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!