Doctor Who: The BBC Books #1 — The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#1
The Eight Doctors
By Terrance Dicks

He’s back! And it’s about… nothing.

So, you’ve got the Doctor Who license. (Not you, Virgin Publishing. Sorry.) What do you do with it? Well, you could do worse than copy the previous guy’s homework. Timewyrm: Genesys was given to a well respected/well liked/well established/well-in Who author (delete where appropriate) and it opens with one of our characters getting amnesia. This is a handy device for explaining the basic tenets of Doctor Who to any uninitiated readers. (It’s nonetheless a rather odd choice, because the vast majority of readers picking up Timewrym: Genesys were already fans who knew this stuff back to front. But I understand the impulse.)

Fast forward six years and enter The Eight Doctors, which also comes from a familiar-named author and does amnesia for what appears to be the same reason – except this time it’s the entire book. And this time it’s an odd choice for a couple of reasons.

The Eighth Doctor’s only previous adventure on screen made heavy use of amnesia, so it seems silly to do that again right away. (We can perhaps infer that Terrance Dicks wasn’t enamoured with the TV Movie or its ownership of plot beats based on the Doctor’s subtle interpretation of it here: “It had been a weird, fantastic adventure, full of improbable, illogical events.” I mean, he’s not wrong.)

Still, “amnesia” doesn’t dictate how you actually write the character or the memory loss – that’s up to you. Dicks in this instance opts to have the Doctor more or less loaded up with his memories already (right away he has his name, ability to pilot the TARDIS and Venusia aikido), he’s just unfamiliar with, or unable to get at them. This is at least a bit different to the TV Movie, but it puts The Eight Doctors in a weird middle ground where the Doctor Who-ey elements are sort of new to it (and to us, the hypothetical new readers), but they are also presented as if you should already know what they are. This gives us weird stop-start prose like “This, although he didn’t realise it, was the old, traditional TARDIS control room” followed later that page by “What was this place? Clearly it was some kind of control room. But what was it supposed to control?” Is it an unknown or isn’t it? It doesn’t quite work if you tell us what it is and then have the Doctor go, “Huh?” All of which begs the same question as the Timewyrm: Genesys opening: who is The Eight Doctors for?

I’m getting ahead of myself, so to recap: directly after the events of the TV Movie (which doesn’t strictly rule out The Dying Days, every cloud eh) the Doctor finds a backup trap from the Master which triggers memory loss all over again. Along comes the helpful booming voice of Rassilon, whose Five Doctors visage lovingly graces the back cover, to tell him to cheer up and “trust the TARDIS”, which then deposits him in Totters Yard for reasons we’ll get to. It’s here we take a slight detour and introduce what will become the new companion.

This is new stuff, bread and butter for those hypothetical new readers. Hooray. How does it fare? Well, in record time we learn that Sam Jones is of school age, a vegetarian, a runner and a gymnast. (If she had time to breathe she’d probably list her favourite bands as well.) We find her running away from a local drug gang, angry at her for informing to the cops, which also tells us she has strong morals. But we still need her to be a companion, so she needs rescuing, which is where a suddenly-appearing police box (and some quickly recalled aikido) comes in. The police turn up, everyone except the Doctor scarpers and the wrong idea is had about his involvement in local drug deals. Cue a bit of silliness in a police station, while Sam is gently interrogated by her teachers.

It’s not great stuff, honestly, but I do appreciate the expediency of Sam’s introduction and the information it gets across. We’ve had similar and/or worse companion intros on television since 2005. Everything about the criminals (“You remember why they call him Machete Charlie?”) and the cops (“I DON’T GIVE A BRASS MONKEY’S”) is, to put it charitably, more your Terrance Dicks of Mean Streets than of Exodus, but if you bear in mind that some people have this idea about Doctor Who being intended for children then it reads harmlessly enough. (I’m less fond of Sam’s teachers: the male one is good enough at his job to figure Sam needs to talk to someone, but he nevertheless palms her off onto a female colleague with “Maybe you can get her to talk about it, Vicky – you know, girly talk.” Just as night follows day, Vicky calls him a “chauvinistic oaf”, like this is some blazing piece of feminism and not just Who’s On First for pipe-smoking sexists. The whole exchange is reheated from the 70s and it clunks like anything.) But anywho, that’s enough about Sam. The Doctor escapes from police custody and retreats in the TARDIS (sans Sam), which sets a course for the multi-Doctor shenanigans of the title.

And, sorry, this is where the wheels really come off.

The TARDIS/Rassilon/the Doctor’s subconscious or whatever has a plan to beat the amnesia: go and visit his past selves, do a bit of telepathy and absorb their memories. If you think about this for more than a second it falls apart: why not just visit his most recent incarnation and get the memories all in one go? But hey, it’s an excuse to go on a jolly Time Lord’s outing. Again though, it’s how you do it, and as with the amnesia the choices are rather muddled.

We find the First Doctor during his first on-screen adventure. Again, the amnesia prose can’t keep straight what our Doctor remembers: “The old man was angry. The old man was him” is followed by “He could understand [the old man’s passions] as if they were his own. And then he realised – they were his own.” He marches up to the First Doctor, bold as brass, during the near-miss with the wounded caveman and the rock. As well as regaining memories up to this point, he uses the opportunity to wag a finger at his predecessor for contemplating murder.

I hate this, because the scene as televised doesn’t leave room for an intervention. There already is one, with Ian stepping in to stop him. So, why add this talking-to on top? It might be there to give the new Doctor a grounding in his own morals, but those already seemed fully developed when he met Sam, and castigated her enemies for selling drugs to kids. You can argue it’s adding fuel to the First Doctor’s fire, but then that takes away from Ian and the role of the companion in general – however there’s no actual sign that the First Doctor has changed his mind afterwards. The new Doctor yells at him and then the Ian thing plays out just the same anyway! So what’s it for? It’s a towering redundancy, a sort of have-your-cake-and-throw-it-away. Odd, odd choice.

And that’s not even the worst bit. Here’s how the First Doctor reacts to the new arrival: “Good grief! Seven regenerations… I am the First Doctor, and you are the Eighth! … You must find your other selves, all six of them. They’ll restore the gaps in your memory, just as I have — though only up to the time in their lives that you meet them, of course.” Even apart from how agonisingly clumsy it is to offer up the book’s entire plot like this, how incongruous does this Doctor, the one least encumbered by continuity (because most of it didn’t exist yet) sound as he casually refers to himself as The First Doctor, and tosses away his own future regenerations like he’s swapping notes with a fellow trainspotter? It doesn’t speak to the character or do anything to show why we should be interested in seeing him again. And there’s nothing momentous about this meeting, despite how bananas it would have been in that moment and how much of an occasion it ought to be for us – indeed, it’s the premise of the book. The whole encounter is over in two pages. If a random fan had submitted a first pass at this scene, it might have read the same way.

Anyway. Hope you’re comfy. One down, six to go.

The Second Doctor fares much the same: found during The War Games, surrounded by soldiers displaced in time, our Doctor regains some memories, gains a few Doctor Who trivia points and wags his finger/offers encouragement about contacting the Time Lords for help, which will get his younger self exiled. As a section there’s a bit more to it at least – The War Games has more going on generally than An Unearthly Child did, plus Terry co-wrote this one so he’s probably more engaged – but again it’s an intervention that doesn’t really contribute to the outcome; again, if it does contribute then some agency is removed from the original story; and again, it’s all so blandly functional that he could be asking an old colleague for train times.

Around this point it becomes more of a short story collection, but Terrance at least starts putting some action into it. We find the next few Doctors in the moments after a TV story: The Sea Devils, State Of Decay and (aptly/confusingly) The Five Doctors. The Doctor helps the Third Doctor find, lose, find, then lose the Master again, at one point revisiting Devil’s End. It’s all a bit redundant, but quite jolly apart from the Third Doctor trying to steal his successor’s TARDIS at gunpoint. You can generally tell Dicks is more engaged here as it was “his” era, but I’m not sure I give that a pass. Similarly he wrote State Of Decay, and this isn’t even his first prose sequel to it, so the next bit is fairly generous as well: the Fourth Doctor runs afoul of vampires, but luckily the new Doctor a) murders a bunch of them and b) provides a life saving blood transfusion, which is a Bill & Ted paradox but no one seems to mind. Then, following up another story he wrote, the Fifth Doctor’s attempt at relaxation is interrupted by the Raston Warrior Robot and some Sontarans. A clever multi-Doctor ruse helps confuse and defeat the robot, and then the new Doctor engineers the deaths of all the Sontarans as an escape plan. It’s around here that I can’t help looking at this blood-spattered new incarnation and wonder if he has lost his memory since earlier in this book, when he told the First Doctor that the ends didn’t justify the means. (It’s also worth noting that the Eye Of Orion is now once and for all ruined as a relaxation spot, what with the robot being left on guard there. Whoops.)

As we meet number 6, still in the throes of The Trial Of A Time Lord, the action shifts to put the Eighth Doctor more at the centre. This makes sense – he ought to draw the focus at some point, it’s his book series – but you could be forgiven for wishing it was executed differently. Initially working with and passionately defending the Sixth Doctor, he is soon exposing corruption on Gallifrey and organising a revolution, all while repeating the plot points of Trial. It’s worth noting that all of this is our second version of Gallifrey in this novel – the other one came to a head in the Fifth Doctor’s segment, as a seditious Time Lord tried to kill two Doctors using the Time Scoop – and the book does threaten to snap under the weight of Time Lord continuity. (You can’t even say it’s worth it for finally getting to the meaty bit of the book, because although the Eighth Doctor draws the focus for a while, this still isn’t really the main plot of the novel. Because there isn’t one.) For good measure, needling the Sixth Doctor for being a bit of a fatty isn’t very nice, but then again there’s a reference earlier on to the Fourth Doctor secretly wishing Romana was more subservient like his old companions, and there’s the Third Doctor’s whole attempted hijacking bit. For a book supposedly delighting in the company of eight Doctors, few of them come out of it well.

Finally we arrive at the Doctor he might as well have visited in the first place: we find the Seventh one so depressed he’s considering medical intervention. (This is certainly a take, and maybe it’s a comment on the often gloomy New Adventures – although a reference to the Doctor’s parents sort of de-canonises those, eek – but I hope not as he mellowed towards the end of the series.) A death-defying trip to Metebelis III cures his ennui, with a little help from the new Doctor who shrinks a giant spider to death and my dude, would you give the killing a rest? Snuck in here as well is some bonus continuity for the Master – the third-and-a-bit version included in The Eight Doctors, god help you if you don’t know his entire timeline – as we helpfully explain how he pulled off the whole “death snake” thing in the TV Movie. It doesn’t really fit, but I guess Terry figured hey, since I’m here.

And at last we pick up with Sam and send her and the Eighth Doctor on their own adventures. An attempt is made for this to seem like a fresh take on “companion enters the TARDIS,” with Sam assessing more or less all the weird stuff happening around her on the spot and taking it in her stride because she’s from a more savvy age: the 90s. I’m not that charitable, however: in the context of this book, where monumental events are rendered as bullet points, it just reads like we’re getting it done faster. It’s also a bit flat having the companion shrug it off like this. The companion is the reader. There should be some amazement.

So, what does The Eight Doctors try to achieve? As an adventure featuring that titular gaggle of Theta-Sigmas it’s rather lacking, bumping them into each other with no greater ceremony (or critically, banter) than whatever old Doctor it is going “Not you again!” As a celebration of those events, well it really isn’t one, more just acknowledging that those events occurred, often in an exhausting list. At best, it advertises that there are different Doctor Who continuities, which is genuinely very canny when you’re launching two book ranges to explore them. Business concerns aside though, it’s a rough restart for printed Doctor Who fiction, jumping from the depth of the New Adventures into essentially Dimensions In Time without the soap opera.

As a first adventure for a new Doctor, forget it. Although he eventually takes the lead, the closest he has to a distinct personality here is an ease with killing. (This isn’t entirely the author’s fault – there isn’t room to make a definitive statement about a new Doctor – but I did find the violence a bit off.) The best you can do is write it off as a rough sketch written to order and look forward to people actually writing this stuff for real. But in order for that to make sense, you do need to forget that this was the launch title, intended to hook readers.

Who, then, is The Eight Doctors for? Well, here’s a twist ending: me. Aged 12, when this was first published, I loved The Eight Doctors. In the Wilderness Years Doctor Who mostly existed as non-fiction books and videos released in a random sequence, almost as haphazard and intangible as the TARDIS itself. A book that devotes swathes of time to reciting canon was an all-I-could-eat treat for younger me, who couldn’t claim to have watched any of this when it aired and knew it only as second hand legends. (I hadn’t read that many books either, which probably helped rose-tint this particular opus.) I can only assume that other fans in that exact situation also had a good time with it, and for that at least, well done Terry — there is an audience for this. But that still leaves everyone else with a shopping list that can barely claim to have come to life where a novel should be.

4/10