By Gary Russell
This one doesn’t count, of course. It’s about a year out of place (publication-wise) and, more to the point, it’s not a Virgin book. Even more to the point, the fact that this novelisation went to BBC Books and not to Virgin probably helped signal the end of their Doctor Who license. Reading it as part of this marathon is a bit tactless, like inviting a loved one’s murderer to their funeral.
Still, I’ve owned this book since it came out and never read it cover to cover. Also, Marc Platt kindly cued it up at the end of Lungbarrow. And like it or not, this is the end of the Seventh Doctor’s journey – print edition. So I’m reading it now, for the sheer hell of it if for nothing else.
Relaunching Doctor Who is something writers have to cope with every few years now (how about that?), and everyone approaches it differently, but they’re always juggling the same stuff: who is the Doctor, who is this Doctor in particular, who is the companion, who are the baddies, what is the TARDIS. Here is an example only speculatively linked to an ongoing series, so we couldn’t keep the companion and we didn’t have the money for monsters. Boo. The sci-fi elements are therefore pretty much what the Doctor had on him at the time, which was himself, the TARDIS and the Master’s remains. That’s probably enough to be getting on with – just look at The Eleventh Hour, which Steven Moffat admits is mostly improv after a character-building first act. But Matthew Jacobs’ script struggles to weave a coherent story out of its ingredients. After all these years and after reading the book, I can still barely follow it.
Crash cut to Gary Russell and an earlier version of the script, with a chance to flesh it all out. And it’s here that the novel takes on a strange life of its own. This is going to be different to what you saw on screen. How much of that is because it’s based on an earlier script, and how much of it was the author? Genuinely, I’ve no idea. The Script book (which obviously I own as well – 1996 was a bad year for my pocket money) veers much closer to the finished product, so that’s no help. But it doesn’t really matter. Spotting the differences and wondering where they came from is part of the fun.
Amazingly, The Novel Of The Film (or whatever you want to call it – but please, not just Doctor Who!) is a lot of fun. Maybe that’s due to context, and the trouble I recently had slogging through the world-building of The Dark Path, and plenty of other books like it. While I may not love the actual plot, there’s something very refreshing about a Doctor Who that rocks up, tells its own bizarre and self-contained story and then swans off again, barely pausing for breath. The pace is an absolute whirligig, with seemingly random chapter lengths and a plot that is dead set on exploding within 24 hours for… some reason. Some of that is probably because Gary Russell wanted to get past the plotty roadbumps without dwelling on them, and who could blame him.
So all right, fine, about the plot. The Master is put on trial by the Daleks (a whimsical idea to start with: “GUILTY!” “NOT GUILTY!” “ADJUDICATE!”) and the Doctor is summoned to collect his remains. Charmingly we get to see the Doctor receive the message and decide to go and get him. (Unfortunately we still can’t afford actual Daleks so we skip the rescue.) Cue the Master gloopily escaping from his little casket, and… something-something-TARDIS-timing malfunction-crash-San Francisco. The Seventh Doctor nips outside (surprisingly calm, all things considered) and is gunned down by rival gangs. A life-saving operation goes wrong and he dies – but not for long.
While he’s regenerating (in a juxtaposition not unlike Spider-Man and the Green Goblin – take the credit, guys!), the Master’s snotty harbinger sneaks into the body of an ambulance driver. And soon the two of them are racing against time to, let me see… get a beryllium chip because that’s the only thing that will fix the TARDIS, even though the TARDIS is completely alien, and conveniently there’s a beryllium chip nearby, plus the Doctor will meet someone who’s on a board of trustees that can get near it… huh… by which time the Master has opened the Eye Of Harmony in the TARDIS, which will only open for a human which, okay, and that will pull the Earth inside out because of all the… energy and stuff… but first it makes some windows go wibbly, but only for one scene, and now the beryllium chip can help with all of that as well by moving the TARDIS back in time to before the Eye opened… only isn’t that like reversing your car to undo a stain on the back seat? In amongst all this there’s a car chase so the Master can get to the beryllium chip first, but then since all roads lead to the TARDIS he might as well have just waited there. Shrug; you want a car chase or not?
The Master wants the Doctor’s remaining lives, which certainly tracks. He has a willing helper, Chang Lee, without going to the bother of hypnotising him – but there are precedents for that, such as Trenchard, the gullible prison warden in The Sea Devils. He offers Lee billions of dollars to help him and Lee is living in squalor, so why not? I think the reason I always struggled with this is that Lee seems to like the Master as well, even trust him. I could believe Lee being utterly mercenary about it, particularly with the added backstory of his parents’ deaths, but why he believes the Master’s hilariously half-arsed stories about bodysnatchers and Genghis Khan, I’ve no idea. (Perhaps we should just be grateful for less hypnotism as, in this version, the Master does it by spitting on people.)
This is particularly galling when the Master is so obviously sinister around him (saying at one point, “You get to live” – aw, BFFs!), and he’s literally a walking corpse. That was another idea that never quite landed for me on screen, as there’s not a huge amount of evidence for it; the bit with the ripped-off fingernail is horrifying, but arguably a bit random. Here, Gary bars no holds: “The skin had taken on an almost translucent look, with blotches of discoloured skin showing through the cheeks and around the eyes. The lips were split and one sore by his right ear was actually cracked and weeping slightly.” Yum!
Dashing through the plot is the new Doctor, and if there’s one thing to convince you the TV Movie works, it’s Paul McGann. But Gary Russell hasn’t quite found the Terrance Dicks idiom for him, defaulting mostly to his hair, his apparent facial similarity to Sylvester McCoy (?), and the possibility that he is a Sasquatch: “[He was] a slightly younger, longer faced man. However, the beaky nose was back and the shape of the eyes and mouth were similar. He had lots of back hair, sticking up and out.” Reading this book made me appreciate all the little inflections and moments that made his performance pop. Russell at least captures his irreverence and excitement. Without the distraction of visuals, however, the book makes it even more obvious that his “amnesia” is just there to pad things out. The Doctor doesn’t know who he is, then he waits a bit, then he does. (Admittedly the Eye Of Harmony helps this along, but oy, let’s just not think about that, shall we?)
Another thing that never worked for me was the Doctor’s ability to glimpse the future. This broadly works in the context of Doctor Who, since he’s been to the future and he knows stuff, but since he’s able to know things about a random bouncer and about Grace as well, it just comes across like clairvoyance. (See also his magic intuition that she wants to defeat death, backed up in the novel with the knowledge that Grace’s mum died of cancer, and that made her want to become a doctor. It’s a curiously random point on screen.) There are many odd little ideas in here that feel like chucking anything at the wall to see what sticks, which makes some sense for a pilot episode. The biggest casualty of this is the Doctor’s half human lineage which, well, what else can you say about that? The handling of it is hilariously throwaway, especially after the careful tiptoeing revelations of Lungbarrow. (Which, timey-wimey, might have been like that because of the TV Movie?) It only seems to be here to explain why the Doctor can’t open the Eye Of Harmony. But since he can’t, and there are other people here who can, couldn’t he have just… er… not been human, then?
Hey ho, a lot of it’s total bollocks. What else? The added material for Grace is nice, although her decision not to go with the Doctor at the end is quicker here, and less emotional. A few peripheral characters get meatier roles including Gareth The Bouncer, who has a romance with Professor Wagg’s daughter – who exists in this version, at least. We see the paramedics collecting Bruce’s deceased wife, and reeling from the thought of their friend being a murderer. There’s Bruce’s partner, another Master victim. And Grace’s next door neighbour, a kind old lady who comments on the Doctor’s borrowed shoes, and sees in the new year with her cat. It’s probably fair to assume these bits are mostly off-script, as Russell makes amusingly little effort to Americanise the dialogue: there’s a reference to people “getting off” with each other, and the (now American) Master says “rubbish” a few times.
Since I can’t help myself, here are a few other bits which I suspect had more than a little Gary in them. The TARDIS’s much-loathed “cloaking device” is now back to a chameleon circuit, and quite right too. The beams of light around the Eye Of Harmony are made of artron energy, don'tcha know. There’s a scene of the Master explaining who Rassilon is. (You can hear those uninitiated viewers sitting bolt upright!) When he’s stealing the Doctor’s lives, there’s a moment where the Master seemingly turns into the Watcher. There’s an adorable reference to Cheldon Bonniface – the book’s sole reference to the New Adventures, or the only one I noticed anyway. There’s a running thing where the Doctor carries around his predecessor’s hat. And the much-talked-about kiss comes with a possibly fan-appeasing caveat: “He hugged Grace tightly, kissing her full on the lips, passionately. Then he pulled back, embarrassment on his face. ‘I’m sorry, I got carried away!’”
If that was the author then fair enough. I think it’s charming that the book takes on its own existence away from the TV Movie, and especially with so many Doctor Who books by this point, it would be weird not to nod to old times. Nevertheless, certain sequences just reminded me how much tighter and more effective they would become on screen. The reveal of the new Doctor is more violent and clumsy here: “The gurney shot out, propelling the dead body forward and across the room, where it thudded into the opposite wall.” Ouch. The Doctor’s sleight of hand with a cop’s gun takes a lot longer here, and is revealed before he threatens to shoot himself, instead of right at that moment, which was much neater. A scene where the Doctor fills Grace in on Time Lord physiognomy and the Master – let’s face it, not the kind of stuff that picks up pilot episodes – is just Grace asking random questions for no real reason, as opposed to deliberately making conversation about anything because people are looking at them. Also, Lee and Grace both die in the finished product, only to be revived by the TARDIS – which is bollocks, but awfully sweet anyway. Here Lee is paralysed by Master spit and Grace has a slight tumble, which, eh? “It might be painful, but she could still move around.” Gee, don’t raise those stakes too high. (This is after he back-pedals another kiss: “[The Master] seemed at first to be kissing [Grace], but Chang Lee realised he was actually sucking the poison back out of her.” EXTERMINATE KISSING.)
Somewhere under all of that, the Seventh Doctor dies with as little fanfare as possible. Hey ho: it’s not about him and the New Adventures did right by him already. (What a shame it still doesn’t match up with Lungbarrow! It’s not a mission he’s been sent on, it’s something that happens while he’s jaunting about the universe as usual. Ah well.) The Eighth Doctor makes a decent first impression, although some of that is just the magic dust Paul McGann sprinkled everywhere. Curiously, reading this has made me fonder of the TV Movie, and more aware of when it worked. So what if it was bollocks even by Doctor Who standards. Gary Russell’s book is a brisk, often lovably awkward rendition that belts along and has its own charms. It can’t help being buried under its status as a curio.
6/10
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