Doctor Who: The BBC Books #85 – Escape Velocity by Colin Brake

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#42

Escape Velocity

By Colin Brake

Here we go then. After six novels set (and stuck) on Earth the Doctor is finally getting his TARDIS back and is heading out into the universe. So no pressure, first time novelist Colin Brake.

To start positive, he does a few things I like. Brake has that very popular habit among Who novelists of changing scenes frequently, but he is more able than most to keep his focus between them, so we might dart over to the side but it’s clearly the same scene continuing, perhaps from a different perspective. (A cabbie or a passing cat, for instance.) I was still jolted by the all-too-TV-ish scene breaks that tie-in writers are for some reason obsessed with, but they contributed to the momentum overall, at least more than I’m used to.

Also, quite a big deal here, Brake introduces the new companion: Anji Kapoor. I don’t think he does a bad job, or at least no worse than we’re used to. Sam had as much introduction as Terrance Dicks could hurriedly scribble on the back of a crisp packet; Fitz and Compassion both had full stories setting them up, but the actual “join the TARDIS” bit fell between scenes and between novels respectively. Anji is the first one to be actively written like a trip in the TARDIS might make sense for her, and although she doesn’t go down the traditional “sign me up” route there’s at least a proper scene to solidify her ongoing adventures. It doesn’t sound like much but you notice when these things are absent.

Beyond that it’s a bit difficult to get excited about Escape Velocity. It’s a momentous story because of where it sits in the arc, but otherwise when it comes to significant events — whether they’re arc payoffs or just the plot — everything feels anticlimactic.

Some of that is due to scheduling. Staying on Earth means running into the same problem they had in 1970: the threat will be random monsters, mad scientists or alien invasions, over and over. As it turns out, The Turing Test, Endgame and Father Time all had malevolent aliens hiding on Earth. (Unhelpfully so did The King Of Terror over in the PDAs.) As a result I’m starting to get my shifty aliens mixed up. Father Time also stepped on Brake’s toes by sending the Doctor on a space mission at the end — an event that, in hindsight, probably should have been saved for the climax of the “desperate to get off Earth” arc, and certainly feels like less of a big deal now. (Granted, he goes in the TARDIS this time, but only as a last minute substitution.)

It’s not just a feeling of “been there, done that,” however. Major events in the book just seem to plod past. The invading aliens, the Kulan, are outed directly to the reader in an interlude, as opposed to through any sort of dramatic reveal or character interaction. That was easy! After that there are scenes of the Doctor and Anji, then Fitz, then biochemist Christine Holland all finding out about the Kulan, each with as little resistance or secrecy as possible — it’s either a case of someone telling them without prompting or them asking and getting back “yeah, since you asked, aliens mate, big time.” Easier still! Brake was a script editor before this, which makes me wonder if he was deliberately trying to move these beats along faster. If so, well done, but now they feel perfunctory — especially where they keep happening. (See also the bizarre damp squib moment when the Doctor announces that humans have Kulan ancestry. Are we doing anything with that? No? Just gonna drop the mic and go? Okay then.)

The Kulan are not a fascinating menace. The idea itself isn’t bad: an expedition crashed on Earth with the intention of reporting back on whether the rest of them should invade. They broke into two groups, for and against, and due to losing their ship they each need to work with a different space-obsessed billionaire in order to build a rocket that can contact their people. A space race ensues; meanwhile the fleet is approaching.

They’re just not very memorable otherwise. Aliens who want to invade Earth for the resources are ten a penny. We hear a bit of lore about their weird family structure towards the end, but by then we’re pages away from getting rid of them. There are some physical characteristics that mark them apart from humanity, but not so many that they can’t pass for human. Fitz notices that they don’t seem to mind rain and they’re good at mountaineering. (Fascinating.) Some of them are benign and at least one of them is a bit of a psycho — I’ll let you guess how this aligns with their views on Earth invasion. The whole “who gets their message through first” plot seems a bit redundant, since the fleet is almost in orbit. Would you turn around and go home? So the plot supporting all this feels much of a muchness until we can get up there and decide one way or the other.

Said plot is mostly a lot of perfunctory (that word again) action and kidnapping. We meet Anji and her boyfriend Dave as they encounter a “good” Kulan carrying precious cargo. He slips this onto Dave as he’s dying — hello, every other Hitchcock movie — who soon after gets nabbed by the “bad” Kulan. By this point Fitz, getting impatient waiting for the Doctor, gets involved because the dead man had two hearts. (An amazing coincidence that’s the only reason the Doctor and Fitz get involved at all.) Soon the CIA are chasing Fitz, Dave is dying of a strange alien infection, Christine Holland gets involved because of her missing daughter, and the characters are ping-ponging effortlessly between billionaires Tyler (team: good guys) and Dudoin (bad guys) until it’s time to launch, executing various quite easy break-ins and escapes along the way.

Some of this feels superfluous in the extreme, particularly the CIA thread that eventually just gives up and stops. (The afterword suggests that this was done to allow a “small cameo” for Topping and Day’s Control character. I’m sure both of them clapped.) Our time with the billionaires isn’t very well spent either. The concept has certainly/unfortunately aged well, what with Jeff Bezos and the like, but Brake is very optimistic with his nice-guy billionaire Tyler, whose last minute tragic info-dump and heroic exit from the narrative are pure B-movie stuff. Dudoin on the other hand might be insane — he seems happy for Earth to be invaded and he has no qualms about kidnapping his own daughter… so more your Elon Musk type, then? — but he’s not deep enough for it to matter, and he’s quickly dispensed with when the plot needs to wander off somewhere else instead.

Dudoin’s ex-wife and daughter — the latter a very unconvincing smart-beyond-her-years eight year old — don’t have space to process his end, and to be frank they don’t make much of an impact in general. Christine ought to be fairly interesting since her expertise is pivotal to the plot (build an interface that allows humans to pilot Kulan-assisted spacecraft) but there are some stumbling blocks to this. Namely: Christine’s bizarrely instant distraction from her kidnapped daughter just because she’s so excited by Dudoin’s task; her going from “I don’t believe in aliens” to “I’ve built the interface” in about a day; and the slight nitpick that they could probably just get a Kulan to pilot the bloody thing in the first place.

In short, there’s not much of interest happening in the novel-specific nitty gritty — it’s all a bit of a low rent racket. What of the regulars? It’s A Big Deal novel for each of them, after all. Unsurprisingly the answer is: see plot.

You’ve probably been wondering where the Doctor’s “Meet me in St. Louis” note would lead. He has, after all, done a few recces to the city of St. Louis by now and found no clues. (As per Father Time.) I’m not sure whose idea it was to make it a bar in London, or how it makes any sense that the Doctor changes an existing bar to be called St. Louis and that happens to be where the note was talking about, but oh well, if you don’t fancy setting the book in America then so be it. The actual meeting, though, is yet another anticlimax. Yes, it’s a delight to see Fitz again — but the Doctor doesn’t seem to agree, feeling decidedly neutral about the whole thing because (oh yeah) he doesn’t remember Fitz. But wasn’t he excited to find out anyway? I’m pretty sure he was. The plot soon requires that they split up (!!!) and that’s that for most of Escape Velocity. Hope you weren’t expecting a big reunion or owt.

Fitz is much as he’s ever been, thank goodness. (Although he fails to cop off with anyone, plus it’s made clear that Anji is not his type. She’s in a relationship anyway.) The relevant parts are when he wonders about the Doctor’s amnesia. He’s pretty sure it’s “denial on a cosmic scale” about what happened to Gallifrey, and he has a few occasions to wonder if he’s just putting it on, before the Doctor outright fails to remember Sam, which seems to clinch it. (The irrelevant part would be the portion of the book where Fitz seems to develop his own amnesia. Is that going somewhere or is it a dropped stitch? It doesn’t do a thing in context and it’s gone by the end.)

Then we have the Doctor, as well as inevitably the wider question of how this arc has progressed. Plot arcs like this always exist at the mercy of individual writers, and this one has been no exception: the Doctor’s allowance for violence comes and goes, his desperation to leave Earth waxes and wanes, at one point he had an adopted daughter but she’s moved on and there’s no sign that this has had a lasting impact on him. Brake very much has his cake and eats it with the amnesia, but to be fair that’s a constant among the writers: the Doctor can remember stuff when it helps, but in practical terms he’s just “the Doctor, a citizen of the universe. I travel through time and space in my trusty TARDIS and I try to help people. That’s about it, isn’t it?”

Presumably that return to simplicity was the whole point of the arc, but I’m not convinced it’s worth all that much, since a) it’s already getting pretty tedious hearing him say “I don’t remember that,” b) we know all the stuff he doesn’t, so it doesn’t add any mystery and c) the Doctor only needs to harp on about continuity as much as you, the writer, want him to. If you want the books to rely less on deep cuts then maybe just stop returning Craig Hinton’s calls. (The Quantum Archangel doesn’t do much for the “clean break” theory, does it? To the casual reader surely this all seems like the same range.)

The Doctor is a fairly breezy genius/action hero in Escape Velocity, albeit he lacks some of the confidence and any sign of the learned humanity he acquired in Father Time, apart from having the financial resources to casually buy a bar. He makes a decent enough companion (so to speak) for Anji, who sees him display various abilities and attributes. And yes, he gets the TARDIS back, which is a relief, albeit it’s yet another example of anticlimax: the TARDIS isn’t ready until it is, and then the Doctor can pilot it until he can’t, which sets up the Hartnell-ish status quo at the end. This is written in (sorry) as perfunctory a manner as ever, all eye-rolling “Doctorrr!” from Anji and “Here we go again” from Fitz. Much like the amnesia, I’m sure this could lead somewhere interesting in the right hands, but that obviously depends on who’s writing it and what Justin’s asking for. There’s nothing mind-blowing about what we see here.

And that just leaves Anji. As I said, some positives to consider here: she gets that “stuck in the TARDIS” scene so it feels like she is officially here to stay, plus there are several hints that she had wanted to broaden her horizons anyway: “What [Anji] really wanted, she had decided recently, was to go somewhere further afield, somewhere truly different in every way. Somewhere really alien.” Hey, I never said they were subtle.

As a character, so far she is unfortunately very much the sort of character you’d find in Escape Velocity. She’s well intentioned, nice enough but ultimately a bit too dry. She’s science-minded in a way that drives a wedge between her and her family. We hear lots about how practical and pragmatic she is: “As ever, a problem was something that needed a solution, and Anji prided herself on coming up with calm, logical solutions to problems.” There aren’t a lot of opportunities for her to show this; one example is when she incites the annihilation of the Kulan fleet, who otherwise might have been convinced to leave peacefully. Oops. (Mere pages later she shoots a Kulan dead: “Anji felt sick — she’d just killed a living creature. Disgusted with her actions, she threw the gun away.” Yes love, but didn’t you also blow up a cruiser just now? And everyone on it?) Her politics are otherwise less extreme than Sam’s, her friendliness is slightly greater than Compassion’s. She seems good enough, if not particularly intoxicating to read about, but then it’s not really her story.

Well, that’s a partial fib, as her relationship with Dave is a key component of the plot, and presumably it will inform her character going forward. It still isn’t much to write home about though: Anji and Dave are already on the rocks when we meet them, they spend little time together afterwards, Anji is too busy to ruminate on her feelings for most of the book when he’s missing and then when Dave recovers from his illness — easily of course, we wouldn’t want to slow things down! — he gets murdered anyway in a fairly dastardly and, the way it’s written, amusingly explosive fashion. Anji is again too on-the-go to be thoroughly traumatised by this, however. I presume that later books will do more with it, but by then I’ll have to remind myself: this is about Dave? That guy? He feels more like a plot object than a person; at best he’s a less interesting version of Fitz. Even when they’ve rescued him people seem to forget he’s there.

Escape Velocity is one of those “necessary” books that just needed to do a thing, which means you could probably have farmed that thing out to another book altogether — and maybe they should have. The scaffolding we get around said thing is unadventurous, if mostly inoffensive enough. It’s quite pacey at least. I’ve seen fairly scathing reviews for it and I don’t think it’s that bad; it’s just a tepid, unimaginative and not particularly well-written effort that seems weirdly keen to get past all that icky drama stuff as fast as possible, with characters bizarrely stopping for visits to the gym or naps at home during critical events. That’s how I’d prefer to live my life, quite honestly, but it doesn’t help all that much with a race-against-the-clock space thriller.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #84 – The Quantum Archangel by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#38

The Quantum Archangel

By Craig Hinton

Well look, if anyone was going to write a sequel to The Time Monster — that barmy Season 9 closer with the silly bird man and also Atlantis for some reason — it was probably going to be the guy that wrote GodEngine.

It was hard to have particularly high expectations for this one. Craig Hinton has certain habits that don’t exactly bring a novel together, shall we say, but he has written well before. That was mostly in Millennial Rites: a Sixth Doctor and Mel book that took a creative approach to the Valeyard problem. This one has the same Doctor/companion combo, so we’re off to a good start. It’s then just a question of “which Craig Hinton are we getting”: the one who has an actual idea for a book, or the one who came here to reference continuity and chew bubblegum and he’s all out of bubblegum?

Sadly it’s the latter. The Quantum Archangel hits every possible self-indulgent traffic cone on its way to being good. It might not be the worst PDA so far (can I interest you in The King Of Terror?) but it joins the ranks of the least effective and the worst written; not for the first time, I’m wondering if the editing process for the PDAs at this point consisted entirely of checking that the page count = 280.

You can’t really critique a Craig Hinton book without mentioning fanwank. (It’s one of life’s little ironies that he is credited with naming it, yet he is one of its most enthusiastic purveyors. I think we need to accept that he probably meant it as a compliment.) Sure enough, The Quantum Archangel is another example of Hinton making so many unnecessary references to things that he must be trying to win a bet. Got the Master in his TARDIS? Well then, why not have him catalogue the various adventures that led to his current physical state, such as Traken and Sarn? Why not have him look at components and remember that he nicked them from Sontarans and/or Rutans? Why not have him recall previous disguises and pseudonyms while he’s devising new ones? (I could say “because it’s not very interesting for a villain to stand around recalling trivia,” but I doubt that the editorial process got as far as asking him about that.)

It’s not just the Master, of course. Everybody, including the disembodied prose, is in it to win it continuity-wise, so we get nods to earlier canon that might be relevant (The Time Monster, Millennial Rites, Business Unusual, Divided Loyalties and — pushing it — The Trial Of A Timelord), nods to things that have nothing directly to do with any of this, but why not eh (e.g. a comparison to the Animus, or locations you might recognise such as the Doctor’s almost-hermitage in The Twin Dilemma) and nods to off-screen adventures, just for fun (featuring Quarks, the Voord, Krotons, Bandrils, Daleks, Yeti etc). It even goes beyond Doctor Who, with chapter names borrowed from mostly inappropriate song titles. (Total Eclipse Of The Heart? Really?) I know there are people that love this sort of thing but for me it has the cumulative effect of making this feel not really like a novel or a story at all, more a series of forum posts with linking material. It’s just bonus stuff sprinkled on already heaped piles of stuff.

Here’s the thing though: I think it goes beyond fanwank. Hinton, no doubt amusing himself greatly all the while, seems genuinely unsure how to distinguish between prose that advances the story and prose that just adds more words. Sentences groan with trivia, whether it’s Doctor Who quiz fodder or just general TMI about the characters. Here’s a typical example, employing punctuation the way you might use chewing gum to hold an old car together: “When he had got back from the physics symposium in Copenhagen — a day early, due to the fact that (a) there was nothing being discussed that was of any interest to him whatsoever, and (b) he had spent most of the week attempting to avoid that old fraud Winterdawn hurling himself around the Copenhagen conference centre in his souped-up wheelchair — he hadn’t gone to the flat; instead, he had come straight to the university — to the TITAN Array, hoping to see Arlene, to surprise her.” Did we need all of that? Did all of it belong in the same thought?

When not overloading us with asides and bonus material The Quantum Archangel indulges an arguably even worse habit: filler. Every character’s inner voice is leaden with dreary rhetorical questions, pondering each line of dialogue and then second guessing every thought: “Hard facts hit him like a bucket of water. How could he return home? How could he face the disapproval and accusation of his peers after the events of Maradnias?” / “He had to choose between emergencies. There were more important considerations that were even greater than a night in one of the best restaurants in the universe. Even greater considerations? Yes, much greater.” / “Friend? Once, long ago, the Master had been his best friend.” (Those are all from the Doctor. Here’s a winner from somebody else: “At that moment his body convulsed in pain and he doubled up in agony. Was he having a heart attack?”) Why can’t they thrash these questions out in dialogue or action? It makes them seem passive, processing the story around them or privately relating it to trivia instead of doing something about it. It matters when characters aren’t dynamic. Between all the fanwank, the overstuffed character detail and the bland introspection it’s an incredibly inert book.

This is at least a bit surprising as The Quantum Archangel has a few ideas that could — if you were the least bit interested in trying — have made for a pretty interesting story.

We find the Doctor and Mel at a crossroads, him having spectacularly misjudged a situation on the planet Maradnias (leading to the deaths of everyone on it), her wanting to leave the TARDIS in disgust, which she then does. What will become of Mel? What, given what we know about (nyurgh) continuity, will happen to bring them together again?

Then we have the book’s really big idea. After about 180 pages spent mucking about with the script for The Time Monster we finally meet the title character: a godlike but flawed entity who wants to make everyone’s lives better by shifting them into timelines that maximise their potential. A benevolent god that nevertheless must be stopped is a terrific twist on the usual fnar-fnar bad guys, and it opens up possibilities for parallel realities. You could write a fairly off-the-wall novel using these realities as a starting point; The Blue Angel, Falls The Shadow, Oblivion and Unnatural History all did something similar, but that’s no reason not to give us the Craig Hinton version as well.

The Quantum Archangel comes to this idea too late to really make a go of it. We get a few alt-histories for the Doctor (now commanding Gallifreyan armies against the Daleks), Mel (now Britain’s Prime Minister facing a Cyberman invasion) and the various physicists they’ve been hanging around with for most of the book. These realities clearly aren’t going to end well so a literal deus ex machina character plucks them all back to our reality instead. Easy peasy, so there’s no need to use these alternatives to reach any new conclusions, for instance with Mel who specifically needs a bit of context for her character arc. Instead it’s just a bit of colour towards the end. What a waste.

That inability to capitalise on ideas runs all the way through the book, which spends great swathes of time trying to dazzle us with enormous space and time phenomena — at one point the Doctor and the Archangel literally throw moons at each other — but Hinton unloads it all in great sweaty heaps of telling rather than showing. He harps on and on and on about incomprehensible things like Calabi-Yar Space, the Six-Fold Realm, the Lux Aeterna, the TITAN Array and (Time Monster fans are eating well tonight) TOMTIT, all while the characters stand around in the TARDIS hearing about it, unless it’s the prose unspooling it for our benefit, in which case it’s just piled over the characters making it doubly hard for anyone to do anything. Before long my eyes were passively rolling over the words. It’s truly tedious stuff, all the scale of a sci-fi epic somehow played out interminably in a small room with a scanner screen.

It’s not much better on a character level. Hinton has specifically served this Doctor and companion well in the past, moving them a little beyond the limited dimensions they often had on screen. Apparently he’s had enough of that now, so the Sixth Doctor is back doing his “repeat a word three times to show incredulity” schtick. Mel spends most of the book out of the way altogether, either trapped in the Master’s TARDIS or thanklessly stuck in a physicist throng in the Doctor’s — which is not great for a character in crisis. But then, presented with a golden opportunity to interrogate her life in the TARDIS, she just ping-pongs arbitrarily between viewing the Doctor as a lost schoolboy and a malevolent menace, before simply picking the nice alternative and choosing to come back. For good measure her hesitation is eventually blamed on an external force, so perhaps there wasn’t really a dilemma at all. Terrific. (I don’t much like the dilemma, while we’re at it. Maradnias is one of the few times in the book that Hinton shares too little information, which makes Mel’s response seem harsh right from the start. We all know the Doctor meant well, and it sounds like getting them to blow themselves up was the last thing he wanted, as well as it being, y’know, their choice.)

The supporting cast aren’t an improvement. The Master has more to do here than in most of his novels, but he flip-flops allegiances and falls on his face so often that he ends up looking utterly hapless. As for the academics the Doctor and the Master are lumbered with — one of whom is a supporting character from The Time Monster, much rejoicing! — it’s hard to get invested, despite tripping over them every other page. It’s like sticking the Doctor with several Liz Shaws, minus the personality.

If you’re a big fan of The Time Monster (hey, it’s a big universe, they must exist) then there’s probably a good deal to enjoy here… except that even as someone who mostly frowns through that story, I kinda doubt it? The Chronovores were the main threat in that one and again for most of The Quantum Archangel, but they barely feature in this book — I suspect because they’re just too massive a concept to really represent for pages at a time. (When Hinton tries to wrap our minds around really big concepts he ends up writing a half-baked reference guide instead of moving the story forward.) But then, if Chronovores don’t work as a menace for your book, why go to all the trouble of sequelizing The Time Monster at all? Surely it wasn’t just to write giggle-fodder lines like “I might be able to search for the Master through the TOMTIT gap!”, or to remind us of that strange piece of sensor equipment that looked like a metal willy?

I don’t think it’s uncharitable to assume that yes, that was the point. Hinton says in the afterword that he meant to write “a fun romp dripping with camp menace.” A contemporary review from the Doctor Who Ratings Guide quotes Hinton a little more specifically: “I set out (with the full backing of Justin) to write the ultimate in fanwank. Indeed, Justin even suggested areas in the first draft which he wanted uber-wanked. I just wanted to see how far I could go.” Which, I mean, you do you, and clearly the editorial staff thought it was okay too, but this is still a published novel that people need to pay to read. In my view, setting your sights no higher than making a small number of geeks laugh because they understood that reference seems like a pretty feeble use of the license and opportunity, not to mention the time of any reader not obsessively well versed in all the lore. And look, I know it’s a Doctor Who tie-in novel, and I’m basically describing most of the readership and myself there, but good god, don’t they ever want anyone new to dip into these? Can you imagine a casual reader sticking with The Quantum Archangel to the end?

Clearly this kind of navel-gazing self amusement isn’t my cup of tea. I do understand that it is for some people, and power to them, but I think this one fails on all sorts of other levels besides its litany of not-especially-comedic “in jokes”. It’s a space opera that’s suffocatingly stuck in the TARDIS console room, forced to describe what’s happening outside with diminishing returns; it’s a sequel that mostly just copies and pastes, until it finds its own genuinely good idea and then doesn’t know what to do with it; and it’s a less coherent idea with worse execution of the two lead characters than Hinton’s own previous effort that used the same ingredients. For all its cosmic silliness and meta winks it’s somehow boring too — a plot the size of the universe and yet no greater ambition than a pub quiz. But hey: I understood the references!

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #83 – Father Time by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#41

Father Time

By Lance Parkin

Gosh. This is an "oh you're reading that one” kind of a Doctor Who book. But in a good way.

Lance Parkin tends to command a lot of respect from Who fans, and although I haven't personally loved every one of his books it's not hard to see why they feel that way. Right from his debut in Just War it's been clear that he is an assured writer, confident enough to tell a smart and emotional story while still allowing room for a bit of geekery on the side. Father Time brings him into the "Eighth Doctor stuck on Earth" arc, and right away that affords opportunities for an unusual sort of Doctor Who book. Parkin takes almost all of those opportunities, and happily it's one of those Lance Parkin books that I did love.

The Doctor is still waiting to meet Fitz — whoever that is — in St. Louis in 2001. Rather inconveniently it is still the 1980s, so we find him pootling about in the Midlands, renting a cottage and fiddling about with sonic technology. One night he crosses paths with Debbie Castle (née Gordon), an unhappily married schoolteacher who hits a UFO spotter with her car. The Doctor and Debbie become fast friends and he soon comes into contact with a strange girl in her class named Miranda. Like the Doctor she is lightning smart, can regulate her body temperature, can do without sleep and ah yes, that other little detail: she has two hearts.

Father Time never outright says "Miranda is a Time Lord" because it would be useless to bandy that term around while the Doctor doesn't remember it. I think we can infer though that she is from a future where a Time Lord began a brutal Empire to control what was left of the universe. His dynasty was hunted down and killed and only one family member is left. Miranda was spirited away to Earth at such a young age that she doesn't remember any of this, but she is still the target of mercenaries and her father's enemies. The Doctor is in all likelihood all that's stopping them from killing her.

I love a complex and satisfying plot, but I'm just as happy to read a book with a simple through-line, and they don't come much simpler than this: a small group of people with a clear reason to want Miranda dead. The rest of the novel is about the Doctor's attempts to keep her safe. Of course the delightful thing about small plots (when they're done right) is the room they leave for character development, and Father Time has plenty of that.

We're five books into the Earth arc and there are certain ideas the authors have all returned to. The Doctor (sans memories) is still capable of the same heroic feats, but he has a greater ease with darkness and violence. Sometimes this is unspoken and almost primordial, like the murder at the end of The Burning, or the off-screen dispatch of the villain in Casualties Of War; sometimes it's more complex, like his almost willing susceptibility to propaganda in The Turing Test and what that allows to happen; and sometimes it's just The Bourne Identity again, like in Endgame. Parkin hews closest to Paul Leonard's approach, providing an emotional reason for the Doctor to lower his pacifist standards: when it comes to protecting Miranda, he'll do anything.

In the course of Father Time he inadvertently gets a guard shot to death, reverses a mind probe to stop a cruel interrogator's heart, uses a villain's bomb to blow them up instead and rigs a transmogrification machine to turn a dozen armed guards into flowers. (It is made very clear that this means death.) He does at least feel guilty about most of this — at one point he's "disgusted" with himself — and he is horrified when the time finally comes for Miranda to choose whether or not to use lethal force and she shows no apparent remorse for doing the former. He can't quite articulate why he must adhere to these standards, he just knows that there is that baseline. (Both the Doctor and Miranda intuitively notice that the villains are "cruel and cowardly," for instance.)

In many ways the Doctor here is as close to "normal" as he's been in this arc. He's capable of quietly remarkable feats like deliberately "losing" a snooker match by potting every single ball on his first shot, or walking across a very frosty car park without any risk of slipping. He's effortlessly able to pick-pocket an alien as they pick-pocket him, and deliberately planting the bomb they left for him on their own spaceship without anyone noticing. When the time comes to go into hiding with Miranda he's able to "incredibly easily" retrain as a business consultant and make heaps of money advising firms of better ways to do things. (This is so he can provide safety for Miranda. He’s not an aspiring yuppie.) When things get so desperate that he might need to steal aboard a space shuttle, not to put too fine a point on it, but he does so. Some of these things don't feel exactly like normal Doctor behaviour because normally he would have other tools at his disposal — however, they ring true.

Contrary to all that, Parkin underlines the ways in which the Doctor feels out of sorts. During a lovely bit where Debbie notices how unearthly the interior of a spaceship is to her (something we'd normally take for granted since a lot of plastic and metal just looks like BBC set dressing to us — she instinctively knows this wasn't made on her world), we find out that the Doctor feels that way about living on Earth: "I’ve felt it for as long as I can remember. Every morning, when I wake up in a world with buttons, green leaves, paper money and traces of argon in the air I breathe.’” The Doctor, we discover, even thought he was human when he first woke up in that train carriage — "of course I did. I thought I was like everyone else, that everyone else’s life was like mine. I learned that was not the case.” This is also clear in the plot, when the Doctor first encounters some of the hostiles looking for Miranda: "The Doctor frowned. ‘You know me?’ The man hesitated. ‘Of course. You don’t know me?’"

By focusing on the Doctor as off-kilter we get to enjoy a plot without some of the usual safety barriers, i.e. he can't have his normal repartee with the villains and their threats won't mean quite the same thing any more. So maybe they'll just kill him and have done with it. (Of course they don't, and the Doctor has been around for almost a hundred years by now so he's incredibly proficient at lots of things. But the jarring sensation of villains who know him not getting the response they were expecting is a delicious plus, and it's unique to this mini-run of books.)

Some of the best characterisation is unspoken. The Doctor's relationship with Miranda is a way to externalise what he's going through in actions rather than words. Here is another character that shares his unique physical oddities, who even has an analogue for his amnesia since her past is actively the reason people are pursuing her, but she has no access to that past. (Granted, this is because she was a baby at the time and not because of a memory wipe. Go with me here.) The Doctor is determined to let Miranda have a safe and normal life, which is in sharp contrast to his own longing to get away from Earth and the 20th century. (Look at the lengths he went to in The Turing Test.) For Miranda, he’s willing to put all of that on hold and get a job instead. Perhaps, on some level, he just wants one more Time Lord to be alive, knowing the part he played in reducing their numbers. He’s clearly lonely as, with no apparent hesitation, he adopts her.

We never find out how long he would have kept this up. (Would he have said "no thanks" to Fitz and stayed here with Miranda, or taken her aboard? Start your head-canons.) But allowing someone else to live and enjoy what he experiences as disorientation feels like a last attempt to integrate himself into all this, to see what Earth really has to offer — and keep in mind, he’s also keeping Miranda from learning the truth about herself, which might speak to his own ongoing wish to ignore the past. (See Endgame.) Although it feels justified, it’s an unexpected dive towards being human at this point in the run.

The other characters are written with similar interest. Debbie is a quietly fascinating pseudo-companion: it's clear from the outset that she'd rather go and look at other worlds than be married to Barry, who is at best controlling and at worst psychologically abusive. Her attraction to the Doctor is obvious, but quite subtle. We can't help sympathising with her, but there's darkness and weakness there too, such as when she initially lets the villains have Miranda, later identifies where they can find her for fear of being killed, and — after Barry meets an unhappy fate — enjoys seeing him in reduced circumstances... but is nevertheless trapped looking after him, rather than being part of the Doctor-Miranda unit as you might expect. (I couldn't help feeling like this reflected darkly on the Doctor, who surely must know that she needed rescuing in some way too.)

Barry, for his part, is an awful if altogether pedestrian sort of monster, controlling his wife while stepping out on her anyway; nevertheless, he's fully committed to rescuing a young girl the moment he hears that she's in danger. So perhaps he's not all bad? (There's some very neat writing around Debbie's self image which is tied to Barry, who at one point calls her a "stupid fat cow.” When she is able to see herself through the Doctor’s memories, totally separate from Barry's negging, Debbie is “surprised how pretty she looked.")

The villains might have simple goals but they have facets as well. A couple of low rent criminals contribute to the Doctor’s capture at one point, but they’re able to be pragmatic and side with his legal payoff over their boss’s shady riches — they know it will be better for them in the end. There are a couple of creepy mercenaries on the periphery whose primary concern is getting paid, and one of them, an angry (non-copyright-infringing) Transformer who turns into a VW Beetle (!) is an emotional psychotic who blames the Doctor for the death of his wife. (The other two doubt that he was the hero in that scenario: "Anyone who had wiped out Mr Gibson and his entire race couldn’t be all bad.") The Hunters, seeking to eradicate Miranda's family once and for all, have certain standards of combat: "They wouldn’t dishonour the warriors of this time by using weapons a million years more advanced than those of their enemies." (They even offer Barry the chance to get out of here since their fight is not with him.) The Doctor gets a chance to look within Ferran, the young Prefect who is left leading the charge against Miranda, and he determines that: "It’s not your fault you were born when you were, into that family. Since your cradle, since before you can remember, all you’ve been taught is revenge. It’s like an addiction, Ferran. You can help yourself. I know that deep down, below all those layers of hatred that others have filled you with, that you’re a decent man.”

Sadly the jury is still out on Ferran at that point, although he does wobble back and forth once he has the opportunity to kill Miranda. It's here that we get to the weaker end of the book, aka the wrap-up.

Let’s back up. I've not discussed the structure for Father Time. This was deliberate because it's quite interesting, and you should probably just go and read the book and enjoy it for yourself — but I will say that the book has an unusual structure, and there are time jumps. There's a fundamental uncertainty to Father Time where it concerns a character of obvious importance to the Doctor, who (equally obviously) won't be around for future books. (I don't think you need to be revisiting these a quarter of a century later to have sussed that.) So, what's going to happen to Miranda? Parkin keeps this question up in the air. It’s not clear how far anyone in this situation will go, so he can get away with things like suddenly pushing the story forward a few years and recontextualising the characters as they continue trying to evade certain doom.

He tantalises the reader brilliantly when Ferran gets close to Miranda, who at this point is living as a relatively normal teenage girl with the problems that come at her age. (Her awkwardness about "normal" teenage activity is beautifully expressed. She doesn't feel like a parody of a teenager, or like a robot. She's just an unusual person who has grown up with the Doctor as her role model.) Ferran's will-he-won't-he is some of the most tense stuff in the book.

But you'll have noticed at that point that there's still almost a hundred pages to go — and you do have to settle on something eventually. Father Time's final third is a bit more explosive, which is saying something since the first third includes sword-welding assassins on flying discs and an angry Transformer. By the end, Ferran has solved his moral quandary and brought a giant spaceship full of slaves to get Miranda once and for all. Up until now we’ve enjoyed some ambiguity about Miranda’s heritage, and whether Ferran has some justification for his plan after all. By the end though, he surely doesn’t: his “racially pure” society is built on slaves and it is obviously repeating the mistakes of before. He’s just a very bad egg. Disappointing. But then we’re asked to believe that he has reformed — again, for those keeping score. Now, I love a bit of ambiguity, but this is ping-pong. Why should we believe it will stick this time?

The Doctor pushes the “how far will he go to protect Miranda” button quite hard in that final stretch, stealing aboard a US space shuttle in the attempt. This is not outside the realm of possibility for the Doctor, let’s face it, but I couldn’t help feeling that as we literally left orbit to explore a slave uprising on a spaceship, which upturns an entire society in an afternoon, that we had left a beautifully observed novel about lonely people in winter and strange family units quite far behind. The eventual payoff also doesn’t feel equivalent to that early stuff: how Miranda would depart after making such an impression on the Doctor, and how he would react to that are driving forces behind Father Time, and I didn’t feel like either was resounding enough.

Long story short, after something quite trailblazing in terms of an Eighth Doctor Adventure we suddenly get a burst of very normal Doctor Who, where the stakes are all about sci-fi and the characters are all a bit archetypal. (Including the shuttle crew, who simply don’t have the page-count to treat the Doctor and Debbie with the suspicion they’re due.) I probably tricked myself into expecting either a beautiful or a devastating conclusion and the one we get is fine… but it’s neither of those things, instead packing Miranda off to an entirely anodyne SF destiny and having the Doctor wish her toodle-pipski like she hasn’t been his actual daughter for the best part of a decade. He felt more of a wrench leaving Cameca behind in The Aztecs, and he’d only known her for a few days.

I don’t think a damp ending ought to ruin the whole novel though. Father Time is quite obviously above par for these books. Parkin explores the Doctor’s difficulties with life on Earth and he finds a reason to counter-balance them. He supplies interesting and challenging supporting characters, both good and bad. (Although now that you mention it he does drop the ball with Debbie, who deserved better than to feel like a spare toy packed away in a hurry.) He gets in quite a bit of geekery for the list-makers among us, including lines like “Not even the sonic suitcase can get us out of this one,” some references to the New Adventures and a scene with several direct nods to upcoming books, as well as some of Parkin’s previous ones. The prose is typically thoughtful, at times addressing the reader like a storybook in a way that somehow doesn’t feel out of place. And it all feels so fresh, daring to throw the Doctor into a directly familial relationship — something the series seems designed to avoid altogether — in a way that instantly works. I’ve got my reservations about it, but I’m not surprised that people love this one and return to it. What it gets right is worth some imperfections.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #82 – The King Of Terror by Keith Topping

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#37

The King of Terror

By Keith Topping

One of the things I look for in these reviews is context. How did each writer begin? How have they evolved? What interests them? When it comes to writer duos, however — say, Mike Tucker and Robert Perry — it’s not really possible to parse that about either of them until they go their separate ways.

We now have such an example from Keith Topping, of “and Martin Day” fame, and therefore we know what would happen if you subtracted Martin Day. The answer, apparently, is: aaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!

Okay, think positive, benefit of the doubt, be nice to him in case it’s his birthday... I think The King Of Terror is just supposed to be a bit of fun, a spirited action adventure that leans silly. It’s quite meta at points, which makes sense as Topping has co-written several irreverent (and very good) TV reference guides. There's nowt wrong with meta if it's applied with the right level of care. That’s Dave Stone and Paul Magrs 101, that is, and they do all right.

Where The King Of Terror goes wrong is in the execution. And, to be honest, the subject matter. Also the meta stuff which is bad actually. The new characters are a problem. So are the pre-existing ones. Somehow just... all of it is bad. This is a "you know what, no thank you" situation. A where-do-we-even-begin-a-palooza. Good. Absolute. Lord.

Okay, okay, I'm getting hysterical now so let's go into review crisis mode: summarise it! The King Of Terror is an alien invasion story set in the modern day. (1999.) The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are brought into an investigation by the Brigadier. A shady billionaire is stockpiling plutonium – what's all that about? Meanwhile a couple of UNIT operatives, Paynter and Barrington, are also on the trail. The aforementioned shady people are congregating in boardrooms and various spy shenanigans are had, all of them a prelude to said alien invasion. (Of which there may be more than one.) More locally, a group of Nostradamus-worshipping terrorists are making trouble. Then Turlough goes missing. It's mostly set in Hollywood by the way.

The story is hard to get a hold of. It should be quite exciting. Aliens have infiltrated corporate America! Shades of They Live there, with much opportunity for satire. But the aliens aren't particularly satirical. They're just your typical Bad Guys with an alien garnish – moody, ordering-executions-on-a-whim-type gangsters who occasionally rip their faces off in private. (And presumably attach new ones afterwards?) It’s oddly reminiscent of Endgame, with aliens that we can barely be bothered to manifest and conspiracies that never amount to much. Also for a guy this interested in pop culture it’s bizarre that the “controlling people via the internet” angle fails to catch on outside of a few references to it.

There are next to no opportunities for the Doctor to face off against them, which let's face it is where baddies get most of their best material, but it's also a useful means to advance the plot. As it is, heavy exposition just has to unfold itself via sheer willpower. There's a bit where Turlough, who has been in prison for most of the book (and so we can assume was not invited to any planning meetings) somehow intuits that the aliens are going to use plutonium to poison Earth's atmosphere. The Doctor knows all about the aliens already of course, in that particularly trite-end-of-Doctor Who way, so he's able to just reel off gobs of their back story at will – but only once he's reached the point in the book where Keith Topping decides that it’s okay to remember who they are now, so as to preserve all that precious buggering-about-not-being-of-any-use time for him earlier. There's a bit, incidentally, where he does his "as you know, Bob" routine in a boardroom, to the aliens, while they all just sit there. When we get to the finale – in theory a spectacular bit that rivals Independence Day for scale – it's for some reason done entirely as reported events, with the main characters sitting around for days while it happens. The phrase "mind-numbingly mundane" is thrown around. By the actual book! (Maybe don't do that?!)

For a spy story/alien invasion actioner it's surprisingly torpid. That lack of involvement from the Doctor sure doesn't help. Step back, though – why even bring him in? Yes, it turns out there's a major alien crisis on the way, but all the Brigadier knows at this point is that a rich guy is stockpiling a sensitive material. He's already got people on the job! What does the Doctor accomplish on top of that? Various meetings, as far as I can tell, including a critical one at the end where he incites a conflict between two groups of aliens that was going to bubble over anyway; ah well, at least it gets the climax underway. It's around here that Topping has the Doctor wonder "Would all of this still have happened if I hadn’t been here?” There's an equal chance that this is a real attempt at self-reflection or just lamp-shading, but either way, yes, it clearly would have, as we have the CIA to thank for much of the solution. Thanks so much for underlining it.

If you're wondering how the book can function without the Doctor front and centre, first of all it's fine not to do it that way. Of course it is! Do whatever crazy version of a Doctor Who story you like, as long as you believe in it. Second of all though, the way Keith Topping does this is by frontloading The King Of Terror with a pseudo-protagonist, Geoff Paynter. He's a UNIT operative, albeit in name only since his behaviour is more along the lines of a roided-out The Sweeney. Paynter receives gobs of coverage and since (as mentioned earlier) the plot is rarely dynamic, that means he's got time to sit around and chat. He mostly does this with his similarly laddish partner Barrington, occasionally pausing the book for cod-Porridge/Red Dwarf bunk-bed scenes. These guys enjoy pop culture, which I mean, Topping writes reference guides so that checks out. But Paynter, as well as sounding absolutely nothing like a person that works for UNIT or a military organisation of any kind, just isn't an interesting guy to listen to. He's the sort of bore who says things like "Rumours of our demise were greatly exaggerated," and who looks at a dangerous situation and says in a long-suffering way, "Another day in paradise." He's coarse and colloquial in a way that's clearly meant to be funny (when riling up Barrington he says "Nah, just pulling your tiddler") but occasionally it just comes off as puzzling. (He says "effing" a lot. Is that the book bleeping him out, or is he just whimsical? Given some of the book's other contents I'm surprised they didn't throw in the F word.)

He's violent to an extent that would even make the Brigadier blush, happily executing an enemy after blowing out his kneecaps, and lucky us: he's a rampaging misogynist as well! Now, I'm not silly enough to think that a fictional character's actions are automatically an endorsement. But Paynter's sheer page-count, combined with a moment where he somehow out-philosophises the Doctor (he fails to grasp the concept of underlying pacifism in wartime until good ol' Paynter explains about Dunkirk and the Charge Of The Light Brigade movie – thanks mate, now I've got it!) suggests that we're supposed to think this guy's pretty great actually. And if you're struggling to make sense of that, take it up with Tegan, with whom Topping somehow conspires to create a romance.

The way it's done would be a terrible, bottom-of-the-barrel cliché regardless of the dialogue. It's two characters forced together by circumstance, who yell at each other and fight (he hits her!) until they give in and kiss. This is a misunderstanding of correlation that many bad rom-coms make. (Never to be outdone for self-awareness, Topping lamp-shades this: "It’s a crass romantic comedy subplot that’s impressing precisely no one." All together now: well, that's all right then!) But the dialogue is howlingly dreadful as well. Paynter, annoyed with Tegan, calls her a lesbian. (Phwoar!) Then he manages to get a kiss following the sentiment – I swear this is in the book – "Smoke my cornet, big arse!” Even Alan Partridge wouldn't attempt that one.

The general suggestion here, divorced from the actual content, is that Paynter is a bon-mot-dispensing machine. ("He was winning the argument through humour.") Tegan is quite up front calling him misogynistic names, and that stuff’s all accurate, but she just... fancies him anyway, no doubt tipped over the edge by a teeth-aching bit of sympathy when he winds up in hospital: "[Tegan] saw another side of Paynter, briefly. A deeply hidden side. ‘It’s like having a part of you ripped away,’ he said softly. The shattering loss was clearly there, inches beneath the surface. He hid his feelings well, she gave him credit for that much, but the veneer was in danger of peeling away and allowing the world to look at the vulnerable, confused, hurt man beneath. She could almost have hugged Paynter at that moment. Almost, but not quite." He said like… one thing there.

Trying to skip over the appalling misreading of Tegan, we've now stumbled across one of the book's major flaws. The King Of Terror is not well written. A recurring nuisance is Topping's fondness for over-description of characters, usually out of nowhere and after a line of dialogue. "‘Sure,’ said Ryman. He was powerfully built with a thick, bullish neck and short cropped hair. He had a livid red scar on his left cheek and a prizefighter’s nose that had taken one punch too many, yet his movements were light and graceful, almost balletic." / "She was a small woman in her late twenties, slightly overweight around the hips and thighs, and power-dressed in a tightly fitting, dark blue jacket and skirt combination that emphasised rather than hid her weight. The cut of her ash-blonde hair was as severe as her clothes and her eyes looked like two chips of ice in the dull lighting of the conference room." / "‘The information that we have from our sources in LA,’ said Frank Greaves, ‘is that there’s a UNIT presence in the city.’ Greaves was a gnomish, tired-looking man with thinning blond hair and a sickly pale complexion that suggested far too many sleepless nights. He cast a nervous glance at his CIA superior who was small, completely inconspicuous and in his early fifties."

There's a nugget of actual characterisation in each of these, but it's still an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach. Good lord, get to the point – and if the character's looks aren't remotely important later on, then you needn't bother. There are heaps of characters in this, a lot of them sound the same, and once they're past the initial description-fest they don't get described again. It doesn't really help to have been told 200 pages ago that one of them moves balletically sometimes. (Strangely Topping doesn't go to town describing the aliens, who just look sort of horrible, really. Their back story, relayed in great dollops by the Doctor, isn’t particularly original either; one lot are compared to the Daleks. Ooh.)

The prose has a tendency to waffle on, often with a comedic bent. I get it – Topping's irreverent, see the original Discontinuity Guide – but it's not well integrated here. Omniscient sentences like "Those who believe that, in a world of infinite variety, an improbable amount of duplication occurs naturally would have just loved the coincidence" will just make you go, hang on, I guess that was a bit of a coincidence wasn't it? Stuff like "Newton turned with a quizzical look on his face. ‘I don’t follow?’" is redundant – you just described the feeling he's having, then signified it with dialogue, you can just pick one. Descriptions like "Milligan had the look of whomsoever it was that had been assigned the tough job of converting Saul on the road to Damascus" are disappearing off into their own little world altogether. Huh?

There's a general uncertainty here about what to do with all the bits that aren't dialogue – but much of the actual dialogue is either first-pass obvious or just embarrassing, like an Irish character who says “He saved my life once, so he did” and “We’re supposed to be the good guys, so we are.” A book with this much action shouldn't have this much time to witter on, and when people say something it should be worth saying.

Tone is another of the book's major problems. It's clearly going for funny a lot of the time, and nerdy, if it can get away with both. (You know Topping, reference guides etc.) Sometimes it's quite unobtrusive: “‘Nice effect. Computer-generated?’ ‘Colour separation overlay,’ replied the Doctor dismissively.” Sometimes it's slightly off: "It’s exactly the same technique the Time Meddler used in the Seventies with that pop concert malarkey." (Yay, a Virgin/No Future reference... but does anyone in-universe call him "the Time Meddler"?) And sometimes it just doesn't work. There's a tissue of references to the Fifth Doctor not being a particularly impressive or well-liked incarnation: "[This incarnation]’s symbolic if somewhat mysterious. A lot of people don’t seem to like it.” / "He strikes me as being a bit wet.” / “‘Which one are you?’ ‘Fifth.’ ‘Oh, the vulnerable one. Well, you’d better sit down before you have an accident.’” What the hell are they talking about? They're not Doctor Who fans! This isn't a Doctor Who forum! You're breaking things for a crap joke. (And look, maybe don't keep telling us how limp and rubbish the character we are reading about right now is. Do you think he sucks? No? Well then, just write him with confidence and ignore the critics. This isn’t The Discontinuity Guide.)

Often that urge to tickle our funny bones arrives at the wrong moment. When we first meet them, the terrorists are variously likened to a With The Beatles-era Ringo Starr and "Noddy Holder circa 1973", and they're clearly meant to be hapless in the extreme. But then they're also very successful terrorists who blow up a building killing 70 people, and later blow up a car incinerating one of the main characters. But like? One of them looks like Noddy Holder, I guess? Ho ho? I barely know why they're in the book – their leader blows himself up after his girlfriend, who he fat shames but don't worry about it, gets her head blown off, and shortly afterwards the remainder are rounded up and that's them done. But they're a great example of the book not knowing when to be funny, or how hard to lean into it.

And yeah, stuff like "terrorists who successfully kill people" kind of punctures any nearby jokes, doesn't it? Those gangster aliens are always having people murdered. Paynter gets into various situations where friends of his die horribly, or he's forced to kill people in a nasty way. Pound for pound, this isn’t a funny story – so why does the prose occasionally lean in to roll its eyes, and why does he conspicuously insert song titles into the dialogue? Didn’t anyone chip in here to say, are you sure these things are complementary?

For the worst example of a tonal mismatch you can check out the nastiest thing in the book, which has no business sitting alongside all those comedy bits and arguably nullifies the lot of them: Turlough's capture and torture. This is done for ultimately baffling reasons, i.e. they want his DNA, which you can get from hair follicles. They nevertheless choose to laser him, rip bits of skin off him, blast him with intense heat, drug him and oh yes – they violently anal probe him as well, after which we're told he soiled himself. Sorry – editor? Justin, where you at? This was one of many moments during The King Of Terror – including action that simply isn't moving the story, puerile characters pontificating for pages at a time, exposition that projectiles at us like the book has food poisoning – that made me wonder if Justin Richards got sidetracked rewriting Endgame and simply didn't give this one his full attention. Because seriously, as well as the book being a literal crap-shoot in many respects, this here is unsuitable material for Doctor Who. Come on. Kids read these. What are we doing. (Turlough's revenge, where he beats his captor and seductress to death with a heavy chain, mashing her head to soup, would probably win the "this really shouldn't be here" award if it weren't for the probe. Good grief.)

The clanging tones are perhaps the worst thing about The King Of Terror, but there's more to go. It wasn’t really worth bringing the Brigadier back given the little he has to do here, and it’s done in a way that means having to reckon with his now thoroughly convoluted novel timeline. The book is way too pop-culture-brained, not just keen to make arch references in the dialogue but occasionally leaning on it for characterisation, which makes it all feel a bit more throwaway. (Tegan talks to a wounded man for support specifically because she saw it in an episode of M*A*S*H, and not because, I dunno, it’s the right thing to do.) Paynter’s misogyny leaks out into the book to some extent; there are very few female characters and they’re either dippy, casually offensive or meanly denigrated in description. And not to get all puritan about it but there are some expletives here that do not belong in a Who book. You’ve got a racist bit, where we’re meant to sympathise with the one saying it, an ableist bit between comedy villains and a random dreadfully homophobic slur when someone is mad at their computer for taking too long. (?!) There’s little enough of this stuff that you could easily cut it with no ramifications, but that just makes it more bizarre that it’s there. (Yes, I know times change and I’d put at least one of these down to just being written in a more ignorant real world — but cumulatively, oof.)

All of this is nitpicking to some extent, so here’s a bigger one: this has to be the worst writing for the Fifth Doctor so far in novels. Perhaps as a response to the (baffling and unnecessary) extra-textual criticisms of his character, he has a sudden equal-opportunities penchant for rude sarcasm, a fondness for making self-mythologising speeches at the drop of a hat, a blundering grasp of philosophy and a need to espouse it, and (when it suits) an apparent dumbness so that Geoff Paynter can "as you know, Bob" at him for a change. I don’t recognise him at all. He's not worried enough about Turlough and he/the novel doesn’t get anywhere near to reckoning with what's happened to him after the fact, attempting to cloak it in a "well, Turlough be mysterious I guess" bullet point that just minimises the whole thing. Similarly Tegan's experiences are apparently meant to make her more cynical, as if she needed the help, but that doesn't explain why she fell head over heels for a guy who smacked her in the face. None of the leads ring true, which raises the question of "why write a novel about them specifically.”

But then... none of it rings true. The King Of Terror doesn't have a clue whether it's a wacky comedy or a brutal action thriller, whether it's Doctor Who or a godawful misogynistic crime show about Geoff Paynter, whether it's introspective and descriptive or irritatingly flippant and obsessed with pop culture, whether it's huge in scope or putting its feet up so it can hear about it all on the news. I really cannot believe that this one passed all the usual editing checks. I don't understand how it's in this state generally, since I enjoyed both of Topping's previous co-written novels — surely Martin Day can't have done all the heavy lifting? As a published novel it’s as rough and misguided as any early days Virgin disaster you'd care to name. It’s the clear nadir of the BBC Books run so far, and with sufficient luck for the rest of it as well.

2/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #81 – Endgame by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#40

Endgame

By Terrance Dicks

There’s something quite apt about getting Terrance Dicks to write for the “amnesiac Doctor” arc. After all, his last McGann book was all about the Doctor losing his marbles.

The Eight Doctors struggled to put this to good use. It facilitated the need to meet other Doctors and borrow a few brain cells, but otherwise the latest incarnation was just some brown-haired guy who oscillates between moral objections and murderous fighting skills. Dicks didn’t seem interested in the whole characterisation bit. Endgame is more interested, and more successful, but it’s still not very much of either.

We find the Doctor living listlessly in 1951. He goes to museums to soak up information and resolutely refuses to get involved in other people’s affairs. Gone is the escalating need to take part and, if possible, leave the planet entirely which Paul Leonard introduced so pointedly in The Turing Test. (You could read his ennui here as a direct response to his failure there, but that will have to stay as head-canon. Which is annoying. Perhaps this is a minor point but I thought one of the main reasons for doing this soft reboot was to make the Doctor easier for the writers to grasp and more consistent to read? At this point it feels like handing McGann a new outfit every week and telling him to wing it.) Despite his disinterest he becomes involved in the hunt for a missing document. He soon comes to the attention of the British, American and Russian governments, not to mention a certain shadowy cabal whom he met previously but now can’t remember.

I got the impression that Dicks was mapping McGann onto another Doctor here. His curmudgeonly insistence on being left alone, and his refusal to help with “politics and causes and crusades” all reads a bit like Pertwee during his exile to Earth. (The shared exile is another canny enough reason to get Dicks involved.) The way we find him is almost a “What if the Third Doctor avoided UNIT and got on with his life” setup — with the unfortunate excision of his attempts to get the TARDIS working, since it’s still just a hollow blue box that he’s only glommed onto out of sheer habit. The Doctor is a rather pitiful figure in Endgame, clearly depressed.

There’s something to be said for this portrayal, even if it does bump irritatingly against The Turing Test. It gives him somewhere to go, and that’s the direction the book takes: the Doctor eventually roars into action, despite objections, and others note that he has “come alive.” (While still noting that “There’s a long way to go.”) There are moments of that old Doctor brilliance, such as a masterful (so to speak) deconstruction of a psychic training camp, and an impassioned speech to a villain about the virtues of humanity and their right to survive.

Dicks can be a good team player with plot arcs — Exodus and Blood Harvest both lobbed the ball to Paul Cornell for his follow up books — and he’s on good form with that here. Despite what I read as mismatched characterisation, he makes direct use of the events of The Turing Test, bringing in background player Kim Philby for a key role. The aforementioned “long way to go” is also more than just lip service: it’s clear that the Doctor has a conflicted relationship with his missing memories, at one point saying “Don’t tell me these things. I don’t want to know them. I am past all that,” and later responding to an offer of mental help by dropping to the ground and sobbing “I mustn’t know! I mustn’t know!” It’s perhaps not too much to assume that his blowing up Gallifrey is getting in the way of things like remembering who the Brigadier is or how the Daleks felt about stairs. More on that later, I assume, which is an altogether more productive approach than I was expecting from Terrance Dicks.

If my expectations seem low it’s because, well, I’ve read his novels. The more of them I read, the more I picture the revered script editor picking the name of a famous person out of a hat and spending perhaps five minutes concocting a reason for the Doctor to meet them. (I’m increasingly sure this is all a conscious effort to show some of the Doctor’s name-dropping in action — something the Classic era rarely did.) Endgame indeed makes some interesting points about the amnesiac Doctor, but it also flubs it a few times, as well as surrounding him with the usual mid-effort Uncle Terry plotting.

As for the Doctor, you can explain away and justify his total failure to keep a friend alive (very unlike him generally) as rock bottom for his refusal to get involved. The Burning and Casualties Of War did similar things. What Endgame handles poorly is the Doctor’s attitude to violence. He’s quite clear about his distaste for guns, yet he’s also quite capable of strangling an assailant to death — only pulling back because a friend tells him to stop. Even worse, there’s a moment where he gleefully attempts to kill a man with his own gun, in that case only being stopped by the villain vanishing in front of him. So what is it he actually dislikes about guns? The colour?

Dicks had a similarly bizarre attitude towards Doctorly violence in The Eight Doctors, with McGann engineering the deaths of multiple Sontarans and actively splatting vampires and a giant spider, not to mention generally Kung-fu fighting when the situation called for it. It’s really not enough to say “guns are bad” if you’re going around trying to kill people anyway, especially if you throw a gun into the mix as well.

The violence is also a bit boring as well as incongruous: the Doctor’s handy ability to “slip back into some kind of atavistic state” when attacked and promptly morph into Jackie Chan is an amnesiac carry-over from The Eight Doctors, and it feels just as ridiculous now as it did then. The Eighth Doctor has been in dozens of books now and he’s not in the habit of relying on Venusian aikido, so it feels like a lazy Pertwee default to get him out of lots, and I do mean lots of scrapes that way. (At one point he Vulcan-neck-pinches two people on the same page.) If all of this is intended to be yet another sign of the character needing to move towards a more familiar centre — “he’s only violent because he doesn’t remember” — which might be the only excuse for it, well, forgive me but I don’t buy that. Terry clearly isn’t a writer to keep such intentions secret from the reader.

There’s no companion to speak of in this amnesiac history tour, so that leaves us with the plot. This works on two fronts, the one self-contained, the other a sequel. Neither is particularly strong.

The hunt for the missing document (which of course becomes a Hitchcockian “wrong place, wrong time” deal for the Doctor) is suitably action packed, but this falls into a routine of the Doctor effortlessly fighting his way out of trouble and cutaways so that government organisations etc can go “wow, can you believe how effortlessly that guy fought his way out of trouble?!” The document eventually points us to a strange conspiracy involving random acts of aggression and mind control — which to be honest feels like an idea we could have seeded earlier. By the time we arrive at it, roughly halfway, Endgame struggles to get up a head of steam about it, merely reporting a few unprovoked attacks and promising big trouble if, for example, Truman or Stalin gets in on this. It’s underwhelming to say the least, although the aforementioned scene of the Doctor deconstructing a psychic training camp is a highlight.

The other plot strand is a direct sequel to Dicks’s earlier PDA, Players. I liked his idea about a group of time travelling malcontents, sort of malevolent versions of the Meddling Monk. I didn’t feel like he did enough with them in Players so I had no objection to seeing them again. Sadly, he still can’t seem to muster much enthusiasm about them. Their plans usually amount to little more than random irritations during historical events in the hope that it will create some vaguely defined level of mess, and their rules rarely matter to anyone playing the game, as they constantly cheat. For a big shadowy org they just don’t have their shit together.

Individually they’re not much better. The main antagonist is a guy called Axel who periodically shows up, monologues foolishly and then allows the Doctor to effortlessly kick him in the posterior. Not very inspiring. When the Doctor meets the enigmatic Countess, the aforementioned speech comes into effect — but unfortunately while this is a very Doctor thing to do, it’s quite a limp way to defuse the entire crisis all on its own, which again leaves this organisation looking utterly hapless. If the Doctor can run rings around them with barely half an idea who he even is, why are we supposed to be intimidated by them? (This ending should probably count as character development for the Countess, but given her handful of scenes across both books, readers are unlikely to be keeping score.)

All in all, it’s not looking good for Endgame. But it has its upsides. First of all you have that usual stand-by, Terry’s writing style. It’s all quite jolly, if flawed. (Philby more than once does an “As you know, Bob” spiel about the CIA and other such groups for the Doctor’s, and transparently our benefit.) But as for the pace, this one whizzes along even faster than Players, which made the awkward choice of spreading its plot across three short stories featuring two Doctors, one of them sequelising a TV story that mostly had nothing to do with it. Not so with Endgame, which might globetrot like a Bond film but does at least stick to one core plot and protagonist. There’s an absurd thrill to watching the Doctor (who, remember, is not the proactive character of old, more closely resembling a Hitchcock patsy) get forced into one shenanigan after another, and while it cumulatively becomes very dull to see him extricate himself over and over through fights, his success in itself is fun to read.

You also have another staple of Terrance Dicks books: historical hobnobbing. Endgame doesn’t disappear into fanboying as Players did over Winston Churchill, but it has a lot of fun spinning the various plates of Kim Philby’s loyalties, and arguably the most fun with Guy Burgess, hedonistic gay double agent. While the writing for Burgess is cartoonish, having him refer to himself over and over as “Brigadier Brilliant!” and occasionally offer his flirting services to get out of trouble, I suspect it all comes from a good place. He’s an enjoyable presence and his scenes fleeing the country with the Doctor are further book highlights. Meanwhile Truman and Stalin don’t appear much, and they don’t meaningfully escape from just having two dimensions — The Wages Of Sin this ain’t — but I think Dicks just about acquits himself within the bounds of his plot. They’re not in it much, so maybe they don’t need to impress all that much. (Hey, I’m trying to be positive.)

I was thinking of Players quite a bit during Endgame, and for what it’s worth I think this is a better book. Dicks makes a point (as well as missing others) about the Doctor within this story arc, and he leaves something for others to pick up on; he tells a coherent and reasonably engaging, if underwhelming story about spies in the meantime. I wish it had been more, and I certainly wish he could think of a more hands-on approach for his “players” idea, but the bar for his books is fairly low at this point and Endgame just about stretches a leg over it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #80 – Independence Day by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#36

Independence Day

By Peter Darvill-Evans

The prodigal editor returns!

As you probably know, Peter Darvill-Evans helped launch the New Adventures and then edited them for years. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have EDAs or PDAs without him, so it makes a degree of sense to get him in to write something for BBC Books.

Of course the concern here is that his only prior Doctor Who book was Deceit: a plot-relevant but otherwise long, stodgy, vaguely unpleasant and action-heavy entry that introduced the controversial New Ace. (An older, gun-toting Ace who ran away and joined the space army for a bit.) It existed in service of a plot arc and what little you could glean about the author’s creativity was not hugely encouraging.

Independence Day* is at least a more measured effort — albeit not in terms of chapters, of which there are only six plus a prologue across 280 pages. Darvill-Evans is no longer saving up all the important bits for 50 page intervals (a weird Deceit tic), and although this one dips a toe in creepiness there’s nothing to rival the Stockholm Syndrome relationship in that book — although the concept of messed up attraction shows up again. It is, if nothing else, an easy to follow book.

If I seem cagey it’s because I spent most of Independence Day convinced that it was Doing A Thing that would eventually pay off. On the surface it looks like the most, well, surface kind of story imaginable: the Doctor and Ace become embroiled in a slave revolt. They’ll light the blue touch paper and then down will come the terrible tyrant. It’s not exactly new ground but it could be satisfying if done well. The way Darvill-Evans positions his players, though, suggests a much murkier story.

Straight off the bat, the Doctor’s past actions have played a part in all this. While travelling with Jamie he landed on Mendeb Two for no apparent reason — rationalising that he always arrives somewhere “for a reason” — so he asked Jamie to pick up a souvenir to remind him to come back. Jamie picked a vital part of the planet’s communication relay, which ultimately caused a critical imbalance between planets Two and Three. (Maybe tie a knot in your hanky next time.) Fast forward to the Doctor’s return with Ace and Mendeb Two is now easy pickings for its sister world; the populace are being used for slave labour. So you have a story about the Doctor fixing his own mistake.

Sat on the ancient space station between the two worlds is Kedin Ashar, a Duke of Mendeb Three who is apparently loyal to King Vethran, whose kingdom relies upon brainwashed slaves. However, he is secretly working against the King. However (part 2) he is also facilitating the King’s slave trade using his own skill as an inventor/chemist. His plan is to invent a new mind-altering slave drug which wears off sooner, and supplant the original without Vethran noticing. Which is… good, but he’s still actively trading in slaves, and has dosed who knows how many people with the permanent version of the drug already. So he’s not exactly the white knight he appears to be, at least to his followers. The question inevitably occurs of whether he’s really any better than Vethran, and his answer isn’t all that compelling: “I can’t claim that I have a grand new vision for my planet, nor that I’m acting from long-held principles. I’m a soldier and a scientist, not a politician.” So there’s a question of whether this coup d'état will turn out to be anything more than a redistribution.

Then you have the slave revolt, which is happening independently of Kedin/coincidentally with the Doctor’s help. Landing on Mendeb Two he finds the slave operation in full swing and meets Bep-Wor, a depressed fisherman whose wife is a slave on the other world. Soon they’re working together on Mendeb Three, with the Doctor hoping to find Ace and Bep-Wor hoping to find his wife. This mini-revolution soon becomes worryingly messianic, with the brainwashed and free slaves alike chanting “Doctor!” Bep-Wor is hugely swept along by this and he begins steering the group away from the Doctor’s plan of finding the King to negotiate; instead they go from place to place freeing slaves, and doing so violently against the Doctor’s wishes. (For a while he lies to keep this secret from the Doctor.) So this revolution isn’t spotless — there are questions to be asked about their methods, whether Bep-Wor is really better than the villains he’s killed, and how the Doctor squares that with his own moral code.

Then you have Ace. Free of her New Adventures continuity, she nonetheless wants to grow and be independent (geddit), and insists that the Doctor set her down on the space station to fend for herself. Soon she’s breaking up a fight to rescue Kedin, sleeping with him, winding up a slave herself and then eventually breaking her conditioning, assisting the revolution and intending to stay behind and make a life for herself. So you have a story about Ace’s independence and burgeoning adulthood, and the difficulties within that.

Even some bits you’d normally take for granted are presented with a little extra ambiguity. Vethran, our oogly-boogly bad guy, hardly appears in the book at all; he’s such a background figure that I couldn’t help focussing on Kedin’s grey areas instead. Is Darvill-Evans using this to tip the story the other way? Is Vethran’s reputation exaggerated perhaps, and Kedin’s muted? And we have the slaves. Now, obviously they’re not happy. They’re slaves! They’re drugged into forced contentment! But then we meet a slave/master couple who seem sort of genuinely functional, the one filling in the deficiencies of the other. Bep-Wor’s half-crazed army can’t cope with this idea so they kill the owner and liberate the slave; it’s strongly suggested that we shouldn’t cheer them on, which suggests that maybe, I dunno, there’s a grey area in all this.

Maybe I’ve got my charitable hat on but I think there’s genuine promise here. Sadly Independence Day doesn’t follow through on any of it. Which suggests worrying things about my choice of hat.

For starters there’s the Doctor. Yes, it’s interesting that his actions may have doomed Mendeb Two. But you ideally need to do something with that other than have the Doctor go “oh, whoops” and then proceed to get exactly as involved in the anti-villainy plot as he would have done on any other planet. His complicity doesn’t make much difference to the story since at no point does anyone find out or care about the Doctor’s little mistake, and beyond a little early encouragement he barely contributes to their victory anyway, instead spending a fair chunk of the finale dead. (He gets better.)

Then there’s Kedin, our distractingly handsome hero/slave trader — you know, that old combo. Kedin is anything but lily white politically, but he seems sure that he can fix the slave problem. Based on what, though? There’s zero actual plan to restore the slaves to who they were before, since at the time he planned all this he didn’t know the Doctor would turn up to at least have a credible go at it. Did he think setting a load of servile zombies free on their old stomping ground was a win? All his new drug does is confirm that some new slaves will revert back. Some plan!

His personality isn’t much better. We’re meant to believe he’s pining for his kidnapped love, Tevana. It’s a key motivator for him. That doesn’t seem to get in the way of his taking Ace to bed though, does it? Not to get all prudish about it, but that’s some very messy motivation for a guy already dabbling in straight up villainy, and yet by the time the dust settles at the end you’d think Aragorn had returned to Gondor. So I guess just don’t worry about all of that.

It’s clear that we’re meant to pity Bep-Wor, who gets a downbeat ending after hearing some unencouraging news. I nevertheless kept waiting for his bloody revolution and occasional lies to come back on him, but they didn’t. Shouldn’t it make a difference that he goes against the Doctor’s wishes, uses him as a figurehead and eventually (unconvincingly) feigns helplessness when his mob kills somebody harmless? Instead it’s just one of those things the book throws at us as if to go, well, it’s more colourful that way. And it is, but you really ought to put a button on it as well.

Like Kedin, Bep-Wor is lauded at the end. His unhappy postscript might be seen as penance — I dunno, he mostly seems unhappy about one very specific thing there. The best I can come up with is that Bep-Wor’s decay is because the Doctor felt he deserved it for making his earlier mistake, and that’s why he doesn’t do anything to stop it. I know, I know, it’s probably just (debatably) interesting colour.

You can see that Ace’s story is meant to be meaningful, a sort of New Adventures character arc speed run, but it just doesn’t work. For starters, she gets it all wrong: she completely misreads the initial attack on Kedin (she thinks the fancy rich guy is blameless, not the band of angry peasants? Ace thinks that?) and she puts a fatal amount of trust in him, even after he seemingly ejects her into space. The “mindless slave” section is then a very curious choice for the character, effectively writing her out for half of it. (That may be for the best as it’s strongly hinted that she did more than serve drinks on Mendeb Three. A reference to her being “fit for the arena” due to her fight skills is promising but that goes nowhere — perhaps it was from an old draft.)

Although her recovery and rush into action at the end is some of the most direct and enjoyable stuff in the book, her moral flip-flopping over Kedin is laughable. He drugged you and sent you into slavery! He boffed you while supposedly pining for his missus! But because he’s sad about it, Ace reckons she’s all grown up now and ready to go and serve Kedin instead of travelling in the TARDIS. No way: you, sir, are having a laugh. And so Darvill-Evans appears to be with Kedin’s wince-inducing Casablanca kiss-off at the end. At least we can find some amusement in the Doctor failing to entertain her plan for even a second.

Lastly we have the “take for granted” stuff, and no prizes for guessing how much that leaves in the bank. Vethran is described with, of course, thwarted ambiguity: “Bep-Wor had expected — he didn’t know what he had expected. Someone more remarkable, perhaps: a man whose face betrayed an inner evil. Vethran was tall, imposing, with keen, intelligent eyes and a full beard. And that was all.” But he’s clearly studied at the Ming The Merciless school as there’s no doubt of his total nastiness based on his actions; he even does the “try to kill the goodie when he’s not looking” trick! So yes, he really is worse than Kedin after all, because he just is, so there. (And to now put on my nitpick hat: why did he wait so long before brainwashing his hostage? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he just brainwash the world? Seriously, just poison the water supply and bam, no more wars. Why all the faff?) As for the apparent ambiguity around slaves — which I’m not exactly hopping up and down about as a concept — there’s only one scene of it. Another example of our “whew, that was weird, anyway” approach to moral complexity.

I’ve clearly got a bit sidetracked by all the ambiguity or-lack-thereof, so to get back to the book: yeah, I guess it is just a surface level slave revolt thing after all, despite appearances. And to be fair it can be enjoyed on that level. Darvill-Evans has clearly thought a lot about Mendeb Three and its strangely anachronistic society, with dukes and peasants somehow flying rickety rockets to a space station with much better tech. (5 years to get from radio sets to orbit? Yeah, okay.) Independence Day has an ungainly way of unspooling the planet’s lore at us, occasionally pausing just to “as you know, Bob” directly in the prose for no reason, but some of the added colour isn’t bad. Sue me, I got somewhat invested. (Sadly though it’s not just the prose that gets a bad case of the talkies. Ace, seemingly possessed with the soliloquy powers of Spider-Man, at one point announces to herself: “Now then … what was all that about? That Kedin’s a crafty old sod. Charming and very horny, but definitely crafty with it. I suppose he’s trying to find out how much I know about all this futuristic technology. It’s obvious he hasn’t got the hang of it at all. I just wish I knew what he was up to on this godforsaken space station.” Smooth!)

It’s not, without wishing to be mean, the most memorably written book. This is the sort of SF/fantasy plodder to throw out lines like “‘The signal, Tevana Roslod,’ Madok said”, and where “flirting” manifests as “I think you’d better say a prayer to your own deity, young lady. You’re about to sin.” (Oh, Pete.) We’ve established that virtually no one in this is someone you’ll want to root for, and there’s little in the way of interesting interior lives; nonetheless, the simple march of Darvill-Evans’s revolution keeps the pace up pretty well. The finale is exciting, and there are moments of wit along the way, like how Ace’s brainwashed speech and thoughts aren’t quite as flat as everyone else’s: “It’s a good job I’ve been told that I’m happy doing this, [Ace] said to herself, because otherwise I think I’d be quite pissed off.” If nothing else it’s unchallenging on a plot level and quite easy to get through.

I think I liked it better than Deceit. That’s not a very high bar, and it’s difficult to tell how much of my generally-finding-it-sort-of-okay was because I’d tricked myself into expecting a more complex book. I still think Independence Day has the germ of something with all that moral ambiguity, though equally that might just be a tonal leftover from the New Adventures. With a book this eager to comment on the action and tell us about the surroundings, however, I have to doubt there’s all that much hidden under the surface.

5/10

*Not a great title is it? This is a coup, they depose the guy. They’re not becoming an independent anything, they’re just getting rid of their ruler.