?  Er, he’s like Matt Lucas doing a squeaky voice as if he’s on CBeebies.  Sorry, is there more?  He’s a talented and versatile comic performer, and probably an excellent actor since that seems like a transferable skill, but you wouldn’t know it here.  Squeaking and hamming, and at one point being decapitated but in a silly sci-fi way that’s played for laughs (imagine that, a death scene with no consequences), the character’s main distinction is being slightly too annoying to forget.  I have no idea why they’re making him a regular.  Greg Davies plays the evil disembodied head, and he’s mildly amusing as he screams revenge threats, but then that’s all there is for him to do.  There’s an entire ship full of people at one point, apparently all utterly awful – so much so that the Doctor and River leave them to die in a spaceship crash.  They’re “not worth it,” he pronounces afterwards.  Except why not?  He’s happy enough with River, who delights in telling everyone she’s a psychopath.
The meat of the story is the Doctor for once seeming to be one step ahead of River.  (You’d think all this not-recognising-him business would go somewhere, but no, she’s just pointlessly thick this week.)  It allows him to observe her with some detachment, since he is basically a guest in an episode of River Who.  And apart from a wry smile at the novelty of being in this position, he doesn’t like what he sees, with her cavorting with genocidal maniacs, planning to off people for the jewellery in their heads, and wiping her partners’ memories (of things like marriage) because they’re “annoying”.  Even so, by the end of the episode he’s taking her to the Towers for 24 years of marital fun.  In a rare moment of sense, River announces that although she loves the Doctor, she knows he couldn’t possibly reciprocate.  Damn right, but then here we still are at the end, pretty much acknowledging that he does after half a dozen years insisting that it’s a two-way street.  I’d be grateful for that re-examination of her character if it worked at all in context.  Either she’s his obsessive follower or his wife; they’ve left it too late to throw in that other possibility.

This doesn’t make me mad like Hell Bent.  It’s poor, obviously – a bit of “ehh” Christmas flim-flam, it tries to do something interesting with River Song which may be categorically impossible, and otherwise just floats along under a snow machine.  Peter Capaldi sells the length of time they’ve known each other and lets the Doctor have a good time, and Alex Kingston does her thing, but to a non-River fan, all of that’s futile.  River is beyond done now, and the one thing I know for sure about her relationship with the Doctor is that it tends to be the worse for him, so let’s just count our blessings and wave her off.  Again.  And cross our fingers this time.

Death Becomes Her (So Die, Already)

Doctor Who
Hell BentSeries Nine, Episode Twelve

Welcome back to Finale Town.  It’s been a while since I looked forward to one of these.  Doctor Who has had an awful lot of practice, but it’s stuck in a downward spiral where they’re concerned.
Russell T Davies used to make them bigger and… well, bigger every single year, chucking in armies and other armies and universes and kitchen sinks until even he didn’t sound like he knew what was at stake any more.  Steven Moffat’s finales are (mercifully) on a smaller scale, though they still do the “all of time and space are dying” stuff, albeit with the vim and excitement of a court order.  Since he took over in 2010, Moffat’s end-of-year focus has been on the characters… which I would absolutely applaud, only he insists on asking bloody stupid questions about his characters and then not answering them.
No doubt you’re familiar with his greatest hits.  “Will the Doctor die?”  “What is the Doctor’s name?”  “Is he a good man?”  (That’s “duh, no”, “duh, we don’t know” and “duh, yes.”)  Series Nine seems eager to keep up the tradition, only the mystery bag is dangerously near empty.  The Doctor has a “confession dial” on his person, which a Time Lord has when they’re about to die.  So maybe he’s going to…?  Okayso obviously he isn’t, and you all know that, so what else?  There’s the mystery of his face looking a bit familiar… only we got that out of the way in Episode Five, and it was pretty obvious anyway.  There’s the story of Clara The Increasingly Risk-Taking, which is also sort of done and dusted now, unless you’re the kind of unscrupulous cynic who thinks it’s impossible for a main character to die two episodes before the series ends.  And may I say, shame on you.
Oh hi Clara.  You're looking well.  Gasp etc.I guess that leaves The Hybrid: an age-old myth that apparently scares the Time Lords (in a “we conveniently didn’t mention it until Series Nine” sort of way), that inspires… nothing, actually.  This must be some new kind of threat that doesn’t do any actual threatening until you know what it is, and right up to the last twenty minutes of Hell Bent (the Series Nine closer) the Doctor still doesn’t know what the bloody thing is.  Oh, there’s some talk of time or space being ripped apart because of it, but we don’t actually see any of that; we rarely do in Moffat’s finales, which are always so sure they’re solving mysteries that’ll redefine the show as you know it that they forget to blow anything up, or really say anything of note.
The Time Lords seem desperate to know about the Hybrid, anyway, which is apparently the reason they trapped the Doctor in his confession dial for billions of years.  Except hang on – what was it for again?  Surprise, it’s typical old Moffat mission creep: this was the Doctor’s personal confession dial, a portent of his death, until it became a Time Lord prison designed to wheedle secrets out of him.  And how is all that personal-hell mind-buggery supposed to work, since the Doctor doesn’t have the answers?  Didn’t the Time Lords wonder, say after the first billion years, if they were wasting their time and ought to try something else?  Like asking him?  Why, besides giving us something to cliff-hang about, were they going on the offensive in the first place?  If he kept dying and starting over, why does he seem to remember all of it?  If he doesn’t, what’s he moaning about, considering the Doctor who escaped didn’t have to die like the rest?  And if he’s in a tiny prison that’s presumably in a different dimension, like the TARDIS, how can he literally punch his way out of it?
It’s all an excuse to get the Doctor back to Gallifrey (hold that thought), as well as make him sufficiently mad that he won’t want to come back, thus keeping the show away from the place deemed so boring Russell T Davies had to blow it up.  Which works if you bear that in mind (although I dunno, you could maybe write Gallifrey as interesting?), but it also means all that excitement and jubilation we should feel now that Gallifrey’s returning is AWOL.  (And, release that thought.)  It’s Gallifrey!  This time last year, the Doctor was smashing the TARDIS with his fist because the Master lied about where he could find it.  Hooray and stuff!  But no, we’re sticking with one of the Doctor’s least appealing qualities, his I Am The Doctor And I Always Win-ness, so we’re glowering instead of celebrating.  On arrival he stands up to authority (so far, so Doctor), uses words instead of weapons (ditto, up to a point), and tells Rassilon to “get off my planet”, and the rest of the planet’s High Council that they’re “on the next shuttle”.  That bit’s… maybe not so in character.
He’s angry, which is understandable what with Clara dying, plus that billions-of-years-smacking-a-wall thing.  But Rassilon?  Bear in mind this is the top brass on Gallifrey, until he became Timothy Dalton and tried to blow up the universe.  How do we square that one with this one?  Why is he back in charge and not in Time Lord jail, or dead?  (Eh, I guess the Master survived.)  And how could you possibly talk that blow-up-the-universe nutbag into buggering off on a space scooter?  Yes, yes, The Doctor Is That Awesome, you don’t need to keep telling us, but considering they successfully trapped him for blah-blah-many years, isn’t it rather pathetic that a heated exchange is all it takes for them to give up and roll over?  I mean, are we absolutely sure they’re antagonists?  Was Rassilon the only one to worry about?
Hey ho, the Doctor’s got an ulterior motive for all of that anyway: this Hybrid stuff is a handy excuse to go and see Clara, pluck her out of her timeline moments before her death, bluff the Time Lords and voila, off they go adventuring!  Just as soon as he shoots his friend, the General, so they can get away.  Because “Regeneration is Time Lord man flu,” apparently.  Yeah, hell no it ain’t.  Coming one episode after a script that brilliantly evoked the psychological and physical horror of going through regeneration over and over again, and in a series that regularly makes a song and dance about how devastating it is to change bodies, this is an utter slap in the face, for starters.  Say what you like about the Doctor being angry or pushed to the brink, but tossing away another guy’s regeneration is not something he’d have countenanced before.  He doesn’t dwell on it here, big surprise, and neither does anyone else.  Death, in the Moffatverse, just sanded off another one of its edges.  And the Doctor’s stance on violence continues to wobble all over the place.  (Of course, you could say this is the Doctor showing his resentment for regeneration, because after all, Clara didn’t get to regenerate.  Time Lords are a bunch of cheaters, what have they to complain about?  He does say of Clara that when she dies, she stays dead.  But Heaven Sent makes it pretty clear it’s not as simple as saying the reverse of that is true for Time Lords, the bunch of jessies.  So no, sorry.  It’s just shit.)

Can't tell if representation or trolling.Not optimistic.And yeah, Clara’s back.  Big duh.  Now, to be fair – oh, I am trying – this is almost a good way to end her story.  I’d be happier if it ended in Face The Raven, of course, since that was the point of Face The Raven, but if we absolutely must dig her up and carry on, fine: have the Doctor “rescue” Clara and attempt, futilely, to convince her to carry on living.  Convince himself, almost, that she isn’t on borrowed time.  And gradually she realises that’s exactly what’s happening and that this is an illusion; she realises that death is something that happened to her because of her actions, she’s ready to accept that and in time he will be too.  Then she’ll go back to (literally) Face The Raven, die just like we already saw, and the Doctor will go off into time and space having learned that everything has its time.  You could have the Doctor come to terms with his grief in person, literally talking to his dead friend, and then they could end it with a big audience cry, if you like that sort of thing.  None of this is even a stretch: it’s clearly where the story is going for the most part, with Clara saying she “doesn’t want this”.  Or, she could change her mind, grab a TARDIS and go off on adventures, having learned nothing.

Guess which one he picks.
Zipping to the end of the universe to shake off the Time Lords, who want Clara dead almost as much as I do, the Doctor meets Ashildr again.  (She remembers him and Clara perfectly, which is odd as two episodes ago she relied entirely on diary entries to remember past centuries, and now she’s millions of years older.)  With little else to do, she’s got a theory about the Hybrid (who hasn’t?): it was the Doctor and Clara all along!  If the Doctor keeps her out of her timeline, time and space will go phooey!  So the Doctor decides on a memory wipe.  Even he points out that the show has done this before, but this time there’s a twist, sort of: Clara fiddles with the memory-eraser so it’s the Doctor who forgets her.  Then she gets to zoom off with Ashildr – having apparently forgiven the immortal’s part in her own demise – going back to Gallifrey (and her death) “the long way round”.  Which means she can take as long as she bloody well likes, living (on death-pause) presumably forever until she decides otherwise.  Which is a pretty gigantic advantage over most of the other people in the universe, innit?  Incredibly, there are people who consider this a sad ending for Clara.  Jackpot, more like.
Face The Raven was, tediously, all about the Doctor, but via Clara: you can live by his example but you can’t be him, or you’ll get yourself killed.  Except for Clara, though, because she’s awesome?  So what was that episode about, now that the rug has been pulled out?  What are we saying about Clara, other than here is yet another Moffaty woman in the Doctor’s life who can get one over on him?  She doesn’t seem remotely bothered about the universe tearing itself apart.  Neither does he, to be fair, but what does that mean?  Hooray, they’re both a dick?  Does Clara’s super-fan-dabby-dozy spin-offy ending come at the expense of all life in the universe?  Not so spiffy now, is it?
After an entirely expected change of scenery in the opening seconds, there is admittedly some intrigue about an apparently amnesiac Doctor stumbling into a diner to meet an apparently amnesiac Clara; as the episode progresses, we wonder which one of them is playing dumb, and it’s well played by Capaldi and Coleman.  The Doctor sits there and relates his story (i.e. the episode), seemingly unable to recall Clara.  Except we’re seeing the episode as it unfolded – with Clara in it.  We can only assume he doesn’t specifically remember what she looks like, and you can’t really show that unless she’s got a bag on her head in all the flashbacks.  But is not being able to doodle her really that big a deal?  At the end, when the diner (which is actually Clara’s TARDIS) noisily dematerialises around him, why doesn’t he twig?  When he sees his own TARDIS at last, which has a whacking great mural of Clara on it, aka the woman he’s been talking to all afternoon… well, “tada” then, surely?  Ultimately, if him remembering her is so bad, why is Clara getting him to run through these events at all?  Sure, she wants to say goodbye and all that, but she’s running a mighty risk.  But then, is the universe in trouble now or not?
THIS.Come back, all is forgiven.This all hinges on what you want from Clara, and what you consider a good ending.  If you want her zooming around Doctor Who land potentially having her own spin-off, no matter what, it’s probably a punch-the-air moment.  If you’re desperately sick of the show sticking its fingers in its ears whenever something warrants a consequence, worse luck.  Net result, Clara hasn’t learned anything and neither has Doctor Who.  Quite the opposite, with all that bollocks about Time Lord man flu, and the rest.
I’ve gone almost the entire review without discussing the other bits, like actors and action scenes, I guess because the episode’s focus is on all that character stuff (and throwing it in the bin).  So: it’s cool to have Gallifrey back, or it would be if they didn’t make it a huge anti-climax.  Remember when the search for Gallifrey was a big deal?  I guess you can add Where The Smeg Is It Then to the list of big questions not worth waiting for.  The “Cloisters”, an underground part of Gallifrey surrounding a database full of dead Time Lords, are suitably creepy at least.  In there are all the famous Who monsters, because um, but at least that’ll please the kids.  The best bit is the spooky soundscape.  (The “Wraiths”, aka faceless Time Lords zooming around on tracks, hover between eerie and hilarious.  Wheeeee!)
The guest cast seem pretty good on paper, with Clare Higgins returning as Ohila (one of the ladies on Karn in the first episode this series), pretty much just to scowl and tut.  Donald Sumpter makes a half-hearted Rassilon, now a daft old man shouting ineffectually, but he’s off to a bad start as the character doesn’t add up.  Peter Capaldi works his usual magic, only hampered by the bum notes in the script.  It’s much harder to separate Jenna Coleman from the absolute dog’s dinner they make of Clara’s departure.  And poor old Maisie Williams is handed yet another version of Ashildr, now with a decent memory.  Perhaps her personality changes as often as the Doctor’s face?  That hypothetical Clara/Ashildr spin-off is off to a rocky start; its heroes have had multiple episodes devoted to them but, through the magic of Moffat, still aren’t recognisably people.

And that’s the final irony of Clara.  For all the effort of telling us over and over that she’s the Doctor's equal, if not his superior, they’ve never once made her someone I can relate to or like on anything more than a superficial level, so she’s never been worth the effort.  So long. 

What else, er...  I’m glad Capaldi got his own screwdriver at last.  (And with a whole one year to show it off!)  He also gets to muck about with a guitar again, although having him play Clara’s “song” as literally the tune Murray Gold came up with is, though undeniably economical, also undeniably wank.  The Ye Olde TARDIS set is a beautiful treat, obviously.  But come on: if you want something substantially good to think about, go and watch the previous episode again.
Hell Bent mostly makes me tired.  It does the same old “big and small at the same time” combo as all of Moffat’s finales, and despite flashes of hope, it bungles them both; it delivers a bogus happy ending and in doing so, flushes away any hope of a point to this story.  Worst of all, that really comes as no surprise.  Something certainly needs to regenerate, and it’s not the Doctor.

Groundhog Doc

Doctor Who
Heaven SentSeries Nine, Episode Eleven

Writing is hard.  It is the creation of something from nothing.  Of all the ideas and images swirling around your head, you’ve somehow got to pluck a precise sequence that complement each other and build, that go somewhere and hold together, that are entertaining.  Ideally this isn’t something you’ll aim to do just once, and every time you’re diving back into that maelstrom, making sense of white noise, returning with music.  Oh, and it can be quite fun sometimes.
Now imagine you’re a TV writer, and you’ve got to do this over and over again, yearly.  (Well, on a good year.)  And now imagine the thing you’re writing over and over again has been written over and over again by countless other people already.  Having trouble coming up with something new?  Boo hoo, do it anyway.  No one-off guest writer spot for you.  Oh, you wrote Blink, did you?  Brilliant.  Now do better than that, and often.
Similarly, I've got to come up with a funny caption every time,even with episodes I like.  #TheStruggleIsReal.Anyway, the whole "Doctor's personal hell" thing is a bit irrelevant, isn't it?(No?  Well, I tried.)It’s perhaps kind to bear this in mind on some of Steven Moffat’s bad days, when things frustratingly don’t come together, such as his often barrel-scraping Specials and finales.  But the TV writer’s journey, particularly the Doctor WhoWhen It’s Past Fifty writer, muttering “Oh shit oh shit oh shit” as the shoot approaches and the cursor blinks on a still-empty page and for god’s sake we’re on Series Nine already, has never been quite as apparent as in Heaven Sent, which metaphorically puts it on the screen for you.
The Doctor materialises in a castle.  He is alone, apart from a slowly approaching spectre that symbolises death, probably literally.  He’ll have to run around evading the creature, and the only way to find answers (and escape) is to rearrange the castle, which occurs only when he confesses something.  Each time he’s in peril, he has to retreat into his mind and frantically figure out how he’ll get out of this one.  And he’ll have to do this again and again and again to escape.
Well, I mean, there it is.  Practically a blank page to start with, nothing but hero and threat chasing each other, almost writing itself as it goes until it’s something clever, and the only way to succeed is to keep doing it.  Making Doctor Who in a nutshell.
And the meaning goes deeper than that.  Here be spoilers, but this is a popular episode so you’ve probably seen it: to get out of here the Doctor must literally punch his way through a wall that’s harder than diamond, and that would take an eternity, so when he’s exhausted or dead the only possibility is another Doctor.  So he returns to the teleporter that brought him here, which still houses a handy Doctor pattern from when he arrived, and beams him up.  But he needs energy, so he uses his own expiring body as fuel.  Thinking aloud to a non-existent Clara, he says: “How long can I keep doing this?  Burning the old me, to make a new one?”
Well, I mean, there it is.  The ongoing story of the Doctor, living and dying and living again.  It’s tempting to view the Doctor’s regenerations as a handy get-out-of-death-free card – you might as well, that’s what they are – but if you think about how that would affect an actual person over centuries, and certainly how David Tennant’s Doctor referred to it (as “some new man sauntering away”), it does involve actually dying in order to start again.  Time Lords: they don’t live forever, they just die and get born more often.  And whereas The End Of Time focussed on the toll this takes by making the Doctor sulk and drag his feet (which, to be fair, could be pretty compelling), Heaven Sent shows the determination he needs to keep doing this.  Quite often he wants to roll over and rest, or let’s face it, finally properly die, but that’s just not who he is.  There’s a mystery to solve, a villain to vanquish, and – in the long run – a death to avenge, so he doesn’t have the option to stop.  In character terms, as well as a possible window to the writer’s process, Heaven Sent is absolutely bloody wow.  Who knew he still had something like this in the tank?
And that’s just the writing.  Here is an episode, peeking indulgently over 45 minutes to about 53, of just Peter Capaldi.  Okay, there’s the thankless dude in the monster costume shuffling down corridors, and there’s an inevitable Jenna Coleman cameo (although she’s totally still dead, you guys), but it’s ultimately just him.  Many, many, many hims, but that’s not the point, and he held my attention absolutely from Minute #1 to the end.  Talking to himself like Spider-Man after too much coffee, this could easily run the risk of “Describe everything that’s happening” syndrome, but instead it naturally feeds the Doctor’s impulse to investigate (and his need to have someone to relate it to), as well as adding to all that natty meta writer stuff.  As the Doctor ruminates on how to cope with a death, tries to figure out why the stars don’t look right, and ultimately relates the whole situation using a certain Grimm’s fairytale, it becomes yet another performance full of light and shade.
We’re losing Peter Capaldi’s Doctor soon, and gaining goodness knows what instead, and looking back now, Heaven Sent almost rubs it in.  Series Nine reshaped the excessively crotchety Twelfth Doctor, sometimes poorly, adding cuddly nonsense like electric guitars and hoodies and trying too hard to sand off his edges.  But Capaldi also unearthed a real warmth, and held onto that vicious streak that made him interesting.  It’s all there in Heaven Sent as he longs for an absent friend and rages against an invisible foe, but this stuff is peppered through Series Nine as well, quality of the episodes be damned.  I’ll probably cling to each episode of the next series, good or otherwise, just for this guy.
Why does frying yourself leave the skull behind?Isn't that the one bit you'd probably have less of?There are nitpicks, of course, or it wouldn’t be Doctor Who.  He says the wall is made of something 20 times harder than diamond; well, your fist wouldn’t make a dent however many times you punch it, then.  Duh.  What kind of diamond isn’t immune to fists?  (And not that it would help, but shouldn’t he at least use the shovel he’s got lying around?)  Then there’s the question of how every room eventually resets to how it was when he arrived, except for the diamond wall (which is diminishing) and the painting of Clara (which is ageing), and quite possibly those chalky and scratchy messages left by, presumably, previous hims.  (And if he can leave messages, why is he buggering about with riddles?)
Rather more ominously, there’s this ongoing nonsense about the hybrid.  Not only is it very hard to believe that Steven’s got another really good arc story in the tank, even after a slam-dunk episode like Heaven Sent, but this episode makes it apparent that the hybrid is something that will change the Doctor’s past as we know it.  And that’s always disappointing.
Did the Doctor’s life story become richer from knowing that he needed Clara Oswald popping up over and over to help him out?  No, and we didn’t believe it because we’ve never seen her before.  Did we really believe the Doctor’s name was going to be revealed?  No, because we know they’d just be making it up 50 years later and it couldn’t live up to the hype, and in any case he’s been called the Doctor for about 95% of his life so who cares; it would be like revealing that his birth certificate had a typo.  And now we’ve got the hybrid, a “prophecy” (those are always terrible) which is apparently the real reason he left Gallifrey.  Dun-dun-DUN?  Moffat loves re-establishing the fundamentals, or at least dicking around with them, as it proves this was really his show all along.  The moment the Doctor starts talking about the real reason he left Gallifrey, a sinking feeling ensues.  Oh yeah, Doc?  Bit odd that it hasn’t come up in fifty-plus years, innit?  Ditto this prophecy in general, which apparently has the Time Lords shit-scared, but not so much that anyone has ever actually talked about it or been remotely troubled by it.  When it comes to ideas in a long-running show, you just can’t cheat mileage.
But frankly, most of that hybrid stuff – including the continued and depressing hints that the Doctor is so awesome that everyone ought to be terrified of him, which is an ongoing hubris kind of like Clara’s, only they probably won’t address it – falls on the next episode, which has the unenviable task of resolving everything.  And as for the niggles about how this world works, well, they’re not important enough to get in the way of what’s good about the episode.
Moffat finds time to come up with another “elemental” monster, this one representing the slow, inexorable march of death.  Bloody hell, that’s not for kids!  And he comes up with a way to genuinely threaten the Doctor, more so than just threatening to off him: this prison, much like the earlier Pandorica (which was great until they threw it away minutes later), is far more of a nightmare for a long-lived person than just death.  Deep down he must know he’ll always find a way out of that, and that in itself is something to regret (as sometimes, a long rest sounds pretty nice compared to the alternative).  Trapping the Doctor for good, though, in a way that regeneration won’t help, rings very true as his absolute nightmare.
There’s tons here to unpack, and yet Heaven Sent still feels like an economical bottle show.  Not every note of it is perfect, but it’s a pretty obvious step up for the show, and evidently it’s bigger on the inside.

Death Of A Clara!

Doctor Who
Face The RavenSeries Nine, Episode Ten

Oh bugger, it’s nearly time for Series Ten!  I’d better get caught up.  I wonder why I stopped?
Oh all right, it wasn’t just that I was bored senseless by Sleep No More.  (Slept quite well, thanks.)  I was also not sure whether to review the finale in three chunks or all at once, and by the time I’d decided, they had started disappearing from iPlayer.  So to recap: I reckon these episodes, though linked, are really separate beasts.
Beast #1: Face The Raven.  In a series made up of two-parters – and Sleep No More, in case you nodded off – it’s a breath of fresh air to have something standalone.  Sarah Dollard presents us with a tidy little plot: Rigsy (the loveable graffiti artist from Flatline) is back, sporting a sinister number tattoo that’s counting down.  The Doctor takes a look and quickly realises Rigsy only has 500 minutes to live.  Finding out why, and where he gained his tattoo, creates a natty and very Doctor Who-ey mystery, as the intrepid trio look for an invisible “trap street” in London.  (As someone who routinely gets lost in London, this isn’t too far from my average trip.)  The Doctor’s methods for finding it, such as counting your steps and looking for “glitches”, seem like just the sort of clever stuff kids can mimic after school.  With, y’know, supervision.  (“Hey look, I found a creepy alleyway!” might not end well otherwise.)
"Quick, Rigsy!  Hide!"Good thing he brought his hoodie, hat and magic shadow.It’s only a pity the trap street is so easy to find.  After a bit of character building with Clara, where she almost plummets out of the TARDIS but isn’t remotely worried about it because she no longer has any concept of danger, we’re in a mysterious part of London that looks uncannily like Diagon Alley.  Or what with the slimmer budget, Neil Gaiman’s London Below.  (I’ve yet to read Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London books, or Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police books set in a shadowy London, but suffice to say Unseen Magical Bits Of London are ironically easy to find in fiction.)  The street itself is still a lovely idea, with various alien life-forms hiding in peace, including certain familiar “monsters” who’ve sworn off violence.  We don’t meet many of them, which is a bit annoying as I’d love to know how a Cyberman could change his ways.  And the street really does look like a bunch of movie tourists will appear and take photos of it at any moment, only to get too close and break parts of it.  But top marks for the concept.
Running the street is Me, or Ashildr.  She’s older now, still looks the same, and relies on her diaries for ancient memories of things like the Doctor and Clara.  She protests that she’s the good guy, keeping the street safe from the Doctor, but I’m not so sure given her actions later on.  More on that soon.
Rigsy has been here before, been accused and found guilty of murder, and given a death sentence.  He was sent home to say goodbye to his family, which seems merciful except that his memory was wiped, so he had no idea what had happened or that he was dying.  (The Doctor points out that this doesn’t make any sense and, well, there’s no answer to that.  Moving on?)  The case against him isn’t exactly airtight either.  As per Ashildr, “He was found over the body.  My people were angry, I had to act.”  Guess we can send Poirot home, then.
We soon find out that the laws of the street are absolute, and it’s the only way to maintain peace, but even so that’s a pretty good case against capital punishment, since being in the same street as a corpse is apparently enough to convict you.  (He didn’t even pull out a blood-soaked knife!)  However, suddenly benevolent (hmm), Ashildr shrugs and says the Doctor and Clara can talk to anyone they like if they think it will help prove his innocence.  Off we go into the episode’s middle act.
Now, it’s very easy to pile on Sleep No More as the cause of my Series Nine forgetfulness, what with it being both boring and crap, but if I’m reallyhonest there’s not much to this episode either.  After the intriguing start, with its topographical mystery tour, and before the talking-point ending, there’s not a lot of middle.  No one really has any information on what happened to the murder victim, and there isn’t any evidence that Rigsy did it, so there’s not a lot to investigate or do.  He was convicted, so they have to make him not convicted before the episode ends.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning that Doctor Who is pretty bad at murder mysteries even at the best of times.  They rely on logic and clues, but the world of Doctor Who means it’ll probably turn out that an alien wasp did it.  Face The Raven doesn’t even get that far: the murder is (spoiler alert) not a murder at all, it’s merely a ruse to get the Doctor to the trap street (the trap street, AHEM) for reasons they’ll explain in another episode.  All the Doctor, Clara and Rigsy do is figure out this is all about the Doctor (sigh), discuss how the death sentence works, and Clara figures out that she can transfer it to herself (and use Ashildr’s promised protection to weasel out of actually dying), hoping the Doctor will somehow sort it all out later.  All of this works well as character development for Clara, whose hubris has been growing steadily more irritating (and dangerous etc.), but as the actual plot of an episode it’s very noticeably lacking.  (There is a built-in excuse for this, i.e. they can pointlessly “investigate” all they want but they won’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late, and then the Doctor will have no choice but to volunteer for the trap.  But that doesn’t add any more substance to the wait.  They certainly don’t rescue Rigsy through cunning or guile: he would always have been let off the hook once they got to the final countdown, provided the Doctor obligingly stuck his head in the noose.)
At least it goes somewhere.  The time has come for Clara to bite off more than she can chew, and in her over-confidence she has sentenced herself – entirely pointlessly – to death.  She brought this on herself by trying to act like the Doctor, and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do about it.  For once, death takes its toll.  That doesn’t happen much in this iteration of Doctor Who, and it’s treated with solemnity here, as the Doctor (beautifully understated) asks her to stay with him while it happens, after raging at Ashildr to fix it or else.  Irritatingly sure of herself to the end, Clara wrests control of the situation away from everyone, tells Rigsy to shut up, tells the Doctor she knows what he’s going to say and does what she wants anyway.  Urgh.  I’d be lying if I said I was sad to see her go.  Her bulletproof overconfidence may be deliberatelately, what with her revealing the Doctor’s intentions to Ashildr without clearing it with him first, and giving away the TARDIS phone number without asking, but god she’s annoying anyway.
"Oh no, not again!"(This will be hilarious if I actually remember to review The Snowmen...)Buuuut... while it’s temping to view Clara’s (still bloodless and gentle) death as the show finally holding itself to account, for a companion who never needed the Doctor anyway, or for far too long treating death like a glib inconvenience you can wish away, this still doesn’t actually work.  Face The Raven is Episode 10 of 12.  It ends with a To Be Continued.  It’s not even the first time Clara has “died”.  (Even ignoring Oswin Oswald and Victorian Clara, this is at least her third time on the deathy-go-round.)  And it’s Doctor Who under Steven Moffat.  I mean... seriously, if you looked at this and thought “Oh, bye Clara, see you never,” then welcome to Doctor Who, since this is obviously your first episode.  What kind of concussion does one need to believe this?  People actually cried at this?!(And spoiler alert: it works even less well in hindsight.)  While the plot ultimately revolves around the Doctor, the actual episode, all beginning, checking-of-watch and end is really about Clara paying the piper; since we all know she probably won’t have to, what’s it for?  A murder mystery with neither a murder nor a mystery?  Not one that it resolves, at any rate.
Hey, it’s not egregious or anything.  The few people we meet in the trap street are suitably scared and engrossing, arguably including the one with an unconvincing plastic face stuck to the back of her head.  They could all do with more development just as we could do with more answers, but considering Hallard originally wrote the episode sans Clara death, it might be fair to assume they originally got it.  The deathly raven special effect is pretty neat.  And Peter Capaldi, unsurprisingly, works wonders: the last ten minutes see him ping-pong between heartbreak and fury, and you’ll probably rewatch it a few times.  There’s also some nice little moments, and even some fun banter with Clara.  “Can I not be the good cop?”  “Doctor, we’ve discussed this.  Your face?”  “Oh yeah.”  It is disappointing that the episode turns out to be all about the Doctor, as every series must be these days; Face The Raven seemed like it might be a nice, self-contained little mystery at first, but no, it’s yet more rampant obsessing over the Doctor, in case you had forgotten the laughable prospect of his impending death, again.  For better or worse, Clara just falls in the cross-hairs.
Crucial yet somewhat oblivious to all this is Ashildr, who I’m less keen on this time.  Maisie Williams had a good excuse to show off between The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived: she added centuries to her character and it was chilling and sad.  She’s become a bit of a different person here, ruling her own little kingdom with an iron fist (or throne, heh), and it’s not really clear how she should play it.  She spars with the Doctor at first, then lets them all get on with their “investigation,” and when her trap is rumbled and Clara mucks it up she’s honestly mortified and all with the puppy eyes.  Yeah, but “I never meant for anyone to get hurt” doesn’t really fly when all you wanted was to summon the Doctor (and send him to his probable doom anyway), and you used a trumped-up death sentenceto do it.  Wasn’t it quite likely someone would get hurt?  Especially since she mind-wiped her chosen patsy, who might never have called the Doctor at all and just stunk up his flat in a few days.  And speaking of people getting hurt, the entire street is up in arms about a human murdering one of their own.  How are they going take the revelation that Ashildr faked the whole thing?
Ehhh.  Face The Raven is passable enough, with a few neat ideas and some good acting.  Also it ends on an intriguing note, with the Doctor teleporting off to who knows where.  But it is still a lot less than the sum of its parts, and not just because there’s two more to go.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #40 – State Of Change by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#5
State Of Change
By Christopher Bulis

Here we go.  I’ve owned this one since childhood and, for whatever reason, never actually read it.  Perhaps it was the historical setting (more or less) on the cover, coupled with the old hard-wired fan logic that Historicals Are Boring.  Whatever the reason – probably laziness – I didn’t have any expectations when I got around to it this week, but with the amount of time it’s been sat on my bookshelves, I certainly had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t disappoint.  It’s written by Christopher Bulis; while I enjoyed his first book, I’m aware that he’s not a favourite among fandom.

Fortunately, fandom has been wrong before, and here we are again: the historicals are jewels of the show’s early years, and Christopher Bulis can turn in a very entertaining novel.  State Of Change is no Marco Polo, but it was good enough to make me clock-watch at work, eager to get on with the story.
It’s about an alternate timeline, and Exodus already showed that I’m a sucker for this sort of thing.  (All right, maybe Back To The Future Part IIgot there first.)  The Doctor and Peri visit Ancient Rome so they can mingle in history, only a TARDIS malfunction has wrought havoc, and the Romans now have modern-day technology, electricity, even (inevitably!) zeppelins.  Meanwhile there’s a power struggle between the children of Cleopatra, with no clear ruler decided between the calculating Selene, the deluded Alexander and the self-deprecating Ptolemy.  There are murderous plots aplenty.

Interestingly, the book doesn’t get too concerned with how to fix history; we’ve already done that in Exodus, so it makes a nice change for the Doctor and Peri to work more on resolving the power struggle, and helping the generally noble Ptolemy overcome his siblings.  State Of Change is not a pure historical: right from the start it’s a fusion of history and sci-fi like The Time Meddler, and later on things get even more sci-fi as it turns out “alternate timeline” was merely the obvious first impression.  Nonetheless, it romps along like a lighthearted ’60s story.
Bulis apparently loves this period of history, so it must have been a pleasure to muck about with it.  (I didn’t know it too well, but there’s sufficient explanation in the book, and a quick glance at Wikipedia didn’t hurt.)  Once you’re over the shock of history not going to plan, there’s a certain lived-in fun to this version of Rome which almost recalls Terry Pratchett’s manky cities.  The characters are the same relatable archetypes you’d find in an old historical, especially a money-grubbing dealer of magic spells and a troupe of loveably hapless thieves.  There are a number of delightful comic moments that have a certain Classic series ingenuity, like Peri frightening off grave-robbers by loudly bellowing “WHO DISTURBS THE SLEEP OF CLEOPATRA?”, and the Doctor flummoxing a gladiator by running away from him, raising a hand to stop him, tying his shoe, then carrying on.  There’s a black humour to the familial villains, and even the odd touch of empathy; the maniacal Alexander believes in himself so utterly, it’s hardly his fault he’s wrong.  (“‘I doubt if I’m actually capable of making a mistake – wouldn’t you agree?’  Vitellus gaped helplessly for a moment, then slowly bowed his head.”)  I often chuckled helplessly.
As to the story’s sci-fi trappings, and the whole mess the Doctor and Peri are in, it’s all the work of a mysterious someone who for the sake of a 23 year old surprise, I won’t name.  (I already spoiled it for myself researching these books, but there’s no sense in ruining it for anyone else.)  One of the lesser-used villains from the television series is put to, frankly, rather odd use here.  The title refers to a general instability in the “alternate” Rome (as well as the obvious zeppelin stuff), which is causing crises for the Doctor and Peri (more on that shortly), as well as for the villain.  Disguised as one of the ruling triumvirate, they are cautioned by the Doctor that they’ll get too wrapped up in their host’s squabbles, and sure enough, their grand plan morphs from getting out of here to ruling this world.  I think I enjoyed it more when they really did just want to get out of here – because not every antagonist in Doctor Who wants to blow up a planet.  Why shouldn’t they occasionally have the same basic interests and survival instincts as the Doctor?  The character reaches a point of vagueness where it’s worth wondering why they were even involved, but then apparently they were a relatively late (and not entirely voluntary) addition to the book, which would explain it.  The great story about this character has yet to be written, alas, but they’re perfectly okay in this one.  I suspect State Of Change would work without them.
And speaking of lesser-used characters, at long last we get a book for the Sixth Doctor.  I know it’s only the fifth Missing Adventure, but there seems to be a certain stigma about him in the Virgin canon.  Whenever past Doctors are invoked – and it happened a lot around the anniversary – Sixie didn’t get a look in, unless it was a grim reference to his being knocked off to make room for the next fellow.  In Decalog, the short story featuring the Sixth Doctor largely side-lined him.  The One With The Patchwork Coat wasn’t even Christopher Bulis’s first choice for this novel.  (To be fair, that’s common enough: Craig Hinton wanted to write a New Adventure, John Peel apparently envisaged Evolution as a Fifth Doctor story, and a number of New Adventures authors seemed to wish they were writing somebody else.)  State Of Change still can’t resist putting the Sixth Doctor at a distance, as if he’s the show’s redheaded stepchild.  He spends almost no time with Peri, communicating with her via video and voice link, and after the halfway point he’s quite literally not himself.
Broadly speaking, Christopher Bulis gets him right.  There’s the requisite sarcasm, plus he’s a stickler for elocution and verbosity.  His dialogue can often be as dry as fossilised toast, but you can hear Colin Baker delivering it.  (There’s more going on under the surface, though not so subtly: “For a moment, the tenderness that the Doctor seemed to hide beneath his superior mannerisms was revealed, and Peri sensed the true depth of his concern.”  Oof!)  But then, owing to that weird instability, the Doctor “retro-regenerates” into his past selves.  Later, with a handy gadget, he channels them deliberately.  We haven’t seen this gimmick since Genesys, and funnily enough it was used to revisit the same (apparently all-purpose) Doctor: in order to survive a gladiator match, the Doctor must channel his third incarnation, fancy footwork and all.
This is great if you’re a big fan of Pertwee, but it does make it curiously pointless that this isn’t a Jon Pertwee book.  It also leaves the current Time Lord looking absolutely hopeless.  (The jibes about his weight don’t help.)  Yes, his ingenuity is generally useful, but he’s reliant on the Third Doctor for roughly half the book, and most of the climax.  It’s such a handy and reliable gimmick that there’s really no need to worry about him transforming against his will at all – and as a side-note, the characters are rarely worried about anything in this, which adds to the relaxed fun of it all, but with the obvious trade-off of tension.  Still, towards the end we do get a (cringily fannish) sequence where the Doctor morphs back through all his past lives.  Retro-regeneration is a cool idea, and you could probably do something eerie with it, but in practice it’s just an excuse to trot out catchphrases and Terrance Dicks idioms, and allow the Sixth Doctor to improbably knock people out with a nerve pinch.  We’ve got a whole range just for these old Doctors – we don’t need these references any more.
Completing the set, Peri is going through changes too.  As you can see on the cover, she’s having a relapse to her Varos days and is transforming into a bird again.  (If you haven't seen Vengeance In Varos, spoiler alert, she turns into a bird for a few scenes.)  I can’t quite figure out why this story is set so much later than Varos, when it hinges on Peri’s mental state in it, and fear of the body horror inflicted on her.  (There’s even a pretty grim addition, when it’s revealed she had an “accident” during the process.  Thanks for that.)  She goes full Bird-Woman in this, complete with flying.  In a world with mutated animals such as hydras this makes a certain sort of sense, and obviously it’s inspired by that previous story, but it still feels like a different genre altogether when Peri swoops heroically to the rescue.  She’s characterised pretty well otherwise – a little brash but empathetic, good at encouraging other people to help each other, gently tolerant of the Doctor – and Bulis does try to examine the effects of her transformation on her psyche.  The bird thing is still a bit random, and all things considered Peri accepts it rather easily.
And yes, it’s worth mentioning the nude scene.  Though not nearly as troubling as the short story Fascination, which mixed Peri and sex like that was automatically what should come to mind about her, it’s still a bit frown-inducing that she is deposited naked in the control room due to a problem with the swimming pool.  We get it: Nicola Bryant looks good.  It doesn’t exactly cover fandom in glory to be so hands-in-your-pockets about it all the time.  (She gets her kit off again later, although most of her’s covered in feathers.  It’s still ick to be focussing on it.)  Peri also has a pseudo-romance with Ptolemy by the end, but to be fair this is more an old-school Doctor Who cliché than Peri-lechery; even Barbara couldn’t seem to land anywhere without tripping over a marriage proposal.
State Of Change has a jolly and exciting pace, even if it all comes a bit easily.  It pleasantly jumbles history and sci-fi, re-uses a few old ideas without reeking of repetition and much of the character writing is excellent.  Despite knowing the “big” spoiler (which isn’t that important anyway), the story kept me guessing; broadly speaking, it’s a fun novel that I’d read again.  It stumbles in is its use of the regulars, and the odd sense of obligation that apparently comes with them.  It’s as if each Missing Adventures author is assigned a Doctor and/or bad guy at random.  It’s hardly a character assassination for any of them, and it’s not enough to ruin the book, but that thematic “instability” is too vague and all-purpose to pin it on.  I’m hopeful that the range will settle down and know its characters better.  In the meantime, there are clearly some rollicking tales to tell.
7/10

NB: Hi again, hypothetical constant reader!  From here on, there'll be a slight change to these reviews: I'll continue posting them infrequently (because I haven't read them all), but 5 at a time, from Monday to Friday.  The next 5 start with Warlock by Andrew Cartmel.  I figure it's better than posting one review in a blue moon, or waiting until I've read everything with the words Doctor Who printed on it, by which time the sun may have gone out.  Happy trails!

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #39 – Parasite by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#33
Parasite
By Jim Mortimore

Odd, this one.  Perhaps even by Jim’s standards.

Parasite exhibits many of the strengths I’ve come to look forward to in Jim Mortimore’s work.  There’s a flair for cinematic action, evidenced in Blood Heat and in its Director’s Cut, and of course in my favourite bits of Lucifer Rising.  Parasite can ratchet tension with the best of them, particularly as a paragraph break or a chapter comes to a head, usually in an ohshitwhatdowedonow?! final line.  There are great ideas, again abundant in all of the above books: the Director's Cut in particular went to some interesting places, without the worry of ongoing series continuity.  And the characters are written well, especially the Doctor, distilled to an iconic essence but kept relatable and fun.  And yet, Parasite seems to be missing something.

It’s set in a mysterious “Artifact”: a vast, enclosed ecosystem where the laws of gravity (for starters) fluctuate on a whim.  There are walls made of ocean, floating continents that dip in and out of them like salmon, and various flora and fauna all about, much of it hostile, or just inexplicable.  It becomes increasingly clear that the whole world is linked and alive somehow.  I imagine it was quite a light-bulb moment when Jim thought of this place, and what it’s capable of.  It’s fascinating, and a lot of fun watching the traditional rules of alien planets get bent out of shape, right from the start as Bernice floats out of the TARDIS.

And there are also those excellent moments – “cinematic” is the word I gravitate towards, like how my stomach practically turned in Lucifer Rising during the bridge collapse.  There’s a sequence early in Parasite where a great wall of the Artifact moves of its own accord, devastating a space shuttle and everyone on board – the dread is absolutely palpable, the images striking.  Similarly there’s a bit where Ace is drawn inexorably into a wall of ocean which is just gloriously nightmarish.

Where Parasite stumbles, I suspect, is the plot.  Not trying to sound glib here, but there isn’t much of it.  There’s some political setup, as the world of Elysium is gradually torn about by different belief systems, hence expeditions to the monolith-ish Artifact that may help to shape their understanding, and their future.  One of those expeditions goes awry early on (curiously the second expedition don’t seem to know about this; I’m not sure how much time elapsed between) and another comes along with similar results.  The Doctor and co. arrive, they inevitably split up and go with different groups, and then everyone involved pretty much just tries to survive events and/or make sense of the Artifact as all hell breaks loose.  The environment becomes more dangerous, landscapes and cities are built and torn apart, there are a stupendous number of monkeys involved, characters are possessed by intelligences and poisoned by fungi, time passes in surprisingly large bursts and it just goes on until it’s done.  It’s a bit numbing by the end by which point, thanks to a bit of mind-reading, Ace delivers an enormous amount of exposition about the Artifact and how it all works.  It’s a lot to get your head around in one go, especially so late in the book, and coming from Ace it’s positively surreal.

This is what happens when the Doctor is out of the action.  Seeking to prevent a malign intelligence from using him, he pretty much switches himself off for most of the book.  Which is fair enough, as Bernice and Ace are (exposition notwithstanding) rounded enough to shoulder the story.  Both have moments of very evocative memory (again, that filmic quality), with Ace in particular making some firm steps towards her departure from the series.  We rely on her military experience (during those books where she was absent) to inform her present, which is about as good as post-Love And War Ace gets, if I'm honest.

Ace must do some terrible things to survive here, and the Doctor can’t reverse all the damage.  I do hope this isn’t leading to another of those (seemingly standard) falling-outs, as it certainly ends on a familiarly dark note between the two.  In fact, dark much?  Ace murders someone almost by accident, everyone except the main three gets killed, the planet-killing monstrosity of the title lets one of its “eggs” go before the Doctor can stop it, and he’s just going to let that one go.  He has zero intention of wading into an Elysium civil war or saving them when their own Doomsday Machine comes alive.  He's still capable of amazing stuff, when he can be bothered: see him shrugging off a bullet wound to one of his hearts.  (This bit is rather too off-screen.  Why bother giving him an apparently mortal wound so close to the end, if it’s just a shrug-it-off thing immediately afterwards?  There's also an odd reference to a maybe-possibly-I-think regeneration taking place, apparently put in there because Virgin were toying with a new Doctor at the time.  Since that went nowhere, this bit's bloody odd.)

I wish the finale was a little more measured out, so stuff like that can be processed.  After such a slow burn of nature taking its disastrous course, and characters simply existing at its mercy, it’s a little sudden to start explaining it and assigning blame.  As an emotional climax, the reader has already seen so much horror that the Doctor's comparative bastardliness seems like an afterthought.  See also the I-suppose-you-could-call-him-that villain of the piece, Alex Bannen’s son Mark (see Lucifer Rising): there isn’t time to develop his personality flaws to the same degree as his father’s, so he just becomes a rather odd recurring figure, a tool as much as the gun he’s holding in the finale.  There’s a recurring motif of his mother’s death on Earth, but like the political situation on Elysium, this is buried quite low in the mix.

A number of the characters feel a bit sketched in, although that may be because so many of them die before we get to know them.  One of them recurs in a different form: Benjamin Green, a man on a mission, who has a fateful meeting with Bannen and becomes "Midnight", a swirling, evolving, mind-reading mass of… something?  He’s probably meant to evoke the Artifact in miniature, but I spent all of his scenes wondering why the other characters weren't gawping at him in utter bogglement.  On the one hand I think it’s a shame Parasite doesn’t come with illustrations, as it’s such a rich and evocative setting; on the other hand, good luck drawing stuff like Midnight.

If I’d reviewed Parasite at the halfway point, I’d probably come across more positive.  Before it began its downward trajectory towards utter chaos, I was able to marvel at the ideas, and enjoy the little moments.  Many of these involve the Doctor, who in (what I like to think of as) typical Mortimore style manages to mix a slight otherworldliness with ordinariness.  He is firstly iconic: “A familiar shape, backlit by the fire.  Hat.  Umbrella.  Eyes turned in wonder to the storm, drinking in the view.”  But he is also able to sneak up on people without making a sound, which is just deliciously other.  The text often revels in the sheer incongruity of his appearance, such as a moment where he literally floats past, doffing his cap but able to offer no actual assistance.  All of this, plus an utterly disarming fallibility: “‘I had the situation completely–’  Only Gail saw the Doctor’s fingers crossed behind his back, and shuddered, ‘–under control.’”  (Also – not quoting it in full, but it’s on page 75 – there’s an adorable bit where the Doctor gets moss on his hands, and can’t get the stuff off, much to Bernice’s amusement.)

Towards the end though, Parasite becomes a somewhat incidental exercise in getting all these events and disasters on the page, with the characters nearly as passive and helpless as we are.  Just as there isn’t time to marvel at what the heck Midnight even is, we never really tackle the ludicrousness of the vast society of monkeys, who occasionally need to commit mass suicide, some of whom can talk, but only in a flat and pedantic manner.  It should probably be hilariously odd; instead it’s just a very peculiar idea among many, like some vast galloping monsters and an enormous grey wall of death.

Parasite is commendably ambitious, bringing to mind Venusian Lullaby.  At first this you could call this a pretty lazy parallel: Paul Leonard took a similar approach to his alien life as Parasite does to its world, aka as "out there" as possible.  But it’s a literal comparison too, as Bernice recalls the Venusian process of “remembering”, a method of keeping the memories of the dead by eating their brains.  (Yum!)  It makes sense to draw a line between these books, as both err on the side of ideas rather than plot, and heck, I do appreciate that it’s hard to strike a balance.  The weirder your ideas, the more a conventional plot structure might seem like you’re conceding something.  But I do wish Parasite had some more individual motivations to go with its great, turning wheel of life, and personified its aliens a little more than giving one of the monkeys a name, and letting a character like Midnight ponder on the periphery.

It’s possibly the strangest New Adventure since Transit, and I suspect it has its ardent fans, as well as their baffled opposites.  It probably comes down to what you want in a book.  If you want a new world, you got it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #38 – The Crystal Bucephalus by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#4
The Crystal Bucephalus
By Craig Hinton

Say it with me: The Crystal Bucephalus.  The Cordon Bleu Syphillis.  The Captain Blue Sympathies.  The Crusty Bucket.  The Diamond Dobbin.  The Emerald Equine.  Join in, everybody!  Anyway, Craig Hinton’s first Doctor Who novel has a great deal of fun at the expense of its own name, and at long-winded verbiage in general.  Set in an exclusive time-travelling restaurant, there’s an air of snobbery and absurdity about it.  For a fair stretch, it’s quite determined to be a comedy.

And not just any comedy.  The premise is the most obvious yoink from Douglas Adams since Gareth Roberts came to town.  The gleefully impossible setting, the pompous personnel, the menagerie of alien oddities, even the belated second coming of a futuristic deity all feel like a nod, a wink, or a deliberate hacking cough towards The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.  But it’s more affectionate than plagiaristic, and to be fair to Adams, his Milliways was more a one-scene gag than a story in itself.  For all its faults, The Crystal Bucephalus does not tire of its namesake.
At first, it feels like Craig Hinton is going to keep it in the same vein as Hitchhiker’s Guide.  The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are accused of murder – well that’s a hoary old trope, but it really lends itself more to farce than drama, since we always know they didn’t do it.  And while we are dealing with the Fifth Doctor (not a comedian by any stretch of the imagination), Tegan and Turlough are both known for their eye-rolling snipes.  All three are in fancy (and therefore, slightly silly) costumes, having been dragged away from historical France; the mental image alone is oddly amusing.  And to play off his innate stuffiness, the Doctor is soon butting heads with the absurd Maitre D’, with whom Hinton has buckets of fun: wherever the man goes, amusing turns of phrase will follow.  “He expanded like a preening baboon.”  /  “His fingers splayed out on the surface like fat spiders.”  /  “His jowls wobbled with pride.”  /  “He sailed away like a galleon in full sail.”
Hinton even pushes the character of the Doctor itself towards comedy in a way that’s either bold or bloody silly, depending on your disposition.  Having a long-standing bank account that occasionally gets “embarrassingly large” due to compound interest, the Doctor occasionally offloads some dosh onto ludicrous business ventures, such as the Bucephalus.  (And apparently, the British film industry.)  As such, he owns the place, which leads to a couple of embarrassed eyebrow-raises later on when he realises the ensuing chaos is his fault.  Hmm.
Other whimsies includes a one-note maniacal torturer who (unless I miscounted) appears in one scene; Chelonians, who have yet to put in a “serious” appearance and don’t buck the trend here; some Alpha Centaurians in all their hysterical glory; an effete Cyberman, plus a Cyber-toilet (!); a religion that parallels the now totally forgotten Christianity, right down to Lazarus and “the Final Dinner”; and a much-deserved wah-wah-wahhh! ending for the villain of the piece.  But most of the above is really just silly window-dressing, or more appropriately for Craig Hinton, fanwank.  The Crystal Bucephalus spends most of its time on science fiction, not comedy.  More’s the pity.
And that’s not to say all the comedy works.  Let’s address the elephant (oh, all right, the giant crystal horse) in the room: yes, I think the Doctor’s ongoing battle of attrition with his bank account is bloody silly.  Why would he even have one?  Doesn’t that suggest a certain stability in the Doctor’s life that plainly isn’t there on the screen?  (Or thus far, in the books?)  As for sinking his extra pennies into random “ludicrous ventures” and never checking up on them, what did he think would happen?  If he’s got so much money to spare, why not use it during the many occasions when money would have been pretty handy?  Such as everywhere he’s ever visited?
There might be something to this as a Seventh Doctor story, as was originally intended.  (Hinton It’s funny that fanwank is such a buzzword where Hinton is concerned – he coined the term, of course, but I don’t think he’s that bad for it here.  It makes sense for different alien races to mix and meet in the Bucephalus.  Since the place is famous for history going on in its rooms, it’s a legitimate way to world-build.  (I wonder if I’m more forgiving of it because this is a Missing Adventure.  Legacy attempted the same sort of thing, only it felt like the narrative was grinding to a halt to reference these things, and it seemed fundamentally at odds with the New Adventures remit.  I still think Gary Russell should have gone the whole hog and made it a past Doctor story, since it was a sequel to stories both televised and made up, but hey ho.)  What The Crystal Bucephalus does enjoy in abundance is technobabble.  Heaps and reams and oodles and great steaming quagmires of the stuff.  Oh, lordy, it’s a bit much.
It quickly becomes apparent that the Bucephalus needs a bit of explaining.  How people time travel, how “real” people are when they get there (and hence whether they can change history), how one can interfere with its workings, how one can stop that, what state of affairs the universe is currently in, what would need to go wrong to mess it all up – and like Legacy, Bucephalus occasionally grinds to a halt to explain this stuff.  And it’s tedious.
Even worse: the main thrust of the narrative is not the opening Whodunit, which turns out to be a red herring, but instead somebody interfering with the workings of the restaurant (well, the time-travelling bit – we’re spared any subplots about gone-off food), and the attempts of the place’s architect (Lassiter) to fix everything, and back and forth, ad infinitum.  This stuff is about as exciting as watching a film about hacking – with two people staring at screens and yelling technobabble – but without the aid of dramatic music.  Hinton does try to up the drama here and there, such as cliff-hangers where Turlough and Tegan both seem to fatally disappear.  This not only doesn’t work when you do it twice, it doesn’t carry any weight once: the atmosphere is already too frivolous and complicated, not to mention it’s a daft stretch of disbelief that we’d kill anyone “main” in between two TV stories they’re both in, but the Doctor still trots out a quick monologue about all the dead companions he’s failed, which feels out of place and subsequently rather comical.  When some characters doeventually get (rather unnecessarily) killed, there’s an air of utter disbelief about it.  Dramatic irony, perhaps, finally landing us with some consequences after so much jargon and nonsense, but it still feels bloody cruel.
Besides wading through phrases like “A Legion’s navigation ganglions are right next to its matriculation net”, and chopping and changing characters and settings so often that momentum never really builds (at worst, I counted six changes on a page), there’s a bit of religious satire going on with the whole “Lazarus” thing.  And, don’t panic!  It isn’t anything like St. Anthony’s Fire.  While it does seem like a crude piss-take at first, it eventually builds to a somewhat heartening point about how religion is what you make of it, and if you decide to build something about helping each other, it doesn’t really matter what started it.  Which is good, since (spoiler alert?) what started it is not the wonderful, harmonious guy everyone was expecting.  Not all the ideas of the Lazarus Intent come off – there’s a priest who’s distractingly good at kicking arse, and there’s a racist undercurrent against reptiles that only feels like it’s going somewhere – but for making a point about religion and not making me roll my eyes, points are given.
There’s also a genuinely amusing twist on the gag about the Doctor’s bank balance.  On his way to fetch the TARDIS, he’s re-directed to a random ice planet, and the only way to get back into the Bucephalus network is to have a restaurant worthy of inclusion.  So, he starts one, taking five years in the process and apparently building a few meaningful relationships along the way.  It’s utterly throwaway, or arguably thrown away (we’re talking two or three pages), but considering the Doctor must inveigle his way into the restaurant biz, it makes a lot more sense than the book’s earlier conceit.  (As well as making more sense than Blood Harvest, where the Seventh Doctor ran a speakeasy.)
It's worth wondering if the book makes much sense of its characters, particularly as Hinton swapped them out when Bucephalus was only a few chapters old.  It’s not exactly a character study anyway, so he mostly gets away with it.  The Doctor doesn't always seem right – there's a bit where he hypnotises someone, which seems like entirely the wrong Time Lord – but Turlough and Tegan are analogous enough to Bernice and Ace to make the switch, and more pointedly, all three TARDIS folk spend their time palling about with somebody else.  This is much more a story about Lassiter (Doctor), Tolqvist (Turlough) and Diva (Tegan) than it is about the main three, which often runs the risk of leaving the regulars flapping pointlessly in the background.  Especially Tegan, whose subplot initially leads her to a “leisurely browse” and some “meandering” in London circa 1985, plus later on – brace yourself – swimming.
Despite the work that obviously went into the balancing act of technobabble and guest character melodrama, however, the stuff between Lassiter and his personal life / the villain Arrestis and his acolytes all gets a bit tedious as the thing wears on.  I was too exhausted from the technological disasters going on relentlessly everywhere at once to be bothered about who was in love with whom, and yes, as often happens, I was page-counting by the end.  The Crystal Bucephalus wears out its funny bone and just becomes an exercise in wondering what any of it means, in between losing your thread because it just jumped to a different character again.
And if you're hoping that Craig Hinton has at least written the proverbial Story Where Kamelion Gets Something To Do, because he's on the cover, keep hoping: of the three companions, he's in this the least.  He's here pretty much to justify his continued non-appearance on screen.  Yeah, we are creaking into fanwank territory here.  (Ditto when Hinton devotes most of his finale to explaining why the Doctor was dusting off a new TARDIS console in The Five Doctors.)
Kamelion thinks he can help, which he surely could, but he doesn't make it two steps out of the TARDIS before he's under a psychopath's thrall, and then he quite happily blows somebody's head off.  Shame-faced (or whatever the equivalent would be), he retires to the TARDIS's recesses to think about what he's done, and that's why you don't see him.  Which... fine, does explain it.  (Really though, it's hard to dislodge the obvious explanation: he's a robot, their budget was an average child's pocket money, what on Earth were they thinking?)  But unlike certain other well-intentioned, even quite spirited bits of fanwank – like a reference to that bit of darkness just outside the TARDIS doors when you're inside it, a cameo from a later companion, and some jolly nods to Star Trek including latinum, Earl Grey and Qo'onos – this just reinforces something that already didn't work as being fundamentally redundant.  Why yes, Kamelion was a powerful, largely amoral stooge.  We already thought so, thanks.  If that's the best you can think to do with him, why bother dredging him up?  So much for finally existing in a format where he can get from one room to another.
As I might have guessed from the overcomplicated and whimsical premise, this isn't really about anything.  At best, it's more of a dessert than a meal: it can be rich, clever and fun, but these are highlights, not main ingredients.
5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #37 – Falls The Shadow by Daniel O'Mahony

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#32
Falls The Shadow
By Daniel O'Mahony

Time for one of those New Adventures I knew nothing about beforehand.  I look forward to those: no reviews on my radar, no expectations, anything could happen.  But, once again, there's a reason I never came across this one on my research rounds.

To start with, Falls The Shadow is a bit familiar.  The TARDIS lands in a weird old house filled with crazy people.  Some echoes of Ghost Light there, which is no surprise as it was originally based on "advanced rumours" about Ghost Light's plot.  And more recently, it's like Strange England.  (Uh oh.)  As occurred in that novel, reality has indigestion; the people that inhabit the house aren’t all there; there’s lashings of violence and torture, which are becoming worryingly ever-present in these books (Strange England, Evolution, St. Anthony’s Fire – maybe give it a rest, fellas?  Shake things up a bit?), along with the messed up metaphysical what-the-effery that forms the finale (and much of the rest of it).  In the blurb, Daniel O’Mahony says he has occasionally “managed to be controversial”.  Despite all the effort, he hasn’t managed it here.  Par for the course, more like.

Falls The Shadow is plenty weird, of course.  Something in the house is killing people more or less at random, and it can look like anything.  Several of the people there are having an identity crisis.  There’s a mysterious grey man who keeps trying to get involved, keeps getting killed, and keeps coming back.  And a scientist is making forays into another realm of existence, which is what started this whole mess.

And some of the book’s ideas are intriguing, though as it often the case, more so in theory.  That other realm is “interstitial time”, which is never really explained; it’s something to do with how time travel causes other realities to wink out of being, and the book is what happens when that comes back to bite you.  In practice: beings from outside time are manipulating people, who are themselves composites of might-have-beens from other timelines.  (One of them is from a timeline where we’re all giant insects!)  Needless to say, these people are varying degrees of nuts, which can become monotonous.  Still, you can visit interstitial time via a wardrobe, which is pleasantly wacky and TARDIS-esque.  The house itself can shift and grow seemingly at random, which is a neat idea and would look great in a film, though it really doesn’t achieve very much here.  We also visit a mysterious city/alt-universe called Cathedral that’s ruled by the grey guy and is linked to the house, which is pretty neat.  It’s not a very interesting place to visit, but it was a nice break from the house.  The grey guy is about as successful as South Park's Kenny for most of it, which makes him oddly comical to behold, and we never really know what he is, but there's definitely something interesting there.  I could live to regret it, but... I think I'd want to read about him again.
Alas, we’ve been down this road before: ideas are great, actually they're essential, but they’re not the whole show.  Put them to one side and Falls The Shadow doesn’t have much story to tell.  Our heroes bumble around a madhouse where troubled people come and go.  The sadistic and all-powerful villains, Gabriel and Tanith, manipulate events and make bad things happen just for the hell of it.  Realities bump into each other.  We may delve into the psyches and histories of the house’s inhabitants at intervals, but they’re all disposed of with varying degrees of shrug.  A lot of it is disposable and forgettable; there were many moments where the remaining pages seemed to expand ad infinitum, like the corridors of the house.  At 356 pages (uh oh, he’s counting), it’s morbidly long.
But the writing is mostly... sort ofgood, if I’m honest, particularly the characterisation.  Bernice is a pleasure, which I refuse to take for granted.  Such a relentlessly witty character could easily become nauseating.  (There’s a bit where the Doctor notes “‘We’d be worse off without your sense of humour, Benny.’”  Not half.)  Ace seems fleshed-out (oo-er – actually, she remains fully clothed!), the narrative adopting her mannerisms with sweary ease.  She’s a lot more believable without the artificial “Toe-rag!”s and “Bilge-breath!”s; it’s surprising what a difference actual swearing makes, while her natural violence takes on a very human fury near the end.  I prefer that to Ace The Cold Soldier.  With Benny and Ace, Daniel O’Mahony has a natty gift for shifting into the second person for a character’s inner thoughts, something he rather oddly drops later on.  I liked it while it lasted.  It certainly helps with the occasionally cartoonish Ace.
Less good is his Doctor.  There’s a portion of the story where it appears one of his friends has died (funny, this also happened in Strange England), and he becomes defeatist and melancholy because it’s seemingly the past repeating itself.  Fair enough, right?  Except he’s out of sorts from the moment he first appears.  The TARDIS is malfunctioning (trope!), hence its arrival in the house, and the Doctor becomes visibly weakened.  “‘Ace, I’m sorry if I’ve seemed a bit brusque,’ the Doctor said softly, close to her ear.  ‘It’s just I’m very worried about the TARDIS.’”  It’s not like him to be so demonstrative, or so easily shaken.  The reader can’t be the only one to think “Here we go again” at the TARDIS breaking down, so why the doom and gloom?  Then things go from not-great to bad when, after allowing Bernice to wander off by herself (!), the Doctor and Ace decide to search an enormous and likely dangerous house from opposite ends!  Surprise, they wind up in separate baskets of trouble.  And near the end he goes a bit mad and hides in the TARDIS.  What the heck is up with him?  (Another serendipitous own goal: “Ace had gone through patches of depression in the past, but she’d been a kid and she’d grown out of it.  Watching a grown man endure the same was embarrassing.”  Yup.)
It’s hard not to suspect “We all go a little mad sometimes” is the excuse for a lot of this, and as bracing as that might be (at least the first time – which this isn't), it’s no replacement for real motivation.  Certainly it’s the best Gabriel and Tanith can come up with: pointless, proud sadists, they introduce an assassin and a pissed-off bug person into the mix just to liven things up, torturing and killing just to see what it feels like.  You can be as clever and meta as you like, and Falls The Shadow is occasionally both, but it’s hard to come up with compelling motives, and sadism is a lame replacement.  The book does eventually try to make sense of them beyond that, but said effort is not only muddled by all that universe-bothering weirdness that comes as standard now (they want to do what with the universe?), it’s also just too late to take either of them seriously as people who want something.
A first-time novelist, O’Mahony’s prose dips between careful, deliberate oddness (like much of the character introspection, and a mad character conversing with an icon around another’s neck) and sheer waffle.  There’s a tendency, especially near the start, to over-describe the hell out of things:
“He was grey.  Grey coat over a grey shirt and trousers.  Grey shoes with loosely tied grey laces that never came undone.  His hat: casual, wide-brimmed, grey.  Even his skin: paper-thin, cold and bloodless, tinged grey by the cold daylight.  His hair, though, was white, but streaked with lines of pure black.  Almost grey.”  So… he’s grey, then?
“It was large, grey and ugly.  It squatted in the corner of the room daring anyone to come near it.  It was, simply, a wardrobe.”  How is that “simply”?  And later that paragraph: “Wardrobe was too weak a term for the sombre artefact.  It was a sarcophagus.”  So it wasn’tsimply a wardrobe, then?
It can affect the dialogue, too: “‘You’re mad,’ she said simply.  There was no point in adding anything else.  Mad said it all.”  Well yes, it did, two sentences ago!  And occasionally characters will ponder things in a circle.  The first line of the book is “Qxeleq would have screamed, had she a mouth,” and then, near the end of the Prologue, “Qxeleq tried to scream.  She discovered that she no longer had a mouth.”  What, again?  I know this sort of thing is picky.  Perhaps I wouldn't be stuck on it if I was swept along by the story.
O’Mahony is skilled enough elsewhere for one to suspect this is all carefully constructed.  I can imagine an editor not knowing where, or even if to start, as this guy seems to know what he’s on about even if it’s a opaque to us.  But there still must come a point where a story is either moving or it isn’t, and for great slabs of Falls The Shadow, that’s simply a negative.
What enjoyment can you derive from it?  Well, there are the ideas, but that’s almost a back-handed insult, since I feel like there must be a more compelling story to be told about worlds that never got a chance to exist, blaming the Doctor for leaving his TARDIS-shaped footprint where they could have been.  There’s the characterisation, which works very well indeed sometimes.  The supporting characters wobble in and out of the narrative, always with the clever-clever air of “Ah yes, I meant to do that,” which isn’t a substitute for giving a hoot about them, or in some cases, telling them apart.  There’s some neat-o imagery, but file that next to the ideas.  The prose is promising, but all told, it would work better if there was less of it.
I went into it with an open mind and I didn’t exactly hate it.  Unless you're hell-bent on reading absolutely every one of these things, however, it's one to skip.
4/10