Doctor Who: The BBC Books #12 – The Roundheads by Mark Gatiss

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#6
The Roundheads
By Mark Gatiss

Historicals are underrated.

A show about time travel automatically gains a license to tell any story it wants — you can go anywhere, have anything happen — yet Doctor Who seemed curiously averse to taking advantage of this. Travelling to the past? Well, you can expect some aliens that are up to no good. It’s practically mandatory, which after a while raises some questions about the Doctor’s choice of landing spots.

All in all the books haven’t been much better about this than the episodes off the telly box, with the vast majority still being of the “something weird from space” variety. (This really ought to be optional since something-weird-from-space appears in every episode, usually accompanied by his companions.) But at least we do get occasional prose adventures in history, such as Sanctuary, The Plotters and oh right, that was it. Well, here comes another one. It’s nice and early in the BBC Books run which hopefully signals that they won’t be quite so shy about the format.

The Roundheads is the third book by Mark Gatiss. I have had mixed feelings about his writing. Nightshade is a hugely evocative horror story but it gets a bit bogged down in executing its central gimmick. St. Anthony’s Fire is a game of two halves, with a rather poignant warzone in space contrasted against some wildly over the top religious satire. This time he’s exploring a known historical event with as much colour as he can muster, and honestly, he’s like a duck to water here.

London in late 1648 presents Gatiss with an opportunity to go on a prose rampage, and he does not disappoint, dirtying up this city in the grip of winter and filling it with memorable and often smelly people. The dialogue is that faux-historical kind that’s slightly gilded, almost corny, but in a way that recalls old adventure novels. People have names like Nathaniel Scrope, and say unironic things like “What next for this benighted land of ours?” So there’s plenty of character and atmosphere even before the TARDIS arrives to deposit its historically deficient quartet.

This feels like a nod to the series’s educational roots: despite their obvious advantages, the Doctor, Jamie, Ben and Polly seem equally uncertain about the order of events surrounding Oliver Cromwell and the death of Charles I, with Jamie coming in for an amusing amount of stick over it because this should all be recent history to him. (He didn’t spend much time in school.) This gives The Roundheads a decent excuse to help out any readers who don’t recall their school days. The Doctor even goes to retrieve a textbook that might help and, with a quasi-magical bit of help from the TARDIS, he finds Every Boy’s Book of the English Civil Wars: an amusingly simple tome that he’ll eventually regret picking out.

The travellers split up, mostly intent on having a nice time, and you can probably guess how that goes. There’s perhaps something to be said for how incredibly easy it is for Ben to get into hot water over one anachronistic clanger chuckled in a pub, but I think this speaks more to the Doctor (this one in particular) being a messy little imp than it does to any contrivance worth complaining about. Frankly, joining the TARDIS crew ought to come with mandatory lessons in what not to say abroad.

Ben and Polly are assumed to be anti-Royalist conspirators, and though they escape unscathed they are promptly involved in a secondary scathing incident that leaves Polly back with some suspicious characters she met at the inn, and Ben press ganged onto a boat headed for Amsterdam. (There are distant echoes of The Romans here, where Ian ended up rowing with slaves.)

Meanwhile the Doctor and Jamie fall afoul of the law. They soon find themselves in Cromwell’s orbit and the only way to avoid suspicion is to pretend that Jamie can see the future. This leads to some amusing shenanigans (including a very funny use of the old escape-only-to-be-recaptured trope) and some genuinely alarming peril, as that pesky textbook leads to difficult questions from Cromwell’s son Richard, who does not have a very bright future ahead. Forcing the Doctor to walk a tightrope around what he can and can’t reveal about the future feels like the natural place to go when a story involves historical events of this magnitude; this gets interestingly muddy when Gatiss’s plot works around, but not necessarily against the facts in order to keep things unexpected for the reader.

The Roundheads takes a measured view of the whole affair, initially painting the King as somewhat sympathetic and fixating rather strangely on Cromwell’s warts (in particular, a boil on his buttock) as if to clearly denote goodie and baddie at a visual level. Sympathy then leaks into Cromwell, such as a memory of being moved to tears at the sight of Charles reuniting with his children, just as we eventually realise the dangerous zeal of the monarch to continue his reign at any cost. There are prominent people on both sides of the conflict, filling out the various conspiracies swirling all around the Doctor and co. Allegiances distort interestingly as The Roundheads goes along, and in the name of Sydney Newman, you might even learn something along the way.

Of course, the best way into history is through people, and starting out with four protagonists gives us a fairly wide net. The Doctor and Jamie deal with history as facts and information, with the perils that follow all that. Jamie, it must be said, loses out a bit here; Gatiss captures Hines’s eye-rolling annoyance at some of the Doctor’s wheezes, and astutely observes that Jamie feels a step behind the other more experienced companions, at least for now, but there’s not a great deal for him to do once the Doctor sets up their carnival act. The Doctor, more the proverbial organ grinder than the monkey here, gets plenty of good moments. Perhaps the best is when he counsels Richard Cromwell with a wisdom that believably fits his age and experience.

Ben has perhaps the most exciting time of it on a literal pirate ship, swapping one for another once he reaches Amsterdam and making fast friends with Captain Sal Winter, a buxom old menace with more replacement parts than originals. Swashle is most definitely bucked by Ben in this: at one point he fights for his life on a storm-lashed boat, later he cannons over rooftops to seek revenge. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me really content to leave behind monsters and aliens for a bit because honestly, what more do you need?

The emotional heft of all this comes down to Polly, who befriends a young girl with allegiances on both sides, ends up inveigled in a plot to rescue the King and then arguably — a bit — maybe? — falls in love. It’s subtle bordering on transparent, but her attraction to one of the conspirators feels real enough, and is supported by a gentle flash-forward prologue that’s so light-footed I almost forgot about it. (I made myself re-read it afterwards.) Her last scenes in the book somewhat recall the Doctor’s heartbreak in The Aztecs, and nicely underscore the lack of a clear triumph in setting history right. All the same though, the high number of companions does make it difficult to give Polly and her feelings their due. I could imagine a version of this that leaned into it more and was better for it. (But maybe I’m just remembering Sanctuary.)

You can tell Gatiss is enjoying himself, or at least he seems to be (which is just as important) with descriptions like “a skinny, blond young man with the face of a disreputable cherub” (Ben) and “eyes that sparkled blue and green as the sea.” (The Doctor.) Much of The Roundheads reads like an actor’s prose, to be read and savoured over candlelight. It’s often funny, always in ways that ring true of the character, like Jamie’s thinning patience for the Doctor’s plots, or the Doctor’s ability to get hopelessly lost in his own TARDIS. The violence is grim, albeit not to a St. Anthony’s Fire extent; some of the pirate scraps push the, er, boat out as far as it’ll go whilst still being theoretically suitable for younger readers. Well, maybe the grubbier ones. (There are a couple of swear words in here as well but hey, it was a civil war, tensions were high.)

I didn’t make a lot of notes, which tends to be a sign that I’ve been entertainingly swept along, but then it leaves me rather out of puff on the descriptive front. I will say that The Roundheads could arguably be better, but what we’ve got here is still the strongest Mark Gatiss book so far, and comfortably the best Second Doctor novel. What with me always moaning that I don’t know what a good Missing Adventure or Past Doctor Adventure looks like, it seems sensible to conclude that it looks like this.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #11 – Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#6
Alien Bodies
By Lawrence Miles

So then. Alien Bodies. Bit of a big deal, as these things go. It’s The Lawrence Miles Book That Everyone Likes, which is no small feat. Plus it’s stuffed to the gills with lore and ideas, much of which will go on to inform the Eighth Doctor Adventures later. It’s sort of like the BBC Books equivalent of Timewyrm: Revelation, showing up in a puff of colourful smoke to say — well that’s all good fun as far as it goes, but what are we doing here, what’s it all for?

The range editors must have sat up very straight when Lawrence Miles (I’m presuming it was him) suggested we see the Doctor’s funeral. Well, if you wanted to look to the future, how’s that? It certainly kicks the dust out of the tyres to gallop so far ahead, then drop that clanger right into the present so the Doctor can react to it here and now. The Doctor of Alien Bodies is still coming to terms with his latest regeneration. (“He wanted to be a force of nature again, he wanted to be the incredible escaping equation all the time, but instead he was trapped in a half-human body with a baby-face and floppy curls.”) Knowing for sure that he’s going to snuff it might well help with his sense of identity.

Events conspire against him on that front — but like Miles, I’ve jumped ahead. I should have mentioned that the Doctor becomes inveigled in an auction for an ancient relic, and that it turns out the relic is his corpse. Naturally this creates great interest. (Just imagine all the Whovians trying to get access.) Only the auctioneer, a slippery figure called Mr Qixotl, knows that the bloke in the green velvet with the brown curls is the Doctor; for obvious reasons he is keen that this stays a secret. Uninvited and unwelcome, the Doctor skirts around the edges of events. It feels like he has trespassed in somebody else’s book. Heck, there are more than two Doctors in Alien Bodies — we meet one at the start, then we see a future one later who may or may not also be the one in the casket — which pushes Dr. Number Eight, as Paul often puts it, even further from the spotlight.

If he is not always in front of you, however, he is still often on your mind. Alien Bodies has a stacked guest cast, and you might well notice certain patterns about them. There’s the two officers from UNISYC: a dotty old explorer and his young, female, insecure-but-capable second in command who does all the work. There’s a legit Time Lord and his futuristic, disguised-as-a-humanoid-female TARDIS, who share a professional bond but appear to be in denial about caring for each other at all. (They do.) And there’s a couple of spooky cultists who arrive in what is, when all’s said and done, a TARDIS, albeit one that operates on black magic. The operator is an aloof young woman and her second is a grubby, angry up and comer. Lots of double acts here, all sort of… mirroring something. Hmm! At a time when the Doctor is (apparently) unsure of himself, it’s interesting to surround him with echoes and surrogates.

Of course he’s only half the equation, and all of this is just as revealing about the symbiotic heart of all these stories, showing just how easily that balance can go wrong. The strongest Eighth Doctor books so far — in true Star Trek movie style it’s the even-numbered ones — have been very interested in the relationship between the Doctor and the companion. I’ve struggled a bit with Sam, sometimes feeling that she’s more a companion-shaped placeholder than a person. (I know that’s not entirely fair or accurate, but it’s my general impression of her.) Well, either they decided to turn a bug into a feature or that was the plan all along, because Sam is confirmed to be something along those lines here. Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but why not: it’s revealed in Alien Bodies that Sam is somehow living the wrong life, or rather a version of it that involves the Doctor, with a separate set of biodata that never met him, and never became the sort of person who would tear off in the TARDIS. Where this is going, I don’t exactly know, although Miles plays amusingly fast and loose with the concept even here. Has Sam been manipulated by a third party? On some level, the Doctor doubts it. Is the Doctor somehow influencing time and space to bring about someone like her? It’s proposed, but who knows. (And frankly, it sounds like a fib.) The wider supporting point that the Doctor always needs someone around, or-does-a-tree-falling-make-a-sound etc, feels earnest enough, but I dunno. Watch this space I guess. (And there we are! Seated and interested in where the series is going. Job’s a good’un.)

The downside to this is the trade off between very interesting (and it is!) context and yer actual, pound for pound scenes with these characters. Sam’s psychoanalysis plays out very much externally in a nightmarish sequence with blood-coloured duplicates, and it’s shared with Lieutenant Bregman (the junior UNISYC officer) who undergoes something similar. The whole biodata thing is then discussed over Sam, between the “antibody” version of her and later on, the Doctor. Sam herself impacts the novel like a small stone impacting a window. I’ll be honest, this was a little disappointing. I wish Miles had found a way to make this turning point for Sam more, you know, Sam’s turning point. But it’s a very busy book and I guess it had to give.

I mean, look at all those characters. And we do, taking time out to hear each of their stories. These are all quite interesting, but they mostly serve to set up the wider stakes in the world of these books. Because oh yes, the Time Lords have got competition.

Quick sidebar: I’ve read Alien Bodies before. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say it was back when I were a nipper and this was all trees as far as the eye could see. I was an adult when I first read this one. More or less.) Alien Bodies is The One That Introduces Faction Paradox, aka the creepy cult version of the Time Lords. And for some reason my brain decided in the intervening years that they were the book’s antagonists. I mean, they are antagonists, but they’re not the enemy the Time Lords are facing. The unspecified Enemy (no name, ooooh) have beaten them back so much that the Doctor’s corpse (and all its weird upgrades) could seriously turn the tide of war. Their agents include anarchitects, beings who can rearrange and delete matter, such as buildings. Miles had by this point already toyed with the idea of unimaginable wars across time and space in Down, and he would go on to perfect it in Dead Romance. (Where amusingly, for rights reasons, the Time Lords are the unnamed party.) All of this strangeness is much more my preference for what a Time War should look and sound like than, to pick a totally random example, Time Lords Vs Daleks, done for the simple virtue that you’ve heard of both of them. (Ever the time traveller, Miles manages to rip the piss out of that idea nearly a decade before the TV series did it: “Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.”)

The Enemy — who don’t exactly appear in Alien Bodies, for much the same reason we’re not resolving the Sam crisis right now — are not the only oddities. Alien Bodies is bursting with possibilities, including a third party in the war, the Celestis: descendants of Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency who took themselves out of time and corporeal reality and mostly use zombies as their agents. Look at characters like Mr Trask (a zombie) and Mr Shift (a concept of language who floats through people’s perceptions in a way that is distinct each time it happens and also distinct from the bits where Miles has chunks of prose acting like dialogue, sometimes in conversation, which in itself is very hard to pull off). Look again at that secondary Time Lord and his female TARDIS, the gently impressive pushing along of that technology. And look at bloody Faction Paradox! A gross, creepy, upside down version of Time Lord orthodoxy where the ultimate punishment is erasure through self-murder. They don’t, contrary to my wrong memories, figure all that hugely in Alien Bodies, but it’s still a hell of an impact, and I can see why they encouraged further study. (And having them not be the novel’s be all, end all is just more of a flex. This is one of its ideas. There are other flexes, like the intriguing early setup for a Brigadoon-style disappearing city, which is explained pages later as a simple trick that Mr Qixotl “doubted anyone would have noticed.”)

I’ve complained before (who, me?) about Lawrence Miles’s tendency to have ideas and just sort of sit in them. Alien Bodies… well, it does do that, quite frankly. Don’t worry, we’re not swerving into “actually Alien Bodies is terrible” here, but it’s worth saying that all of this creativity and setup is not what you’d call a very forward moving plot. The auction is called; the interested parties arrive; the Doctor, rather inconveniently, is there too; several parties stir up trouble; trouble overflows until it explodes and then the Doctor does a thing. I did reach a certain point in Alien Bodies where I thought, oh this is it, isn’t it, plot-wise? And the frequent diversions to hear this person’s story or that tenuously sentient form of language’s story made it a bit of a higgledy-piggledy read at times, although I don’t remember that being the case when I first read it. (Back when I were only twenty-one and this were all trees m’lad, etc etc, music from that Hovis advert.) I suspect my attention span has shifted (Shifted?) a bit over the years, or perhaps it’s just the accumulated weight of 130-odd Doctor bloody Who books rattling around my head now, but anyway, dash through Alien Bodies I did not. Although I highly enjoyed paddling through it.

And that’s the last big thing I’ve not mentioned yet. Alien Bodies is somehow really really fun. It’s pleased as punch most of the time, despite the sepulchral, well, everything, frequently letting these events and characters be funny even when the situation is creepy. Look at the Doctor’s funeral, which comes with a joke about how this omnipotent focal point of the universe can still bugger up a timer. Look at the Doctor’s first scene, when he escapes an assassination attempt by diving out of a window into the TARDIS parked 90 degrees up against a wall. (Was Moffat taking notes?) Mr Qixotl is perhaps the funnest single thing here, and you do get to care about the sneaky little git despite, well, him. But then the rivalry between Time Lords and Faction Paradox — big, lore-y stuff! — is allowed to mostly play out as bitchiness. There are plenty of honest to god goofy little jokes sprinkled about as well, mostly the kind that would specifically tickle a Whovian, like the Doctor’s quasi-mystical relationship with his pockets, or the Raston lap-dancing robots (“the most perfect dancing machines ever devised”), or what appears to be a lightning-fast dig at War Of The Daleks (“My Dalek history’s always been a bit rusty. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t keep changing all the time”), or the big joke that everyone remembers about Alien Bodies that even now, wading in spoilers, I don’t want to spoil just in case, which then pivots into possibly a meta comment on the previous unavailability of certain characters, and then becomes a clever reinvention of a crap baddie.

So, it’s a fun one, especially for long term fans. But it also manages to be quite sweet about the old two-hearted sod, at least occasionally in between all the buffoonish facsimiles, the winking references and horrible blood rituals. My memory had no trouble preserving the Doctor’s funeral for Laika, his rage about her mistreatment, the unspoken bond he feels with the lost dog. That truly has stayed with me ever since. I had though, delightfully, forgotten Mr Qixotl’s cheeky hint that despite all this fuss over his casket, the Doctor of the future might have pulled a fast one after all and not even be in there.

Alien Bodies then. It’s a lot. At the same time it is strangely small, with the zesty pluck of a murder mystery. (And speaking of Bernice, he manages to sneak in a reference to Tyler’s Folly from Down, one of the Bernice Summerfield NAs. I read them all so I guess it’s my job to spot them.) Normally that’s just what I’m after, but — at the risk of angering the gestalt — I do think Alien Bodies could have been stronger. The hall of mirrors approach to characterisation has its ups and downs, and I could have got more of a feel for Sam in this — indeed, that felt like the point of her story here. Also, I know it seems picky to criticise a Doctor Who book for being more in love with the idea of the Doctor as a general concept than with the McGann version specifically, and I don’t even think he’s poorly served here, getting flourishes of anger and cleverness that would glitter on any Doctor’s resume, but — might as well be honest here — it’s a just plain very crowded book and he’s only one part of it.

Hey, every book deserves the occasional poke and prod to make sure it’s all up to snuff. Even the sainted ones. This one’s still pretty bloody good.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #10 – Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#5
Illegal Alien
By Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Daleks! No, wait, it’s the other one. Cybermen weren’t as elusive in print as the pepperpots, but it still feels like a coup for them to show up this early in BBC Books, and in the same month as the Daleks, no less.

Before we get to them, however, it’s worth saying that Illegal Alien is a bit of a milestone. The Seventh Doctor and Ace represented the show’s present when the New Adventures came along. Their stories were the direction Doctor Who was going in, to the extent that it could move without TV screens. Now they are part of its past, and we will only visit them on occasional jollies, handing them back afterwards like a couple of tuckered out grandkids. It’s a subtle change of context but, when you’re used to following the evolution of the strange little chap with the funny umbrella, it’s a noticeable one.

Now we’re getting the Doctor and Ace as they were on telly: thick as thieves and looking for trouble. Who better to write that than someone who worked on the show, and while we’re at it, co-wrote a non-fiction book about Ace with Sophie Aldred? So here comes effects guru Mike Tucker — along with Robert Perry — to bring back memories.

Illegal Alien does this literally and figuratively. It’s set during the Blitz, which is a good call from a character point of view since Ace is a tough Londoner with a keen eye for prejudice; in the shadow of the Nazis she soon has cause to remember her friend Manisha getting bombed out by racists. (See Ghost Light.) There are a few moments where she — not so subtly, it must be said — recalls recent history, for instance wondering how her grandmother is getting on. (See The Curse Of Fenric.) And of course, pitting Ace against another famous Doctor Who monster brings to mind the time she introduced a Dalek to a baseball bat. (See Remembrance Of The you-know-who.)

The Doctor is treading faintly familiar steps as well. He indulges an apparent interest in American culture — this time baseball rather than jazz, see The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis — in his breezy interactions with a black barman. (See Remembrance again.) Later, he dusts off his chess skills against the villain of the piece. (See Fenric again.) I’m not complaining about these reference points, by the way. It makes sense for someone versed in the era to steep their novel in it. The early New Adventures were all over this as well. Tucker and Perry are no slouches at capturing the characters’ voices in general, but all this era window-dressing undoubtedly helps.

Not that I would exactly call Illegal Alien a character piece. With its spooky Cybermen stalking around an easily identifiable, highly atmospheric setting, it’s trad as heck, and it tends never to be far away from its next action sequence. You’re thrown right into that with a bit of first person narration courtesy of Cody McBride, a down on his luck American PI in London. (Circa 1940, so very down on his luck, then.) McBride’s inner monologue might as well come with a boozy jazz accompaniment; at one point he recalls a girl back home named Dolores who, “if he’d asked, would have married him there and then.” After following a crashed spaceship he then thinks of the local law enforcement: “Of all the strange, glowing, flying-sphere-filled bomb craters in all the world, Mullen had to walk into [mine].” I don’t know if Terrance Dicks ever had the time or inclination to read other people’s Who novels, but he’d surely have enjoyed this one — partly because of Cody, partly because he also wrote a Seventh Doctor and Ace vs the Nazis book, but mostly because there are a couple of Cybermen in this disguised as gangsters. (Not a joke. The man would have stood up and applauded.)

There’s lots of goofy, meaty excitement to be had here, what with a confused Cyberman on the run committing random murders (and smearing itself with all the blood and gore — lovely) and Cybermats, converted from local wildlife, carrying out targeted killings. Combined with the unmistakeable squalor of Blitz London, the general ordure brings to mind The Bodysnatchers — and sure enough, Illegal Alien is another BBC Book that a younger me actually bothered to read in 1997, happily hooked by its horrors. Cybermen have a tendency to be very nasty in print, as Iceberg and Killing Ground showed over at Virgin, and they continue that trend here, not only with the berserk Cyber-Leader ripping apart vagrants, but in the perhaps inevitable scene delving into the awful transformation from human to machine. (Here, like Mark Morris with his Skarasen rampage, Tucker and Perry arguably go too far by introducing a converted baby.) While I think you could make the point and still rein it in a little, I nonetheless appreciate it when authors push the Cybermen to a place that Daleks don’t go. As perennial runners up of Doctor Who monsterdom, they could use that distinction.

Atmosphere, action, getting the era right… you can tell what I’m about to say, right? And yes, the odd one out here is plot. Because there’s not much that actually interests Cybermen, it’s perhaps hard to find labyrinthine ways to tell stories about them. Illegal Alien lands on a simple enough structure: some Cybermen wound up here more or less by accident, and some overzealous humans have tried to take advantage. (To their credit, they did surprisingly well in the Not Getting Converted department.) The bulk of the book comes down to finding out who is pulling what string, and what they want out of it. While that’s not uninteresting, in execution it perhaps belies a shortcoming with getting a writer who has hands on, very practical experience of making the programme: we very authentically capture the feeling of moving between half a dozen sets, over and over again, until enough has been revealed or it’s time for another cliffhanger. McBride spends about a quarter of it in a prison cell off screen, perhaps giving us the verisimilitude of an actor on holiday that week.

Eventually the story gets crazy and relocates to a Nazi stronghold on Jersey — which is good character fodder for Ace, obviously, but also low hanging fruit, commentary-on-the-evils-of-mankind-wise, especially coming so suddenly in the last act. It’s even more conspicuous when you remember that Virgin Publishing, as well as already producing the proverbial Really Good Seventh Doctor WW2 Book in Exodus, went and did it again in Just War, and they set that one in the Channel Islands. (Messrs Tucker and Perry can at least claim to have done “the Nazis get their hands on modern technology because of Ace” before Big Finish, but Steve Lyons — who has surely read this — would get more out of it when writing Colditz.)

Much of Illegal Alien seems to be about just understanding the assignment, and there really is something to be said for the characterisation of the Doctor in this, hewing closer to the calculating yet loveable presence he was before the New Adventures looked under the hood. At one point he charms the occupants of an air raid shelter by “conducting an off-key choir with a stick of rhubarb”; at another he (inevitably) turns out to have gamed his chess playing to achieve a secret result. That said, a moment where McBride correctly guesses at the Doctor’s inner darkness all in one go does not convince, and conversely I’m not sure I buy the Doctor’s obliviousness with the villain of the piece, needing to have the penny dropped for him by McBride. They’re going for a pretty obvious Moriarty thing here, and although the secret malefactor is not an unwelcome creation — wanting knowledge for its own sake and causing an Allies/Nazi Cyber-arms race to get there — they overdo the misdirecting wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly thing, making it seem rather unlikely that he’d actually be steeped in so much wrongdoing. Hey ho: I know he comes back in a Tucker/Perry sequel, which I also read years back. Maybe he’s a bona fide stinker there.

You get bang for your buck monster-wise, atmosphere-wise and this-feels-like-they-could-have-made-it-on-the-telly-(with heavy editing)-wise. But with all the memberberries I can’t help considering if other stories did some of these things better, and the wrench from a fairly bloody runaround to a sudden Nazi showdown left me feeling less than satisfied with it as a coherent whole. If you’re into what Illegal Alien has to offer after a chapter or two, though, you ought to enjoy following it between its bombed-out set pieces.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #9 – War Of The Daleks by John Peel

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#5
War Of The Daleks
By John Peel

Daleks! For real this time, sink plunger and everything, DALEKS!

Say what you will about this one, but this is a big deal and quite an exciting shot fired from BBC Books. Sure, they may have copied Virgin Publishing’s homework in general, but those guys never had the license for the most famous Doctor Who baddie of them all. While I would argue that they didn’t suffer for it (they were all about New things after all), sometimes it’s just plain nice to go Doctor Who = Daleks.

Of course, it’s one thing to wheedle a license out of the Nation estate. You’ve then got to actually do something with all those pepperpots. What does that look like in print? Daleks aren’t exactly famed conversationalists; often the worst bit of a Dalek story IS-WHEN-THEY-ARE-GI-VEN-TOO-MUCH-DI-A-LOGUE.

John Peel — known for, among other things, his Dalek Masterplan novelisations — makes some choices in this regard, and some of them are good. War Of The Daleks is not all Daleks, all the time. They are very much kept in the background for the first 150 pages or so, an implacable force of nature that the plot and characters must work around in order to survive. This might seem odd when not showing Daleks was already our default setting, but there’s a lot to be said for atmosphere. Look at the Borg: were they ever better than in The Best Of Both Worlds Part 1, which is mostly just the Enterprise crew bricking it?

Don’t panic, though, Dalek fans: they’re still here, just a bit off to the side. There are several interludes that show Dalek combat in various forms, and never from their POV. We see a Space Security Service agent working a bit of subterfuge against them on an aquatic world; Draconians in a death-or-glory fight in an asteroid belt; Mechonoids, forced to take a break from their daily routine, attempting to keep them away from their never-to-arrive human settlers. (Possibly my favourite bit in the book is a dying Mechonoid’s final report “to Central Computer, to inform it that another Mechon unit would have to be assigned to check on the insect infestation on the geraniums tomorrow.”) There’s good variety here, with some scenarios playing out how the “good guys” hoped, others going in the Daleks’ favour. It paints a picture of an entire way of life spent fighting these things, which can take as many forms as you care to list. As well as giving a good example to any readers who are (god forbid) unfamiliar with what Daleks are all about, it’s using Daleks as more of a narrative way in than as the whole narrative, and as you can see in stories like Power or Evil Of The Daleks (Peel novelised both) that approach can be a great starting point.

We open with probably the most interesting interlude featuring the oldest Dalek enemy, Thals, in the heat of battle. This is likely just what you want when you pick up a doggarn Dalek book at last: loads of action, new and different types of Dalek, even the first word of the book is “Exterminate!” More interesting still is what it says about the Thals: dropping a nuke to wipe out the nearest attack wave also obliterates a primitive settlement nearby, much to the chagrin of Ayaka, the soldier with the biggest conscience. Immediately after that the entire planet is destroyed; unbeknownst to Ayaka their mission was simply a trap to lure some Daleks to their deaths. The entire planetary population are just collateral damage. It’s genuinely a bit of a swing to open your Dalek novel by asking if we can trust the Thals.

Unfortunately, just as getting the Dalek license doesn’t do everything for you in one go, it’s one thing to set up a conflict — it’s another to make a satisfying story out of it. War Of The Daleks asks these questions about the Thals but then follows them to their most literal conclusions. Delani, their leader, has a plan to capture Davros and — rather than put him on trial or kill him — put him to work. Doing what, you ask? Why, genetically modifying the Thals, of course! Because in order to defeat Daleks, y’see, he is willing to turn his people into Daleks and oh god, the obviousness, it’s giving me a rash. This storyline doesn’t have anywhere else to go once we’ve gazed into Nietzsche’s abyss: it’s evil and wrong, we can see that. So things promptly change afterwards and the power is taken away from Delani, leaving the whole genetically-engineered-Thals thing a bit of an “aaaaaanyway.”

And yeah, Davros is here. That should probably be a spoiler since he’s not on the cover, but the blurb happily gives it away, and besides, did you think we could possibly avoid him? Ever since he first appeared, Daleks and Davros have been like a dinner party with Frasier and Niles: you get the one, you get that other one. Davros is an interesting character in his own right, but he tends to diminish the Daleks — and vice versa. Having him here just feels like we looked at the trajectory of Dalek stories in the 1980s, which all do it like this, and genuinely could not imagine a different approach for the next one.

In Peel’s defence, it matters that we’re picking up Davros’s story after we last saw him, and he is central to the plot. But this is a rather shaky defence because the further you stray into the plot, the more obsessed it is by continuity in place of actual storytelling. Now, to an extent, I think it makes sense to go over some key points about Daleks. Why not? There hadn’t been a TV story about them in nine years, and there were no novels featuring them (apart from novelisations). Some readers genuinely might not know much about Daleks, so having the Doctor, for example, recap the plot of their first adventure might help lay down the ground rules. Having Thals in the mix helps with that theme, continuing the original thread right up to the present. I mean it: not all continuity refs are bad. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

There are harmless little sprinkles here and there, such as references to Marc Cory, Varga plants, the Slyther and “that business with Reginald Styles”. You don’t need to have seen The Chase to enjoy the bit with the Mechonoids, for instance. But the main purpose of picking up the story of Davros, which after that little Nietzsche For Dummies bit with the Thals is all that War Of The Daleks is about, is to reshuffle his previous telly stories in a way that will undo Skaro getting blown up in Remembrance Of The Daleks. Which is… fine, if you happen to care deeply about that, and great if you are in the market for a random conspiracy theory re-reading of some unconnected telly episodes, but it’s not really serving an overall story, is it? Never mind those hypothetical “what are Daleks” readers. After a certain point it ceases to be a novel so much as a paddling pool for big fans of lists. It’s Dalek housekeeping. (And the novel seems aware of that: Sam says the info-dumps are “like Jackanory,” and “coming in at the middle of a film.” Which, I mean, nice lampshade and everything, but…? Maybe don’t do it then?)

War Of The Daleks at least lives up to its name. After the Dalek Prime laboriously fills the Doctor in about their crazy plan to avert the destruction of Skaro (trust me, it’s nuts) he engineers a civil war in order to smoke out Davros’s remaining supporters. And there is a lot of action, which certainly provides some bang for your buck re Daleks. I got a bit bored though, since the whole thing feels like a retread of Evil Of The Daleks anyway. More importantly, who cares? They’re Daleks. We keep cutting back to the fighting as if it intrinsically matters how this side or that side is getting on. Blow up or don’t, guys, just call me when you’re done. (Several of the Thal supporting characters get killed off as well, but most of them never got named in the first place.)

There’s not a lot else going on, since it’s all in service of continuity and the eventual civil war, but it’s worth mentioning that Ayaka is fairly compelling; she shoulders most of the “but at what cost?” war moralising, and does it in a more interesting way than her boss’s mad plan to breed Dalek Thals. It’s not her fault the story just stops finding this stuff interesting. Also good is Chayn, an engineer on the garbage ship that finds Davros’s escape pod. She’s fun, capable and instantly intrigued by the TARDIS, but she conveniently falls in love (more or less) so she won’t be joining the Doctor after all. Boo. She mostly seems to be here just to set off Sam’s jealousy, which is all rather unappealing but certainly on brand for her; where her feelings for the Doctor don’t entirely add up, I suppose we can write them off as belonging to a messy seventeen year old, but her possessiveness and over-eagerness are getting a bit old now. It’s a pity Peel couldn’t work in her guilt from Genocide, especially as there is a brief reference to the aliens from it. There are scenes here of Sam literally carrying a gun and wondering if she can pull the trigger, which practically jump up and down to continue that conversation. Ah well.

(Sidebar: I should probably mention the Doctor as well, so here I am, mentioning him. He’s fine. Bit naive at times, suitably grave at others. His characterisation is at least better than in either of Peel’s Virgin novels, it’s just not especially exciting. Both Doctor and companion are just sort of here, apart from some of Sam’s more annoying habits which are regrettably bang on.)

The final stretch is such an exploding onslaught that I started to forget the stuff I liked. And hey, I like stuff in here. It’s highly readable — genuinely, never something to sniff at. There is some creative context to establish why the Daleks are a big deal, and questions around the morality of fighting against them, which hint more towards one of Terry Nation’s other well known shows. I even empathise a bit with the impulse to write the next chapter in the 80s Davros chronology — since they all followed on from each other already, why break the habit of a lifetime? I just don’t think the answers and ideas he comes up with are as exciting as getting Daleks into a book in the first place, and by the end, despite early promise, this one’s just a lot of noise.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #8 – Business Unusual by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#4
Business Unusual
By Gary Russell

Well, I’ve got to do admire the title. Gary Russell promising Business Unusual is a bold claim, since he is definitely one of those writers who Knows What He Likes.

A fairly bold claim is also contained in the book’s introduction, where he announces a “desire to write a sixth Doctor story that I thought Colin Baker would have liked to be in.” Not knowing Gary or Colin personally I’ve no idea what this means — more dinosaurs? — but perhaps more telling is his apparent aim for “what might have been the Sixth Doctor, given time and a decent go at it.” Any Big Finish listener can point to the cuddlier, less explosive character played by Colin on audio as “the version he liked better”. (Gary would of course have had a hand in that.) You can also find an eerily close approximation of this in Millennial Rites. So, story and characterisation-wise, what does Business Unusual do for the guy in the aggressively colourful coat?

Oddly, he’s a lot like he was on screen, particularly in Season 22 when his demeanour hadn’t yet softened. He’s rude (clapping back at an American that his accent seems out of place because he made a similar comment about his coat), he’s loud (frequently doing that “say a word three times with increasing volume” thing to show up whoever said the word first) and he’s more incongruous than is usual even for the Doctor (there are plenty of references to his weight, an odd thing to highlight about a timeless alien but something that makes him stand out more physically). I don’t know what Colin thought of all that; it’s very recognisable, much as it was in The Eight Doctors, but it doesn’t move him on in the same way as, for instance, The Trial Of A Timelord, when he and Peri seemed able to enjoy each other’s company for once. (At least until he went mad and she got murdered.)

Some of this abrasiveness is deliberate, as the Doctor in this is attempting to avoid his own future. Business Unusual gives us, at long last, Mel’s introductory story, as the Doctor’s travels have brought him to Pease Pottage in 1989, where Mel is from. He reckons that if he doesn’t become friends with her then his path will change and he won’t eventually become the Valeyard. QED. We’ve had shades of this before in Time Of Your Life, when he lived off the grid on a distant world to eliminate any possibility of a red-haired fitness fanatic entering his life. This time it’s all a bit more pointed: the Doctor tries to avoid meeting her, then pours cold water on the wonders of space and time travel, being fairly rude to her in general just to split the difference.

This idea ought to be valid, what with there being a prior attempt, but I just don’t like the way it’s done here. Living on a backwater planet is one thing, especially for only a brief portion of the narrative. Actively trying to put Mel off her established future (for most of the novel) is direct interference, and more overtly self-involved than I’m used to for the Doctor. (Perhaps, ironically, this talent for manipulation is a hint towards his future.) Who is he to say that Mel shouldn’t have those experiences? Why is his happiness worth more than hers? It’s also worth saying that the more direct his action to change his future, the more we’re putting it under a microscope and the less it actually makes sense for a Time Lord to think that this is even possible. He has met and interacted with a future, Doctor-adjacent Mel. He even used evidence of their adventures in his trial! Hell, the paradox of even trying this might end up creating the Valeyard. (You can argue that this is all a desperate Hail Mary and even he doesn’t think it will come to much, and fair enough, but there’s little suggestion of that in the text. Even showing us some genuine fear and concern about his future as the Valeyard would help justify it, but the whole thing is presented merely as continuity: he will become this thing so he needs to not do that thing. The Trial Of A Timelord is left to do all the heavy lifting.)

Long story short: “what might have been the Sixth Doctor, given time and a decent go at it” ends up being pretty much the same Sixth Doctor who stomped around shouting at Peri. The stuff I like about him in this is more incidental. We begin Business Unusual with the Doctor closing off a previous adventure (featuring the Master! No, he’s not in the book) which right away is a fun place to start, but in practical terms this means working with the police. By making this the end of an adventure we skip all that tedious “you have to believe me” stuff, and the Brighton constabulary instead have a wonderfully eye-rolling acceptance of the Doctor and his foibles. It’s refreshing to cut to the chase like that, much as it was for Hartnell when The War Machines suddenly repositioned him as a known quantity in the British scientific scene, and for Pertwee during pretty much his entire run. The Sixth Doctor in this also manages to be quite persuasive with new people he meets, such as Mel’s somewhat open minded father Alan and, oh yes, Mel herself, who despite the Doctor’s best efforts to the contrary accepts that he is an alien and quite fancies a trip in the TARDIS. (Perhaps dialling down the “I’ve got a spaceship” bit might have helped his plan along. Ah well.) The Doctor might be a certifiable pain but he brings other people along with him. Perhaps this is what Gary was going for viz “what might have been” etc.

But enough about Joseph and his very colourful whatsit: Mel is here! And Business Unusual does a good job of introducing her, meshing the character’s slightly disparate interests of fitness and computer programming in ways that a novel can do more comfortably than a few frenzied TV episodes. We learn that Mel took a gap year and went to university as a mature student, which right away makes her seem like someone apart from the world around them. The technology she’s working with feels beneath her, the job offers doubly so. It doesn’t take long to believe that this person would be doing a smart thing to get off this rock altogether and see the universe. Her refusal to be cowed by the Doctor (in full “don’t do it” mode) also bodes very well, suggesting a kind of authority that — for better or worse — she rarely had on screen. (See the moment where she screams at something awful, and we make a point of saying it’s the first time she’s ever done that.)

I would rather her first adventure had not been so interested in an abortive attempt to call the whole thing off, and had instead focussed on building their Doctor/companion rapport, but she nevertheless comes out of it well. Or at least she does until the final stretch, when she pleads and pleads with a still-implacable Doctor to let her aboard and he still says no. When she sneaks onboard anyway he gives way genially enough, but by this point she’s ceded some of that authority she’d built up, and the turnaround comes with no apparent resolution of his (highly questionable) future-avoidance plan and certainly no humility about trying to neg her out of her destiny. (Although maybe I’m onto a loser expecting that from the Sixth Doctor.) On balance then, as a companion intro, it’s hit and miss.

Of course there are other reasons to read Business Unusual besides the new companion schtick. What of the proverbial business? Sadly, to quote a Welsh philosopher, it’s not unusual. We’re picking up threads from The Scales Of Injustice (and further down the rabbit hole, Who Killed Kennedy) with the “pale young man,” a shifty inhuman presence with access to a lot of discarded alien tech once again making a nuisance of himself. (He has rebranded as “the managing director”, which makes for a less irritating repetition.) With him as before are the creepy Irish twins and a Stalker — a giant dog infused with Stahlman’s Gas which makes it even deadlier. This is not an inherently bad toy box, and it gives him a completely valid license to regurgitate old continuity. Certain other familiar elements creep their way into the plot, which generally concerns sinister video game consoles; the discerning Whovian will surely develop suspicions about the plastic figures and glassy-eyed duplicates that begin to show up, and let’s just say they’re onto something.

But after a while, when all the pennies have dropped and it turns out the guy who collects old alien stuff is going to (brace yourself) use the old alien stuff, it begins to feel like the writer forgot to actually bring his own idea to the table to make it any different. The villain’s collection ends up as a sort of accidental mirror of his own limited imagination. (Here’s his grand plan: “I want to take over the world simply to give myself something to do.” 200+ pages for that, honestly.) The creepy game consoles are a nice idea, but the “game” part never really manifests; they’re supposed to be a means of control, but the initial test just activates the free toys that come with each one and kills the nearest kid. Which is horrible, obviously, but also pointless. (Do you want to control them or kill them?) And hey, we already did a version of this in Terror Of The Autons, only that was just the toys and not the random game console as well. If you’re going to add elements but not explore them, what you end up with is the old ideas again, with bonus clutter.

The less than intricate plotting is supported by a Gary Russell staple: casual excessive violence. Heads and various other limbs are bitten off by the Stalker, horrific injuries are sustained generally, and we hear about similar awful things in flashbacks — sometimes wistful ones, recalled by psychotic characters. I got whiplash going from the horrible story of a woman taken to bed then (mid-intercourse) violently pulled apart and mind-wiped so she can be a cybernetic secretary on wheels (I don’t even) to the general Enid Blyton cheeriness of the prose in other scenes, but that’s how it goes. When characters die the length of time we’ve spent with them has no bearing on the quickness of their passing, like a man with a tragic UNIT backstory, forgotten by the Brigadier and corrupted by the managing director, only to finally turn and fight back and, oh right, now he’s dead, next. (The secretary doesn’t even get her memory back before being unapologetically bundled out of the book.) There’s a creepy indifference to this stuff that seems to happen in book after book. I wish he’d find a balance between blood and guts and the other stuff he writes, which tends to be blandly inoffensive if prone to a continuity reference.

Speaking of which, we’ve got one more box to tick besides plugging that gap in Mel’s timeline: the Brigadier is here, ready to meet the Sixth Doctor, because Dimensions In Time doesn’t count. (Gary’s own words via Terminus Reviews.) And look, fair enough: everyone likes the Brigadier, so why not. That said though, it’s a curious impulse when the other thing he wants to do is lock up the Brig for almost the entire book, and only have him meet the Doctor briefly at the end. The lone Brigadier stuff is at least worthwhile, having him reflect on the odd situation of living after UNIT (and teaching maths at an all boys school — his life story is in places as disparate as Mel’s), jumping at the chance to get back in action. It’s an excuse to reflect on the cost of what he used to do for a living, particularly when faced with a now corrupted ex-subordinate. This is good character fodder. (Which also ran satisfyingly rampant in The Devil Goblins From Neptune.) Later, when forced to confront Mel with the necessity of killing, he reflects eloquently that living with it means “never forgetting … not letting one face, one name, ever fade away.” I like that very much, although I wish the author would take it on board too.

There’s plenty of introspection elsewhere, but it’s generally just “halt, introspect, onto next bit”, like the sudden mucky remembrances of Mr Jones, or the record-scratchingly abrupt change of heart for the Irish Twins. The prose is as harmless-if-unpolished as ever — unpleasant asides aside — with some purple bits probably thrown in as tribute to Pip and Jane Baker, who get a favourable mention in the introduction. (They’d have loved “Do you possess even the most rudimentary auditory organs under those flowing locks of golden gossamer?” Although I can’t say that I do.) And it does at least try something different, which is to start each scene with its exact time and place. This is perhaps intended to give the story an urgent real time feel, but ultimately it’s stage directions we just don’t need — it’s a novel, there’s already enough context. I’m not likely to bother reading the likes of “Madeira Drive, Brighton, East Sussex, 24 July 1989, 12.36” more than once.

Clearly there’s a lot to say about Business Unusual, and yet there’s really not a lot going on here. Is this a more developed Sixth Doctor? Not that I noticed, and in some ways, he’s worse. Am I glad we finally “met” Mel? Sort of. It mostly works. Am I pleased that the Sixth Doctor met the Brigadier? Well he didn’t particularly, although it was nice to see the latter again. Is this a good finale for Gary Russell’s Scales Of Injustice toy box? Honestly, not really. Similar ideas would later be repurposed as Torchwood, and although I never cared much for that, clearly you can get more mileage out of this stuff than “gosh, this guy’s evil isn’t he? I wonder if the aliens from Terror Of The Autons that he’s manipulating will turn on him like they did in Terror Of The Autons oh.”

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #7 – Genocide by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#4
Genocide
By Paul Leonard

Paul Leonard. Heck yeah! While it’s not surprising to see another rising star from Virgin Publishing make the move to BBC Books, I’m glad he’s here. His books are often very good; even better, they are interesting.

Genocide is a very Paul Leonard book. In particular we’ve got aliens who are really rather alien, now that you mention it. The Tractites are ostensibly horse-like beings, but they possess two sets of eyes (for night and day) and a charmingly smell-based way of reading books. They are utterly benign, even when faced with potential danger, which wins Sam over instantly. Their way of life is front and centre, as is the question of how much it is worth compared to, plucking a not random example out of the air, ours. Because something has happened to Earth — now a lush green world with no pollution and no wars — and all of a sudden the Tractites have always lived here.

The Doctor brings Sam to what should be London hoping to get more back issues of The Strand. (That’s twice now in as many books. Who’s sponsoring this series, Big Strand?) It is immediately apparent that something ain’t right, and soon the dilemma is laid out before them: the calm, positive society they see here has got to go. As Sam quickly realises, this amounts to killing them all. But who’s to say which society has the greater claim to existence?

Well, the Doctor says it, and quite definitively, so there you go. This isn’t just another possible future on some cosmic Lazy Susan: it’s a paradox deliberately set up by a bunch of angry Tractites whose own world will one day be destroyed by humans. Deciding that one bad turn deserved another, they found a way back in time to wipe the Earth clean and start over, which has the slight downside of breaking the time lines altogether, although Leonard rarely crystallises this into as many words. He keeps it a little more broad and “this is all wrong”-ish as opposed to doing the whole Back To The Future Part II bit with the blackboard. (I wish he had though. It’s a minor point but without so articulating it, Genocide never seems entirely clear on why the whole rebooted Earth thing won’t work. Or maybe I’m just being picky and wouldn’t have been happy unless the Doctor outright said “You can’t change the past or the future won’t happen which stops you changing the past.” Heck, it’s not as if saying that would convince the Tractites. But then it’s not really articulated visually either, as the breaking timelines are only apparent if you can move about in time. Which you still can, a bit? Which muddies it even more.)

So, all things considered, the moral dilemma is taking on water. I mean it’s not even a dilemma at all, since we have it on good authority that Earth (and who knows what else) will simply go phut at some point unless they put everything back how it was. Nevertheless, I implied that Genocide is good. (Uh, as in the book.) So how about it?

Well, it’s not always about solving the dilemma, so much as just having the conversation. Critical to Genocide is Sam’s response to it. We’re in her head more comfortably than we’ve been so far outside of Vampire Science. She dials back the snark, focusing more on the simple wonder of seeing an alien world (even when it’s her world), which is something every Doctor Who companion ought to revel in but Sam is sometimes denied. Her background in activism naturally informs her reaction, so that she’s able to appreciate (or perhaps, unable to ignore) the positives of the society that has replaced her own. She’s full of conflict about it anyway — see, Having To Destroy All This — but there are hints of deeper insecurity when she thinks about her parents, their activism, and how that sometimes left her feeling abandoned. Is it always a good thing to save the proverbial whale? Or is that line of thought just a desperate attempt to be okay with what must be done to the Tractites?

Again — it’s not like there’s an option, really. But that’s not the point, is it? She’s still got to actively help to put it all back how it was, still got to take all this away. The story gives Sam the wonder of travelling with the Doctor, but also the horrible cost. I don’t care about the dilemma, or how much of a dilemma it is, so long as we’re using it to define the characters.

And Genocide doesn’t stop there. Sam goes on to befriend and rescue one of the Tractites, Kitig: a particularly nice and noble one with a family back home. (But not any more.) His presence makes the point all the more sore, just as the presence of the Doctor and Sam weighs on Kitig, who in his own way must go along with destroying his world. He later meets the Tractites responsible for all this and he, along with the Doctor, hears them out. There’s a genuinely harrowing account of what triggered all this in the far future, and if you can’t forgive their actions afterwards (which you should’t) then it’s at least clear what drove them to it. (Leonard, to be fair, still takes a slightly easy way out in making them very unstable and damaged, so what they’re doing is cruel even when you ignore the paradox. But this gets Kitig neatly into the right frame of mind, so job’s a good’un. See also, the slightly unfortunate character of Jacob Hynes: a human collaborator who befriends, aka lies to Sam, and provides her with another mirror for what she must do. Unfortunately for this interesting train of thought, and any moral trump cards he might have, and especially for the UNIT officers who somehow approved his work, Jacob is an obvious nutjob.)

By the end of this, Sam has taken a life, which leaves a scar perhaps more painful than the loss of the Tractites’ world. It’s a particularly grim cherry on top of some character development that, despite a few flaws, leaves Sam feeling more real. When she makes mistakes in this, they feel natural for a teenager faced with the whole universe. When she’s wrong, it’s because she’s fallible and learning, and not so much because she’s a bit of a douchebag. Done well, mistakes give a character somewhere to go. After a fairly lukewarm start, I’m excited that she’s going somewhere.

Of course Leonard is no slouch at writing that other TARDIS occupant of note — but it ought to be said that the Doctor in this is possibly more befitting the New Adventures than the TV Movie. (Just as Genocide, as a book, feels a bit more NA.) This Doctor is a bit unapproachable from Sam’s perspective, especially where she’s still learning the ropes — all of which is itch-inducingly out of step with the series so far, particularly Vampire Science where they were thick as thieves, but I think it works for this book. The Doctor here is not a friendly presence, or at least he’s not just that: he plays the fool well enough but suddenly it’s all a bit unconvincing, failing to mask a darkness that hasn’t really been apparent before. (Not including his bloodthirstiness in The Eight Doctors. Yes Terry, I’m still mad.)

Arriving on the Tractites’ Earth the Doctor is correctly (if discretely) identified as The Uncreator, a fabled bringer of doom to their way of life. He schemes to get back to the TARDIS as fast as possible, even faking a medical emergency to move things along. When Sam urges Kitig to get into the TARDIS and out of oblivion, the Doctor’s response is “You can’t possibly save him, you can’t save any of them and anyway what would be the use?” There is no great agony of indecision as you might expect. This is a Doctor who knows how the universe works and will not let it get out of joint for anyone. (Although later on he tries his hand at galactic diplomacy in the Tractites’ future. It’s the best he can do.) Making the Doctor more of a bastard helps put Sam’s struggles into focus, and it’s an exciting look on the most approachable Doctor since Davison. It’s also worth remembering this was all pre-Big Finish, and What The Eighth Doctor Is Like was still virgin territory (ahem) and open to interpretation. Then again, maybe all Leonard’s really saying about him here is that time paradoxes give him migraines. Who knows.

Surprisingly for a book that is quite A to B in terms of story (paradoxes notwithstanding) there’s still other stuff to talk about. A couple of palaeontologists get inveigled in Jacob’s mad scheme to wipe out humanity; they’re interesting (particularly Rowenna, still traumatised by the home intruder who put her in a wheelchair), but the book reaches a point sooner than you’d expect where there’s nothing more to be done with them, and ejects them so forcibly that I mostly felt bad that they’d been in it at all. I have a sneaking suspicion they’re only here so one of them can contact Jo Grant, who oh yes, is in this as well.

Leonard has already done her proud in print (Dancing The Code is very good) and, while I wouldn’t say he ruins any of that here, I’m not sure Jo really needed to show up. We get a snapshot of her later life — she’s okay, but things didn’t work out with Cliff beyond having a son together — and she practically jumps at the chance to get involved again. It seems like Jo, with her life of activism, will provide another mirror for Sam — more for what she’s going through now than that whole School Reunion, “you too, huh?” bit, which is fortunate as that barely registers, which might come as a disappointment. (Perhaps it was felt that readers had sufficiently scratched that itch in Vampire Science, with Carolyn the could-have-been companion.) But the moment never really comes to contrast ideologies, and Jo in the end is just here as well. Although, tell a lie, their viewpoints do cross over a bit: when Sam sullenly announces she will not kill, Jo says she’d like to go home now and takes over the death ray (long story), causing more damage than Sam. If she takes any scars home, we don’t hear about them beyond Sam’s guesses. Given Jo’s mounting horror of violence in Dancing The Code, this seems like a particularly odd choice of Leonard’s.

There are a few odd choices along the way, and some bits that don’t take off quite like they ought to. (What about that Time Tree, eh? It’s critical to all this but it’s just sort of there.) Nevertheless, Genocide has a great central idea (as in, the book!), and uses it to make the Doctor and Sam more interesting, or even in the Doctor’s case, interestingly odd. So I reckon it’s worth a few wobbles. Come back soon, Paul!

7/10

(Oh, and there’s a bit where someone writes a message for someone else to read a million years later in fossilised rock, which New Who straight up pinched. I guess those showrunners don’t just read the Paul Cornell ones…)

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #6 – The Ultimate Treasure by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#3
The Ultimate Treasure
By Christopher Bulis

A flicker of light. Objects begin to move independently, disturbed by fingers of electricity. A great breath seems to draw in all around as Christopher Bulis ascends out of his chair, away from his word processor and into the air. His arms are splayed, eyes closed, smile beautific. He has at last written a book for every classic Doctor. The quickening is at hand.

Good old Bulis, eh? While he tends not to top any Favourite Author charts, he is one of those who’s happy enough to write any combo of characters. I think there’s something to be said for that kind of adaptability, although of course it doesn’t guarantee brilliant books. (I thought State Of Change, Eye Of The Giant and – yes! – Shadowmind were all pretty enjoyable, but the rest were more miss than hit for me.) Love him or hate him, he’s a dependable old workhorse and if you’re diving into a twice-monthly book release schedule, it makes sense to include people like him in your roster.

For his latest mix-and-match assignment Bulis has parachuted the Fifth Doctor and Peri into (as you might have guessed) a treasure hunt. This is quite an unusual pairing, since Peri was only around for one story before violently swapping out Doctors. Is there much to say about that brief window where her travelling companion favoured cricket gear instead of Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat?

I’ll rip off the plaster now: no, not really. We’re reminded that Peri is just enjoying the rest of her holiday in space rather than in Lanzerote (bless her, maybe she should have stayed) and she’s having, by and large, a nice time. What does she think of the Doctor? Not a great deal, although she considers him passingly attractive, but so plainly uninterested in her that there’s no reason to go there. Peri is written with recognisable and likeable informality, but the story doesn’t delve much into her dynamic with the Doctor. There’s little opportunity, as he seems at somewhat of a distance throughout. (You could put that down to The Ultimate Treasure being more from her perspective than his, as after all, she doesn’t really know the guy.)

Glancing at reviews – and may I just say, ouch! – this seems like a popular sticking point. The Ultimate Treasure is not very big on its two leads. Or more specifically the Doctor. Yes, Bulis has crossed off every one of the classics by now – but is it perhaps significant that Davison came last? Recognisably him is a certain insistence on fair play (well, y’know, cricket etc), and there’s a bit where he uses his bowling arm. But he cuts a rather muted and unimpressive figure for most of the novel. Witnessing a murder, the Doctor waits around until the police are summoned so he can help. They immediately point to him and Peri for the killing – and at no point does he say, well why did I call you, then? When said police officer stows aboard the TARDIS, which by then is heading off to find the treasure/catch the crooks, the cop points a gun at him and orders him to turn the ship around. Trying very hard to ignore the fact that guns shouldn’t work in the TARDIS, why does he listen to her? (He is only prevented from dutifully changing course by external forces.) Good grief, man, this is your house! Later, when the treasure hunt is in full flow, the criminals kidnap Peri to force his cooperation in their winning the contest, and he just goes along with it. No underhand tricks or anything, just honest help. I despair. You’re the Doctor!

Of course, if you want to be charitable to Bulis – and just as uncharitable to this incarnation of the Doctor – if any Time Lord was known for letting others get the better of him, it’s this one. His concern for his companions often takes more of a toll on him than his fellows (hey, look what ended up killing him) and he seemed to spend more time in jail awaiting assistance than yer average wibbly wobbly medical practitioner. Could the less than spectacular, downright colourless characterisation here be deliberate, pointed even? I don’t know. But I’m enough of a Fifth Doctor critic to think this doesn’t ring totally false, even if it is all a bit disappointing on the page. (And just to redress it a bit further: the Fifth Doctor at this point in the series was quite hot tempered at times, actually. His fiery mood in the very next, climactic story didn’t entirely come from nowhere. So it might be understandably difficult for some readers to square this zen pushover with that guy.)

Perhaps the reason the Doctor isn’t charging heroically through The Ultimate Treasure is – and it’s a big, hypothetical, nothing-to-back-it-up perhaps – that might not always have been the plan? Not long after this was published Bulis would contribute a book to the Bernice Summerfield range. Does a hunt for lost treasure strike you at all as a sort of, well, Bernice-ey thing? With very few revisions this could be just her sort of caper. There are shades of Dragons’ Wrath about the famous macguffin, and shades of Down about the strange planet. Even the bright, frothy tone is right for her. I’m not disinclined to believe he had a few archaeological ideas floating about and ultimately went with Tempest for Benny, leaving the Doctor on a treasure hunt instead. (Mind you, a grab bag of ideas assigned willy nilly to different Doctors might have been Bulis’s strategy throughout his career.) We still get requisite dollops of Who continuity, never fear: there’s a positively gratuitous recap of Peri’s introductory story at the start, and an even more gratuitous, downright inexplicable cameo towards the end. (I know “spoilers for a 30 year old book” is a touchy subject, but it’s honestly so left field that I’d feel like a bad sport just blurting it out. I’ll stick it at the end in case you want to go “Oof, really?”) Regardless, “Bulis had a spare Benny pitch” is my head canon and I’m sticking to it.

As for the actual treasure hunt and the book at large… well it’s probably significant that I haven’t gone on about the plot much. You can map it out without much help: there is a lost treasure, information is doing the rounds in seedy space bars, multiple colourful parties are interested, they all end up (including the decidedly killy ones) on an equal footing on a mysterious planet all racing to the finish. It ends up sort of like The Ghost Monument, except some things happen in it.

And you know what? I don’t hate it. Of depth, there is not a whole heck of a lot – spreading it across a dozen characters will naturally make that the case, this ain’t Game Of Thrones y’know – but Bulis imbues the various traps with enough variety to keep them interesting, and then varies the response of each group that comes into contact with it. I particularly enjoyed the desert of trap doors, which contain a variety of pitfalls, one of which the Doctor turns into something useful during a heatwave. This kind of narrative is very simple, but the execution has a colourful sense of fun about it, a solid “what’s next” momentum.

As for the characters, there aren’t any that I’d clamour to see again, but they generally acquit themselves within their little arcs. The police officer is fairly enjoyable, although her journey from total stickler to “ah, you guys are all right” is not difficult to predict. There’s a bloke who models himself after Shakespeare’s Falstaff, which you’ll either find annoying or harmlessly quirky. (I leaned towards quirky.) I quite liked the strange tension of these trials all being observed by the omnipotent people of this world and by a nosey reporter using flying drones. (Equally you might say that the former makes any real degree of danger or success rather unlikely. And I mean, fair enough.)

The nature of the ultimate treasure, you ask? From the title alone I was making an each way bet that it would be supreme knowledge (which the Doctor must of course decline) or The Friends We Made Along The Way, and I’m thrilled to report that it’s… not literally that first one. There’s again some variety in how the “treasure” sequence plays out, such that I wasn’t actively disappointed with it. A ringing endorsement, I know.

While I haven’t written The Proverbial Glowing Review Of The Ultimate Treasure, I can honestly say I had a good time with it, in spite of its deficiencies. (And hey, I missed one: there is a higher frequency of grammatical errors is this book than I’ve spotted since beginning this leg of the marathon. “To” instead of “too,” “lose” instead of “loose,” at one point “cleaver” instead of “clever”. I know they were running a conveyer-belt but not every BBC Book is like this, so they can do it.) Perhaps Christopher Bulis just has a talent for catching me in the right mood. If you’re up for 280 pages of undemanding adventure that could just as easily have been Doctor Who as any other sci-fi, you could do worse. If that’s not enough then I don’t really blame you: the ultimate treasure can be the power to skip this one.

6/10

***

That Bonus Spoiler For A 30 Year Old Book So You Can Go “Oof, Really?”, Either At The Spoiler Or The Fact I’m Calling It A Spoiler

So, while separated from the Doctor Peri encounters a mysterious steed (pictured on the cover) which stays by her side and ultimately sacrifices itself against a murderous crime lord. The steed? It’s Kamelion. His essence wasn’t entirely dead after Planet Of Fire, and the mysterious beings on this planet helped him find a new body so he could die all over again, but heroically, instead of being triggered into a heart attack and then shot by the Doctor. And hey, good: every single thing about Kamelion was a weird choice, so I don’t hate the idea of revisiting him after the fact. But a page or two of “by the way it was me, hi and bye I guess, dying again lol” is not going to win awards for not being a quick and random continuity bullet point. Is he really better off this way? Well, as the saying goes, the important thing is, he’s dead.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #5 – The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#3
The Bodysnatchers
By Mark Morris

Ah, The Bodysnatchers. We meet again.

When I was a kid and these books were new I developed a strange habit of buying them but not reading them. I’d take them with me on our weekend visits to the grandparents – literally packing dozens of books into a sports bag. I just liked having them around, I guess. They were smooth and diversely colourful (something they had over the more visually organised Virgin books, which is a bit funny when you consider their more outrageous reputation) and from the blurbs they all sounded like interesting and weird Doctor Who stories. So much potential there. Somehow, having that choice of books to read was as enjoyable to me as actually reading any of them. Sort of like paying for a streaming service now. Or possibly a sign of ADHD.

Anyway – I did read The Bodysnatchers. With a recognisable monster on the front and a recognisable character in the blurb, it tickled my fan brain in much the same way as The Eight Doctors. I could not resist.

Certain moments from it have lingered in my mind ever since. I still remember the opening meeting between grave-robbers Jack and Albert and their shadowy employer, a man with much of his face covered but still something noticeably odd about the eyes. I recall the ending, with a TARDIS full of (thankfully pacified) Skarasen, the Doctor taking them to a new home. And I remember the rich, dank atmosphere of London; this, along with some of those other memories, is largely thanks to the writing.

Mark Morris is our first new writer for BBC Books. (Or first solo writer. Sorry Keith Topping and Jonathan Blum, it’s hard to know who wrote what on a collaboration. Your day will come…) Unusually for a new Doctor Who novelist, Morris was already a seasoned writer, and that shows in the frequently splendid prose. “Within seconds the fog had swallowed not only the tavern itself, but the welcoming glow from its windows.” / “She imagined the huge ripples of the creature’s passage extending ever outward, a series of concentric circles like a widening shiver of fear on the dark skin of the Thames.” The Bodysnatchers is at its best, even as I read it now, when up to its eyeballs in the muck and murk of the Victorian capital.

Something else that would have captured young-me’s attention is – whatever this says about me – the violence. The Bodysnatchers starts with grave-robbing and goes downhill from there, taste-wise; Mary Whitehouse certainly would not approve. But all that’s in keeping with one of the show’s more bloodthirsty eras. As if to underline the parallel, this one takes place in the same location, 5 years on, as one of the most celebrated Gothic stories, even sharing a guest star. Absolutely no prizes for guessing whether Mark Morris is a big fan of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang, what with Professor George Litefoot asking follow-up questions about the Fourth Doctor and Leela, even down to their old joke about said companion having been found as an infant in a hatbox. (There are many other examples of Morris undoubtedly being One Of Us, such as “an almighty KKLAK!”, but I’ll bet there are nevertheless still people complaining that Henry Gordon Jago spent the whole thing in Brighton. Call yourself a fan, Morris?!)

That sense of sheer fannishness would have greased some wheels with me at the time, and I wouldn’t have been alone. I mean, look at it! Zygons! A popular monster that wasn’t done to death in the telly show, back again with no watershed to curtail them! Absolute manna from Heaven for the morbid young geeks who made up at least some of the readership for these books. (With grumpy old geeks filling out the rest.)

I stress this stuff because, stepping away from the author’s talent for atmosphere, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot to The Bodysnatchers otherwise. The Zygons are suitably creepy, although I’m not sure if Morris knew quite how hard the marketing guys would go on their inclusion: they slap one on the cover and name-check them (and their TV story) in the blurb, yet The Bodysnatchers takes half its page-count to name them. It also spends a lot less time on questions of body-swapped identity than you, Zygon fan that you probably are, might reasonably expect; barely anyone gets replaced by the infamous copycats. A rather more urgent concern seems to be the Skarasen, their infamous Loch Ness monster-inspiring pets, who receive much the same “they don’t look crap any more” makeover that the Slyther got in the Dalek Invasion Of Earth novelisation, only with more blood and guts.

And that, frankly, is another thing. There are times in these books (Virgin too, of course) when you’re aware that an older readership is being catered for, and I think that’s fair, just as there’s a fair middle-ground with the “watches horror movies that are too old for them” kid crowd. But there are a few moments in The Bodysnatchers that go too far, and I’m fairly sure I noticed that back in the day as well. I’m not saying Mary Whitehouse was right, but bloody hell, Mark, some of those Skarasen kills are a bit much. Certainly the bit where Jack mutilates a young lad for speaking out of turn should have had a second pass, if not been taken out.

As for what the Zygons are up to, shall we say, not much? There’s nothing exactly wrong with having your aliens want to kill all humans and take Earth as their own and leave it at that, but there’s consequently not much to say about such a plot that hasn’t been said before. The Zygons themselves seem to be going through the motions over it, as perhaps was the author given that this is an actual line: “Invasion. Colonisation. Something boring like that.” Even the novel’s interesting opening gambit – the local Burke and Hare unknowingly supplying the monsters with a ready stock of the dead – turns out to be nothing more interesting than feeding the Skarasen. Keeping it simple probably helped get younger me on board, in all honesty, but it’s an aspect that really falls off if you’re not just now reading your first Who book.

Characterisation is in a similar sort of ball park. The Doctor strikes many of the right notes, with that unstoppable motion that unifies all Doctors, plus the occasional moments of apparent innocence unique to this one. (Morris even includes that rather odd clairvoyance habit from the TV Movie. What was that, anyway?) Once you get past the confidence and the charm, however, the Doctor does a pretty terrible job here. The usual “aim for a peaceful resolution until it all goes belly up” thing happens, of course, but not because of dreadful old humans interfering: it’s because the Doctor makes an almighty cock-up with his Zygon anaesthetic, killing nearly all of them and irredeemably enraging the rest. Events move too fast to stop and examine this, so allow me. Doc: what the hell happened there? I normally hate the clever-clever argument that the Doctor is the cause of most of the universe’s problems, but when the remaining warrior Zygon unleashes hundreds of hungry Skarasen on London, that is unavoidably part of the Doctor’s mistake as well. And there is no examination of that here, which really ought to be the price (if not, the actual interesting bit) of doing something so out of step. Very odd choice there, and/or a messy execution.

More examined, and a bit less dangerous, is Sam. It’s taking me a while to warm to the new companion. Partly this is down to her general demeanour: she’s as aggressively abrasive as Ace, but unarmed; she sticks defiantly (and unwisely) to anachronisms when out of her natural time; she responds to every comment either with sarcasm or with pouty outrage at not being included to the extent she prefers. She’s kind of annoying, then, but that’s at least plausible, if not inevitable for a 17-year-old. More significantly she has a major chip on her shoulder about what kind of companion she’ll be, reacting furiously to not coming along to a mortuary and castigating herself for seeming weak or afraid. At one point she ponders how “she wanted to be indispensable to him, wanted to be an equal half of a dynamic duo that would become feared and revered throughout the galaxy.” And I mean, you what? I dimly recall that this is all intentional and it may well be Going Somewhere, but it doesn’t feel organic so far. Where her origin story basically had her follow the Doctor on a whim, I’m not seeing a basis for this desperate need to live up to something. (Unless her competitiveness with Carolyn-the-would-be-companion in Vampire Science really set something off.) Crucially, with Sam sparking off at everything and the Doctor more or less reacting as he would to any companion, the bond isn’t really there. They don’t seem especially to like each other and she doesn’t seem especially to like being here. In Sam I just see a Totally Radical 90s Companion who doesn’t want to be a Typical Screaming Doctor Who Girl – except I have no idea where she’d have heard about them, and therefore how she can react against said concept.

I’ll always have a soft spot for The Bodysnatchers, for much the same reason I’d fondly recall any book that captivated me enough to finish it as a kid, and had then stuck around at all in my memories since. In the less flattering light of adulthood there isn’t much more here than a solid Past Doctor Adventure – everything you’d want on the telly, only more so – except it’s an Eighth Doctor book, and there’s perhaps an expectation of more depth where they are not boxed between existing episodes. Clearly there are things afoot here, what with the epilogue featuring an Eighth Doctor notably and cagily without Sam. But apart from that future nugget, and his protégé’s awkward fixations, this could easily be a story you’ve heard before – only with something noticeably odd about the eyes.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #4 – The Murder Game by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#2
The Murder Game
By Steve Lyons

Back when the New Adventures were new, fans used to debate the different kinds of book you’d get. One kind was trad: books that felt like photocopied scripts, lovingly familiar but a bit staid. And the other kind was rad: books that felt like someone took all of the drugs and was, at best, dimly aware that Doctor Who used to be a TV show. The Missing Adventures, by virtue of slotting between existing episodes, skewed more trad. Of course they did. And now we’re getting into their successors, the Past Doctor Adventures, I’ve got to wonder how much variety they’re going to have viz trad and rad.

Well, The Murder Game is trad. Very, very trad. It’s as trad as the annual Christmas luncheon held by Sir Henry Tradwell, head of Traditional Studies at Tradition University, a hereditary post that has now been held by ten successive generations of Tradwells. It’s really rather trad, is what I’m hinting at.

Is that a problem? Well, it depends on the reader. Obviously there is a market for stories that feel like gently reheated stories you’ve already heard, or a good chunk of Doctor Who just wouldn’t be there. But when it comes to investing hours and hours in a novel, it’s not really what I’m after.

We begin in the TARDIS – which straight away feels like a throwback to ye olden times, forgoing the novelistic setting of the scene that usually comes before treating us to yer actual Doctor and companions. (At least it spares us a moody and incomprehensible prologue which is often standard in Novel Who.) From here it’s a hop, skip and a jump to a distress signal, a seemingly empty space station, a gaggle of characters who are mistakenly expecting our heroes to turn up, and then a murder mystery game that – don’t tell anyone – might involve a few actual murders before very long. All of which is a bit, oh no, that script fell through, what else have you got that’s ready to go?

Some of this is undeniably fun, with the Doctor in particular relishing the opportunity to put on a costume – his character is “Miss Lucy Buxom” and all that entails – but the Agatha Christie-esque sequence of events that follows still feels like the oldest of plots, and without a veneer of metaness or even Romance Of Crime-ish comment to set it apart. Some people are not who they seem, even when they are not in costume, but they all have that unmistakeable stink of Look, We Need The Numbers So There’s Enough Of Them To Kill Off. I occasionally mixed up my Daphnes and my Dorothys; it seems so inevitable just from the setting that they’ll each have secrets that it’s more surprising when they don’t.

Not much happens in the first half – or rather, so much happens in the second half that my memories have now been taped over. (We’ll get to it.) But anyway, murders are happening for real, and all of this has something to do with the Selachians: aquatic space monsters with a chip on their shoulder. The Doctor and co must find what they’re after before they arrive and ramp up the killing. Red herrings abound, and Ben seems to find himself knocked unconscious quite often. This presages one of the novel’s recurring habits, never-ending jeopardy, with a sudden bout of oblivion lurking behind every corner. It gets a bit silly, but one of its other habits – the announcement of a death, but you’ll have to wait a few pages to find out whose it was – works very well at ratcheting tension.

Eventually it’s time to pay off this Selachian thing, and it’s worth debating whether the long wait was better than giving them a dramatic entrance sooner. Characters mention this murderous species quite a bit, but I kept imagining all this on screen and thinking, well show them, then! When they arrive they don’t disappoint: sharks (or are they dolphins?) so fed up with persecution from land dwellers that they’ve gone to war with everybody, they travel about in water suits with aggressive shark artwork painted on for effect. There’s certainly a hint of Chelonian about them, with the shark replacing the rather more anachronistic tortoise, but their commitment to kill-kill-kill is certainly to be reckoned with.

By the time they arrive on the space station/hotel it has been knocked out of orbit and is inexorably falling towards Earth, and that’s the pace in a nutshell, suddenly ramping up towards imminent heat death. The Selachians want a weapon that was smuggled aboard the station and will kill until they get it. The weapon could doom thousands so the Doctor and co must keep it from them, all while not perishing in Earth’s atmosphere. On top of that the weapon is finally deployed – an algorithm that will use anything mechanical or computerised to kill its target – which leads to Ben evading some very holistic assassination attempts over and over again.

This stuff is quite exciting, and from a quick glance at reviews the last stretch seems to be the agreed upon Favourite Bit. However, there does come a point where constant (and it does become constant) peril gets a bit tiresome, like continually hopping between frying pans and fires. It’s exciting incident with nothing underpinning it; yes, the Selachians are terrible and the weapon (though decidedly wacky) is a big problem, but it’s just a bottomless bag of cliffhangers after a while.

The characterisation is very good, though there’s not a huge amount to dive into with the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly at this time in the series. Ben yearns to be back at sea, and has conflicting feelings of friendship or-possibly-something-more for Polly. Polly feels similarly, but gets slightly shoved down in the mix with all these other characters milling about. The Doctor is fiercely himself, offering up beguiling smiles, outraged outbursts, childish panic and sudden ingenuity. His frustration at being in the company of murderers, and not wanting to encourage any more deaths, believably underscores his Troughton-ish antics. And Lyons makes this the point where he canonically decides that a sonic screwdriver would be a neat idea, if you like that sort of thing.

The Murder Game falls somewhere between a tried and tested 60s episode and a wet Sunday afternoon with Big Finish. It really is very authentic – I kept picturing the lights glaring off the studio floor – but then I kept waiting for it to be funnier, remembering that Steve Lyons was the Conundrum guy. To be fair there are funny flourishes, like the murder mystery game (not enough is made of that), and some oblique Whovian references like “Nobody would end up as cinders floating around in Spain if he could help it,” or – triple nerd points for this one – “He burst into a song, about business being business and always aiming to please.” But I’d hesitate to call it a comedy.

There’s just nothing at all under the surface – and for what it’s worth, barely anything I can say about it. The Murder Game executes its plot very efficiently and gets the voices just right, and I appreciate all of that. Perhaps that ought to be enough, but something is missing here that left me wading all too slowly through its pages.

5/10