Doctor Who: The BBC Books #91 – Eater Of Wasps by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#45

Eater of Wasps

By Trevor Baxendale

Yuck, obviously.

We’re three novels deep with Trevor Baxendale — at this point you can tell what he likes. Body horror, with an emphasis on degeneration. The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart both concerned worlds in a state of decay, with the inhabitants getting the worst of it. Eater Of Wasps continues that theme but on a much smaller scale: instead of alien planets it’s Earth, and instead of a planet-wide problem it’s a spot of bother in a quaint English village in the 1930s.

The spot of bother is, to be fair, revolting. Local wasps have somehow become intertwined with an alien artefact, causing them to swarm into people’s mouths and noses with the aim of controlling them. (We don’t go into that much detail but suffice to say it’s a “gestalt intelligence that causes genetic mutation” kind of arrangement, not “wasps driving people around like in Ratatouille”. Sadly.) This gradually causes human bodies to disintegrate, leaving a bizarre new life form in their place. If the Doctor doesn’t stop it then it will take over and/or kill everyone on Earth.

The difference in scale is a bit disorienting. Eater Of Wasps more closely resembles a nightmare version of Agatha Christie than Baxendale’s usual brand of sci-fi. This at least makes for a fun juxtaposition, and he accelerates the plot in a way you couldn’t do in a true period piece. Horrible wasp deaths occur early and more or less in plain view, the alien intelligence apparently having no truck with subtlety. Okay, it’s trying to take people over one at a time, and it successfully creates at least one spy, but otherwise it’s not doing a very good job of staying out of the papers. There is a “man vs wasp monster” set piece on top of a moving train at one point.

The downside to the smaller scale is a corresponding lack of plot. There’s no great mystery to unravel in Eater Of Wasps. There’s an alien weapon causing all the ruckus, but the people responsible for it are dead before we even get started. All that’s left is to stop the main host, Charles Rigby, before he starts sharing the love outside the village. (Once he goes “full monster” he ceases to be interesting. We are talking “calls the Doctor Doc-torrr.”) There is a secondary threat at least, a team of time agents sent to retrieve the weapon before it takes effect, or destroy the entire town to ensure it never does. This creates a bit of tension with the TARDIS crew and it eventually adds a ticking clock in the finale, but there’s nothing really to unpack there either; it’s not as if it’s very surprising, for instance, that the possibility of a bomb going off becomes a race to defuse it in time. They’re quite mysterious as a group, which at least creates the possibility of following that up in later books.

Is it so terrible for a book to skimp on the plot? Well, no: excitement is its own reward, and there’s a good amount of that here. The aforementioned train sequence might be a transparent effort to get us that bit closer to 280 pages but it’s still a good bit. (Equally obvious but less good is the bit where the Doctor and co. get arrested.) There’s not a huge amount here besides the plot, though. The denizens of Marpling have a certain degree of colour and back story, such as a local rogue and a young boy with questionable parentage, but most of it fails to ignite. There’s a critical relationship for example between Rigby and the boy: it’s enough that the wasp-addled man is still on some level trying to protect his friend. But what’s actually so important there that it transcends species? It’s not made clear, especially where young Liam is terrified into silence for most of it. (And no, Rigby is not his secret dad — but wouldn’t that have been an idea?)

The future people aren’t much better. Kala is sufficiently dimensional that she considers asking the Doctor for help rather than just going through with her contingency plan. By the end of the book she’s flirting with the possibility of joining him in the TARDIS, and it doesn’t sound all that implausible. (Hell, he must have said yes to Compassion.) The other two are for various reasons less interesting, and their modus operandi is a bit hard to fathom. Sorry, I know they’re from thousands of years in the future and time travellers be aloof and all that, but nuking Britain in 1933 is going to have big enough consequences that they might feel it too, despite their casual attitude here. Presumably they have ancestors who would be better off without any radioactive fallout? Or suddenly not existing at all due to the paradox? (The whole nuclear bomb threat feels like an easy reach for extra peril. And why does it have to be a nuke?)

The closest the book gets to Doing A Thing (character-wise) is with the Doctor, specifically the callous way he is sometimes perceived, especially by Anji. “‘Pity about the plants.’ ‘Oh yeah.’ Fitz nodded sardonically. ‘Terrible shame.’ He couldn’t remember the Doctor even passing comment about the death of Tom Colton.” / “‘Anji’ll be wondering where the hell we’ve got to.’ The Doctor just glanced at Fitz for a moment, almost as if he was trying to remember who Anji was.” / “No wonder you were so keen for us to go! You were worried about the flipping fragment, not me!” / “[Gleave] found the Doctor’s clinical detachment rather disconcerting; he couldn’t detect even a shred of sympathy.” / “He doesn’t care, though, Fitz. He does the things he does simply because he can, not because he really cares. It’s just something for him to do. Like a distraction, or a game.” / “All that sympathy for a few crushed wasps, and not one mention of Hilary Pink. Taking care not to risk harming the monster that Charles Rigby had become, but allowing him to keep Liam Jarrow hostage.” / “I just wish you’d get a bit more involved sometimes.”

Anji, and the various other characters in the mix there are not exactly wrong: the Doctor can appear flippant. He can be very interested in mint humbugs but not all that bothered about a dead man. The thing is though, it’s not exactly a fresh take on the character — and Eater Of Wasps barely does anything with it anyway. So he’s a bit aloof. So what? There’s an autopsy scene in this, and the mortician is aloof too. Besides, the Doctor clearly does care about stopping Rigby from doing more harm, or from becoming a monster with no way back. Anji gets a few opportunities to grouse about this but, like Liam, she also spends a chunk of the story as a mute hostage — not exactly time well spent. Then when she puts him on the spot at the end it’s easily dismissed: despite complaining that he misled the alien intelligence that was trying to kill them all (oh, what a bounder!) she is able to live with it after all and so nips off for a bath. It’s a bit of a nil-nil draw, characterisation-wise.

Plot and character are pretty threadbare, then. (I’ve barely even mentioned Fitz. Reader, he puts in the legal definition of an appearance.) What Eater Of Wasps does unequivocally have going for it is of course that Baxendale standard, the yuck: people falling apart, nasty things happening to them. He’s clearly landed on something good (I use the term advisedly) with the invasive wasps. It’s an arresting and unpleasant image, no doubt… but that’s sort of it. Not only is the horror of wasps-in-your-mouth repeated so often that it threatens to become normal, it doesn’t then speak to anything else, since the wasps are technically benign and they don’t have much of a plan. They don’t feel representative of something. And it never evolves into something greater or more horrible, apart from Rigby turning into your standard monster-man at the end. I frequently had the image of Baxendale spotting a wasp crawl into someone’s mouth and trying to spin a whole novel out of just that. The relative complexity or world-building of The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart is missed.

I’m aware that expectations such as complex plotting, thoughtful character work or identifiable themes are relative to the reader and potentially quite unfair, since most readers aren’t in the silly position of reading all the books in order, or even just reading lots of Doctor Who. They might not want or need that much variety, a bit of grisly fun like this might hit the spot just fine for a casual reader — it wouldn’t be the first time that they’ve aimed to produce just that. Eater Of Wasps has a similar skill for pacing to something like Vanishing Point, and it would make another decent showcase for Doctor Who stories that deal with monsters and whip along in good order. I enjoyed it in the moment. It’s just that, since we’re bringing it up, Vanishing Point also had unrealised potential. Eater Of Wasps has an icky front cover and novelises it.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #66 – Coldheart by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#33

Coldheart

By Trevor Baxendale

The last time we saw Trevor Baxendale he was injecting some very trad (though still quite effective) elements into the EDAs. The series had, to be fair, settled into quite a trad pattern by then, all “the Doctor and Sam visit a colony world” this and “ancient doomsday device” that.

Now things have changed. Sam’s gone, the gang’s different, they’re on the run in a TARDIS that is also one of them, and in the previous adventure said TARDIS was so upset that she ended up killing a guy. What a strange new world Baxendale has stepped into! But for all the difference it makes we might as well still be in the Sam era, because with a few honourable exceptions Coldheart is just another EDA.

That’s not always a bad thing. Baxendale’s The Janus Conjunction didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it did its thing sufficiently well that several later books felt like they were treading on its toes. And Coldheart finds some of the same things interesting: once again we have a largely inhospitable planet that’s killing its people, there’s a schism between two groups which means one of them is visibly decaying to death, and the leader of the mutants wants wholesale destruction for everybody out of sheer spite. Missing this time is a sense of intergalactic doom, with only the people living on the desert planet Eskon in immediate danger. That’s no problem though, as long as they’re quite compelling and/or sympathetic.

So, yeah, about that.

What I will say is that Baxendale once again sells the physical details of his world very well. From the underground ice caves to the blistering heat on the surface (already a memorable juxtaposition there) we soon discover vast caterpillar-like “sand-cars” that work like wagon trains. Then there are the native Eskonians who look a bit like camels, and their city Baktan which is a giant hollowed-out rock. Water is at a premium on this world so it’s the basis of their economy, itself a free albeit rationed resource that you can sell on in other forms once you have it. Eskon and its society are very easy to picture. Mind you, I read most of this during a heatwave, which added a certain horrible verisimilitude. (Yuck. Eff off, heatwave.)

The Eskonians have a few problems besides the heat however, which recently has increased causing their previously not-that-bad climate to worsen. (Gee, what must that be like?) Their society looks down on women, frequently denying them identity or even speech. Then there are the “slimers,” a subset of society with an unexplained degenerative disease; they are literally losing their shape and when they die, an event somewhat unfortunately called “the Squirming,” they dissolve into a pool of slithering leeches. Needless to say, the slimers have been ostracised, but rather than politely go out into the desert and die they’ve blockaded Baktan, causing even more friction with the non-infected Eskonians who hate them as their presence has halted trade between Baktan and neighbouring cities. What few aliens come to their city tend to take advantage of their desperation.

It’s an interesting and heated dynamic. There’s an obvious question of who are the real monsters here, with the less unpleasant-looking Eskonians behaving inhumanely towards the more mutant-looking slimers who live in squalor. Baxendale complicates this however by making the slimers unlikeable as well: they’re justifiably angry about their situation, but their leader Revan is just another fanatical nutjob who delights in arranging murder and havoc. If any of his lieutenants feel differently, they’re awfully quiet about it.

The slimers even reject Ckeho (rhymes with “keyhole”, which we are told and then I thought of it every time I read his name) because he is the son of an Eskonian elder. That elder also rejected him, however, locking him in his bedroom because his position prevents him from having kids and a slimer in the family would bring great shame. When Fitz releases Ckeho his first impulse is to strangle his rescuer. In the end however, Ckeho is our token likeable slimer.

The non-slimer Eskonians don’t have such good representation. There’s Brevan, an ice-miner who meets the Doctor and co. early in the story and then lingers beigely in the background. Not memorable, but at least he isn’t outwardly horrible. Two of the ruling Forum members, Krumm and Anavolus, seem alternately harmless and perhaps even kind, but they’re still complicit in the living conditions of slimers and the mistreatment of women, as well as the political cover-up surrounding Tor Grymna. (Ckeho’s shamefaced father.) Grymna is a dubious and troubled figure, whom we’re obviously supposed to hate because of his treatment of Ckeho, but he wobbles back and forth in a way that suggests character growth. I say “suggests” because in his final scene he’s definitely a baddie again, even getting dispatched with a one-liner. Presumably we’re not meant to weep.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about a society with problems. It would be boring if they didn’t have any! But Coldheart isn’t here to fix anything. (A fact it’s well aware of, with Fitz noting “They’ve still got problems here, Doctor. Big problems” after it all wraps up.) The treatment of the slimers reverses, to the paltry extent of allowing Ckeho to represent them on the Forum, and only because the Doctor and co. find a scientific basis for what’s happened to them which proves that they are blameless. The Eskonians don’t use empathy to get there, they just get more information.

The subjugation of women is even worse. There’s only one woman in the story apart from Compassion; she only gets one line and her death isn’t used as a direct motivator for change. It’s still up to Fitz to make the case — off screen! — that maybe they ought to stop being so awful to women like her. This is also right at the end, and there’s no Ckeho-like rep in the Forum, so good luck with that, I guess.

If you cram all of your societal change into the epilogue then what is the rest of the story about, and who are we rooting for in the meantime? The Doctor is “not very impressed with a lot of things about these people” and Fitz more than once expresses the view that he could take or leave everyone here (“As far as I’m concerned, you can all bloody well starve to death, dry up and blow away or mutate into who cares what. To hell with the lot of you”) and it’s hard to disagree with either of them. All that’s left when you take out emotional progress is a load of plot and action, most of which we’ve either heard before or just plain isn’t going to set the world alight. 

Coldheart does a pretty good job of upping the stakes at least, especially near the end with the delirious one-two punch of “your people are all going to turn into slimers and die out” BUT ALSO “the slimers exist because of a giant terrifying alien worm lurking underground” BUT ALSO “Revan’s actions will cause tectonic disasters that will destroy your city” BUT ALSO “the big worm had babies and they’re gonna eat everybody before any of that even happens.” I actually laughed (not entirely derisively) when Fitz, then the Doctor, then Compassion all walked into a dramatic summation to contribute one bombshell each, although obviously we are kind of playing silly buggers at this point. You reach a point when you genuinely think, wow, they’re screwed! Which at least adds a certain excitement to the final act.

That sense of peril is shared by the main trio, who are continuing their randomised flight from the Time Lords. I was cautiously optimistic about the randomiser (hold that thought) because although it takes away Compassion’s agency as a TARDIS it can still land them in interesting places. To the device’s credit, it means that they can’t rely on Compassion to spirit them away from danger, as she won’t be able to control her landing. Given that Compassion is otherwise invincible and could, in theory, shield the Doctor and Fitz from all harm, anything we can do to introduce an element of danger is a good thing.

It’s hard not to be a little sceptical about where this new TARDIS will take them, however, based on current evidence. They’re not really achieving anything with their random hops since “go somewhere the Time Lords aren’t” is the single stated goal at this point. What does progress even look like in this arc? Not a string of Coldhearts, surely. I hope some sort of progress is made soon. Even The Chase had the Doctor working on an anti-Dalek weapon between landings.

Coldheart is not, as you might have guessed, very big on the arc stuff. (Inasmuch as there can be arc stuff once you land and there are definitely no Time Lords about.) Some effort is made to ask questions about Compassion in a way that is in conversation with the previous book. There’s the curious development about the randomiser. (You can release that thought you were holding.) “She hadn’t liked the idea at first. It still rankled … But she had found that travelling through the vortex, feeling the passage of space-time around her and through her, was a glory in itself. She didn’t actually care much about destinations. It was the journeying she craved.”

I wouldn’t call this a complete back-pedal, she’s entitled to change her mind after all and the thrill of travel probably is a big factor… but it’s still rather abrupt after the previous novel had her, not to go on about it, killing or attempting to kill people over it. For good measure she considers abandoning her fellow travellers (“What was to stop her just leaving?”), something the Doctor appears to sense during the final crisis. This stuff is interesting, although to be honest if Compassion was still willing to stick with these guys after The Fall Of Yquatine then I don’t see why she’d wobble about it now.

There’s a bit more wobbling with Compassion apparently tuning into the Doctor’s telepathy and mourning her inability to save a man from a great fall, which of course she survives. (Not to get all “I hope someone was fired for that blunder” but could she not have popped him safely indoors before they hit the ground?) Both things suggest an increasing sense of empathy, which would be an ironic character shift after she became less and less personified before. This is somewhat at odds with the way Compassion is actually written, however, which is robotic at times. I know she’s a machine of great power now and she was specifically never personable, but having her rattle off lines like “I’m still not certain how my own position in the space-time continuum is defined. As a temporally annexed life-form I am irrevocably linked to the space-time vortex too” brings to mind a Star Trek science officer, not the surly cyborg from Yquatine. I guess ongoing characters + rotating writers is a lucky dip.

There’s some interesting stuff around the Doctor, although Baxendale doesn’t fully integrate it into the story. We have a moment where Fitz, for some reason, intuits that “the Doctor was [possibly] trying to distract himself … from the sudden loss of his TARDIS.” I would have no problem at all with that: if anything, we’ve been severely undersold the impact of that event since (and during) The Shadows Of Avalon. But there’s not much actual evidence of it here, and it doesn’t come up again. Then we have Compassion observing (so it’s external, again) that “there was something nagging at her subconscious. Something about the Doctor’s whole demeanour.”

Possibly this is the same “something” that allows the Doctor to cheerfully orchestrate Grymna’s death, in a way that will also resolve the planet’s giant worm problems. The Doctor is generally anti-killing, although it would be unhelpful to storytelling to never consider going there; this time, however, he seems a bit blasé about it. Is this what Compassion was talking about? Are we Doing A Thing? Could we be hinting at the Doctor’s still-percolating time bomb disease from Interference? No idea. But it’s among his more notable moments in an otherwise pretty standard performance, all “I like meeting new people!” and “Wow, things!”

Shockingly, Fitz is not left to fend for himself this week, or not to the extent where he has to consider a new lifestyle. He has a likeable enough dynamic with Ckeho (once they’re past the whole “sorry I strangled you” business) and he manages to find and get attached to the only woman in the book, because of course he does. I’m not sure if we’re meant to infer more than just companionship here — Compassion seems to raise an eyebrow when she interrupts them indoors — but I hope not, since her mute slave status would render a relationship with a passing white saviour a little on the iffy side. Fitz’s capacity for fancying is so far beyond parody at this point, but it does at least speak to empathy of a sort. The Doctor’s suggestion that Fitz stay behind and mediate is, however, laughable. (Anyway, isn’t he still planning to go and live with Filippa some day? Is he going on tour?)

Fitz is not especially well written when it comes to dialogue, steering clear of bad language in a way that recalls some of Ace’s less natural moments; see “I don’t give a cuss about him or anyone else here” and “What in the name of muck happened to you?” Dialogue isn’t really the book’s strong-point, however, often gravitating towards hoary SF/fantasy-speak like “‘Revan! Manag! Come quick! Ibres is ill!’ ‘Is it the Squirming, Hefeg?’” (There’s a lot of “good morrow, character A” followed by “indeed so, character B”, which is a pet hate of mine. People know who they’re speaking to! You can make this apparent to others by making them sound different!) There’s the odd good bit of prose, such as “Dawn struck like an ironmonger’s hammer,” but the book mostly just trundles along between shouty bits — to be fair, often at quite a lick.

Coldheart is meat and potatoes stuff. The characters arrive, there’s a problem to resolve, action, escalation, sigh of relief, wheezing groaning sound. Some of the visual ideas are well established — none of the nitty-gritty ones fare that well. There’s perhaps a subtext here about empathy (which snuck into my review more than I intended), with a generally unlikeable group challenging the notion of who you should care about, an idea that maybe includes Compassion as well? Your guess is as good as mine. Really though it’s a sharp reminder of how quickly an interesting arc can level out; like Compassion, you’ll wonder if there’s any compelling reason not to just leave.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #32 – The Janus Conjunction by Tevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#16
The Janus Conjunction
By Trevor Baxendale

There’s nothing like a new author to shake things up a bit. Here comes Trevor Baxendale with a story about human factions fighting over an abandoned alien artefact that doubles as a doomsday weapon and… actually, are we sure this is a new guy?

Certain tropes are bound to spring up in a long running series — especially one based on a long running series! — and the BBC Books run seems to have a few of its own by now. We’ve already had severely narky groups fighting over a dangerous alien thing in Longest Day and Vanderdeken’s Children. Alien ruins appeared and were utilised in both of those, as well as Alien Bodies, Kursaal, Option Lock, Seeing I, Legacy Of The Daleks and Last Man Running. Probably others too. It’s starting to look like a default setting: want to do SF? Have humans abusing, or wanting to abuse old alien tat for their own evil aims. Just add TARDIS.

This is pretty reductive, of course. It would be silly to put down books like Alien Bodies or Seeing I just for including familiar ideas. As I seem to say quite a lot, it’s what you do with your ideas that counts. And The Janus Conjunction… well… it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel there either. But I think it does This Sort Of Thing better than most recent attempts. And I think there’s genuine merit in that.

Right away we’re plunged into a warzone on the eerie world we can see on the cover: permanently eclipsed, with strange blue luminescent sand for lighting, this is Janus Prime. Soldiers in sealed suits are attacking a few visitors from Menda. What their actual beef is, we don’t yet know, but it’s an exciting start that introduces enormous cybernetic “spidroids” and ends with a very well timed wheezing and groaning. The Doctor and Sam instantly fall in with the Mendans, but are then separated by the Link — a mysterious gateway to the sister planet on the other side of their dying star. The Doctor is now on Menda. Sam is now in trouble.

The longer Sam is on Janus Prime, the greater the risk of (spectacularly!) fatal radiation poisoning. But the occupying military figures are not sympathetic types. The Doctor, meanwhile, has to talk the more peaceful (but just as stubborn) Mendans into letting him rescue his friend — as well as stopping whatever it is the maniacal Zemler is up to over on the dark planet, which has something to do with the Link.

It’s worth mentioning here that they’re all human. In a bit of continuity that for once actually puts old stories to work in a way that inspires new ones, we learn that following the Dalek occupation humans made some scrappy efforts to visit the stars. One of those was to set up a colony on the fairly remote Menda. They were escorted by mercenaries led by Zemler, a disgraced military figure who wanted to stay busy. On arrival/crash landing, when it became apparent the mercs couldn’t go home, the mood turned sour. Following the discovery of a strange portal to the neighbouring Janus Prime, Zemler and co found a new lease of life — somewhere to go, a planet to conquer — however this turned out to be an irradiated dump and returning to Menda after too much exposure meant instant death. Worse, the Link couldn’t be used to get them back to Earth. The end result was a pack of mercenaries who hate Menda, and a mysterious Link sitting between them in Chekhov’s Gun fashion.

There’s not a lot of varied motivation here. The Mendans like their planet and Zemler’s troops are mad about stuff. I think, putting on a somewhat charitable hat, there’s a unifying idea here about people trying to make their way and struggling to deal with the consequences of that: the Mendans want a colony, Zemler wants to maintain a kind of career after disastrous crossfire ended his time in the military. With the added continuity (which I like in this case!) it does sort of loosely become a story about What Mankind Did Next, and the different impulses that might drive that — wanting the best for everyone vs wanting the best for yourself. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it the book’s theme — to the extent that it is, it must be a fairly late addition, Zemler’s gang having been aliens in early drafts — but it gives you something extra to latch onto if you want.

Because… yeah. The characters aren’t terribly interesting otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had worse, and I think they all function pretty well within their limits, but there are limits. Julya wants her colony to thrive and she sort of likes Lunder. Lunder is an ex-mercenary who grew a conscience, so he has history with Zemler/a tension with the mostly peaceful colonists, and he sort of likes Julya too. His loyalties don’t wobble as much as you might expect. (A moment where he openly talks a character into self-sacrifice rather than do it himself makes rational sense, but it’s still pretty mean and goes completely unexamined by the Doctor.) Of the rest of the colonists, few register at all, and Menda is pleasant but dull as a rock — basically your average somewhat old-timey Star Trek outpost. An odd thing to get killed over.

The mercenaries are pretty much going along with their mad boss because they’re all dying anyway and it’s something to do. (When one of them switches sides it happens between scenes, so we skip the actual interesting bit.) Zemler is an absolute Emperor Zurg-level bad guy, sitting in an evil lair stroking a pet. He seems openly resistant to any rational reason for what he’s doing, starting off generally annoyed and sinking into megalomania from there. When the story finally starts playing around with the doomsday device, however, with all the technobabble that creates, it’s sort of nice that the stakes are so clear. One guy hates everyone so much that he’ll destroy everything. Okay, that’s a very quantifiable problem if nothing else.

Again with the charitable hat: I don’t think it’s that hard to empathise with these different groups. The Mendans have a nice home, of course it makes sense to protect it. The mercenaries are dying, and dying horribly, so it makes an awful kind of sense that they’d want to lash out, and otherwise have no better ideas than just “whatever the boss says”. Baxendale underscores the point by putting a lot of effort into the horrors of radiation, bodies rotting until they die at which point they instantly liquify. You’re always horribly aware of what’s happening to them, or what’s going to.

I think he just about pulls back from revelling in it, with the cost of it weighing on Sam for a lot of the book. She really puts her principles to the test here, hanging out on Janus Prime (at certain points, voluntarily) and putting herself at risk to help others. She suffers greatly for all of that, getting visibly sicker until she actually dies — a spoileriffic thing to blurt out, I know, but it’s also a thing that is resolved within 5 pages in a way that Sam won’t notice and the Doctor didn’t either, which I think makes it okay to mention here and perhaps makes it a contender for the all time Damp Squib Awards. (I wonder if that brush with/actual encounter with death will somehow come into play at a later date. I suspect that, like her possession and unwitting crimes in Kursaal, it won’t.)

There’s some pretty good interrogation of Sam’s stance on guns (Genocide still casting a shadow it seems), with the awkward bonus that her attempt to create a distraction ends up taking alien lives. She never actively finds out about this, although I very much enjoyed the subtle suggestion that the Doctor tells her via a psychic bond. (“The explosions had stopped the moment the Doctor found out it was Sam using the ripgun.”) Perhaps it’s fair to spread the bad feelings about; the violence here, after all, emboldens the Doctor’s characterisation. He gets to display not only a literal, mental link with the spider creatures/Janusians, but he empathises strongly when they are killed, more so than anyone else around — and he rages when it’s done deliberately by Lunder.

The Doctor here is as dead-on as he gets, a whirlwind of charm that can turn instantly to serious consideration instead. He confronts Zemler fearlessly (albeit perhaps foolishly) and his distress at realising Sam has unwittingly taken lives is as palpable as when he realises just how ill she has become. He displays a pleasing amount of cheekiness as well, at one point using the TARDIS’s temporal orbit to sort out a problem without advancing the overall ticking clock (he should do that every week!) and at the end steering himself and Sam away from a party because “I’ve seen the future and we don’t go.”

The best thing about The Janus Conjunction is the pace. It doesn’t let up, leading to a highly readable story that only looks as if it’s dragging its feet near the very end. The constant and very visible threat of radiation, plus the equally constant, equally visible moon and sands of Janus Prime (and the danger they represent) propels the thing along even though it is, in all honesty, a meat and potatoes Doctor Who story, and a familiar one at that. The writing for the regulars is excellent; the writing for everyone else is good enough. I doubt it’s anyone’s favourite, and I’m very ready to move on from alien wreckages and doomsday machines, but it’s a very solid bit of work.

6/10