The Doctor Who Multiple Choice Test
1) If presented with a race that are manipulating humanity for their own, possibly sinister, ends, do you:
a) Expose them to humanity, turning their powers against them so humanity can see them for what they really are and hopefully come to a peaceful settlement – but however they deal with them, humanity must come up with its own solution to being manipulated by aliens.
b) Turn their powers against them by turning the whole of humanity into a race of hypnotically programmed murderers?
2) If your friend is kidnapped and you don’t know where she is, do you
a) Trace the mysterious signals back to their source, or look in the TARDIS information bank, or make an amazing deductive leap, or stumble upon a clue.
b) Get one of your other friends to dress up as a Roman and blow up Cybermen’s spaceships til they tell you where she is, despite the Cybermen having no connection whatsoever to anything, while making macho action-movie quips?
3) If you’ve just spent 90 minutes hammering home the point that the shape-shifters controlled by others’ minds have a sentience of their own, and then discover that one that you thought was your friend is in fact a shape-shifter, and that your friend, unaware, has been kidnapped and is in another, pregnant, body, do you:
a) Find some way to restore your friend to her own body with minimum trauma to both her and the shape-shifter.
b) Zap the shape-shifter with a magic wand ‘sonic screwdriver’ so your friend suddenly finds herself in labour with no warning and the shape-shifter is now dead?
4) If you know your friend and her baby have been kidnapped by your enemies, do you
a) Come up with a clever plan involving sneaking in, maybe stunning a guard with a Venusian aikido blow, but otherwise trying not to hurt anyone very much, and save them, possibly leaving a dummy made out of pillows in their bed or something
b) Come up with a plan that involves sneaking in then dramatically revealing yourself, before bringing in an army of thousands, including lesbian Ninja Silurians, space-Spitfires, pirates and other cool-sounding things, as well as Sontarans, Judoons and anything else they don’t need to make a new costume for, and having them all have a massive fight in which all the NPCs die, but the baddie still escapes with the baby?
How did you score?
Mostly As You are the Doctor, you solve problems using your native intelligence, wit and knowledge, and try not to hurt people unnecessarily.
Mosty Bs Hello Mr Moffat!
I got an email today from my friend Bob Temuka, which I hope he won’t mind my quoting in part:
Bloody hell, there I am, watching the latest Doctor Who and really digging it, and then they have that bit where they point out that ‘Doctor’ now means warrior to many, and that he shouldn’t be getting away with the massive threats he lobs around based on his fearsome reputation, and all I can think is “Damn! Andrew Hickey was right all along!”
Moffat can be great at plotting (though in my opinion he *really* dropped the ball on the first two-parter this series) but where he falls down in my opinion is that he’s got no real moral or human centre to his writing. It’s all intricate clockwork, and wheels within wheels, but there’s no ghost in the machine. That means that it can very, very easily tip over into amorality.
Note I am *NOT* (unlike, say, Lawrence Miles) saying that Mr Moffat himself is amoral. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to think through the moral implications of his writing, or gives them far less consideration than the workings of his epic plotlines.
Last night’s episode was exciting, if clichéd – we knew from the very second that we saw the Headless Monks that one of them would be concealing the Doctor, who would reveal himself at a moment of maximum dramatic tension, but it did all those clichés very well, and there were some genuinely nice moments (the Doctor talking to the baby, the Sontaran nurse), but it still, ultimately, felt hollow. The characters were being jerked around in the service of the plot, rather than seeming to act from any consistent motivations.
Doctor Who at its best – the show I love, which I accept is only a small part of the programme as it was made – is a very small-scale thing, and mostly about the clash of ideas and worldviews rather than about epic space battles. From The Aztecs through to Ghost Light, all the best Doctor Who has been about a clash of characters, and could as easily have been performed as a stage play as on TV. The best of the Welsh series has been like that too, though I think that ‘best’ is a fairly small subset. That kind of thing necessitates developing a character with a strong moral centre – it might be one you disagree with (as when the Doctor destroys Skaro or kills off the Vervoids) but it’s as consistent a moral centre as a programme with multiple writers, script editors and lead actors could possibly have.
But these considerations seem alien to Moffat.
While last year’s series was definitely the best of the new series, this year’s hasn’t even been patchy so much as bad. We had a two-parter that was more plot hole than plot and which ended with the Doctor brainwashing the human race to become killers, a story about pirates that was pretty much the definition of average, a Neil Gaiman story by Neil Gaiman (by *far* the highlight of the year), a decent two-parter that was let down by an ending which contradicted all the moral arguments built up over the previous ninety minutes, and then a fun-but-empty 45 minutes of action-movie bombast. The series has been getting better since that appalingly bad two-parter at the start, but it’s still not reached even the average of last year.
One encouraging sign is that the budget is clearly now almost zero. They’re getting cleverer and cleverer at reusing sets, props and costumes, and this kind of limitation may yet be the making of the show.
I’m not (again unlike Miles) saying you’re wrong if you liked this series – there’s lots to like about it, which definitely wasn’t the case during the RTD era, and taking the last two series and the special as a whole, the trend has been mildly up overall, but this series is like a mix of Earthshock and Time Flight in roughly equal measure, when what I want is The Caves Of Androzani or Castrovalva.
Hugo Blogging 1: Chicks Dig Time Lords
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to start reading more science fiction (especially as I’ve been *writing* more SF, and it’s a field that demands keeping up with what’s current). Other than Charles Stross, Greg Egan and Neal Stephenson, I’ve read fairly little from the last thirty years or so (oddly, while I prefer SF to fantasy, I’ve read far more fantasy from my own lifetime than SF), though I have an exhaustive knowledge of the field before that.
So I decided to get the Hugo packet, to get an idea of the current state of the best in the field, and vote in the Hugos for the first time.
(I note incidentally, that the Hugos are awarded by AV *and* have a ‘none of the above’ option and so are more democratic than our Commons elections will be. Not that I’m bitter. (I am bitter.))
While I’ve got it, I thought I might as well blog my reactions to the various entries as I read them. First up, an entry in the “Best Related Work” category
Chicks Dig Time Lords is a book I *wanted* to like. It’s published by Mad Norwegian, who among other books have published almost all the Faction Paradox books and the wonderful About Time series of guidebooks, and who are a very small independent company. And it’s about the female experience of fandom, something that’s been neglected.
I certainly wouldn’t have any hesitation in recommending it to some people, but I am so far from the target audience for this that it’s not funny. While the promotion for the book has described it as being about female fandom, it’s actually, for the most part, about a very specific part of female fandom – namely people who will use the word ‘squee’ on a regular basis. We’re actually, here, looking at a snapshot of a sub-subculture – one that grew up around the website Outpost Gallifrey and communities on LiveJournal in the middle of the last decade, one mostly based around enjoying the Welsh series, and one that is extremely uncritical of the show itself.
Now, this is not an invalid perspective, and it is one that deserves to be shared, but this book seems written for people who already have that perspective. Words like ‘squee’ or ‘aca-fan’ are thrown around with an assumption that one has the cultural context to appreciate not just the literal meaning of the words but some kind of subtextual nuance for them. (I had to google aca-fan, having never come across the term before).
Far too much of the book is made up of short autobiographical sketches of very similar-sounding people. There must be at least four or five essays in here which could be summed up as “I remember watching Tom Baker on the PBS affiliate for my Midwestern US state with my annoying kid brother when I was a kid in the 80s. All the other kids at my school thought I was weird for liking this weird English English weird English thing with wobbly sets, so I grew out of it. But then Russel T Davies brought it back and I fell in love with all the characters, especially Jack Harkness, and SQUEE!”
Now, again, I am not criticising this as a perspective – as one of the essays (by Kate Orman, one of the better writers involved) is titled, “If I Can’t Squee, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution”, and enthusiasm is the reason why anyone becomes a fan of anything. And I would have a *LOT* of explaining to do to my wife when she gets back from visiting her Minnesotan parents tomorrow if I tried to say that the perspective of women who grew up in the midwestern US in the 1980s didn’t deserve to be shared.
But I am, fundamentally, an analytical person. Descriptions of how something makes you feel do very little for me, compared to descriptions of *why* something makes you feel that way (or attempts to make the reader feel the same way). I also find it far more revealing sometime to talk about something’s failures than its successes – I’d rather read About Time or The Discontinuity Guide than something that didn’t talk about Doctor Who’s flaws, for the same reasons I’d rather read Liberator than a Lib Dem party press release. And the analytical is pretty much absent from this book. Which is OK. That’s not what it’s for. It’s a celebration. I’m just not a very celebratory person.
Of these autobiographical sketch things, the best by far is “Mathematical Excellence: A Documentary” by Seanan McGuire, which moves away from the generic and had me genuinely laughing quite hard, as well as being moved by the rather poignant ending. Most of the rest of the pieces in this vein are descriptions of emotions, while McGuire’s piece inspires those emotions in the reader. Maybe more of the other pieces would, if I were part of the target audience.
More interesting from my point of view are the descriptions of fan creativity – people talking about creating costumes for their own imagined characters in the Doctor Who fictional universe, or writing fan fiction, or making fan videos. This is something that female fandom has been far more willing to do than male fandom generally (all exceptions duly noted – of course any female/male split is an artificial division, but this book *exists* because of that artificial distinction) – to take elements of others’ work and reimagine them as elements in their own creative projects.
Still, though, by the nature of the book, these essays are too short to properly go into the issues involved or the process of making these things, and I get the impression that a far more interesting book (from my point of view) could have been made just using examples of this fan-art (though I understand that it would be prohibitively difficult to do legally). At least one representative piece of this fan art has been included, a comic strip called Torchwood Babiez. Unfortunately, it didn’t display properly in my ebook reader.
And the book is rounded out by a few interviews with women who have been involved in Doctor Who, mostly actors who have performed for Big Finish, which might be interesting to those who’ve not read interviews with these people before.
It sounds like I’m being terribly critical of this book, and I’m really not. If you’ve taken part in online new-Who fandom, especially on LiveJournal or the old Outpost Gallifrey, this book will probably be precisely your thing, and I know some of my friends have been and are part of that world. The writers are obviously intelligent, talented people for the most part, and I can’t imagine a better book of this type. But it’s emphatically not for me. But that’s OK – not everything has to be. It’s an open-hearted, welcoming, *friendly* book, and that I’m a cold-hearted joyless curmudgeon is, essentially, my problem, not the book’s.
Toy Story The Doctor’s Wife
I’ve often half-seriously wondered if Steven Moffat has just decided to make this entire series of Doctor Who as an elaborate means of winding Lawrence Miles up. The riffs on Alien Bodies in the opening two-parter were blatant enough, but this might as well have been labeled as an adaptation of Miles’ short story Toy Story. Except of course it’s written by Miles’ least-favourite writer in the world, Neil Gaiman.
Truth be told, I doubt Gaiman’s read Miles’ story, but both have such similar ideas as their basis (the TARDIS takes on the form of a human woman, and amongst other things reveals that she had as much choice in who her pilot was as he had in his ship, and it’s also made clear that the interior of the TARDIS is more software than hardware) that Moffat at least must have noticed. People on the Faction Paradox forums have been pointing out other, more tenuous, similarities too, but I suspect these are more down to Gaiman and Miles having common influences than anything else. (I strongly suspect one of the reasons Miles loathes Gaiman so much is that he sees him as a warped mirror reflection of himself).
The result is easily the best Doctor Who TV story since Dalek, and feels more like Doctor Who than anything on TV since the McCoy era, but is a strange collision of at least four separate styles.
First, we have the standard Gaimanisms – the TARDIS is written as, to all intents and purposes, Delirium of the Endless. Auntie and Uncle could easily have stepped out of Neverwhere. And the whole cosmic junkyard thing felt very, very Gaiman. Even the production design felt this way – it looked all steampunk-goth – though the whole series since Moffat took over has had that feel.
On top of that, we had the Big Idea stuff – the stuff that felt like Miles, the living planet that eats TARDIS energy and creates puppet people to play with out of the parts of dead Time Lords, the possessed woman with the mind of a TARDIS, the space-time twisting inside the TARDIS itself, and so on. This is a side of Gaiman we don’t often see, but which seems to owe a lot to Alan Moore in horror mode.
Then we have a few bits which seem to be Gaiman deliberately trying to write like Russel Davies – the tearful goodbye to the embodiment of the TARDIS felt exactly like the kind of tearful goodbye-forever speech Davies wrote about four times a series (usually before bringing the same character back two episodes later).
And there are a few bits which seem to be either Moffat’s direct input or Gaiman trying to sound like Moffat (the “be afraid of me, I killed *all* the Time Lords” bit seemed very like Moffat’s usual macho action-hero posturing). I suspect the Ood was also just dumped in in order to have a visible ‘monster’, as it had little part to play in the proceedings.
But all this hangs together, thanks to Gaiman being a good enough writer to make it work. He even manages to take a joke about running down corridors (and having the corridors looking all the same to save on expense) and turn it into something quite scary and effective. Though it would have been more scary had they not killed Rory and brought him back to life AGAIN – the South Park jokes are getting more appropriate all the time.
I have serious problems with the episode – mostly that the TARDIS in human form is just Gaiman-mad-woman-by-numbers rather than the truly strange and awesome (in the literal sense of the word) character she should be. People have been comparing this to things like Edge Of Destruction, and the comparison really does it no favours – in Edge Of Destruction, it’s all about the characters, whereas here there really *were* no characters – a majority of the characters are really just puppets played with by an omnipotent disembodied entity.
But this had a plot that made sense, a few good lines, a couple of scary bits, and the Doctor didn’t commit any genocides (though he did cause the death of at least two intelligent entities, one accidentally and the other in self-defence). By the low standards of 21st-century Doctor Who, that’s as good as it gets.
NuNuWho Series 2 Episode 1: The One With The Things And Stuff
SPOILERS and stuff.
Well that was certainly a Steven Moffat story, wasn’t it?
Spacesuits, disembodied kid voices, the Doctor saying various things are cool, the Doctor saying something really annoying like “wobbly bobbly flippity floppity” or something, I don’t even remember what, alien monsters that are more a conceptual threat than a real thing, astronaut suits, hints as to River Song’s identity, a major character ‘dying’ in a way that will very obviously be reversed, characters knowing secrets about other characters’ futures, a bit ripped off from Alien Bodies (the bit where they have to destroy the Doctor’s body in order to stop it being prized by alien civilisations), Mary Sue River Song being able to do everything in the world… It really was like somebody’s got some kind of machine, the Moff-O-Matic, churning this stuff out by the yard.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you – one could make a similar list of ingredients for a Terrance Dicks, or Robert Holmes, or Christopher Bidmead, or Douglas Adams script. And of the writers on the Welsh series, Moffat is by far the most competent at actually telling a story. And Matt Smith is still turning in an astonishingly good performance. I have trouble seeing Smith’s character as the Doctor though – while some have described Colin Baker’s TV Doctor as ‘a stupid person’s idea of what a clever person is like’, Smith’s character seems to be a deeply dull person’s idea of what an interesting person is like. He’s not so much an eccentric as “I’m mad, me”. The performance manages to sell it, though – Smith is as good an actor as ever played the role (I didn’t warm to his performance at first until I read an interview where he talked about how he was influenced by Peter Sellers, and it became obvious then that Smith is playing the Doctor as Sellers would, were he given those scripts).
On a comparative scale, this ranks somewhere in the middle of last year’s episodes, which means it would still be by far the best thing in any of the four series prior to that. But compared to the old series? Earthshock or something from that era. It’s about up to the standard of a Series 19 mid-season filler, right down to a surplus of companions (two companions is OK. Two companions plus River Song plus Guest FBI Blokey is too many) and the desire for SHOCKING EVENTS! (The Doctor Died!!!!!).
It’s not a bad piece of TV by any means – I laughed at points, the monsters were quite spooky, the bloke playing Nixon looked slightly more like him than Ian MacNeice did Churchill last year, and everything more or less made sense. But it was just sort of… there. Forty-five minutes of extruded TV product.
Moffat *is* capable of better. When he’s good, he can actually be very good. I hope he starts trying later in the series…
Gallifrey Series IV
I come to Big Finish’s new Gallifrey series from a slightly different angle from most of its listeners. I listened to the first three series several years ago, and was unimpressed – I remember the first series as being moderately entertaining fluff, while the second and third series got so far up their own arsehole they actually succeeded at navel-gazing from the inside, (This may be an unfair judgement. I remember them as being the very definition of fanwank, but it may well be that the attempt to do a fifteen-part epic story was just too ambitious for my own attention span).
But series three of Gallifrey had ended on a cliffhanger – the start of The Time War, with ‘some metal gentlemen’ having infected all of Gallifrey with a virus. And if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s the Time War. Especially since reading Richard & Alex’s wonderful Fractal History Of The Time War, I’ve been treating the Time War in my head like a gigantic multidimensional puzzle.
The interesting thing about the Time War is that the further one gets from ‘canon’, the more interesting the stories become. The Faction Paradox books are among the best books I’ve ever read, as is Dead Romance (which is slightly more ‘canon’ than the books). The Faction Paradox audios (with officially licensed Doctor Who baddies) and the Eighth Doctor books are good – sometimes very good – but rarely great. And the actual 2005-2009 TV series that established a version of the war as ‘canon’ is, to my mind, pretty much uniformly awful. The Time War/The War/The War In Heaven is as much as anything a war between alternative versions of history, and a history written by the winners and imposed from above is usually far less interesting than the multiple perspectives of the oppressed – would you rather read Homage To Catalonia or a piece of Falangist propaganda?
That’s not to compare Russel Davies to Generalissimo Franco – though I can imagine certain of the more rabid message board denizens emulating the example of the Tilbury dockers – Davies has actually been remarkably good on the issue of ‘canon’, loudly and publicly refusing to use his position of authority (in the minds of the kind of fans who like authorities) to adjudicate on what does and doesn’t ‘count’. For all the faults I find with him, Davies’ view is an inclusive one.
Rather, it’s to argue that those who are looking for certainty and ‘canon’ are limiting themselves unnecessarily (an argument I have made before, of course, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!). The Daleks as one possible Enemy in the Time War is a decent, though rather obvious, seed for other stories. The Daleks as *the* Enemy, on the other hand, closes off the other possibilities (an incursion of Time Lords from another ‘bottle universe’, the Time Lords themselves in the future/past, a new idea that radically disrupts ossified ways of thinking, the writers of the books themselves, a non-existent threat created purely to give the illusion of conflict, humanity, the vampires/Mal’akh wanting their universe back, the new TV series itself… ).
It might be fun, in fact, to do a few posts here looking at different options as to who or what The Enemy is. I particularly like the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy as the war between the ‘classic’ (small-c conservative, big-L Liberal) and Welsh (New Labour – modern, glossy, “we can brook no criticism, because however bad it is, it’s better than the horrible wilderness years we had before, do you want Thatcher back/the show off the air again?”) series…
But anyway, if we pop out of this digression from a digression from a digression, the Gallifrey audios – like the Big Finish audios generally – are in an odd place when it comes to ‘canon’ for those who care about such things. They’re officially licensed, but have to be approved by the makers of the current show. But at the same time, they can’t make reference to anything in that show. So even though Gary Russell, who is in charge of the Gallifrey series, is also a script editor on the Welsh series, and he has clearly stated (including on the special features for these stories) that he intends the War that happened off-stage between series three and four to be the Time War featured in the TV show, this can’t be stated directly in the stories themselves. This leads to an interesting kind of forced ambiguity being imposed *against* authorial intent.
And whether intentionally or not, this has produced a story where the in-universe and out-of-universe epistemic statuses are mirrored. We have a multiple-universe story (always a very good thing), but one where all the alternate universes travelled to are just that – alternate universes. They exist not as the parallel worlds in, say, Lance Parkin’s Faction Paradox novel Warlords Of Utopia, do – as worlds whose divergences produce results both good (in Parkin’s case, a peace that has lasted millennia, and a flowering of culture and technology) and bad (dictatorship, paedophilia as social norm, slavery). Rather, they exist as wrong turns that could have been taken, lessons that this (or in this case, the main Doctor Who universe) is the best of all possible worlds, with each of these universes being defined as wrong, inferior timelines, and each one diverging in precisely one way, which leads to disaster.
So along with the ‘real’ Romana, Leela and K9, plus the characters Narvin and Braxiatel from earlier stories, we get alternative versions of Romana (both her first and second regenerations), Leela (an articulate, educated fascist torturer, whose distinctly different tones show once and for all that Leela’s rather stilted way of talking is a deliberate acting decision by Louise Jameson, rather than a poor performance), two Sixth Doctors, and more, all in some ways ‘worse’ than the ones we know.
(Sadly there is no alternate K9. John Leeson was the star of the earlier Gallifrey series, with his bitching between the two K9s. Here, there is only one, and he doesn’t get to shine the same way except during his brief promotion to Castellan).
Of the four stories here – which can only be bought as a bundle, though for a very reasonable £30 (£35 if you want the CDs rather than just downloads), by far the best is CD3 – Gallifrey: Annihilation. Oddly, given that Russell was a co-writer, and he’s known for being more obsessed with continuity and fan-wank than most, there are no alternative Doctors or Romanas or whoever (though Lord Prydon *may* be intended to be an alternate Master, given that he’s played by Geoffrey Beevers), and surprisingly/thankfully Katy Manning isn’t playing Jo Grant or Iris Wildthyme, but a female Borussa.
For those of us who like playing games with that sort of thing, in fact, this story could fit quite neatly in with Faction Paradox, as it’s set on a Gallifrey where Rassilon was turned into a vampire by the Great Vampire, and there’s a civil war between the Vampire Gallifreyans and the ‘True Lords’, who never developed time travel but *could* regenerate. This could easily be the timeline from which the Faction’s masks come, and it will be in my ‘personal canon’ from now on. (Also in my ‘personal canon’, these are four of the Nine Homeworlds. No-one said the Nine Homeworlds had to be in *this* timeline – or if they did I don’t remember, which is the same thing).
It’s quite a nice piece of space-opera-Gothic, Beevers makes an appropriately sepulchral vampire, and it’s an entertaining way to spend an hour, though hardly ground-breaking stuff.
The worst, unfortunately, is Justin Richards’ Gallifrey: Disassembled. I say unfortunately, partly because this has the best performances of the bunch (from Louise Jameson as two Leelas, and a great turn by Colin Baker as Lord Burner), and the first half-hour or so is genuinely good, but it soon degenerates into a load of nonsense, with illogical, made-up-on-the-fly rules about what does and doesn’t count as a paradox, hints at Braxiatel being the Doctor’s brother, explanations as to why the Doctor originally left Gallifrey…
When I say that the big turning point in this universe is that Zagreus took the place of The Other in its history, I think that will tell everyone all they need to know (if you don’t know what those words mean, be thankful…)
The other two stories, Gallifrey: Reborn and Gallifrey: Forever, bookend the series quite nicely, providing us with, respectively, the set-up for this four-story series, and a new status quo at the end with Romana and Leela trapped on a Gallifrey which hadn’t yet invented time travel but where Romana’s now president.
Overall, quality-wise this sits somewhere in the middle of Big Finish’s range. Nowhere near a genuine masterpiece like Peri And The Piscon Paradox or some of their other recent triumphs, this still feels like it was created because of someone’s desire to tell the story, and so it’s still above some of the landfill “let’s have the Doctor team up with two companions from different eras, and have them fight the Celestial Toymaker, who’s teamed up with the Zarbi” stuff they do when inspiration fails completely.
You already know if this is the kind of thing you like or not (in fact you probably either ordered it in advance or are never going to hear it), but for the kind of thing it is, it’s well done. And thankfully, either through diktat from above or through taste on the part of Gary Russell, it leaves as many questions about the Time War unanswered at the end as at the beginning.
Doctor Who: Smoking Mirror
(Sorry if this is drivel – I’m not very well and having a great deal of difficulty writing coherent sentences. Pretty much every sentence here started out as “it’s like that thing, oh you know, the one with the thing”).
Obligatory disclaimer-cum-explanation as to why I’ve bought this book. I’ve vaguely known Lawrence Burton as one of the more intelligent posters on the Doctor Who forum Outpost Gallifrey and on the Faction Paradox forum for a year or two. We’ve recently become Facebook/Twitter friends, and he wrote a very flattering review of my most recent book. So I may be biased here.
On the other hand, I don’t know him well enough that I think I’m biased – and if you read through that thread (Lawrence reviewing several hundred science fiction books) it’s obvious both that he can actually write, and also that he shares a number of my tastes – of the books we’ve both read, I’d say I agree with at least 80% of his reviews, and especially the stuff he’s most glowing about (Philip K Dick, Lawrence Miles, David Louis Edelman) and his tastes in individual works by writers (preferring The End Of Eternity and The Gods Themselves to Asimov’s Robot stuff).
So when I saw he’d self-published a couple of books himself, I bought this one without even reading the description.
It turns out to be an unofficial Doctor Who novel. I’d hesitate to call it fanfic, partly because it was intended for BBC Books (and quite why it was rejected I can’t understand) and partly because fanfic tends to suggest something of poor quality, and this is anything but. It’s a Doctor Who novel that happens not to have been licensed by the BBC, that’s all. (Lawrence is selling the book at cost price and not making a penny from it, I hasten to add).
Given that it’s self-published, there are surprisingly few criticisms I can make of it. The review thread linked above is called “Crappy 70s paperbacks with airbrushed spaceships on cover”, and the cover design is a perfect imitation of those, the typography on the back being spookily reminiscent of some of them (the closest comparison I can find is the Granada paperback copies of The End Of Eternity and The Zap Gun, but I know I’ve seen something even closer). However, the typography in the book itself is less wonderful, being in Times New Roman (or a facsimile thereof) and eight- or ten-point type. Having a legally-blind wife, I know from experience that ideally one should print things in at least twelve-point, and wherever possible use a sans-serif font, for readability.
Other than that, the only really jarring thing about the book is a moment of lampshade hanging, when the Doctor is on a collect-the-plot-tokens quest and thinks about how he hates this kind of thing when it happens in books. It’s not done quite well enough to overcome the problems.
One other problem I have – and one that’s my problem rather than the book’s – is that the book is set in pre-Columbian Mexico, and so the characters’ names are all phonetically unlike anything I’m accustomed to. This gave me some difficulty in keeping track of the characters, but that can hardly be helped, given the subject.
The plot is a pretty good one – why has the universe shrunk, so that it now consists of only a small area of Central America and a few centuries? Why are the Gods walking among the humans? – but the plot is less important than the writing. Lawrence obviously has a huge love for the Mexica culture and mythology, and this comes across in every word. Before I read this, all I knew of the Mexica culture was that some of their sculptures in the British Museum look like they’d been made by Jack Kirby, if Kirby had had an obsession with skulls (which is a good thing). But Lawrence manages both to make this seem like a sympathetic culture (putting even the human sacrifice into a context where it seems entirely reasonable) and to bring out the utter strangeness of the culture’s myths.
A lot of individual scenes will stay with me for a long time – the Doctor getting an inkling that problems are starting when Carl Sagan starts talking about how the Earth is a few thousand years old, the god at the centre of the TARDIS, the journey through Mictlan – this is a book as much about the journey as the destination, and Lawrence isn’t afraid of devoting time to his interests, whether that be retelling old myths or explaining Mexica social structure or making asides about old sitcoms.
In fact, after the obvious in-joke that the Third Doctor used to watch Dad’s Army (which starred Bill Pertwee) I started wondering about the other references – what does the confirmation of a Doctor-Who-universe Wilfred Brambell and Tony Hancock mean for the careers of the ‘Whoniverse’ Ron Grainer and Terry Nation? – but that’s just the 60s-TV fan in me coming out.
And there’s a very sitcom feel about parts of this book, but in a good way. It’s a funny book, but the humour all flows from the situations, whether it be the Doctor’s other console rooms (I want to see the McConsole Room ™ now) or the TARDIS translation circuit malfunction that renders speech more… idiomatically than before. The one funny bit that doesn’t quite fit in is the bit with three priests (trying not to spoil anything here). But that is so funny – and so incongruous – that it works, even though it could easily have fallen into the too-common trap of mistaking a reference for an actual joke.
The characterisation is spot-on as well. Lawrence catches Peri’s voice perfectly, and his Sixth Doctor is definitely Colin Baker (although the character here is closer to the TV series than to the more nuanced portrayal in the audio stories – understandably, as this was written in 2002, when the audios hadn’t been going that long). At times the Doctor seems almost *too* verbose, but then this is a Doctor whose defining writers were Pip & Jane Baker, and the fact that nobody else talks like that shows it as a stylistic choice rather than a tin ear.
It’s a first novel, with all that that entails, and Lawrence’s influences are clear (and he thanks Philip Purser-Hallard and Simon Bucher-Jones in the acknowledgements, if it hadn’t been obvious) – I’m sure the use of Mictlan here is at least in part a reference to its use in the Faction Paradox books – but while this doesn’t rise to the level of the very best Doctor Who books, it’s funny, clever, well-written and written by someone with an obvious love for his subjects – both Doctor Who and pre-Columbian Mexica culture – and is certainly better than a good 90% of the Doctor Who books I’ve read.
Now if only Air France hadn’t lost my bag with my DVD of The Aztecs in, I could do a compare/contrast here. Oh well…
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to a non-fan of Doctor Who, but it’s an excellent self-contained story which requires a minimum of continuity knowledge, so if you’re even a casual fan – especially if you’re a fan of the Sixth Doctor, who’s otherwise even worse-served in print than on TV – this is well worth a read. I’ll definitely be buying Lawrence’s book of short stories.
Smoking Mirror is published by Ce Acatl/Lulu and is available here.
Big Finish: Peri And The Piscon Paradox
Big Finish’s output has been very, very variable recently. In the last couple of years, since they started doing ‘trilogies’ rather than stand-alone stories, they’ve become increasingly likely to do complicated continuity-twisting stories – the Sixth Doctor travelling with the Second Doctor’s companion, the Sixth Doctor travelling with the *Eighth* Doctor’s companion, three Celestial Toymaker stories in a year… this month’s story involves the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn teaming up with DI Menzies (a character from the Sixth Doctor’s future who has to pretend she doesn’t know him) against Thomas Brewster (a character from a Fifth Doctor trilogy from a couple of years ago).
But then you get stuff like A Death In The Family, the recent story by Steven Hall (the writer of The Raw Shark Texts), which manages to play with continuity lightly and tell a story about the nature of reality, the nature of fiction, the power of words, and the sacrifices people will make for each other. The gimmick – the Seventh Doctor and Evelyn – and the continuity references (it ties up threads from at least eight different stories going back nearly a decade) don’t matter. A Death In The Family is as good as anything Big Finish have done in the last five years, and was far and away the best thing they put out last year.
It’s only the 23rd of January, but I already know what the best thing they’ll put out this year is.
Peri and the Piscon Paradox is part of the Companion Chronicles range – a range of stories closer to audiobooks than the full-cast dramas Big Finish usually do, where an actor playing one of the Doctor’s companions tells a story over the course of a single CD, with one other actor usually taking part to play a character they’re narrating to or something.
This one, by Nev Fountain, is a little different in that it’s two CDs long, and the second actor is actually Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. It’s also the single best multi-Doctor story ever. This post, like all my reviews, may contain spoilers from here on in, but be assured I’m not actually spoiling anything.
The first disc tells a story of Peri and the Fifth Doctor fighting a fish-monster-thing in LA in 2009, with the assistance of Peri’s ‘forty-several’ year old self, an agent for a secret government agency who Peri quickly grows to despise. It ends with Peri vowing never to become like her older self.
The second disc tells the story of Doctor Perpugilliam Brown, presenter of a ‘celebrity relationship counselling’ TV show, and how she gets dragged into a complicated plot by a man claiming to be someone she once met in Lanzarotte, more than twenty years ago, even though he looks nothing like him, and how that plot involves tricking a past self she can’t remember.
Those who remember Nev Fountain’s earlier Big Finish work, especially The Kingmaker, will recognise a number of his regular motifs as the story goes on. Not only are there multiple Doctors interacting without being fully aware of each other’s actions, and time paradoxes, there are many, many jokes set up in the first half that only pay off in the second. The first three-quarters of this story, in fact, is pretty much laugh-out-loud funny throughout. I know it’s hard to believe, given that Fountain also wrote for Dead Ringers, but it is a good piece of comedy.
And Nicola Bryant is excellent. Despite the fact that she’s hampered by having to do the accent and characterisation she lumbered herself with as a much younger actor, she manages to play the two Peris remarkably well, and it’s an astonishingly subtle, nuanced performance for someone who never really shone on the TV. Colin Baker is, of course, as excellent as ever, and is in it more than you might think.
But it’s only at the end, when the full story is revealed, that what Fountain is doing really falls into place and you realise just how good this actually is. In a couple of lines of dialogue, Fountain clears up a continuity problem that avid fans reading this have already spotted. At the same time, he also manages to make the story about things – about growing up, about betraying our youthful ideals, about our youthful ideals betraying us, and about how we harden with age and with compromise. It’s a very sad, very political story, in the end. He gives the story a bittersweet ending that fits in with my own preferred ‘all stories are true’ Doctor Who ‘canon’, and he manages to make the same scene seen from two different angles mean two totally different things. It turns what was already one of the best stories Big Finish have done in a long time into one of the best they’ve ever done.
A Death In The Family is better, but that requires you to have listened to more stories and to have an attachment to the characters. This is a wonderful comedy that suddenly punches you in the gut, and will do so no matter who you are.
All the praise that people have been giving Moffat’s A Christmas Carol should really be going to this story – it does the same things (and indeed some of the same things that this month’s main-range Big Finish story does) so much better that the TV story looks like a sad parody of this one. It’s a story that anyone at all could listen to and get a *lot* out of, and it’s something that could only have been done as Doctor Who. I’ve only listened to it once, but it may be in my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories. It’s certainly in my favourite Big Finishes (along with Davros, The Kingmaker, Jubilee, A Death In The Family, Doctor Who And The Pirates, The Holy Terror and Spare Parts) and is one I would urge anyone to listen to.
Even many Big Finish fans don’t buy the Companion Chronicles, because they’re seen as cheap filler things This one really, really isn’t. It’s as good as anything they’ve done. Buy it, if you like funny, intelligent, thought provoking science fiction, whether or not it’s labelled Doctor Who. It’s only a tenner as a download, and it’s worth every penny.
I do have one proviso though, that I feel obliged to mention even though it may be slightly more of a spoiler than the other things I’ve said
and that is that the ending may be triggering for those who have experienced spousal abuse. It’s dealt with sensitively, and in a way that’s necessary to the plot, but be aware that it’s there.
Eschatology & Escapology 4: Faction Paradox
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
“But there was war, even there. There was a war in Heaven. And the wrong side won. The Dark Side won.”
Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle 1, by Grant Morrison and Pasqual Ferry
In the mid-90s Doctor Who was in the worst state imaginable. The TV Movie starring Paul McGann had been a flop, and not only was there no prospect of a series, there was not even the prospect of anyone else having a go because of the complicated rights issues it created. On top of that, the New Adventures series of books, which had been an ‘official’ continuation of the show’s story (at least in the eyes of the writers) and projected an ‘adult’ image (though in retrospect many of them were more adolescent) lost their license to use Doctor Who characters, and instead there was a series from BBC Books, which started with the frankly awful The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks (which was the dullest thing ever to have the ‘Doctor Who’ name on it until the new series came along) and didn’t look like it was going to get much better from there.
And then Lawrence Miles wrote Alien Bodies, which for the small number of people who were reading or writing the Who books at the time (I wasn’t one, and I’ve had a lot of catching up to do – they were doing a book a fortnight for the decade-and-a-half the show was off the air) was revelatory.
The basic premise was a good one, which is always a good start – various interested parties (the Time Lords, the Celestial Intervention Agency, the Krotons and others) were bidding for a weapon, which turns out to be the body of the Doctor, from his subjective future – he’s had so many adventures by that point that the information encoded in his body is valuable.
But the book also reveals quite a bit about the future of the Time Lords. In the future, the Time Lords are fighting a war, and losing. We don’t know who the enemy are, and the Doctor doesn’t want to know, for fear of upsetting the Web Of Time. But the Time Lords are, to put it bluntly, shit-scared. So scared that the Celestial Intervention Agency (who are pretty much what their initials would suggest – one of Robert Holmes’ black jokes turned into a major part of fan-lore) have removed themselves from history altogether, turning themselves into purely conceptual entities. Most of the major powers in the universe were lining up on one side or the other, but there was also a third force involved.
Faction Paradox were a breakaway group, started by a rebel Time Lord called Grandfather Paradox, who was so called because (or so the myth goes) he actually did kill his own grandfather, wiping himself out of existence and becoming pure concept. They are a ‘time travelling voodoo cult’ who worship paradox, and who treat timelines and other such concepts as being loas or egregores in Chaos Magick type workings. They wear bone masks made from the skulls of Time Lord/vampire half-breeds from an impossible time-line, and aspire to be a random factor in the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy. (If you’re now thinking of The Invisibles, you’re not far off – Richard Flowers, after reading the first volume of The Invisibles on my recommendation, said “it’s Faction Paradox, if it had used ITC adventure serials rather than BBC Doctor Who as a jumping-off point”).
The identity of The Enemy is never revealed, though Miles’ novel Dead Romance (one of the last entries in the now-Doctorless New Adventures series, which continued with a focus on supporting characters, this was later reprinted as a Faction Paradox ‘prequel’ by Mad Norwegian Press ) gives a very good idea of who he thought it was at the time. But the War caught the imagination of the writers of the series, and quickly became a major throughline for the books.
This was both a good and a bad thing – good in that it inspired some of the better books from the series, but bad in that the one thing a relatively unpopular series really didn’t need was a complicated, ambiguous ‘story arc’ running through many books. The major stories in this ‘arc’ are Miles’ two-volume Interference (where the Doctor’s own past is rewritten, to the extent that his third regeneration now happens in the ‘wrong’ place and time – probably the most controversial Who book, I like it myself, but know people who despise it), The Taking Of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham (a rather nice story which combines Lovecraft pastiche, hard SF and the return of an old villain) and The Shadows Of Avalon by Paul Cornell (a sorta-kinda Midsummer Night’s Dream-cum-Arthurian-legend riff with Silurians), before it was suddenly curtailed by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole’s The Ancestor Cell.
The Ancestor Cell has a … mixed reputation. Among other things it revealed that Grandfather Paradox was the Doctor in the future and that the Enemy are (as Miles put it) ‘three pages of technobabble’, before also destroying Gallifrey. This was intended to clear up the continuity of the series and create a fresh start, but in fact the books became more impenetrable than ever (though some post-Ancestor Cell books build on it very successfully, most notably Lance Parkin’s The Gallifrey Chronicles).
As pretty much all Miles’ original contributions to the book series were excised by The Ancestor Cell, Miles took his ball away with him, and started a new series of books, audio plays and (two issues of) comics based on Faction Paradox, licensing a few other characters who’d appeared in the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures, and completely ignoring the revelations of The Ancestor Cell. In this new series, the ‘Great Houses’ (the Time Lords) were still fighting a nameless Enemy (which in this context seems to be more a mode of perception than a physical enemy).
(FOOTNOTE: The whole question of who fought who in the War was made even more complex with the return of the Doctor Who TV series, which portrayed a Time War with some strong similarities to the one in the books (The End Of Time, the last Russel T Davies episode of Doctor Who, has been described by those who’ve seen it as being like an adaptation of Dead Romance by someone who hadn’t understood it properly), but where the Enemy were specifically named as the Daleks. There was ALSO the start of a War in Big Finish’s Gallifrey series (which looks like it will be told in full in their forthcoming Season Four). Richard Flowers and Alex Wilcock have made an extraordinary attempt to disentangle all of this and interpret it as rival Hypertime threads in an essay in my ‘zine PEP – free PDF and expensive paper copy. That essay is essential reading for anyone who is reading this.)
I’m only going to look at the first four books of the series (which is still ongoing, between different publishers, at the moment – a new short story anthology is due to be published by Obverse Books in February 2011), partly for reasons of space and partly because I’m more familiar with those books, but so far the Faction Paradox series has been the only multi-author book series I’ve ever read where every single book can be recommended without qualification. Given its origins as a spin-off of a spin-off, this is nothing short of a miracle.
In part this is because the authors clearly have something of a shared aesthetic. They all belong to what Lance Parkin (whose own Faction Paradox novel is one of the best) refers to as The Gray Tradition:
Here’s a by no means exhaustive list of the sort of authors I’m thinking of: Douglas Adams, Ballard, Iain Banks, Roberto Bolano, Borges, Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Phillip K Dick, Umberto Eco, Alisdair Gray, David Lindsay, CS Lewis, HP Lovecraft, David Mitchell, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Philip Pullman, David Foster Wallace.
They also have more general shared cultural roots – not only in Doctor Who, the mythos of which permeates everything, but at a couple of steps’ remove, like a pinch of garlic added to enhance the flavour rather than anything overt, but in things like I, Claudius (both the TV series – which Miles regards, rightly, as the best TV programme ever made – and Graves’ original novels, which provide an important source for at least two of the books), Monty Python and more. This gives the books a feeling of unity that makes them feel like the work of a single author trying on different styles more than several different authors.
(In this respect I’m talking only about the books, which are a very different beast from the audio adventures. The audios tell a single, complex story with a large cast of characters and regular cameos from Doctor Who villains who are either in the public domain or whose rights can be bought cheaply. They are aimed four-square at what, for want of a better term, we can call the ‘geek’ market, and while interesting aren’t really on the same level as the books).
The Book Of The War, the first book in the independent Faction Paradox series, is one of the two or three most astonishing novels I’ve ever read, if it even counts as a novel. A collaborative work by ten authors, edited by Miles (with the largest contributions apparently being by Miles and Bucher-Jones, but also featuring work by Clapham, Philip Purser-Hallard, Daniel O’Mahony, Ian McIntire, Mags L. Halliday, Helen Fayle, Kelly Hale and Jonathan Dennis), it’s somewhere in-between a non-linear hypertext-like novel, an encyclopedia of a non-existent world, a collection of short stories and a role-playing game sourcebook.
The non-linear structure (though it can be read as a linear story by following the links between the stories in a particular way) is, of course, appropriate for a story of a war that takes place throughout time and rewrites history, but it’s far from the only – or even the most – notable thing about this extraordinary book. Every one of the several hundred entries contains at least one new or interesting idea, ranging from the City Of The Saved (the Omega Point by way of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld) to the conceptual entity The Shift who enters and rewrites the text as you’re reading it, to the connection between Bach’s Musical Offering and the early computer experiments of Charles Babbage, to the hilarious Mulan/Phantom Menace mash-up, to the history of James Whale’s last, forever-unfinished film, to the Ally McBeal parody, to Lego bricks you can use to build your own black holes, to the Piltdown Mob to… well, to entries with titles like “Women (Dressing Up As)” or “Killerbots (Autonomic)”.
The story it tells is a simple one – there is one major force in the universe, the Great Houses, who literally created history. With the event known as ‘The Anchoring Of The Thread’ they created the whole history of the universe from beginning to end, and made it the kind of universe where creatures like themselves could exist, to the extent that they are closer to gods or living concepts than to biological entities. They literally embody history, and it’s not just physically but conceptually impossible for them to be threatened… until they are. By an enemy which they can’t even comprehend, which seems to be attempting to rewrite history into something other. Rather than telling the story of the War (though a chunk of it does), the book concentrates on the effects the War has on other species, most notably a Lesser Species known as Humanity.
Some of the ideas in here come from earlier BBC Books and New Adventures by Miles or his friends, while others would later be expanded into novels or audios in the series, but this is just like getting an injection of pure Concept straight into your brain. An extraordinary, extraordinary achievement.
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles, the first Faction Paradox novel proper, is equally extraordinary and thought-provoking, but in different ways. Described as ‘a study in ritual, politics, pop culture, time-travel and urban horror’, this is equal parts Vonnegut, Orwell, Philip K Dick and Pynchon, a story of what happens to four people in a literally anonymous town. Told over one night from midnight to 6AM, it splits its three stories up into ‘minutes’ rather than chapters, offering a minute-by-minute breakdown of the night in titles like “5.21 Bastard Racoon Has Arrived”, “1.58 On Red Uranium” and “0.20 Traces Of Nuts”.
It tells of a town that is being devastated by a war the inhabitants can’t understand. All they know is that missiles drop from somewhere and cause explosions, and that somehow nobody is ever hurt by the explosions (some people have a theory that the explosions rewrite time so that anyone who was there is removed from history, but this is obviously absurd). They don’t know who’s fighting the war, or why, just that the war exists.
Our protagonists are Inangela and Horror, two Goths performing an improvised ritual with the intent of making the world a little more interesting, Valentine, an ambulance attendant who has a girl in a bone mask dying in his ambulance but has something even more important to do, and Tiffany Korta, a manufactured pop star who’s worried that her image is becoming sentient. Over these six hours, the story follows how all their lives change through such events as George Orwell’s appearance on the Muppet Show and the discovery of a buried Timeship.
A book that takes several readings to absorb properly, This Town… is aiming for something very, very different from the usual SF tie-in stuff you might expect. Closer to Joyce or Pynchon than to Terrance Dicks, had this been published as a standalone work rather than as part of a series it would be the kind of thing that would be in with a chance of winning prestigious literary awards, were literary awards open enough to truly interesting writing. An unalloyed masterpiece.
Of The City Of The Saved… by Philip Purser-Hallard can probably best be described as Post-Singularity Noir. The City Of The Saved exists on the boundary between this universe and the ‘next’ one, at the very end of time, and contains every single human being, from the first proto-hominid right through to posthuman alien hybrids and cyborgs, within its very expansive boundaries (it’s the size of a galaxy or so), all resurrected at the end of time. Based loosely around Frank Tipler’s Omega Point idea, here everyone is free to live out an immortal life in whatever culture they want, from reconstructed Imperial Rome to crime-ridden slums, with no fear of physical harm ever coming to them.
But there are questions. Why are only humans and part-humans there? What about aliens and robots? Who created the City and what for? Are the agents of the Wartime Powers infiltrating the City, and if so how?
And then suddenly, somehow, someone is murdered in the City, something that should never have been possible. And Laura Tobin (a character Miles created for the Eighth Doctor books) is asked by a member of Faction Paradox to investigate. Along the way she uncovers the truth behind the City, the horrible reality of the next universe and the secret identity of the Emperor Claudius, and briefly meets Philip K Dick, while Julian Mammoth-Tooth, a Neanderthal, searches for his lost love.
Finding the perfect balance between the rush of ideas in The Book Of The War and new-reader accessibility, Of The City Of The Saved… manages to be a genuinely thought-provoking book (Purser-Hallard’s doctoral thesis was on the relationship between creator and creature in SF, while he’s written extensively on SF and Christianity) while also being entertaining fun. The only criticism I can make is that it’s not actually possible to solve the mystery given only what we’re told in the story, but that’s a pretty minor criticism for a great book.
And finally (as far as this article goes, though there have been three more novels since) we come to Lance Parkin’s Warlords Of Utopia. The least interesting of these books, this is ‘merely’ an extremely good high-concept SF novel, about a war between all the universes in the multiverse where Rome never fell and all those where the Nazis won World War II. That it manages to live up to, and even surpass, the high concept makes it worth reading.
Written as an extremely good pastiche of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius The God (explained in-story – “I commissioned a prose piece ostensibly the autobiography of the first Emperor Claudius from one of my fellow soldiers, Sepulcrius, but ended up having to amend a great deal of it myself. If you are minded that my writing style resembles his famous book, then that is the reason”), Parkin occasionally goes, Douglas Adams-like, for the cheap joke (and, rather more annoyingly, throws in a few Monty Python references. Much as I love Python, the idea that the mere mention of a line from Python is enough to make something interesting and/or funny is one of the most damaging to have ever happened), but he is so good at his world-building and so consistent in his Gravesian style that I can more than forgive this.
Most impressively, he paints a realistic portrait of a Roman Empire that includes all its worst features – slavery, dictatorship, paedophilia – but still manages to be clearly preferable to the Nazi worlds, and has his narrator defend all these while still being a relatable protagonist. (Of course, a truly brave book would have reversed things, and had the Nazis be the ‘goodies’ in comparison to the Roman Empire, but that would be in horribly bad taste for the forseeable future). Few writers at the moment can avoid the temptation to assume that late-20th/early-21st century small-l-liberal Western values have ‘really’ been universal in all times and cultures, and that all decent people ‘really’ agreed with them. Parkin manages it.
Warlords Of Utopia is the least interesting of these four books, but not due to any faults in itself – it’s a very, very good SF adventure novel, well-written and imaginative. It’s just that the other three can stand up to pretty much any book I’ve ever read, whereas Warlords can ‘only’ stand up against 99.9% of SF novels.
Doctor Who From The Beginning: 5 – The Keys Of Marinus
The Keys Of Marinus
Writer: Terry Nation
Director: John Gorrie
DVD availability: single-disc DVD Buy from Amazon
This one’s taken a *long* time to get around to writing about, hasn’t it? Partly that’s because my DVD player broke, but also it’s because of the nature of this story. While it might have worked well as a serial, particularly for the eight-year-old demographic at which it’s clearly aimed, watching it all in one go (which is how I’ve been doing these) is like trying to eat ten dry cream crackers. When you start you think “this will be easy!”, but after a few minutes you’re thinking “Why on earth did I think this was even possible? I want to die!”
The Keys Of Marinus is the first bad Doctor Who story. Why on earth this was saved when Marco Polo wasn’t is something we shall never know. The performances – at least those of the main cast – are as good as ever and the production design is *astonishing*, but there’s a gigantic hole in the middle of the script.
All the previous stories have been *about* something, or several somethings – An Unearthly Child was about future shock and the generation gap, The Daleks was about fascism, Edge Of Destruction was meant to show us more about the characters and bring their relationship forward, and Marco Polo was, by children’s TV standards, a pretty decent stab at showing how life was lived in another continent and another century.
But The Keys Of Marinus isn’t about anything at all except filling up six twenty-five minute TV slots between the Telegoons and Juke Box Jury. It’s the first example of someone trying to write ‘a Doctor Who story’ – it’s the first of many, many attempts to recapture the Daleks’ success, but even though it’s written by Terry Nation it comprehensively misses everything that made them a success. While the Daleks were hideous inhuman tank-robot-monster-aliens with zap guns, Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, is a bloke in a wetsuit.
It also has a rather… confused… morality. An ancient scientist kidnaps the TARDIS crew and holds them to ransom until they retrieve the pieces of his giant mind-control machine that, until someone found a way round it, was controlling the minds of every person on the planet. He’s the goodie.
But that doesn’t matter, because this isn’t really a story at all. It’s a ‘quest’, where Our Heroes have to find all the pieces of the MacGuffin, splitting up into groups and adventuring in several different ‘exciting’ locations, against various ‘scary’ foes of the psychic-brain-in-jar variety, before finally getting together to defeat the big baddie. In other words it’s the sort of plotting that had previously been a staple of Republic serials and bad superhero team-up comics, but is these days better known as video-game plotting.
In other words, this is the first example of Doctor Who being written by a lazy hack. And just how much of a lazy hack Nation is being here can be seen by the place names – Marinus (a watery planet) and Morphoton (where you’re dreaming while you’re there) must have taken whole *seconds* to think up. We also have those Terry Nation staples “plants.. that are more like animals!” (unless you’ve watched a lot of Nation’s work you’ve no idea how tedious ‘scary’ jungles can get), casual sexism (both Barbara and Susan want nothing more in the universe than a nice dress, while the Doctor wants a well-equipped lab), and a heroic character with a name like Terry Nation who saves the day. (In this case the character is called Tarran, but in future we have magical substances callled Tarranium, heroes called Tarrant and, most blatantly of all, a sexy super-spy called Sara Kingdom).
Terry Nation could, when he wanted, be a very good writer. Unfortunately, he only wanted to three times in his many years on Doctor Who – the first two Dalek stories and Genesis Of The Daleks (and it’s very debatable how much of that story he actually wrote). The rest of the time he was the absolute definition of a hack.
While reviewing the previous stories, I’ve found myself straining against my self-imposed 1000-word limit – they all have many points of interest, good lines, well-composed shots or *something*. In this case you have a bunch of good actors and an excellent set designer doing their best with terrible material, and there are only so many synonyms for ‘not very good’ you can come up with.
Doctor Who has always been a children’s programme, but the stories before this one all pretty consistently refused to use that as an excuse to be bad TV. But this is just unbelievably lazy writing, and the story is only redeemed at all because the cast haven’t yet realised that it’s OK to give a sub-par performance when handed a sub-par script. But even there, one of the chief joys of early Who is watching William Hartnell’s extraordinary performance, and he’s off on holiday for two weeks here, when the team split up.
This wouldn’t seem so bad in another context – to be honest, the script isn’t *MUCH* worse than the standard of, say, series three, much of the Troughton era, mid-period Pertwee or whatever. Whenever the programme makers get lazy and think ‘will this do?’, The Keys Of Marinus seems to be the standard to which they sink. But here it’s placed during an otherwise impeccable run of classic stories. This is the only unarguably *bad* story in the show’s first year (one can argue about The Sensorites, and we will in a couple of weeks, no doubt), and while it’s easy to see what they were trying to do, it’s amazing that this story didn’t kill off the ‘rubber-suited monster’ genre of Doctor Who for good.
Luckily, next up came one of the best stories the show’s ever produced…
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