Doctor Who: The BBC Books #73 – The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#36

The Ancestor Cell

By Peter Anghelides & Stephen Cole

Here we are then: the season finale of The Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s all been building to this. Allegedly.

I’ve no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I’d like to think they at least asked Lawrence Miles to come and put his toys away.* The Ancestor Cell is all about patented Miles stuff like Faction Paradox, the unnamed Time Lord “Enemy”, the bottle universe, human TARDISes, Fitz’s other life as “Father Kreiner”, the Doctor’s premature death on Dust, his infection with a slow-acting Faction disease, and then the ensuing interference (!) in all his intervening lives. There’s also the Compassion-vs-the Time Lords stuff, but then that’s clearly based on Miles’s mythology as well. It just feels weird to outsource a book that’s so obviously entrenched in one guy’s ideas.

Hey ho. For whatever reason, Miles didn’t come back. (Perhaps, not unreasonably, “tie up all your plot threads and then don’t start any new ones” didn’t sound like fun.) The thing to do now is to engage with what The Ancestor Cell is, or at the very least how Anghelides and Cole manage in Miles’s stead.

To answer both questions: not great.

It certainly hits the ground running, picking up the “Time Lords chasing after Compassion” thing straight away. When the Doctor and co. narrowly evade capture they encounter a new threat, the Edifice: an enormous plant-like construction made of bone, orbiting Gallifrey. (It’s the thing on the front cover.) The Time Lords are worried about it; Faction Paradox, who have impressionable young agents on Gallifrey, are curious about it. There’s a good chance this will be the thing to finally ignite the conflict between the two forces.

The book continues from there at quite a lick, with lots of action crammed into short chapters. (46 of them!) It’s highly readable, and I wouldn’t describe it as boring as such, at least not in a page-turning sense. But the actual content of the book is rather dull, since we are so obviously here just to put toys away — as quickly as possible in some cases.

A lot of that comes down to how the EDAs have handled their story arc(s). For a positive example, look — surprisingly enough — at Sam Jones. Yes, that character was riddled with shortcomings, but the actual arc was introduced by Miles, kept afloat by Blum, Orman and Leonard, and then resolved by Miles. There weren’t a lot of plates to spin, so in hindsight it didn’t necessarily matter that the intervening authors weren’t doing much more than mention the arc. (If we were lucky.)

Now go back to that list in the second paragraph. There’s a lot more in the pot this time. We’ve at least had intervening novels that added to the mythology — The Blue Angel, The Taking Of Planet 5 and The Shadows Of Avalon. But the existing ideas haven’t got much further along in the meantime.

Take the Big Two from Interference: the Third Doctor’s immediate future being in flux because of his early death, and the Eighth Doctor slowly becoming a Faction agent. These seemed at the time to be major turning points for BBC Books, and yet somehow The Ancestor Cell has to resolve both of them from a standing start. Why? From interviews it seemed that the whole point of that Third Doctor thing was to introduce some uncertainty into the PDAs. Why even bother, if none of the PDA authors are going to run with it? Also — and look, I know how snotty it is to armchair-criticise a series like this, but how hard would it have been to at least hint that the Eighth Doctor was gradually changing for the worse, or even that the trigger was imminent? Multiple authors could have worked that in!

There’s inevitably a sense of anticlimax when you do all of this stuff at once. In order then: it turns out the Doctor’s TARDIS isn’t dead after all (another lacklustre arc thread incidentally), but it is in a bad way. One of the reasons for this is the Dust fiasco causing it to go mad keeping the Doctor’s right and wrong timelines separate, but it has done that successfully. So in essence, the PDA “interference” could never have happened anyway. Terrific. Toy put away. Then we have the Eighth Doctor’s transformation, which we’ve heard precisely zip about since it was introduced. This week, Faction Paradox turn up and start the countdown. Well hey, at least they didn’t forget about it altogether! The Doctor spends a chunk of the book being told he definitely, positively, almost certainly is going to turn into a Faction guy… any minute now. Just you wait. It’s terribly exciting. Much convince. Many worth the wait. Seriously though: that’s not a story arc. It’s a pause button.

You’ve almost got to admire the amount of stuff The Ancestor Cell tries to cram in, but rarely does it tie something off in a way that works. I’m not convinced that we even needed to resolve Faction Paradox and the Enemy, seemingly for good, right this second. Yes, Justin Richards wanted a clean slate, but you could have just gone easy on these things until someone had a good idea about what to do with them later. Instead we dump the parts like an airplane in trouble.

Who are the Enemy? They must be pretty bad to be worth the appalling behaviour of Romana and her agents in response; they must also be pretty impressive to be worth pointing at Faction Paradox and saying, you think those guys are bad? The Ancestor Cell includes a somewhat convoluted Faction plan to resurrect an obscure Time Lord President, Greyjan, who happens to have theories about the Enemy. These theories are then presented as fact. In essence, the Enemy are some sort of offshoot of the oldest life in the universe, and the Time Lords’ method of travel has upset them. You may or may not find that satisfying as a concept; in either case, the Enemy still aren’t actually in the book, so this (like the Doctor’s feeble Faction conditioning) just feels like tell-don’t-show. The Enemy are lamely described, their influence is shown, and then we’re probably never going to hear about them again. Great. What a pay-off. Incidentally, I’ve no idea how a human TARDIS like Compassion would have helped that particular war effort in the slightest.

Then we have Faction Paradox. Honestly, this might be worse. Getting them right is clearly difficult: Miles wasn’t happy with the way they were handled in Unnatural History, but at least that was colourful and demonstrated how strange they could be. Faction Paradox in The Ancestor Cell are mostly represented by a few bumbling Time Lord kids trying to impress girls, plus a couple of grinning megalomaniacs who want to destroy all the things. They barely demonstrate their awesome powers and freaky practices, and in such small numbers it becomes a bit implausible that they can hold so much sway over the Time Lords in the first place. (Probably the only reason that works is the thoroughly unimpressive and human-seeming Gallifrey we have in the book; grandeur and brilliance are largely missing there too, and all the people are small and malleable. The only one acting like she owns the place is Romana.) Their constant references to the Doctor’s impending transformation aren’t very convincing, since he’s so good at staving it off. Then in the end they’re just swept away, presumably forever. If Miles disliked Blum & Orman’s effort then he’d surely hate this.

Probably the only Faction point of interest here is Father Kreiner, since his existence speaks to actual character development: “our” Fitz is a copy, this embittered Faction guy is the original, and he’s desperate to avenge himself against the Doctor. There’s even a bit of a broader theme here, with the Doctor’s actions having consequences against other people. Fitz (both) has reason to worry about that; there’s a pseudo-companion called Mali who wobbles in and out of his orbit; most of the deaths on board the Edifice can be traced back to the Doctor; and in the end he makes a decision that destroys Gallifrey, presumably killing Romana, Mali and millions more. Probably the best scene in the book is a quiet reckoning between Kreiner and the Doctor, the old man begging the Time Lord to break the timelines to fix his life, and the Doctor refusing. Kreiner’s story is resolved inasmuch as he begins to mellow, but then it’s suddenly over in the most offhand and unsatisfying way, making you wonder (not for the first time) why we’re even bothering with this stuff.

The Faction, in their race to be written out, do at least show us something new: we establish who Grandfather Paradox is. The trouble with that is twofold: no one actually asked, so it’s not a satisfying reveal to suddenly get the answer, and the answer we do get (you can probably guess) just feels like a boring repeat of Kreiner’s story, underlined by Kreiner himself being there. It seems to be an effort to give the Doctor a Big Bad to face off against at the climax, but that feels like a misunderstanding of the kind of threat they represent. The Ancestor Cell just doesn’t seem very engaged with their mythology, and then — or so it seems anyway — they’re over and done with. What a waste.

It’s tempting to focus on the big arc stuff because all the other stuff is a bit pedestrian. The Edifice could be an interesting idea, with a suggestion that it is “affecting causality” — but a suggestion is all we get (tell don’t show, again) leaving us with a big boney spaceship full of killer spiders. That isn’t really anything to write home about — literally, with descriptions such as “The gross, contorted, ivory bodies of the huge spiders” followed on the same page by “Their gross bodies cast huge shadows.” Scintillating.

The supporting characters are largely fodder, to be dispensed with for quick shocks, but even before that they seem unusually ordinary for Time Lords, with altogether dull aspirations like impressing pretty girls. (This must be at least partly deliberate as — unlike Virgin canon — these Time Lords are explicitly made up of parents and children. A line has been drawn there.) Romana continues to be thoroughly awful, which is at least consistent from The Shadows Of Avalon, but the suggestion that her heroism at the end of Warriors’ Gate somehow led to her current fanaticism is a ridiculous reach. Show your working.

It’s a fairly busy story for Fitz — as in “our” one — and he does get some fun interactions with Romana, bringing out her less awful side. He has some rather rudimentary internal back and forth about whether he can trust the Doctor, but at least it’s there. Otherwise he’s very “factory settings” in this one, always dispensing a quip, being inappropriately horny or both. (To be honest the horniness is getting a bit embarrassing. Yes, Fitz is a somewhat embarrassing character on purpose, but one or both authors still took time out to write that he was looking up Romana’s skirt and/or admiring her “shapely backside.” After a certain point the authors themselves [as in all the EDA ones, but also Anghelides/Cole here] become the creepy ones, just as the reader becomes more and more aware that BBC Books is mostly run by men. It risks reading as legit lechy.)

It’s a fairly significant book for Compassion, being — for all intents and purposes — the last time we’ll see her. The question of whether the Time Lords will break and control her is often the focus, but there never seems to be much actual debate about that; Romana and co. are implacable until the Doctor is able to offer alternative solutions, and when those fall through they’re right back to implacable again. Compassion sits out a good chunk of the book while she recovers from an early attack, and then she flits between Time Lord and Faction control. It’s commendable that at no point does she stop demanding her own agency — she’s a Doctor Who companion with no particular fealty to the Doctor, she will seize every opportunity to leave everyone else to deal with the mess. However, stuffing her into the background makes her demand a bit more meta than it ought to be. She escapes in the end, arguably kidnapping a Time Lord of her own to begin some new adventures. The optics of that are debatable (does he particularly want this?) but it’s still nice that our last sight of Compassion is her in control at last, mirroring the Doctor’s path.

It’s a shame, obviously, that her story had to end. Compassion clearly represented an effort to do something different. I suppose it’s at least themed that she wouldn’t want to be tied down longer than necessary. As an arc, it’s been eventful but wonky; yet again BBC Books can’t seem to get all their authors singing from the same hymn-sheet, so you end up with books like The Space Age which barely wrote for her at all, or The Banquo Legacy which contorted to write her as someone else. The excitement of Time Lords in pursuit, much like those leftovers from Interference, could have been a lot more exciting than what we got. I guess all that’s left is to hope that, as and when Justin Richards has a story arc, he has more success encouraging his authors to contribute. (Based on the arc that immediately follows this one, the plan is apparently to force them!)

The last and I suppose biggest piece of The Ancestor Cell is the Doctor, who must be made ready for his next phase of adventures. It’s a shame that more isn’t made about his relationship with Compassion, since that relationship has presumably been the cornerstone of the arc; it would have been nice to afford him a bit of closure there, as even Kreiner managed. He doesn’t see properly eye to eye with Romana either before the end when she, presumably, dies along with everyone else. And about that: it’s a curious choice to pair the Doctor’s imminent soft reboot (amnesia again — sigh — with a convalescence period on Earth while the TARDIS repairs itself) with the destruction of his homeworld. Yes, he’s got a clean slate, but (forgive me) at what cost? Is the deliberate genocide of his own people not going to bother him at all once he remembers it? This might just be the new series talking, but surely this will cause the occasional sleepless night? If the intention wasn’t to create more angst then this is overkill.

It’s a decent showing for the character, particularly in his too few scenes with Kreiner, but the overall structure of The Ancestor Cell inhibits some of his usual flourishes. It’s an enormously stand-around-and-talk sort of a book, only changing up the location from Gallifrey to TARDIS to Edifice and so on. At times it’s about as exciting as Arc Of Infinity, which is presumably where the generous action scenes and (I can’t stress this enough) short chapters come in. The Doctor at least manages to be an unknown element for all sides of the conflict, which is a pretty good summation of the character, even if there is no opportunity to reflect on what it has all meant to him. It also helps that Gallifrey is kept as an uncomfortable, hostile place even for the Doctor, since the intention is to do away with it at the end. I doubt you’ll miss the place. (It’s worth noting that there is some actual show-don’t-tell here — I know! Fetch the bunting! — as the prose carefully hints that the “nine Gallifreys” are slowly whittling down to one, and only the reader and Fitz are aware of this. See, they can do it.)

Despite a few bright spots — the pace, some of the writing for the regulars — it’s likely the chief takeaway here will be the sheer frenzied continuity of the thing. It’s very apparent that The Ancestor Cell is here to do a job, with little room for an actual novel to live and breathe underneath. In doing so, The Ancestor Cell shows up the flaws of the series leading up to it. I doubt even Lawrence Miles could have made it work, since he’d also have to reckon with the general lack of preparedness in the earlier books. It’s frustrating, because the second act of the EDAs has only taken bigger risks, displayed more imagination. The trouble is, your story arc’s only as good as the effort you’re able to commit to it, and The Ancestor Cell is where you end up when that hasn’t been good enough.

5/10

*Update: they didn’t. Sounds like they didn’t fancy the editorial back and forth that would have come with it. HEAVIEST SIGH.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #58 – Frontier Worlds by Peter Anghelides

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#29

Frontier Worlds

By Peter Anghelides

We’re now a few books into the new normal, or “minus Sam/plus Compassion”, but there hasn’t been much in the way of normality. After the pyrotechnics of Interference came the highly experimental The Blue Angel; after that came a lot of lore-heavy histrionics in The Taking Of Planet 5. I don’t object to books taking big swings, but doing it three books in a row has been a bit exhausting.

Enter Frontier Worlds which — phew — is more down to Earth. The Doctor, Fitz and Compassion are investigating strange experiments on the planet Drebnar, although that’s secondary to the planet having dragged the TARDIS down there. It’s one of those that starts in media res, and it’s one of those where they’ve gone undercover with jobs and everything. I love that feeling of really mucking in and investigating; the New Adventures crushed this when Roz and Chris were around, and Fitz and Compassion make a similar impact here.

Fitz, as “Frank Sinatra”, has an office job and all the internecine annoyances that come with it; he also has a steady girlfriend, Alura. Compassion, or “Nancy Sinatra” (guess who chose the names) is going even more undercover as a somewhat bubbly office girl, keeping a few flirtations on the boil just to find out more. The Doctor wants the two of them working together; it would be beneficial, perhaps especially for Compassion, for these guys to get along.

Right away this is my favourite thing about Frontier Worlds. Now, I think it’s unfair to consider the absence of certain “Doctor Who companion” beats as a failing; the more of these I read, the more I realise that stuff like “spend an episode bedding in the new companion” is mostly a new series invention, and it’s wrong to take it as read that it will be in old books or episodes. Nevertheless, we haven’t had this stuff with Compassion, who joined the TARDIS more or less between books, and I am reading these books with a post-new series brain, so it’s just doomed to irritate me a bit when it’s not there. What can you do. (You’d think I would learn, since we also skipped it with Fitz. And as for Sam…!)

Whatever the reason behind it, Frontier Worlds seems to recognise the room for improvement here, so it spends time on the leads. We get gobs of first person prose with Fitz, which is immediately the sort of no-brainer creative decision that ought to become standard operating procedure. He’s disarming, hilarious and vulnerable, buoying the text nicely where otherwise it might threaten to become procedural. When things with Alura take a shocking turn his cheerful outlook is then doused in cold water, leading to at least one act of, if not revenge, at least a brutal act of not trying terribly hard to help the guilty party. “Fitz suffers” already feels like an EDA trope, but I think this book handles it well, using it to show another side of the character.

We don’t get that close to Compassion — that’s sort of her thing — but after highlighting some of her physical peculiarities in The Taking Of Planet 5, here we focus on her emotional ones, the ways in which she does or (mostly) doesn’t relate to those around her. Some of the best stuff here is a now combat-hardened Compassion reassuring Fitz of his worth in this team. Describing a glance at the stars: “I’d see clouds and stars and vapour trails. The Doctor would see scientific classifications and animal shapes. You’d probably point out that the only reason we could see those things while we were staring up at the sky was because someone else had stolen our tent during the night.” That later turns out to have been a knowing pep talk and not wholly sincere, and that speaks to how absent Compassion is from Fitz’s idea of normal — but it still makes clear that she can, albeit academically, care about her friends. She overall seems to regard this business as a mission to execute. That’s not a new archetype for a companion; her ease with violence puts her in a similar bracket to Leela, for one. But it’s an approach that works, and keeps things moving.

I also liked the way Anghelides made use of their shared physical history. Both Compassion and Fitz have been replicated by the Remote; neither is the person they once were, with Fitz benefiting from a more nuanced set of memories stored in the TARDIS to make him whole again, or at least as close as he can get. Anghelides is right to underline this as a neurosis for Fitz; can he ever be sure who he is? Compassion, having not undergone such a drastic flip-flop, naturally feels more comfortable with her “remembered” self, and rejects the Doctor’s insinuation that she could grow more into the shape of the person she was.

All of this dovetails nicely with the plot, which concerns an alien method of “regeneration” with wildly dangerous side-effects that can ostensibly extend your lifespan. The question of whether the people undergoing these changes are really still themselves afterwards is an effective parallel for the Remote history of Compassion and Fitz (whose shared, too-perfect DNA also figures into the plot), not to mention the Doctor, who knows a thing or two about the Ship of Theseus/Trigger’s broom.

Perhaps that underlying echo explains his rather dishevelled characterisation in Frontier Worlds. Early on Fitz clocks that he “wasn’t like a kid any more”, although admittedly that was following a death-defying fall down a snowy cliff and chase that has left him ragged and bloodied. The Doctor in this seems heightened and vulnerable, just as Fitz does, at one point coming close to a painful vivisection and only escaping thanks to bluffing for time and rushing his aggressor at the last moment. His best laid plans don’t end up happening thanks to Fitz and Compassion’s imperfection, but he manages to steer things right anyway. The whole network of trying to stay one step ahead and then having to wing it speaks, hopefully, to the sort of dynamic we can expect from these three: smart and competent, but woolly enough to remain interesting.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the focus on character dynamics comes at the expense of the plot. That’s not me segueing into “the plot’s bad actually” — more an acknowledgement that there isn’t a huge amount of it here. Sometimes that’s fine. Frontier Worlds is definitely an example of having just enough plot to hang the cool stuff on. And there’s plenty of that, with the aforementioned death-defying jump being just the first example. There’s a lot of memorable action and violence in this, from body horror (characters literally shedding their skins to be reborn) to more general horror (a man walking into an industrial shredder; later, a man falling into a combine harvester) to action movie fare (snow bike chases; a struggle to escape a cable car in a lightning storm). As unpleasant as it can be, it’s brilliantly clear to visualise, particularly where a lot of it takes place in snowy vistas. I would bet David A. McIntee enjoyed reading this one.

For all of that though, there are effective smaller moments. There’s the Doctor’s bookended visits to a man with no short term memory, trapped in a sense of panic whenever his wife leaves the room; Fitz’s inability to break it off with Alura for the sake of the mission, and then his heartbreak when that decision is taken away from him; and there’s all the silly ground-level annoyance of office politics, with “Frank” and “Nancy” navigating local irritants and arranging business deals. You get a convincing sense of how well they’ve integrated here, and at least some sense of how an office job on Drebnar differs from one on Earth.

I’d be lying if I said I raced through Frontier Worlds, but I suspect that’s more on my touch-and-go attention span than the book itself. This is a decent (if trad) story very competently told, heightened when it needs to be and making the most of its lower stakes by making the regular characters the stars. I doubt it dazzles many readers as much as the preceding books, but for whatever reason it’s right up my alley.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #13 – Kursaal by Peter Anghelides

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#7
Kursaal
By Peter Anghelides

New writer alert!

Oh all right, new novelist then. Peter Anghelides (it’s pronounced ann-ja-LEE-deez) had by this point written two short stories for the Decalogs. I loved his first one and didn’t think the second one worked at all, so I had no idea what I’d make of Kursaal — a novel that, on the whole, no one talks about. Maybe that’s ominous, but I don’t care. I love not knowing what’s about to happen.

Famous last words, I suppose, as Kursaal is not what you’d call a mystery novel. We open on an archaeological dig (which immediately triggered my Bernice Summerfield sensor — alas, no sparkling archaeologist in this one) and we are promptly confronted with a series of strange animal attacks. What could be happening there, then? And, I mean… what with the front cover, it’s probably werewolves, isn’t it? Knowing that is not exactly a mark against the book — I’m guessing the cover design was not the author’s edict, see also The Bodysnatchers, and anyway it’s a very nice cover design — but it’s perhaps an unfortunate choice when it takes around 100 pages for the reader to get to the moon-howlin’ monsters.

Still, there is something to be said for delayed gratification. And there I was saying how nice it was to be surprised: it’s surprising that Kursaal is for a large part more concerned with the development of, and environmentalist activism in defence of the planet Saturnia Regna, which will eventually host the theme park/world of the book’s title. It is admittedly a little awkward that the Doctor has come here on purpose, albeit a few years early, as that straight away tells us that the environmentalists will not stop it being developed. But nobody joins those dots, so hey ho. (I suppose it would just have made things uselessly awkward.) Kursaal, as it’s probably easier to call this planet, is somewhat interesting to behold, with its giant terrifying bulldozers moving it all into shape, and its occasional vertical walls of water. You do however get the impression that it will be more interesting when it’s finished.

The Doctor and Sam quickly find themselves impersonating police pathologists, which earns the suspicion and enmity of chief of police Kadijk. Sam then unwittingly falls in with the “eco-terrorists” (as per the blurb), who it turns out aren’t as bad as all that. The grizzled, zero-tempered policeman seems irritatingly cocksure about the Doctor being the terrorists’ leader; we frequently seem to be in his orbit hearing about that. The book mines more tension from Kadijk pushing back against these guys than it does from what happened to those distinctly dog-eared corpses, at least at first.

But the penny eventually drops: lo and behold, it’s werewolves. Or rather it’s the Jax, a species who procreate by infecting other life and turning it into them. Strangely most of their converts start off dead. (Are the converted Jax now properly alive, or is there a shelf-life? If they need converts then what’s with the crazed killer instinct? Too much damage to the body means no new Jax, surely.) Once that’s out there Kursaal becomes a fairly blood-soaked affair, which to be fair is often the assignment for a good horror story. But this one has surprisingly little to say for itself beyond that.

The Jax are mostly mute; they only seem to get one “I was converted and all I got was this lousy flesh wound” spokesman at a time, which leads to a lot of grandstanding baddie dialogue when there’s anything to say. So the Jax are baddies, then: the Doctor calls them “vile” and seems keen to rescue their converts. That makes things a little bleak for our eco-terrorists, perhaps (trying not to psychoanalyse) saying something about the misguided motives of such individuals? But then the cops who are out to stop them are so heavy handed that lives are lost in the process, so I dunno if any of this is anything. It feels to me like if you’re going to do a story about indigenous werewolves, it is legitimately a take to go somewhere other than “it’s important to respect nature”, but in execution it’s quite hollow. The Jax themselves are literally drones; copy and paste horrors. By their nature they skip what is generally agreed to be The Good Bit of a werewolf story, the fear of your own actions, the horror at your own transformation. What a shame. Even the talky ones are just full on Bad Guys, giving it the old “how can you stop me now, Doctor?”

Once our heroes/that bloody policeman track down and deal with the head Jax, the story takes another surprising turn, this one really quite massively surprising with bells on: with a hundred pages still to go, the Doctor and Sam (having barely escaped with their lives) bugger off in the TARDIS. Yes, they do that in every story, but the dust hasn’t even begun to settle on this one when the duo catapults fifteen years ahead to enjoy Kursaal at its most (or, at all) relaxing. Canny readers might twirl their moustaches at all the remaining pages, and sure enough something is afoot that you might have spotted glinting in Sam’s eyes. And if you spotted it, pat yourself on the back, because at least someone did. (Looking at you, Doctor.)

The last act of Kursaal should get kudos for unexpectedly diving off to the side, but doing so creates a few problems. First, the unmistakable feeling that you have actually hit reset and moved on gives you, or me anyway, the feeling that after all that effort the first act doesn’t actually amount to very much. Most of the characters are dead and only one or two of them were likeable, whilst any plotty revelations not explicitly to do with the Jax already feel like optional footnotes. Second, the actual story choice being made here is not one I liked.

Spoilers, I guess.

…

Still here? Okay then: Sam is infected, and she’s still alive, so she’s going to be the new President of Running Around Savaging People Inc. The transformation happens almost entirely offscreen — again we’re shying away from The Good Bit Of A Werewolf Story, grr — and when it’s done, she’s a bad guy now. Not conflicted, not here’s-her-inner-monologue-trapped-inside, just our A-villain to ride out the novel. We know how Sam feels about killing; we are reminded twice of her guilt around the events of Genocide. So the casual fact that Jax-Sam must have killed a few people ought to be a loaded gun for storytelling. But no: when (probably not a spoiler!) Sam recovers she doesn’t remember any of it, and the Doctor doesn’t tell her. Is that one in the bank for a later book? Quite possibly. (Look at the use we’re still getting out of the Tractites.) But for all the good it does Kursaal, the actual book doing the actual work here, Sam might as well have body-swapped with someone else for all of that. Loaded gun? With blanks, maybe.

Third (remember we’re counting off here), the Doctor. I know good characterisation is partly subjective, but I mean… he should have figured this out, right? That just feels right to me. He takes Sam away so suddenly to keep an eye on her, surely. But… no, he really just oopsied there, and his decision to visit Kursaal a decade and a bit later results in more deaths, just as his decision to leave Kursaal in relative disarray a decade and a bit earlier will have done. So what’s all that about?

Sadly, I’m not convinced the Doctor in this has great depths. When we meet our two heroes they’re pretty much on autopilot, Sam griping and moaning like a committed Tegan Jovanka cosplayer, the Doctor blandly not noticing or minding any of that. I’m fairly certain this is not the first EDA to go with this kind of default Doctor-companion dynamic, but I still hate it. (Especially the grumbling companion. You’re in space! And the previous book established that you are preternaturally disposed to want to do this sort of thing!) When it comes to the Jax, the Doctor can’t stop most of the carnage; when Sam goes bad, he is totally unable to spot it and then, for a bit, unwilling; by the end, despite half-heartedly floating the idea of rescuing untold numbers of semi-converted Jax, he’s thwarted in that too. He does not cut an impressive figure, and worst of all, he runs a genuine risk of not brightening up a scene when he appears in it.

Kursaal’s final surprise is more a sense of disbelief. You get about five pages to decompress, with Sam barely needing that much thanks to some memory hokey-cokey. The last chance to really say something is given over to a monster epilogue. (Curiously, after the acknowledgements.) I have no idea if Kursaal will warrant Genocide-esque follow-ups in later books. I suppose it works out so that it doesn’t need to, but then, why write this stuff for these characters in the first place if it’s not for a purpose?

It’s not what I’d call a bad book. I can’t say the writing really bowled me over one way or the other; the only tic I noticed was how the dialogue and narrative seem strangely keen to avoid swear words, with an awful lot of “Jeez!”, a guy who says “Oh, poo” all the time, and Sam apologising for the bad language just because she exclaimed “Gordon Christ!” a second time. (This was apparently an editorial decision from BBC Books and not Anghelides, which makes sense given how jarring it is. It sort of makes sense not to want these things getting all sweary since they’re aimed at kids. On the other hand though, Kursaal is still a werewolf novel with blood, body parts and sick everywhere. Make it make sense.) As a story it’s the kind of gruesome yarn you might want, or at least expect from Doctor Who tie-in books that exist outside the watershed, and I can’t fault it on readability, or its occasional genuinely unusual choices. But there were opportunities here to underline what’s happening and speak to the characters, and these passed by unnoticed, so Kursaal will likely end up doing much the same in my memories.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #102 – Decalog 4: Re: Generations edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Decalog 4: Re: Generations
Edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

One of the less celebrated parts of Virgin canon is the Decalog series, and now it continues (along with the New Adventures) without Doctor Who. You’d be forgiven for thinking the linking theme here is “The Doctor doesn’t turn up,” but it’s the Forrester family throughout history. (I love the title.) Honestly, that’s one of their better ideas. I’ve no idea how it’ll go.

*

Second Chances
By Alex Stewart

Sort of a murder mystery on a space station featuring Jack Forrester, an affable guy who mentally pilots a maintenance drone outside the station, and may or may not be dead. The main drive is not hunting the killer but settling on a future for Jack. This has some great sci-fi ideas like bouncing your consciousness into random technology (possibly inspired by the baddie in Original Sin?), and some good writing as a character does not initially realise they’ve died. It’s not exactly spectacular and there’s a bit too much description of people’s speaking tone, but it works very well as a short story.

*

No One Goes to Halfway There
By Kate Orman

Oh snap, Kate Orman’s in this? Here we find another Forrester working a somewhat menial space job, only Theresa Forrester feels a lot more like Roz, being abrasive to co-workers and rejecting her family’s influence and wishes. (If you really wanted to you could draw a parallel between the Forrester dynasty, Roz’s/Theresa’s friction with them, and the Doctor’s rejection of the Cousins in Lungbarrow.) Theresa has few close relationships but she is fond of another space-garbage hauler who goes missing. When she finds out what happened to him it’s bad news for the outpost named Halfway There, and possibly for Earth as well.

Pretty much any Orman is good Orman. This features her characteristic flair for playing with convention: the story flips between diary entries, scripted (and wonderfully interrupted) comms dialogue and normal narrative, with memories weaved in there too. Theresa really is a lot like Roz, and I’m not sure how deliberate that is. The story has a genuine threat and a sombre ending; the problem is an unknown force and there’s no magical Doctor to sort it out, so the characters must make do. Dashes of the writer’s endearingly cheesy humour (such as the garbage scow names, like Cash Scow) lighten a story that is sometimes unexpectedly visceral. It’s a cracking one-and-done.

NB: I’m pretty sure this is the first use of the f-word in any of these books (Decalog, NA or MA), swiftly followed by a second and a third use. I guess they don’t give an f-word any more.

*

Shopping For Eternity
By Gus Smith

This one doesn’t quite come off. Jon Forrester is a huckster. The (naturally sinister) Pabulum Corporation want to use his dubious skills to persuade ne'er-do-well colonists to find religion. (And also, the Corporation.) Despite an apparent spaceship crash and later an escape using just his wits, Pabulum are never far away and Jon ends up on the run for his life. Probably. (Do these Forresters ever make it to old age or, y’know, actually breed?)

The jaunty first person prose lets us into Jon’s head, but the other characters don’t work as well (particularly a silly space captain who throws Jon overboard for silliness reasons) and there’s too much then-this-happened-then-that-happened in the narrative. A few moments could have used a red pen, such as “I had other ideas. Seeing those exhibits on stage had given me an idea.” And “I thought of all the millions of light years I had travelled in space during my lifetime, and here I was, defeated by a few hundred metres of water. Ironic.” (Is it?)

It ends with a satirical swipe about shopping (see title) but with few actual consumers in the story this feels a bit random. Still, it’s all somewhat fun to read.

*

Heritage
By Ben Jeapes

Another one bites the dust. Did the Forresters desecrate an ancient burial site or something?

This is a tense, well written stand off on a “sleeper ship” arriving at a new world after centuries in space. Two generations of Forresters meet, one with less than savoury intentions for the ship and its cargo. There’s a hint of moustache-twirling here which is disappointing, and some moments of villainy seem to jump the gun due to the low page count. Billy Forrester is the star, the weight of responsibility for all the lives on board carving an immediate personality in her, and it ramps up to an impressive, if yet again bleak climax. It’s promising stuff, but jeez would you give a Forrester a break.

*

Burning Bright
By Liz Holliday

This one’s straight out of the New Adventures. Anjak Forrester is in law enforcement on a turbulent future world – so another Forrester that feels quite a bit like Roz, albeit younger. After the apparent death of her partner (okay, you’re taking the mickey now) she works with a disgraced cameraman to uncover a conspiracy that links frequent riots to drug abuse – and possibly the Psi-Powers arc? I’m nostalgic as hell right now.

Besides the latent NA-ness this is a tightly written story that whizzes by, despite being one of the book’s longer entries. Anjak’s family conflicts (now who does that remind me of) help define her and she has a nice rapport with Kenzie the cameraman, although it escalates a bit quickly once again because there’s only so many pages. I’ll let you guess whether Anjak has many Christmases to look forward to after this, but at least Liz Holliday orchestrates a fittingly heroic finale for her.

*

C₉H₁₃NO₃
By Peter Anghelides

Yuck. Kids, this is why you don’t write in second person. Peter Anghelides finds a reason for the device towards the end of this story – the title is as annoying as the prose, anyway it’s the formula for adrenaline – but that in no way makes up for constantly disorienting you and putting you at a distance from the main character. Second person seems designed to stay out of their head; it’s rarely done and, in a remarkable coincidence, is also a bloody stupid way to tell a story.

As for what this actually is, talky and unpleasant, mostly. Samuels and Bocx are on the run from synth humans. They find evidence of dangerous experimentation and for most of what follows, Samuels (you / the lifeless video game protagonist) just listens to expository dialogue about it. Bocx is our best shot at a character and the best thing you can say about him is that he seems to enjoy Virgin’s sudden lack of a swear filter. It ends with a revelation that explains the godawful narrative voice, then gives us more exposition, because in second person there’s sod all you can do but sit there and be told things.

It’s a strange mix of the fairly average and the totally unreadable. Thanks, I hate it.

NB: There is a Forrester in it, but don’t panic, he’s dying.

*

Approximate Time Of Death
By Richard Salter

Phew, another good one. Our Forrester du jour is Mark, who runs a family business that makes food easier to transport across space. A hostile takeover looms and, in possibly the most on-the-nose plot development in Decalog 4, he has received death threats. An Adjudicator (Rachel not-a-Forrester) investigates.

This is a confidently written, craftily plotted was-it-a-murder mystery that warrants a second reading. Rachel comes across as very smart, particularly when wheedling cooperation from a news anchor by threatening to keep him in holding just long enough that his replacement might make a good impression on the public. The Forresters once again have some bad news for the family quilt, but a quick reference at the end reminds us that one of them may actually breed at some point. Anyway, this story’s a winner.

*

Secrets Of The Black Planet
By Lance Parkin

This one’s quite interesting. A sleekly futuristic story featuring taxis that cry over movies and Special Editions of films with higher “emotional definition,” it follows Kent Forrester, brother of the more influential Troy, whose film about Nelson Mandela has (among other things) led to possibly getting the highest office available. He wants to remake his Mandela movie with greater accuracy and he tasks Kent with the research. The consequences are serious, and they come around a bit too quickly. Guess that’s short stories for you.

Parkin gets an immediate feel for the complex racial politics at play here, including the ballsy conceit of Mandela being retrofitted into the man who introduced apartheid in order to strengthen the (at this time) black-led society. Equally eyebrow-raising is the idea that the Forresters are descended from Mandela, but the fact that this seems to be the first I’m hearing about it is surely a clue...

With plentiful ideas and challenging themes, this is rewarding. A pity it’s only 20-odd pages.

*

Rescue Mission
By Paul Leonard

Well that was, er, lovely, wasn’t it?

Abe Forrester lives with his little sister, ailing mother and daydreaming father on a run down colony world. They would all like to escape to a better place, but Abe passes the time merrily enough in flights of fancy and the prose goes along with him, wallowing pleasantly in details as Paul Leonard often does. Then Abe’s sister Callie goes missing. Abe eventually figures out a conspiracy that led to this.

Leonard’s story escalates into a full blown horror movie about (I think?) snuff films, and it’s brutally nasty stuff. This hurts even more after the quite wistful writing about life on the colony, crap as the place is; there’s nothing as sad as betrayed children. I wonder if there was a less extreme avenue this story could have gone down. It’s a bit much, in terms of believability and taste, but it’s certainly not poorly written. Inevitably this is one of the more memorable stories. It’s probably very good, but still, good grief.

*

Dependence Day
By Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Finally we check in with Leabie Forrester, Divine Empress of Earth, in the aftermath of So Vile A Sin. How are things? Unsurprisingly, not great.

A historian, Tranlis, has nearly finished documenting the lives of the Forresters and Leabie is his last port of call. He finds a dead empire, a ruined palace, an old and weakening empress in name only. Oh, and cannibal gangs. Some mysterious aliens have arrived seemingly to hand out food parcels, but something is amiss.

This is funereal stuff, but beautiful in its way. We almost end on a note of hope, though naturally this is qualified with cynicism, and by the time we get to it there’s already been another family tragedy for the Forresters. (It’s as gruesome as the climax of the previous story.)

There’s a hint of mechanism in having the last story feature a guy documenting the Forrester history, but it makes enough sense. His final act is a bit implausible – let’s just say he really wants an ending for his book – but the story’s not really about him. Roz’s spirit makes a literal and figurative appearance and she makes an important difference once more, which is quite fitting.

I’m not sure I wanted this post-script, but it’s a well written piece.

*

Taking Doctor Who out of the equation has been good for the storytelling here, removing the usual constraints of needing to arrive, introduce self, find problem, solve it in under 40 pages. These tales are more grounded in people’s lives and by and large, they’re excellent. That said, they are generally very downbeat to the point where it seems surprising that the Forresters made it this far. Perhaps that’s the point – triumph over adversity – but each generation is so separate, with little to no immediate link between ancestors and their actions in these stories, that it feels more like random people who cannot catch a damn break. Certainly the concept of the Forresters as an elite family with great influence is kept to the sidelines, as much as it was by Roz herself.

Is it a good collection? Yes. The quality is perhaps more consistent than any earlier Decalog, and it’s certainly the best use of a linking theme so far. I would recommend it. But all the same, once in a while it would be nice if the sun came out.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #81 – Decalog 3: Consequences edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: Decalog 3: Consequences
Edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Time for more short stories, mostly by new writers, which is exciting.  The theme here is consequences, and we’re leaning back towards the linked story format of Decalog 1: “Ten stories.  Seven Doctors.  One chain of events.” Interesting to see how the authors handle it, and whether anybody takes it literally and coughs up Revenge Of The Sensorites.

Let’s find out...

*

...And Eternity In An Hour

By Stephen Bowkett

We’re off to a dramatic start as the Third Doctor and Jo are sent on a mission by the Time Lords.  They must halt the spread of a colossal time rift which is causing (among other things) horrific deaths on Alrakis.  There are ideas aplenty, such as the TARDIS having “intuition circuits”, which explains why it always arrives at pivotal moments.  (Fair enough, but personally I like the New Who version: “I always took you where you needed to go.”)

Plot-wise this feels like a full story heavily condensed.  The Doctor and Jo are immediately separated when they arrive on Alrakis and promptly given info-dumps by the people they meet.  They then march straight to the story’s climax.  (Jo does this by convincing the TARDIS to fly itself.  Hmmmm.) It has a very busy and bleak ending which would be even harder to swallow if we spent any time with the characters.  Stepping back and letting the Alrakians sort it out / blow themselves up is novel, I guess, but it doesn’t suit these two, or quite tie off the mission they’re on.

The writing is flowery and often very evocative, particularly in describing the effects of the temporal disaster and the Doctor explaining it all to Jo with dominoes.  It’s a pleasure to read in places.  But elsewhere the Doctor witters on a bit too much even for Pertwee, and Jo has a philosophical nous that has simply come from nowhere.  (“Or was it, [Jo] wondered, just making meaning out of chaos? Could it all be simply self-delusion, the presence of prescience in a purposeful void?” And we are all together, coo-coo-cachoo...)

It’s still quite nice to read a mature and contemplative Jo, even if I don’t buy it.  Same goes for the story.

*

Moving On

By Peter Anghelides

Well this is brilliant.  I sort of wish it was a full Missing Adventure, more out of enjoyment than there being anything lacking.

Sarah Jane Smith interviews an unpleasant tech genius interested in Virtual Reality, sees him die in a traffic accident, and then has a fairly odd time afterwards.  (I know what you’re thinking, and to head off any eye-rolls: it’s not that exactly.)

The story mostly concerns Sarah’s life after the Doctor, struggling to make her career as a novelist and deal with the gulf in understanding caused by travelling in the TARDIS for a few years.  K9 seems to be breaking down with no hope of repair and no Doctor around to help him – or her.  Wisps of her past crop up in creative ways, and a sinister figure inadvertently allows her to get closure on the Doctor.

Just because Sarah is not happy with him for letting her go does not mean she can’t have a life, and following her blistering rebuke against a man that isn’t really there we jump to a Ten Years Later epilogue.  We find her stronger, happier and putting the Doctor properly behind her.  It’s bittersweet and brave, particularly the extraordinary bit of writing that closes out the story, paralleling the fate of K9 with Sarah’s old dog, Rab.

Peter Anghelides cares not for spin-offs; everything has its time and everything dies.  That sentiment, and therefore the story is probably not for everyone, but it is definitely for Sarah.

NB: The villain turns out to be a direct continuation from the first story, although the plot is self-contained.  A bit of a tightrope walk in terms of theme; I’ve no idea how everybody else will approach it.

NB(2?): In the “Ten Years Later” bit, Sarah’s new book is published by Virgin.  Aw.

*

Tarnished Image

By Guy Clapperton

This could technically be the least eventful story in Doctor Who history.  It features the First Doctor and Dodo doing some reading in the TARDIS.  The “story” has been resolved already, so they read news correspondence about it and pick apart the inaccuracies.  Buckle up!

Actually it’s not a bad approach, as we still have to find all the stuff out.  Plus it’s refreshing to come at a story from another perspective.  The earlier events concern a planet ruled by the Azmec Company and a series of ritualistic murders.  The Doctor has theories on what caused them and a possible conspiracy involving the Company.  He and Dodo have been mistaken for actors taking part in recent celebrations, but they are secretly investigating.

The Doctor and Dodo are well written, although Guy Clapperton leans a bit hard on Dodo’s accent and the Doctor’s mannerisms.  (Sort of understandable when you’re only here for 30-odd pages.) There is an enjoyable oddness in chopping between the reports of what happened and the Doctor disagreeing with or correcting them.  The main issue for me was the reporting itself, which isn’t supposed to be brilliant – the Doctor bemoans how sensationalist and vague it is – but is nonetheless so busy and full of interjection that I had difficulty following it.  I’m still not sure how the faked holovid dénouement went down or if I’m supposed to recognise the Azmec Company from something else.  I initially missed the link to the previous story, but the Disco Guide helped me out there.  (It has to do with the holovid, so no wonder I was befuddled.)

So yeah, it’s creative and it more or less works, but the writing could have been tighter.

*

Past Reckoning

By Jackie Marshall

In another understated one, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa visit Trentillys Castle so he can see how some advice he once gave has panned out.  It turns out not well, and the young man he met spent his inheritance and now the castle is open to the public.  Whoops.

This is at the same time a very accurate Fifth Doctor, revelling in the role of blandly pleasant museum guide for Nyssa, and also a rather ill-fitting one.  His determination not to visit Tegan – because she chose to leave and that’s that – goes against his usual amiability, especially when adding in Tom’s portentous line about walking in eternity.  He shows an odd lack of regret for how his advice took effect, and when said advice claims a second victim he cheerily insists that he and Nyssa leave the corpse to be found by someone else.  Pragmatic, yes, given how often he is mistaken for a murderer due to bad timing, but it’s still unusually cold.  He even gets in a bit more busy-bodying, telling the soon-to-be-victim how to live her life.  What a jerk.

It’s all very low-key as strolls around country homes tend to be, but there are some apt bits of writing describing a rather unhappy family’s day out.  The prose is generally delightful; I particularly liked the description of a lake, “as sleek and placid as a pampered cat.” There are some poignant moments, especially a woman’s furious response to the Doctor’s meddling.  (Is a lot of Decalog 3 going to be people shouting at him?) However a quick reminder of Nyssa’s tragic past just underlines how weirdly under-utilised that bit of dramatic fodder has been.  Such indifference suits the Doctor in this story: a callous interior added uncomfortably to our usually milquetoast Boy Scout.

NB: An item directly links this to the previous story.

*

UNITed We Fall

By Keith R. A. DeCandido

Let’s just hurry past the title, shall we? “You Knitted, We Fall”?

Half a decade into his retirement, the Brigadier is still having to justify UNIT’s expenses.  An apparent stroke of luck brings the Doctor (avec scarf) to New York where he can testify that UNIT needed the funding way back when, but he’s early so he slinks off to take in some museums.

The real reason for his summons is a man whose life took a downward turn in the last story, all because of the Doctor.  He has manipulated the UNIT hearing together, recalled the TARDIS and built a bomb with the Doctor’s own equipment, hoping to take the Time Lord out.  He’s not to know that he has an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, and wouldn’t care if he did.

Things promptly escalate to the man panicking and trying to shoot the Doctor dead.  Having survived through the usual mix of being light on his feet and knowing how to stall, the Doctor rushes back to the UN to defuse the bomb, sending the (considerable) explosion ahead in time and knowing it will have consequences there.  That’s two stories in a row that make a slightly laborious point of stressing that there are consequences; a bit clunky.

There’s not a lot to say about this one – a quick, action-driven story that directly follows Past Reckoning and leaves things open for the next story.  It’s as spirited as the Doctor haring through New York amid gunshots, and it works, but aside from the wronged villain and a few amusing insights into the Brigadier as he adjusts to retirement – his sense of humour coming more into focus – there’s no particular substance.

*

Aliens And Predators

By Colin Brake

Am I clutching at straws, or is that a highly unimaginative pseudonym?

Anyway, another not-exactly-deep story places the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe on a ship harbouring the last remains of humanity, in data and DNA form.  The Hope is under attack from the Other.  (Nothing to do with the Doctor’s shady New Adventures past.) They’re bigged up as basically the worst life form in the universe, the Doctor even saying they’ve evolved evil (!) and there’s no turning back for them, and in the scant page-count we can’t really back any of that up.  The supporting cast of tell-don’t-show bad guys and ostensibly good androids aren’t terribly interesting, nor are the space battles.  Also the links to previous / future stories are too obscure.  The humans assume the Doctor is his Seventh incarnation, and the artwork he leaves behind in a gallery is presumably for a future story.  The explanation for the TARDIS signal that brought him here – presumably the one from UNITed We Fall – is somewhat bungled and unclear.

There’s the germ of something emotional here, as the Other represent a different path for humanity and the Hope is pretty much doomed, with humanity’s custodian androids choosing oblivion to resolve the conflict.  But there’s no time to reflect on any of that in a short story, which makes it all a bit of a wasted effort.

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe acquit themselves, but the prose isn’t brilliant (spotted an apostrophe error, deary me) and it’s a bit late in the “chain” to be so wilfully vague.  It didn’t do much for me.

*

Fegovy

By Gareth Roberts

Good old Gareth Roberts.  His style of snippy comedic writing suits the Sixth Doctor very well, and this little jaunt concerning an auction of – wouldn’t you know it – thoroughly unlikeable people makes for a fun 30 pages.

Numerous alien races have come to bid for the painting the Doctor was given at the end of Aliens And Predators.  (I’m not entirely clear if he placed it in this story’s past or future; probably the former.) Fegovy, the computer intelligence hosting the auction, naturally has other plans.  The thoroughly beastly Miss Monodine will probably let her temper scupper the whole thing.

Roberts writes a note-perfect Sixth Doctor, indulgently verbose and brashly confident.  “His eyes glazed over, which [Mel] recognised as a bad sign.  ‘Did I say breakthrough? Too meek a word.  No, our work will be a positive confutation to the sceptics.  A bold charge through the flummery, a vital strike against the purist hordes!’ Mel sniffed.” (He would do it again, with Clayton Hickman, in the sublime The One Doctor.) Mel gets kidnapped, talks her way out of it and otherwise handles the Doctor’s hot air with aplomb.  She’s not as annoying as usual, thank heaven.

The supporting cast are typical Roberts, so a bunch of back-biting low lives including some Chelonians.  He does this sort of thing brilliantly, it's just that (as in the case of Zamper) it can result in diminishing returns when stretched to a novel.  He’s always good for scrumptious prose and frothy dialogue: the Doctor notes that the New Alexandrians have displayed “some leanings to learnings”, and at one point a door breaks down into “buttery gobbets”.  Yum.

The whole thing fits the short story remit very nicely, neatly using an element from a previous story (although still not explaining how it had a TARDIS signal embedded, or some such – I’m probably being thick).  It doesn’t exactly leave the door open for the next story, but it’s excellent all the same.

*

Continuity Errors

By Steven Moffat

Wow, obviously.

As a really cool Doctor Who fan who knows where it’s at, I’ve talked a lot of smack about Steven Moffat.  He’s written an awful lot of Doctor Who, including a measurable amount of awful Doctor Who, but on a good day his interpretation of the character and what he means to those around him is thought-provoking.  It puts the show in a new light, like how you feel about towels after reading Douglas Adams.  Again, that’s on a good day – these ideas have had a lot of airtime over his years as scriptwriter and showrunner for Who, so not every one’s a winner, or can be indefinitely.  Consequently some of the shine might have disappeared from this, his first (?) published Who story, now that I’ve got around to it.*

Yeah, nope.  Continuity Errors explores some of the themes he’d come back to later**, in particular the Doctor’s relative omnipotence when it comes to time and the moral ambiguity of his doing terrible things for good reasons, or wonderful things for selfish reasons.  There is a running thread of lecture notes concerning, in that fourth-wall-bothering way Moffat made seven years of telly out of, the Doctor and his various facets.  Is he our friend? Do any of his friends think it’s odd that everyone in the universe speaks English? Does he just discard them when he gets bored? But even this, the closest Continuity Errors comes to over-egging it and having me reach, with a smug grin, for the “Con” column, is ultimately not as simple as it seems and is put to smart use.

The whole thing revolves around the New Alexandrian Library (mooted in Fegovy) where the Doctor cannot get a librarian to lend him a particular book.  She is written at first very much in Bernice’s vein, all smart-alec observations (oh good GOD do I miss her smart-alec observations, and oh hi Bernice as well, welcome back, stay!), but there is a thunderous misanthropy which will be very important later.  Of course it’s also biting and hilarious.  “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I haven’t memorised the entire stock, consisting, as it does, of every word ever written by a sentient being.  I had yesterday off.” Her inner gripes do not feel like gimmicks even though they are the meat of the story’s machinations.

The Doctor is written beautifully, forgoing the obvious Oncoming Storm ominousness that, to be honest, would befit his actions in this story, for a more Season 24 portrayal.  At first.  He has “the gap-toothed smile – no, grin – of a seven-year-old delightedly showing his mother some worms he’d found in the garden.” He “seemed likely to suggest they bunk off school together and raid an orchard.” He’s friendly and unassuming, until she figures out who/what he is and says no, flat out.  Then he sneaks off and suddenly little things we’ve already taken on board about the librarian begin to shift, from her thoughts on Bernice’s earrings to the number of people she’s disliked today to her relationships and, in a passage that made my head spin in a good way, a memory that alters in real time as she’s remembering it.  I.  Still.  Have.  Goosebumps.  The librarian is impressively resilient and the Doctor is relentless.  The tug of war is earned, thrilling and deliciously creative.  The whole thing veers between dark and hilarious.

All through this we have Bernice wandering in and out, charmingly up to no good as well, and able to observe the shenanigans from the outside.  (Time traveller’s privilege, I guess.) She’s note-perfect too, from the diary post-its to the quest for a minibar to, best of all, a resigned and even affectionate understanding of what the Doctor is.  She’s done her time being mad at him.  All of which adds up to me wishing Moffat had done a full New Adventure for them both.  Let’s face it, the ideas expounded here would fit right in.  But as with an earlier very enjoyable story in Decalog 3, that’s not because this short story is missing anything.  Continuity Errors fills its space exactly, says its piece and vanishes triumphant.

It’s perfect.  Keep forever.

* A recent Big Finish story, Asking For A Friend, maybe took some of the shine away as it has a suspiciously similar premise.  But I generally like James Goss and the story – which has some important differences, namely the Doctor’s motivation – is also brilliant, so I’m going with unconscious plagiarism.

** Though not all of them.  I still think of The Curse Of Fatal Death as the Moffat era’s Rosetta Stone: the nudge-wink jokes and the show-off time travel one-upsmanship are unmistakeable.  (So I guess Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is the real Rosetta Stone?)

*

Timevault

By Ben Jeapes

This isn’t half bad, but the goalposts have moved a bit in recent pages.

The Doctor and K9 are aboard the cargo ship Collateral Security, the Doctor having bought himself passage by making some repairs and improvements.  He quite enjoys the voyage and admires his efficient hosts, the Lorq – who will store anything, for anyone, so long as it’s paid for.  But then a virulent disease breaks out, followed by something worse: a life-form the Time Lords knew long ago, which can be transmitted in the cure.

The Crialans are perhaps not the most original idea, and they’re the second Big Bad alien in this collection, but they have more going for them than the Other.  A race who only exist as bacteria, members of which are created wholesale when the bacteria is spread and take control of their hosts, they have a pretty good grievance with the Time Lords: they got Continuity Errored, so now there are only two left.  For the Doctor to get rid of any Crialans he essentially has to kill them, which he does to a newborn to save a young Lorq he’s befriended.  It’s a dark observation, but they helpfully don’t leave him a lot of options, making it clear they 1) take people over against their will and 2) will not accept anything less than the universe under their command.  It lets the air out of a moral dilemma somewhat when you stack the deck, but a truly cruel attack wouldn’t suit the Fourth Doctor anyway, especially in a story where he is otherwise his affable, jelly-baby-sharing self.  He’s well written here, and his relationship with the young boy is charming.

I mean, this is absolutely fine.  No complaints.  The story holds together and it doesn’t feel too small for what it is.  There’s just not a lot that’s remarkable about it.  The Time Lord meddling referred to here is executed far more literally and interestingly in the preceding story, and although there is an overall theme of consequences – being the Time Lord war, I guess – there’s nothing much linking it to the rest of Decalog 3.  (There is a reference to an Institute which references Continuity Errors, but I had to look that up.) It would work better in less prestigious company.

*

Zeitgeist

By Craig Hinton

We ride out Decalog 3 with a bit of technobabble.  The Fifth Doctor and Turlough arrive on Heracletus seemingly at the behest of the Time Lords, only to get separated in time; the much talked about Spline, a form of time machine that will allow the Heracletans to benefit from their own future, is surely responsible.

This works quite neatly, dividing its time (ahem) between the two versions of the planet and leaving us to guess what has happened there.  There’s an enjoyable symmetry to the Doctor and Turlough both investigating the same building in different times, but reality gets decidedly complicated towards the end.  As you’ll likely guess, it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of deal, and the “consequences” here partly rest on the Doctor turning up at all.  There is also an unhappy epilogue to the Doctor’s new friendship in Timevault, which he never actually clocks.

The Doctor is well written, but Turlough gets more opportunities to shine, bringing his patented brand of exasperation to a people that don’t appear to make sense.  He is neatly described as being a mixture of cowardice and bravery.  It all ends unsurprisingly on a bleak note, far from the collection’s first.

It’s another one that does its job well, but isn’t going to set the world alight.  Decent sci-fi fodder.

*

And that’s Decalog 3, apart from a cheeky Afterword from Steven Moffat that adds another Christmas decoration to the Continuity Errors tree.  (It comes a bit closer to over-egging it, but then he’d come a lot closer by pretending he was going to reveal the Doctor’s name decades later, so eh.)

This is ostensibly the last one, or the last in this format: there will be no more Decalogs featuring the Doctors.  I think the format went out on a high, finding a middle ground between a bunch of stories that are tied to a central one (Decalog) and just having a linking theme (Decalog 2).  That said, this is often more about continuity than consequences; some of the links are a bit obscure, and there’s really no overall domino effect at work.  I don’t mind.  The stories are generally of a good standard, and there are several real standouts.  It’s worth seeking out, with a touch of essential reading.

8/10