#28
Last of the Gaderene
By Mark Gatiss
Mark Gatiss returns to Doctor Who with a trip down memory lane, if you can believe such a thing.
Last Of The Gaderene isn’t a literal examination of nostalgia like Nightshade, but it’s just as baked in the stuff, from the use of a favourite era (Gatiss loved the Planet Of The Daleks novelisation so much that he read the BBC audiobook) to the ease with which his characters reflect on their pasts. The sleepy village of Culverton is filled with people such as the commander of the aerodrome, the local police chief or an old war hero who all tend to drift off mentally and think of other times. Jobey Packer, a fabulously-named old sign-painter, thinks of his hometown whenever he travels — another way of yearning for something familiar.
There’s something of a theme here, with unfriendly interlopers encroaching on a peaceful little town and threatening to modernise it into something unrecognisable and dangerous. (The townspeople begin to lose their identities as well.) But I’m reaching a bit, as this really isn’t another Nightshade in story terms — it’s not doing that much with its ideas. I just think “reflecting on the past” is something Gatiss is good at as a writer, and he uses it mostly justifiably to ground his characters and then let rip with often sumptuous, emotionally-tinged prose. Besides, the truest sense of nostalgia here comes from the Doctor Who era setting. (I know that’s not a reach because Gatiss waxes lyrical about it in the book’s introduction.)
The Third Doctor, Jo, the Brigadier and UNIT hold a special place in fandom’s affections, particularly for those who grew up during this unusual part of the show’s history. Last Of The Gaderene offers something of a victory lap for all that, ticking off various elements that ring true of the period. It’s a smart choice for one of those infrequent modern-day reprints, offering an uncanny example of what new fans might expect from old episodes. For better or worse, you could imagine this being transmitted in 1973 — or perhaps more specifically you could imagine it as a novelisation around that time. One of the chapters, in true Terrance Dicks fashion, is titled Escape To Danger.
Culverton’s long-disused airbase has been bought up by a mysterious company. They promptly start making a lot of mess and upsetting the locals, mostly at night. People are also beginning to act strangely and there appears to be a monster in the marshes. Much of this gets back to the Brigadier via his old friend, ex-Spitfire pilot Alec Whistler. After returning from a hair-raising Metebelis 3-esque adventure on a planet enduring a civil war, the Doctor (though initially reluctant) agrees to go and investigate. He eventually discovers that the Gaderene are fleeing their dying home-world and have, regrettably, settled on Earth as their replacement — and its inhabitants as their hosts.
If you like Pertwee reference points, tuck in. We’ve got highly placed duplicates (Spearhead From Space), alien parasites (The Mind Of Evil), monsters who just want a new home (Doctor Who And The Silurians), shifty companies (Colony In Space), a hard cut to the Doctor alone on an alien world (The Green Death), the Doctor showing a sudden interest in helping (The Dæmons), the Doctor getting into fights that probably would have required Terry Walsh (too many to mention but let’s go with The Curse Of Peladon), the Doctor piloting an outrageous vehicle (got to be Planet Of The Spiders) and to cap it off, a villain reveal that would have been somewhat of an exercise in nostalgia even in 1973.
There’s not a lot that feels new here, but to be honest that doesn’t feel like the assignment anyway. There are a few diversions of sorts. The nature of the Gaderene threat means that it’s not as simple as letting off five rounds rapid; you don’t want to hurt the approaching baddies because they’re real people underneath. This doesn’t exactly lead to a change in tactics for the Brigadier however, as the Doctor finds a way to incapacitate the brainwashed denizens before the Brig has to carry out Plan B. There’s another, slightly different Silurian-esque dilemma of an alien race that just wants to survive — although handy for us, they’re so destructive about it and they have so little time left that the Doctor doesn’t need to work out an alternative path for them. (You could do more with this and make it all a bit more Mac Hulke, but I suspect it’s not that sort of UNIT story — we’re not here to boo the military this week, it would defeat the point of being pleased to see them.)
There’s also that early scene of the Doctor finishing off his heroics on the planet Xanthos, which interestingly has occurred without Jo. Is this anything? She was very keen to get home at the end of the preceding story (Planet Of The Daleks, naturally) so perhaps she would have opted out of another TARDIS trip right away, and she does so explicitly in the next story (The Green Death), but given her reaction here of thinking that he might be gone forever, and briefly considering a life after UNIT with some degree of worry, I doubt she would have said no. The whole sequence mostly serves to provide an example of what not to do during a climactic scene later on; otherwise, it might have been an amusing way to make the book a bit longer. (It’s perhaps also meant to nudge us towards Jo’s impending departure, along with the moment where she rankles at being called “a good girl”, but it’s pretty thin stuff all the same. Dancing The Code has nothing to worry about.)
One reference-y area where Last Of The Gaderene perhaps needn’t have bothered is the Master. Turning up without much fanfare on P176, and then not making himself known to the Doctor and co. for another 90-odd pages (to the justifiably unimpressed response of “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in”), he continues his earlier tradition of feeling a bit shoehorned into somebody else’s plot. It’s perhaps significant that this is happening after Frontier In Space, making Last Of The Gaderene canonically the last Roger Delgado Pertwee-era story. It’s not much of a salve if you found Frontier disappointing, however; he turns up late, the two nemeses don’t spar very much, and there are no references to the fact that, the last time the Master saw him, the Doctor was apparently dying. The Master then has the kind of “wait, did he just die?” exit from this story that would quickly become tiresome in the 1980s, which becomes another thing not really commented upon here. He mostly seems to be here just to be here, perhaps to make it all seem a bit more like the more UNIT-heavy Season 8, back when he was in it more or less every week. It’s a shame when The Face Of The Enemy previously made such a satisfying meal of the character.
It’s perhaps easier to discuss the more unsatisfying specifics of Last Of The Gaderene because the positives are more general. It is, once again, very well written by Gatiss. He describes a ladybird as “Bright against his skin like a bead of blood.” He tells us that when the TARDIS is gone, “the empty space yawned like the dusty rectangle left after a painting has been removed from a wall.” He describes “Mr and Mrs Neesham’s little green sweet shop, tucked between two cottages like the filling in a sandwich.” It’s easy to imagine Gatiss packing in the acting and screenwriting lark to write jolly children’s books instead.
There are also moments of clever economy, like following up a meeting between the police chief and the villain by having another character notice “what he was sure was a police whistle, sounding feebly from somewhere inside,” which tells us more or less what happened there. And he keeps up a terrific pace — although, by contrast, not a lot seems to happen for much of it, as we slowly get all our key ingredients into place. A much built-up summer fete is important in the end, but hardly the set piece you might have been expecting. The chapters whiz by anyway.
I wonder if, on some level, Last Of The Gaderene really belonged to the Target range, and what we’ve got here is inevitably a bit longer than the best version of itself. Or perhaps that’s carrying the idea of Gatiss and his reverence for Terrance Dicks a bit too far. What it does well is embody an era of television. I don’t think it engages with its ideas in the most interesting ways possible, but it is nonetheless one of those books where you sense that it was all intentional: it’s here to make a certain impression and then speed off triumphant, probably in a Spitfire. If you yearn for teatime in 1973, your dinner’s ready.
6/10
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