#28
The Taking Of Planet 5
By Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham
Things are looking up for the Eighth Doctor Adventures. A range of books with much to recommend, they nevertheless often find themselves in ruts, usually consisting of visits to ill-fated colony worlds or, if Sam Jones is around, the nearest hospital. There’s a definite sense post-Interference that this will no longer do, and quite right. The scale of storytelling is much grander all of a sudden. You can’t move for all the ambition flying around.
This has its downsides. I found The Blue Angel all too pleased with itself and apparently keen to keep its genius out of reach of the reader. I felt like my time had been wasted. The Taking Of Planet 5 isn’t quite so obscure, but there is still that sense of authors trying really hard to prove how clever they are. I’m genuinely glad that there seems to be a renewed mission statement at BBC Books — be bigger, grander, don’t be afraid to get complicated — but I wonder if they’ve hit the accelerator a little too hard.
Once again we’re playing with ideas and entities established by Lawrence Miles (they didn’t pay that guy enough), and it’s not just him. The Doctor is intrigued by the apparently real existence of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Elder Things” so he takes Fitz and Compassion back to Earth’s pre-history to investigate. Here he finds Time Lords from his own future (Miles’s War In Heaven from Alien Bodies) masquerading as Elder Things after killing all the real ones. (Or, spoiler alert, the “real” ones.) They have a plan to help win their war, but this is in jeopardy because the Celestis (estranged Time Lord splinter group, also Alien Bodies) have infiltrated their group, hoping to usurp the plan for themselves. To make things worse, the two Celesti agents don’t share the same agenda. Meanwhile, 12 million years in the future, an Antarctic base in 1999 is investigating the fallout from what will happen here. Compassion has somehow straddled the two time periods.
It’s definitely complicated, and it’s not made any easier by all the characters being in disguise. The Time Lords look like blobby eldritch horrors, although that’s not their normal appearance; the Celestis look bizarre in their own way, but (when they’re not casually making themselves two-dimensional) they’re disguised as Time Lords disguised as eldritch horrors — actually, both are disguised as the same one. In the 1999 portion of the story one of the scientists is secretly a Time Lord agent, and pretty soon another one is a Celesti in disguise, killing and copying a little like The Thing.
Navigating all this can be tricky, especially when the Celestis are called “One” and “Two” and are sharing the same disguise. It’s harder still without a lot to get your teeth into character-wise. Both groups investigating this site either side of 12 million years, the Time Lords and the humans, could do with more definition.
The Time Lords are split into veterans and newborns, with the varying levels of experience that implies; their leader Xenaria has a certain no-nonsense attitude that comes across well, subordinate Holsred is quite likeable, but the rest could just as easily be random names generated as the novel went along. They believe the Doctor to be a general from their own ranks pretty much just because he said so, which is great as an example of the doctor’s ability to take (or fake) authority, but does rather diminish them as a serious concern. They’re all a bit silly, albeit knowingly so: busy people encumbered with tentacles.
The humans are worse. The Taking Of Planet 5 has quite an irreverent sense of humour, which is perhaps another carry-over from Lawrence Miles (he treats this sort of universe-bothering weirdness much the same, even in Interference), but it manifests rather awkwardly at times, particularly in 1999. Pretty much the only thing going for the humans character-wise is that McCarthy, an American woman, is fat, something the book finds very amusing. (“Luckily her butt was big enough to absorb most of the impact as she hit the ground.” Oof.) The rest all snap at each other or, where men and women are concerned, boringly lust after one another. The most interesting one isn’t human. There is indeed a joke to be made about whether you’d notice if these guys had been bodysnatched. You might hope to latch onto these scenes for their contribution to the plot, but nothing very interesting is happening in the 1999 part of the story, other than explaining how Compassion got there or why there’s a big hole in the dig site — things that, once revealed, are really more technical explanations given than great mysteries solved.
That’s the book’s main issue for me: a lot of it feels academic. That’s not to say it doesn’t have interesting ideas. The faked existence of characters from H.P. Lovecraft (and by extension, the ability to manifest any literary nonsense as real) is an obvious story goldmine, but the creatures are dead by the time we arrive and the device is hardly used again, very much damp-squibbing the Doctor’s assertion that “we’d better be prepared to meet anything. Anything at all.” The Time Lord plan is quite grand, involving the release of an ancient horror that might doom us all etc, but it rests entirely on close familiarity with a Classic story that is itself barely represented here. Granted, it’s safe to assume that sort of nerd pedigree in the readership — who else are these books aiming at? — but the casual way said story is invoked leaves us without any of its original legwork or sense of danger.
Then you have the Celesti plan — or plans I suppose, oy — which entirely concerns their headquarters, Mictlan. (A weird Hell analogue that is mysteriously falling apart.) Quite apart from why the reader should care about a place this fundamentally unpleasant, the existence or destruction of Mictlan is neither here nor there for most of the characters, besides One and Two. And heck, even those two feel differently about it. Blow it up, don’t blow it up. Ehh. (You can see how this will figure into the War In Heaven arc, so I’m willing to concede it will be interesting. But right now do the Doctor, Fitz or Compassion give much of a stuff either way? Not really. Should we, if they don’t?)
The best we’ve got in terms of stakes is general suggestiveness about the wider story arc(s), but for obvious reasons none of that pays off here. The War In Heaven doesn’t noticeably budge, although you can see how the removal of Mictlan might matter to all that. As to the other plan, it probably would have been a bad idea to try to control Evil From The Dawn Of Time #numbers anyway — it places the entire universe at risk to even try — but hey ho, they’re prevented from doing so because the Doctor is around to course correct, which is another thing that makes the Time Lords look like unthinking idiots for even attempting it. Still, this kind of thing suggests a way that a war in the distant future can affect the here and now. Considering the Doctor would rather not know about any of it, that’s probably the only way we’re going to integrate it into the EDAs.
Probably the most compelling thing about The Taking Of Planet 5 is another little ongoing Easter egg hunt, viz, what’s going on with Compassion? Fitz and the Doctor haven’t forgotten about her ease with piloting TARDISes in The Blue Angel, and we add to that a strange ability to make use of the signals around her and make inexplicable, powerful sounds that control her surroundings. Her personality is still a little on the rudimentary side — unemotional yet bitchy, a sci-fi favourite — but the authors are all in with the peculiarities of this ex-Remote person. She’s utterly unfazed by her wrench across 12 million years, and quickly falls into a sort of Doctor-companion role with the secret Time Lord, albeit both of them are a bit less friendly than the duos we’re used to. I still think it’s weird that the books skipped her addition to the crew, but there’s some back-filling of a sort here: the Doctor considers “whether letting her join him in the TARDIS had been the solution to her problems”, suggesting there had been a thought process there, and when Compassion thinks she’s stuck on Earth she thinks how “[she] could have hoped to travel for longer, but Earth would have to do for the immediate future”, telling us she actually wants (or wanted) to do this. Hey, it’s just nice to have it confirmed. Anyway, apart from that we’re engaging with the interesting things about her, which from past experience is not something to take for granted.
The Doctor and Fitz fare less well. The Doctor is a bit of a rough sketch in this one, with a “goldfish attention span and constant energy”. Between his not-trying-all-that-hard subterfuge with the blobby Time Lords and his getting caught up in a lot of TARDIS action near the end, he has a tendency to fade into the background of the plot, at one point ceding what feels like Doctorly action to that guy in 1999. (He even has an equivalent sonic screwdriver!) I liked the bit where he sympathised with the terrible evil thing and considered going back to rescue it one day.
Fitz has never been friendlier or, in all honesty, less useful to the plot than he is here, but he’s a delight to be around; highlights of his activities include an arguably sexual encounter with an Elder Thing-disguised Celesti, because Fitz gonna Fitz. He’s mostly here to bluntly and repeatedly ask what’s going on, which feels like something I ought to be critical of but to be honest this time I was relieved to hear it. Even the Doctor at one point remarks that “It’s all so confusing I could do with explaining it to myself.”
I wonder if the mixture of ambitious-bordering-on-convoluted scheming and the occasional simple restating of facts is a hint of the cowriting process between Bucher-Jones and Clapham. See also, the helpful (I mean it!) recaps of how Fitz became Kode and then Fitz again, what Compassion’s deal is, and even a whiff of how The Blue Angel came about and where it’s left the Doctor emotionally. Maybe that was all done by one author or the other or both, but I think in mixing it up The Taking Of Planet 5 keeps just on the right side of confusing. It doesn’t help with the general sprawling state of it as a piece of drama, but at least you’ve got plenty to think about.
A last thing to mention would be the general jolly nerdiness of the thing. Obviously there’s the geeking out about Lovecraft, which is mostly lost on me as I haven’t read any. (See also White Darkness.) There’s an obvious debt to a certain 70s story, although as mentioned that’s not handled all that well. The stuff I liked most was the sprinkling of references, something I’m normally immune to but in the context of a big complicated event, and with the general sense of humour employed, it adds a certain levity to an at times stodgy book. There are nods to things as disparate as zygma energy, Karfel, Morlox, Stangmoor Prison, Raston Warrior Robots, Ogri and D-Mat guns. There’s a pre-emptive puncturing of the mysterious Enemy of the Time Lords: “They’ll probably be terribly disappointing. With my luck it’ll turn out to be Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, with a big stick.” The plot manages to explain (although did it need explaining?) the way the people on Delphon communicate with their eyebrows, as well as the way the Tersuruns communicate with a less subtle bodily function. (The Curse Of Fatal Death is canon!) There are oodles of references to looms, helping to settle that debate, as well as a brief mention of Tehke, a deity who’d turn up in the final New Adventure co-written by Mark Clapham two months after this. (Nice to see a bit of Virgin cross-promotion. All friends here.) And on the less meta or piss-taking side there’s also the casual suggestion that the Doctor’s poor piloting in the early years of Who was a deliberate effort to avoid the Time Lords. Head-canon for sure, but I’ll allow it.
I think all of that mild indulgence helped ground The Taking Of Planet 5 for me during its bigger indulgences — a knowingly fuzzy plot with tons of moving parts that all leans on Importance To The Arc(s). I was rarely hooked but I made it through quite painlessly. Saying that, this now makes three Important And Slightly Difficult books in a row. I appreciate the jump in ambition but it’s starting to get a bit stuffy in here. Does every book need to be a massive mind-boggler?
5/10
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