#28
The Plotters
By Gareth Roberts
If you were new to Doctor Who you might find it odd that
there are so few stories where the characters get embroiled in history. It
seems like an obvious win for a time travel show, and to be fair there are many
great examples of this in the early years, with characters trying to keep
history on course while struggling to escape from it. But Daleks and Cybermen
get you more Radio Times covers, I guess, so after 1967 the historicals sadly died
off; all of a sudden the only way to see history was if aliens were trying to
blow it up. (Not including Black Orchid, where you only wished aliens would blow it up.)
The novels have mostly followed
suit, stapling reassuring sci-fi bits to any errant historical settings with two
exceptions: Sanctuary, David A. McIntee’s grim book about the Spanish
Inquisition, and now The Plotters by
Gareth Roberts. In some ways this is the better historical. No doubt McIntee
did more detailed research (Roberts’s book opens with an acknowledgement that The Plotters isn’t very accurate), but this
one’s set in the Hartnell era, where you were most likely to find trips to the
past. Roberts knows exactly how best to use these characters in that context,
with the Doctor, Vicki, Ian and Barbara assuming more or less parallel roles to
those in The Crusade. They slide back into the swing of things with such ease
that you could easily imagine this being made for television.
Arriving in 1605, the Doctor
dismisses Barbara’s obvious enthusiasm for this period of history but allows
her and Ian to take in the sights while he and Vicki loiter in the TARDIS. This
is a lie, of course: he knows just how close they are to a juicy bit of history
and he intends to find a good seat to gawk from. His deception leads to some
pretty unpleasant business for everyone else, and it’s absolutely in keeping
for Hartnell’s Doctor to lap up every minute of it regardless. He’s a wily,
wilful, crafty old sod in this, as comfortable leading Ian and Barbara astray
as he is playing word-games with the devious Robert Cecil. He never exactly
apologises to his friends for the consequences of his fib – more on those
shortly – and none of it seems to upset him at all. He practically cries with
laughter at King James’s oblivious line on the back cover, “If anyone tries to interrupt the opening of
Parliament … there’ll be fireworks!”, and later he works with one of the
conspirators because doing that will be better for history than not. You could put all of
this down to Roberts indulging Hartnell’s gift for mischief, and that’d be
fair, but I like to think it deliberately underlines how the Doctor is unlike
his companions. He can often be a serious presence in historical stories,
reminding the others of the implacability of time, but at this stage Ian and
Barbara have learnt the lessons, so he seems almost free of obligation. He has
faith that time will sort itself out and if he has to give things a little
nudge along the way, nudge them he will.
Barbara, possibly winning the “least
fun weekend in 1605” award here, goes with Ian to a tavern and promptly gets
embroiled in the work of Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby. She’s kidnapped, assaulted
and threatened several times with execution, only escaping because she tells
Fawkes a worrying amount of the truth about where she comes from and what she
knows about him. (You can guess what she leaves out.) Fawkes is dead set on his
goal, but he has no wish to harm her; he helps her escape from the more
dangerous Catesby. Barbara observes several times that Fawkes is not such a bad
man, or not universally so, and she’s absolutely tortured by the knowledge of
what will happen to him. She still goes
out of her way to ensure that it will. If The Plotters had somehow been made back in the ’60s, this would
have made a bleak but satisfying end to Barbara’s learning curve in The Aztecs.
Good as all of that is, it would
be fair to say that Barbara essentially just gets captured and escapes in this,
which makes it even more unimpressive that Ian’s entire role in The Plotters is to dash about looking
for her. Despite often inhabiting the more heroic role in Doctor Who, or maybe because he does,
Ian fades into the background of the plot. (And later, The Plot.) He meets a pair
of cheerful shoemaking rogues, Firking and Hodge, who offer shelter and haphazard
support when he needs rescuing from Catesby and co. Roberts seemingly can’t
wait to steer Ian back towards these two, as it allows more opportunity for
amusement. I love Ian, but he’s at his funniest when the Doctor is making a
faux pas, not so much when Barbara’s in danger.
Firking and Hodge provide a few straightforward
laughs, but there’s a better comedy double act in the bickering Haldann and
Otley: working to transcribe the King James Bible, they constantly snipe at
each other but quietly agree it’s best to leave out some of the boring bits, because
“Well, would you like to be stuck on the
begats for week after week?” The Doctor’s apparent interest in 1605 is the
transcription (at first), and he ingratiates himself not just into the King’s
court, but between these equally cantankerous old goats. I found myself looking
forward to these bits and gleefully imagining them on telly.
It’s debateable whether this
version of King James would have made the cut. It’s remarkably similar to Alan Cumming’s take in the recent series, all lascivious looks and lusty Scots wit. But
Roberts doesn’t so much acknowledge the King’s sexuality here as build a rocket
out of it: he subverts the trope of the lusted-after companion by disguising
Vicki as the Doctor’s ward, then making her the object of his affections
precisely for that reason. It’s a particularly crafty farce that all Vicki has
to do to end the King’s advances is lose the disguise, which is the one thing
she can’t do. Grim as the consequences of her discovery would be, Roberts has
endless fun with the obsessed King, whether patting his knee hopefully and sending
knowing looks or throwing a drunken sulk because he can’t find him. There are
some near misses: “‘I promise if you let
the King have his way you will get a lovely surprise!’ ‘Not half as lovely as
the surprise you’d get,’ said Vicki.”
A character like King James is a
gift when you can write prose like Gareth Roberts. “With a snap of his fingers he summoned a boy to refill his goblet
(boy-summoning was a choice pastime of his).” / “He was constantly searching for these little reminders of his
specialness. He remembered his father warning him that the first sign of
serious levels of unrest in one’s subjects was everybody’s dinner looking the
same. Poor Dad. Blown to bits at Bannockburn.” / “‘Something – oh, something awful
has happened!’ ‘Ugh. How awful?’ ‘Very
awful, Your Majesty.’ James remained to be convinced. ‘On a riding scale, if
one is a stolen pie from the kitchens and ten is revolution in the streets, how
awful?’ The Chamberlain hesitated. ‘Oh, eight, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh, doom.’” Even the prose around him is fun.
Describing the busybodying Chamberlain: “Patches
of pink bloomed on his cheeks, making plump mulberries of them.” And the
Chamberlain on food prep: “He’d forgotten
to remind the cooks of James’s innate loathing of meringues.” There’s just
gobs of this stuff, all delicious.
Where the TARDIS team are
concerned, the wit is tinged with characterful insight. Barbara on the TARDIS’s
failure to hit the 1960s: “Back to the
Ship and pull the handle on the fruit machine again.” And adorably, “We’re only about three hundred and sixty
years out. That’s quite good for the Doctor, all told.” Vicki is
particularly, almost conspicuously unamused by the Doctor in this – probably spurred
on King James’s affections – observing “He
wore his own Edwardian outfit, which [she] didn’t dare point out was as
anachronistic as any plastic mac.” More significantly, “[she] had noticed before how he faked
symptoms of ill health when bringing bad news or trying to conceal a mistake.”
At one point she’s so tired of lugging books for Haldann and Otley, she
contemplates kicking him in the shins. The Doctor meanwhile snidely congratulates
himself that “This excursion was turning
out quite satisfactory, particularly without those schoolteacher people to
distract him,” and on meeting the Chamberlain “found his constant gesticulations irritating, and quelled a desire to
reach out and slap him.” Significantly (and dangerously) he gives Cecil one
in the eye when he says “‘The ordering in
the Alexandrian section is quite gone to plot – I mean to say, pot.’ Feeling
rather puffed up and pleased with himself for that one he strode away round the
corner.”
It’s not all playful and fun, of course, what with Barbara’s mistreatment
and her inner torment over the fate of Fawkes. Also some marvellous, earnest
little nuggets like this jumped off the page: “In this age it was still possible to see the stars, and as he trudged
up the road Ian stopped more than once to look up and wonder which of them he
had visited.” There’s a grim interlude where Ian and Barbara witness a bear
being exhibited for cruel London punters, and there’s a surprising and
horrifying murder late in the book (which thankfully Barbara misses), but nonetheless
the plot errs on the side of fanciful. (Hence Roberts’s acknowledgement/warning
at the start.) The Plotters offers a
sinister linking presence to the machinations of Cecil and the delusions of
Catesby. It’s never less than fun to read, particularly as the Doctor surprisingly
disarms Cecil by agreeing to help him, then hoodwinks a mastermind by sheer dumb
luck. But some of the machinations do get a bit silly, particularly a male character’s
prolonged successful disguise as a serving wench, which seems more like Blackadder than Doctor Who. Towards the end of the book there’s an almost
unruly number of scenes with characters held captive in dank little rooms; I had
trouble remembering who was where, held at sword-point by whom.
I’ve definitely got some quibbles.
The Plotters is a smidge too long at
nearly 300 pages, some of it being the aforementioned game of “Whose cellar is it
anyway?” Also it’s so intent on giving the Doctor a whale of a time that Ian
and Barbara, and very nearly Vicki don’t get a great deal to do. But I’m so
enamoured with the prose that I can just
about write this off as era-appropriate. Historical stories could go on a
bit just as much as the sci-fi epics, and four characters is always a lot to
balance in terms of plot. (The Crusade, which I adore mainly as a novelisation,
ultimately runs out of material for the Doctor and Vicki.) Where The Plotters isn’t perfect, it still feels
like something the Hartnell era was foolish to let go. It’s just great Doctor Who.
8/10
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