#23
Unnatural History
By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
The era of Sam Jones is almost over, but lucky us, there was another Blum & Orman book down the back of the sofa.
I doubt it’s in any way controversial to say that these guys write the best Sam stuff. It’s not that they’re the only ones who are good at it — Paul Leonard and Lawrence Miles are no slouches, and most EDA writers at least get the basics right. However, Blum & Orman seem the most actually interested in writing for Sam. They don’t just do it well, they make it the whole assignment. Vampire Science showed us what kind of Doctor/companion team we had now. Seeing I showed us how much they had grown. Unnatural History toys with the idea of not having Sam any more — perhaps more meaningfully so than the brief stretch of books where she actually left — and in doing so, it tells us in more certain terms why she is here, and what that means to her and to her friends.
I’m sure you’re as bored of me banging this drum as I am, so I’ll be quick: BBC Books rushed Sam’s introduction, and then never stopped paying for it. Sam just seemed like a cookie cutter companion, which left multiple authors unsure what to do with her apart from the obvious. Here was a 90s Ace, only without any trauma to fuel her actions. (Ah, I can already hear you saying, but that’s where the books come in. Cue multiple trips to the hospital for Ms. Jones…) She does what she does because that’s just what Doctor Who companions do, which makes absolute sense in a nuts-and-bolts storytelling way, but doesn’t do you any favours in a long-running series.
Was it always the plan for that sort of shiny blandness to be a deliberate act, in-canon? Some of Sam’s behaviour in The Bodysnatchers could be construed as an early hint. By the time of Alien Bodies, anyway, it was officially rubber stamped that she had a second set of biodata — another life, in other words, where she has dark hair and a drug habit. The Sam that we see in the books could suddenly be excused as not entirely whole; maybe there was another one out there to put her in context. But why? And would we ever see how the other half lived? Multiple books have since reminded us about Dark Sam — as she is somewhat portentously known, erroneously suggesting a goatee and a volcano lair — dropping occasional references just to keep the engine running. I tended to assume Lawrence Miles would be the one to pick up the thread proper.
Clearly he will to some extent, as some important questions are left hanging at the end of Unnatural History, as much concerning the Doctor as his oddly duplicated friend. In the meantime though, Blum & Orman take the opportunity to write The proverbial Dark Sam Book and, being Blum & Orman, get as much Samness out of it as possible.
How they go about this might raise a few eyebrows. Sam is gone: something finally snapped in her biodata and our Sam has been supplanted by her dark-haired equivalent, still very much Earthbound and not the person we know at all. The story opens with the Doctor, sounding much like a crazy person, trying to wrangle her help. (I love when stories start already on the move, and this one in particular made me laugh because of course page 1 of the final Blum & Orman book has someone turn up and say they know Sam Jones really well.)
In quick succession we meet Sam’s parents, who we learn have been receiving our Sam’s postcards whilst actually knowing other Sam* instead (*sorry, I can’t type “Dark Sam” with a straight face, I’ll stick with “other”) which suggests that this isn’t a sudden switchover at all, but rather a mess that goes backwards and forwards in time. It also makes a minor virtue of the slightly aggravating EDA habit of not visiting Sam’s parents or even really acknowledging the absence of their daughter: now, we couldn’t have gone back there without inviting a colossal mess. (Or maybe we could have. Don’t worry about it; certainties are not all they’re cracked up to be, at least in this one.)
We then encounter a member of Faction Paradox trying to get hold of Sam. (That messy biodata means a juicy paradox for them.) When the Doctor saves her life, that settles it, she’ll go with him — giving us arguably a more fully-formed companion intro than the one afforded to our Sam the first time around. Next stop, San Francisco, where our Sam went missing and things generally are in a bit of a state.
It’s quite daring to stick Sam, as in the proper one, in a separate dimension for almost the entire book. You might assume this derives from the same impulse as those authors who do their best to sideline her, but no: by replacing Sam with an almost-but-not-quite copy we can see the gap she leaves behind. Other Sam does this directly at times, commenting (usually with some bitterness) on the apparent perfection of her “goodie two-shoes” alter ego. “Was that all? Blonde Sam would probably have picked the kid up and carried him to the nearest police station so he could phone his mummy.” (Ahem, Beltempest.)
She doesn’t know the shorthand between the Doctor and her blonde self (putting her ironically in the same position as Fitz when he first joined), and lacks her immediately heroic instincts. She isn’t remotely as skittish about sex and romance with her two attractive male companions, giving the Doctor a massage that would have sent her primary self into therapy, and finding a human comfort with Fitz that would have been out of the question otherwise. She’s about as sarcastic as the more usual Sam, but here it doesn’t jar against an apparent starry-eyed commitment to her place in the TARDIS. (Other Sam, along with Blum & Orman it must be said, rather undersells Sam’s propensity for moaning all the bloody time.)
There’s a wonderful kind of mess about this Sam that is lived-in and deserving of life: she’s not a mistake, she’s just different, and coming from less overtly plucky beginnings has the effect of making her heroism (when it arrives) feel at least as earned as anything our Sam has done, if not more so because it’s so far out of her comfort zone. Other Sam has the opportunity to see what kind of life she could be living and she can honestly aspire to it because she’s seen the alternative. It helps our Sam make a kind of sense she didn’t before. At least someone’s out here reaching these decisions for actual quantifiable reasons, in effect repeating that opening “why yes I will go with you” set-piece on a bigger canvas.
Urgh. I’m going to say the thing, aren’t I? Yes, I think I prefer other Sam. I’m not convinced the deliberate falseness/double-biodata thing was always the plan, but either way, this version of the character plays out important beats in a more grounded and believable way. When she is placed in a moment of crisis at the end her heroic act has real weight; we can trace her journey from normal person to active protagonist. It’s deliberately heart-breaking that there isn’t room in this world for both Sams, but it’s perhaps more upsetting than was originally intended that it has to be this way around. The assignment could, I suppose, be considered a bit of a backfire as it’s not so much affirming what we’ve already got as showing us how much better this all could have been to start with. But I think this speaks more to the series’ handling of, or at least my enjoyment of the character as a whole. Ultimately Other Sam is Sam, and what Blum & Orman carve out of Sam(s) is really only confirmation that you can write depths within Sam Jones if you want to.
That’s not only true of Sam here. Unnatural History is an important outing for the rest of the TARDIS crew, continuing that process of showing us something by examining the gap it leaves behind. The Doctor and Fitz are clearly moved by the loss of their friend; an awkwardness hangs in the air as they implore her to help, all three knowing the optimal outcome here is that she will ultimately give up her existence for her better half.
Fitz is written at his best in the series so far, perhaps in part because he has that absence to work with, the better to define himself. He feels like a fully integrated member of the team, using his specific skills — mainly theatricality, also an irresistible amiability — to find out information. There’s a feeling that he really wants to be doing this, he knows he is putting these skills to good use. His usual brand of horny nonsense won’t work with this Sam, however, as she is more on his level to begin with, short-circuiting his gags. There’s a tangible sense that he misses his friend, but that he more strongly connects with this one. When they eventually sleep together it feels utterly natural, while also giving an outlet to Fitz’s sensitivity, as he supports Sam while her biodata keeps fritzing. (Something that occurs throughout the book, suddenly remixing Sam’s past and making her into someone new.)
He also has a moment or two of great heroism in this, and again these feel like they come from a real place, not just him signing up for the TARDIS life. Blum & Orman get mileage out of Fitz’s brainwashing in Revolution Man, itself an ideology with no basis in character — something not unlike Sam being a certain kind of way without having truly earned it as a person. When the Sams inevitably swap back at the end, and our Sam attempts to comfort him, Fitz’s familiar bitterness resurfaces for a moment; that cynicism, too, is made to feel more earned.
There’s a lot going on with the Doctor as well. (Indeed, you could write a book about it.) The plot and setting, surprisingly for a book so focussed on Sam, are really all about him. After the damaging events of the TV Movie a scar has been left in San Francisco, pouring out strands of the Doctor’s biodata and causing instability between realms, as well as in the city at large. Seemingly mythical creatures are roaming the neighbourhood while Faction Paradox, strange grey men and an even more sinister gentleman all observe. The TARDIS is as lost as Sam, put to work out of sight in a desperate bid to keep the “scar” from collapsing and causing total chaos. Before long a literal Kraken will awake and destroy the city, not to mention the Doctor’s biodata — and possibly his past and future.
First of all, how immensely cool and totally insane is it to revisit the TV Movie? We’re talking about a full on sequel to something legally off-limits for BBC Books (novelisation notwithstanding), and they went ahead and did it anyway. It gets really good mileage out of it too, building upon that earlier script’s scattershot weirdnesses like windows you can walk through to give us steep hills with varying gravity and unicorns, casual-as-you-like.
The concept of the Doctor’s biodata, torn apart by the Master’s machinations in that earlier story, allows us to dig into a few grand ideas about his heritage — not least of which is that blasted half-human thing, now fully recognised as a twist of the timelines, one possibility of many, and if nothing else the sort of inconsistency Faction Paradox eats for breakfast. Unnatural History is at times as nerdy as it is character-focused, throwing in among other things the fanbait mystery of Daniel Joyce (and his assistant who shares a name with someone in The Infinity Doctors), but there is meaning in how it for example juggles contradictory factoids about the Doctor, and makes the villain an obsessive categoriser who wants only to get his facts straight, someone “not interested in specimens that don’t confirm the theories he already knows. None of this messy ambiguity or complexity.” Griffin the “unnaturalist” is an archetype perhaps familiar to dwellers in fandom, but he also embodies the novel’s refusal to say that a person is one thing or another, just as simple as that. It’s a book about possibilities and uncertainties.
The Doctor is having a fairly terrible time here, having lost the TARDIS and Sam — again, it must be said, due to that unfortunate synchronicity with Dominion. (The authors do their best to recognise this but it still feels way too soon.) For what it’s worth, Unnatural History does it better by not having the Doctor at the whim of some agency for most of it and instead forcing him to confront and/or work around what he’s lost from the get go. Other Sam sees him struggling to cope aboard a plane — a little hint of the cabin fever he gets without a TARDIS, or simply being in one place at a time — and then generally leaving little things unsaid about his intentions towards her. She believes (in a thrillingly bleak moment) that he might simply throw her into the scar to get “his” Sam back. We can be in no doubt that he wants that outcome, but things are already too complicated to get it. His actions just before something like that finally happens leave a question in the air — did he engineer it? — and he refuses to answer, defiant that this uncertainty is part of who he is. There’s a rawness to how much he needs Sam and the TARDIS back, pleading with Joyce to hurry up and fix a gizmo that will aid him, negotiating with (and later ripping vicious strips off of) Faction Paradox, and at one point seemingly lying to the TARDIS itself that he won’t ultimately sacrifice it to save the city. Even he doesn’t seem to know sometimes — although to be fair, this close to the biodata equivalent of a random number generator, who would know for sure?
The Doctor’s ongoing crisis would perhaps be more satisfying if we hadn’t just had a very similar one before this — losing the TARDIS and Sam both times, for Pete’s sake — but again, it’s how you do it, and the situation here goes on to become a broader thesis on who the Doctor is; it makes the point that a loss of history won’t change who he is, he already changes fundamental tenets of himself just by regenerating; he must always cling to who he is now. This Doctor in particular discovered a foundational sort of happiness by forgetting his past. The story also, of course, demonstrates exactly how he’s come to depend on Sam when there are situations that visibly throw him and Fitz into disarray (or in Fitz’s case, heroic action) without her. It all comes back to that.
There’s heaps and heaps to think about, most of which I’ve hardly touched upon here. As I was reading it I was thinking about what I’d get out of it a second time. That said, Unnatural History isn’t perfect. For all the imagination of a San Francisco in this sort of cosmic disarray, there doesn’t seem to be room to meaningfully show it. The city feels incredibly small, with the action frequently ping-ponging back to the same alley with a special effect in it. We are told of things like dragons and unicorns but only briefly see them, and hardly see the reactions of the regular populace at all — there’s barely a supporting cast at that, although that’s perhaps deliberate in a character piece.
As fun as it is to throw out a mystery like Who Is This Daniel Joyce Guy Anyway (sources differ but it seems you can trust TARDIS Wiki here) it can be unpleasantly disorienting to wonder if you’ve forgotten something or someone from another book — and he’s certainly written in that way, just matter-of-factly being sought out by the Doctor. Blum & Orman are keen to play ball with ongoing plot arcs, toying cleverly with the question of who started this Sam biodata business and throwing out conflicting theories before definitively half-answering it (over to you, Lawrence), but some of this stuff does border on homework, which may or may not be your cup of tea. Mileage, and memory capacity may vary. (I’ve read The Infinity Doctors twice and I still missed some of the overlap in this. TARDIS Wiki ahoy.)
How much any of that matters (or is even true) will vary among readers, of course. I think there’s also a belief in some corners that the plot isn’t particularly strong. I have some sympathy with that, as there is a problem to solve here and there is a very nasty character seeking to gain from it, but everything that’s happening is really fallout from something else. Again though — does that matter? Unnatural History is all about the characters and the importance of understanding who they are in the moment. Surrounding them with chaos, not unlike replacing them with an imperfect copy, only serves to underline what matters.
8/10
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