#12
Seeing I
By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
One of the unique but, to be honest, difficult things about Doctor Who is its constant need for redefinition. It’s an easy show to “get” overall, that’s its appeal, but the characters have an in-built turnover that means having to re-learn the same truths, preferably in new and interesting ways every time. When the Doctor changes, who is he now? (Or she.) When a new companion comes along, who are they? But hold up, now there’s follow up questions: why do they want to travel with the Doctor? What about them makes that an attractive proposition, to them and to the Doctor? You can’t just pop another bright young thing out of the fridge and call it a day.
That, I think we can all agree now, is what happened here. Sam Jones comfortably meets the criteria for what a Doctor Who companion might look like in the late 90s. Young. A bit radical. Not immune to the Doctor’s McGann-ish charms. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what is, when you boil it down, Ace minus the explosives and Fenric, plus a teenage crush. (Apart from perhaps a general lack of imagination.) But it’s also how you introduce the character, and The Eight Doctors had far too much on its plate to worry about that as well. By the time Vampire Science rolled around, despite valiant effort from Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, a critical moment had passed, and all the novels afterwards have felt its absence. If I can affix my Coulda Shoulda Woulda hat for a second: there should have been a Sam Begins novel after The Eight Doctors. Introduce him, then her, with a whole book devoted to who she is and how this makes sense, actually. Write Sam’s Love And War. Instead, we were more or less just told this is the right sort of person so let’s all just get on with it, shall we, and it has felt like varying shades of going through the motions since.
Cue a major course correction. Sam left in Longest Day, convinced that the Doctor was dead, and even if he wasn’t, beginning to doubt whether her juvenile feelings were justification enough for this kind of life. It felt a bit left-field coming in at the end of that book (Longest Day sadly isn’t very good) but it set up an intriguing pause. I don’t think that was very well handled either, with the Doctor more or less making “find Sam” a side mission in Legacy Of The Daleks and, to an extent, in Dreamstone Moon as well. But at least the latter gave Sam the time of day. How does she cope without the Doctor? Who is she without him? Taking things away is a useful route to redefinition. I think Paul Leonard did a good job there.
That book wasn’t allowed to reunite them, but to be honest, maybe that was for the best. Blum and Orman are back now and Seeing I gives it the full works. Who is Sam without the Doctor? Who — blessed relief to hear this — is the Doctor without Sam? Should they reunite? This is no side mission. It’s a character-based story with plot galore, albeit further down the pecking order than usual. I’m betting this ratio of plot to character is hit and miss with some readers, but I can’t complain. The questions and answers about Sam undeniably hit harder in this one.
The main and most shocking thing Seeing I does is take its time. Sam is on a new world, having been dragged away from the Doctor all over again in Dreamstone Moon and once again having no direct path to seeing him again. (And a dwindling certainty that she would even want to. She feels a lot of guilt about giving him the kiss of life, and the boundary she pushed.) She has nothing but her core interests, all the time in the world and occasionally a cat for company.
She volunteers at a soup kitchen and begins making friends. When she needs more from life she gets an unrewarding job with INC, a vaguely sinister company in control of everything, thanks to some spiffy eye tech. When that doesn’t get her anywhere — and when she begins having suspicions about INC — she returns to the soup kitchen, and from there joins a group of ex-INC biologists living in a commune. For a while she just lives, having boyfriends and broadening her horizons. But her commitment to helping others is always there, and she slowly begins taking charge of the fight against INC, which explodes when the company (for no apparent reason) comes to knock down the commune. This, as another central character will later impishly observe, means war. But the more important bit is everything else.
She has grown. She is more certain of who she is, because these values have been tested and they have stuck. By the end of Seeing I Sam is at least twenty-one years old, and could comfortably pass for her own older, wiser sister. There’s been no radical reinvention here; merely a chance to examine what we have, test it, and finally be sure of it. They find the best version of Sam here.
It’s so rare that a character can just percolate like this. A break is not unheard of, as Blum and Orman are only too aware, making a direct reference to Ace leaving and then coming back in the New Adventures. Trying not to squee too loudly that this is apparently all the same universe (!), we probably have Deceit to thank for showing how not to do it: don’t just send a character away and bring back their Version 2.0. We need to see them grow. It’s a promising development for Doctor Who print fiction to realise this, even if it’s only occurring because things didn’t exactly go smoothly at launch.
But as I’ve observed/moaned about before, The Sam Problem isn’t all on Sam Jones. She was thrust upon the Doctor because (as Seeing I says, staring right at the elephant in the room) “maybe someone out there had figured it was a good idea to pair him up with a nice non-threatening little kid. Someone who'd keep him busy and distracted by getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. Someone they'd arranged to be the perfect safe companion for him.” Which, okay, fine (also mee-ow, guys!), but all of that detracts from the Doctor as well, because the situation is contrived so that he doesn’t get, or even need a say in it. (“It wasn’t me who guided the TARDIS to her, come to think of it. It was all an astounding coincidence that I should arrive at precisely the moment in time and space where Sam needed rescuing, wasn’t it?” BAD ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. WHO LET YOU IN?) We don’t know that he really needs Sam, or anyone, beyond the surface level need for the Doctor always to have someone around.
Well, Seeing I puts that to the test as well. The Doctor is actively looking for Sam in this, which is a good idea, isn’t it? Sort of helps the urgency along? (Sorry, Legacy and Dreamstone — I don’t think he was trying hard enough there.) He is politely thwarted by a receptionist when trying to make information requests, which goes on for a very amusing few weeks. It’s fun seeing the Doctor struggle with a problem on such a small level. When he inevitably retaliates and hooks into the INC system to steal the info he needs — having by this point also worked up a cautious curiosity about INC and the technology they possess — things backfire spectacularly and he ends up in prison. No big deal, you’re probably thinking, and that’s certainly his view, insisting he will leave as soon as he learns what he needs. But something about this prison makes it very difficult to escape. And before you know it, Sam isn’t the only one spending three years in this novel.
I think there are reservations to be had here. There are good reasons for the Doctor’s difficulty in escaping: he is unwittingly under closer surveillance than he’d ever imagine, and there is a very clever computer at work that can predict his actions. It also serves a vital character point to show him diminished and unable to flourish without a companion — indeed, when he finally escapes it’s because Sam rescues him, because that dynamic has at last been restored, and because she has help. All good stuff and I see what they did there, but I’d be lying if I said this genuinely seemed like an impenetrable fortress that even the Doctor can’t handle. When you stand back from it, it seems like a series of technically solvable problems.
I think the argument here is institutionalisation: they keep keeping him here, which he hates, and an escape attempt costs the life of another inmate/recognisable type of Bright Young Thing, which inevitably strikes a nerve. There is no dramatic evil for him to fight (at one point he asks to be transferred to another, famously more brutal prison just so he can retaliate), and the psychiatrist working with him genuinely seems to want to help him. (This is borne out after the Doctor escapes, and Dr Akalu observes “at least the Doctor seemed so much more alive now. That could only be good for him.” Nothing but love for Dr Akalu, even though he’s wrong about stuff.)
On a deeper character level, the Doctor is alone. What is he doing? What’s it for? He seems rudderless and begins to diminish, becoming childlike and defeatist. Bleak it might be, but it very well makes the point that Sam not being here is a problem for him. And inevitably it puts INC on something of a pedestal, suggesting they are a force to be reckoned with if they can stop the Doctor.
As with the prison I don’t think that bit’s entirely earned, especially as the book nears the end. We find out that INC have indeed got hold of alien technology. Suggested lore-heavy links to other organisations (such as TTC in Longest Day) are eventually shot down, as it turns out INC’s controlling interest isn’t particularly interested in the minutiae. There’s even an external force that orchestrated the alien tech and wants it back — who, in turn, aren’t what you’d call evil and are eventually rendered harmless. Does the planet have systemic problems? Aplenty. Is INC good? Broadly nah. But there’s no profound evil working against the Doctor, which might be a problem for some readers since it’s so pivotal that the immovable object meeting the Doctor’s unstoppable force is, y’know, immoveable.
Hey ho, though. I think Blum and Orman are Doing A Thing by not having an easily defined bad guy (or, bearing in mind the dodgy stuff that INC is doing, not having a bad guy be behind it all), as it takes the focus away from that black and white conflict and redirects it — you guessed it — towards the Doctor and Sam.
When the time comes for them to hang out again (and the rescue itself is awfully quick, isn’t it, almost an anti-climax really but okay, shutting up now!) the Doctor has been through so much that Sam must take the lead. He doesn’t even have his costume — a fun bit of symbolism to show that he’s not quite right — and Sam’s gang don’t trust him, neither seeing him at his best nor knowing anything about him besides Sam’s maybe-apocryphal stories. She is disturbed that people could not be in awe of him, but that is perhaps another little learning curve for her, and a diminishing of those romantic feelings.
She goes back and forth on their reunion. (And so does the Doctor, but it takes a long time, and a connection to Susan, for him to consider that this might be a no.) There is a definite yes-or-no conversation right at the end, but I think her decision was already made by then. She knows herself and her boundaries better than before. She fully believes in her ideals, knows that they’re not just shrapnel from her upbringing, and being in the TARDIS will let her be her best self. She understands that she’s not a monster for being attracted to an unattainable guy. She kisses him — just once, seemingly that’s enough — and away they go. (Sidebar: the Doctor has his costume remade, and then some: “Every last detail of the design was right, but so much more care and workmanship had gone into this outfit than the original.” Implication being that he, too, has grown into something more now. Blum and Ormannn!)
For a characterisation rescue mission, Seeing I is more subtle than I expected. While I agree with the need to do it, I think Steve Cole’s reservations about Sam in those early books was a tad over-cautious — and I think that’s borne out by the fact that what we see of her in this rings true with what we already know. She just needed to pause and work at it. Not to spoil the party, but it’s not as if we’re suddenly immune from authors taking a swing in the wrong direction. (It’ll be interesting to see what happens; can they stay the course?) But as with the first couple of novels, it will be a help to point at Blum and Orman and say, “like that please.”
Seeing I has the patience to sit with things, making those core elements better for it, but there’s a decent plot here too. For all my niggles about immoveable objects, I like that INC has its good apples such as Dr Akalu, and that the beings at the root of INC’s problems are doing what they do because of an absence of clear intentions. Most of Sam’s gang are, to be honest, somewhat interchangeable, but there are little gems strewn through the book that caught my eye, such as the Doctor’s increasingly childlike outrage in prison. (“‘He shouldn’t have taken my bear away,’ the Doctor said grimly. ‘He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.’”) There’s a very satisfying reveal about the cat Sam has been hanging around with, which I’m thrilled to reveal I guessed several pages early, and of course I adored the other little New Adventures nods. (An apparent sequel to Bernice Summerfield’s book is mentioned, as is a sentient computer program from Transit and SLEEPY.)
I’m not sure what a reader who wasn’t following the series would make of Seeing I, whether it would work alone. If you squint, though, Seeing I could be that introductory Sam novel I wanted in the first place, just showing up fashionably late. I would hope any passing newbies would find Sam as successful as the rest of us, and climb aboard with her.
8/10
