Plagued with Flawed Tapes by Kevin McCorry 7/8/98
Here is the sad chronicle of my past few months in collecting of CBS-FOX's Doctor Who videos. In April, I had a friend buy and send me Destiny of the Daleks. Through the second 50 minutes of the tape, there were repeated dropouts caused by dirty heads on the machine that recorded the tape, including one that obliterated the whole picture for some 4 frames. At some 5 dollars expense of postage, I had to return the tape for a replacement. Luckily, the replacement was perfect. But my fortunes went downhill fast. I ordered Earthshock from Columbia House. First tape: major tracking problems in Part 4. Replacement (after paying 5 dollars in postage to return the defective first tape): the dirty-heads-on-recorder dropout problem, including the ever-popular screen-spanning dropout. Second replacement: same picture problems, though in different places, as on first replacement. Conclusion: after spending 15 dollars on postage returning one inconsequential tape after another, I give up on Earthshock. I'm never going to get a decent copy.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me The Armageddon Factor. Same problem: the dirty-head recorded screen-spanning spurts of video noise. Had to return it. No doubt replacement will be equally unsatisfactory. Trying a different source, I ordered Castrovalva from Amazon.com. When it arrived, I put the tape in my machine and found a pair of rainbow glitches at the start of the tape, indicating that the tape was reused and not properly blanked. Rainbow glitches are unacceptable on a prerecorded tape that costs more than 30 dollars in Canadian dollars (when I can buy theatrical movies for less than 15 dollars with more reliable quality. Had same problem with "Terror of the Autons" that I ordered from various sources. Every tape I ordered of this episode had rainbow glitch on it. Last year, on a double pack of The King's Demons/The Five Doctors, rainbow glitch on The King's Demons. Double tape packs are invariably flawed on one of the tapes.
Just what is going on here anyway? Am I just the unluckiest collector in the world, or does CBS-FOX not care about its Doctor Who videos and is using inferior, used tapes and unkempt equipment to record them? Has anyone else experienced these problems? Right now, I'm at the end of my rope. I just cannot order any more Who tapes. Until they're available locally with a money-back guarantee, I cannot risk any more of my hard-earned money on these shoddily manufactured videos.
Through the Past Darkly-- Enjoying the Lost Episodes of Doctor Who by Carl West 22/8/98
Being exceedingly curious about this Telesnap Reconstruction craze, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and request a copy of the much raved-about Fury from the Deep. With the deepest respect for the talented (and kind) gentlemen who create and distribute these reconstructions for free, I really have to say that I was a little disappointed with the video. I have heard that the actual telesnaps are really rather tiny in size, and I am afraid this becomes all too evident when they are scanned by a video camera: the resolution of the images is fuzzy. I understand that with some of the more recent reconstructions, the scanning of the telesnaps is much better, so I certainly do not wish to demean these people's more recent work (I have not even seen any of it).
Anyway, my point is that, for me, the Telesnap Reconstructions are scarcely better than the Target novelizations in terms of being an adequate means for bringing the lost episodes back to life. So where does the answer lie? If you ask me: the audios. Although I was not really impressed by the visuals of the Fury video, it was very exciting to get the chance to experience the existing audio of the story. Particularly since most of us are quite familiar with Patrick Troughton's Doctor from the stories that do still exist, his voice in the Fury audio is more than enough for us to imagine the tramp-like little man (this holds true for Jamie's and Victoria's presence on the audio, too).
I was quite delighted to hear that the audios for every single lost episode do in fact exist. Now, I for one would not recommend that anyone try to sit down and listen to a "raw," unnarrated Doctor Who audio and expect to be very pleased. The predominant question on your mind half of the time would be: "What the hell is going on?" The BBC has released several of the audios with narration by Tom Baker, Colin Baker, and Jon Pertwee, but for some exceedingly frustrating reason the BBC has allowed these tapes to go out of print. (Actually, there is a marvelous site called The Missing Scripts, which provides what could be a valuable and accurate readable companion to the audios.) Regarding the Target novelizations, Doctor Who for most of us is a sight and sound, television experience, and those rather unliterary TV tie-ins can be a little less than satisfying sometimes.
With the recent lawsuit in England concerning the illicit distribution of BBC material, the future of fan-distributed, rare Who seems quite uncertain. Personally, I would really like to see the BBC release more narrated audios of the lost stories. Marco Polo and The Abominable Snowmen are two that I would particularly love to see released.
My vision for the future by Jacob Cash 22/8/98
Doctor Who should be in a strong position for revival. There are many dedicated and sensible fans willing to support any sort revival that anyone might suggest. In fact, there are many more fans than one might first suspect.
I suspect that Star Trek had a similar following after its original series ended, but it had the advantage of having a shorter original series, allowing the perfect timing for it's original creator to make "the next generation". Doctor Who of course kept going with it's original series, making any "next generation" seem like a copy-cat manoeuvre.
As with any long running show, keeping originality and "freshness" of ideas becomes difficult, and Doctor Who has it's share of "re-hashes", but less than most due to its highly flexible nature. It's long running and established "tradition", makes any departure into a "next generation", I suspect, a risky move that would be confronted with much (unjustified?) negativity from the dedicated fans. New or casual fans might not be as concerned, but a group of vocal fans could make such a series unpopular. I think these factors keep possible sponsors of a new series away.
Perhaps some fans see the Doctor Who movie as a "next generation" departure, and hence this is why they don't like it. I will admit that it is definitely a different generation from the original series, but whether it is the next generation I think is up for debate.
Something to consider is an amalgamation of the movie and the original series, if we are to see Doctor Who move into the 21st Century with new adventures to its name. Of course many fans will tell me that the books, and in some way the telesnap reproductions are the new Doctor Who. In many ways they are right, but for the majority of the public (to which a new series has to be aimed), Doctor Who is a television series, nothing else.
What I prepose is a re-creation or re-production of the missing/destroyed episodes. Obviously you wouldn't "copy" to the extent that you would get a William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton impersonator, but instead use the scripts with the new characters. The stories could be re-created with a new doctor and companions, without having to drastically change the story. Of course some of the dialogue would change for a new doctor and companions, but the story, the most important factor in any Who, would still be there.
I know many fans would see this as sacrilege, but I think it would make the basis for a number of seasons and allow the public to see these great stories again. Some would say, "what happens if we find a warehouse with all the missing episodes"? Well firstly, I would say that this is extremely unlikely, and secondly, so what? The object wouldn't be trying to re-create exactly the older episodes, but make them as new adventures, with the plot or story the same as the older episodes.
Obviously some problems exist, such as stories with one or two episodes in existence, but I'm sure there are many inventive ways this could be overcome. You could even use these on purpose, under the pre-text that the doctor has to re-visit his past to save the fabric of time from some unknown evil or some more inventive scenario.
Predominantly what I'm trying to say is:
I would be most interested in people's comments.
The Future For Doctor Who by Tom May 24/8/98
Jacob's vision (in the essay above) is one which potentially is a winner. Personally, I would like to see newly scripted stories, by an array of good writers-- Parkin, Miles, Orman, Blum, Cornell etc, backed up by a reasonable budget, a stylistic direction for the series to take, and directors of Alan Wareing and Graeme Harper's class. The direction my series would take: As much as I'd like to do a more adult series, circa The NAs, I think new Doctor Who would have to have broad appeal, without the JNT Era continuity excesses.
I'd have to use monsters a lot, and bring back old enemies, but not very often. The cleverness and social depth of the McCoy era should be moulded with historicals from the Hartnell era, the horror of the Troughton era and the humour of the Williams era. Of course, to achieve such a lethally good combination would be distinctly tough.
Jacob's idea should work fine, but has this sort of thing been attempted before? A lot of people would have to be convinced, not least the fans. Nevertheless, I think it would be great to see big budget creations of such classics as Marco Polo, Web of Fear, Abominable Snowmen, Fury From The Deep, Daleks' Master Plan, Power & Evil of the Daleks, The Massacre, The Crusade.... The only problem would be how the Doctor's personality and actions in these stories would have to be changed. For instance, the actor chosen would find it hard portraying the same role in Marco Polo and Evil of the Daleks.
Also, the relevance of Power of the Daleks would be lost, unless the lead actor changed. The whole concept of re-doing stories, could also entail a little agitation for hardcore fans, who know exactly what's going to happen in the missing stories. The funny thing is though, that this approach to new Doctor Who could have large appeal to the general public, despite alienating fans who hate it, because it can't fit into the Doctor Who canon.
It would be worth giving it a try I think. All of the true lost classics could be made, and then, once this new series was popular, new stories could be made. The choice of Doctor/Companions would be vital, with Alan Davies, Martin Clunes and Brian Blessed all likely to do well. For the companions, I think that either famous, or up-and-coming actors (for the Ian/Ben/Jamie role), and actresses (Susan/Barbara/Polly/Victoria) should be cast.
All of this though is highly unlikely to happen, as the BBC harbour a ridiculous grudge against it's most iconic and entertaining programme.
The Meaning of Vortis by Dr. Terry Evil 24/4/99
...being an update of The Meaning of Liff, wherein the names of towns get their own definitions. Here, I've done the same thing with planets in the Whoniverse, wherein you get more exotic, if slightly more quarry-strewn, places.
Anea (n. medical)
The correct term for choking on a cup of tea, thereby spraying it both up
your nose and for a two metre radius.
Aneth (n.)
An Estonian holiday celebrating the one time when stuffed pork roll was
available on the black market.
Argolis (n.)
A type of cheap heater which Anne Robinson is always warning you about but
which has nevertheless been gassing selected members of the elderly
community for the past twenty years.
Betrushia (n.)
A Russian eyebrow comb.
Castrovalva (n.)
A type of motor oil that used to be manufactured in East European
communist countries. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many gallons have
been imported to the west, where it's been hilariously ruining the cars of
penny-pinching capitalist running dog lackey drivers ever since.
Chloris (adj.)
Descriptive of the annoyance directed at a partner who feels that one
cannot have enough photosythesising going on in the house.
Draconia (n.)
The mysterious treatment which has been keeping the Queen Mother alive all
these years, despite the fact she drinks three bottles of gin and smokes
50 fags a day.
Dronid (pl. n.)
The excretia from very small insects which you apparently swallow three
tons of during your lifetime, according to a typically panic-inducing
article in the Sunday Times magazine.
Emindar (n.)
The panic caused by equating the amount of dairy products eaten in a
lifetime with a new report on the possibility of catching lysteria,
salmonella, e-koli etc.
Gallifrey (adj.)
A friendly punch-up in an Irish bar.
Kastopheria (vb.)
The apprehension one feels when Cliff Richard releases a new record.
Kursaal (vb.)
To chastise oneself for doing absolutely nothing when you at least should
have done something about that smell in your bedroom.
Mechanus (adj.)
An official BBC phrase describing the interior workings of devices created
by Matt Irvine.
Menda (vb.)
The act of walking incredibly fast. Usually only performed by sellers of
the Big Issue and people in shell suits.
Mictlan (n.)
The language spoken by actors in films when they're ordered to converse
in any foreign language. Usually consists of phrases like
'isken-lisken-bisken-twisken-noronov.'
Mondas (n. archaic)
The ancient Roman word for actors who come on occasionally, sincerely
agree with the lead character, and walk off again. The word is only used
today in reference to Noel's House Party.
Pakha (vb.)
An Indian term of amusement, mostly displayed on witnessing a westerner
arrogantly ordering the hottest curry on the menu and zealously eating his
way to dehydration, mouth ulcers and a full fortnight of horrific toilet
experiences.
Peladon (n.)
University professor specialising in a subject especially created by an
insane English monarch and which has been so buried in embarrassment that
he can claim a stipend for doing nothing.
Refusis (pl. n.)
Of arguing - Polite words that begin along the lines of "I agree with
you, but..." followed by a whole stream of baseless argument painstakingly
culled from various sources expressly for this purpose.
Reklon (n.)
What the bodies of Soviet cars were made out of.
Ribos (vb.) The antithesis of Tigella (qv.). To play a practical joke that is so vicious that the participants never speak to each other again, despite the many cries of 'it was only a joke'.
Segonax (n. archaic)
A medieval instrument of torture, the exact nature of which has been lost
to time. Usually displayed on stately home walls, it has made visitors
uncomfortable for many years, as they go through all their secret
psychotic fears trying to work it what it was used for.
Skonnos (n.)
Hell's Angels' tea cakes.
Solos (n.)
An ancient Egyptian god who once earned the honour of having thirty-five
dogs sacrificed to him, despite giving no indication that this is what he
wanted.
Spiridon (n.)
University professor specialising in the practice of drawing intricate
patterns with plastic cogs.
Tigella (vb.) To play an ineffective practical joke on someone far too nice but who insists on 'joining in the fun'. Usually consists of hiding their stapler or deliberately getting their name wrong on the Christmas card list.
Traken (n.)
The specific word used by the emergency services for fell walkers who
have inadvertently died while climbing what they thought was a hill but
turned out to be a mountain.
Vandor Prime (n.)
A pre-Bill Gates computer, so outdated that it is only used nowadays for
kitsch, as a reference point for useless technology and for co-ordinating
air traffic control at Heathrow Airport.
Vortis (n.)
A make of battery only ever found in 50p shops that are guaranteed to run
out just after opening the packet.
Zamper (n.)
A new device which greatly improves the quality of tape players and which
will shortly become a standard on all new models, thereby forcing
audiophiles to bankrupt themselves once again.
Zolfa-Thura (n.)
Nuclear Man's arch-enemy (c. DC Comics 1960-61).
My Theory of the Doctor's Early Life by Robert McMullen 24/8/00
Because I am, and will forever be, a Whovian of the Prydonian order (as we all are, even if some of us aren't quite aware of this truth), I am fascinated by the Doctor's life, and am intrigued as to what makes the Doctor who he is (no pun intended). What made the Doctor such an independent spirit? What made him hold his own people, the Time Lords themselves, in such utter contempt? In all of his adventures, why was he so selfless? Why has the Doctor always been so willing to share his voyages with so many different people, even those who have stowed away on the TARDIS? I feel the only way I can dare to shed light on these questions is to look at his life while he grew up on his home world, Gallifrey.
The Doctor's early life prior to his arrival on earth with Susan in London in 1963 is veiled in mystery. Because the Doctor is a sentient being, he has grown, learned from, matured, and lives his life based off of his experiences and what he was able to gain and discard from those life moments, just as we all have done. Assume then, for the sake of open-ended argument, that the Doctor's childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and the duration of his formal education were years of great misery, confusion, tumult, anger, that ultimately, led to understanding in his life that made him take drastic measures to ensure his freedom and to promote his goodwill towards others.
My theory is that, during the Doctor's youth, Morbius had to be the President of the High Council of Time Lords on Gallifrey. Because of Morbius' reign of terror, which incidentally involved the Elixir of Life that belonged to the Sisterhood of Karn, the Doctor knew early on just what immense harm evil can produce. This would be an explanation as to why he had such a horrific reaction when he saw Solon's sculpture of Morbius' face in the story, The Brain of Morbius.
As the Doctor grew into his adulthood and his years in the Prydonian Academy, normalcy came to the High Council. Successions in power often went very dully and without complication, and everything ran smoothly as far as Gallifreyan government went. This could not be said for the Doctor. Because he's always been a very gifted person, one who has vast intellect balanced with emotion, and strong convictions that are tempered by his overwhelming sensibility to others, sentimentality, and a romantic, almost quixotic outlook on life, the Doctor had a hard time identifying with many of his peers. Because of this difficulty in trying to accept his role in the strict society he lived in, he forged relationships with such wayward souls as the mischievous Drax (The Armageddon Factor), the shallow Runcible, the newscaster in The Deadly Assassin, The Master, and The Rani. He also sought enlightenment from older and more learned Time Lords such as Borusa, eventual President of the High Council (The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time, Four to Doomsday, and The Five Doctors) and Kampo Rimpochet, AKA Cho-je, the wise monk who guided the Doctor through much of his tribulation during his adolescence, notably when the Doctor would visit him atop his lonely hill (as alluded to in Planet of the Spiders).
Finally, after years and years, it reached a point where our hero could no longer endure the conformity of Time Lord society. On Gallifrey emerged a system of social stratification, hence the different colored headdresses and attire of each group of Time Lords, pomp and circumstance that overshadowed the importance of his society's advancement and whole reason for its poignancy and omnipotence, and utter disregard and lack of respect for other beings in the universe, many of whom were treated by Time Lords as second-class beings (humans, and Rutans, The Horror of Fang Rock) or were races across galaxies who needed defense from threats too frightening to imagine at any point in time--Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, Sutekh, Nestene Autons, Axos, and countless more--who were looked upon indifferently.
Quite frankly, the Doctor could have none of it any longer. As a show of protest and rebellion, the Doctor chose to act against all of the conventions of Gallifreyan culture. He spoke out against nonintervention, rebuked his formal learning and urged change. He encouraged people to speak out and to just live. And since this wasn't enough to make his fellow Gallifreyans open their eyes and realize that they could not suffice on their own for eternity, the Doctor made a fateful decision that would set into motion his future. He then came to a realization--why not steal one of the many symbols of Time Lord greatness and arrogance--The Hand of Omega (Remembrance of the Daleks) and flee Gallifrey for good? Could this be the one thing that would make the other Time Lords realize that they were so caught up in their own hyperbolic existence that they in turn, undermined the collective vision that Rassilon and Omega shared that brought about their world to begin with? The Doctor took the risk, and off he went. And thus, the rest is history in the making.
From the lessons he learned living on his world, the Doctor learned that in a universe so vast, so great, and so wondrous, there are two things that prevail and remain at a constant--a hand in need, and the ugliness of evil. Most importantly, he learned that an impact had to be made to ensure that balance and harmony could be maintained in the very universe that Gallifrey shares with so many other worlds. In his lifetime, up to that point, he himself was in need--many times. The Doctor was fortunate and thankful to have those in his life support him and aid him through his crises. He also saw how brutal and painful death and destruction can truly be. It is this premise that the Doctor bases his life's work upon, to fight endlessly in the pursuit of what's right.
Too Broad and too deep for the small screen by Yonatan Bryant 4/4/01
In my mind the books are where Doctor Who truly belongs. The TV show was trying hard but it was nigh impossible for the show to show us the big picture, there wasn't the money and there weren't the fans writing for it. But in the Novelizations and the books when have seen more than we could ever see on TV. We has seen a giant seal of Rassilon with people living on it surface. We have been in the cockpits and flying along side of great starship . We have seen a ship trapped in an infinite loop, We have Seen the Whole of London being transformed time and time again we have seen the Doctor dancing with death on the surface of the moon, we have being into the depths of the Doctors mind, we know more and less about the doctor than we ever had before. We have seen a planet blown abort. All of those would not have looked good at all on the TV show. The Stories are truly too broad and too deep for the small screen.
Also we have people writing the books these days who know the show, they love it they are all of us, they are the people where here amazed by the show when the first saw it 10 ,20, 30 years ago and fell in love with it. in the TV show you had 2 or 3 fans who ever wrote for the show. For the writers of the show, it was their day job, for us it is our lives. All of us yearn to be fighting the fight of the just alongside with the Doctor. And because of that any new show will ultimately disappoint, because what can be seen in the mind is not always transferable to TV. To be able to maybe achieve the scope of the books, you would need a movie sized budget for each story, in order to make the villains believable, the settings real and the story unconstrained by money.
And lastly we have the actors. In the TV show people stayed or 2-3 years generally and then went on. There is now way with a TV show we could have got 9 years of the Seventh Doctor or 6 out of Bernice also there is no way the Mel could have appeared in one story and the vanish for 2 years. In fact there was an interview with Sylvester McCoy where he said that he would have left the show after one more year.
When the TV show died, Doctor Who, which is now in Guinness World Records for the books, stopped becoming just a old TV show with a bad budget. It became a legend. A legend that freed from the pettiness of the Small screen like the 3rd Doctor From earth, was free to explore the entirety of Time and Space uninhibited by anything but the imagination.
Hype Space by Andrew Wixon 1/9/01
Living in the UK at the moment one rapidly comes to the conclusion that nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Nearly every Saturday night the TV listings are filled with 'I Love the Seventies' or 'Top Ten Folk Music' or 'The 100 Greatest Gardening Programmes Ever'. This sort of list-making is addictive and insidious but it certainly fills up the schedules. It's spreading, too; it seems you can't move without tripping over the Ten Best This or the All-Time Great That. And, inevitably, DW is not immune - it features in other lists (apparently the BFI membership thinks it's the third best TV series ever made which even I find hard to believe), and for a few years now there've been regular 'Best Story Ever' polls. The DWM one was won by Genesis of the Daleks, of course, and isn't it interesting that the most frequently-shown story should turn out to be the most popular? But elsewhere, for the most part outside the walls of Who-fandom, a consensus seems to be appearing on this topic. And the consensus is that the pinnacle of DW is City of Death.
SFX magazine recently covered the serial's genesis in its' Past Perfect column, saying DW in general was 'mostly charming, usually interesting, and habitually inventive, but rarely brilliant. And yet for four weeks in the fag end of the 1970s it touched excellence...' going on to cite the vast audience as proof of its superiority, apparently unaware of the special circumstances of its broadcast. The BBC Online section devoted to Douglas Adams is unequivocal when it describes CoD as 'Douglas' (and the shows') finest [story]'. Some of you probably agree. There seems to be a critical juggernaut building up here and I'm going to be brave and stand in the path of the beast.
I like CoD a lot. It is, obviously, brilliant: deliriously witty, fantastically original and inventive. Certainly a top ten contender. But is it the best story ever? If I was to pick one story to show DW at its' best and most representative, would this be it? I find myself shaking my head. This isn't a review of CoD per se, so I'll keep this brief, but... CoD is a marvellous souffle of a story, it leaves a wonderful taste in the mouth as it skips along powered by ingenious plot-twists and eminently quotable one-liners. But DW's strength is to be powerful and moving as well as fun and inventive, and powerful and moving are two words you can't use to describe CoD. It has a heart of purest candyfloss. It's great, but ultimately undone by this in any 'best ever' consideration.
And I think it's fair to say that it owes its' current favoured status largely to the name of the author. (It seems that most of the time Douglas Adams gets sole credit for what was a three-writer script.) Doctor Who very rarely attracted 'name' writers to it. Nigel Kneale turned the opportunity down, Christopher Priest was approached but ultimately fell out badly with the production team, Tanith Lee was reportedly interested but nothing came of it. Terry Nation did become relatively famous but this was on the back of his work for the show. Virtually the only well-known authors to work on DW were Douglas Adams and Steve Gallagher - and with all due respect to him, Gallagher has never approached Adams' degree of fame. That CoD is Adams' story must draw attention to it when people outside hard-core fandom survey the series. That it should be so good is a bonus.
From a certain perspective it is obvious, even logical that CoD is the best DW story. Adams was a brilliant writer of SF comedy, and as previously mentioned the most celebrated author ever to be credited for a DW script. To an outsider, how could an almost unknown hack like Robert Holmes or Malcolm Hulke write a better script than him? By awarding CoD, and Adams, the 'best DW ever' prize the SF community in general reassures itself that a feted author is a feted author no matter what the context (and as a corollary, proves to itself that it understands DW just as well as any hard-core fan may).
But I think the very idea of a 'best DW story ever' is mistaken. The series, famously, didn't have a format or an agenda. It could and did do different things, in different styles, from week to week, and exactly what the 'best' story is depends on what you're looking for. You want the wittiest dialogue and most inventive script? Sure, City of Death is the best example. You want moral debate and a dark, gripping narrative? Turn your attention to Genesis of the Daleks. Or literary pastiche, and a loving recreation of period? Then Talons of Weng-Chiang is where you should be looking. There is no single greatest DW story, any more than there is an archetypal DW formula. But the glory of this is that almost no matter what you're looking for, Doctor Who will have made a story, often a great story, that exactly meets your needs.
The Rad vs Trad Fallacy by Rob Matthews 6/12/01
I only became aware of it very recently, but I find this whole argument about 'rad' and 'trad' Doctor Who quite stultifying. One reviewer of City of the Dead recently assessed the novel not in terms of whether it was good or bad, but whether it was rad or trad. And as a 'rad' novel it was dismissed almost out of hand.
This almost reactionary attitude seems entirely against the spirit of the impetus of Doctor Who, which, whether on TV or in books, was never about ploughing familiar furrows or talking down to its audience. A quick rundown of the series' recognised classic stories reveals them all as in some way radical -
(well, to be fair, Warriors of the Deep doesn't entertain even briefly)
So I'm confused by why stories like, say, Alien
Bodies or Transit get these 'rad' labels stuck on
them. Alien Bodies is a Doctor Who story pure
and simple. That it introduces new concepts is par for the course. That's
sort of the point of an ongoing series. Transit,
meanwhile, is Doctor Who 'does' cyberpunk, just as Spearhead From Space is Doctor Who 'does'
Quatermass or One of the reviewers of another 'rad' novel, Verdigris, suggested he was uncomfortable with the
appearance of a gay character, because Doctor Who started life as a
children's programme. This - like criticisms of (what is after all very
occasional) swearing - disregards the fact that the novel range is not
written for children (kids don't even know what Doctor Who is
nowadays), and also implies with casual homophobia that the subject of
homosexuality must be kept from children at all costs.
I suppose what 'trad' readers want, then, are slightly patronising and
conservative children's stories. I suggest they only buy the books with
the words 'Terrance Dicks ' on the cover.
The Paradox of Set's by Andrew Wixon
28/1/02
For a programme which for the majority of its run was fundamentally
concerned with time travel, Doctor Who never really explored the
whole knotty and cerebral area of time paradoxes and the effects of
changing history (and all the better for it - I wish someone would tell
the Big Finish crew as much!). There's the grandfather paradox in Day of the Daleks, the whole messy finale to the McGann telemovie with the Pertwee logo, and, um,
that's about it... except for Pyramids of Mars.
As every true fan knows midway through episode two of this marvellous
story the TARDIS visits 1980... the 1980 that will occur if the Doctor
does not oppose Sutekh's schemes. It's a barren, devastated wasteland, of
course. So history is not predetermined and Sutekh must be fought. It's a
nice twisty tangent for the story, and doesn't seem to be a paradox at
all. Until you think about it a bit more.
Time for the jargony bit: for convenience's sake I will henceforth be
referring to the main, standard universe that DW occurs in as
Earth-P (for Prime; yes, I read too many DC comics as a child). The
'wasteland Earth' version of history where Sutekh escapes is Earth-S. The
version of history where Britain became a fascist dictatorship and an
apocalypse was triggered by Stahlmann's project is Earth-I. The version
where the destruction of Auderley house led to World War Three and a Dalek
invasion in the 21st century is Earth-D. The version of history where
Thinktank cause a nuclear war (averted by the Doctor on TV) is Earth-R.
It seems pretty much a given in Doctor Who that History as such
can only be changed by time-travellers, or aliens with a time-travel
capacity (such as Linx in The Time Warrior). The
Master's attempts to reroute History in, for example, The
King's Demons are described as perverting the course of History,
whereas the Zygon attempt to conquer the Earth isn't. It also seems
reasonable to suppose that without the Doctor's intervention the History
of Earth-P would be vastly different; Earth-P would have been conquered
many times over in the 1970s alone. So the Earth-P that Sarah is native to
owes its existence to the Doctor's efforts to enforce his view of History.
Sutekh is not a time traveller, nor does he appear to actually employ
time travel technology (the 'time tunnel' just seems like an
interdimensional short cut). So he is a native of the main Earth-P
timestream in the same way as the Axons and the Zygons, and left unopposed
his actions would be a part of the natural flow of History. The Doctor is
the one who interferes in order to stop him.
All this would be fine were it not for the sidestep to Earth-S. The
suggestion is that a given future (in this case, the 'artificial' Earth-P
Sarah comes from) cannot come into existence until the actions that create
it have occurred. Earth-S is the 'default' future until the moment
Sutekh's defeat becomes inevitable, at which point it is replaced by
Earth-P. In other words, Sarah's Earth can't exist until Sutekh is
defeated.
But this is nonsense. The Doctor visited Earth many, many times in his
personal timeline. Most of these were post-1911 and Sutekh's death, but
prior to Sutekh's defeat in terms of the Doctor's own personal history.
The first, second and third Doctors all visited Earth-P, not Earth-S,
despite the fact that Sutekh's defeat was not yet certain.
Why was it not yet certain? Sarah says 'We know the world didn't end in
1911', basically making the same point. This is the whole reason they
visit Earth-S. There are two possibilities here:
a) That Sutekh's defeat is uncertain, which means that all the Doctor's
previous (to him) post-1911 visits should have been to Earth-S and not
Earth-P, that Sarah should never have been born, and that the Doctor's own
life-history would have taken a vastly different path.
b) That Sutekh's defeat is certain, in which case Earth-S will never
come into existence (and so can't be visited).
Consider this analogy: suppose the Doctor leaves Earth midway through
Robot and visits the future of the planet. According
to Pyramids of Mars' view of temporal mechanics he
should visit a future where Thinktank either won, or caused a nuclear
holocaust (Earth-R). Now suppose he made that trip a few months earlier -
just after Monster of Peladon. Thinktank's plan still
hasn't been stopped yet, so he should still wind up on Earth-R. When you
think about it all his visits to the future should be to Earth-R until the
events of Robot when he defeats Thinktank, at which point Earth-P will
reappear. This isn't the case. Therefore Earth-S is a weird anomaly of
some kind.
Other possible solutions that have been suggested to me: One idea was
that the Doctor can visit all possible alternative futures at will, it's
simply a case of steering the TARDIS down the correct trouser-leg of the
time vortex. This seems dubious to me for several reasons: the Doctor is
genuinely staggered to arrive on Earth-I in Inferno,
suggesting that alternative worlds are unknown to the Time Lords. It also
makes a nonsense of any idea of 'the web of time' or 'changing history' if
all possible histories are equally valid from the Time Lords' viewpoint.
(You also wonder why he hangs around on Earth-P at all, given that there
has to be a alternative version somewhere where the Daleks were never
created, the Silurians not blown up by the Brigadier, etc, etc.)
It's not the same as Earth-D (the home of Day of the
Daleks' guerillas), either. That was another anomaly, but a
self-negating one given the Doctor's influence (sadly we don't see what
happens to the future Earth ruled by the Daleks when the events causing it
are prevented from happening).
I suppose we could just put this down to another bit of illogical
grandstanding by Bob Holmes (that's not meant as harshly as it probably
sounds), but I feel obliged to offer a solution: Sutekh would not have
been freed even had the Doctor not been around to stop him. There was a
faulty component in the rocket's antigrav drive; it blew up on takeoff
setting fire to the Priory and destroying Scarman and the mummies. Sutekh
stayed trapped until his death c. 12000AD, and so no Earth-S in the usual
flow of events.
When the Doctor and Sarah arrive they interfere, as is their wont.
Unfortunately (and unbeknownst to them) one of their bits of interference
is to inadvertently fix the damaged component in the rocket (picking it up
and shaking it; this happens just before the side trip). Thus for the
first time there's the potential for the rocket to work, for Sutekh to
actually escape and create Earth-S. This narrow window of possibility only
exists until the end of the story, but it's within this timeframe that we
see Earth-S. A brief glimpse into alternative time, which - subjectively -
only existed for a few hours. It's not much of a solution, and I'm open to
a better one.
(I leave it to the interested fellow-student to explain why Sarah is
able to visit a version of history her very existence is incompatible
with, and why the Doctor doesn't recognise Earth-S as the blatant anomaly
it clearly is.)
The McCoy flamewars on RADW by Terrence Keenan
27/8/02
It's common knowledge that Doctor Who fandom is fragmented. Put
ten different Who fans in a room and you're guaranteed ten
different opinions as to what makes great Who and what makes bad
Who. Overall, this is a good, and expected thing for a television
show/book series/audio adventure format that's lasted nearly 40 years.
Taking that into account, where one's favorite era of Who might
lie depends on numerous factors -- ex: first Doc watched, first author
read, etc. --, so it inevitable that certain eras ring true for certain
fans, while others drive them crazy. For me, Tom Baker is the standard
bearer, Peter Davison is my new second favorite, Colin Baker has dwindled
in favor, and unfortunately Sylvester McCoy does nothing but irritate.
Which is a good time to bring up a certain battleground that has raged
over at rec.arts.drwho. A lengthy,
pedantic, mean-spirited and downright crass flamewar has been going on at
RADW over the relative merits, or lack thereof of a total of 12 stories
that starred McCoy as the Doctor. Between diatribes, insults, smart-aleck
FAQs, poetic attacks and other methods, the Pro-McCoys and the Anti-McCoys
have waged war over each other to the point where the mere mention of
McCoy mobilizes both armies into action.
I've been a lurker at RADW for the past nine months, ever since hearing
about it at the Ratings guide, and am now an occasional poster. I will
admit to posting a couple of comments as to why I don't like the era. What
I don't understand is how things got so poisonous over one era? Not that I
can't imagine things like this occurring in a place where words are the
only weapons, it begs to wonder who fired the first salvo and why?
But, it's not just whether McCoy was good or bad that's part of this
fight. Another aspect is a counterattack against the Pertwee Era. For some
reason, the pro-McCoys seems to have nothing nice to say about Pertwee and
in their defence, point out the numerous faults of the Pertwee era. (Note:
I wonder if this is part of the Pertwee backlash that happened in fandom
during the early and mid 90's). A second offshoot is a Liberal v.
Conservative battle that rages along. Anti-McCoys seem to generally
loathe the PC leftist views that were hinted at in the McCoy stories and
expanded upon in the Virgin books by certain authors. (Note: The PC
politics bug me, not because I'm a conservative -- far from it -- but
because of how the message has been presented by the messengers). Author
Jonathan Blum, husband of Kate Orman, seems to be at the center of this
storm, because of his political views. A main counterattack in this
sub-war is the calling of Anti-McCoys anti-PC, anti-gay & against common
decency because they're right wing gits.
So, what would a newcomer make of seeing people's taste, ancestry and
intelligence questioned by taking side either way in this battle.
Honestly, I think it turns people off. Anyone who checks out the newsgroup
hoping to see interesting discussions of Who has to wade through
numerous posts which state, more or less, "you're a moron if you like
McCoy," or "you're a moron because you don't like McCoy," would be bored.
I know I am.
And it's a shame, because, from what I heard, RADW used to be a place where authors would
hang out and chat with fans, debates would develop over fun nitpicking
details, new stories would be over analyzed, old stories reviewed for new
takes/ideas. Regular RADW posters would
get namechecked in books and whatnot. Now RADW is dragged down by whether or not its
okay to like 42 25 minute episodes of a children's/family television show.
It's a shame. And it needs to stop. If you don't like an era, fine.
State your case once and be done. Refrain from posting a story by story
episode guide where stories are rated according to their level of
"shittiness." Refrain from posting odes that declare all McCoy fans stupid
and gay. Refrain from counterposting attacks on Pertwee being a right
winger. Refrain from calling anyone not pro-McCoy anti-gay,
anti-diversity, anti-PC.
"Can't we all just get along?"
A postscript -- for now, it seems that the Anti-McCoys are "winning"
the flamewars, if only because their side is more obnoxious and
confrontational. It's hard to be Pro-McCoy when you'll be blindsided
anytime you post something positive about that era.
A second postscript -- As much as I dislike the McCoy era and the
Virgin New Adventures that followed, this flamewar has prodded me into
doing a reevaluation of the era just to see if opinions made long ago
still hold up. I'll let everyone know about that in the near future.
A Life in the Year of Doctor Who by Andrew Wixon
30/8/02
It's July 15th 2002 as I sit down to write this. Yesterday I watched the McGann TV movie. The day before that it was Survival episode 3, the day before that Survival episode 2. And so on, and so on, missing only
two days (once for a convention and once for the Star Wars premiere) all
the way back to the beginning of August 2001, when I'd popped An Unearthly Child into the VCR. Obviously I don't have
a complete run of episodes, and there have been times when I've watched
more than one at a time, but even so I didn't expect it to take very
nearly a year (and, I should add, I've got a good two months worth of
stories to catch up on that didn't fit into the chronology of the run).
What possessed me to do this? Well, it seems to be fashionable in
certain circles of Who-dom. DWM have their Time Team, someone on
the BBC board was commending it, and I understand Paul Cornell is in the
middle of a similar, rather more leisurely undertaking (last I heard he
was mired in the Key to Time season). And, well, having spent the last two
summers religiously watching an episode of either This Life or Big Brother
every day it did seem to me that DW was far more worthy of this
kind of attnetion.
So, was it worth it? And what insights, if any, did I gain?
Well - yes, it was entirely worth it, for several reasons. Some of
these were thoroughly practical: for one thing it made me aware of some of
the shameful gaps in my collection, and inspired me to fill them (though
the absence of the two Pertwee/Baker regeneration stories still rankles as
do the yawning gaps in seasons 16 and 20). And for another, it made me
watch stories I hadn't actually sat down and viewed in years and years: The Mind Robber. Ambassadors of
Death. Snakedance. Most of the Colin Baker era.
If we're honest, I'd got trapped in cycle of watching the same few tales
over and over again, mainly from the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era and season 7.
Which is a shame, because it was reassuring to see that throughout its
history Doctor Who was rarely less than watchable. Sure, every now
and then a story like The Rescue or Seeds of Death swims into view, but there's always
quality close at hand. It just isn't always the same kind of quality. Once
again, I'd always associated great DW with the idea of a totally
dominant Doctor, a commanding, Holmesian, investigator-crusader. But the
stories of season 1 are nothing like this, and that season contains at
least one all-time classic and several outstanding episodes in other
stories. Season 1's Doctor is shadowy and erratic and self-interested, but
still entirely the Doctor. As is the 'polite' Doctor of the Davison years,
the enigmatic gamesman of the final seasons, and - irksomely - the
pain-in-the-neck Doctor played by Jon Pertwee.
The series has this chameleonic quality too: as I rather clumsily
allude to in my review of Spearhead from Space
(for which I sincerely apologise, by the way), it's more like several
different series with different formats and styles, all of which happen to
share the same title and a few recurring characters. But there must be
some golden thread linking them all up, and noticeably lacking from the TV movie.
I can't claim to know the secret of Doctor Who. It's something
to do with the series' magpie appropriation of bits and pieces from other
genres and series, its concentration on plot and ideas rather than
character and emotion, its philosophy of the power of the individual even
in a hostile and corrupt universe. Whatever it is, it's unique, and
rightly celebrated.
The other great benefit of the run can be summed up in one word:
context. Time and again I would watch stories that had never really
clicked with me before, like The Aztecs, Ark in Space and of course Caves of
Androzani, and it would be like watching them for the first time,
they're so much greater than the stories that precede or surround them.
Not to say that they wouldn't be equally great watched individually, I
suppose, but being sandwiched between Planet of Fire
and The Twin Dilemma really does make Caves shine.
The benefit was in terms of more than just single stories, though.
Watching one story in isolation gives you almost no sense of how it fits
into the series' style of the time or how representative it is,
quality-wise. Similarly, viewing five or six Jo Grant-era stories in a row
was almost enough to put me off the third Doctor for life. Nearly every
era of the show produced at least one great story (yes, even the dark ages
of Baker/Saward), but there were a few times when the show hit a run of
startling sustained quality: Season 7, Tom Baker's first three seasons
(rather more often than not, anyway), the run from Full
Circle to Earthshock, and of course Seasons 25
and 26.
Had the series ended in late 1986 I would be inclined to put my hands
up and say 'Yup, fair cop, it got what was coming to it,' so tired and
flat was it beginning to look (Robert Holmes' final pyrotechnic plot
twists excluded). But to axe it after season 26 verged on the criminal -
this was a series that seemed as fresh as ever, it was going to new
places, it was rapidly growing in maturity (something it had struggled to
do throughout the 1980s), it was politically aware and astute. Had stories
like Greatest Show and Ghost
Light been made on film rather than VT and promoted better by the BBC,
I'm sure the popular and critical success they might have achieved would
have put them within spitting distance of prestige projects like The
Singing Detective and Edge of Darkness (which they resemble far more than,
say, Blake's 7 or Star Cops).
Wasn't to be, of course. Proper TV DW went away, never to
return, and while I enjoyed many of the books and the TV
movie was a nice idea in principle, nothing has ever really filled
that hole it left in my heart. Right now I'm fighting the strangest urge
to stick the pilot episode in the VCR and start all over again. Do the
chronological run yourself and you may see what I mean.
But for now, I tell myself, fight the urge... fight the urge... fight
the urge... (Where's that complete set of Babylon 5 tapes gone, anyway?)
In defence of BBC by Joe Ford
6/9/02
It's not like me to want to write an ultra long review on a particular
subject but in this circumstance I feel I should. You see I feel the BBC
eigth Doctor books get too much flak when compared to the Virgin output
and I can't for the life of me see why. So I thought I would go back and
have a look at both series and see if I can see how this opinion came
about.
The Virgin books had something of an opaque start with the convoluted
Timewyrm and Cat's Cradle
series. Neither were particularly good but they proved one vital point,
this series was going to be bold and wasn't going to play by the rules.
One book of these first seven stood out however (Exodus) and it was hardly a suprise to learn it was the
work of Who expert Terrance Dicks. However many of them were just a
mess with dull secondary characters (Apocalypse) and
amateurish prose (Time's Crucible, Genesys). They weren't exactly satisfactory as arcs
either being quite plodding and failing to continue the plot threads in a
exciting or easy to follow way. It was quite a worrying start, especially
Timewyrm: Revelation which I feel epitomises
everything this series did wrong. It was horribly violent, pushed the
television characters into situations I really didn't want to see them in
and was full of boring dream imagery (Kinda style!).
No thanks Paul.
However suddenly we were treated to two excellent books out of the
blue. The wonderfully frightening and nostalgic Nightshade which is still one of my all time favourite
Doctor Who books ever. And Love and War, which
introduced Professor Bernice Summerfield who in this one book proved more
interesting than anything we had seen with Ace to this point with the
books. Her instant appeal and the books dramatic and emotional ending
proved fortuitous for the range which now promised things that were much
more interesting. And we left the now stale Ace far behind. Cheers Paul.
Then it was a steady period of hot and cold for at least eleven books
(Transit to The Dimension
Riders) where a number of new authors were experimented, sometimes
surprisingly successful (the gripping Birthright and
the bizzarre but brilliant The Highest Science)
but more often producing stale and unreadable books (The
Pit is famously awful but Transit, Deceit and The Dimension Riders
are all similarly bad). It didn't help matters that Ace returned, older,
tougher and more angst ridden than ever. Her disgust at the Doctor and his
manipulative ways got tired very quickly so thank the godess we had
Bernice to remind us how companions SHOULD be done. There were some
awkward science fiction ideas during this period and the 'curse of the
first time novelist' seemed to affect Ben Aaronavitch, Neil Penswick,
Peter Darvill-Evans, David A. McIntee and more...
Once again though the range had a sudden upswing of quality. And it
couldn't have come a second sooner. The Left Handed
Hummingbird, Conundrum, Theatre
of War, Blood Harvest, Falls
the Shadow, Sanctuary, Human
Nature... these were all fantastic reads. Virgin had finally hit its
stride. It knew what its fans wanted and it gave it to them. Relationships
between the regulars was kept fresh and interesting and for her last
stretch Ace actually WORKED along side Bernice and The Doctor. She had a
grand exit in Set Piece when it was well truly time
to say goodbye. Bernice was just so wonderful she had a number of books
solo and they, not surprisingly turned out out to be some of the most
popular books the range offered up (Sanctuary and Human Nature). The writing too seemed to improve with
earlier writers offering up some meaty characterisation and solid plots
(Andrew Cartmel and David A.McIntee improved in spades!). The introduction
of the exceptional novelist Kate Orman, the first female voice to the
range was a stroke of genius and she went to write some of the best the
range had to offer. Steve Lyons too was a fine addition to the cast of
writers. of course there were still clunkers (who can forget St Anthony's Fire and Strange
England, I know I can't!) but they seemed less offensive surrounded by
these towering classics.
The third quarter of the books (say Original Sin
to Happy Endings) was solid, sometimes exceptional
but more often just solid. The books were okay... Zamper, Head Games, Shakedown, Death and Diplomacy
were all fine, perfectly readable but they all lacked a certain sparkle
that the earlier classics maintained. Three books stand out as excellent,
only three which is a a pity but they were SO good it eased this average
period a little. Just War was the first book by
newcomer Lance Parkin and proved an instant winner. He tortured Bernice in
inexplicable ways and put The Doctor through hell... this was rivetting
drama the likes of which we had never seen before. The
Also People was Ben Aaronavitch's salvation after his apalling Transit, a light, frothy read featuring a world everyone
who's read the book wants to live in. It was so unexpectedly different it
just worked. And Warchild which again provided some
emotional fireworks and was unputdownable all the way to the excellent
finale. We had the introduction of Chris and Roz in this period and in
some respects they were perfect (their banter was great and Roz had some
seminal scenes with the Doctor being, as she was, Ace done right) and in
others they disapointed (with three companions in the TARDIS it seemed the
writers wanted to bed them all in so many varied ways... I have nothing
against rumpy-pumpy within the ranks but for god's sakes it seemed Chris
was bedding someone every week and Roz and Bernice made some stupid
mistakes on this score too, a shame). However the ensemble did feel fresh
once again which was a nice feeling. They got on too, which was a godsend.
Happy Endings was a whole lot of fun. Bernice
leaves the TARDIS to marry Jason Kane and everyone from the Virgin books
turns up for the celebrations. Paul Cornell writes comedy superbly and
this had many memorable scenes. However, it totally epitomises the biggest
problem with the range. Its self contained nature. Although they were
telling seperate stories the Virgin range insisted on heavy continuity
from one book to another and this made it difficult for casual readers
(and me) to follow the psi powers arc and other inter-related
relationships. And this book must have been a real nightmare for someone
just joining the range. The Virgin range reminds me strongly of the TV
series Babylon 5 in this respect... having created this universe they want
to explore it to the fullest... leaving casual viewers behind but
rewarding regular readers no end. It is both a curse and a blessing, after
all the Virgin range had created a mighty fine universe to play with but I
will admit I left certain books behind unfinished for this reason.
The last stretch of books shows a significant improvement with some
great work being done with the soon to be regenerated Doctor and the death
of Roz which sets the series up for a dramatic exit. Two books, Damaged Goods and Bad Therapy were
just superb and I ripped through them like no others in the range but So Vile a Sin, Return of the Living
Dad and Lungbarrow were also quite excellent. The
books went on the high the deserved to. There was a bit to much emphasis
on 'events' (Roz's death, Bernice's Dad) than telling original stories but
then they had a whole lot to wrap up and you can't complain about that.
The Virgin range was a good series of books and often fantastic. They
brought some wonderful characters to life and visited many wonderful
planets. They were never short of surprises and many authors made their
names here. I just don't feel it was consistently GOOD enough to be as
popular as it is. The first chunk of books was almost consistently poor
and the bad novels were B-A-D. Inexcusably bad. I guess I would have to
quote that old nusery rhyme to sum up my feelings on this set of books...
"When they were good they were very, very good but when they were bad they
were awful!" I would say mixed, but good.
The BBC books on the other hand are another kettle of fish
entirely.....
The BBC books had a horrible, horrible start. Almost so poor you had
to wonder how ANYBODY stuck with them. The first ten books produced three
good books. THREE. Vampire Science, Kursaal and Option Lock... the only
three I managed to finish. Even the revered Alien
Bodies rubbed me up the wrong way in the last third and I put it down,
never to return to it. And the biggest insult is that Terrance Dicks, who
wrote the best book of the Virgin range's begining, wrote the laughably,
horribly lame The Eight Doctors which kick starts the
range on such a bad foot you wonder how they recovered (oh yeah, Kate
Orman and Jon Blum). The ultimate atrocity was the inclusion of Sam, the
new female companion who seemed to be a mix of both older Ace and Chris'
worst characteristics and a pacifist, greenpeace, vegetarian at that. Oh
please. Spouting out liberal crap every five minutes it is just impossible
to like this girl!
Things improved but only slightly, still a number of desperately
atrocious books (Beltempest, The
Taint, Placebo Effect) but a number of okay to
good books (let's say readable) in the form of Dreamstone
Moon, The Janus Conjunction, Demontage. Seeing I and The Scarlet Empress rise so far out of this dreck it is
impossible to think they are edited by the same guy. Seeing I in particular seemed like a Virgin book at the
height of their powers, compelling, thought provoking and in places
devasting. Whats more they managed to do something with the nigh
unapproachable Doc 8/Sam partnership which bordered on outstanding (they
even made that "Ooh Sam let's do plan 11 today" look good which is a
miracle!). These two books were like a breath of fresh air.
And then Fitz came along. Now please don't think I'm saying Fitz
solved all of the BBC books problem because that would be simplifying
things but lets just say he started them on the right track warp factor
nine! He was just so wonderful, easily as good as Bernice upon her
introduction. He drinks. He smokes. He swears. He wants sex, sex, sex!
He's from the sixties! And he's got a heart of gold. And the fact that he
proves the complete reverse of Sam in being writer-proof instead of unable
to write for was a stroke of luck indeed. He was just so damn human you
couldn't help but love him no matter how many mistakes he made.
Fitz's arrival seemed to coincide with a dramatic upswing in quality.
From Demontage to The Ancestor
Cell things ran a whole lot smoother. I have a few theories as to why.
If you take a peek at the writer's names you will notice that the first
chunk of books in the BBC range are all written by Virgin writers. Writers
who had exhausted their talent with the other range. The only 'old'
authors still providing any enjoyment were those that are justifiably
renowned... Kate Orman, Justin Richards. Suddenly Stephen Cole started to
introduce new talent to the range and their opus was such an
improvement... Nick Walters (Dominion is a cracking
little thriller), Peter Anghelides (Frontier Worlds
proves alien planets can be fun!), Paul Margs (whose Blue Angel was almost as great as The
Scarlet Empress!). With the introduction of Compassion, the selfish,
nasty, back stabbing bitch of a companion to the range the books started
to gain some momentum from NO-WHERE! After Compassion gets the
overwhelming twist of turning into a TARDIS, the Stephen Cole is on easy
turf to its conclusion with only a few duds to spoil all the fun (The Space Age was especially bad). However The Banquo Legacy, his penultimate book proves an
intelligent surprise success and matches anything done in the Virgin range
in terms of sophistication, prose and cleverness.
Justin Richards takes over and all nervous readers can relax. He has
the BRILLIANT idea of wiping out Gallifrey and the Doctor's memory (and
thus all continuity) and we start his reign with the feel of a genuine new
era. The Doctor is stuck on Earth for 100 years over six books, it was an
arc but unlike much of the Virgin output these six stories were VERY
induvidual with only the Doctor providing that vital link. The quality of
this arc was phenomenal with only the finale, Escape
Velocity letting it down. But who cares when you have such gems as The Burning and Father Time,
easily two of the best Doctor Who books ever published. I remember
feeling so excited about the range at this point, more than I had since I
heard Virgin were going to start a range themselves!
To the surprise of everybody things didn't return to normal once the
Doctor got the TARDIS back. No old monsters or planets, just a fresh new
TARDIS team (what with the new less idealistic, more violent Doctor and
the wonderfully dry Anji Kapoor on board... and of course Fitz things were
looking great!) and zero continuity. This was probably the most refreshing
change Who had been through in many, many years.
But Mr Richards didn't finish there. There has been a constant stream
of fresh new writers (Steve Emmerson, Jac Rayner, Llyod Rose, Kelly Hale,
Jonny Morris, Paul Ebbs, Mags L Halliday) providing some wonderful books.
The stories are loosely connected by the terrifying idea of 'With the Time
Lords gone who will look after all time?' but the current output is
completely standalone and easy for a casual reader to follow whilst still
being well written and enjoyable.
Justin, an acclaimed novelist himself has been driving solid, exciting
works from people who were seriously disapointing earlier in this range
(stand up Trevor Baxendale, Stephen Cole, Lawrence Miles, Steve Lyons and
Mark Clapham). There have been a number of utterly flawless books that
have just blown any comparison with Virgin out the window (The Year of Intelligent Tigers, City
of the Dead, Adventuress of Henrietta
Street, The Crooked World, History 101). The biggest difference is that these
books have succeeded on their own with no back up from past characters or
mentions of earlier books, they have been totally original works from
authors who are working their butts off to impress. And with the emergence
of Sabbath, the mysterious character in shadows directing events in the
timeline it appears another arc is sprining unexpectadly from the range,
just compelling enough to be exciting and not intrusive enough to be
annoying.
The Doctor, Fitz and Anji make a highly engaging but it looks like
things are set to change in a big way soon. i for one cannot wait.
The BBC books have done some really surprising things. I wouldn't even
consider comparing them to the Virgin range during their first third, it
would have been an insult to the older range. But by golly wow things have
improved tenfold and im currently more optimistic about the series than
ever. Such a dramatic upswing in quality is unheard of usually but we
should be thankful, Doctor Who is exciting and unpredictable again.
Long may it continue!
I think you have figured which range I prefer but at the end of the day
they both produced some brilliant books and some seriously disturbing
duds. They are very different in their own way but are both
quintessentially Doctor Who.
And as such should both be reverred.
DWM Comic Strips (Additional Doctorless Strips, DW Related) - A Guide by Richard Radcliffe
30/10/02
Doctor Who Weekly began in October 1979. Included between its pages was
a mix of new stories (in comic strip format), old Sci-Fi classics and
information about the series. We were treated to information about the
Daleks, the Story so far. The information has long since been superseded
by books and magazines, but at the time it was a godsend - it was all we
had. Now the articles seem basic in the extreme, and all rather quaint. It
is therefore to the Comic Strip that much of the magic still lies. DWW
Number 1 had no less than 3 Comic Strips, and the Weekly was to continue
in this vein for the bulk of its 43 issue run. I had dissected (literally)
my magazines years ago, but a friend had more sense. Thus a great big box
of old DW magazines found its way to my house. I eagerly lapped up
the main strip featuring the Doctor (reviews elsewhere).
The Main Strip was always the Current Doctor - the 4th in this case.
The Iron Legion saw the 4th Doctor battling against
aliens who controlled an earth, where Rome never fell. The secondary strip
plundered the Sci-Fi archives. War of the Worlds was the first of these
classics, closely followed by The Time Machine and First Men on the Moon.
These turned slowly into more general Time Tales, and all manner of
classic Adventure stories were told. By the time the Monthly (issue 44)
was upon us Time Tales were no more. There was also another Strip. These
featured monsters, villains, characters from DW - but with no sign
of the Doctor. These strips lasted well into the Monthly. It is those
strips that promoted this project - because a lot of them are actually
very good indeed.
DWW and DWM printed at regular intervals the Dalek Tapes - written by
David Whittaker, an alternative history of the Daleks. That is for reviews
elsewhere, as is the impressive attempt to copy this - the Cybermen (DWM
213-238). In this article I will focus on the run of stories that took up
the last few pages of Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly - the forgotten DW
strips - Doctorless Doctor Who stories, if you like.
And so over the course of this article the names of Steve Moore, Alan
Moore (yes really, the one whose recognized as the Best Comic Strip writer
ever), Paul Neary, John Peel, David Lloyd, Steve Dillon, John Stokes will
be prominent. They deserve their place in the sun. Let's begin:-
Return of the Daleks (1-4) - DWW began with the obvious monster
- the Daleks. The Planet Anhaut had been invaded by the Daleks 800 years
previous. Glax, a film-maker, wants to make a real life movie about the
Daleks. He signs great actor Hok Nepo to play the lead role - Nor Din, the
man who defeated the Daleks. A Spaceship arrives at Anhaut, the beautiful
and mysterious Kuay has a suspicious cargo. The Daleks are let loose on
Anhaut, and the film becomes reality.
What's impressive about the opening strip is not just the
straightforward story by Steve Moore (the writer of all the secondary
strips up to issue 34). The art by Paul Neary and David Lloyd is extremely
good too. All would contribute to the success of this secondary strip
during its run. Anhaut is given alien, but highly humanoid inhabitants.
The Archive Library beckons you in, urging you to explore the past - you
want to know what the History of this place is all about, despite having
only just heard about it! The people of Anhaut travel round on the back of
Pterodyctal-like birds. There's a wasteland that's mysterious and
frightening.
The Daleks are their usual selves, exterminating all and sundry in the
name of progress. But it is the Anhaut characters that emerge best from
this 4 part, 16 page strip. Glax is highly likeable and seems involved in
everything, Kuay is wonderfully mysterious - just why is she working with
the Daleks?
The first additional strip is a very enjoyable story. A good start.
7/10
Throwback (The Soul of a Cyberman) (5-7) - So this was where Kroton
the Cyberman first appeared! I had read all the DW main strips,
including the Cybermen Barnes/Salmon saga. In the 8th Doctor's time Kroton
joined the TARDIS crew as a Companion. It seems the authors of those
stories went to the past of their magazine for inspiration.
You usually get with groups of villains or monsters 1 good one - it's a
common plot device of Sci-Fi - the one that will help the good guys in
their battle against evil. Kroton is one of the best of this type I have
come across, and his repeated appearances show many others think so too.
The planet Mondaran (bit close in name to another Cyber Planet that!) has
been invaded by the Cybermen. Small pockets of resistance amongst the
humans survive. Two such freedom fighters are Pendar and his partner
Marilka - our 2 heroes. Kroton, junior Cyber-leader, begins to doubt his
races actions against the populace. Slowly and surely he becomes Pendar's
ally, and enables them to escape to freedom.
Throwback describes Kroton's inner turmoil. How he changes
sides, his human originality coming to the surface over the machine.
Pendar is the heroic fighter, just wanting freedom for his partner,
Marilka. Kroton feels for them, and this exploration of the Cyber race was
never really emphasized as much until much, much later in DW. All
credit to Steve Moore (writer) and Steve Dillon (artwork) for giving us
this excellent character, and great story over just 12 pages.
I really like the character of Kroton. He seems to be dead at the end
of the story, but such a good character survives. I look forward to seeing
him again. 8/10
The Final Quest (8) - We've had Daleks and Cybermen. Time for
another monster now - the Sontarans.
Katsu is a ferocious Sontaran Warrior. He lives for battle, and has won
them all except one. He wants to find the ultimate weapon that will defeat
this enemy - Levanaxus. Thus he arrives on Aleph 777, a planet of peace.
There he violently acquires the weapon, but 1 resident outwits him,
turning the biological weapon on Katsu.
This one off story isn't the strongest additional strip, but it has a
good moral at the end. When the Doctor appears (as a narrator, common
policy amongst these strips) saying the smallest foe can outwit the
biggest, so there's a knowing nod from the audience.
Steve Moore brings something new to a pretty 1-Dimesional race - the
Sontarans. Paul Neary draws the 4 pages pretty well. 6/10
The Stolen TARDIS (9-11) - We move away from the monsters of
DW now, to the Time Lords. Plutar wants to become a Time Lord, but
those in the know say he is better suited to TARDIS Maintenance. Thus he's
busy working away under some console, when an alien Circus arrives on
Gallifrey. Sillarc the Sage wants a TARDIS of his own, and only Plutar
knows about his clever scheme to pinch one.
There then follows 3 parts of shifting through Time. Back to
Prehistoric Gallifrey, where they meet some dinosaurs. All the time Plutar
is trying to stop the dastardly lizard-like Sillarc, from acquiring his
own TARDIS.
This isn't a bad story at all by Steve Moore. There's clever use made
of a Time Machine, and the fact it can only travel in Time not Space.
Steve Dillon provides excellent artwork again - I believe he just shades
Neary and Lloyd for these strips. It's nice to meet a bit of a rebel on
Gallifrey, which the Doctor himself must have been like. Plutar is the
hero here, and we always support the small people, don't we. Gallifrey is
an interesting place after all it seems! 7/10
K9's Finest Hour (DWW 12) - This 4 page "K9 is still around"
vehicle is quite funny. It's not the most profound of strips because of
its size and the main character. It's pretty unique as it's the only time
the Doctor appears the the secondary strip (apart from his usual
narration).
Rolgof wants the Doctor. The Sontarans have expressed an interest in
the Time Lord and Rolgof, with the aid of Firandel thinks he can acquire
the prize. Unfortunately instead of beaming over the Doctor, Rolgof beams
over K9. K9 saves the day by outwitting a stupid robot, and zapping the 2
baddies.
That's it really. Steve Moore has written better, Steve Dillon draws
just fine. The 4th Doctor and K9 have a good laugh about it at the end. If
this is K9's Finest Hour then it was time for it to be written out, which
indeed it was in the next TV season of Who. Not the secondary
strip's Finest Hour. 5/10
Warlord of the Ogrons (DWW 13-14) - Another old monster returns -
the Ogrons. A few writers have tried to make the Ogrons more interesting
than they are. The key to this, they believe, is intelligence - and thus
we have a brainy Ogron story, which does the strip no favours at all. In
an attempt to do something different Steve Moore writes a pretty standard
spin-off story.
The best pilot in the galaxy, Rostow, allies with the best surgeon Dr
Leofrix. Leofrix wants to augment an Ogron. Make him brainy, then he will
form an army of Ogrons, thus giving Leofrix and Rostow a chance to conquer
the galaxy. Of course scientists with such high ideas who pervert the
course of science never win - and it is Ogron Gnork who goes off to
conquer the galaxy.
Steve Dillon's art is excellent as usual, but it's the story that fails
to ignite any flames. Standard at best. 6/10
Deathworld (DWW15-16) - I often used to wonder what would happen
if 2 of Doctor Who's enemies battled each other. This strip has
just that - the Ice Warriors and the Cybermen fighting each other for the
control of Yama-10.
The Ice Warriors want the Trisilicate. The Cybermen just want the
Planet. This battle of honour vs logic is a good one. Each are determined
in their efforts, they want this planet.
It is the Ice Warriors that ultimately win. The logical Cybermen forget
that water turns to ice, and this is not fatal for the Ice Warriors. The 2
contrasting Monster races make this strip work - Steve Moore again
providing the script. New boy David Lloyd appears with the art, and he
starts well - he was to provide much that was excellent in the coming
strips.
If you like battles, Cybermen and Ice Warriors then this is your story.
I liked it pretty well. 7/10
Abslom Daak - Dalek Killer (DWW 17-20) - There must be a great deal
of affection out there for these early comic strips. We've already met
Kroton the Cyberman, who returns later. Now we meet probably the most
famous DW comic creation of them all - Abslom Daak, convicted
Murderer - he kills Daleks you know. Daak is a great character. You can
see why he was used again. He totally overshadows the Daleks to be honest.
Daak is a murderer. He is sentenced to death or DK Duty. He chooses DK,
chances of survival very slim. DK Duty involves entering a Stargate (least
it looks like one), travelling light years to a Dalek occupied planet,
killing as many Daleks as he can, before he is killed. Daak manages to
kill lots of Daleks on Mazam, he falls in love with a princess (Taiyin)
and survives.
As befits such a character Daak is wonderfully savagely drawn by Steve
Dillon. Even more impressive, in a rather different way, is Taiyin - the
depiction of people in these strips is very good indeed. This is
ultimately a tragic tale by Steve Moore. Daak starts with no wish to live,
he finishes wanting to live - but only for revenge. The legend of Abslom
Daak is born - and having read his return stories they have yet to beat
his best - the original. 9/10
Twilight of the Silurians (DWW 21-22) - The Silurian culture was
one of the most interesting of the entire DW series. They were
monsters, but you could see their point of view. It's great, therefore, to
go back in time with this strip - and see their society as it was before
they hit the shelters.
This is a story about Nagara - a Silurian scientist, who keeps apes to
study. He separates them, treating them like the animals he thinks they
are. The other Scientists meanwhile discuss the imminent destruction of
their world - the Moon is about to arrive - and the long sleep awaits.
Meanwhile the Apes are not as stupid as they look - particularly lead ape,
Kin. The moral of the story is clear as Kin gets revenge on Nagara - the
apes are beginning to get smarter.
The artwork is excellent once more by David Lloyd, and Steve Moore
produces one of his better smaller stories (it's only 8 pages long). This
is a superb depiction of one of the better presented monster races of
DW. 8/10
Ship of Fools (DWW 23-24) - Steve Moore after this story had now
done 24 Weeklys. At 4 pages per issue this was homing in on the 100 page
mark quite quickly. The experience of the medium was building, and he
decides to bring back one of this best creations (as he was to do with
Daak later) - Kroton the emotional Cyberman.
Kroton is left floating in space in Throwback. Here he is picked
up by a pleasure liner. The ship is stuck in a time warp though. These
people are living out their existence aimlessly - not one of them doing
very much about getting them out of it - hence the Ship of Fools. There's
a great deal of boredom for some, cocktails for others - these people
really are stupid. Kroton can't get his head around this. The love of life
exhibited by Pendar and Marilka are miles away from this bunch. Kroton
decides to do something, the Robot Pilot is accessed, and the ship is
freed.
Kroton continues his voyage of humanity in this strange 2 parter. It's
good that he sees the worst of humanity, along with the best - that he
acts to save them, only to destroy them - is rather profound for such a
little story. It looks like Kroton has a good few many stories in him yet
- and for that I'm glad. 7/10
The Outsider (DWW 25-26) - The S Moore/D Lloyd team are back
together again for another story featuring the Sontarans. Again, like
Final Quest, this is about a lone Sontaran.
He has been called to set up base on Brahtilis. Demimon, an astrologer
of this world, welcomes Sontaran Skrant with open arms. It is only when
things start to go very wrong - and his daughter is involved, that Demimon
realizes prophecies are open to interpretation - and he has interpreted
this one very wrong.
I wasn't quite as interested in this story as most others of these
secondary strips. The Sontarans I never really liked too much, and Demimon
- the big new character, seems pretty naieve. It's not bad, just not
stand-out good like many of the others. 6/10
Star Tigers (DWW 27-30) - Again we come across a character who
reappears later. The Star Tigers, founded by Abslom Daak, become a duo -
thanks to introduction of Salander the Draconian.
Star Tigers has extremely good points about it (Daak, Salander,
the story) - but is spoilt by some terrible things. The Space battles
between Daak and the Daleks are pathetic. You just can't see whats going
in those little panels. The Daleks are marginalized too (quite a feat in
that it contains a man whose sole mission is to be a Dalek Killer!).
Draconian politics are also terrible. It's one of the main reasons I don't
like the Draconians - but I'm willing to give Salander a chance, a lone
ranger is better than the collective.
This strip also shows Steve Dillon to be a superior artist than David
Lloyd for this type of story. It's always a tough job coming in to do the
very last issue of an ongoing story, when someone else has done the rest -
but that's what Lloyd has to do here. It shows him up a bit, which is a
shame as Lloyd is a good artist. Dillon wasn't to appear again, Lloyd
would vastly improve over the next few issues.
Draconia succeeds in being even more boring than ever, but Daak and
Salander should provide good things in the future. 6/10
Yonder... The Yeti (DWW 31-34) - Steve Moore has given us some
pretty good strips. It was time for him to step up to the main strip. He
would write a few more of these additional strips - but this is the last
of his initial run. David Lloyd has stepped up to become the main artist
of this strip - and the way he evokes Tibet is really excellent. The
additional strip has also been shortened to just 2 pages an issue. Lasting
4 mags this is actually only 8 pages long. But they do pack the action in
to these things, so I'm not complaining.
Bruce and Angela Healy are taking a break. They're searching for the
Yeti. Local guide Shiro joins them, and they are initially put off by Lama
Gampo - lead monk in the area. Gampo however turns out to be one of a long
line of protectors. They are ready for the Great Intelligence to return -
and will fight to rid the world of it at all cost.
Borrowing prolifically from Abominable Snowman
this actually becomes hugely interesting just as it is finishing. The
Great Intelligence stuff is nothing new, but real Yetis fighting against
Robot Yetis - now that's interesting! It brings back fond memories of the
original DW story, and is quite a good ride by itself. 7/10
Black Legacy (DWW 35-38) - It is with a sense of pride that
DW fans cite Douglas Adams as a former script editor of the TV
show. I'm a big fan of the DW Comics - and I can cite (with some
pride) that Alan Moore, the greatest comic book writer of them all, graced
DWW with his talent way back in 1980 - long before he became famous. His
first strip is excellent, there's enough characterization and atmosphere
to satiate my moods.
The Cybermen arrive on Goth. They've heard of a super weapon that lies
there. The world is dead, cities are crumbling, the residents long since
gone. But in the wilderness outside the city lies a darkness that is about
to overpower them. The Apocalypse Device roams free, and the Cybermen are
in big trouble.
The Apocalypse Device Humanoid is straight from Dr Death - a
frightening apparition. The Cybermen waste away, and emotions run rampant
- not bad for an inhuman species. The Cybermen are the anomaly in this.
You can understand their fear developing over the course of the story, but
the emotions run rife right from the beginning (I'm not at all sure about
the Cyberman Medic either!) - and this is the only problem with an
otherwise excellent story.
Overall probably the best additional strip there has been. This is 8
pages of great story, terrific artwork by David Lloyd. This really is a
voyage into the imagination - even if the Cybermen weren't quite right!
9/10
Business As Usual (DWW 40-43) - The team of Alan Moore and David
Lloyd continue with another excellent story. The length is the usual 8
pages (4 issues), and the inspiration is showing more this time. We're in
Spearhead From Space country. Lots of this is taken
straight from that story - but I expect the Autons work in more or less
the same way in all their invasions anyway!
The excellence comes from that art this time. David Lloyd produces some
really dark, scary artwork for this. There's much use made of shadows, and
the eerie plastics factory is the perfect place for shocks. Alan Moore's
story is a little too similar to Spearhead for me to
applaud him totally - but he seems to know what the fans want. This is
another masterpiece.
In 1989 Winston Blunt, a plumber, discovers some strange balls in a
field. He is possessed by them, and builds an Auton. They discover a new
form of plastic and make millions. The Auton, Mr Dolman, lives on whilst
Blunt commits suicide. Meanwhile Max Fischer, a business spy, wants to see
what's going on at the new plastics factory.
There are lots of impressive scenes in this story, but the one with
Fischer trying to escape from the toy soldiers is particularly excellent.
Toy Story never was this scary! 8/10
And so the Weekly finished. Every issue, bar 1 had a main strip, and 2
supplement strips. The spin-off DW strips was arguably the most
consistent of the lot. But this isn't the end. It wasn't about to keel
over and die just yet. The monthly would dismiss the Classic Sci-Fi strip,
but this additional strip would continue for a year or so yet.
Star Tigers Part Two (DWM 44-46) - Steve Moore returns to the
secondary strip here, David Lloyd again providing the art. Daak and
Salander return in a strip imaginatively named exactly the same as their
previous story! So let's call this Star Tigers Part Two.
It's time for Daak and Salander to swell their Tiger Team. Thus their
Killwagon (their spaceship) seeks out Harma (Ice Warrior) and Vol
Mercurius (Daaks old partner, Earthman). Harma is running some kind of
strange torture chamber. Mercurius lives in a tower in the middle of a
vast waste with a Robot. The 4 then go off to their 1st adventure, and
promise the reader thrills and spills, but not a lot of camaraderie.
It's made clear here that Daak has been in this space for a long time.
This must therefore be considerably after his initial exploits with
Taiyin. Taiyin remains frozen in her capsule though - a story that would
be picked up much later in the Main DWM Strip. There's a few Daleks,
disguised as Meteorites, in the final part - but this apart the artwork
isn't too great. Daak doesn't dominate as before, Salander does nothing.
The 2 new kids on the block have some potential though.
Star Tigers isn't something that really sets my pulse racing to
be honest. Macho exploits with lots of battles, dysfunctional teams who
really don't want to be together - not really my thing. 6/10
Star Death (DWM 47) - DWM had now decided to keep their
additional strip to just 1 issue. The page count varied between 4 and 8,
but it seems the standard suffered the most initially. The opening
1-parter was by Alan Moore, and it fooled us into thinking the strip was
still pretty good. The art continues nicely, new boy John Stokes joins the
show here.
Star Death takes us back to Gallifrey, in the early ages of
Rassilon. Qqaba is just about to become a Black Hole, the means by which
the Time Lords come into being. A Time Traveller from the future, Fenris,
wants to put a spanner in the works of all this. He actually becomes the
means by which Rassilon puts the whole jigsaw of Time Travel together -
thanks to his Directional Control Device Belt.
Star Death isn't that bad, it's just average. It's one of those
Time Stories that DW didn't do enough of. There's also a bit of
mystery surrounding Gallifrey, which is always welcome. But it's not in
the same league as his previous efforts. 6/10
The Touchdown on Deneb 7 (DWM 48) - This is where the strip really
started to get pretty terrible. Paul Neary returns to the fold, this time
as the writer (he helped draw the first few stories in this series). David
Lloyd provides the art (which is actually pretty good).
K9 disobeys the Doctors orders when the TARDIS lands on Deneb 7. He
goes out of the TARDIS, meeting some robots. They are seeking the Pennant
Bearer. The robots are there to figure out whether the planet should be
settled.
To be honest I just couldn't get my head round this one. I read the
thing, re-read it in an attempt to understand it. Then I just flung the
magazine down in exasperation - I wasn't going to waste any more time on
such drivel. By far the worst strip of these additional stories thus far -
but it was the shape of things to come. 3/10
Voyage to the Edge of the Universe (DWM 49) - Paul Neary and
David Lloyd combine again. After the atrocious Touchdown story I
was expecting an improvement. It is better, but not by much.
This story brings back the Daemons. They are on a trip to find the Edge
of the Universe. Azal is aboard. They travel for a very long time, not
arriving at the very edge. Then they get caught up in a strange nether
world - blank space. Here Azal meets himself, and strange things occur.
That's really it for this one. The Daemons are well drawn, but surely a
better new story could have been invented for these excellent monsters
from the 3rd Doctors era. It just meanders along, not really igniting much
interest at all. The additional comic strip was falling behind.
5/10
Crisis on Kaldor (DWM 50) - Steve Moore returns to the strip,
hopefully to give it a much needed injection of life after the last 2
clunkers. John Stokes showed skill with Star Death, and he is very
good again with this Kaldor City story.
Sylvos Orikon and Tran Korkolo are Kaldorians. They are a bit
suspicious of the Robots - so many are in Kaldor City it seems. The Super
Vocs are now considered the ideal captains of the Sandminers - and Orikon
is determined to show they are not. He thus goes undercover as a Super Voc
Robot - SV23 - to prove his theory. His plans go horribly wrong.
After the Daemons returning in the previous story, its good to see one
of the best designed foes in this one. Kaldor City is a place rich for
story potential (as the continuing Audio series of 2001 onwards shows).
This is only a toe dip into such a world. It's pretty good overall, and
further proof that Steve Moore is a very good writer. 7/10
4-D War (DWM 51) - A shift of Moores takes us back to Alan now!
This isn't his best offering though. It's basically a continuation of his
previous strip - Star Death, but this time with David Lloyd in the
artist chair.
The Time Lords want to rescue Fenris from the Time Vortex. They're
intrigued to find out who sent him, and for what purpose. Thus the
eminently disposable Wardog is sent in. The 4-D war of the title is a War
that concerns Time. The Order of the Black Sun are involved. There's a
battle in the Vortex, Wardog loses his arm.
This tale is rather forgettable overall. Everything seems very rushed,
and Alan Moore seems to have lost his initial magic. He was to write one
more, but it was clearly time for him to move to his own thing. 4-D War is
hardly his greatest 5 minutes! 5/10
The Greatest Gamble (DWM 56) - After a 5 month gap, where we
thought we'd lost this additional strip, it suddenly returned opposite a
Photo-File on Celestial Toymaker. Bit of a giveaway
that as to who the villain would be! There's a new writer and artist too.
John Peel, the author of those controversial Dalek Books, takes us back to
the Old American West. Mike MacMahon, artist of the controversial Junkyard
Demon, provides the images.
We're on the Mississippi, Old West. Gaylord Lefevre likes a game of
cards. He wants to win at all costs, and the Toymaker calls him into his
Games Parlour. Lefevre gets more than he bargained for when he accuses the
Toymaker of cheating.
It's interesting to see the Toymaker moving easily through Time. Q-Like
he seems to appear as and when he wants, appearing in Ancient Rome towards
the end. The artwork is unusual, that's for sure, but I happen to like it
as a one-off (which is turned out to be). It's an imaginative little
story, making greater a very good character from TV DW. 7/10
lack Sun Rising (DWM 57) - Alan Moore returns with his 3rd part
of his Time Lord Trilogy. David Lloyd is employed again for the art, and
the same rushed style that brought down the previous 2 stories, afflicts
this.
Lady Remadu arrives for a business conference. She is accompanied by
the Parahumans - X-Men style people (with wonderful names like Millenium
and Cobweb) - who can help her in her dealings. One of these is Wardog.
There's also a Sontaran on board, and the Order of the Black Sun are up to
their old tricks. The Sontaran proves the nasty bloke, brainwiping one of
the Parahumans. Wardog deals with him.
Reading this I was constantly looking back through Stardeath and
4-D
War.
It does form a pretty definite trilogy, but it's not a very clear one.
This proved to be the last of such jaunts for Alan Moore, and you have to
say it's pretty lame. The arts okay though. The strip has certainly not
shied away from representing the Doctors Home race, but it hasn't been
particularly successful. 6/10
Skywatch 7 (DWM 58 & WS81) - Steve Parkhouse lends his
considerable talent to this additional strip, drawn by Mick Austin (whose
Lunar Lagoon main strip was excellent). Featured monster - the Zygons -
well one of them anyway.
UNIT are manning a remote Radar Post. Captain Hawks is in command when
an unidentified meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere. Campbell is sent out
to investigate, and on his return smashes up the Radar equipment. The
Zygon has taken on his form. Hawks takes matters into his own hands,
accidentally shooting the real Campbell, and giving the Zygon invader an
icy grave.
I have been most surprised that these additional strips have not
featured UNIT more. But this makes up for that, because its excellent. The
classic base under siege scenario is played to its full. There's also THE
most memorable image of the additional strip in these 8 pages - The Zygon
in the cupboard. You had to buy the 1981 Winter Special to read the 2nd
part, but it was well worth it. One of my favourites. 9/10
MINATORIUS (WS 81) - Accompanying the 2nd part of Skywatch 7 was
this stand alone Time Lord story. Written by editor Alan MacKenzie, with
the great Dave Gibbons providing the artwork this promised to be special.
Time Lord new boy Cargan is on one of this first trips in his TARDIS.
He's accompanied by ORB, a small flying robot, who likes to chip in with
daft comments. Cargan arrives on Minatorius, where the populace have a
rich energy supply that makes their lives very easy. Turns out this energy
supply is dangerous. Cargan takes matters into his own hands, disobeying
the Time Lord rule of non-interference. The feedback from his electronic
dabblings destroys his own TARDIS and himself.
Now this is a cheery little tale! The hero of the story dies, and the
irritating little ball survives! It's all wonderfully drawn, and you have
to applaud MacKenzie for doing something dark. It's a better, and easier
to understand, Time Lord story than Alan Moore's efforts too. Not bad at
all really. 7/10
The Gods Walk Among Us (DWM 59) - John Peel will provide the
next 3 additional strips, all of them delving into the rich mythology that
DW provided. They do so extremely well, and thus Mr Peel joins the
best contributors to this medium. David Lloyd provides the art - his
talent is evident. The old monster on show here is the Sontarans - used
quite a bit in these additional strips.
We're in Egypt, and an archeological dig is about to open the Tomb of
Sontar. Back in time we go to Ancient Egypt. Turns out a lone Sontaran
landed there, slaved the populace. Only Tothmes was wise to his invasive
plans, and while the Sontaran slept he was walled up. And so Styx has
remained in the Tomb all that time. He escapes, naturally, when the dig
opens the Tomb, only to be caught by another Trap, where he is buried in
tons of Sand.
Ancient Egypt provides an effective backdrop to this 4 page story.
Tothmes emerges with great credit from this story, and I got really
engulfed in it all. It's clear, it's concise. It's exactly what these
strips should be. 9/10
Devil of the Deep (DWM 61) - The same team as before - Peel and
Lloyd. But a totally different tale, tinged with sadness, laced with an
unusual friendship - enter the Sea Devils and Pirates.
Early 17th Century South America. Diego De Columba of Cordoba is
captured by Pirates and made to walk the Plank. He ends up as a Castaway
on a Desert Island, thanks to a friendly Sea Devil, who just happens to be
passing as Columba is about to drown. They strike up a friendship. One day
the Pirates return, the Sea Devil is captured. Then Columba remembers a
device that the Sea Devil told him not to ever press. He does, and a Sea
monster rises up destroying Pirate Ship and his friend. Columba is rescued
by a Spanish ship.
It's a terrific little story this one. The Desert Island is wonderfully
drawn, and its good to see a DW Monster that isn't really that bad.
The device that the Sea Devil possesses provides a rather convenient story
plot, but the whole idea was well put together generally. Another hit for
this strip. 8/10
The Fires Down Below (DWM 64) - John Peel finishes DWM's
additional comic strip run (the next 2 are in the Summer Special), with
John Stokes returning with the graphics. The privilege of the last Monster
is given to the Dominators - Hmmm!
UNIT under the command of Major Whitaker are sent to a extinct Volcano
in Rejkavik. Tremors under the surface need investigating, and so UNIT
metamorphosizes into a Geology team. Seems a lone Dominator, with his
Quark entourage wants the Planet Core. UNIT sabotage the machinery and the
plan is foiled!
The Dominators suffer because of comparison with the TV story. For me
that was one of the worst DW stories ever - so I never was going to
be that struck on their return. It's a pity such a villain is presented as
the last. Nonetheless the story is adequate and the art pretty good. An
average end though, which is disappointing. 6/10
The Fabulous Idiot (SS 82) - The end of the additional strip was
given to us by Steve Parkhouse. This, and the next, were part of a Summer
Special that boasted interviews with Peter Davison and Anthony Ainley. In
both strips Parkhouse uses existing creations of his, actually both from
the DWM Main Strip The Free-Fall Warriors. Here the focus is Dr
Ivan Asimoff.
Asimoff is a Science Fiction writer. He creates Commander Conquest,
which is himself, who battles enemies and conquers all. He re-enacts the
main scenes in his bedroom - much to the annoyance of his Auntie who he
lives with. She wants him to write quieter stories! Meanwhile his
illustrator is working on the new cover. This startling image knocks the
poor Doctor over in shock!
Parkhouse give us a marvelous one-off strip, better than any featuring
this character. Asimoff's daily routine is the cause of most of the humour
here, and the story cleverly leads us down one line, only for our
preconceptions to be shattered at the end. It's a supremely likeable
strip, much in keeping with Parkhouses previous efforts. Parkhouse also
helps draw this one (with Geoff Senior), and it's not bad at all on that
front. Very good. 8/10
A Ship Called Sudden Death (SS 82) - Steve Parkhouse brings back
another creation of his own in another terrific one-off strip in the
Summer Special of 1982. This time it is the Free-Fall Warriors themselves.
Dave Gibbons is recruited on the art front, and this really is excellent.
There's a race about to be taking place, starting on the planet
Ariadne. The 2 competitors (small race this one) goes round the planet
Persephone, getting rather close to an asteroid belt. Against the
Free-Fall Warriors, in their ship Tigerfire, is Khan, with his ship Sudden
Death. Our favourite pilots outwit Khan, emerging triumphant, with Khan
apparently dead.
It's a very simple story about a race. But the introduction of Khan is
impressive (a skull like baddie, with a ship straight from hell), and the
Free-Fall Warriors are better here than elsewhere. Parkhouse thus finishes
off the additional strip run in fine form. 8/10
SUMMARY And so the additional strip was no more. Lasting a very short 3
years it had given us much of DW mythology, presented without our
hero at the fore. Some stories were great, others very poor indeed. The
additional strip was actually the same with consistency as many other
medium - books, audios, TV stories, main comic strip - whatever.
New characters like Abslom Daak and Kroton the Cybermen proved popular
enough to return elsewhere. Characters like Lama Gampo and Plutar-TARDIS
man, were to disappear forever - and that was a shame. The monsters and
villains we knew would return.
But overall the additional comic strip that graced DWM for those 3
years
was a good ride. I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and reviewing, this
neglected part of DW History. Access to these 30 Stories will be
limited,
I expect. But hopefully it will encourage those fans who have an extensive
DWM collection to go up to their attic and recover these lost treasures.
There's a lot to enjoy. Try it, you might like it! Overall rating for the
additional strips 7/10
Here's the best Ten:-
Skywatch 7, Black Legacy, Abslom Daak - Dalek
Killer, The Gods Walk Among Us, Business as Usual,
Throwback, The Fabulous Idiot, Devil of the Deep,
Twilight of the Silurians, Minatorius
So just what is Canon anyway? by Paul Deuis
28/1/03
We Whovians are a passionate bunch, and it doesn’t take much to
realise that we all have differing opinions on many subjects related to
our favourite Time Lord. What is your favourite story? Who is your
favourite Doctor? Which companion did you hate the most? So many of
these types of question are asked, time and time again, particularly when
introductions are being made. It gives you a nice cosy starting point to
the conversation. For the most part, people will have their say, listen
to the other person/people have their turn, and little more is said.
They end up respecting the other opinions presented, agree to disagree if
the viewpoints are extreme opposites, and get on with their lives.
This, however, is not true if we are talking about canon. Trust me, if
you want to start an argument in any Doctor Who club, forum or
discussion, online or real life, just mention the word
“canon”. I can almost guarantee you fireworks will follow
shortly afterwards. What is it about mentioning that one little word that
makes so many Whovians climb on to their proverbial soap boxes? Why do
they start telling anyone who wants to listen that they are an authority
on the subject and anything they say goes? Of course, if you don’t
agree with them, you’re wrong and that’s all there is to it.
The judge’s decision is final, no correspondence will be entered
into.
The biggest headache is caused by the fact that so many viewpoints can
be, and frequently are, taken on the subject. The worst people to
encounter on the topic are the extremists, a statement which won’t
surprise anyone greatly I’m sure. On one side, there are people who
argue “If it wasn’t televised between 1963 and 1989 by the BBC
then it doesn’t count”, leaving even Shada and the TV Movie out in the
cold. On the other side, there are those who say “I don’t
care if it was a badly drawn one frame comic on the back of a cereal box,
it was called Doctor Who and it looked a bit like Tom Baker with
that hat and scarf and that makes it canon”. Thankfully, the good
majority of Whovians fall somewhere in the middle of these two arguments,
but that doesn’t necessarily make discussion on the topic any less
animated.
At the time of writing this, it has been over thirty nine years since
that unmistakable theme music played at the start of An
Unearthly Child for the first time, and Doctor Who has surfaced
in many shapes and forms, many not on the television, and one of the many
arguments for accepting something as canon, is the stamp of approval from
the BBC. This on its own means a lot of hard work trying to piece it
together. The Virgin line of New and Missing Adventures was endorsed by
the BBC. The new books ARE from the BBC. The Big Finish audios are also
authorised and licensed by the BBC. The
Pescatons is believed by many to be canon, as are the three stories
that were to be part of season 23 before being dumped, since all have seen
the light of day as Target novelisations. Even Dimensions in Time, though it is a short story
shot only for charity, was produced by the BBC and I seem to remember
being told it had its own production code, although I could well be
mistaken about this.
Even companion spin-off stories can be included. Harry and Turlough
both appeared in Target novels without the Doctor. Benny Summerfield has
proven to be very popular since leaving the Doctor in both book and audio
forms, and who can forget almost everyone’s favourite companion,
Sarah Jane Smith, who was in the (in)famous K9 and
Company and now has her own Big Finish audios as well.
There are, of course, plenty of good arguments for almost any stand
taken on the subject. The problem lies in drawing the line somewhere.
Just where do you make your stand? What makes people say “enough is
enough” and decide what is canon and what is not? Is it enough that
there are the words “Doctor Who” attached? The Doctor may not
be in it, but he wasn’t in Mission to the
Unknown either but that isn’t questioned as being canon. The
BBC originally endorsed the Virgin line, but on finishing that up and
starting their own series with The Eight Doctors,
told writers to disregard anything written in Virgin books for continuity
purposes. Does that mean they aren’t canon? Well apart from the
fact that many writers have ignored that directive, and at the very least
not contradicted anything written in the Virgin books, continuity as we
all know too well was often thrown right out the window during the
televised series. Many times, this was in stories which are regarded in
many circles as out and out classics, Genesis of the
Daleks being the most obvious example I can think of at this moment.
Anyone want to say Genesis isn’t canon? I
wouldn’t think so.
Confused? Most are, and that is probably the reason most Whovians
avoid the subject like the plague. We’re happy watching and
re-watching the series over and over again on our VCRs and/or DVD players,
and in a lot of cases, reading the books and listening to the audios, but
even if your life depends on it, just don’t upset your little world
(or anyone else’s) by asking that question “So just what is
accepted canon anyway?”
Get off that soap box. Like beauty, canon is most definitely in the
eye of the beholder, and while opinions will probably always differ on the
subject, the most important thing to remember was said by our good Doctor
to Duke Giuliano: “Keep an open mind. That’s the
secret.”
Baker Bashers Beware! A review of violence in Doctor Who
during Season 22 by Ronald Mallett
3/3/03
If there is one word that captures the essence of the character of The
6th Doctor it is controversial. Take note of how many reviews there are of
Colin Baker's interpretation as opposed to the others and how much they
vary! Like all The Doctors he made the journey from an extreme caricature
of himself to that of a more settled, mellow version over the course of
his tenure. He was proud, verbose, abrupt, eccentric and at times callous
but he was also heroic, noble and a born iconoclast.
The Doctor we meet at the beginning of The Twin
Dilemma is not the same Doctor we know by the end of the story. It has
long been recognised that it was a mistake to introduce The 6th Doctor as
a deranged maniac as many were unable to let go of the image of him
attempting to strangle his companion. While he remained at times
unpleasant, The Doctor's morality could not be questioned. His
chastisement of The Rani in The Mark of The Rani
attests to this as he debunks her grim philosophy of being. His speech to
Drathro in The Mysterious Planet, explaining why
organic life is important indicates the consistency of this morality. As
he explains to Peri in the same story, he can't allow innocent people to
die if he can save them.
If The 6th Doctor has a central failing (aside from his rather
lacklustre interpersonal skills and dress sense) it is his callous (i.e.
alien) reaction to the death of his adversaries. As Colin Baker insists in
the audio commentary of Vengeance on Varos, that was
a conscious production decision in keeping with his more alien persona. He
turns to the dissolving guards in the acid bath and declares: "Forgive me
if I don't join you". In The Two Doctors after
killing Shockeye with cyanide (not ignoring the fact he had recently
killed and eaten an old woman, had just been in the process of dissecting
Jamie alive and at the very least intended to kill The Doctor with his
sword) The Doctor remarks: "Your just desserts!" However in the same story
he openly mourns Oscar's death - quoting Shakespeare in a very sensitive
way. It's just clear he doesn't have a lot of pity for murders and
psychopaths. After Orcini blasts Davros' hand off, The Doctor playfully
offers his own in a fake gesture and comments: "No arm done!" This aspect
had all but vanished by The Trial of a Time Lord and
after being forced to wipe out the Vervoids in order to save humanity, the
Doctor looks remorseful. But perhaps it is because he knows that the
Vervoids have just been following their instincts and are not truly evil
in the pure sense of the word, although their actions appear that way to
us. There is certainly no admission such as The 5th Doctor made at the end
of Warriors of the Deep: "There should have been
another way!" The 6th Doctor just isn't the type to openly wear his heart
on his admittedly gaudy sleeve!
Many voices raised against the character of The 6th Doctor point to
differences between him and the other Doctors. How fair is that? It seems
clear to me that he was continually acting by virtue of a strong moral
impulse [rather than continuously playing god with time or forcing his
companion to face her darkest fears (ie. Ghost Light)
like The 7th Doctor]. It has been suggested that in Vengeance on Varos during the scene where Peri is being
converted into a bird, The Doctor displays a fascination with the process
and at first does not attempt to stop it (The Handbook: The Sixth Doctor,
Howe-Stammers-Walker, 1993, pp. 496-497). In reality his first reaction is
to shout "What!" His voice betrays his concern. He prevents Jondar from
throwing away his life in a useless gesture of resistance. Quillam
declares the experiment has gone too far. When he is viewing the
experiment it is with deep concentration as he is trying to think of a way
to save Peri and Etta. He demands the machine be turned off. Then he
provides the distraction needed for Jondar to seize a weapon. The Doctor
then uncomfortably attempts to force Quillam to cooperate at gunpoint (no
worse than The 5th Doctor holding a gun to protect himself and his friends
from a loose Kaled mutant in Resurrection of the
Daleks - and unlike the Doctor in that story who had finally decided
that Davros needed to be 'put down', the 6th Doctor had no real intention
of using the weapon to kill). He doesn't shoot him but the machine
instead. Shortly later he prevents Jondor from killing a guard, saving yet
another life. In fact he's continuously saving lives throughout the entire
adventure just like any other Doctor. The Doctor actually refuses to even
take a gun in The Mark of The Rani joking he has
given them up as they can seriously damage your health! So much for Doctor
Wholigan!
Let's look back at the behaviour of one of the earlier Doctors then and
place him on trial for a moment. Paul Shaw (Data Extract 162 July/August
2002, p. 8) clearly lists some of his more questionable behaviour: he
calmly causes the death of Styre in The Sontaran
Experiment, blows up the Zygons in their ship in Terror of the Zygons, uses cyanide on Solon in The Brain of Morbius, snaps a neck in The Seeds of Doom, brings about the molecular
disintegration of Greel in The Talons of Weng-Chiang,
deliberately masterminds the death of Taren Capel by altering his voice in
The Robots of Death. All were acts of premeditated
murder but given the circumstances and the nature of the victims,
perfectly understandable. The Doctor Wholigan tag often applied to the 6th
Doctor and coined I believe by Antony Howe, seems a mite unfair when
placed in proper context. Of the early 4th Doctor, Paul Shaw concludes:
"...he snaps and snarls, beats up people in The Seeds
of Doom, lays into Goth with a big stick (The Deadly
Assassin), coldly flicks a flesh eating Horda onto someone's shoulder
(The Face of Evil) etc. etc. ... Tom is praised for
this, Colin is damned. I've never understood why..." As the 6th Doctor
himself professes during his trial he resorts to violence only in
self-defence. That can probably be qualified as all the Doctors at times
also acted violently in the defence of the defenceless. The 4th Doctor
shoots down a Rutan ship at the end of The Horror of Fang
Rock and declares: "That'll teach them!" He also claims the universe
won't miss the Jagaroth and engineers their final extinction in City of Death. At least The 6th Doctor didn't send off
the hand of Omega to obliterate Skaro (i.e.. Remembrance
of the Daleks). One would hope that the 7th Doctor knew that is was
clear of Thals. But then again, didn't even the 4th Doctor think that
Dalek life counted as well in Genesis of the Daleks
when given the opportunity to abort their evolution?
Probably the most misunderstood of all Colin Baker's stories was Vengeance on Varos. It seems to epitomise the degree to
which the use of violence in the program at that time has been distorted.
Antony Howe (A Voyage Through 25 Years of Doctor Who, December 1988)
claimed that while it was an attempt at social criticism of video nasties,
its over-exploitation of violence turned it into one. Paul Corrigan (Data
Extract 161, May/June 2002, pp. 10-11) has more recently maintained that
it was the lunatic behaviour of The 6th Doctor that resulted in two deaths
in the notorious acid-bath scene and that he deliberately engineers the
deaths of four Varosians in a way that equates with premeditated murder.
Closer inspection of the story on DVD reveals that both opinions are
flawed. There is no gore in Vengeance on Varos, only
the suggestion of it and the traditional fantastical violence involving
fictional death rays etc. For example when Jason Connery's character
Jondar is being tortured, it is simply a ray of light shinning or
super-imposed onto his torso. I don't see how that even compares with the
infamous drowning scene in The Deadly Assassin, which
is actual physical violence and easily imitated by the impressionable.
The acid-bath scene is less than a storm in a tea cup and more a sort
of black-out in a police box! What actually happens is that the Doctor
recovers and then in an inoffensive manner, taps one of the guards on the
shoulder. They believed he was dead and perhaps surprise causes one to
fall into the pool (into which they were about to tip the body of the
Doctor). The remaining guard then tries to force the Doctor into the pool
alive and is eventually pulled in by his dying comrade.
Like all Doctors, when pressed and given no other choice, the 6th
Doctor would act to protect innocent and even not-so- innocent lives.
People forget that when the Doctor saves the lives of Peri, Jondar, Etta
and himself by causing the death of Quillam and his henchmen, Quillam has
just told them what he has planned: "I want to hear their screams till I'm
deaf with pleasure. See their limbs twist in excruciating agony.
Ultimately their blood will gush and flow along the gutters of Varos. The
whole planet will delight in their torture and death." By utilising the
vines, the Doctor is merely defending himself and his charges against the
worst kind of psychopathic scum.
The other stories from season 22 - which has come to be known as the
video nasty season in some circles - have not been devoid of
criticism. The most distorted scene in Attack of the
Cybermen is the
moment the 6th Doctor shoots the Cyber Controller. He was actually trying
to rescue Lytton and when discovered, he was attacked.
The Cyber Controller isn't wandering over to give him a
warm bear hug! I've actually read very little about the scene which I
believe did cross the line that is where Lytton has his hands crushed to
a bloody pulp by the Cybermen. It was actually even included in Timeframe
by David J. Howe as one of the selected magic moments of the series!
I feel that blood has no place in Doctor Who and all injuries
should be internal and caused by fantastical weapons that children will
imitate with sounds. Ooze running out of corpses and the like was a
trademark of the 5th Doctor's era and was actually a very good substitute
and retained for the death of Mestor in The Twin
Dilemma. Having said this, it must be noted that the 6th Doctor was
not present in the aforementioned scene and I feel the scene was an
attempt to reinforce the ruthlessness of the Cybermen as a race.
The Mark of The Rani features people being
transformed into trees which is more laughable than graphic. It is all
done in puffs of smoke of course and there isn't even time for the
traditional scream. Despite popular belief, The Two
Doctors does not feature any cannibalism at all. Shockeye is an alien.
I think some people need to look up the definition of cannibalism in the
dictionary, you definitely have to belong to the same species as your meal
for it to qualify as such. In Timelash the Doctor
merely reflects the Borad's beam back onto him, causing his clone as it
turned out, to age to death. At the end of the story the Doctor felt his
exile to 12th Century Scotland was a just punishment - not death!
Cannibalism on a mass scale is referred to in Revelation
of the Daleks, much to the disgust of the Doctor and Orcini. Davros
has in fact been financing his experiments into producing Dalek/human
hybrids by selling the remains of those interred on Necros in the form of
a concentrated protein to starving human colonies. It's a disgusting
thought but it's meant to be: Davros is evil. He had his own people wiped
out in Genesis of the Daleks because it suited his
purposes. It's remarkable the difference a large alien in a kilt licking
his lips over humanity can make isn't it!
In conclusion I must say that the degree of violence during Colin
Baker's tenure has been exaggerated. In fact compared to some other
seasons, I have found season 22 it to be rather mild. I think there have
always been a number of people who have disliked Colin's portrayal and
have used a few little production misjudments to slander his
interpretation and his stories. To me the 6th Doctor is the definitive
Doctor as he draws strongly on all other Doctors up to his own time and
also injected a great deal of individuality. He played the Doctor as a
tough hero, just as Tom did during his peak. If you don't like his
interpretation I can deal with that, but don't lie in order to make an
argument. I have a great deal of regard for Peter's era but don't think
much of his Doctor. When I say he looks uneasy in the role I'm not
claiming anything Peter hasn't admitted himself. I don't have to lie and
distort to make my point. In fact I like season 21 because he largely
began to find his feet and toughen up a bit (i.e. Resurrection of the Daleks) and arguably become a more
pro-active Doctor in the tradition of his predecessor and successor. The
6th Doctor will of course continue to be the most controversial Doctor of
all, which is sad because I suspect given time his popularity would have
eventually rivalled that of Tom Baker. It is fitting to note that he was
recently voted most popular Doctor in a DWM poll - a long overdue
endorsement of character who was certainly the best Doctor of the 80's, if
not of all time.
Big Finish guide! by Joe Ford
10/3/03
Okay okay okay... enough of this Big Finish audios isn't proper
Doctor Who already! If you don't want to fork out 13.99 every month
then why not check out my handy guide to find out just which one's are
worth looking into...
Phantasmagoria.
Whispers of Terror.
The Land of the Dead.
The Fearmonger.
The Marian Conspiracy.
The Genocide Machine.
Red Dawn.
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor.
Winter for the Adept.
The Apocalypse Element.
The Fires of Vulcan.
The Shadow of the Scourge.
The Holy Terror.
The Mutant Phase.
Storm Warning.
Sword of Orion.
Stones of Venice.
Minuet in Hell.
Loups-Garoux.
Dust Breeding.
Bloodtide.
Project: Twilight.
The Eye of the Scorpion.
Colditz.
Primeval.
The One Doctor.
Invaders from Mars.
Chimes of Midnight.
Seasons of Fear.
Embrace the Darkness.
Time of the Daleks.
Neverland.
Spare Parts.
...ish
The Rapture.
The Sandman.
The Church and the Crown.
Well I hope I've helped a little bit. I hope you enjoy the audios as
much as I have... and if you've given them a try, try out some these I
reccomend, you might find yourself surprising addicted.
Supplement, 14/1/04: Jubilee: What a mixed reaction this piece
received. Generally fans appeared to relish it, enjoying its rich
characterisation of the Dalek slave, the scathing comments about the
commercialism of the show, the witty lines and the dramatic use of top
companion Evelyn Smythe. Non-fans mocked the strong humour, the unbalanced
characters and the sicker moments. I loved it, a Rob Shearman commentary
on the Doctor Who universe, more than any other CD this year it
made me think: 9.5/10
Nekromanteia: Oh dear, a space opera, not one of
Doctor Who's greatest genres anyway, that lacks the three things
that would make it work. Interesting characters, excitement and suspense.
The Doc/Peri/Erimem has already started to lose its impact and Davison
gives his worst performance of the year, the scenes in his head are about
as revealing as his celery explanation in Androzani!
And I hate the music: 2/10
The Dark Flame: And we started the year so
well! It's the first of Big Finish's epics this year, by that I mean short
stories stretched beyond capacity to a two hour length and filled with
pointless running about and bitching. There are some good ideas here, a
space travelling cult is worthy of a follow up but this all so predictable
and slow not to mention another poor attempt from McCoy whose seventh
Doctor is starting look a bit stale: 2/10
Doctor Who and the Pirates: Are they only
trying with the sixth Doctor audios? Yes this is the famous musical, well
at least part three is and yes it's brilliant. The lyrics are witty, the
songs are catchy and the payoff is satisfying. Evelyn once again comes
across very well; her breakdown in episode four is one of the most
dramatic Doctor Who moments. Colin Baker gets his own classic:
9/10
Creatures of Beauty: I love Nick Briggs'
work, he's always trying something different and ploughs ahead to give the
best work he can, whether fans will hate it or not. This story deliciously
plotted to tell the tale in fractured non-linear chunks takes a lot of
work but is ultimately fascinating and rewarding. I love it when the
audience is left to do some of the work and this is the ultimate story in
that style. Great use of Sarah Sutton too: 8/10
Project Lazarus: A tale of two halves, the first
half being gritty, dramatic and emotional and the second half being
disturbing, twisted but a bit empty. Once again it is Maggie Stables who
makes the most impression, her viscous reaction to Cassie's death being
one of the highlights of the year. McCoy manages to rein his over
excitable tendencies and delivers a quieter, more intense performance and
Colin Baker pleases in two very different roles. It is superficially
gripping but don't go looking for too much intelligence underneath:
6/10
Flip-Flop: Hmm, a story that is too invested in
being a story to actually tell as story! Does that make sense? No? Then go
listen to this, another overlong piece that is too obsessed with plot
mechanics than characters and hard to get involved with as a result. The
direction is weak, some entertainment is available thanks to witty lines
and Bonnie Langford's star turn but ultimately the two responsible for the
story (Morris and Russell) fail in their attempt to make this screwball
temporal thriller as fun as it is clearly meant to be: 5/10
Omega: Another half/half story, it is genuinely
funny in places and Davison rocks throughout. The twists come thick and
fast in later episodes and the cliffhanger to episode three is a winner.
However the first episode is dreadfully boring and I had no compulsion to
finish the story after hearing it. The music (shame on you Stone!) fights
the story and the direction again lacks punch (tut tut Russell). I enjoyed
this a lot but it should be a classic and never once reaches close to that
status: 7/10
Davros: Colin Baker and Terry Molloy,
outstanding. Gary Russell and Bernard Horsfall, disappointing. Wendy
Padbury, a surprise success! The script, lyrical and dramatic but way, way
too long. The big events feel small (nuclear explosions, climatic
suicides) and small events feel BIG (the intimate exploration into Davros'
character, the flashbacks to his non-romance) and the overall package is
spoiled by a director who is taking on far too much work and not lavishing
enough time on each piece: 6/10
Master: Gary Russell get away from the
director's chair! Joseph Lidster get a decent script editor! It seems a
shame to critisize Master when it does succeed in
its basic aim in taking the Doctor/Master to a new place, exploring their
old friendship rather than their rivalry in a powerful fashion. It's the
incidentals that are lacking, the murder mystery is predictable, the
secondary characters are Unlikable and the sudden twist into horror/SF
territory with the appearance of a comically melodramatic Death harms the
story terribly. A shame: 5/10
Zagreus: Oh shit, looking over my scores so far
it is clear I have been less than satisfied this year and here is the real
crunch, the worst Big Finish story I have ever listened to made all the
worse thanks to their 18 month gap whetting the appetites of the fans. Go
read my review for my reasons but I truly
believe this is not the way Big Finish should be taking the series, there
is now more continuity in this series than there ever was in the eighties:
0.5/10 (Nicola Bryant is hysterically good!)
Scherzo: At last! At last! I can say something
nice! And this really is a fantastic story, experimental in all the right
ways and exploiting the audio medium in fascinating and disconcerting
ways. Paul McGann and India Fisher give emotional performances and guide
you effortlessly through 100 minutes of riveting, powerful drama. The
setting is unique, very alien and brilliantly scary throughout. I loved
it: 10/10
Doctor Who Unbound:
Auld Mortality: Go and read Rob
Matthews review of this story, what a wonderful piece of writing and
he sums up well my feelings on this story. The only real disappointments
are Carole Ann Ford who still fails to convince as Susan after all these
years and Marc Platt continues to be quite a pretentious writer, obsessed
with getting his view of the show across. The story is intelligent,
touching, refreshing even so: 8/10
Sympathy for the Devil: Now David Warner is a
guy I would love to see taking on the Doctor more! This is so different
from Auld Mortality, fast paced, exciting and full
right bastards! The music is great and the production never once fails to
convince, it shocks me to think these shock looks into the possible worlds
of Doctor Who are more gripping than the real ones this year. The
last scene is an annoying tease: 8/10
Full Fathom Five: If there was anybody who
could convince you the Doctor is a caring, thoughtful guy and twist him
into a nasty, selfish bastard in the space of 70 minutes then David Bishop
is your man! The story revels in its cliches, helping to make you feel
safe before slapping you in the face with the final, breathtaking twist.
The atmosphere is dark and disturbing and despite the presence of some
iffy accents the production impresses a lot: 9/10
He Jests at Scars: Oh just when it was going so
well Gary Russell had to get in on the action! Stick to your day job mate,
this script is crap! A tedious, unimaginative mess that makes zero sense
treats its characters (and the audience) like imbeciles and has the
audacity to waste Bonnie Langford in a role she should have refused to
play. The more I listened the more annoyed I got until the last scene,
which capped off the whole nightmare with a spin on the 'did this really
happen' idea. God I hope not: 1/10
Deadline: I would have thought it impossible,
a Rob Shearman script I hate and the one he claims was his best! I don't
understand the point of setting a story in a nursing home where the main
character abuses his family, ignores his friends and loses his grip on
reality. It deals with nasty stereotypes, bored kids, schizo nurses,
unbalanced sons and fails to say anything interesting about any of them.
Set in one room (or the entire universe) this story pokes fun at Doctor
Who by including aspects of real life the show shouldn't touch:
2/10
Exile: I think the last line of my review summed this story up perfectly in my eyes;
"I loved every second of it. Now don't do it ever again"... a one off
experiment with a female Doctor who gets drunk a lot, has a job at
Sainbury's car park and hangs out with two illiterate losers. Nick Briggs
again, of course, making us wet our pants with laughter and upsetting half
of fandom in the process! Ever wanted to hear a Time Lord say "Oh shit!"?:
7/10
Supplement, 27/10/04: The Creed of the Kromon: Surely one of the
dullest chapters in the eighth Doctor's life and proof that the cult of
Gary Russell made a huge mistake containing his adventures in the third
season to one planet. It is a plodding run-around with little sparkle and
introduces the incredibly dull new companion C'rizz and even Charley seems
boring compared to her superlative treatment in the last story. It's
another overlong with too little plot and too much exposition:
The Natural History of Fear: Loved and
loathed in equal measures, I was pretty much on the fence with this one.
The schizophrenic season three takes another silly risk with this
experimental tale of mind wipes and controlled societies. On the plus side
Paul McGann and India Fisher both give phenomenal performances, surely
some of their best ever material. On the downside it's all a bit
complicated and silly with a twist at the end that is so silly it defies
belief: 6/10
The Twilight Kingdom: Oh dear, the point where I
nearly gave up on Big Finish. It's a competent run-around but there is
nothing to define from all the other competent run-arounds Doctor
Who has served up over the years. Micheal Keating makes an ineffective
villain and Paul McGann seems to have given up interest in the story,
sounding very, very bored. Its clichéd and obvious and features Charley
acting very Adric-like. One of the blandest stories ever: 4/10
The Axis of Insanity: The best Peter Davison story
is ages... the fifth Doctor is given especially much to do but Davison is
on real form anyway, shouting and cursing and bringing the story alive.
The twisted character of the Jester is one of the better Big Finish
baddies and his world is memorably frightening, providing loads of
dangerous fun for Peri and Erimem. There is a great musical score and the
script is loaded with imaginative ideas and witty lines. The best story in
nearly a year: 9/10
Arrangements for War: Doctor Who as a
Mills and Boon romance? Yuck surely? Trust the superb Maggie Stables to
refuse to let this sink into hopeless melodrama and keep the listener just
on the edge of tears throughout. It is heartbreaking to imagine Evelyn
leaving the Doctor and Colin Baker's sensitive portrayal of the Doctor
helplessly out of depth when dealing with human emotions keeps you
riveted. Another fab score and the political back-story is for once
genuinely interesting. Well written and acted, it is a real return to form
for Big Finish: 8/10
The Harvest: Well I never - a decent seventh
Doctor story! We haven't had one of those since Colditz! Philip Oliver makes a terrific debut as Hex,
the laddish hospital nurse who joins the Doctor and Ace in this horror
tale of organ theft and emotion harvesting. There is some juicy horrific
material but the human element is never forgotten and one of the Doctor's
old foes returns with unexpected style, having a much better success on
audio than their last few years on telly: 8/10
The Roof of the World: The first episode
drags terribly with little of interest happening. The second episode is an
psychological tour de force, exploring Erimem's past in succulent detail.
The third episode is a bizarre mixture of embarrassing SF ideas and silly
voices and genuine human emotions. The fourth episode wraps everything up
rather too neatly and and reveals the monsters to be rather less
interesting than their build up. A real mixed up story, which entertains
but offers nothing new: 6/10
Medicinal Purposes: Hmm... not the gothic
nightmare I was expecting because this is an SF story disguised as a
historical. Leslie Phillips shines as the callous Dr Knox and has some
delicious scenes with Colin Baker's jolly Doctor. The atmospherics are all
in place and yet the story loses points because it concentrates more on
plot than character and refuses to deal with the grotesque idea of
bodysnatching outside of a Doctor Who style-romp. It's a perfectly
good story, just not what I was expecting: 7/10
Manic Episodes: In Praise Of The Format by Matthew
Harris
21/4/03
Now, as you may have noticed, there has been a lot of complaint about
the fact that our beloved show has been axed. In fact, there has been a
steady stream of animosity for, oh, about thirteen years. Fourteen, sorry.
And for much of that time, the BBC has ignored it, putting it down to
where it comes from - that is to say, a bunch of sad, spoddy
SF-conventioning Comic-Book Guys, which, while an accurate description of
much of the fanbase, hardly justifies their ignorance. Even
Comic-Book-Guys deserve a say.
Anyway, it turned out last year that Heggessy, the Queen of BBC One,
She Who Brought The Dancers (which, now I come to think of it, will be
lost on the non-British readers, but it's so manifestly unimportant I
don't know why it isn't lost on the rest of us as well), Lorraine Bloody
Heggessy, anyway, she is, er, a fan. Or at least appreciates the show. Big
yay. No, really. And she's (apparently) now embroiled in talks over
"rights issues" with a view to thinking about contemplating bringing it
back, a bit. At least she's trying.
This news inevitably took over the hearts and minds of Doctor
Who fandom for all of a fortnight, before everyone realised that,
despite talks continuing (and still continuing as I type this, by all
accounts), it still wasn't back. And so, jaded by one more disappointment
among several, they got bored and went home.
But during that rather wonderful fortnight, any casual observer to rec.arts.drwho could conceivably have had a
small aneurysm at the newsgroup's content - for instead of being filled
with people whining about how the McCoy era wasn't to their taste, and
other people whining about the people whining about the McCoy era not
agreeing with them, and some of the more hardcore twats slagging off
anything and everything, just because they had been involved with the
series after 1987 (Mark Ayres and Alan Wareing, for Christ's sake!), the
good folk of RADW had made lists. Lots and lots of lists. Lists of things
that they wanted to see and didn't want to see in the (any) new series.
Included in these lists were things like casting McGann (of course),
not casting Ainley (or Roberts), losing much of the continuity, apart from
the TARDIS (uh-huh). There was the odd radical thing, like tearing the
whole thing down, losing the Doctor and starting all over again years
later, but few people responded to those.
There was one thing, however, that most everyone agreed with. This was
to lose the episodic format, and go with 50-minute episodes a la Star
Trek.
And this is where I scratch my head. Because, you see, I don't get it.
I really do not get it. Excuse my going slightly unnecessary here, but...
What. The. Bloody. HELL?
Take a look at that opening paragraph. How long did I say we'd been
waiting? Fourteen years? It's closer to thirteen and a half, really, but
either way it's a bloody long time. Thirteen and a half sodding
years we've been waiting for a new series, and now we're closer than
ever (I won't say we "are close") to getting one, your initial concept is
to ruin it completely? Am I missing something? Why was I the only
dissenting voice? Is "Doctor Who Fandom" in reality a codename for
a shadowy BBC-funded organisation bent on bringing it down completely
(which, now I come to think of it, doesn't seem that unlikely)? Am I alone
in this world? What's going on?
Okay. Right. Calm blue ocean. Okay, so, we want the episodic format
gone, do we? Zoom, out the window, bye-bye "NEXT EPISODE - PRIEST OF
DEATH", so long, cliffhanger, nice knowing you, cliffhanger noise.
Self-contained it is. Like Star Trek. One hour. Well, 50 minutes without
the commercials. We can tell a decent story in 50 minutes. Or 45. Hey,
that's, like, er, half as long. Oh, well, never mind. We can do that. I
mean, we had two-parters back in the day. We had, er, The
Awakening. Um, and Kings' Demons... The Sontaran Experiment? The
Rescue? Ah...
See, there's a reason why the old two-parters were the exceptions,
rather than the rule. For the record, I enjoy all of those stories, but
none of them are keepers in my collection. Do you want to know why? Well,
I'll tell you anyway: because NONE OF THEM HAVE VERY MUCH DEPTH TO THEM.
And that is because (do you see where I'm going with this?) they are TOO
DAMN SHORT. All of them are gap-fillers, with the possible exception of Rescue... but even that was really a gap-filler with a
new companion attached. And they all have something in common: rather
crap endings.
Remember how Rescue ends? The Didonians suddenly
appear from nowhere and kill the bad guy, then they bugger off again. The Awakening, meanwhile, has the Malus give up very
easily at the end there, and after Styre in Experiment is defeated (also comparatively easily) the
Marshal and his fleet also decide to give up and go home. Meanwhile, King's Demons doesn't even end at all, the Doctor just
sods off in his TARDIS and lets the story finish itself without him. All
of these had problems dealing with a 45-minute plot rather than an
80-minute one.
You know how a lot of Who fandom hates Star Trek? I don't, I
quite like it (even Voyager - it picks up eventually, really it does), but
it will never take the place of Who in my heart of hearts for one
reason. It's big and red and it's called the Reset Button. 90% of all
Star Trek episodes, no matter how enjoyable they might be (to me and
Michael Hickerson, anyway) end with someone finding something right in the
nick of time and saving the day. There just isn't time in forty-five
minutes for enough to get done, and the sacrifice is almost always a
proper conclusion. Most of fandom hates Star Trek, and yet seems to want
to turn their series into it.
Imagine Caves Of Androzani truncated to less than
half its length. Think of what is lost. Imagine Genesis
of the Daleks squidged into 45 minutes. Does that work? Does it?
Alright, so maybe it would have made a two-parter, but still, we've lost
probably that whole, forbidding first episode, the whole character of
Kavell and maybe Ravon, and possibly the conversation about the virus. It
doesn't help the plot, does it? Does it? It's therefore surplus to
requirements and goodnight, Vienna. Now can anyone, truly, hand-on-heart,
really, actually, want that to happen?
(This isn't to say that it's impossible to inject depth into a
45-minute story - Black Orchid, for example - just
that it's the exception rather than the rule. Rather tellingly, Black Orchid is a pure historical, rather than a science
fiction one, and so Dudley was therefore arguably under much less pressure
than he was for, say, King's Demons)
So, if that's all true, why do people want to shrink it? The main
reason is that "the episodic format is dated" (as someone said on these
very pages). Dated? That just means old. And yes, I suppose the episodic
format is old. But so was William Hartnell. Evelyn Smythe's no spring
chicken, either. Nor is the show, in fact - 26 years is a long time for a
show to exist, especially a niche show like Doctor Who, and soon it
celebrates its 40th anniversary and it's still going strong one way or
another. My favourite football team, Plymouth Argyle (quiet, you) recently
appointed Michael Foot, who I believe dates back to the Plesiozoic Era, as
a director, and they got promoted as champions immediately afterwards!
Dated? Well, yes. But who cares? It works!
"But no-one makes programmes episodically anymore!" I hear someone
bleat. But they do; ER, The West Wing, Buffy and so on all have plots and
subplots that span the entire season, which gives the writers the space
they need to develop things, instead of simply moving them about a
bit and then stopping altogether, as they are forced to do on Star Trek.
Trek doesn't tend to develop storylines beyond two-parters and sequels
very often, which is why it feels the limitations more. The open-ended
format of Doctor Who (please tell me that bit at least is sacred)
means it will be in the same boat - every episode utterly self-contained,
with little possibility of season-wide subplots. It's going to hurt, in
other words. Besides, since no-one does something anymore, is it any
reason not to do it now?
All right, so there's been "arcs", and sequences like The Key To Time. But even they were largely self
contained - the only Key To Time story that could
give a damn about the Key To Time is Armageddon
Factor, and the Psi-Powers and Cat's Cradle Arcs are built around unrelated stories
with bits added on and taken off to give it some sort of continuity.
The other criticism is more tricky. Hooking it to a 4 or 6 part format,
they reckon, is trying on the writers, constantly having to engineer
cliffhangers rather than develop anything. Hmm. Well, yes, that is a
danger. Look at Twin Dilemma, for example, where the
first and last cliffhangers suddenly burst from nowhere, or almost any
episode written by Terry Nation. But to a good writer it doesn't matter.
The Man Robert Holmes, for example, gave us some truly memorable
cliffhangers over the years. The Ultimate Foe, for
instance. Anything from Caves. Both in The Two Doctors. The first and third in Deadly Assassin. The first in Carnival
of Monsters. I could go on like this, but it's dull enough now, thank
you.
And there are ways around it. Twin Dilemma made
the mistake of thinking that "cliffhanger" means "the Doctor's in danger!"
Not necessarily. Terence Dudley, for example, almost never used that
format, except for Four To Doomsday episode 3, and to
an extent King's Demons. But as a general rule, he
preferred the shock-and-awe method (to coin a phrase) - "This is me." in
Four being a good example, or the "chilling
atmosphere"-style one in Black Orchid. A good writer
can make the cliffhanger flow from the story. A bad writer (or one, like
Anthony Steven, who's talented but unused to the format and genre, and is
ill and dying anyway and whose typewriter exploded etc etc) is forced to
tack their cliffhanger onto their story - a story which, if it's in that
situation, is probably rubbish any road up. The moral of the story is:
hire good writers. Which they'll hopefully do anyway.
The point I'm trying to make is that after fourteen years of waiting,
now that there's a greater than 2% chance of bringing it back, why on
Earth do people want to rob it of its main innovation - the 100-150 minute
format? Why pester the BBC for a whole decade and more and then tell them
to ruin everything? If you're in a restaurant, and the waiter's being
unusually slow with your order, do you, once it finally arrives, pick up
the plate and hurl it to the ground? Keeping the analogy up: if you order
steak, and get a small, greasy, plain beefburger, would you be happy?
Don't drop the episodic format. It's what Doctor Who is all
about. Never mind the beefburgers. Eat steak.
NA Thematic Chronology by John Seavey
23/4/03
I've been going on about this on Jade Pagoda for a while, so I do think
it's time to set down my personal ideas of how the NAs wound up working in
terms of their structure -- that is to say, even though it wasn't intended
to have a unified, 61-book arc, it does seem that you can pin down various
phases of characterization, theme, and so forth that exist in addition to
and superceding the various different "story arcs" we see. There are, no
doubt, a number of sub-phases this could be broken down into further, but
I feel that simplicity is a virtue, so three it is.
Phase One: Birth Pangs
This first arc dealt with the baggage left behind by the TV series,
with its new and radically different portrayal both of the Doctor (a more
manipulative, "darker" Doctor who played bigger games with higher stakes)
and of the relationship between the Doctor and his companion (trust and
friendship, as with previous companions, but an undercurrent of
manipulation and resentment that was entirely new.) Ace underwent
significant change, turning from an angsty teenager to a violent and
angsty adult, and we saw a new companion introduced in Bernice, who
entered the series aware of the Doctor's manipulative nature, but very
wary of it. As the series progressed through several "false resolutions"
of the issue (Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War, Lucifer Rising),
tension levels rose among the TARDIS crew, finally culminating in the Alternate Universe Cycle, where an outside opponent used
these tensions as a weapon against the Doctor. Defeating the enemy meant
reconciling with his friends, and breaking the tension once and for all.
Phase Two: Smelling the Roses
Tragedy Day-Happy Endings
After No Future, the Doctor and his companions
finally and definitively reconciled with each other. The Doctor became
somewhat less manipulative, but just as importantly, his companions grew
to understand the pressures he was under, and come to accept their roles
as occasional pawns. It even became something of a running joke (lines
like "needs must when the Doctor drives" in SLEEPY,
or the wonderful interchange between Chris and Roz in Death and Diplomacy). Every once in a while, hints of
that tension rose up again (as in Head Games, where
Melanie compares the Doctor she sees quite unfavorably with the Doctor she
knew), but for the most part, the danger and tension came from outside of
the TARDIS here, rather than inside. Even when Ace left, it was to take up
the Doctor's role as protector of time, not because she hated him --
symbolically, at least, she'd become his daughter taking on the family
profession. Her later appearances confirm and heighten this impression;
witness Happy Endings, where she and the Doctor talk
about the impending death of Danny Pain like two true professionals. Two
new companions replace her, Chris and Roz, but they get assimilated into
the TARDIS crew quickly, easily, and with the barest minimum of angst. All
of this joy, happiness, and more straightforward adventures culminates in
Happy Endings, Bernice's wedding and essentially a
celebration and summation of the 49 previous New Adventures. It ends with
the Doctor trying to leave his friends behind, only to be told, "Nobody
should be alone."
Phase Three: Grave Reservations
GodEngine-The Dying Days
By this point in real life, the television movie had already come out
-- the Seventh Doctor, after gaining an extension to his life in print,
suddenly found himself obsolete. From this point on, the New Adventures
begin concentrating on connecting their stories to the FOX movie, and that
meant preparing the Doctor for his own impending demise. Suitably for
Time's Champion, the Doctor knew of his regeneration, and books like The Room With No Doors and Lungbarrow focused on his decision to face his future,
and his own possible death, head-on. (It's important to note that the
Doctor only knew of his future existence up through his seventh self -- as
he puts it, he's the original Eighth Man Bound.) The Doctor wasn't the
only person to face death, though; with So Vile A
Sin, the series gave us the first companion death since Kamelion's in
Planet of Fire, and the first meaningful companion
death since Adric's in Earthshock. Like the Doctor,
Roz knew that she faced death; her wonderful line, "This isn't history,
it's family," could almost foreshadow the Doctor's trip to Lungbarrow.
Ultimately, the books suggested that they were culminating this mortality
trip the only way they could, as The Dying Days
killed off the Eighth Doctor mid-way through the novel -- however, Lance
Parkin saved the Doctor and ended the final phase of the New Adventures,
an exploration of death, with a celebration of life. Regenerated and
renewed, the Doctor continued on to a new series of adventures, if not to
a series of New Adventures.
The EDA quick guide by Joe Ford
25/4/03
Part one:
Whilst scanning through Outpost Gallifreys forum I was shocked to
discover how many fans of the books just buy the popular ones and have no
idea what many of the others are about! So here, for the benefit of
everybody (especially you Rob!) who only pick up the odd book is my
definitive quick glance guide to the EDA's, what to watch out for and
what to avoid like the plague!!!!
The Eight Doctors: A terrible start to the range,
a confusing, continuity heavy mess with no coherence or character. As a
leap board into a new range it tells us nothing about what is to come
merely re-hashes so much of the past. Terrance Dicks prose is so very poor
his Junior edition books were more of a compelling read. And what's more
new companion Sam is awful. Avoid: 2/10
Vampire Science: This is more like it. Bold and
refreshing with a great take on the movie's 8th Doctor, this actually
feels like an opening story. Kate Orman works in successful collaboration
with her husband and the book is a triumph of wit and scares. The imagery
is quite memorable and Sam gets some of her best ever scenes where she
realises just how dangerous it is to be the Doctor's companion:
9/10
The Bodysnatchers: Average but underrated. The
Zygons really
didn't need a return visit especially so unrecognisable from their debut
TV story but it gives a chance for the Doctor and Sam to have a typical
Doctor Who adventure in smoggy Victorian London with loads of good
atmosphere. Some nice twists and characterisation help but we've seen all
this before, a lot better: 6/10
Genocide: A rarity for this early into the EDA
range but this is actually has quite an interesting storyline that is
worth following to its memorable ending. Sam is used quite effectively and
a companion returns in an older, slightly more memorable form. Good stuff
if you can ignore the simplicity of the prose: 7/10
War of the Daleks: A convoluted, continuity
obsessed (and destroyer of!) nightmare with enough plot to fill ten books.
John Peel tries to take the Daleks into the new media and fails dismally.
Loads of grating Daleks talking does not a good novel make!: 3/10
Alien Bodies: This is okay if a bit location bound
and insipid in places. Some of the alien characters are fascinating and
knock spots of the characterless 8th Doctor and Sam. The story begins on a
real high and has an ending that everybody raves about but once you know
the 'twist' in the tale it's really nothing special. Bonus points for the
comical return of an old monster: 6/10
Kursaal: Well written and quite tense, this is a
Earthshock part one, done better. Sam's continuing
ability to betray the Doctor actually makes sense here and the story moves
along with some marvellously gory passages and some excellent prose from
Peter Anghelides. I would recommend this as how to get an early EDA right:
8/10
Option Lock: Justin Richards reminds us why he's
in charge of the EDA's now with a brilliant entry, both atmospheric and
gripping. With all the talk of war looming on the horizon this tale of
nuclear Armageddon becomes even more exciting and the passages with the US
military base being sabotaged and the nukes being fired are truly nail
biting (and how often can you say that about the books?). And what's more
Justin has remembered to give the 8th Doctor a personality and it is nice
to have such a clever and involving hero for a change: 9/10
Longest Day: Michael Collier should never have
been
let near Doctor Who.
His novels are only 280 pages long but they feel three times that length
after you've dredged through the flat prose, uninvolving characters and
boring SF ideas. Plus this is the point where we truly hate Sam and her
treated of the Doctor. Why can't she just die? The aliens we meet here
are so dull and the ending is a damp squib: 2/10
Legacy of the Daleks: OHMIGOD!!! This is
(somehow) even worse than War withmore of the same
but this time it's diluted into action adventure form which is insultingly
simple. Some nice imagery (spider Daleks) cannot excuse an author who is
making a mockery of both the TV series and the books: 1/10
Dreamstone Moon: An improvement but not perfect,
at this point the hit rate of the books is so low we'll take anything
that's better than the last two. Leonard has a good grasp of how to
structure a good novel and his ideas in this are highly imaginative too.
Sam is almost likable (until the end) and her friendship with some of the
aliens provides some good scenes. It's too short but it's quite enjoyable
for it: 6/10
Seeing I: This is so good it actually diminishes
everything around it. An excellent psychological thriller taking the
characterless Doctor and Sam and testing them to the limit. There are so
many devastating moments it would take me ages to recite them. The scenes
with the Doctor stuck in the prison where everybody is NICE to him and how
it wears him down to nothing are nothing short of amazing. Sam grows into
a young woman over three very memorable years. A superb book conforming
the Orman/Blum name as one to watch for: 10/10
Placebo Effect: Ahhhh! No, get Gary Russell away
from the typewriter! He's messing about with continuity (why? WHY???) and
undoing all the good work done by Orman and Blum concerning the Doctor and
Sam at the same time! His story is so slow moving you actually get excited
during a wedding, the characters are awful. I don't know how this one made
it to print: 0/10
Vanderdekens Children: Worthy and has bags of
atmosphere, this still needs two or three re-writes. There are far too
many characters rushing about and introduced in numbers it is extremely
difficult to tell them apart. Still the cover is incredible, the story
unfolds unpredictably (and tortures Sam so that can't be that bad!) and
the 'vessel' proves to be one of the most intriguing locations for a long
while. Bulis has done better but he's also done a lot worse: 7/10
The Scarlet Empress: The definitive Paul Margs
book. It's quite wonderful, full of so much magic and wonder I read most
of the book with a huge smile on my face. Iris is an incredible addition
and very funny too (and if any book range needed a few laughs it was this
one at this point!) and her scenes with the Doctor set the book alight!
Hyspero is described in wonderful detail and is only the second alien
planet I'd like to visit (after the planet in The Also
People). Packed with detail and charming scenes, Margs' reputation was
rocketed sky high from the very beginning. Even Sam's okay: 9/10
The Janus Conjunction: Second good book in a row
(something of a record!) this introduces fab author Trevor Baxendale,
coined 'traditional' Trevor by those who don't like his archetypal
Doctor Who type stories. I think this is great, a fast paced,
action packed mystery with tons of good characterisation and lots of
healthy scenes of Sam melting away in a radioactive wasteland. The Doctor
rocks in this, he's funny, charming and entertaining: 8/10
Beltempest: You cannot fault Jim Mortimore's
ambition and he sets about destroying planets on a grand scale in this
one. Unfortunately he forgets to tell a coherent story around it and the
finished book has a bitter aftertaste to it, not attempting to justify
death on such a grand scale. The Doctor is again on form (there are
developments with Sam we would rather forget though) but he can't save a
book that has not been edited with enough thought or detail. Jim has been
responsible for some rip-roaring classics in the past but alas, this is
not one of them: 4/10
The Face-Eater: Hmm... the first third is quite
intriguing with an unusual but effective narrative style (basically it is
told from different characters' POV one chapter at a time) and the planet
is well brought to life but in the end a horror story without much horror
just cannot sustain itself. The actual monster isn't worth getting excited
about but an excellent twist later in the tale adds a lot of boost and
tension to the story: 6/10
The Taint: Another disaster, albeit one that
should have been much more. There are some effective passages here,
especially concerning wonderful new regular Fitz but in the end Michael
Collier just cannot hold my attention. The plot is good but the prose is
just worthless with no drive to it. It feels as though he struggled to
finish the book too with a sloppy ending. Still Fitz brings a little hope
after the failed Doctor/Sam relationship: 4/10
Demontage: Bless Justin Richards, old hand at this
game but so much better than practically anyone else having a go at the
EDA's at this point. He tries his hand at comedy here. to unusual effect
because this space opera has far more to it than that. Fitz proves to be a
laugh and half and we even get Sam hidden for half of the book so we can
spend some more time with this hysterical loser. The plot unfolds with the
trademark Richards twists with a particularly brilliant poker game near
the end. Effective and needed therapy for the range: 8/10
Revolution Man: Paul Leonard gets better with each
book and this one has a killer of an ending that left me reeling. The plot
is simple but quite strong (drug controlled hallucinations!) in places and
Fitz and Sam are fleshed out nicely ina story that affectionately pokes
fun at the 60's. Truly scary hallucinations: 8/10
Dominion: All the stuff with the Doctor and Fitz
is wonderful especially the absolutely gripping attack on the house by the
aliens but this is dragged down by Sam and her psycadelic adventures. UNIT
is dragged out of mothballs and given a re-vamp and the action oriented
scenes contain the right amount of oomph. Nick Walters has a good writing
style, not too heavy but quite effective: 7/10
Unnatural History: Oh dear. Orman and Blum, my
heroes finally let me down. Don't get me wrong this is a well written book
with some more wonderful work done with the Doctor (more than any other
writers they manage to capture the magic of the character) but the plot is
just a big confusing mess that gets sillier and more complicated as it
goes along. The US has lost its appeal as a Doctor Who setting too
and the couple struggle to find anything new to say about it. Mind you I'm
perhaps the only person who likes the fact that Fitz shags Dark Sam (a
decent character): 5/10
Autumn Mist: Completely unmemorable, I can hardly
remember anything about this book accept that David A McIntee is utterly
obsessed with his weapons which are more lovingly described than his
characters. Sorry folks but this one left no impression on me at all, for
good or for ill: 5/10
Interference 1 and 2: Erm, not bad. It surely has
a grand scope and has to tie up lots and succeeds on that front giving the
horrible Sam a memorable send off and twists accepted history in a most
unexpected way. There are some truly emotional scenes especially in book two as the Doctor makes the ultimate sacrifice.
The book is trying to be far too clever for its own good though and seems
to just go on and on. Miles has never been known for his concise attitude.
There's lots that will make you laugh, cry and declare in a loud voice "I
am a Doctor Who fan!" but there's also some stuff that will make
you want to tear the pages out and burn them. A brave experiment that
doesn't quite come off despite setting up good things to come: 6/10
The Blue Angel: A unique book that treads the
fine line between comedy and drama that the show often did so
successfully. This book is quite popular and it's easy to understand...
these Margs books are packed with detail and spoilers. He writes for the
new TARDIS team with a deft hand and convinces us confidently that this is
definitely the right way to go. Iris is back in fine form (gee can't she
be in every book). A Star Trek parody provides most of the laughs but this
is actually quite touching book that hits all the right buttons:
9/10
Frontier Worlds: This is more like it,
Anghelides returning in style writing a book that verges from the
hysterical (that bloody robot!!!) to the disturbing (Compassion and her
terrifying attitude) to the gripping (the gorgeous corn field climax!).
The prose is stunning and the book has a real fresh feel to it what thanks
to the fascinating three protagonists. The scene where Compassion leaves a
character with an axe hanging from his head is unexpectedly magical:
9/10
Parallel 59: Underrated, this is two thirds good
and one third running on the spot. Fortunately it is the beginning and end
that rock and only some repetitive scenes in the middle that get tiresome.
Fitz's plot is probably the best, his shagging adventures proving a lot
more touching than they initially suggest. Stephen Cole has a good eye for
his characters and there are some memorable bastards about this one. The
ending is excellent, sombre and melancholic: 8/10
The Shadows of Avalon: Whoa this is a good run
of stories... it's Paul Cornells turn to up the ante for the EDA's taking
us on a wild trip of magic and danger. Some brilliant sequences especially
involving the Doctor and the Brigadier add much to this involving drama. I
love the character of Mab, she makes a formidable ally. There is a twist
at the end that surely NOBODY saw coming and once again leaves us with
hope for the next book: 9/10
The Fall of Yquatine: A space opera but a good
one with some fine action sequences an drama. It is the private drama
between the Doctor and Compassion that wows the most, as he effectively
rapes his companion (don't forget she is a TARDIS... no funny business!!!)
and the consequences are page turning stuff. Fitz falls in love again but
that is never dull since he's such a readable loser you're rooting him for
him every second of the way. It's not so much a wonderful whole but a sum
of it's many exceptional parts: 8/10
Coldheart: A bit dull actually, Trevor Baxendale
has got the Doctor right but never really sets his story up with enough
drama or pathos. The prose is readable, quick and snappy but the setting
and characters are difficult to care about. A near miss: 5/10
The Space Age: Oh dear, the usually reliable
Steve Lyons disappoints big time with this strange tale of intergalactic
space hippies. I never felt engaged or interested in the central story.
The potential of this TARDIS crew is ebbing away and so is the time, a
shame after some great earlier stories. Another quick read but severely
lacking: 4/10
The Banquo Legacy: Incredible. Lane and Richards
have written a superlative tale, chilling and fast paced. The narrative
style is wonderful, the story dished out between two well rounded,
fascinating characters. The first half is a tense chiller but it soon
erupts into an out and out horror story with some of the most memorable
deaths in the entire range. This is a wonderful piece and full proof of
what the EDA's are capable of: 10/10
The Ancestor Cell Not a good end to Stephen Cole's
editorial reign, this is a beastly book which I lost interest in early on
thanks to its torturously complicated storyline and dull characters.
Romana and Gallifrey are back but these strengths are quickly glossed over
and the deathly dull faction paradox return to haunt the books again
(what's the appeal?). If nothing else the end is as dramatic as anything
the EDA's have managed and set the books off in a whole new direction...:
4/10
Part two:
The Burning: What has happened? Gone is the
smiley buffoon of an 8th Doctor and in steps a darker, ruder and more
violent version. I could read about him all day. Justin Richards returns
the 8th Doctor to his Victorian roots and creates a wonderfully
atmospheric story. Taking the simplest monster available (fire) a handful
of exceptionally crafted characters and some vivid prose we have a strong,
inventive beginning for the new 8th Doctor: 9/10
Casualties of War: Whoa, this is scary! An
excellent debut novel from Steve Emmerson with some really terrifying
images. The Doctor continues to grow into a formidable character this time
indulging in almost romance with Mary Minett, a wonderful character we
root for all the way. The book starts out slowly but the second half is
packed with scares and action. The prose is gorgeous and the ending to die
for: 9/10
The Turing Test: Wow, another winner and easily
the best thing Paul Leonard has ever produced. It’s a literate novel
told from the unique first person perspectives of three historical
characters. Quite wonderfully Turning’s is the best as he is so
besotted with the Doctor but Heller and Greene are both strong
personalities too that make their mark most memorably. The ending is
devastating; we are as shocked as the Doctor to see what lengths he will
go to leave the planet. But it’s the unusual narrative that really
elevates this one: 9/10
Endgame: This is actually quite a lot of fun
assembled in a way only Terrance Dicks can with his quick, snappy chapters
and comic book violence. This is more like a fast paced movie than a
novel, switching locations without excuse and indulging in lots political
machinations. The players are still interesting and the Doctor’s
conversation with the Countess is a gem. Read it for Terrance’s
unique look at how bored the 8th Doctor is now with his life on earth:
7/10
Father Time: Stunning. This is everything Human Nature should have been and more, brave, mature
and utterly compelling. The Doctor finally settles down and has a family
and realises he cannot have ties to this planet in one of the most
emotional books in the range. Miranda is a great character that demands a
return visit and the book is filled with magical scenes that stay with you
long after the last page is turned (the rose petal tower, the
transformer). The Doctor’s reaction to the death of his
‘wife’ is unexpectedly powerful: 10/10
Escape Velocity: Actually this isn’t that
terrible, it’s just the past five books expose its faults more than
it would if had stood alone. You’ve got the return of Fitz, the
introduction of Anji and the TARDIS back… all great scenes and the
final scene is a real charmer. Unfortunately Colin Brake’s space
opera tale would suit TV much more (being as shallow as much current
telly) and the climax is insultingly simple. Clunky prose too: 6/10
Earthworld: Bubbly, frothy and much needed.
Jac Rayner’s steady hand is apparent in this outrageous comedy. Anji
is fleshed out superbly after her first story and given a very strong
voice. Fitz is treated to an overhaul too, providing some great laughs as
he takes on Elvis (don’t ask!). It is this refreshingly
unpretentious new TARDIS team and the imaginative surroundings that
impress most. Great characters too: 8/10
Vanishing Point: Under Justin Richard’s hand
Steve Cole produces a good novel with some really effective prose (just
read the first page… its full of gorgeous imagery). The religious
angle is very brave and dealt with in an unexpected way. The Doctor has
emerged from the COE arc as a real star and his
breathless enthusiasm in this just rocks! Not much else to sat except well
done: 8/10
Eater of Wasps: Excellent. Trevor Traditional
manages to shut up all his critics by providing a squirm inducing horror,
which looks back at the TV series nostalgically but also looks to the
future with much optimism. The more violent aspects of the Doctor are out
in the open here in the most entertaining way. There are so many good bits
from the exciting fight on a moving train roof to the disgusting wasp
attacks to the poor old git Rigby turning quite horribly into a giant
wasp: 9/10
The Year of Intelligent Tigers: Intelligent
indeed and a return to form for Kate Orman. Hicthemus is one of the most
vivid Doctor Who planets we have ever visited, its surface is
explored thoroughly throughout becoming a character in it’s own
right. The story is justifiably slow as it leaves room for some scorching
character drama and the beginning of Anji’s long tirade against the
Doctor. The ending will just blow you away: 9/10
The Slow Empire: Dave Stone disappoints by
running out of steam before
the book is out. While this is still is packed with wit and charm (I love
the footnotes!) it's so unfocussed, the plot would only sustain one
hundred pages but it's dragged out to double that length and more. Lots of
fun diversions in a novel that betrays Doctor Who’s and Dave
Stone’s talents… imagination (there’s just not enough of
it here): 5/10
Dark Progeny: Quiet but mature. An impressive
cast list head this eco thriller that manages to be much more than that
describes. The opening passages are gripping and the climax shocking. The
middle of the book is much slower but full of magical touches that flesh
out the characters considerably. Another stellar portrayal of the Doctor
(his reaction to the alien children is beautiful): 8/10
City of the Dead: Good stuff but far too
overrated. Yes New Orleans is gorgeously recreated on page and yes the
book manages to put a great spin on the occult with some deliciously dark
scenes. Anji and Fitz are well treated too. But the ending is a mess and
the book struggles to flow into a coherent whole. Still the Doctor’s
nightmares are fantastically scary: 8/10
Grimm Reality: Ahh… not this one! A cynical
fairytale is not something I would read by choice. There are some good
lines, the odd funny joke and even a good twist or two but that
can’t disguise the fact that this book has been written with adults
in mind (which while writing a fairy tale is the ultimate crime). A
tedious sub plot does not help matters. Neither does the tacked on
‘planet in danger’ ending: 4/10
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street: Lawrence
Miles’ best work. He says he sweated blood over this one and it
shows, it’s so full of historical detail, top-notch drama and
genuine frights the books becomes an experience, not just another novel.
The incredible narrative style gives the book a unique flavour and the arc
twists are nothing short of masterful. It would be a nightmare to try and
read this quickly but take your time with it and you’ll be privy to
one of the greats: 10/10
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Margs is back doing
what he does best; making us wet our pants with laughter. This a superb
follow up to Adventuress, a much-needed return
to the fluffy adventures of old. Splitting the narrative between the
different time periods gives the Doctor, Fitz and Anji a chance to shine
on their own and there are some memorable surprises along the way. At the
end of the day it’s the genuine good humour that gives this its
bite: 9/10
Hope: A strong SF tale and good character piece
for Anji. Silver is the best thing about this book though, a cool comic
book villain who has a giant cybernetic arm. How cool is that? Hope itself
is a memorable place to visit and enjoyably inhospitable. The Doctor/Anji
fireworks give the book a real emotional kick: 8/10
Anachrophobia: Kept me awake some nights because
it scared me so much. Another Doctor Who staple, the base under
siege story, is worked into the books with real imagination and
atmosphere. You really feel for the Doctor, Fitz and Anji as they are put
through physical torture. The imagery of the clock-faced monsters is
enough to give you nightmares and some of the death scenes gave me the
shivers. An excellently written book: 9/10
Trading Futures: A surprisingly lightweight book
from Lance Parkin, which still manages to impress thanks to some decent
dialogue and good laughs. My least favourite genre, the spy thriller is
given the Doctor Who overhaul and escapes the shallow confines of
its Bond parody and emerges as a fun holiday novel. Nothing deep just a
whole bunch of fun: 8/10
The Book of the Still: Paul Ebbs' incredible
prose forces a couple of extra points onto this one because the overall
book is so entertaining and psychedelic despites its made up plot and
incomprehensible ending. It zooms by safely, Fitz coming up trumps in a
subplot that looks set to disappoint but actually ends up quite touching.
Loads of violence, dance routines and sadistic wankers never hurt a book
either: 7/10
The Crooked World: Pleasantville the sequel set
in cartoon land. Such a thoughtful book and yet so laugh out loud funny
too. Nobody escapes the book without incredible growth including the
reader. I love the characters and their funny quirks, Lyons captures all
that is wonderful about cartoons and yet all that is lacking too. He
reminds us why Doctor Who is so brilliant by providing a book that
is in turns heartbreaking, hysterical and intelligent. Plus the cover's a
beaut: 10/10
History 101: Another great debut but this time
an extremely complicated one. The rewards are plentiful here, a female
voice capturing Anji so beautifully, a miss-one-line-and-you’re-lost
plot that gathers terrific momentum and drama, another frightening example
of a TARDIS-less Doctor, Fitz out on his own experiencing history in the
worst possible way… Mags L Halliday should be used again and soon
this book is nothing short of brilliant: 9/10
Camera Obscura: Justifiably reknowned, this is
another masterpiece in an unbelievable run of books. A delicious depiction
of Victorian society enhances an already priceless examination of the
Doctor/Sabbath relationship. The prose is unbeatable, not fancy but
extremely evocative. I just wished this one could go on and on but in the
end you’re left with 280 pages of pure delight: 10/10
TIME ZERO: What a corker, the short chapters
enhance the tension and Justin Richards builds up a violent and action
packed SF tale. He treats the regulars with a really sensitive touch and
they steal much of the limelight but why not, they are by now the best
book line-ups we’ve ever had! The last third is deliciously
complicated so make sure you pay attention, it’ll leave you
scratching you head but in the most wonderful way. And what a cliffhanger:
9/10
The Infinity Race: Anji’s bits are
smashing, such a blatantly female look at time travelling adventures
creates laughs a plenty and Fitz and his boyish dreams ad a lot of charm
too. The book enjoys a comfortably Doctor Who-ish plot and has a
nice run of well-defined characters (especially the pathetic Marius).
However, it is a little too simple for my tastes and does take quite a
while to get going. And by the end you want the narrative to stop shifting
as it distracts you from the fireworks elsewhere: 7/10
The Domino Effect: Terrific, pulse racing work
that doesn’t leave you time to put it down. David Bishop's ability
to tell a tight human drama on such a grand scale still impresses me and
his detailed and structured story adds a lot of juice back to the range.
The last third is a unputdownable race against time and ends on a helluva
cliff-hanger that leaves you gagging for more. What’s more
he’s managed to use a staple of the books in an unexpected and
imaginative way: 9/10
Supplement, 22/2/04: Reckless Engineering: Humble but a little
dull, this is the only book you can actually skip in the AUN arc without
missing anything. Lacking Sabbath is welcome and the prose is rewarding,
Walters proving he is improving with each book but the plot is a mess,
sometimes deliberate, sometimes not so and with an ending this lazy and
unsatisfying it is hard to get worked up: 4/10
The Last Resort: Gripping and wonderfully
complicated, I love reading all the reviews of people who were tied in
knots over this book. The plot is actually very simple but told in a
fractured, easy to get lost way, Paul Leonard not interested in making it
easy but trying out an experiment while he has the chance. I'd say he has
succeeded, some of the most memorable EDA scenes crop up here: 8/10
Timeless: Outstanding and further proof that
writing suits Stephen Cole more than editing. His characters shine,
especially the regulars, the plot is snappy and full of twists, the
atmosphere is delightful and most of all he shakes up the ongoing story in
a fantastically unpredictable way. Who knew he could write something THIS
good? Let's have another Steve: 9/10
Emotional Chemistry: Bizarrely out of place
but a much welcome return to the historical genre, Simon Forward writes a
mini epic about love over the centuries. It's well written, well
characterised and well thought out but the absence of the regulars does
jar somewhat, Trix having yet to prove her place in the series:
7/10
Sometime Never...: Oh snap this up right now,
Justin Richards is responsible for the best book in ages, full of huge
ideas and wrapping up plots that stretch back to his freshman editing
days. The plot is a constant delight, the Doctor is as magical as he has
ever been and Sabbath rocks big time in his best appearance to date.
Everything The Ancestor Cell should have been but was
not: 10/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Turlough)
Top moment: The Doctor plays Valentine at his own game...
Overall: An excellent start. A funny, atmospheric piece with lots of
good OTT characters and a wonderful villain. What's more the horrible team
of Davison and Strickson (at least horrible on the telly) is given a very
entertaining spin by the talented Mark Gatiss: 9/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Peri)
Top moment: Beth Purnell torturing the sound-villain. Oh and the woman
who gets stabbed is pretty scary too.
Overall: Spooky. Justin Richards writes a script that exploits the
sound medium to the full and the production is full of wonderfully scary
bits. Colin and Nicola sound much like they did on telly... bitching and
moaning... look to other productions to see them both at their best:
7/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Nyssa)
Top moment: the first TARDIS scene where you're genuinely happy to
hear Sarah Sutton again before the tedium of the script settles in.
Overall: Dull as dishwater and then some. What a horribly complicated
and boring plot. Even Davison and Sutton can't hide their boderm and the
guest characters are just atrocious. Avoid at all cost (unless you're
having trouble sleeping!): 2/10
Doctor: Seventh (and Ace)
Top moment: Has the Doctor been infected by the Fearmonger... top
cliffhanger at the end of episode three.
Overall: Great dialogue throughout and a good production convinces you
this could have taken place in season 27. Jackie Pearce makes a star turn
as the fascist dictator (hmm and that's probably not going far enough)
and Alistair Locks gritty score is perfect. Exciting and pacy: 8/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Evelyn)
Top moment: The scene where the Doctor tries to tell Evelyn about his
chat with Willian Cecil is laugh out loud hysterical. His quiet moments
with Queen Anne are priceless.
Overall: An excellent historical with a simple but compelling plot.
Maggie Stables makes a fine impression as Evelyn and already she and
Colin have great chemistry. Not for those who want action and thrills but
for the quiter, cleverer side of Who it gets a definate thumbs up:
9/10
Doctor Seventh (and Ace)
Top moment: The entire second episode as the Daleks make their
presence felt...
Overall: A good action piece that falls to pieces in the last episode.
The sound effects are exceptional and it is never confusing during the
action pieces who is fighting who. McCoy overacts (as ever) but Sophie is
still acting for two. I love the comedy character Mr Prink who never gets
a word in!: 8/10
Doctor: Fifth (and Peri)
Top moment: The chilling cliffhanger to episode one... the Ice
Warriors are here...
Overall: Hmm a bit underated actually. Okay so we have Stephen Fewel
as one of the dullest bad guys ever but the portrayl of the Ice Warriors
(as noble creatures) almost makes it worthwhile. Russell Stone's high
octane score halps alot and fortunately Davison and Bryant make an
engaging team: 7/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Evelyn and the Brigadier)
Top moment: Evelyn describing her attack by the imp creature, very
creepy.
Overall: A gothic tale with all the spooky trimmings. Its also a good
SF tale full of memorable characters too. The dialogue is fantastic and
there are lots of scary bits to keep your interest perked up (Nicky's
death, Mrs Moyailhan being savage by her dogs!). Evelyn continues to
impress and has a great line in sarcasm ("You're crackers!"):
8.5/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Nyssa)
Top moment: The mirror smashing to the floor and then the fragments
collecting in the air to attack. Oh and the Doctor being pursued by a
grand piano!
Overall: Another underated Davison adventure (brr... I must stop
saying that!) which has atmosphere in spades but little of a coherent plot
to go around it. There are some fine characters here (Ms Tremayne the
Scot's headmistress is scary as hell!) and the music by Russell Stone
compliments the horror of the tale perfectly. It just has a daft ending
that spoils things considerably: 6/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Evelyn)
Top moment: President Romana's meloncholic monologue in her cell
talking about the horror of the Daleks. The Doctor's outburst at Evelyn in
episode four is shocking.
Overall: A bit of a mess really. It tries to be an action piece but
wants to tell too many stories (the missing planet Archetrax, Romana's
abduction, Evelyn's first encounter with Daleks, the invasion of
Gallifrey...) and ends up being the Resurrection of the
Daleks of the audios. All style and no substance. Superficially
entertaining: 6/10
Doctor: Seventh (with Mel)
Top moment: the end of episode two. Mel is arrested just one day
before the volcano is to erupt. How on earth can she escape this one?
Overall: A masterpiece. Bonnie Langford turns out to be a surprise
success and delivers a tour de force performance as a companion
struggling with her knowledge of the future. The score is beautifully
cinematic and the cliffhangers are gripping. Don't miss out on this one
folks: 10/10
Doctor: Seventh (with Ace and Benny)
Top moment: The Doctor is taken by the Scourge and Ace and Benny
realise he has been beaten at chess by a better opponent...
Overall: Very good but poorly placed... anywhere else and this would
be celebrated but surrounded by two classics it falls down a bit. Benny
and Ace make a fine team, I love Sophie Aldred's turn as the more
agressive Ace from the NA's. Paul Cornell has written a dense, complicated
script with lots of well played emotional moments. And a killer ending:
8/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Frobisher)
Top moment: The absolutely devasting ending... it left me in tears.
Overall: One of the best. Frobisher as played by Robert Jezek is
witty, cool and entertaining. We should see more of him. Colin Baker makes
a fantastic script even better and delivers his finest performance. So
many excellent characters (Berengaria is hysterical!). Rob Shearman twists
the story from high comedy to horror then tragedy and it hangs together so
well no matter how many times you give it a listen: 10/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Nyssa)
Top moment: The Daleks call the Doctor's bluff and kill one of the
hostages... his pained reaction is great.
Overall: Tedious and dull, even the Daleks are boring this time round.
The plot tries to be clever but before we can get to the good stuff in
episode four we have to wade through three episodes of non-atmosphere and
boring characters. No thanks: 3/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: I'm sorry but the ROOOARRR scenes are just brilliant!
Overall: A jolly adventure romp to begin the eigth Doctor's audio
adventures. It helps that McGann and Fisher are instantly likable. Gareth
Thomas is great as Tamworth such an OTT British gent and yet all the more
lovable for it. The Triskili are a very imaginative alien race and the
whole story has a delightfully fresh feel to it: 9/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: It's kind of cool when the Cybermen get blown out into
space.
Overall: Oh dear. Not as exciting as Nick Briggs would like to think
it is and full of well 'ard characters that say things like "Shut it!"
this is a tremendous letdown after the promise of the previous story. Even
the Cybermen aren't around very much, the audio medium needs something
more than the mere suggestion that they're hiding around the next corner.
A bit dull to be honest: 4/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: The ending with Orcino killing himself to save Venice...
it has the perfect romantic end.
Overall: Splendid, a Doctor Who romance full of secret cults,
misguided Dukes, sinking cities and rebelling toad people. The score
deserves to be heard on its own it is so beautiful and McGann is so
gorgeously full of wit and charm you can't help but get excited with all
the adventure as he does. Seductive: 9/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: Senator Pickering knocks down Charley's bedroom door with
the face of the devil screaming ("You're not Senator Pickering!" to which
he replies in a very cocky... "You think?")
Overall: Terrible accents and way too long despite having some great
ideas (an amnesiac Doctor being split between several people!) and another
excellent return by the Brigadier. The US is depicted in a very
stereotypical way full of cheesy characters like Dr Pargeter and Pickering
(who even has the nerve to say "You varmit!"). Becky Lee is so obviously
Buffy it's insulting: 5/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Turlough)
Top moment: The Doctor challenges Stubber and in doing so
inadvertently becomes Ileana's champion! Much to his embarassment (tee
hee).
Overall: Seriously overated this story is horribly edited in places
and has far too many boring speeches about Turlough's 'dark side' (yawn).
This is a werewolf story... too much chatting and not enough action. Marc
Platt tries to make things thoughtful but it just ends up being dull.
Still Alistair Lock's on hand and delivers a gorgeous score: 4/10
Doctor: Seventh (with Ace).
Top moment: The unveiling of.... well just wait until you listen to
the end of episode two!
Overall: Better than the last two but far from perfect. Caroline John
has a lot of fun with her OTT role of Madame Salvodori and she is great
fun to listen to. Sophie Aldred disappoints... she spends most of the
story shouting and her replacement Bev Tarrant (from Genocide Machine) is a bit bland to care about. A case
of too much plot too with leads to a overloaded fourth episode. The Krill
are cool and should return soon: 6/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Evelyn)
Top moment: The discovery of the Silurians larder... human corpses
hanging from meat hooks...
Overall: After a bad eighth, fifth and seventh Doctor audio Colin
Baker returns to save the day. The Doctor and Evelyn's scenes in episode
one are a delight, their scenes together radiate such warmth. The story
itself is intelligent and thoughtful with a new twist added to the
Silurians to keep them interesting. Darwin's inclusion should be
gratuitous but it isn't, it makes the story and listening to Evelyn trying
to resist pushing him closer to his theories is great fun: 8/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Evelyn)
Top moment: Cassie's gradual transformation in episode four.
Overall: Gritty, dramatic and rivetting. A perfect recipe of gore,
violence and drama. Evelyn was the perfect choice for this story as the
horror seems all the more repulsive through her eyes and the sixth Doctor
once again proves how shocking he can be (his reaction to the truth about
the villains is exceptional). Reggie and Amelia are memorable villains
and I really want to know how Cassie is getting on now: 10/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Peri and introducing Erimem)
Top moment: Peri's schizophrenic attack in episode four.
Overall: It seems ages since there was a decent fifth Doctor story
(hmmm) and its good to say this is a return to form. A snappy
psduo-historical with some good politics reminicent of The Aztecs. Nicola Bryant continues to ahine on audio
and has great chemistry with newcomer Caroline Morris. They hold up
episode three on their own beautifully. Yanis is a poorly acted bad guy
but his rantings aren't enough to drag this fascinating look at Egyptian
culture down: 8/10
Doctor: Seventh (with Ace)
Top moment: Easily the most exciting moment yet as Kurtz is torn apart
by the TARDIS!
Overall: Steve Lyons has written another fascinating historical with
lots of detail. There are some great set pieces here from Ace's escape
from Colditz to the Doctor's mind bending conversations with Kline (who
makes a brillaint baddie!). Great militaristic music too. All in all this
an underated gem: 9/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Nyssa)
Top moment: Kwundaar taunts the Doctor ("Don't turn around..." "I'm
not frightened of you!" "No but you haven't turned around have you?") and
then he attacks him!
Overall: Pleasant and easy on the ear thanks to another seductive
score by Russell Stone. It's a bit talky in places though and the people
of Traken are such hypocrites its hard to care a fig for any of them.
Still Nyssa gets some nice development (and a semi-romance with Sabien)
and Kwundaar is a great, silky voiced villain (of which Big Finish is
chalking up an impressive number of by now!): 8/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Mel, Sally Anne Stubbins and Banto Zame!)
Top moment: Too many to mention but for laugh out loud brilliance it
would have to be the Doctor/Banto scenes ("Have you taken a look in the
mirror lately... come to think I don't think you've done much else!" or
"Oh here we go another voyage around the English language!").
Overall: For sheer entertainment you can't do better. Another cracking
performance by Langford who has a great time poking fun at her character
("You can drop the goody-two shoes act!" "What act?"). Very, very funny
with lots of heart warming moments... Big Finish have taken the TV show's
most unpopular team and made them the most popular in the course of one
story (This won the best audio poll in DWM). What an achievement:
10/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: Any bit with Mouse who has the funniest accent ever!
Overall: Enjoyably camp with a hysterical score. It's not the
strongest story introduce McGann back in on but its a lot of fun
especially with all the kidnappings, camp villany and insane aliens! A
fine parody of the gangster genre with two excellent guest spots for
Jessica Stevenson and Simon Pegg from Spaced: 7/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: The whole thing is brilliant but okay, the heartfelt
conclusion between the Doctor and Charley.
Overall: A classic with a creepy soundtrack and a frightening Sapphire
and Steel atmosphere. It's another Rob Shearman masterpiece with plenty of
sick humour ("She's been stuffed with her own Plum Pudding!"), intriguing
mysteries (the eerie episode one) and set pieces (Charley turning against
the Doctor and becoming Mr Grove's daughter, time racing forward to take
anothe victim...). The last episode is the best with the plaudits going to
the character of Edith who manages to be pathetic and supremely
sympathetic at the same time. Brilliant conclusion proving how perfect
McGann and Fisher are together: 10/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: The surprise appearance of.... oh you'll have to wait and
listen to the end of episode three!
Overall: Poor Paul Cornell he always comes along at the worst times
once again following a towering classic his story pales in comparison. It
is still a strong tale with lots of historical facts that are interesting
and another good role for Charley as the plucky sidekick ("I went to an
orgy once!"). We'll call this The Keys of Marinus of
the audios... lots of hoppin about and fun little tales all compressed
into one entertaining whole. Cracking cliffhanger too: 8/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: The suitably horrible cliffhanger to episode one.
Overall: Sorely underated this is an atmospheric tale with lots of
great lines and brilliant red herrings. The post production work is
terrific giving the story a real SF feel (the ROSM units sound fab!). A
more subdued McGann is something i'd like to see more of and his bites at
some of the characters are great. It is surprising the amount of tension
they rake from an audio story: 9/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley)
Top moment: Leaman gets her just desserts in the end when she is
mutated into a Dalek... cool and disgusting!
Overall: Needs two or three listenings to aprichiate all the nuances
Justin Richards has put in the dialogue but it emerges as another strong
eighth Doctor tale with a fascinating new role for the Daleks. To hear
them quoting Shakespeare is both funny and disturbing... good job. Leaman
is marvellous, what a cow but you can't help but cheer her on.
Interesting: 8/10
Doctor: Eighth (with Charley and Romana)
Top moment: The Doctor's final choice... kill Charley or sacrifice the
Web of Time...
Overall: Yes it's a bit dialogue cluttered in places and the plot goes
into overdrive in the last twenty minuts but who cares? A truly
imaginative script that takes on the monumental task of wrapping up the
McGann season and manages to give Charley's situation a truly emotional
and sensitive end. Romana makes another startling performance and there
are loads of strong images thrown in (especially in Neverland... but the
frozen TARDIS is also quite excellent). Amazing, nail biting cliffhanger
too: 9/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Nyssa)
Top moment: The incredible twist end... find out just how badly the
Doctor influences the Cybermen's history...
Overall: Excellent. Top notch human drama and gripping SF too. Sarah
Sutton and Peter Davison give their best performances yet (and have a
heartfelt argument in episode two... their best moment together ever!). A
dramatic, rising score by Russell Stone punctuates the genesis of the
Cybermen...: 10/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Peri)
Top moment: The end of episode one ("What makes you think you'll get
out of here alive...?"
Overall: A delicious script, superbly performed. I love this with
every fibre of my being. I've heard it be called torturously complicated
but it's not, it's intelligent, literate and makes perfect sense if you
listen carefully. A traditional Doctor Who story given a lexical
twist as the longest word ever invades our vocabulary and attempts to
destroy all language. And how great is Colin Baker... once again proving
why he's the best Doctor of them all: 10/10
Doctor: Seventh (with Ace)
Top moment: The incredible head fuck that is the end of episode two.
Overall: Childish but compelling it is the horrible acting that lets
this one down... the worst production in a while (but still pretty good).
The music is phenomenal and carries the production throughout. McCoy gives
a towering powerformance outclassing Aldred for a change who plays the
teen angst of her character a bit too melodramatically. Once again the
ideas are good and as a whole the production is very listenable:
7/10
Doctor: Sixth (with Evelyn)
Top moment: The end of episode one, the entire first episode is
subverted as the Doctor turns very nasty indeed...
Overall: Subsequent re-listenings have changed my opinion of this one
quite a bit. It's very moody and has a great premise (the Doctor as the
bad guy!) and uses it to the full. This script is a gift to Colin Baker
who gets to play bad big time and loves evey second of it... this visious,
condescending monster he plays so well and yet there are still so
glorious gentle scenes to play that against. In all a good SF tale, the
Galyari are superbly explored and Evelyn is so welcome after such a time
away: 9/10
Doctor: Fifth (with Peri and Eremim)
Top moment: Any bit with Nicola Bryant as the Queen. What a
performance.
Overall: What a let down, what promises to be a fun swashbuckling
adventure turns out to be a damp rip off of every Doctor Who
historical ever made! Davison is forgotten about as he has such wonderful
(and far more interesting) companions around him. Nicola Bryant is
astonishing, let's hope we see more of her soon. I just couldn't get
involved with the overdone melodrama of this one. Sorry: 4/10
Timewyrm: Genesys-No Future