Old Doctor Who - Part 4

[purlieu]

I'm planning on alternating between the EDAs and Benny NAs I think, might try and draw up a release schedule in fact. I know that some of them actually do tie together, albeit in vague, loose ways so I might as well make the most of it. My plan is then to start the Benny Big Finish stuff as well, which I know alternates between audios and novels for a while, and use that as a springboard for a complete Big Finish marathon as well. As it looks like we'll only be getting nine episodes of TV Who in the space of two or three years (and all of it Chibnall), this is all a nice and welcome stopgap.

There's also a PDA and a Telos to go between The Room With No Doors and Lungbarrow, plus then the movie novelisation and then, after The Eight Doctors, the awkwardly placed final NA, so nine more books before I can do a proper NA roundup.

edit: yes, I am a lunatic.

[Replies From View]

BENNY

[purlieu]

The New Adventures and the Limping Spacemen Eternity Weeps by Jim Mortimore

Feeling increasingly silly writing my thoughts about Benny now, with this book being the third book she's been in the six since her departure, and the second in which she's the main character. Half of it's told from the perspective of her diary!
Still, if you're going to commission a book about the collapse of Benny's marriage, the callous hand of Jim Mortimore would seem the logical choice. She's actively unpleasant towards Jason in some parts of this book, while he's tediously clueless. It's got the shape of the breakdown of a marriage, only written by someone who doesn't quite know how to write realistic characters. It's a shame, because their rocky relationship could easily have been explored really well here, rather than two people sniping at each other with little reason. Still, Mortimore manages to wipe out a significant proportion of Earth's population (including a gruesome and totally unnecessary death for a returning Liz Shaw, just what we wanted!) - and make swathes of the planet uninhabitable - in the process, so it's all par for the course for Jimbo.
It starts off with an archaeological trip to find Noah's ark, which gets caught up in some local bother involving Iranian and Iraqi soldiers killing almost everyone involved, and then action shifts to the moon where an ancient terraforming virus is accidentally released, turning Earth into a sulphur-based landscape, with all life dying by their water being turned into sulphuric acid and them being corroded from the inside out. Liz Shaw is the first to die in this way, which is obviously how we, as fans, imagined her life going. The Doctor is completely out of his depth, which has been a theme over the past few books. At one point he even manages to make the situation worse. This gradual move from him being the manipulative Time's Champion character to a mellower, more emotionally responsive Doctor in time for his regeneration is something I'm enjoying, so that's a plus, although he's actually barely in the book at all. Benny and Jason are largely annoying, which is unfortunate as the book is written - unconvincingly - as their diaries, each offering alternating chapters. None of them actually feel like diary entries. Chris is pretty much absent, even in the scenes he's involved in. His only development is believing a Silurian Earth Reptile is Roz. I think he's due for a breakdown soon.
All in all, a book with huge scope but ultimately just very unpleasant and negative. Which is what I've come to expect from Jim Mortimore at this point.
Doctor Who is not referenced on the front cover, another sign that we're heading into a new era. The covers of these last three books are preparing us for the forthcoming Benny books.

Next time on Doctor Who... goodbye Chris Cwej. I think.

[A Hat Like That]

Eternity Weeps is hilariously OTT in the damage that gets done to the Earth.

IIRC Liz doesn't die on the page, so there's another piece of work suggesting that she got mercy killed. Which is ... better?

[samadriel]

Oh wow, I'd forgotten all about that one. I remember how ridiculously unpleasant and excessively apocalyptic it was; I remember thinking the chapter presented as a Threads-esque emergency publication type thing was quite innovative for an NA, but a terrible fit for a Doctor Who story. I walked away from that book with a grudge against the author, but I forgot all about Mortimore in the years to come, and I don't think I've read anything else of his. Did he do more Who writing?

[Ron Maels Moustache]

Mortimore's love of inflicting brutal injuries on his characters seems almost pathological, you almost get the impression he hates every single one of them about and wants them to suffer. Doesn't Bernice get shot through the lung in Blood Heat? What was the point of that?

Actually I've just remembered a Mortimer story I did enjoy reading, the short story "Book Of Shadows" from the first Decalog. Although I think

Spoiler alert

Ian Chesterton

[close]

does die in that one so even a Mortimore short story has to feature some gratuitous suffering.

[purlieu]

I remember thinking the chapter presented as a Threads-esque emergency publication type thing was quite innovative for an NA, but a terrible fit for a Doctor Who story.

Oh, yes, that was also quite blackly funny in a When the Wind Blows way. Apparently Mortimore intended the book to be a comedy, which I can kind of see - it's basically a farce of death - but nah, it's still fucking unpleasant.

Did he do more Who writing?

Yes, and vast numbers of characters die in almost every single one. Parasite involves

Spoiler alert

the death of all life in a solar system-sized biosphere

[close]

.

Mortimore's love of inflicting brutal injuries on his characters seems almost pathological, you almost get the impression he hates every single one of them about and wants them to suffer. Doesn't Bernice get shot through the lung in Blood Heat? What was the point of that?

She also gets shot in Eternity Weeps. It's hard not to see him as some kind of sociopath, really.

[crankshaft]

Did he do more Who writing?

WELL.

He wrote "Eye Of Heaven" and "Beltempest" for BBC Books. He was commissioned to write a First Doctor book called "Campaign" for them, too, but the book he delivered was nothing like the book they commissioned, so they rejected it. It would be fair to say that Jim did not take this well, eventually putting the emails between the BBC and himself online (or in the book when he self-published, I can't remember).

(Spoiler: Jim comes out of this looking pretty bad.)

He wrote "The Natural History Of Fear" for Big Finish, and also did a Tomorrow People play. He was commissioned to write a Bernice Summerfield play called "Last Of The Drop Dead Divas" but they cancelled it once he submitted it. More on this can be read in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story.

(Spoiler: Jim comes out of this looking pretty unreasonable.)

These days he goes on Gallifrey Base and talks about the BBC plot to undermine white men in the current era of Doctor Who.

In short: Jim Mortimore - you can keep him.

[A Hat Like That]

Eye of Heaven - OK, I think. Highly non-linear. I think I had to re-read all the chapters in the intended orders to really 'get it'.

Beltempest - loads of people die, planet-loads iirc, even with some religious-metaphor-as-nanomachine thing keeping them alive. Drs heartbeat is a jazz rhythm.

[mjwilson]

WELL.

He wrote "Eye Of Heaven" and "Beltempest" for BBC Books. He was commissioned to write a First Doctor book called "Campaign" for them, too, but the book he delivered was nothing like the book they commissioned, so they rejected it. It would be fair to say that Jim did not take this well, eventually putting the emails between the BBC and himself online (or in the book when he self-published, I can't remember).

(Spoiler: Jim comes out of this looking pretty bad.)

He wrote "The Natural History Of Fear" for Big Finish, and also did a Tomorrow People play. He was commissioned to write a Bernice Summerfield play called "Last Of The Drop Dead Divas" but they cancelled it once he submitted it. More on this can be read in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story.

(Spoiler: Jim comes out of this looking pretty unreasonable.)

These days he goes on Gallifrey Base and talks about the BBC plot to undermine white men in the current era of Doctor Who.

In short: Jim Mortimore - you can keep him.

Campaign is quite an interesting read, but not in a "likely to be published by BBC Books" kind of a way.

[Midas]

The Natural History Of Fear is good to be fair.

[purlieu]

The Room With No Doors by Kate Orman

"Oh yes," said the Doctor. "This is just an adventure. A bit of swordplay, a few jokes, nothing worth taking very seriously."
The Seventh Doctor's second-to-last (ish) story is very deliberately low key. After some ludicrously dark and over the top tales, the whole series is winding down to the basics to ease in to the huge mythos-building finale. It's a story that could easily have been broadcast any time between 1965 and 1989. The Doctor and Chris land in feudal Japan, and find various groups of samurais fighting over an alien pod. A Victorian scientist and her companion - Joel, from Return of the Living Dad - believe they've made a time machine and get involved. The Doctor helps free the bird-like alien from inside the pod, and the fighting stops. End. The prose in the first half is so flighty it could almost have come from a Target novelisation.
But of course, this book isn't about the main plot. It's about The Doctor. In one of the psi powers books - I can't remember which - he saw a foreshadowing of his next regeneration: a pointless death, entirely alone. It's a really nice way of hanging a lampshade on how terrible the death actually is, and makes me hate it a lot less. He's been worrying more and more about it. He and Chris talk a lot about regeneration in general, and his fears about the upcoming one, and difficulties of past ones. He considers whether it would be better to just die for good. More Twice Upon a Time foreshadowing. Chris, similarly, has his own fears, believing himself to be responsible for Liz Shaw's painful death in the last book, and thinking he's useless and not the heroic Adjudicator he wants to be. Basically he wants to live up to the standard he feels Roz set. And it's all done really beautifully. Orman writes character-led novels better than just about any other author in the line that I've come across so far, and this might be her best in that vein yet. The events of the novel, and the main two characters contrasted with Penelope and Joel - the former refusing to get involved in history, the latter getting involved too much - give both of them a chance to act wisely and reflect on their pasts. They both manage to find peace with themselves and their pasts. Both characters are done real justice with the writing: this is by far the best Chris novel to date, and it's a shame to be losing him; we see events from the Doctor's perspective, which a rarity, and it gives him a sense of vulnerability and humanity that he's been gradually working towards. He's becoming the peaceful version of the character we see at the start of the movie. It even manages to retcon the ludicrous idea from Head Games that this incarnation 'killed' the Sixth Doctor because he needed to be Time's Champion.
I kind of wish the Japanese stuff was more engaging, because it definitely lets the book down a little and loses it a point or two: there's a lot of detail, but it feels strangely superfluous with all the fascinating character stuff going on.
Still, it's a really good thing that the movie came along the way it did, because it allowed the Virgin team to wind up Seven's story brilliantly, giving them a goal to reach, and enabling them to foreshadow the regeneration nicely. A lovely book.

Next time on Doctor Who... Lungbarrow! a PDA. The past few books have been leading up the regeneration so well that I really hope this isn't tonally jarring. Would be a shame to lose the momentum.

[Replies From View]

Imagine an entire barrow of lungs

[notjosh]

I have absolutely no desire to 'get in' to Doctor Who novelisations, but if there was one that I absolutely, pos-i-tiv-ely had to read what would it be?

[Ron Maels Moustache]

I have absolutely no desire to 'get in' to Doctor Who novelisations, but if there was one that I absolutely, pos-i-tiv-ely had to read what would it be?

Human Nature. There's a reason that it, out of all the VNAs, was cherry-picked to be adapted for TV, because it's just that good.

[purlieu]

I have absolutely no desire to 'get in' to Doctor Who novelisations, but if there was one that I absolutely, pos-i-tiv-ely had to read what would it be?

In terms of actual novelisations, Remembrance of the Daleks is your go-to, a wonderful book that expands on the TV version in the most wonderful ways.
In terms of original novels, of the Virgin New Adventures I'd say Human Nature is a very good starting point. It's quite different from the one that was adapted for the new series. If you want something very traditionally Who-ish, Nightshade is a lot of fun. For Past Doctor stories, the Fourth Doctor stories Festival of Death and The Well-Mannered War, set between Shada and The Leisure Hive, are magnificent. A couple of the ones written since the new series started, Harvest of Time (Third Doctor) and The Drosten's Curse (Fourth Doctor), are fantastic.

Quick bit of research and it seems Bullet Time and Companion Piece are probably set after Lungbarrow, so on to that I go. Also, it turns out I share a birthday with Chris Cwej.

[Gurke and Hare]

The novelisation of The Creature from the Pit is good, David Fisher channels Douglas Adams quite well.

[notjosh]

Thanks, will have a look for those next time I'm book shopping, especially Human Nature as it's possibly my favourite new-Who story. I did read Moffat's Day of the Doctor novelisation which is pretty good fun.

[Deanjam]

I'll nominate Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, which is Malcolm Hulke's adaptation of The Silurians, and from the NA I remember liking All-Consuming Fire, where Doctor Who meets Sherlock Holmes.

[Poison To The Mind]

It's Dr Who meets Sherlock Holmes IN a C19th sci-fi story! (eg CS Lewis-style)

[purlieu]

Doctor Who and the Friendly Nimon Lungbarow by Marc Platt

Hooooooo boy.
Before The Timeless Child there was The Other. Despite the hints given in season 26, and expanded upon a little in the Remembrance novelisation, the actual Cartmel Masterplan remained a vague mystery during the show's time on the BBC. It wasn't until Marc Platt introduced the idea of Looms in Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible that we really started to see bits of Gallifreyan history. On the whole, this was left on the back seat throughout the NAs, with only a handful of reference to Looms, Lungbarrow and the Other throughout the 60 Seventh Doctor books. Until it came to regeneration time, and the end of Virgin's license, and so Platt finished up by giving the Doctor a backstory.
The difference between The Timeless Child and this is it doesn't fundamentally change who the Doctor is. If anything, it helps explain his character a bit. One of the founders of Time Lord society, the Other, felt constrained by his society even back then, but as he was unable to escape, he threw himself into the Loom - the genetic material used to create new Time Lords since they became sterile - and was effectively reborn as an entirely new being as the Doctor. And although it explains why he seems different to most other Time Lords, it's also explicit in the fact that the Doctor is the Doctor, his personality simply inspired by his former existence. He's still just a Time Lord. Is it necessary? Not especially. Is it satisfying? Vaguely. Does it destroy our idea of who he is? No. And of that I'm really glad. It manages to make him mysterious and different and yet still totally normal at the same time. Which is quite a clever thing to do, and handily works as an intriguing reveal that can effectively be forgotten forever.
As a book itself, it's frustrating. There's so much going on - an exploration of the Doctor's house, the introduction of several of his Loom Cousins, a military coup in the Capitol, the return of Romana, Leela, Ace and K9 Marks I & II (who have a bloody brilliant scene together) - but it's bogged down by the Cousins themselves who are almost all unlikeable, a collection of snivelling, argumentative characters who feel like attempts at creating some Dickensian-style grotesques but just come across as childish and annoying. They live in a sentient house, full of plants, and living oversized furniture. It goes too far into fantasy and is totally at odds with Gallifrey and Doctor in general. It felt to me like a particularly humourless mix of Terry Pratchett and Roald Dahl trying to write Gormenghast.
Chris is given some good stuff to start off with but is utilised as nothing but a vehicle for the unconscious Doctor in the second half; his exit is pretty much brushed over. Although far from being a Dodo or a Mel, he never truly came into his own in these books, which is a real shame as there was potential in his character. Everyone else is nicely done, especially the flashbacks of the First Doctor, who Platt captures magnificently. The prose is reasonable, better than the oft-impenetrable Time's Crucible, but low on truly memorable or striking imagery or phrases. It gets the job done.
Continuity-wise it's surprisingly light, with only two links to the TV series: how he came to have the Hand of Omega, and who Susan is. The latter, similar to the Doctor's revelation, is kind of unnecessary in the overall Who picture, but doesn't actually change anything. And I suppose there's the infertility plot from Time's Crucible, finally concluded by giving Leela the first pregnancy on Gallifrey in millennia. Lucky her. She and Aldred have about as much chemistry in the book as they did on screen. There's also a nice reference to the season 27 plot of the Doctor wanting to send Ace to the Time Lord Academy ("no thanks," is her reply).
It ends with a foreshadowing of the movie - the TARDIS is forced to change its interior, and President Romana sends the Doctor on a trip to an inexplicably-rebuilt Skaro to collect The Master's ashes. It'll tie in very nicely with the movie novelisation, which will be slightly undermined by the PDA and Telos novella I have between.
So, yeah. It's Lungbarrow. It does the unforgivable and just about gets away with it.

Next time on Doctor Who... er, Seven and Sarah Jane Smith?

[mjwilson]

I have absolutely no desire to 'get in' to Doctor Who novelisations, but if there was one that I absolutely, pos-i-tiv-ely had to read what would it be?

It's an obvious one, but (assuming that you're including novels as well as novelisations), then Alien Bodies probably the best of the 8th Doctor books.

[purlieu]

Bullet Time by David A. McIntee

Unlike the 1970s, which had distinct cutoff points between companions, the New Adventures have no gaps. So where this story of Seven, on his own, helping some aliens escape Earth and accidentally finding himself the head of the Hong Kong Triad fits in I don't know. Especially given that David McIntee wrote several NAs. It certainly isn't post-Lungbarrow, as, even ignoring that book's direct lead in to the movie, the Doctor is the white suited plotter of the mid NAs here. As with most McIntee novels, the culture is exceptionally well researched, which sadly ends up just being lists of researched culture regurgitated onto the page rather than feeling like a living, breathing world. The story is utterly bland. Sarah Jane gets to meet the Seventh Doctor, gets a bit moody with him and then forgives him, which is about as far as characterisation goes. Dull.



Companion Piece by Robert Perry & Mike Tucker

This, on the other hand, exists in a very different timeline to the NAs, as it features a companion called Cat who replaced Ace after she left. Perry and Tucker never wrote for the NAs, so it's less surprising, and the Telos books have largely been a lot more experimental than the main lines so it feels like a 'what if?' type story. Sadly it's crap. Might as well be called Doctor Who vs. the Space Catholics. The first half is the Doctor being tortured by the Inquisition - who have decided that Time Lords are witches - and the second half leads up to a boring reveal that Cat is a robot. I really enjoyed their Season 27 series of books, but this was a really let down.


Next time on Doctor Who... the Eighth Doctor, finally!

[Norton Canes]

I have absolutely no desire to 'get in' to Doctor Who novelisations, but if there was one that I absolutely, pos-i-tiv-ely had to read what would it be?

Donald Cotton's The Myth Makers

Although if you happen by accident to pick up either of his two other comic masterpieces, The Romans and The Gunfighters, you'll be equally impressed. 

[purlieu]

Doctor Who and the Terrible Puns Doctor Who - The Novel of the Film by Gary Russell

I love the fact that at the end of Lungbarrow, Marc Platt went out of his way to tie the ending into the film, and yet almost all of that is undone in the opening chapter of the novelisation: The Doctor has changed the TARDIS interior out of choice, and retrieves the Master's remains after a telepathic communication with him. Of course, the novelisation was written from an early draft of the script, and so differs in a few places (mostly subtle, although the fight at the end here features a bleached out silhouette as the Master's body deteriorates, which would have been awful with the visual effects of 1996); I've gone with the 1996 novelisation here, while the version this past March changes things again to be somewhere between the final film and the book. I can't be arsed to read it to compare, although some of the differences look interesting (notably the removal of the half-human nonsense). The one genuinely good addition is the description of the Master having joined with a reptilian creature which absorbs consciousnesses, explaining why he's a body-jumping snake in the film.
Despite it being significantly longer in terms of page count, once it gets going, it's mostly just like a Target novelisation, with little in the way of depth or interested added to it. The story's still a bit crap, with too many action sequences and not enough actual plot. Having not seen Eric Roberts's performance as The Master, and a few script changes along the way, he basically feels like Anthony Ainley's version, which is no bad thing for me as I cannot stand the movie incarnation of the character. Otherwise, eh, it's an inauspicious start to the Eighth Doctor's run. Still, I'm looking forward to whatever comes next, if only because my exposure to the character is still limited to the movie and Night of the Doctor. Even if there's some bland stuff ahead, at least it's totally new territory for me.

Next time on Doctor Who... a notoriously terrible book. Can't wait!

[Psybro]

Getting into Doctor Who as a result of seeing the TV movie (there must be about six of us out there somewhere), the novelization was probably the first Who book I bought. I'll see if I can dig it out of my ancestral home this weekend.

I think I filled the gap between it and The Eight Doctors with the only Who books in the school library, The Left-Handed Hummingbird (impenetrable) and the Power of the Daleks script (good fun). Also randomly bought the MA System Shock, what a weird artefact that is.

[JamesTC]

Getting into Doctor Who as a result of seeing the TV movie (there must be about six of us out there somewhere)

You've found one of the other five here. Started with The TV Movie circa 2003 and then watched Pertwee omnibuses on Saturday mornings on UK Gold.

Still not read/listened to the novelisation but I do have it on audible waiting for me.

[A Hat Like That]

Bullet Time by David A. McIntee

Unlike the 1970s, which had distinct cutoff points between companions, the New Adventures have no gaps. So where this story of Seven, on his own, helping some aliens escape Earth and accidentally finding himself the head of the Hong Kong Triad fits in I don't know. Especially given that David McIntee wrote several NAs. It certainly isn't post-Lungbarrow, as, even ignoring that book's direct lead in to the movie, the Doctor is the white suited plotter of the mid NAs here. As with most McIntee novels, the culture is exceptionally well researched, which sadly ends up just being lists of researched culture regurgitated onto the page rather than feeling like a living, breathing world. The story is utterly bland. Sarah Jane gets to meet the Seventh Doctor, gets a bit moody with him and then forgives him, which is about as far as characterisation goes. Dull.

IIRC it is strongly implied Sarah-Jane is killed at the end, which is a future plot point raising its head.

[Psybro]

You've found one of the other five here. Started with The TV Movie circa 2003 and then watched Pertwee omnibuses on Saturday mornings on UK Gold.

Still not read/listened to the novelisation but I do have it on audible waiting for me.

Thanks to somebody wonderfully putting up a list of the UK Gold air dates, I can see that I started watching the Sunday omnibus religiously at the end of 1996 with the final part of Trial of a Time Lord, somehow kept going through Time and the Rani, and stuck with it when they reset from Survival to Robot.  Explains why Seasons 12-14 are still Peak Doctor Who to me. I started losing interest when the Key to Time kicked off.

[JamesTC]

Thanks to somebody wonderfully putting up a list of the UK Gold air dates, I can see that I started watching the Sunday omnibus religiously at the end of 1996 with the final part of Trial of a Time Lord, somehow kept going through Time and the Rani, and stuck with it when they reset from Survival to Robot.  Explains why Seasons 12-14 are still Peak Doctor Who to me. I started losing interest when the Key to Time kicked off.

Blimey, don't know how I missed so much. I had this impression that UK Gold only ever repeated Pertwee because that was all I ever managed to watch on there. After that I started picking up the DVDs for other Doctors.