#3
The Ultimate Treasure
By Christopher Bulis
A flicker of light. Objects begin to move independently, disturbed by fingers of electricity. A great breath seems to draw in all around as Christopher Bulis ascends out of his chair, away from his word processor and into the air. His arms are splayed, eyes closed, smile beautific. He has at last written a book for every classic Doctor. The quickening is at hand.
Good old Bulis, eh? While he tends not to top any Favourite Author charts, he is one of those who’s happy enough to write any combo of characters. I think there’s something to be said for that kind of adaptability, although of course it doesn’t guarantee brilliant books. (I thought State Of Change, Eye Of The Giant and – yes! – Shadowmind were all pretty enjoyable, but the rest were more miss than hit for me.) Love him or hate him, he’s a dependable old workhorse and if you’re diving into a twice-monthly book release schedule, it makes sense to include people like him in your roster.
For his latest mix-and-match assignment Bulis has parachuted the Fifth Doctor and Peri into (as you might have guessed) a treasure hunt. This is quite an unusual pairing, since Peri was only around for one story before violently swapping out Doctors. Is there much to say about that brief window where her travelling companion favoured cricket gear instead of Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat?
I’ll rip off the plaster now: no, not really. We’re reminded that Peri is just enjoying the rest of her holiday in space rather than in Lanzerote (bless her, maybe she should have stayed) and she’s having, by and large, a nice time. What does she think of the Doctor? Not a great deal, although she considers him passingly attractive, but so plainly uninterested in her that there’s no reason to go there. Peri is written with recognisable and likeable informality, but the story doesn’t delve much into her dynamic with the Doctor. There’s little opportunity, as he seems at somewhat of a distance throughout. (You could put that down to The Ultimate Treasure being more from her perspective than his, as after all, she doesn’t really know the guy.)
Glancing at reviews – and may I just say, ouch! – this seems like a popular sticking point. The Ultimate Treasure is not very big on its two leads. Or more specifically the Doctor. Yes, Bulis has crossed off every one of the classics by now – but is it perhaps significant that Davison came last? Recognisably him is a certain insistence on fair play (well, y’know, cricket etc), and there’s a bit where he uses his bowling arm. But he cuts a rather muted and unimpressive figure for most of the novel. Witnessing a murder, the Doctor waits around until the police are summoned so he can help. They immediately point to him and Peri for the killing – and at no point does he say, well why did I call you, then? When said police officer stows aboard the TARDIS, which by then is heading off to find the treasure/catch the crooks, the cop points a gun at him and orders him to turn the ship around. Trying very hard to ignore the fact that guns shouldn’t work in the TARDIS, why does he listen to her? (He is only prevented from dutifully changing course by external forces.) Good grief, man, this is your house! Later, when the treasure hunt is in full flow, the criminals kidnap Peri to force his cooperation in their winning the contest, and he just goes along with it. No underhand tricks or anything, just honest help. I despair. You’re the Doctor!
Of course, if you want to be charitable to Bulis – and just as uncharitable to this incarnation of the Doctor – if any Time Lord was known for letting others get the better of him, it’s this one. His concern for his companions often takes more of a toll on him than his fellows (hey, look what ended up killing him) and he seemed to spend more time in jail awaiting assistance than yer average wibbly wobbly medical practitioner. Could the less than spectacular, downright colourless characterisation here be deliberate, pointed even? I don’t know. But I’m enough of a Fifth Doctor critic to think this doesn’t ring totally false, even if it is all a bit disappointing on the page. (And just to redress it a bit further: the Fifth Doctor at this point in the series was quite hot tempered at times, actually. His fiery mood in the very next, climactic story didn’t entirely come from nowhere. So it might be understandably difficult for some readers to square this zen pushover with that guy.)
Perhaps the reason the Doctor isn’t charging heroically through The Ultimate Treasure is – and it’s a big, hypothetical, nothing-to-back-it-up perhaps – that might not always have been the plan? Not long after this was published Bulis would contribute a book to the Bernice Summerfield range. Does a hunt for lost treasure strike you at all as a sort of, well, Bernice-ey thing? With very few revisions this could be just her sort of caper. There are shades of Dragons’ Wrath about the famous macguffin, and shades of Down about the strange planet. Even the bright, frothy tone is right for her. I’m not disinclined to believe he had a few archaeological ideas floating about and ultimately went with Tempest for Benny, leaving the Doctor on a treasure hunt instead. (Mind you, a grab bag of ideas assigned willy nilly to different Doctors might have been Bulis’s strategy throughout his career.) We still get requisite dollops of Who continuity, never fear: there’s a positively gratuitous recap of Peri’s introductory story at the start, and an even more gratuitous, downright inexplicable cameo towards the end. (I know “spoilers for a 30 year old book” is a touchy subject, but it’s honestly so left field that I’d feel like a bad sport just blurting it out. I’ll stick it at the end in case you want to go “Oof, really?”) Regardless, “Bulis had a spare Benny pitch” is my head canon and I’m sticking to it.
As for the actual treasure hunt and the book at large… well it’s probably significant that I haven’t gone on about the plot much. You can map it out without much help: there is a lost treasure, information is doing the rounds in seedy space bars, multiple colourful parties are interested, they all end up (including the decidedly killy ones) on an equal footing on a mysterious planet all racing to the finish. It ends up sort of like The Ghost Monument, except some things happen in it.
And you know what? I don’t hate it. Of depth, there is not a whole heck of a lot – spreading it across a dozen characters will naturally make that the case, this ain’t Game Of Thrones y’know – but Bulis imbues the various traps with enough variety to keep them interesting, and then varies the response of each group that comes into contact with it. I particularly enjoyed the desert of trap doors, which contain a variety of pitfalls, one of which the Doctor turns into something useful during a heatwave. This kind of narrative is very simple, but the execution has a colourful sense of fun about it, a solid “what’s next” momentum.
As for the characters, there aren’t any that I’d clamour to see again, but they generally acquit themselves within their little arcs. The police officer is fairly enjoyable, although her journey from total stickler to “ah, you guys are all right” is not difficult to predict. There’s a bloke who models himself after Shakespeare’s Falstaff, which you’ll either find annoying or harmlessly quirky. (I leaned towards quirky.) I quite liked the strange tension of these trials all being observed by the omnipotent people of this world and by a nosey reporter using flying drones. (Equally you might say that the former makes any real degree of danger or success rather unlikely. And I mean, fair enough.)
The nature of the ultimate treasure, you ask? From the title alone I was making an each way bet that it would be supreme knowledge (which the Doctor must of course decline) or The Friends We Made Along The Way, and I’m thrilled to report that it’s… not literally that first one. There’s again some variety in how the “treasure” sequence plays out, such that I wasn’t actively disappointed with it. A ringing endorsement, I know.
While I haven’t written The Proverbial Glowing Review Of The Ultimate Treasure, I can honestly say I had a good time with it, in spite of its deficiencies. (And hey, I missed one: there is a higher frequency of grammatical errors is this book than I’ve spotted since beginning this leg of the marathon. “To” instead of “too,” “lose” instead of “loose,” at one point “cleaver” instead of “clever”. I know they were running a conveyer-belt but not every BBC Book is like this, so they can do it.) Perhaps Christopher Bulis just has a talent for catching me in the right mood. If you’re up for 280 pages of undemanding adventure that could just as easily have been Doctor Who as any other sci-fi, you could do worse. If that’s not enough then I don’t really blame you: the ultimate treasure can be the power to skip this one.
6/10
***
That Bonus Spoiler For A 30 Year Old Book So You Can Go “Oof, Really?”, Either At The Spoiler Or The Fact I’m Calling It A Spoiler
So, while separated from the Doctor Peri encounters a mysterious steed (pictured on the cover) which stays by her side and ultimately sacrifices itself against a murderous crime lord. The steed? It’s Kamelion. His essence wasn’t entirely dead after Planet Of Fire, and the mysterious beings on this planet helped him find a new body so he could die all over again, but heroically, instead of being triggered into a heart attack and then shot by the Doctor. And hey, good: every single thing about Kamelion was a weird choice, so I don’t hate the idea of revisiting him after the fact. But a page or two of “by the way it was me, hi and bye I guess, dying again lol” is not going to win awards for not being a quick and random continuity bullet point. Is he really better off this way? Well, as the saying goes, the important thing is, he’s dead.
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