EDA #1: The Eight Doctors

The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

In Brief: Suffering from amnesia, The Doctor must (all together now) FIND HIS OTHER SELVES!!!



Here we go, into the great unknown. Having originally departed the world of Doctor Who fiction with the wrap-up of The New Adventures I'm approaching each of these BBC Books "Eight Doctor Adventures" with little to no preconceptions. Well except for (based on memories of reviews/newsgroup comments from the late 1990s):

1. New companion Sam Jones is apparently the most irritating character ever introduced to the series and I will soon pray for her horrible death.
2. There are a couple of Dalek stories coming up early in the run. This is notable since Virgin never obtained the rights to use the Daleks directly in their books. Also the books in question are apparently awful (will confirm later...).
3. The Eight Doctors is the worst book written by anyone. Ever.

And that's it. I know very little about the 70-something books that were published in the series between 1997 and 2005. At the time I'd decided to stick to the Benny books, and when they ended I didn't want to start this series part-way through. Then in 1999 with Big Finish releasing their audio adventures there was a way to get a Doctor Who fix that felt much more authentic than these books, especially once they got Paul McGann to record some “real” Eighth Doctor stories.

Overall the feeling I've always had towards the BBC Books series is that they're alright but somewhat a pale imitation of the New Adventures, perhaps more consistent but less imaginative. However this is purely based on my reading the online opinion of various hardcore "Doctor Who Fans", and if there's anything I've learned in life it's to try to ignore the online opinion of hardcore "Doctor Who Fans" as much as possible.
As that road leads only to the Absorbaloff

But now I'm taking the plunge into BBC Books’ output, and with The Eight Doctors it really *is* starting at the deep end. The reason being that this book is possibly the biggest misstep in the entire almost 50-year history of Doctor Who. I can imagine that intentions were good; the editors would get a known name from the show to write the introductory story. It would bring things "back to basics" after the view held (by some) that the New Adventures had gotten somehow away from what Doctor Who should be RAWR! The problem with this mind-set though in that the only thing that Doctor Who ever *should be*is giving the audience something new.

The Dying Days gave us a new way to tell an old story, the very 1970s-style alien-invasion transposed into the present day (of 1997). The Eight Doctors is Terrance Dicks telling a (sort of) new story in a very old way. Having been script editor on the show proper from 1969 to 1974 I suspect that Dicks sees himself as being the "Elder Statesman" of Doctor Who, showing the “youngins” how IT SHOULD BE DONE DAMNIT! Unfortunately he tries this feat by bringing Doctor Who creatively kicking and screaming back to 1972. Rather than brushing aside the perceived clutter this is Terrance Dicks waving his fist in the air and screaming "You Damn Kids get OFF MY LAWN!" to anyone who'd altered the series in the slightest since he'd been in charge.

The result is close to what a Doctor Who story would be like if recounted by Grandpa Simpson, meandering and pointless (or should that be wheezing and groaning?). Having lost his memory due to a leftover trap of The Master's following events of the TV-movie, The Doctor must find each of his previous incarnations in order to remember his life. First though he briefly arrives in the present day and meets vegan-gymnastics student Sam(antha) Jones, who is running from some drug-dealers. I suspect a lot of the book's bad reputation comes from these early chapters, which are horribly written. I'd be critical if these passages were part of some amateur fan-fiction let alone a man who by this point had been professionally an author for close to 40 years.

However, once The Doctor leaves Sam to her fate (however not permanently) the book does improve, albeit relatively. In order we have the Eighth Doctor meeting versions one through seven during or just after various televised stories. I found each of these sections less about visiting the history of Doctor Who as much as being a chance for Terrance Dicks to offer his commentary on everything from 1963 to 1989.

Doctor 1: As the first Doctor contemplats stabbing a caveman to death during "An Unearthly Child" the Eight appears to tell him to be nice. This is Dicks saying that the Hartnell Doctor isn't quite what he wants the character to be, but will be with a few tweaks.

Doctor 2: Amidst "The War Games" the Doctors briefly meet as the Eighth gives the Second some tips for his upcoming trial. This is Dicks not having much to say about the Troughton era since as he was involved in it the show must have been perfect.

Doctor 3: Just after "The Sea Devils" as The Master escapes and finds his Tardis where he left it (so we also get a revisit to the scene of "The Daemons"). Jon Pertwee is obviously where Dicks has his notion of the Doctor stuck, the man of action who is "never cowardly". Although to the rest of us he comes across like a bit of an arrogant and condescending arse.

Doctor 4: The Fourth Doctor and Romana have some increased difficulty with vampires just after "State of Decay". Dicks likes Tom Baker, but as he was in his earlier seasons, back when he was still writing for the show.

Doctor 5: (Good Grief) The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough once again visit the Eye of Orion after "The Five Doctors". Encouters with the Raston Warrior Robot, Sontarans and Drashigs ensue. The Davison Doctor is bland and far too nice says Dicks, although he is appropriate in filling this section with nonsensical returns from old monsters.

Doctor 6: Set during "The Trial of a Time Lord" as the Eighth and a temporally-displaced version of the Sixth attempt to explain the complexities of that story. This part ends with Dicks stating that the entire trial actually never happened through use of a time-loop. If it were up to him this Doctor would never have happened as Colin Baker was a fat buffoon.

Doctor 7: Following "Survival" as the Master prepares for the TV-movie (death-worms are involved) and the Seventh Doctor mopes around solo on Metebelis 3. The McCoy Doctor is just so not fun says Terrance. Who wants a Doctor who thinks ahead?

Then at the end The Doctor whips back to allow Sam Jones to join him in his travels for no apparently good reason (and her first scene in the Tardis is just strange). Mixed among these assorted set-pieces are scenes as Timelord President Flavia (don't ask) follows The Doctor's progress as various factions on Gallifrey try to kill him. Or something.

So yes, in this instance Internet fandom is right and The Eight Doctors is awful, although in a somewhat interesting way. I didn't hate it the same way as I have some other "New" adventures and after the terrible opening section I sort of got with the flow of what Terrance Dicks was doing. It’s the same as how occasionally a slightly senile grand-parent can spin a mildly interesting tale. This is a grumpy old man complaining that everybody who followed him has done it wrong without wanting to admit that he’s actually just old-fashioned. This book is the perfect case for why Doctor Who needs to constantly have new and fresh talent involved in its construction.

NA #61 The Dying Days

The Dying Days by Lance Parkin

In Brief: My re-read of The New Adventures ends with a recently regenerated Eighth-Doctor, along with Bernice Summerfield, thwarting an invasion of Earth (specifically London, quelle surprise) by the Ice Warriors.


Here we are, almost 2 years after I started reading them, at the end of Doctor Who: The New Adventures (although not *quite* the end of The New Adventures, I’ll explain later…). Following the airing of the Paul McGann movie in 1996 the BBC decided to bring the book series in-house rather than renew Virgin Publishing's licence. So we have Virgin’s wrapping up their involvement with Doctor Who as well as setting the scene for the ongoing adventures of Bernice as the focal-point of the series.

The Dying Days is the one and only Virgin-published New Adventure to feature The Eighth Doctor. And it's really very good indeed. Despite the plot-summary making the book sound like the most clichéd and routine story ever done in the series the result is impressively “modern”. The reason being that the book uses a formula of taking a traditional Doctor Who set-up, the old Alien invasion, and putting it in a completely contemporary context. Even televised stories that had aliens coming to Earth would tend to go for a slightly futuristic feel, the UNIT years in particular always felt somewhat disconnected from reality. However The Dying Days is *very* much set in 1997, with references to "The X-Files", Internet newsgroups (oh those were the days...), satellite dishes etc. abounding.

What the book ends up being is essentially a post-2005 story, albeit 8 years early. Scenes of a giant Ice Warrior ship hanging above London echo the later "The Christmas Invasion", a missing prime-minister and conspiracy within the government is very "Aliens of London", having a new Doctor menaced by an old enemy is very "Rose". I won't go so far as to say that Russell T. Davies ripped off Lance Parkin's book, but he was definitely taking notes. It's also surprising how here, at the very end of the range's association with Doctor Who we actually have our *first* real alien-invasion story. I suspect that since the New Adventures wanted to make its own distinct mark there had been a purposeful avoidance of this “classic” Doctor Who scenario (despite the relative rarity of invasion stories in Doctor Who proper).

But not only is The Dying Days prescient of what was to come, it's also a reaction against the 1996 Doctor Who movie. Any review of that fateful night in 1996 basically amounts to "McGann good, effects great, shame about the story". Here we have Lance Parkin showing the world how it *should* have been done, bringing the humour and adventure of Doctor Who into the here and now with the budget it had always been denied. Even in 1997 there's no reason that The Dying Days couldn't have been produced, it's just that the Doctor Who we did briefly get was a written-by-committee mess.

Also good in The Dying Days is how the reader “sees” the new Eighth Doctor mainly from the POV of Benny and the guest-starring Brigadier, we get to really understand the differences (and similarities to Doctor #7). Just as how "The Christmas Invasion" was about Rose and her family reacting to Doctor #10 Benny has to adjust to having a different (and troublingly attractive) version of the character. It's a huge shame that this would be the end of her character's encounter with the Tardis as having a "companion" and Doctor of the same physical age (well, appearance-wise since the Doctor's somewhere between 500 and 1200 years old) is an all too rare occurrence in the series.

But while reading (and greatly enjoying) The Dying Days I was reminded of why I never followed on with the BBC Books "Eighth Doctor Adventures" in 1997. I’d been very invested over the previous 6 years in reading a series of books which expanded and improved on Doctor Who and had established a pool of talented authors whose output I greatly enjoyed. Reading that the "revamped" series would be a series of more "traditional" and less complex stories really irritated me. I had little interest in continuing with what I feared would be a dumbed down version of what I wanted.

So instead I decided to forego the continuing adventures of The Doctor and stick with Benny as she took up her residence as a professor on the planet Dellah in the 26th-century. Even without any Doctor Who connections (although NA characters such as Chris, Jason or the Chelonians could still appear) the New Adventures continued...for a bit.


The New Adventures #62: Oh No It Isn't!

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that while the series continued to be entertaining it just couldn't maintain itself without The Doctor. One big problem was that without a space/time machine it became increasingly difficult to have stories with any great variety, authors constantly had to find reasons to get her away from her day-job to have exciting adventures. Another is that withouth the Doctor Who tie-in it was unlikely to ever attract new readers. However the series still lasted another 23 books and finally wrapped up in 1999. While there were a couple of decent books from what I remember of that period, the series never really regained former glory.

But that’s the road I’m not taking this time, back to The Dying Days. It's a fitting end to Doctor Who as it was from 1991-1997, a series not on television but still finding new tales to tell. Looking again at The New Adventures, many years after the show came back, it's clear that they were the bridge between the show as it was up to 1989 and what we have today. Even in the poorer books there was a sense of authors trying something new and different with the potential of Doctor Who. While I definitely enjoyed the novels which aimed at being literature more than those that wanted to be novelisations of potential TV-stories I still appreciated the latter. There's really never been a set of rules of what Doctor Who should or shouldn't be like, and I always appreciated the variety and sheer effort that went into the series. The New Adventures is what paved the way for “Rose” and all that came after.

And now begins something completely different as I go into The Eighth Doctor Adventures with little knowledge of what is to come. Allons-y!

NA #60 Lungbarrow

Lungbarrow by Marc Platt

In Brief: The 7th-Doctor's final story (although not quite the final New Adventure). On the Time Lord's home planet of Gallifrey, hidden within the buried House of Lungbarrow, is the answer to the question of "Doctor Who?"

Firstly, Lungbarrow is the bridge between the New Adventures and the 1996 TV-Movie with the novel ending as The Doctor leaves to collect The Master's remains from Skaro (which is a mission given to him by President Romana).

Secondly, Lungbarrow is the novel that fully explains The Doctor's background. It's...complicated

Thirdly, Lungbarrow is insanely continuity-heavy with the reader expected to be familiar with and understand the backgrounds of Romana, Leela, Andred, Dorothee/Ace, 2 versions of K9 and the complete history of Gallifrey.

Fourthly, Lunbarrow started life as a script for the 1989 series on TV before it was decided to take the core idea of a spooky old house and turn it into "Ghost Light".

Fifthly, Lungbarrow isn't actually very good.

15 years later, with the New Adventures a distant memory and the seventh full series of the revived show currently filming all of the revelations of Lungbarrow feel flat. If anything the book proves what a good idea getting rid of Gallifrey and the Time Lords was for Doctor Who in purging the series of much of the unneeded baggage that had accumulated over 30+ years. The problem is that for the most part The Doctor's home planet just isn't very interesting and having him return is rather purposeless. The truth is that Time Lords are boring.

So while many readers may rejoice at "discovering" that The Doctor is actually the reincarnation of a founding-father of Time Lord society known as The Other who passed his genetic code along through the Gallifreyan Looms which birth the adult children of a society struck barren by the curse of the ancient Pythia and that Susan is actually the grand-daughter of The Other who met The Doctor when he illegally traveled into the past of his own planet in a stolen Tardis under the control of the Hand of Omega to me it just seemed a bit silly.

In particular Platt's version of a Time Lord society without children and the "truth" about Susan just seems to be the most extraordinarily complicated way ever devised to keep The Doctor as a character who has never had sex. While I'm at times critical of Steven Moffat I'm glad that he through this all away in having The Doctor admit that he knows how to "dance".

However Lungbarrow isn't terrible, more just a mess (much like the author's early New Adventure Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible). Platt's writing style is good and he's excellent at devising memorable settings. It's just that despite the massive amounts of references to past stories and surfeit of old characters there's not really much going on. Most of the book has The Doctor and Chris wandering through the musty remains of Lungbarrow dealing with murder-mystery involving The Doctor's family. Meanwhile in the Time Lord Capitol Leela and President Romana must thwart an attempted coup (a plot-thread which sort of disappears by the end of the book). So overall it means that the last full 7th-Doctor story is somewhat underwhelming.

But the biggest problem for Lungbarrow, as stated earlier, is just that it's a dated version of what Doctor Who is meant to be. Even for 1997 this is a throw-back to an earlier time (the continuity-laden 1980s) with old characters and monsters brought back with little reason or care. The strength of the New Adventures is how it added depth and development to the regular characters in Doctor Who, which was mostly lacking in the original show but so very important post-2005. The series had moved beyond these "celebrations" of the past.

However it's still fitting that the secretive and manipulative 7th-Doctor has all of his secrets laid bare at the end of his life. Everything is nicely tied up in preparation for the Paul McGann movie, with Chris electing to stay on Gallifrey as The Doctor heads off to his destiny in 1999 San Francisco. But still, 15 years after publication, Lungbarrow doesn't hold up well. While it's brave with delving into The Doctor's background it suffers from the truth that removing the mystery somewhat lessens the character.

Plus the "truth" isn't actually very interesting, which is all well and good since the malarkey around The Other is never mentioned again which shows how pointless it was.

But still, despite my (surprising) disappointment with the book I'm a little sad that I'm now through all of the New Adventures involving the Sylvester McCoy version of The Doctor. I've enjoyed getting through all of the books again, even the bad ones. It's remarkable how the series really grabbed hold of the possibilities of a book-based version of Doctor Who. What could have just been a rather mediocre series of spin-off novels, such as the Star Trek(s), instead became *the* new version of Doctor Who for most of the 1990s. There's no reason that everything from Timewyrm: Genesys to Lungbarrow isn't an official part of the grand story of Doctor Who, such is the strength of the stories and characters.

The New Adventures is what proved that there was a lot more life in Who after 1989 and for that they need to be celebrated. Now on to the adventures of Doctor #8...

NA #59 The Room With No Doors

The Room With No Doors by Kate Orman

In Brief: A temporal anomaly is hiding somewhere in 16th-century Japan. The Doctor and Chris, in trying to find its source encounter a mysterious pod, an alien slaver, battling armies and a Victorian time-traveler.

The Room With No Doors admits early on that it's a "light" story. One of no huge drama and no real threat to Earth or the rest of the universe at large. A small adventure to be had as The Doctor waits for whatever event create his eighth persona to arrive. With the next novel, Lungbarrow, being the last for the Seventh Doctor Kate Orman creates almost a meditation on life, death and change. Particularly concerning The Seventh Doctor and what it will mean when he's gone. This is the story of how Chris comes to terms with the eventuality that he will stop travelling in the Tardis, and also how The Doctor must face his guilt over the actions and manipulations of his current persona.

This makes the book sound very dark and heavy, which it absolutely is not. Orman's skill is able to mix the darker aspects of the book into a rather frivolous and at times funny adventure, as with the best of Who. The shift from the norm is that The Doctor is rather more reactive than usual with his purposefully pushing Chris into taking more of a central role in events. Chris, always tending to be pushed to the side by the stronger characters like Benny or Roz has to face being in charge, really for the first time. It's an important step for the character since he can sense that a massive change is coming.

A fresh perspective is kept on the two regulars by having the character of Penelope Gate appear, an "adventuress" brought into the past due to the mysterious pod. Also trying to find the pod is alien slaver Te Yene Rana, as well as a group of escaped prisoners (who resemble large chickens). As villains go Te Yene Rana is not one of the greats and is essentially defined by how crap she actually is, particularly in how she meets her (surprised) demise. But this just reinforces that The Room With No Doors isn't about The Doctor defeating a menace, but instead setting it up so that Chris is able to gain the confidence to do it himself.

The best parts of the book are where Chris and The Doctor discuss the titular Room, which appears to Chris whenever he dreams. It turns out to be part of The Doctor's psyche, which is being transferred to Chris due to properties of the pod. It represents the prison within his mind that The Doctor knows awaits his current persona once he regenerates. Due to his becoming a darker and more manipulative character than in his prior lives it is where he senses his previous selves will lock him. However just as Chris is able to emerge from his guilt and insecurities so The Doctor is able to accept that he does not in fact deserve the Room and is able to shake off his own guilt.

Also, The Room With No Doors is where the New Adventures really begins to end. With it's themes of working through the guilt of the past and being able to look forward it strongly signals the end of the series that is soon to come (what with the BBC not renewing Virgin Publishing's licence following the 1996 movie). It begins with The Doctor and Chris locked into old patterns, but scared of change yet by the end allows them to face what is coming.

Probably the only real negative for the book is that with it being purposefully lightly-plotted it's not very memorable (I remembered nothing from my original read in 1997). It's a good read, but not one that sticks in the mind like other entries in the series. While I enjoyed it more than Orman's SLEEPY it wasn't quite up to the standard of her earlier entries. Still, it shows how much the New Adventures have progressed since the early days in that a mainly character-based story doesn't seem odd or jarring. After 59 books we have a Doctor Who just as much about character as the strange places and creatures. Developing characters like Chris, Roz and especially Benny are what paved the way for Rose, Martha and Amy and the strengths of the post-2005 show.

Ace unfortunately just didn't quite work, especially when the older battle-hardened space-bitch version showed up.

So overall The Room With No Doors was a good read, even if it is purposefully unambitious. It's the needed calm between the intensity of recent events and those yet to come.