Theatre of War

It's funny re-reading 'Theatre of War' after all these years, a bit like watching a recording of an old friend. You find yourself going back to the things that seemed so new at the time, so strange, but now are the old and familiar habits you've known forever. Sometimes you find yourself chuckling a little ruefully at their mannerisms, knowing that they haven't changed a bit in all these years. And of course, experience makes you appreciate everything you liked before in a new way as well.

I feel like that because when I first read it, 'Theatre of War' was the only novel from a young Justin Richards. It was before he became a reliable novelist for the Missing Adventures line, and well before he became something of a crutch for a BBC range of novels that was perpetually short on time and willing to throw commissions at someone who could write full-length books on laughably tight deadlines and come out with a result that was readable. And it was ages before he wound up the editor of said range of books, overseeing a late flowering of quality before the entire thing turned into a tiny adjunct to the most successful television revival in the history of ever. This was, in short, before we really knew Justin Richards as a writer.

As such, some of the things that seemed fresh and unpredictable then come off as a little shop-worn now. The intertwining of Shakespeare and science-fiction, which was startlingly strange on first reading, now stands revealed as one of Richards' stylistic quirks (and one that seems more than a little ironic in retrospect--in a story that revolves around a made-up civilization whose culture was never detailed beyond the bare minimum needed to fool people, it's more than a little amusing that the Heletian culture's obsession with theatre extends as far as Shakespeare, Osterling, and nothing else).

The functionality of the book also stands out more on re-reading as well; when I first read the novel, I was fascinated by the mystery of Menaxus and the clues scattered throughout the book, and charmed by the clever reveal at the end. Now that I know how it all turns out, it is hard to avoid noticing that the book functions more like a machine than a novel--everything intricately crafted to bring about the final conclusion, but very little done purely for humor and very few characters that function as more than plot dispensers. Even the scares are more a matter of disposing of people who've run out of usefulness to the story.

That said, the story retains its intricate craft; the scheme that Braxiatel lays out is ambitious and cunning, and the clues are laid out perfectly in a manner to keep you interested the entire way through. (This one is also particularly interesting to read in light of years of Bernice Summerfield spin-offs where Irving plays a major part; it's hard not to want to see a version of this from his perspective, meeting his old friend for the "first" time.) There are wheels within wheels within wheels in this story, revelations stacked on revelations that are in turn designed to disguise the big reveal in the third act.

A book this tightly-plotted demands discipline, and Richards is especially disciplined given that this is his first novel. There's not a slip or a misstep in his story, no anomalies that aren't planned with explanations already in mind. Every detail works towards the conclusion, every scene propels the plot forward with momentum, and the whole story races past in a matter of hours. It's a rare skill, and it's easy to read 'Theatre of War' and see how this particular writer was destined for greater things.

"Theatre of War" by Dee

Life is weird, where it takes you. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say health problems interfered. Then I actually LOST our copy of this book! So I had to get back to writing, then get a copy of the book, then read it…

…and it was a lot better than I remember it being, as far as I’d gone into it. (Which was about 100 pages.) I think “Legacy” almost destroyed Dr. Who books for me. I haven’t cared much for Justin Richards before, but this was quite all right, and that’s good enough to get started again!

Ace is still militant in this book, but she’s calmed down a lot and she’s not violent for the sake of violence. Benny does more than drink and grumble about things - in fact, she gets some really good action. And I recognize the Doctor, which is the most important part. Here he is as both Time’s Champion and a chess player on a universal scale, and it works well - especially because there are other chess players around and he knows of and respects them. That part is fantastic!

Don’t get me wrong, I could see most of the way the plot was going for much of the book. I wasn’t particularly surprised by any twist but the closing one, and that one I could look back and see being telegraphed. The supporting cast is straight out of the show. But at this still-early stage, that’s kind of the point - and it’s something Richards tends to like anyway: bring back the feeling that this is an episode that could have been televised. And I had a great deal of fun imagining all of this action taking place on cardboard sets with the synth music blaring.

I really would like to point to good utilization of Benny, here. Yes, there can be issues with “archaeological dig” stories overwhelming the series, and I’ll be sensitive to that, but this time worked really very well. She is allowed to be intelligent, allowed to stretch and use her skills and training. I can see why she became a favorite with the way Richards presents her, and I’m still holding out for a Big Finish crossover with River Song and Benny. After “Theatre of War,” I am a lot more confident that they wouldn’t have to get Paul Cornell to write her in order to have her work well!

An Update on the Blog's Status

Hi all,

Recently, someone asked if we had decided to abandon this blog, probably because it's been a little over a year since the last update. It's a fair question and it deserves an answer, even if that answer amounts to a long-winded "I really hope not."

Last year about this time, Dee started having some health issues due to some medication she was taking. The medication carried with it a risk of blood clots, and after a few weeks of what she thought was non-specific pain and nausea, she went to a doctor who confirmed that she had a blood clot on the portal vein leading from her liver. She went on blood thinners for an extended period of time to help diminish the clot.

Even after the clot got smaller, though, and she stopped taking the medication that caused it, she wasn't improving. It took us several months to narrow it down and get an official diagnosis, but the doctors confirmed that she has fibromyalgia and that the stresses on her system from the blood clot, the blood thinners (and attendant bruising and trauma from having blood that didn't clot well), and a few other shocks around the same time had left her entire nervous system hypersensitive to pain.

Basically, right now Dee is dealing with a chronic medical condition that leaves her susceptible to fatigue and discomfort, and she has very little energy. Under those circumstances, we're focusing on conserving her strength for things like work and family life, and letting other things go for a bit. We're hopeful that as she recovers from the shocks to her body, she will gradually see a diminishing of the symptoms of her fibro and be able to resume the blog, but it's not a priority (understandably) and we don't have a timeline. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

Legacy

I've read 'Legacy' at least five times now. I read it shortly after it came out when I was buying every New Adventure I could get my hands on, I read it again when I got caught up and read the series in order to see how it all fit together, I read it when Virgin finally finished their run and I was reading the entire sixty-one book series as a whole, I read it when I was reading all of Gary Russell's novels back-to-back, and I read it for this blog. I may have read it additional times, although certainly not for pleasure. But it's at least five. And I have to admit, there's never been a time where I haven't struggled mightily to find anything good to say about the book.

It's not that there's no good ideas in there. Russell chooses to set the book well after both of the televised Peladon stories, picking up the relationship between the Federation and the Pels at a point when there are some tough questions to ask about whether the Federation's stewardship was an enlightened effort to bring civilization to a backwards planet or simply a means of exploiting an indigenous population for their natural resources. There's interesting material in that choice, especially since the Federation has always stood in as an allegory for a united Europe, and the European Union has always been a body more united in theory than in practice.

But that material never lives up to its potential. Which is a shame, because it's just about the only thing that has potential in what essentially amounts to a mound of words written to meet page count requirements more than anything else. Russell has two plots going on, neither one of which has enough material to sustain a full-length novel, and so he pads the book out to the required number of pages with tedious backstories of characters we're not given reasons to care about and endless digressions that come from nowhere and go nowhere. He confuses incident with plot, obfuscation with mystery and familiarity with significance, leading to a story that's clearly intended to be a landmark epic but which fades from the memory within moments.

The obvious problem is that it's woefully underwritten. The story doesn't even really start until page 75--everything prior to that is redundant backstory that's either irrelevant or restated later in the novel. There are numerous digressions to scenes that could have been alluded to, long conversations about characters from the previous Peladon stories that don't mean anything to this novel, and at least one sequence that seems to be there solely to show that Doctor Who books can have sex scenes now. A good trim for content would have cut this down to a novella.

Worse, it's not even good as a novella. It's presented as a murder mystery, but the only reason that there's any confusion at all over whodunnit is because Russell writes multiple scenes without specifying who's acting, and because the Doctor decides not to tell everyone who the killer is for seventy-three pages because Reasons. A good mystery should make you re-read the book with a new understanding of events; as mentioned, I've read 'Legacy' and still neither know nor care who's doing what for the middle third of the book.

And of course, no review of 'Legacy' would be complete without pointing out the obvious--Russell assumes that his potboiler murder mystery is made more significant simply by setting it on a planet that the Doctor has visited before and making numerous references to his previous adventures there. It's clear that he expects us to be cheering the return of Alpha Centauri, the Citadel, Mount Megeshra, Lady Lianna, the trisilicate refinery, et cetera et cetera, and to be comparing Atissa and Tarrol to the other High Priests and Kings we've seen in the previous iterations of this plot. But there's no genuine emotional resonance to any of it, just the mistaken belief that nostalgia can substitute for meaning.

I will say that Gary Russell gets better over the years. (I will also say that his strength still lies as a producer, a role he's thankfully gravitated to, but that's neither here nor there.) Here, though, undisguised by experience or editing, is the core of Russell's talent on display. And while I may yet wind up reading it a sixth time, I can't say it's gotten better with age.

Legacy

This sums up how I feel about Gary Russell's Legacy. I was so happy after Decalog, so sure I was going to be able to dive right back in and get the project going again!

Then I hit the first few pages of Legacy and the steam just left the engine. Wow. I began to refer to it in my imagination as "Lag-acy," because of the lag in posts. I finally forced myself to get through it, but I am now craving a really good one to be the next book.

It's not that there are no likeable characters at all. I actually enjoyed the Ice Warriors, and I could see so much wasted potential in so many others in the book. But I couldn't bring myself to really care about any of them, and that's a deep problem when you have the vast cast and numbers of races Russell brings to the table.

Maybe I would have liked it more if I'd been more familiar with Peladon, but I've never seen the TV episodes and by the time I was through the first chapter I didn't care. Pointless blood, beings pointlessly growling at one another, pointless. It did nothing, really, to illuminate the plot. Swords flash and people fall dead right after introduction, when the same points they are supposed to express are re-explained in later chapters. 

At no point did I really feel like any of the Main Three characters were in danger. At no point did I feel like I had a handle on what made any of the other races different from humans. 

It's not a horrible book. It's not like some of the others we've read that made me despair, and I can't honestly say I would have done better. But, as Opus says, "Lord, it wasn't good."

Chat: Decalog

John: Man, they call them “short” stories, but..the problem I always have with anthologies is that just when you’re getting interested in a story, it ends and you have to pick up a new one from scratch. There’s not enough narrative momentum, even with a framing sequence like this one has. Do you feel that way too, or is it just me?

Dee: I feel that way sometimes, and then sometimes it’s a relief. In one or two of the ones in here, it’s a relief. And I really have a couple of things to talk about with you, because I think we saw at least one story very differently and I wanted to explore that. In particular, “Fascination.” I didn’t like it for very different reasons than you, and I felt a little sick reading your review after I wrote mine and wondering how I missed those things.

John: Well, I think some of it may have been that I was around when that story first came out, and I was aware of a lot of conversation about it at the time. A lot of people felt that Howe was kind of crossing a line between “fanfiction” and “slash” that probably shouldn’t have been crossed in a canonical, authorized work, especially as a) it was about a lack of consent, and b) there was no place to really explore the consequences for Peri. She was very much the object of that story rather than the subject, and it was very “male gaze” for something that sat so near to a story like “Lackaday Express”. Especially as Howe has personal and professional connections to the editors.

Dee: Yes, and I want to clarify the reasons I said it had ingredients for me to like it. It has magic and that magic has rules, it had kindly elders who really turned out to be good guys instead of the Evil Ringleaders, and I do like a bit of mind control in my Doctor Who stories. It didn’t even occur to me as I was reading it that it was rapey, and I’m more than a bit ashamed that my near-total dislike of Peri may have blinded me to that. If it had been, say, Nyssa I think I would have noticed more.

John: Well, don’t sell yourself short--I think it was also the blithe obliviousness to consequences that played at least some part. They really do just sort of walk into the sunset with a, “Oh, tee-hee, my body and mind were violated by a stranger, but I got in a token retributive action and so now it’s alright, on to the next adventure!” tone to it all. I don’t think you can do that in a story that’s ostensibly a part of canonical Doctor Who, treating Peri like a real character. If it was a piece of erotica, I might feel differently, but this is at least claiming that Peri is the same Peri we see in ‘Caves of Androzani’, and it does something to her that would have consequences for a real character. But it doesn’t. The magic is good, the concept is good, but the sexual peril doesn’t belong here anymore.

Dee: That might be part of it. I think were it Ace I would have felt differently about the whole thing. But now I feel dirty, and glad I didn’t like the story in the first place. I just can’t help feeling like I disliked it for the wrong reasons. I also didn’t like “Prisoner of the Sun,” but you seemed to enjoy that one a lot. Can you explain to me what I’m missing there?

John: I don’t know for sure. I remember really disliking it the first time I read it, but this time it grew on me. It feels so weird and experimental, really just sort of setting itself along a whole different tack from the era it came from and the stories around it that I felt almost like I had to like it just for being so unashamedly itself. It was strange and uncomfortable, and I think maybe I was in the mood to be taken out of my comfort zone. Especially since the Pertwee era feels so “cozy” that it’s almost twee sometimes. Does that make any sense?

Dee: It sure didn’t feel that cozy in the stories in this book. I may just not have seen enough of that era to see what you’re saying. I felt like both stories with Three were really badly written. I didn’t care about the deaths in either, and I didn’t find the way they characterized Liz to be at all appealing.

John: Yeah, Liz gets short shrift for a long while. I think it’s because people cared about her for the wrong reasons. The people who wanted to write her the most were the continuity obsessives who wanted to “explain” her abrupt departure from the TV series, so they focused a lot on giving her reasons to leave without warning and hammering her personality to fit those reasons. It’s going to be a while before we get a good Liz Shaw story, I think.

Dee: Let’s move on to Four. I loved “Scarab of Death.” It felt just like it should, to me. I could see Tom Baker and Liz Sladen in every scene, and I’m not a visual person as a rule. But you thought it was fanwanky. At this point, I’m almost surprised we both liked “Duke of Dominoes!”

John: Well, it was fanwanky, but it wasn’t bad. It was one of those stories that didn’t have much to it beyond evoking the feel of its era, and I think we’re going to get enough of those that I want something a little more ambitious. It’s not that I disliked it, just that I felt like it could have done more than just say, “Hey look everybody! A sequel to ‘Pyramids of Mars’! Eh? Eh?” Which I thought ‘Duke of Dominoes’ really did well. It wasn’t just that the Master was well characterized and you could imagine Roger Delgado in every line, it was that it showed us the Master from a perspective we’ve never seen before and really made you think about the character in a new light while it evoked Delgado’s performance, and that was interesting. I like stories that get the past right and also show a new angle, and Marc Platt did a great job with that.

Dee: I fully agree with your thoughts on “Duke,” and I felt like it was a refreshing break from all of the Doctor-centered stories. The inter-story bit with the psychometrist freaking about about the evil of the Master was great too. And I didn’t see “Scarab” as just a sequel to “Pyramids,” I thought it was well-developed on its own. I loved the planet - it reminded me a lot in many ways of the planet in “Robots of Death” more than anything in “Pyramids,” and that was a good thing.

John: Fair enough. There was some worldbuilding in there, among the Osiran references. I’ll cautiously upgrade my initial impressions. Other than that, were there any stories you particularly wanted to get into? I think we both liked “Book of Shadows”, we both liked “Lackaday Express”...

Dee: If I talk about “Lackaday” too much, Paul Cornell might think he needs to avoid me at CONvergence next week. (He doesn’t, but I know how I sound when I fangirl.) I’ll reiterate what I said before: It started out as confusing as “Book,” but I felt like Paul pulled me out of the confusion faster, and I liked the characterization better. I liked “Book” as well, because I enjoyed the Barbara-centrism and her confusion but her equal determination. And “Fallen Angel” was fun. It anticipated the Christmas Angels from “Christmas Invasion” nicely, too. I wonder if that’s where Davies got the inspiration?

John: Good question. I know Davies and Moffat were reading during this era--heck, Moffat writes for a later Decalog. So anytime the question is asked, “Was this an influence on the new series?”, I think my answer is going to be, “Yes, it’s just a question of how much.” And this was mostly a positive thing--I think that on the whole, this was successful as an anthology, as a group of Doctor Who stories, and as science fiction in general. I can certainly see why Virgin commissioned a sequel. But we won’t read that for a while--for now, it’s back to the New Adventures with ‘Legacy’!

Decalog

OK, so I admit this took me a while. Depression, losing a job, getting a new job and intensive training, and all-around burnout will do that to a woman. But I did finally finish Decalog, and I have thoughts!

Because this is a collection of short stories, I'll break this down by author:

"Playback," Stephen James Walker
A solid introduction, this is doing what you expect a prologue to do: set the stage. It's a frame sequence that allows the others to do whatever they want, but provides a theme. In this case, it's that the Doctor has lost his memory and goes to a PI to help him figure out who he is. The PI, in turn, intuits something is weird about this guy and takes him to a psychometrist to try to figure things out.

Naturally, this being the Doctor, that means we have a ready excuse to use any of the Doctors at all, and naturally all of them are used, some more than once. And we start with the Second Doctor in...

"Fallen Angel, "Andy Lane
Plot: The Second Doctor teams up with a gentleman thief to stop alien robots from causing problems in the English countryside.

I liked this one. It took me a few minutes to figure out which Doctor we were on, and the character of Lucas Seyton isn't as deep as he thinks he is, but it hit all the right notes and it was an engaging read. I did like it better than Lucifer Rising, for what it's worth, and Lane proves he can characterize other Doctors than Seven without missing a beat.

"Duke of Dominos," Marc Platt
Plot: The Master is trying to take over the Universe, and he has found an important key! Will he be stopped in time?

This one is written from the Master's point of view, and I love that! I'm not sure it pulled it off, mind you, but at least it tried. Yes, the Master gets a few digs in at the Doctor, who in this case turns out to be the Fourth. The Doctor is more in the story in spirit than in actual body, and I didn't mind that much. Well done.

"The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back," Vanessa Bishop
Plot: Three detects an alien whose gaze kills people, while he has a fallout with the Brig.

I have to say this is my least favorite in the volume. As I write this, there is a big fooferaw going on in the fandom community about "message fiction," and while I like my stories to have an moral and ethical center, I think this one could be cited as one that delivers it with a club. It's almost toy-tie-in-cartoon levels of "Do you get it? DO YOU?" Three deserved better.

"Scarab Of Death," Mark Stammers
Plot: Four and Sarah Jane are up against a cult trying to resurrect one of the Osirans.

I loved this one. It's very cinematic and captures that era of Who beautifully. Evil cult leaders, dark and dusty city streets, "I suppose you're wondering why you're here" pontificating - perfect. It's not the strongest story, but it's close!

"The Book of Shadows," Jim Mortimore
Plot: In a Barbara-centric story that jumps back and forth through time, the First Doctor has to make a hard decision about changing history - more than one line.

This one starts out pretty confusing and then unknots itself nicely. I do like the characterization, and Mortimore is good at ending lines for each scene. I can see people dropping out because of the confusion early on, though, so my advice is to stick with it.

"Fascination," David J. Howe
Plot: Peri and Five arrive in a perfect village. So, of course, it isn't - and Peri is the target of dark magic.

This one has all of the ingredients for a story I should like, but the fact that I can't abide Peri makes it hard for me to care. I suppose that's a sign of good characterization, but for the life of me I can't see what the Doctor sees in her. It might not help that I've seen magic in Who done so well in City of the Dead with the Eighth Doctor. It's not a bad story, but it's solidly Eh.

"The Golden Door," David Auger
Plot: Dodo and Steven don't recognize the elderly First Doctor. Meanwhile, they DO recognize the Sixth and there's some mysterious guy trying to scare them!

Another solidly Eh story. Dodo can only cling to Steven so many times and deny knowing One before I roll my eyes, and I found myself skipping pages. Not good. The good side: Six and One are well-drawn. Meh.

"Prisoners of the Sun," Tim Robins
Plot: The Third Doctor is pitted against UNIT colleagues in a future he never expected. And who is to blame but Liz...and the Doctor's own knowledge!

Argh argh argh. This is a neat concept, but it's not so well-written. I want to see what someone like Andy Lane could do with this idea, because it's a good one. I like the idea of the Doctor's knowledge. given to someone else, and then used to derail time. But I don't like the idea that the Doctor himself can muck around with time with nothing more than his bare hands, and I felt like there was a lot of detail that could have been better-expressed. Again, Three deserves better!

"Lackaday Express," Paul Cornell
Plot: Five, Nyssa and Tegan must save a woman who is trapped in a time loop, doomed to live her own life over and over and over. But, of course, attempting to save her might destroy the Universe...

This story starts out as confusing as "The Book of Shadows," and Cornell is, as always, equal to the task of sorting it out. He doesn't disappoint on the one-liners, either: "Your refusal to come to terms with your personal life may quite possibly mean the end of the entire cosmos!" Hee. And the ending is, of course, perfect. Yes, this is the best in the book, and I am becoming a raving Paul Cornell fangirl. I'm OK with that.

"Playback (ending)," Stephen James Walker
Plot: Finishing up the frame story, the PI must solve the riddle of why the Doctor can't remember any of this.

It's passable, and it certainly does wrap things up well! I could have done without the villain being one from an earlier story, but it will do just fine.

Next up: Legacy!

Decalog

It's really tempting to spend my time talking more about what 'Decalog' represents than what it is. I'll try to resist, but it is worth mentioning that this is the first real attempt to treat the series' past as anything beyond an adjunct to its present--past Doctors had appeared before, in anniversary specials and nostalgia pieces, but this is the first real time that anyone had gone back to the show's history in an attempt to add onto it. It's all a big retcon in one sense; this is adding something new while attempting to pretend that it's been there all along retroactively. But in a greater sense, it's an acknowledgement that the Doctor's story has always been somewhat fractal in nature, capable of hiding an infinite number of stories in between any two points. We've known for ages that the Doctor has adventures even when we're not watching him; this is just the point at which everyone wakes up and realizes how much potential there is to the idea. But how well was that potential realized?

Well, 'Playback', the book's framing sequence, eases us into the idea by portraying the whole thing as a series of experiments in psychometry carried out on the contents of the Doctor's pockets. In other words, it's setting this clearly and straightforwardly as a series of flashbacks from the Doctor's present rather than stories about the Doctor's past. It's a framing sequence that seems a little unnecessary in retrospect--certainly you'll never see it again in any of the later anthologies, and thankfully the idea isn't carried through to the Missing Adventures line. But for a first effort, it's probably a good idea, and it helps that it's a nice little mystery that even ties together one or two of the stories within the anthology (although they'd later take this to more ambitious heights).

That makes 'Fallen Angel', by Andy Lane, the first trip into the Doctor's past proper, and it's an appropriately cute story that does things both Lane and Doctor Who do well. Specifically, it's a style pastiche of another genre's standards that drops the Doctor into it in order to see how he bounces off the tropes of another story. I'm not sure whether Lucas Seyton is meant to be the Saint or Raffles, but he holds up surprisingly well against a very vivid portrayal of the Second Doctor and makes this story more than the sum of its admittedly slight parts.

Meanwhile, 'The Duke of Dominoes', by Marc Platt, shows that there can be more to these stories than simple pastiche. Platt's story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the Master, the Doctor's legendary arch-foe, and gives him a depth and majesty that wasn't often present in his appearances on television. Platt's story does a wonderful job of creating atmosphere and pulling you along with its plot, all the while fleshing out the Master and giving more narrative richness to the series' past. Oh, and the Doctor's in it too for a few paragraphs. (Okay, that's actually a really funny gag, to be honest--the Doctor foils the Master's evil scheme without even knowing he's there.)

Vanessa Bishop's 'The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back' also tries to expand upon the era it's set in, this time in the service of repair to some damaged subtexts; many fans have commented on the strange relationships between career military man Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, acerbic scientist Liz Shaw, and pompous alien "John Smith", and the way that the tensions between them were remarked upon at times but never really explored or made meaningful. Bishop tries to correct this with a story that genuinely gets at the problems inherent in the Doctor's relationship with the Brigadier, but she doesn't have time to do it fully over the course of one short story--the result is good, but still leaves something wanting. (Luckily, this is just the first of many such explorations.)

On the other hand, 'Scarab of Death', by Mark Stammers, is the first appearance in this volume of fanwank. Fanwank, in the context of "missing" stories, usually takes the form of a sequel to a classic story that really only exists because the classic story is so beloved that people want to get just a little bit more of it and don't care whether it's warranted. Here, we get a sequel to "Pyramids of Mars", complete with more Fourth Doctor and more Sarah Jane Smith and more Martian pyramids, in a story that's by no means bad but also by no means necessary. It's hard to match Robert Holmes at his prime, but unfortunately this is only the first time someone's going to try.

Weirdly, Jim Mortimore's 'The Book of Shadows' feels like a bizarre harbinger of the book that would one day end his career. Like 'Campaign', it takes place around the time of Alexander the Great (this time slightly after his death), and like 'Campaign' it features a bizarre and otherworldly set of timey-wimey circumstances that lead to Barbara being the wife of a great leader of that time and bearing him a child, and with this shocking twist portrayed through narrative circumstances and experimental prose that deliberately unsettles the reader and leaves them off-balance. Like 'Campaign', it's a beautifully poetic version of the First Doctor and his companions that shows just how dramatically sophisticated and intelligent this era of the program truly was, and how well it holds up today; unlike 'Campaign', it has an ending that makes sense and doesn't wear out its welcome. Really, this is one of the best in the collection.

And it's followed by...well, it'd probably be unfair to call David Howe's 'Fascination' the worst of the collection, but it's certainly got a layer of tangible squick all over it that makes it unpleasant to read and leaves you wanting a hot shower afterwards. That may have been the intention all along, of course, but it still feels like this story about the Doctor saving Peri from a mind-controlling rapist with magic powers is a little too sleazy to really fit into Doctor Who at all, and it's hard not to feel like there's a little too much enjoyment of Peri's sexual assault included in the narrative voice.

And then, hidden in among all the random stories from the Doctor's past, we get a multi-Doctor affair that also happens to be the key to the framing story's mystery. 'The Golden Door', by David Auger, is a nicely twisty mystery that relies on something the classic series could never do--have one incarnation of the Doctor mistaken for another. The subsequent convolutions of the plot are surprisingly easy to follow while still quite dense in their variety, and the final moral (it's okay to be different) is by no means a bad one even if it is a bit unsubtle. This was a good choice to connect to the final act of 'Playback'.

But before we get that far, we have Tim Robins' 'Prisoners of the Sun', which is experimental enough to almost not feel like a Doctor Who story at all. It's a brutal alternate reality story involving all of the Third Doctor's allies turning into sadistic soldiers in a bizarre civil war engineered by mysterious aliens we've never heard of who are nonetheless ancient enemies of the Time Lords, all wrapped up in a retconned explanation for Liz Shaw's departure, the Master's arrival, and oh by the way the whole thing is an intervention by the Doctor in a Time War that presages the later BBC books and the New Series. It's no surprise with all that going on, the prose is packed so tight with revelations as to be practically incoherent with breathlessness. Still, there's a good read buried under all that, and it may well be one of the hidden influences on a number of later writers.

And last but not least, we have Paul Cornell, warming up his Fifth Doctor impersonation with 'Lackaday Express'. It's a good story that trades well in Cornell's strengths--warm characterization, celebration of the small human moments that connect us, an acknowledgment of the pain of nostalgia while still understanding the desire to revisit the happier moments of our lives--all wrapped up in a nicely science-fiction-y premise that makes consistent sense. I'm glad this wasn't his only visit to this era in the series' past--Cornell didn't make many, which makes me appreciate the ones he did all the more--but it's definitely a good one.

And then, of course, we get the redux of 'Playback', where all the loose ends are wrapped up in satisfactory fashion and the current Doctor walks off into the sunset, his memories safely relegated to his past. But that's the thing about the Doctor's past as opposed to ours. His past is still alive, still growing, still worth talking about. It's no wonder it didn't stay relegated to memory for long.

Chat: Shadow of the Scourge, Parts Three and Four

Dee: Surprise! Happy Valentine’s Day!

John: I’ve actually been wanting to get back to this for a while, but before we can move on to anything else, we need to finish up our talk on ‘Shadow of the Scourge’. And the back half...it’s good, but it’s good in that weird sort of way that an author revisiting a past triumph is good but not quite as good as the original. It kind of invites comparisons to ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’, and I think it’s hard to win those comparisons even though this is also a good story. Is that me being unfair, or did you kind of feel that way as well?

Dee: I… didn’t see that,  but that’s partly  because I was having too much fun with Sophie Aldred. Whereas in “TW:R” Ace was slogging through the Doctor’s mind, here Benny is more at home and Ace is busy going “EH!? ALL RIGHT, BUT I HOPE YOU HAVE A PLAN!!” at the top of her lungs. Much more fun, less imagery-heavy. For obvious reasons, mind you, but still they felt different enough I didn’t run to that comparison. And good grief, was the cast having fun.

John: Okay, yes. You’re absolutely right, this is one of the biggest reasons why Big Finish slowly took over as “Doctor Who” in the hearts of fandom over the period between 1999 and 2003, because they had Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy and Lisa Bowerman all sharing wonderful chemistry and bringing an indefinable magic to scenes that made them even better than on the printed page. Lisa Bowerman, in particular, deserves special mention simply because she makes Bernice seem like such a natural and organic part of the TARDIS crew. It feels like she’s known the Doctor and Ace for years (and yes, I know that’s technically true because she was one of the Cheetah people in ‘Survival’, but still…) You’re absolutely right, the cast is having a ball. I just kind of felt like when we went back into the Doctor’s mind again, and when he conquered his guilt again, and when we got a happy humanistic ending again...it was all good stuff, don’t get me wrong, but it just felt a bit over-familiar.

Dee: Eh. You’re allowed, obviously. I just don’t see it. I think that guilt and shame are things that creep back in, speaking as a person with depression, and that you really do have to beat them again and again. This time felt different to me, and that’s perhaps good enough. Or maybe I’m just easier to please as long as Ace isn’t being a total git. That’s also very possible. And again, we’re talking about a story that could have been written for my interests, so it had me a lot earlier and kept me better. And I loved “Revelation.” At least I remember loving it!

John: Well, it is pretty easy to please me as well, when it comes to Paul Cornell writing a 7/Ace/Benny book. For all that I gripe a bit about it being a lot like Cornell’s other work from this era, it’s worth noting that I consider Cornell’s other work from this era to be some of the best of Doctor Who, full stop, and a model for the New Series to the point where they had to just break down and adapt ‘Human Nature’ because it was the mission statement of Doctor Who from the moment it was released and they needed to make sure everyone knew about it. If it’s an imitation of Cornell’s other work, there are worse things to impersonate. And the message is good, too. It’s not just that you have to beat back guilt and shame, it’s that if you reach out to other people, they will support you and help you in that fight. They will forgive you if you ask forgiveness, they will care for you if you need care, and that as bad as it can seem sometimes, you’ve got more friends than you realize. It’s a little sappy, but it’s an important thing to hear.

Dee: I’m wondering if that message is more visceral to me because of my depression, too. It’d be really nice to think that instead of having broken circuitry in my brain, it’s aliens trying to use me to gain power when I feel like staying in bed for a week, you know? I don’t think I can hear the “reach out, you’re not alone” enough. Might have to mention that to Cornell at CONvergence this year. And that might also be something that influences my opinion of this story. Also cross-stitch. (Seriously, pointing that out will never get old to me.)

John: The cross-stitch convention is awesome. It’s a sign of Cornell’s creativity and cleverness, to me; I think the easy route would have been a sci-fi convention, complete with lazy jokes about con-goers that would get laughs out of familiarity. Instead, he gets to show the audience that everyone’s got things they’re passionate about, and even if we don’t share that passion we can understand what it’s like to care that much about a hobby. I also like the ending, where the Doctor tells Brian that he will find someone else not because he has some secret insight into the future, but because he believes in the healing power of time and understands that no matter how bad things seem when they’re at their worst, there’s always tomorrow. Those are good things. (Oh, yes, and Ace wandering around being smugly badass to monsters that don’t know how dangerous she is to them. That’s cool too.) There’s definitely a lot to like here, no question.

Dee: Honestly, I’ve liked Benny OK before, but I think this is the first time I’ve really loved-loved her, and her beautiful snarkiness made me giggle. I feel good about this story, and I hope everyone involved does as well.

John: I suspect they do. And now, back into official Virgin territory, and the first short story anthology we’re about to tackle! Join us next time for ‘Decalog’!

Shadow of the Scourge

The main reason this fits as well as it does with the era it's set in is that Paul Cornell really doesn't like the Seventh Doctor that much.

Oh, don't get me wrong; he's a Doctor Who fan and always will be. But he's a fan because he admires certain qualities in the Doctor--his sense of whimsy and magic, his essentially romatic nature, his irrepressible joy at the human spirit. The "sweet" side of the Doctor. He's deeply conflicted when he has to write the Seventh Doctor, that sinister manipulator and player of games with the darkest of monsters. It's not that he doesn't understand that they're two sides of the same person, and that the whimsical Romantic sometimes gives away to the terrifying monster-to-monsters that the Doctor can be...but he's not comfortable with it. Virtually all of his Seventh Doctor stories exist within that tension, and explore it like a scab that just won't heal.

And 'The Shadow of the Scourge' is no exception. The front half is mainly about the Doctor coming up with what Cornell thinks of as one of his "typical" plans...although it's really only typical for a Cornell Seventh Doctor story. When other authors describe the Seventh Doctor as doing something that will eventually come to be known as "timey-wimey", it's usually presented in the form of a benevolent predestination paradox; the Doctor discovers that events have already been arranged in a particular way, and ruefully assents to being history's puppet just one more time. Whereas Cornell always describes it as weeks of tedious stage-managing in order to make sure the latest caper goes off without a hitch.

It doesn't work, of course, because it never works. The halfway point of the audio marks the end of the first act as all of the Doctor's manipulations are undone, forcing him to improvise desperately and to rue and regret his manipulative ways. The former happens in most of the Seventh Doctor's stories--after all, it'd be a pretty poor piece of drama if the Doctor solved everything in the first fifteen minutes. But the second part, the Doctor confronting his personal flaws, is unique to Cornell. In that respect, 'Shadow of the Scourge' is a close cousin to 'Timewyrm: Revelation', to 'Love and War', to 'No Future' and to 'Human Nature'. It's an analysis of the fundamental contradiction within the Seventh Doctor, the dynamic between his callous and cruel manipulations of his friends and of strangers and the ultimate rightness of his actions when all is said and done.

So the back half is mostly about the Doctor beating himself up over being such a jerk to his friends, and because he wants to explore that theme, Cornell uses the Scourge as a villain precisely because they're using his own conscience as a weakness. The Scourge point out everything Cornell's thinking--that his overplanning and arrogance were used as a weakness against him, that he was used as the Scourge's weapon against humanity precisely because of his conceited belief that he could stage-manage one of the oldest and most powerful races in the universe to death with just a few parlor tricks. It overreaches, perhaps, in suggesting that everyone can defeat their own private Scourge simply by remembering the small and simple pleasures in life...not only does it weave unsteadily across the line between sentiment and schmaltz in places, it's also unfair to people to suggest that they always have the power to defeat their own private demons if they'd only think happy thoughts.

But ultimately, the point of the story is that optimism and hope are stronger than despair, that friendship and unconditional love can defeat the worst things in the depths of our souls if we'd only reach out and ask for it, and that people have an enormous capacity to forgive, if we only extend our sincere repentance. Oh, and that cute babies and long parties with tea are pretty damn awesome. Those are messages worth having around, even if they do come with a bit of schmaltz on them. (It brushes off.)

Shadow of the Scourge Part Two

I didn't care as much for the second half of this story, but when I say that it's because the first half was so very good. There are still so very many wonderful parts it feels a bit petty to complain.

For instance, Ace's sacrifice of her hearing was a lovely, inspired touch. Sophie Aldred plays that scene wonderfully, and while some of the jokes were predictable it would have been sad if they hadn't been made. She is violent when she needs to be, but it isn't her first choice of methods. (She does, however, still think confronting the enemy is the way to go. The minute she yells "Oi!" I start grinning.) Ace is back, and back to having faith. It's not the unreasoning faith of her youth, but the tested faith of someone who has made the choice to believe. 

Joining her in that faith we find Bennie, and she is fantastic. I particularly loved her comments about Eight, who doesn't play an active role but whose existence provides a plot point. Her partnership with Ace is beautiful and forms an important fulcrum on which the Doctor can move events. They have come to an understanding. Bennie is equally capable of snark, but she has an innate tenderness. Her intelligence gets them through multiple bad moments, and the aforementioned faith is pivotal in fixing the situation.

The Doctor is less a factor than normal as far as actions go. His primary role is to struggle with himself and the Scourge.  While this lets the humans play the most active part in events, it means we get a lot of what comes dangerously close to whining. On the plus side, McCoy gets some lovely lines and he does a great job when he's allowed to be reflective. The end, too, is well-acted.

Michael and Annie's story comes to a more-or-less satisfying end. So does the story as a whole. 

I would not advise listening to this story with a headache, by the way. The sound effects can get a bit harsh. 

Chat: Shadow of the Scourge, Parts One and Two

John: So the plan to seamlessly flow this off of the back of ‘Tragedy Day’, and thus see ‘The Shadow of the Scourge’ in the context of its era, seems to have gone a bit off the rails. On the other hand, I’m not so sure this is a bad thing. I’ve seen a lot of posts where people do that, and they all seem to come down to, “Gee, it doesn’t fit in there all that well!” I hope that the delay means we can talk about more than just whether they recaptured the mid-90s feel.

Dee: I can’t say I felt like it was anything like ‘Tragedy Day,’ and if you hadn’t told me they were supposed to flow one from the other I wouldn’t have known it. On the other hand, the first two parts are a solid adventure and a fun one. Especially for me, as I said in my review post a few months back. Geeking plus mocking Newagers (which you should pronounce “newage” like “sewage”) plus cross-stitch. They had me at the concept.

John: The concept is great. But I have to say, as we sit at the halfway point, that it hasn’t really gotten going yet. It has a problem that was always one of the weaknesses of Paul Cornell’s Seventh Doctor material, which was that he never really liked the manipulative aspects of McCoy and so they tended to be a bit ham-fisted. The Seventh Doctor rarely did anything as clunky or blatant as nip back in time and stick a giant cylinder of sleeping gas in the ventilation ducts to foil the baddies’ plans, even during this era (which may be why it doesn’t feel like it fits in with ‘Tragedy Day’). He was always a subtle manipulator and a brilliant improviser and you could never tell where one ended and the other began. This part, where he’s just being really obvious about scamming the monsters, is the weakest bit of the story to me. Do you feel the same way?

Dee: It’s hard for me to say. Right now, having not heard the whole thing, my feeling is that he’s still playing them because Seven was never this, as you say, blatant. But there are lots of old Who episodes where the Doctor was, so I am inclined to give it a pass. Instead, I’m focusing on the lovely character grace notes and the humor, which is thrilling me no end. I don’t even want to specifically talk about the parts that made me laugh out loud in case I spoil it for someone else. Furthermore, with Cornell writing and Sophie Aldred reprising her part with clear joy and her usual talent, we’re back to an Ace I like. That goes a long way, in my heart, towards spackling over plot holes.

John: Oh, yes. Ace and Benny are the clear highlights of the first disc, what with her casually chatting about how she did her usual “storming off in shocked betrayal” bit, and Benny getting a rather terribly large number of good lines. I will avoid quoting most of them, for the reasons you mentioned, but I have to say that the exchange: “Are you pregnant?” “How did you know?” “I didn’t. I just ask that question to break the ice at parties,” is one of his better Benny moments, and this is the man who created the character. They were clearly having a ton of fun, and you totally forget that this is the first time that Sophie Aldred and Lisa Bowerman have acted together as Ace and Benny. Which is why I’m glad they didn’t do a story set earlier--with chemistry this good, why waste it by having them act all tense and angry at each other?

Dee: Precisely. The bigger negative, to me, than the plot being hamfisted is that I just can’t tell the baddies apart. It’s one thing when you can see actors facing each other on screen, but in this case it’s just distracting because you’re never sure which baddie you’re hearing. It’s still minor, though. And it doesn’t hurt my anticipation of the next installment. I do want to address the nice bait-and-switch that was almost set up, which is that we hear the possession of the medium before we have the body in the elevator. I wish we could have had the body first, so it looked more like a murder mystery. But then I suppose the fandom gatekeepers would have been upset we didn’t get the monster first, so there’s no way to win on that one.

John: I know what you mean about the monster voices. The actors in question have some really good voices, but they’re so heavily modulated that you can’t tell them apart in monster form. I agree that the body would have been a better cold open in some ways...actually, I was going to say “but” when I realized there’s no “but” there. The body would have been a better open, it would have foregrounded the Doctor, and it’s not like they couldn’t have gotten to the other stuff later. Have you noticed, by the way, that we haven’t been talking much about themes? This feels so much like a nostalgia piece to me that it seems more concerned with being of this era than being about something. Or am I being too hard on it?

Dee: I don’t see that at all. I see it as being more of a throwback to a Hinchcliffe era, if you want to talk nostalgia, but that’s OK with me. To me, the themes are more about people needing something to believe in. Mary needs to believe in Brian and the medium. Michael needs to believe in Brian, then in these people who are (hopefully) saving his life. Ace and Benny need to believe in the Doctor and are almost desperately doing so.

John: I can see something of that, but it does feel sort of secondary at this point to the Doctor being smug about fooling aliens and the aliens being smug about fooling the Doctor. I do recall some people at the time being put out a bit about the Scourge, by the way. In terms of themes, there were people at the time who felt like putting clinical depression down to “evil aliens making you feel that way” was trivializing a very real thing. Speaking personally, I sometimes feel it’s helpful to externalize depression, to remind myself that it’s a brain chemistry thing affecting me and not an aspect of my feelings, but I can see how this might be taking it too far.

Dee: As someone who’s mentally ill myself, and sensitive to this, I didn’t hear the Doctor mention “clinical depression,” which can be seen as different from colloquial “depression,” so unless on a relisten I hear him use the word “clinical” I’m giving it a pass. I welcome others to feel differently, though, and there is a bit of ableism in there. I don’t think at the time this was made that was even a word, though, so again, giving Cornell slack. He always tries hard to be openminded and caring, and he’s a definite ally to many communities. Now, the smugness thing… yes, but holy cow, how many times did Baker do that schtick? It’s not new to the series, that’s for sure.

John: No, it’s not new at all. But I just feel like McCoy doesn’t quite know how to play it. He’s good at enigmatic, he’s good at knowing, but he always played that off in the past as distant and mysterious. I don’t think he likes having to be the one to explain all his own plans here. But as I said, he’s much better when he gets to be clever instead of smug and improvisational instead of all-knowing, so the next disc should be much more entertaining. Join us then!

Shadow of the Scourge: Parts 1 and 2

This one has some of my favorite things: Science, cross-stitching, Ace being snarky but not nasty, and making fun of New Agers. It also has some of my least favorite things: Mistaking pentagrams for a symbol of evil, the Doctor playing a transparent game, and demons. I guess you can't win them all.

I am enjoying Benny's voice actress. She plays Benny exactly as I think she should be played, and she works so well with Aldred and McCoy. The ongoing chemistry between the old series pair easily widens out to include her.

The plot so far: Evil aliens from another dimension are invading Earth, of course. Their location of choice? A hotel in Kent with three conventions going on: A time experiment seminar where a guy is trying to interest backers in his machine, a bunch of New Agers attempting to channel the Rigellian Enlightened Being Ulm, and a cross-stitch convention. What could possibly go wrong? It sounds like a perfect place to invade! (I mean, I would invade it. (Did I mention I cross-stitch?)

As it turns out, it is. And the plot thickens when it appears that the Doctor has sold invasion rights to the Earth, which he has claimed as his after the number of times he's saved it. To me, this is the weakest part of anything in the first two episodes: the Doctor's motives are transparent. The second weakest is the contract discussion. If the clauses discussed don't turn out to have relevance later on, I'll eat my hat.

Now the strong points: The plot is unfolding logically and it doesn't bog down. Again, the chemistry is fantastic. Benny is acting exactly as I would expect her to, occasionally putting her foot in her mouth and then using that as a springboard for more investigation. At one point, the Doctor asks "Isn't it obvious?" and a whole room choruses "No!" at once. I loved that. Maybe it was a cheap laugh, but it was so very well-done.

I'm going to hold off on more plot discussion for now. I'd like instead to talk about Ace's portrayal. She's apparently come to a kind of peace with the Doctor again. She's obviously got combat background, but the younger-Ace sass is present as well. It makes me wonder if I'd like Ace better as the cold, hard soldier if Sophie Aldred read some of the lines. Then again, these lines aren't so hard to hear from her as some from, say, Lucifer Rising would be.

So far, I've enjoyed listening. The voice acting is distinctive enough I have no issues telling the characters apart. The foley work is excellent, and the cast seems to be having a good time. I hope parts 3 and 4 live up to the first parts.

Chat: Tragedy Day

John: I don’t know why, but reading ‘Tragedy Day’ reminds me of nothing so much as the scene at the end of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, where George Carlin watches Bill and Ted practice and looks at the camera, shrugs, and says, “They get better…” It’s that kind of book. It’s so obviously the juvenalia that even ‘The Highest Science’ wasn’t, a sophomore slump from an author who would figure out exactly how to make work what fails here. Or was that just me? I mean, I know you weren’t fond of it either, but did you feel like it was Gareth Roberts trying really hard to make things click and just not having it all sorted out yet?

Dee: I don’t think he’d really thought through how to make the characters relatable. I couldn’t find any, except for Benny in a couple of parts, who felt like real people. That’s partly in an attempt to show just how decadent this culture was, but it was heavy-handed and really made the book a slog. It felt like no one talked to him about how to make things lighter. Once again, I am going to put a hell of a lot of blame on the editor.

John: I do think that’s part of the problem, yes. The previous five books had a lot of story hooks; “Ace and the Doctor are in a simmering conflict over the Doctor’s manipulaions”, “Benny is disenchanted with traveling in the TARDIS and contemplating leaving,” “There’s a shadowy figure playing with alterations to the Doctor’s personal history,” et cetera. Those were a lot of things that could spark a writer’s imagination. This? “The Doctor’s just traveling now, and he’s got companions he gets along with.” It feels rather flat. But I don’t think the novel does its best even with the things it’s got. Olleril never really feels funny enough to be a parody, and it feels too contrived to be real. Luminus is too pathetic to be a serious group of baddies, and too murderous to be joke villains. The slaags work neither as serious monsters or comedy monsters. Everything feels like it falls between two stools.

DeeL No, I don’t think that’s the problem. Ace and the Doctor are still fragile, and there’s a lot that could be done interpersonally with them to show that. You don’t rebuild that easily. Instead, they’re split up. I do agree that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to write, but I don’t think it was a lack of story hooks. And there are serious problems with the antagonists, all of them. Not just Luminus and its pubescent leader (which, ewww) but the big bads at the end, whose names I have forgotten.

John: I almost said “The Monks of Felescar”, but those were the guys from ‘Love and War’ who wrote that book. It says a lot that they’re more memorable than the big bads in this book. These guys were the Friars of Pangloss, but I had to look that up. And yes. They’re all utterly unmotivated. Crispin is taking over the planet and killing most of its inhabitants because, um...Reasons, and the Friars of Pangloss are EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL! Because of Evilness! That was actually the only bit of humor I thought worked, although it may not have been intentional. The Friars were so ludicrously and unmotivatedly evil that if it was parody, it worked. If it wasn’t, then oh dear.

Dee: And the way Crispin died was so very anticlimactic. It would have been one thing if he’d been portrayed throughout as a kid, but he was portrayed as a short adult with as many maturity issues as your average MRA Redditor. Which, of course, makes the Benny crush thing even squickier. I am glad Roberts got through this phase, because if you had only given me this book to read I never would have watched any of his episodes.

John: Anticlimactic and unpleasant, too. I mean, yes, he wasn’t portrayed as a kid, but I still felt like he was being killed off because That’s What You Do With a Who Villain, and Roberts didn’t even think about how it might come off in the book. There’s a very real disconnect, I think, between the way the book plays with the tropes of Doctor Who and the way it functions as a novel, and a lot of the issues come from the way that it breaks away from its own structure in order to make a joke about Doctor Who. Oh, and Forgwyn...is Forgwyn a Marty Stu, or just a badly-executed effort at making a sympathetic non-regular?

Dee: I am seriously hoping the latter. He’s pretty incompetent, really, and I would hope Roberts thinks more highly of himself.

John: And Forgwyn’s mom...actually, you know what? That I’m going to give at least mild props to. There’s something interesting about a character who’s sworn to kill the Doctor while owing him a debt of honor, and I like the way that he didn’t go the cliched route of making her deeply conflicted. She’s not happy about it, but she knows exactly who she is and what she’s about, and she is not going to let her guilt get in the way of her family’s future. It’s some good stuff. If the book had focused more about it, or even just had more stuff like it, I’d have enjoyed it more.

Dee: Yes. We didn’t need the stupid Big Bads. I would have loved a well-done novel with a fragile-relationshipped Doctor being pursued by a really competent assassin! Ah well. A book we didn’t get.

John: Oh, well. At least we’ll get more Cornell soon. Because it’s back to the audios, for our first listen to the one, the only Bernice Summerfield! Join us then!

Tragedy Day

It's hard to be nice to 'Tragedy Day'. There are two basic tacks you can take when writing about it; you can either say that it proves that Gareth Roberts was really better suited to write something other than the Seventh Doctor, or you can say that it was a work of juvenalia that sorted through ideas he later did a much better job of handling in his other work. Let's do both, shall we?

First, let's talk about Gareth and the Seventh Doctor. It's become more and more obvious over the years that Gareth Roberts is a warm, fluffy, huggable teddy bear of a writer who loves writing gloriously silly romps. He is a champion of the Graham Williams era, and has done an excellent job of pastiching it and capturing its humor, wit and charm. He's written for Tennant and Smith and Eccleston, and every one of his scripts is filled with glee and laughter. His Big Finish audios are comedy classics. In short, Gareth Roberts = fun and frolic and froth.

But the New Adventures were never particularly frothy, even after 'No Future' when they finally reined in the apocalyptic dysfunctionality of the TARDIS crew to manageable levels. Ace remains a hardened soldier and full-tilt badass, the Seventh Doctor is still a manipulative bastard (and I'm suddenly picturing the Tarantino Doctor Who story, "Manepulativ Basterd") and the Whoniverse is Grown Up and Serious. Trying to do a comedy in this line of books is like swimming the English Channel dragging an anchor. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's difficult enough to make you wonder why anyone bothered.

In 'Tragedy Day', you can feel the anchor a lot. There are at least three too many gruesome deaths of innocent people to really enjoy the comedy surrounding it, and even the death of the main villain feels awkward and unpleasant because (spoilers) Roberts came up with the bright idea of making the villain a twelve-year-old kid. Which yes, funny that a kid is behind everything, but less funny that a kid gets crushed by girders. There's a constant, unpleasant dissonance in tone that makes the work feel like a Frankenbook, comedy and horror stitched so badly together that you can see the joins.

And, to shift to the second tack, the comedy isn't all that funny. Everything Roberts does here, he does better in 'The One Doctor'. A villain with a scheme to turn a whole planet into a 50s sitcom is a vaguely amusing juxtaposition of adventure-story tropes and mundane domesticity, but it doesn't do the job nearly as well as forcing the companion to assemble dimensionally-transcendent shelving to placate psychotic furniture-packaging robots, while the Doctor is on a Quiz Show of Doom. Roberts got the hang of this as he went along ('The Lodger' is another good example of him hitting that sweet spot between "normal life" and "madman with a box") but 'Tragedy Day' goes on too long and doesn't have enough jokes to make it work, even if it didn't also have the minor problem of being bleak and miserable. (Although some of that may be ironic; the Friars of Pangloss are so over-the-top EEEEEEVIL! that it almost does become funny through the back door. But there's too much going on to be able to make that stick.)

Basically, the nicest thing you can say about 'Tragedy Day' is, "He gets better." And he really really does...so let's just look at this one as an early work and move on.

Chat: No Future

John: The one thing I’m going to admit that the detractors of this book have right is that Paul Cornell has no idea what punk rock was about in the Seventies. Punk wasn’t actually about the political importance of anarchy; ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was taking the piss out of people who cared about that sort of thing. It appropriated the symbols of politics in service of nihilism, suggesting that the only real use for political symbols and movements was in displaying them in front of people who hated them and watching the sparks fly. If a real band had played a song called ‘Dissent Is Good’, like Plasticine did, someone would have cut their mike about thirty seconds in. That said, pretty good book, huh?

Dee: I loved it. I had such a good time reading it, and it’s one I’d go back and read again just for fun. The Brig, Danny, and oh my goodness the Monk... so entertaining.  If Cornell didn’t get punk, he did understand the Monk’s motivations perfectly. Also, origami.

John: It’s one I do go back and read again just for fun. Because it is fun. It’s so much fun. It is such a wonderful catharsis, after five solid books of “grim grim angst angst grouchy grouchy grouchy”, to see the Doctor win in such a magnificent, clever, spectacular, oh-my-freaking-grud-how-did-he-do that sort of way. It’s a clear influence on Moffat, now that I think about it; having the Doctor do something extraordinarily clever and wibbly-wobbly (if not actually timey-wimey in this case) that he waits to reveal to the audience until the last moment so as to preserve the wonderful gobsmacked-ness of it all is a very Moffat-y thing. And yes, origami is a Moffat-y thing too.

Dee: It’s the kind of thing he wishes he’d thought up first, yes. I wonder if Amy wasn’t in some way a recovery from Ace in the books. In some ways they have similar personalities. But really, I don’t want to compare this to Moffat too much. I want to talk about how much fun Benny is. I want to talk about the Brig’s perception and wisdom and his learning from his past experiences to keep from getting found out by the baddies. I want to talk about Ace’s being able to fool everyone. And I have to say, this is the book where I first found myself really liking Benny and seeing what everyone saw in her.

John: And coincidentally, this is the first book since ‘Love and War’ written by the guy who created her, and the first where he’s allowed to really play with her. You remember how I said that I felt like in ‘Love and War’ Benny wasn’t so much a part of the plot as a character who wandered through and explained her backstory? She doesn’t feel like that here. She feels like a proper viewpoint character, arguably the main character of the story, and she’s really good in that role. She’s the only person who has no trouble holding fast to her principles, because her principles are all about small kindnesses and human decency being the really important things when you get right down to it. And I think she’s vindicated in that, especially at the end where the Doctor symbolically restores his TARDIS to the blue box. (Which is now Cornell’s third book where the Doctor renounces his manipulative ways and vows to be a straightforward adventurer once more, but I forgive him that because it’s also a book where Ace learns that sometimes you gotta be sneaky.)

Dee: I agree. I think the events of Conundrum make it easier for her to do and say the things she does. She is really, really good to Danny and the other band members, and they appreciate it. Her reaction to the bomb is wonderful. I also like your point about Ace learning to be sneaky, but that is partly because she’s chasing something from someone who has the power to make her regret just about everything in her life. I love the red-clad woman bits of the book. At first, I thought they were a mind control device from the Monk. I was glad to be wrong.

John: No, they were awesomely fanwanky fanwank instead. (I find it amusing, by the way, that Craig Hinton reviewed this for Doctor Who Magazine and complained about how fanwanky it was to bring back so many old elements like the Chronovores, the Vardans and the Monk...and then he went on to write ‘The Quantum Archangel’. Bless his heart.) Actually, that’s something that takes some getting used to as I go back into the Wilderness Years stuff, how continuous the threading of continuity was through the work. It was like we were all speaking in a secret code back then, dropping all these references throughout each story as if to say to each other, “You get it, right? You’ve picked up on the secret messages that we’ve implanted into this TV tie-in, and you’re one of the We.” It makes more sense when you remember that these authors were really Internet-present back then during an era when that wasn’t as common, and that readers could go onto rec.arts.doctorwho and say to Paul directly, “I loved the ‘chap with ‘Wings’ reference!” It was a really weird sub-culture thing, I think, and you don’t see it at all anymore on the new series.

Dee: Having memory of the 70s makes me giggle at that because I remember not getting what the big deal was... it sounded like perfectly good music to me. I liked that part of it more than the in-joke for fandom. But I get what you’re saying there, of course. I just wasn’t a part of that culture. (I wonder if I’m going to be visited by a gatekeeper now? “You don’t like the joke because of the chap with the wings bit? You are NO TRUE WHOVIAN!”)

John: I hope not. I mean, I’ll admit that one of the weird things nowadays about the new series is that it’s so easy to get into. You can pick up everything you need to know about the new Doctor Who over the course of a week or so with Netflix, whereas back in the day, getting every single joke in ‘No Future’ probably involved a masterclass in British Popular Culture. (I didn’t get everything either. I mean, I maybe got more of the Doctor Who jokes than you did, but I have no idea who the Goodies or the Wombles are, and I don’t think I could even name a single Wings song.) But I like to think that I have enough perspective to understand that those things aren’t actually important, just because they’re ‘Doctor Who’ references. Trivia is called that for a reason, after all.

Dee: Back to the Brig... I loved the natural progression of his growth from the series. It made perfect sense to me, the Buddhism idea. At the beginning of the book, I was as stunned as I was supposed to be by his behavior, of course. When the explanation came through it almost made an audible click, it matched so perfectly.

John: Oh, yes, it’s a perfect evolution of the character, and a wonderful comment on the Buddhist threads that ran through the series in that era. Barry Letts, the producer, was famously converted to Buddhism not long before he took over Doctor Who, and he tried to work little subtle references to the attainment of enlightenment and the abandonment of worldly things. The Third Doctor’s regeneration is presented as a sort of Buddhist parable; in that light, having a Zen Brigadier was a perfect evolution. And since they never used the Brig much in the new series, we can imagine that this was how he finally wound up. YAY!

And on that note, it’s time to move on to a book that both of us liked, um...considerably less. Join us next time as we slog through ‘Tragedy Day’!