Chat: The Dimension Riders

John: It says a lot that when I sat down, I had to remind myself that we weren’t doing the chat for ‘The Left-Handed Hummingbird’. Because this really is such a forgettable book--in fact, I’d say it’s the only forgettable book of this whole arc. All the others stand out in my mind as classics (and yes, I do consider ‘No Future’ to be a classic, no matter what know-nothings like Paul Cornell might say) but this one...it’s there. Things happen. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. A monster from Gallifreyan myth shows up, it does bad things, and the Doctor stops it. Oh, and there’s a lot of continuity references. If they ever made a Generic New Adventure, I think this would be it. Or am I being unfair?

Dee: I can’t say yet, we’re not done with the New Adventures. But I’ll say that it’s a quick read, hits all the beats, and still somehow melts away after. It’s not bad, like Warhead, of which I now remember all of three scenes. But I wonder if, in six months, I will remember any at all from this book.

John: I rarely do. I’ve read it at least four times now, maybe five, and all I ever remember is that it’s got the Garvond in it--I don’t remember who the Garvond is or what it wants, which is mainly because the author barely explains who the Garvond is and never gets around to explaining what it wants, but I do remember the name “Garvond”, because it has that perfect “generic Doctor Who monster name” feel to it. It feels like if you were to chop up all the phonemes of all the Doctor Who monsters into a blender and reduce them down to a two-syllable puree, you’d wind up with “Garvond”. So I remember it for that. Oh, and I always remember that whatsisname dies at the end. And the author makes it blatantly clear that I’m supposed to care a lot, but doesn’t clarify the reason. I think that’s about it, although I think if you quiz me in three months’ time I might remember that it’s got an evil Time Lord in it. But not in six months’ time.

Dee: … I’m honestly hung up for what to say here.

John: Well, we could try to puzzle out the villain’s plan together. I get that he wanted the President to assassinate himself, because that wasn’t supposed to happen, because...well, wait, if he was a disguised Time Lord all along, then how was that part of “established history” to be disrupted? Or was the whole “disrupting established history” thing just what the Garvond told the President, and actually it was a closed loop like what happened on the space station and that was how he got his power? And where do the two Cheynors actually fit into any of this, anyway? And also, what the heck was the Garvond going to do when it got all this power? I mean, the Doctor said, “If it does this, it’ll be invincible,” but so what? Is it going to be an invincible model train hobbyist, setting up its tracks in the Basement of History regardless of who tries to stop it?

...or did it make more sense to you?

Dee: I hate to tell you this, but I don’t remember the Cheynors. And I didn’t have a clue as to what the Garvond wanted. It was, for me, very much a “OK, this thing is killing and torturing people for no expressed reason, not that I would have accepted any reason given for the crap it was doing. Therefore, it’s bad. Therefore, it getting any more power is bad. Therefore, stop it.”  I’m shallow, I’m afraid.

John: The Cheynors were the college student from Oxford and the second-in-command on the spaceship, who was supposed to be his descendant. They were the Garvond’s Time Focus, which was important because it was capitalized in the middle of a sentence and you don’t do that with ordinary words unless they’re important to the plot. I think that’s how ninety percent of fantasy novels work. Other than that, I got nothing. But I should clarify...it wasn’t that I didn’t understand why the Doctor should stop the Garvond. The whole “killing people” made that pretty clear. (Certainly clearer than why whatsername went crazy and started talking in French midway through the book. Did you pick up on why that happened?) No, I just meant that there was never a clear idea of what was at stake in the story. To pick a not so recent example, since I just realized that it’d be mean to give away the ending to ‘Name of the Doctor’ so soon after it aired, in ‘The Big Bang’ we see very quickly and clearly what the consequences are of not fixing the TARDIS. Every star in the entire universe has gone out. (Although, speaking of things that don’t make sense, what consequences exactly are the Silence trying to prevent by killing the Doctor that could be worse than that? Um...but I digress...) Blythe never really makes the threat of the Garvond concrete and tangible. It’s just something that dicks with people...using TIME! And capitalized words.

Dee: I know something that caught my attention! The TARDIS team isn’t really a team here. They’re in three different places hoping to God they find one another. I don’t care for Who books like that. Small thing, but there you go. I don’t think the writer was clear on multiple fronts, and you’ve hit a few of them. Mostly, I could have wished for another chapter or so telling me why I should care.

John: I’d like to say that was deliberately done, to emphasize their emotional distance from each other, but I just don’t think the writer was thinking that far ahead. Unlike our next book, which is really about to grab the TARDIS crew’s emotional centers and yank on them. See you then!

The Dimension Riders

It's clear that 'The Dimension Riders' is the work of a first-time author. It has the very specific, utterly unmistakable feel of a writer who's been living with these characters and these ideas for years, perhaps even decades, and is so completely in tune with them that he totally forgets that we're being introduced to them for the first time. Daniel Blythe assumes a rapport instead of building it; James Rafferty is, to him, a well-known and beloved character who's an old friend of the Doctor and the Brigadier, with a fascinating past filled with adventures all his own. But he forgets to tell us about them. Instead, we get a blast of old continuity references and name-dropping, and a bland academic who wanders through the plot without really connecting.

The same goes for Romulus Terrin, whose tragic past is clumsily dropped into the narrative rather than being organically exposed, and whose supreme self-sacrifice falls flat as the emotional climax of the book because we just don't know him very well. (The same can be said, even moreso, of McCarran and Strakk.) It's not that Blythe is incapable of doing these things--there are hints here and there, with Tom Cheynor, of a personality that could be charmingly mischievous. But Blythe makes the unfortunate assumption that we know him already, instead of taking the time to introduce us.

Even the villains fall into the same trap. The Garvond feels like the work of someone who assumes the audience is already intimately familiar with 'Shada' and the rest of the Gallifrey stories; his scheme, an overcomplicated trap involving grandfather paradoxes, time-traveling spaceships, two TARDISes, and an assassination that happens a couple of times, never stops feeling abstract and unengaging. There's never a sense that we know what the Garvond is trying to do, or more importantly why it's trying to do it; Blythe assumes we already know. The President's downfall, which has the potential to be rich with irony, fails to affect because it's not really worked into the plot properly. It just sort of floats on top of it without getting involved.

Even through all that, you can see that there are seeds of talent. The plot is ultimately coherent, even though it never feels particularly well explained. Characters have detailed backstories, even the minor ones. The Doctor himself is portrayed as an alien wanderer haunted by his past, which is perfectly apt for this particular point in the story arc. Benny is spot-on as well, although Ace comes off a bit more like her teenage self than she should. Even the setting is nice, although here again there's a bit of first-novel jitters--it's simply assumed that Oxford is a fascinating, larger-than-life location with more than its share of weirdness and hijinks, so why bother showing them? And at 241 pages, the book certainly doesn't outstay its welcome...but a bit less tell and a bit more show would have done wonders for it, even if the page count would have gone up a tad.

The Dimension Riders

After the sturm und drang of "Blood Heat" comes the also-violent but oddly bloodless-feeling "The Dimension Riders." After the last chat talking about the 90s gritty hero bit, I can clearly detect that here. Unlike the previous book, though, there's a different flavor: where the remains of humanity are struggling to just survive in "Blood Heat," here the theme is sacrifice for the good of the many.

Almost all of the heroic characters in this novel make brave sacrifices in order to make sure the main cast can save others.  Note I don't say a lot about the actual wisdom of said sacrifices: many times the sacrifices the characters make aren't all that bright. Nevertheless, they make them. They're a survey corps ship, not really military, but they behave far better than the remaining members of UNIT in the previous book. 

I have to say I'm getting really tired of Ace having emotional one-night stands with some soldier or other. It was all right for a book here or there, but it's getting a bit old. It would be one thing if she was just enjoying the connection physically, but it seems that every other book she's getting drawn to stay. Eventually, I'm sure this will end. Right now, it feels like a square on a New Adventures bingo card. Benny drinks, the Doctor is cryptic and creepy and enigmatic, Ace gets a soldier boy. I also thought the Epsilon Sigma character was too unbelievably dumb to be a Time Lord. 

All of that said, I don't think I'll be reading this book again. It's like cotton candy, melting away. I can't remember almost any of the character names three days after finishing. I don't feel the need to go back and find out, either. I'm ready to move on. 

Chat: Blood Heat

John: Welcome...to the ‘Blood Heat’ chat. (Cue John Williams score...) This feels to me like a big watershed arc, the point where the juvenalia gets all tucked away and the TARDIS crew becomes a functional group of friends instead of a book-long bicker each month, but I’ll admit that seems pretty far away at the beginning of this arc. In fact, I think they kind of try to make things worse before they get better. I’ll toss it up to you--did you feel like there was too much TARDIS-angst?

Dee: This book is dark. DarkDarkDarkDark. At some points I was thinking it read like someone trying to do a White Wolf game without any supers. But angsty? Mmm. I’m not sure I’d agree until the very end of the novel, and then the gutpunch seems to be almost par for the course of the book, a kind of “Well of COURSE it can’t be that easy, not this time.” But it made me want to watch “The Doctor Dances” to clear the taste from my mouth.

John: But at the same time, stories like ‘The Doctor Dances’ are written because the writers remember stories like this. Eccleston’s “Give me this...” moment comes from Moffat reading a story like this, or possibly even this very story, and imagining the Doctor so infinitely old and weary and heartsick from seeing death beyond human comprehension. And somehow enduring, somehow able to turn that into hope. Stories like this convey that he is alien, truly alien. And I think that part of the process for Ace and Benny is understanding that they have to take him on his own terms, that he’s not going to become a normal person just for them. That he will have his moments where he does terrible things, for good reasons. (And supposedly the arc is about the Doctor learning to do that a little less, but we both know that’s not going to stick.)

Dee: I know. It just strikes me that this is where Ace *should* be turning from him, at the end of this novel, and that it makes more sense that way than earlier on. And I really can’t see how the Brig got so clearly broken. And yet... I really actually liked this book, and I couldn’t tell you why looking back at it now.

John: I think it pretty much works on Mortimore’s prose skills. He’s an excellent stylist, to the point where I’m not even sure “prose” is the right word; there’s something so poetic about the way he describes the posthuman Earth, and paints such a vivid picture of something strange and new growing out of the bones of the Nightmare. I don’t think he’s always going to be able to carry off so much bleakness and ugliness with poetry (certainly I don’t think he manages it in his next novel) but here it works. And of course, the plot is purest fan-porn. A bad-ass Brigadier on the edge of madness leading a UNIT Resistance movement in a fight against the Silurians? You could practically hear the fangasm across the Atlantic.

...or did you not see it that way?

Dee: Um. No, I didn’t. I saw the Brig as a shell of a broken man, not a badass. No fangasm here. I didn’t see the group as really being UNIT so much as “who can we get together and oh yeah we’re ex-mil so of course we’re in charge.” The fighting almost got them wiped out early. I would never have had what you described occur to me.

John: Point taken. I should say that it’s a fangasm for a certain type of fan, the sort who wants to see ‘grown-up’ versions of all their childhood heroes, with ‘grown-up’ being synonymous in their minds with “sees violence as a first resort, is bitter and emotionally scarred, dispatches one’s enemies in gore-porn fashion, has casual sex/drinks/uses drugs/all of the above, and doesn’t display much of a moral compass because being a goodie is for chumps and suckers.” As you may be able to tell from my description, it’s not actually a viewpoint I’m enthralled by. But in the era this book was written in, this was a huge movement in fandom, and not just Doctor Who fandom. This was the era where Mystique and Sabretooth were aggressively promoted as “the new anti-heroic X-Men superstars”, the era where we got a grim ‘n’ gritty post-Apocalyptic dystopia in the X-books (literally--this was the dawning of the Age of Apocalypse) and...well, let me put it this way. This is where Warren Ellis’ career took off. Not where he started writing, but where he realized that the way to make money off of fandom was to write stories like ‘Ruins’ and ‘G.I. Joe: Resolute’, then use that money to fund his actual good writing like ‘Transmetropolitan’. Basically, the TL;DR version of that last paragraph is that the Brigadier in ‘Blood Heat’ = Spider-Man in ‘Reign’.

Dee: I am looking at you with the same complete and total lack of impressed-ness with which I regarded this kind of thing at the time.

John: And that’s an entirely fair response to me giving you a window on a type of human who thinks that the Brigadier is cooler in this book than he’s EVER BEEN. (Which, BTW, is also the look I give to people who really loved Future Amy in ‘The Girl Who Waited’. But I digress. Again.) The point is, this was a book that was practically a manifesto for the edgy, violence-is-cooooool type of adult Doctor Who fan. And I think it’s pretty safe to say that Paul Cornell’s book, at the end of the arc, is designed to be an explicit and glorious antithesis to it. But I’m getting ahead of the story. But at the same time, it’s hard not to because really, all that ‘Blood Heat’ is memorable for is the prose style, the grim ‘n’ gritty UNIT, and the fact that the Doctor is forced to do unspeakable things at the end and this...is only the beginning. (To coin a phrase.) Fair or unfair?

Dee: Fair. Also, congratulations: I now like the book less because I need brain bleach. The Doctor in that view is both cowardly AND cruel, and I can’t see the same guy in Remembrance in this book when put into that frame. I think I like mine better.

John: Well, I don’t know that the Doctor is part of that world. He’s visiting, and I think all the regulars spend most of the book trying to avoid the gravity well of grim ‘n’ gritty...but he doesn’t live there. In the end he puts it back in the box and says, “No. This isn’t the way things should be.” And he even does it in a way that lets everyone live. Does that help?

Dee: Eh. I won’t be rereading it. But at the same time, again, it was a good read while it lasted. And I’m already done with the next one...

John: And you may well have forgotten it already. That’s right, folks, up next is ‘The Dimension Riders’!

Blood Heat

In some ways, 'Blood Heat' is almost a metatextual commentary on alternate universe stories as much as it is an alternate universe story. It starts out like your typical alt-u storyline; the Doctor winds up in a parallel reality where the Silurians won World War II...er, that is to say, where the Silurians killed the Doctor and wiped out the vast majority of the human race. Only a few survivors remain--and as is always the case in stories like this, those survivors just happen to be alternate versions of the Doctor's close friends. Liz Shaw, the Brigadier, Benton...even Jo Grant shows up, in total defiance of any kind of real world logic or even her own regular role on the series, solely so that we can finish off the scorecard of Pertwee regulars. (Well, okay. We don't get Mike Yates. But there's always one regular who died tragically off-screen, to show that this reality Is Serious Business.)

Then, of course, we get the other tropes of parallel universe stories fired off at us; the dystopian alternate present, because the hero has to be shown to have Made a Difference; Manisha, the character who died in the "real" reality, but who survived in this reality, because the heroes have to wonder if maybe Things Wouldn't Be Better This Way; and the escalating action as the heroes obtain a nuclear weapon and the villains find out the heroes' secret base, because these thing always have to end in a blood-soaked apocalypse that kills everyone off so that the heroes can put everything back to normal with no qualms at all...

Except that's not what happens at the end. At the end, everyone survives. The Brigadier finds a way to make peace with the Silurians, the humans move past their fear and the Silurians move past their genocidal hatred, and the next generation has hope for the first time. The Doctor even stops the nuclear missiles. It's all the kind of miraculous ending you never get in a "proper" alternate universe story, because the traditional alternate universe story always builds up to the one thing that the regular episodes can never do--total narrative collapse, as expressed through the death of people who are normally off-limits due to the need to have them in the next story. (See "Inferno" for a perfect example.)

Instead, everyone lives...until the Doctor steps in to personally inform Ace and Benny that no, that's not the way things are supposed to work. Parallel universes are made to be destroyed. The narrative collapse can't be averted by anything as mundane as saving the day and making people get along. This world was here for one reason and one reason only, to elicit an emotional reaction. Now that's done with, it's time to switch it all off.

The rest of the novel is good enough, but it's in that moment where 'Blood Heat' really does something unique and fascinating. The Doctor stands revealed, just for a moment, as one of the men behind the curtain, an agent of the narrative and not of morality. He's there to make sure the story runs the right way, not to save the day. No wonder Ace and Benny are repelled.

Spare Parts

So here we are, a few weeks after the listen, and I'm still pondering how I feel about Spare Parts.

I will say right up front that it's an incredible audio. The actors and the crew were clearly enjoying themselves. The production values are very high. Fans of audio dramas, even ones who may like other audios more than they like Doctor Who, should check these out. They make great background for doing all kinds of things - I highly recommend them for airports and public transit, for instance.

The thing I most like about this one, oddly enough, is that the Doctor doesn't win. He decides this time he is going to try to change what would later be called a fixed point, and he blows it - and the depth of his blowing it isn't clear till the last second. In fact, there's no telling if the Doctor *ever* finds out how much he failed. It's entirely possible he goes on through the rest of his existence and doesn't clue in.

I also like the way Doctor and Nyssa are still working out their relationship post-Adric and Tegan. Despite the fact that it's been decades since the relevant events in real time, in the story it's been... weeks? Months, maybe, and they have been dancing around it? The cast brings their years of additional experience and wisdom to the scene, portraying the relationship with finesse and wistful remorse. It's quite frankly beautiful.

It's not perfect. A few weeks out the imperfections melt away, though, and the positives far outweigh the negatives. I really recommend this one. Give it a listen.

Spare Parts

'Spare Parts' is one of those stories that's almost, almost, almost legendary. It's very good, don't get me wrong, and certainly quite well-remembered; Marc Platt is one of my favorite 'Doctor Who' authors, and this is one of his better works. But you can feel the story pulling back just a little at the end, because it has to risk being hated to be perfect. And it's just a little bit too afraid of not being loved to do what it needs to do to be legendary.

The story is, in structure, similar to 'The Aztecs'; the Doctor and his companions travel to a historical civilization that straddles the line between brutality and glory, and must choose whether to use their power to change that civilization to eliminate the brutality, or to keep history on its established course...only to discover that they don't have quite as much choice in the matter as they thought. The only difference is that here, the "historical" civilization exists in Doctor Who's history, not the textbooks; this is Mondas just before it became the home of the Cybermen, monsters who've been a part of Doctor Who almost since the beginning.

Like 'The Aztecs', 'Spare Parts' gives us a well-grounded, sympathetic portrayal of the society the Doctor and his companions enter; we meet the Hartley family, some of the most charming and likeable characters in the history of Doctor Who, and Doctorman Allen, who has to be the most likeable and sympathetic total bastard Doctor Who has ever given us. (She's not quite Bester, but she's damned close.) We see how a pre-Cybermen Mondas might work, and for the first time we're really given to understand the dilemma that led the Mondasians to become Cybermen. Doctorman Allen at one point challenges the Doctor to come up with a solution to their problems, if he's so willing to sit in judgment on the one they came up with themselves, and his silence is telling.

Every character is great, really. Dodd is the kind of character who would be the villain of any other story, but here he's almost decent; he might be a literal organ-stealing mercenary serial killer, but even he's horrified by what Mondas is becoming. Sisterman Constant is a zealot and a prude, but you see her enough to know that she genuinely cares about her charges and believes that she's doing what's right. Even Zheng, the chilling harbinger of Mondas-To-Come, is doing the best he can to save his homeworld and its people. It's just that when you look at it in the cold light of logic, well...the only way to save everyone is to convert them. Nobody has ever shown the Cybermen's side of things before, and it's surprising how easy it is to agree with their methods even as you shy away from the ultimate extension of those methods.

Which is, unfortunately, the problem with 'Spare Parts'. Unlike 'The Aztecs', this story tries to have its cake and eat it too. It doesn't take its story to the ultimate conclusion we know is coming, the tragic ending that we saw from the beginning as the Doctor realizes he can't avert Mondas' horrible destiny. It's understandable, really; taking the story to its logical extension would mean sitting through a chilling, brual ending with the deaths of pretty much every character we've grown to care about. (As opposed to the deaths of pretty much every character we've grown to care about except three...it's hard to tell why they try so hard, given how bleak everything's been up until Part Four.)

As a result, the ending feels hollow. We all know the fragile peace won't last. We all know that the Cybermen are right from their perspective, and their perspective is the only one that matters to them. The stinger ending feels like it should have been the real ending, or else the Doctor should have been allowed to make a difference. Trying to do both doesn't quite achieve either. That's not to say the story isn't very, very good; every actor is amazing, the worldbuilding is fantastic, the dialogue is note-perfect. It's only at the very end that you feel the difference between the tragedy the story wanted to be and the adventure mold Doctor Who usually fits into.