Doctor Who: The BBC Books #42 – Deep Blue by Mark Morris

Doctor Who: The Past Adventures

#20

Deep Blue

By Mark Morris

Here’s another one I read earlier! And for once I have quite a clear memory of it. One day my family went out in the car to a pub dinner, barely-teenaged me reading all the while. Some time after we arrived I realised I’d been so engrossed in Deep Blue that I’d travelled there in slippers.

Unlike Demontage, which to be fair I still like a bunch, I think Deep Blue has retained most of its appeal after all these years. It is, to be clear, an extremely trad book. We’re talking UNIT soldiers vs marauding aliens here; Sgt Benton at one point says “Sorry, sir. It’s just that… well, there’s a monster on the beach, sir,” which is the sort of dialogue you can 100% imagine hearing in the Pertwee era. Push boundaries this book certainly does not, but there is a market for trad-as-all-heck Doctor Who and Deep Blue goes after it like a laser-guided missile.

Seeking a bit of rest and relaxation after the events of Warriors Of The Deep, the Fifth Doctor brings Tegan and Turlough to Tayborough Sands in the 1970s. The Doctor has barely stepped out of the TARDIS when he gets a telepathic sense that something is amiss. He doesn’t let on to his companions right away, genuinely hoping that they’ll have a nice time while he sneaks off to investigate. Unfortunately this secrecy is enough to rile Tegan — it rarely takes much, let’s face it — who nonetheless manages to have a fairly nice time with a local policeman. Unbeknownst to any of them, Mike Yates is already on the scene investigating on behalf of UNIT.

And there is plenty to investigate. Something recently arrived from another world, and not coincidentally there have been strange mutant fish sighted, as well as an unexplained clear jelly all over the beaches. More importantly there have been savage attacks by seemingly unconnected people. Something is affecting the local populace and it is escalating fast.

If you’ve read The Bodysnatchers then the level of violence in this will not be a surprise. I already had done by the time Deep Blue came out and to me it was practically a selling point. (I guess young fans like the idea of Doctor Who minus the watershed.) Within a few pages of Deep Blue a man has had his fingers bitten off; within 30 pages he and his entire crew are dead. Later we meet a man nursing seriously disturbed serial killer fantasies (with disturbing crimes already part of his repertoire) and the body count begins to rise.

It’s Mark Morris rubbing his hands with glee again, no question, but there are examples of restraint. The monstrous rampage alluded to by Benton happens off-screen, as does the slaughter of the boat crew. The violence tends to be nasty but not protracted. Various mutant hybrids are offed with clinical headshots like we’re watching a zombie movie. I doubt any of this will transform Deep Blue into a great read if you strongly dislike this kind of violence, but I like to think it shows growth.

At the root of the violence are the Xaranti: apparently the nemeses of the Zygons, they are a parasitic species who steal technology and transform other species to swell their ranks. Morris is well aware of existing copyrights in this area, having the Doctor note that “it’s what the Cybermen do, and the Wirrrn.” In defence of the inevitable Here We Go Again accusations, then: the Xaranti have a fairly novel way of going about this, and Morris is able to tap into a much more direct vein of body horror than the Wirrrn were afforded in Placebo Effect. The whole process is so specifically tied to senseless violence that the Xaranti inevitably take on a life of their own — albeit not a terribly interesting one, because there really isn’t much to them beyond their mission statement. There’s no singular being behind all of this, or not for almost the entire novel, and there’s no complicated plan to unpick besides the previously stated mission of the Xaranti. It’s just a case of stopping it. Still, that invasion method really is quite clever, and it makes for a satisfying penny drop moment in the last act.

There’s not a lot of character work here, which perhaps ought not to be a surprise — you know right away that you’re in for a monster mash, and those rarely afforded any acting challenges on screen. Nevertheless Morris builds in a few little nuggets.

Mike Yates is between Pertwee stories here, recovering from The Green Death but not yet an ideological traitor in Invasion Of The Dinosaurs. There are quiet hints that the Doctor wants to make him feel better about all that, though of course he can’t say anything about it. There’s a moment where Mike reconsiders the path of UNIT and whether it’s the right thing to do, which seems like foreshadowing.

The Brigadier is here (I’d entirely forgotten this), allowing Turlough a few whiffs of awkwardness at meeting his future teacher. The Brig, along with most of UNIT, suffers a malevolent possession in Deep Blue which really ought to cause as much of a problem for them as Yates had in The Green Death, but mercifully they all forget about it in the end. While it’s happening, anyway, the Brigadier’s turn against humanity is an interesting one, which speaks to his general stubbornness — something the Doctor has occasional cause to lament. (NB: it’s adorable that Benton is the last Xaranti hold-out. What a good boy he is.)

When it comes to the regulars, Turlough gets the least to do. He’s accused of cowardice by Tegan, and pretty much leans into that as the crisis deepens; at one point the Doctor endangers him and fails to apologise sufficiently so that Turlough starts to see Tegan’s problem, which is quite a fun, if nasty way to do that. The Fifth Doctor puts in a good showing, very much in his less forgiving Season 21 mode: he retains his whimsy but isn’t one to be bossed about, at one point negotiating his release into danger by putting a gun to his own head. (It makes sense in context.) He has a pretty solid stand-off against the Xaranti, delivering this natty ultimatum: “I’m here to offer you the chance to withdraw the infection you’ve set in motion on this planet and leave before I get cross. Rather sporting of me, I think you’ll agree.” I’m often unimpressed by this incarnation of the Doctor, but I find he strikes a proactive balance in this one between his usual fallibility and his characteristic, almost human impatience.

Tegan has the most to do, so in other words she suffers the most. After meeting some abnormally violent youths she is rescued by a young police officer and they take a liking to each other. Before long they’ve been on a date and she flirts with the idea of staying with him — a very quick turnaround, I know, but as with other Who flash-in-the-pan romances like Ace and Robin in Nightshade, I think this kind of lifestyle encourages it. You can already guess what sort of obstacles might prevent this in Deep Blue (though to be fair, Tegan had already decided not to stay), and as well as losing him in a traumatic fashion she must also face a possible transformation into a Xaranti herself. Morris is no continuity slouch, so he draws a parallel here with the Mara; Tegan is specifically afraid of being turned into something against her will again, which is a good use of such a plot device. It’s arguably a cop-out that she (along with the other converts) loses her memory of these events, and therefore of her holiday romance and ensuing trauma, but PDAs and Missing Adventures will inevitably be stuck in this cul de sac if they want anything significant to happen to anybody between serials. Maybe there’s a better solution out there. For now it’s perhaps better that we have it and forget about it than that we don’t bother at all.

There’s a reasonably stacked guest cast, most of whom go through something at least memorably unpleasant here, but they do tend to fade into the background. I think there’s an argument to be made that there are too many names floating about in Deep Blue, probably in aid of killing them off. (Which isn’t much of an endorsement, I know.) Charlotte, a young holidaymaker with problems of her own even before the Xaranti turn up, fares the best.

The seaside setting doesn’t afford Morris as many prose opportunities as Victorian London in The Bodysnatchers, but he heightens the body horror and violence wherever possible with visceral little observations, like a ship full of fish being a “slimy carpet.” (The image of little black quills spouting on people’s skin has also stuck with me over the years.) The prose is good enough that I wish we’d got a few more Who novels out of Mark Morris, but I would understand a resistance to that if they were all going to follow such a traditional path. Granted, his books are far bloodier than anything you’d get on television, so in a sense they’re hardly trad — but they are nevertheless an obvious extrapolation of “Doctor Who in print”, viz “all the scary nastiness on screen but in more lurid detail.” In truth books like Deep Blue don’t aim much higher than Target novelisations for slightly older readers, but is that automatically a bad thing when (as in this case) there’s absolutely no fat on it, and it is absolutely clear about the kind of story it’s telling? (For better or worse, depending on the reader.) Deep Blue does This Sort Of Thing well, in other words, and while I wouldn’t want This Sort Of Thing to come along every week, that’s the bar I’d want authors to clear when we do get it.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #41 – Demontage by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#20
Demontage
By Justin Richards

Here’s one I read earlier! This was part of a run of books that I picked up as they were originally released. (I was about 13. Yikes.)

I remember really enjoying Demontage. A few fragments of it have stayed in my mind since, which tends to be a good sign: in particular there’s the incongruous opening image of a cramped spacecraft where terrified elderly passengers listen to their tour guide, an enormous anthropomorphic wolf. It’s quite a colourful and visual story in general, with fairly regular bursts of action. I can see why a younger me liked it.

I’m older now, somewhat jaded and beginning to creak, and it’s fair to say Demontage didn’t work as well the second time. But there’s still stuff to recommend about it.

For starters, this is our first bona fide adventure with the Eighth Doctor, Sam and Fitz. The newest companion was introduced in The Taint, which put some work into what he is like, but not so much into how he slots into Doctor Who. There are more clues to that in Demontage. Visiting a casino in space (Vega Station) Fitz has enough cultural mores to pretend to be James Bond, and he only sticks out as horribly as most visitors already do, so he’s capable of enjoying himself out among the stars. He’s still out of his depth, at points either flailing about and making a mess or simply hanging back from the main action because he doesn’t know what to do, but all of that seems to be part of his charm.

It’s a surprisingly vulnerable showing for a character who seemed so carefree in his first appearance, but that feels like a natural evolution when you’re sending him off in the TARDIS for the first time. Besides, I loved all the comical flailing and the farcical misunderstanding where he is mistaken for an assassin. I didn’t much like Fitz in The Taint; this revised prat version, this I can work with. (I also enjoyed the genuine crisis around his diminishing number of cigarettes. I’m not a smoker, but this seems like a neat way of reinforcing his native time period and highlighting that he might not get back there.)

Sam, as seems almost irreversible at this point, doesn’t stand out much. There’s an amusing moment early on when she snaps at a friendly stranger, then catches herself and apologises; an awareness, perhaps, of the character’s heavy-handed sarcasm and general lack of charm. (There also seems to be a mild frisson between the two characters, both women, but perhaps I only imagined it.) Richards makes some effort to relate Sam’s experience here with the wolf-like Canvine to her time with the wolf-like Jax in Kursaal; he flirts with a sense of trauma that we could meaningfully build upon, but sadly leaves it at that. Bonus points, however, for appearing to recollect that Sam is missing memories from that adventure — not everybody does!

Something interesting does eventually happen to Sam (Fitz and his not-the-assassin routine generally draws more focus here), but again not enough capital is made from it. Suffice it to say she is forcibly transported to another mode of existence from which she’ll be lucky to escape, and when she shortly thereafter does escape, that’s pretty much that. I doubt this one’s going into the Suffering Sam files — it’s a cool idea that just sort of sits there, being an idea.

All the same, this central conceit — the strange realm — is perhaps the biggest thing to recommend about Demontage. An art exhibition is taking place on Vega Station, but there’s something off about it. Turns out, due to the technology used to create them, the paintings can come to life and roam free, and similarly people can be trapped within them. This feels like a distant echo of Richards’ earlier Theatre Of War, where a projector could bring plays to life. It’s not, to be clear, a rip-off — it just feels like Richards isn’t done being interested in the concept of art wandering into real life. Fair enough. There’s some pathos to the painted creatures lumbering about in Demontage, albeit apparently not enough for the Doctor to think twice about incinerating them. (The Doctor in this has the right amount of flighty whimsy but he can seem oddly cold, at one point dismissing Sam’s concern about someone trapped in a painting, at another itching to start a deadly fire. Not sure I’m on board with this.)

There’s a theme of things not being what they seem in Demontage, which allows for some shades of grey in the Canvine — huge wolves that eat raw meat but also enjoy culture and opera. I got the sense that this was also meant to extend to the paintings, who ultimately are just following orders, but no one seems really interested in pushing the point. Richards seems more interested in the expectations surrounding his human (or human-ish) characters. There’s an assassin who strictly obeys random chance; his agenda isn’t as nefarious as we think. There’s the visiting President of Battrul, whose visit isn’t what it seems. The head of the station is hiding in plain sight as merely the head of the casino, a misleadingly flamboyant character in pink suits. (The “flamboyance” is pretty much just his suit for most of the book, which makes the [groan] homophobic slur from Fitz towards the end feel a bit of a stretch, as well as just plain unfortunate to a modern reader.) Richards is clearly having fun with Newark and Rappaire, a couple of art collectors/forgers/card sharps, although they never quite break through into the genuinely funny realm of a Holmesian double act that you sense he’s going for.

I think that’s a key problem with Demontage: it should be funnier. There are great bursts of farce here and there, particularly the “Fitz accidentally identifies himself as an assassin” stuff, but both the character and plot largely shrug that off. The Canvine are an inherently amusing contradiction — and it’s one we mine for pathos, as we get to know “Bigdog” Caruso better — but they’re not in the book very much. The general atmosphere of Vega Station, if not the book, is one of low stakes misunderstanding (when the Doctor observes that it’s “best to keep things low-key” he might as well be talking to us), but as it goes on there’s an inevitable pull towards a tight plot and some serious stakes instead. These are not bad things to have, but they feel off-course from where we begin, and they don’t enrich the somewhat scrappy setting. Moments where we find the Doctor gambling for the fun of it or cheating at cards to get out of trouble feel too much like exceptions to the tone, not enough like they’re supporting it.

Somehow, that sense of fun worked for me just fine the first time I read it. I think a key difference is that I’ve since then picked up an adverse reaction to this style of writing — that cuddly mascot of this marathon that is Short Sections With Lots Of Scene Changes. Your attention span changes as you get older and I think mine was better at locking in when I was younger. Demontage always seems in a hurry to pause what it’s doing and go check on something else, which just kills the momentum for me, or it does so now anyway. Richards is very good at plots but I became more and more aware that I was being reminded of disparate characters just so that we could get them all arranged for the grand finale. We rarely spend enough actual time with them in these hurried chunks that I’m overly thrilled to be back with them, or all that moved to discover that character X or Y was the real bad guy all along, or miss them when they’re gone. There’s a sense of mechanism to all the dancing back and forth in Demontage, which could perhaps have been obfuscated if we’d leaned more into the confusion and farce of it all. Isn’t that what Fitz is here for?

The pace didn’t work for me, so I ended up taking ages to re-read Demontage. I think it’s too busy to really land anything, and for all the effort we just move on from the plot as soon as we can. But the general atmosphere of low-stakes fun is still a tonic after multiple moody books with this Doctor and Sam, and it seems like a good way to allow that new dynamic to develop — even if it’s admittedly still glomming together at this point. I’m a firm believer in fun books and at its best Demontage is fun enough.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #40 – The Wages Of Sin by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#19
The Wages Of Sin
David A. McIntee

David A. McIntee lands what is surely his favourite kind of assignment in The Wages Of Sin. It’s a pure historical, so he can play with all his customary research without then having to staple it to a spaceship. The sci-fi-est thing here* is local interest in possessing the TARDIS, which puts it on a similar footing to Marco Polo.

(*The Tunguska blast was due to part of the TARDIS crashing, at least according to Birthright. I think we can safely say that if McIntee is aware of that piece of Virgin continuity then he doesn’t think you need to be.)

This seems apt as, according to I, Who, The Wages Of Sin started life as a First Doctor story with Ian, Barbara and Vicki. Knowing that makes a bit more sense of some of its choices. For instance the addition of Liz Shaw, which otherwise looks like a trademark McIntee Really Cool Thing to get fans on board, but is arguably a bit flat in practice.

Bringing Liz back — giving her a trip in the TARDIS, no less — really ought to be a big deal, since going back to past companions has never been the norm, especially when the Doctor is quite happy with the current model. (Jo Grant.) Liz disappeared unceremoniously between TV serials, hardly to be mentioned again, making it doubly intriguing that he scoops her up again just as soon as he gets the TARDIS working. Was he just waiting for an excuse? Did he think about her often? It sure seems that way, but I dunno: we begin this adventure with the team already having landed, only displaying the reunion via a brief flashback, and there’s no definitive goodbye at the end. How the Doctor feels about getting the band back together never explicitly enters into the book; Liz has some interesting mediations on Jo as her replacement and time travel generally, but if she feels a particular way about seeing her friend and colleague again then scientific detachment has the final say about it; and Jo barely scrapes into the plot, let alone ponders the ramifications of the Doctor casually picking up where he once left off.

Obviously you wouldn’t need to think about any of that if she was just Barbara to your First Doctor, but since this is what we’re doing I wish there’d been an effort to make some lemonade with these rather promising lemons, especially with The Wages Of Sin coming in at 30 pages under the usual count. It’s a surprising lapse for an author well known for fan service, but I suppose the plot he’s chosen doesn’t leave a huge amount of time for ruminating on old friendships — or at least, not their own.

With Liz hoping to see the Tunguska event of 1908 but flying off course (well, it is a test flight) the TARDIS lands in 1916, not long before the death of Rasputin and the start of the Revolution. The Tunguska near-miss is a natty if roundabout way to get us there (because otherwise 1916 Russia would have been an odd pick), and it’s strengthened by adding Liz, a scientist specialising in meteorites who would plausibly want to see that. Pretty quickly the TARDIS goes AWOL and the trio are inveigled in aristocratic politics while they look for it, mixing with the likes of the Tsarina, future conspirator Felix Yusupov, British agent Kit Powell and various other shady types whose names challenged my not-Russian brain. The three travellers all know what’s coming and are keen not to contribute to it. They all end up doing so anyway.

Despite opening with an explosion and some spy shenanigans, it’s predominantly not a flashy book. McIntee is keen that we feel the awkwardness of these last days of the regime, where no one really comprehends the change that is coming and consequently (despite a few murder plots) everyone seems eerily calm, all things considered. The Doctor and co. have had many worse receptions than this.

Historically-minded as ever, McIntee does his best not to sensationalise real people or events, including several of the conspirators and the man himself. He surrounds the death of Rasputin with a few competing essay-friendly reasons, from genuine concern about his influence over Alexandra and the negative effect on the Russian war effort (not to mention the country at large) to more selfish concerns over the same things, to a deep-seated hatred of his infamous temperament and vices. (The latter perhaps hints at a deeper class warfare, his betters resenting a peasant who made good — “good” being, of course, extremely relative here — but at this point I’d better leave the actual essays to the professionals.) There are moments that emphasise the brutal conditions of Russian poverty, on which Liz reflects that times haven’t changed all that much; specifically, the inability of the Royals to do something about it just seems to push them further out from reality and any sense of consequence — much like Alexandra’s merry letter exchanges with siblings on both sides of a catastrophic war — which again heightens that odd, light-headed sense of a calm before the storm.

Rasputin himself is portrayed, if not exactly with sympathy, then at least as a real person who will be murdered. He can still be a quite revolting charlatan and not deserve to die in the moment, as suggested (however naively) by Jo at several points. She does eventually contribute to his survival by swapping out poisoned food and drink for the safe kind, but that’s only to save others including Liz from becoming collateral damage, and it still more or less tallies with real events. (Go check Wikipedia.) Liz must bait a trap and stand by while it all happens. The Doctor has an opportunity to rescue him at the last minute and, in probably the book’s most poignant moment, holds his ground.

Elsewhere, the text is always ready (perhaps too ready?) to underline its thesis statement on the mad monk, at one point comparing him favourably to a character we’re implicitly on board with: “[Rasputin’s] determination suddenly reminded Jo vaguely of the Doctor’s pugnacious stand for his beliefs.” / “Do you have proof or are you just believing too much of what you read in the papers?” / “[Rasputin] no longer was the bear-like figure that held Russia in a fearful grip, but a passionate man who strayed out of his depth.” / “Rasputin may be a rather unsavoury man, but that’s all he is.” / “[Rasputin] might be the very incarnation of crime and vice, but he was still a man. He was still a flesh and blood creation of God’s, with all the rights to life and privileges that Felix would consider for any man.” / “[Liz] wished she could hope for Rasputin to survive since, seen like this, he was no monstrous ogre. He was just an aging hellraiser with a big mouth, who had picked too many fights over the years.” / “He isn’t the monster everybody says he is…” And so on. In short, to quote Zaphod Beeblebrox’s therapist: well, he’s just zis guy, you know?

As for the death itself, there is an element of black comedy about it, but probably no more so than when the event itself itself is described. Perhaps this is the reason for that final sobering moment with the Doctor, when two men shed tears on either side of the ice.

It’s not all historical context and calms before storms, of course. The Doctor gets into several hair-raising scrapes, gifting us another McIntee staple, the intense action sequence, at least two of which take place on moving trains. Liz, for all my complaints over the lack of contextual character work, makes the most of what will probably be her only TARDIS outing: at turns she takes a maternal approach to Jo, easily refutes Rasputin’s advances and — in another hair-raising moment — violently interrogates a man to tell her where the TARDIS is, even taking Jo by surprise. I liked her in this. Jo, for my money, loses out. It makes sense that this is a Liz adventure (since we’re skipping Hartnell’s wacky TARDIS and coming to Russia on purpose), but there’s nowhere in the series for that to go, so you’re stuck with the chirpier companion as well. Her main purpose seems to be (also) fending off Rasputin. However she does give us another perspective on the affair, that being the bluntness of “can we save him actually.” (The Doctor and Liz are quite patient about this.) Honestly it would be weird to write a novel about an impending murder and not vocalise that.

This is the closest McIntee has come for a while to writing pure history — with, of course, Doctor Who squeezed into the gaps. (That’s how he himself puts it in his introduction.) While I do love a historical, at times this one feels a little too weighted in favour of events just happening while we look on, but it generally avoids the McIntee pitfall of feeling like a lot of research detail for its own sake. It’s all done in favour of trying to make sense of something dreadful.

Also, now that I’ve waffled on about it, and despite some awkward frayed edges I feel a bit more positive about Liz-and-the-Doctor here. (Sorry, Jo.) How much of this is head-canon I don’t know, probably all of it is, but the implication seems to be that however little he vocalises it, the Doctor had not forgotten his friend, he wanted to share a happy event with her and the last sentence confirms that he succeeded. In due course Liz experiences enough hardship for it to make sense that she didn’t rush to do it again, but it’s great for her — and for our lasting impression of The Wages Of Sin, a not exactly happy read — that she got something positive out of it as well.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #39 – The Taint by Michael Collier

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#19
The Taint
By Michael Collier

Things are about to change for the Eighth Doctor and Sam, and you know what that means: range editor Stephen Cole must don his fake moustache and unplaceable accent to become the mysterious Michael Collier. Between them they will introduce the next companion, Fitz Kreiner. So let’s start there.

Much has been said about the inadequacies of Sam as a character, or to put it more charitably, the difficulties authors had in finding that character. This far into the series nothing had consistently worked. Something had to change.

That feeling seems to bubble under the surface of Collier/Cole’s second book. There are moments when the Doctor takes stock of his increasing reliance on the TARDIS as a solution to his problems. He laments the number of scrapes Sam seems to get into because of him, just as Sam herself notes that she has “seemingly done little but recuperate lately; after Janus Prime, Belannia, Proxima II.” I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the range was, if not in a rut, at least rut-adjacent at this point. Especially with the range editor all but saying so.

Enter a new companion to (hopefully) shake things up a bit. A lesson has been learned since The Eight Doctors, however, so Fitz isn’t hanging around in a B-plot waiting for the Doctor to finish the main action and get back to him. He’s a primary character in The Taint, tied to the plot and making the main duo’s acquaintance early. We get a strong impression of who he is and what he’s like, rather than just a shopping list of his attributes.

Fitz — as in the person, not the character writing — is a bit of a mess, and is unsuccessful in most of his endeavours. Residing in a thoroughly dank flat with a grotty mattress and a suspicious “relaxation lightbulb,” he presents an altogether unimpressive figure to Sam, but this doesn’t detract from his confidence in openly lusting after her. He’s a musician (accounts vary as to whether he’s talented or dreadful; he does all right at an open mic night) and a cynic. The cynicism mostly comes from years of unpleasant post-war reactions to his German heritage. (Fitz was born in the 30s; The Taint is set in 1963.) Perhaps as a consequence he doesn’t seem to particularly like or care about people, at one point faking a French accent out of boredom while talking to customers, at another observing almost casually as a man is beaten to death, reasoning that death is better than the alternative in this case.

There are choices here that strike me as odd. Not inherently bad, just surprising for a new companion. Fitz seems to be the furthest thing from an aspirational character, which I suppose gives him somewhere to go. The misanthropy in particular, since an interest in helping people is usually a prerequisite for travelling in the TARDIS — make him too aloof and what use is he going to be? But I need to be careful here not to wear New Series Goggles(TM), and remember that people used to just end up as companions sometimes. That is very much the case with Fitz, whose already tenuous world has collapsed by the end of The Taint, leaving him to surmise that “the Doctor had offered him a way out and he’d taken it.” Incredibly we skip the moment where this is actually said, which has the odd effect of making Fitz’s introduction as an ongoing concern — and it was always going to be ongoing — look almost like an afterthought.

Viewing The Taint as effectively his job interview for companionship, there’s not a lot here. He’s involved in the action because one of the people in danger is his mum. He’s not especially enamoured with the Doctor, tending to agree with some more antagonistic characters that his actions seem dangerously unregulated; his last really active moment in the story is him trying to stop the Doctor from carrying out his world-saving plan, which seems like an unusual note given where this is going. This is admittedly after giving the Doctor somewhere to hide from danger, which is a plus, and there’s much to be said for the kind of instant bickering that occurs between the two, albeit more as a germ for friendship than as a sign of a brilliant TARDIS crewman to be. All in all, you get the sense that he will prove his mettle once he’s fully divorced from his surroundings, which is fair enough, just not how this sort of thing usually goes.

It’s also worth considering how he will fit into the existing dynamic, that being the thing that needed fixing. Bluntly, he doesn’t get the chance: by the time he’s really partaking in the plot The Taint has become yet another novel where Sam ends up the worse for wear and so sits a chunk of it out, so there isn’t an opportunity to say “how will these three handle the crisis?” This really does strike me as an odd choice, although perhaps it speaks to a kind of baked-in ennui with Sam that it isn’t even worth the effort to spin three plates instead of the usual two. Oh well, not ideal but I guess the other writers can sort it out.

What we do get of Sam and Fitz together is inauspicious at best. His defining trait here is that he’s a lech, and she’s (understandably) not receptive to it. This is another “give him somewhere to go” thing I suppose, as well as a way to clarify that he is a person from a different time to Sam. Differing attitudes to sex are a good way to contrast the 60s and the 90s in particular, but that’s not a dynamic I’m really keen to explore since most female companions already ran into outdated views on sex without necessarily needing to meet someone from the 60s. (Peri had these sorts of conversations with, among others, the costume department.) Besides, if Fitz’s closing thoughts are anything to go by — “I am Fitz, from beyond the stars. On my planet, it is customary to shag by way of civilised greeting” — we’re intended to find it charming, at least for the time being. Contrary to any long term learn-and-grow mission statement about sex, there’s something to be said here for 1999 being as much a historical period as 1963, specifically the little pocket occupied by male Doctor Who fans of a certain age, whom Fitz is often said to resemble. While there’s nothing actually abhorrent about a character who’s keen to get his end away and is also a bit pathetic, it says something that this was the guy parachuted in to win over the readership.

Anyway, that’s enough attempted psychoanalysis. Onto the plot which concerns… well a bit of psychoanalysis, as it happens. Half a dozen people with mental health issues are under the care of Dr Charles Roley. They have very individual problems but also a shared psychosis involving an ancient cave. Their problems are getting worse. Meanwhile a couple of peculiar gentlemen, one of whom appears to be a psychic robot, are stalking the periphery. This all has something to do with invisible leeches. The Doctor and Sam can’t help investigating. Fitz’s mum is one of the patients, so neither can he.

The Taint is often talked about in the context of horror, and there are certainly aspects of that here, with people losing their minds, a spooky cave and the inherent body horror of being covered in things that you can’t see. The addition of robots, mind-reading, generational alien visits and superhuman powers has the effect of making it feel like a grab bag of ideas rather than a specific vision of, for instance, terror. I didn’t find there was enough momentum to really build an atmosphere of creepiness. The cave aspect doesn’t amount to enough, as the actual therapy of the patients doesn’t feature very much. By the time we get to explanations for how the robot, leeches, cave and mental patients all link to each other, I was at a point of rereading passages and then giving up. It’s frankly a bit of a mess, with the question of “who is the real antagonist” left all too vague until late in the proceedings.

The answer is not one that I think really works. Twisted by a combination of alien influences, Roley’s patients find themselves suddenly powerful and wanting to wreak havoc on a world that has mistreated them. This could have a lot of pathos — things like shell-shock and domestic abuse would be powerful, if somewhat tasteless triggers for the villainous trauma here — but the characters revel in their powers, joyful at the chance for revenge, with little apparent inner conflict about any of it. They are not, the book seems to suggest, characters we should pity; boo and hiss at, more likely.

The plot suggests they’re not really themselves any more, which perhaps helps to salve any inadvertent stigmatising of the mentally ill, but it doesn’t really clarify what they are beyond a sort of alien-exacerbated mess. (The Doctor for example doesn’t believe Fitz’s mother is herself when she appeals to him.) Whether or not they have agency is quite important in grounding how we should feel about them. If they really are just a bunch of human-shaped monsters, I don’t think that’s very interesting, as it doesn’t particularly speak to who they were. If they really are damaged people who can’t handle this new destructive power, that’s horrifying and sad, but there isn’t a lot here to interrogate that, and we skip the part afterwards where it might have been unpacked. What’s left is a grisly battle to the death with some shrieking self-professedly “mad” people, then a swift exit from the corpse-strewn finale. Sensitive it ain’t.

That mean spirit is then compounded by a post-script where Dr Roley, damaged but left by the Doctor to hopefully recuperate, ends up arrested for what looks like multiple murders. (Hey, he’s no innocent, but if the Doctor thinks he ought to have some degree of peace then presumably so should we.) I wasn’t really sure what, if anything, to take from that.

Just about everything here is in some degree of a mess, either deliberately (Fitz’s screwball charms) or otherwise (the plot, the meaning). The presence of a good, or even a few good ideas combined with the absence of a really unifying effect of said ideas feels like a carry-over from Longest Day. Some of it though is a noticeable improvement — I’m thinking mainly of the Doctor, whose influence and personality feel a bit more convincing in The Taint, and Sam, who if still not given a great deal to actually do is at least written consistently this time. The range editor more than anyone should have their eye on continuity, and there are several nods to where she’s at at this stage, including the ongoing question of Sam’s semi-hypothetical other self. (A concept that I find a bit muddy as written, since Actual Sam always seems so bitingly miserable about her lot; the idea of a more boring Earthbound version mostly serves to tell her to shaddap and be grateful.) It’s a pity Cole couldn’t quite muster the idea of how the Doctor, Sam and Fitz will work together, but individually they are well crafted.

Despite a few creative, if occasionally ill-advised ideas, The Taint leaves an impression of something slightly cobbled together to get the new guy on the payroll. It’s not his worst, but all the same it might be nice to see Cole work on something that doesn’t have to change the paradigm for once, and see if that benefits the story.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #38 – Salvation by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#18
Salvation
By Steve Lyons

This one’s quite weird.

I tend not to read blurbs. Well, there’s no need to sell me on anything if it’s already part of a marathon. So all I knew about Salvation was that it’s a First Doctor novel featuring Dodo.

And before we get into it, that’s quite novel in itself. Neither of the character’s Virgin appearances could be described as exactly enthusiastic: one tells us how she longed for attention as a child, then gifts her what looks suspiciously like an STD; the other establishes the mental health issues caused by her last on-screen appearance, then murders her. And that’s just expanded media. In her actual episodes Dodo had possibly the worst introduction and exit of any companion, arriving at the tail end of one story and getting binned off halfway through another. All things considered, she’s been about as lucky as her namesake.

Salvation might then be a very apt title as Steve Lyons seems interested in doing repair work on the character. For starters, we’re revisiting and building upon that rushed introduction. We meet Dodo before she crashed through the TARDIS doors; we then expand her unceremonious arrival into a full adventure.

A degree of unhappiness at home helps bed in her otherwise rather odd enthusiasm to leave it all behind. Her great Aunt, as confirmed on screen, doesn’t massively care for her. Dodo’s dreams and ambitions generally haven’t come to pass. (Particularly travel.) She’s hardly depressed, but based on all this you can see why she’d jump at the chance for something different.

There’s also an expansion of the production quirk that is her accent — sort of Northern-Cockneyish one minute, RP the next, all because the producers had differing ideas about how she should sound. (Sadly it’s one of the more memorable things about her.) According to Salvation she adopted the Southern accent after losing her parents, hoping to better fit in at school; there is conflict within her about whether she is expected to be Dorothea, the falsely proper girl raised by her great Aunt, or Dodo, her true messier self. The wonky accent is therefore a part of that. (Credit where it’s due, Daniel O’Mahoney posited something similar back in The Man In The Velvet Mask. It’s clearly the favourite way to go and it works here too.)

Expectations are a key part of Salvation’s story, and it’s quite charming that in the end Dodo has cause to broaden hers. When Steven notes that she doesn’t realise what the TARDIS is capable of the Doctor neatly defends and sums her up: “Dorothea is a sensible child, but with an unfortunate history. Perhaps she does not allow herself to hope for too much.” The preceding story challenges that notion for her — and now we come to the weirdness.

While visiting an elderly man to help with his shopping, Dodo finds him in a bizarre mood, and soon becomes his captive. Worse, the man appears to be a duplicate — the original is dead. The stranger grows younger. He doesn’t seem outwardly angry towards her but he can’t let her go, and eventually his bewildered emotional state leads to an attempted sexual assault. Dodo escapes and barrels into the nearest police box.

If you’ll hold your questions for a moment, what follows is a condensed and admittedly a bit awkward recap of that original Massacre scene: in order to make these events fit the script, Dodo makes up a story about a child rather than telling the truth — perhaps this makes sense as it would be difficult to talk about, easier just to take any police officers to the scene of the crime. Alas, this is the TARDIS, so they promptly end up in New York instead. (At more or less the same time they left, which is rare.) Dodo’s cares are temporarily swept away — again this is slightly awkward but then she was very eager for an adventure, wasn’t she? — until she and the Doctor become aware of a group of “gods” causing a stir. This is too much for the Doctor to ignore; pretty soon the military feels the same way. Because they are gods. They can perform miracles, good and bad. And they probably have something to do with the bizarre alien who recently attacked Dodo.

How people react to the gods, and what they do next is really what Salvation is about. It’s a strangely high concept approach for what is essentially a character piece, however much about it is interesting, in particular the question of where it ends when you have the power to answer prayers on the spot — what if there isn’t always a right answer? Needless to say, with the Vietnam war going on it is possible to test this theory in the extreme.

Steve Lyons writes it in some interesting ways, too. Of particular note are the journalistic or biographic entries at the start of chapters, placing all this in an alternate history context. That’s quite a splash of water in the face when you’re dealing with such openly fantastical concepts as gods, and later a Heaven that responds to your wishes, conscious or otherwise. He also grounds it with fun little touches like the way the gods decide to hire a manager to get their message out, and end up with an unscrupulous Allen Klein type. (He later writes his version of events entitled How I Saved The World.) It remains a pretty out-there premise all the same, flirting with fantasy and religion more directly than the show was known to do at the time.

It’s debatable how much this matters, but I couldn’t find a lot of forward moving plot here. Once we arrive at the problem of the gods that’s pretty much it, until everyone decides where they stand on the issue and it’s finally revealed what’s going on here, why these beings are doing all this. The answer is a thoughtful one, applying more context to the characters — particularly Dodo, whose journey takes her back to the shapeshifting alien, now named Joseph, who sort of loves her and offers her a kind of happiness. Bearing in mind they started off as a kidnapping and an almost-rape (adding an unfortunate item to Dodo’s eyebrow-raising list of misadventures in print) the allegorical quest for happiness is a harder sell than it ought to have been for a character people already struggled to grasp, but it manages to humanise the gods and let Dodo’s fantasies be demonstrated and tested. By the end she seems ready to let adventures happen for real.

The gods themselves are less than fascinating as characters. There are half a dozen of them, but apart from the Patriarch (think Zeus) and Joseph they’re all a bit interchangeable. They exist, again apart from Joseph, as a sort of amorphous problem to be solved rather than as characters. I suppose it’s plot relevant that they don’t have rich inner lives — plot relevant, but not especially helpful when you’re spending time with them, and very occasionally mixing up your Normans and your Nevilles. One of their best moments concerns an unnamed “god” or equivalent creature: it’s sent away so that it will stop trying to comfort (and by definition mislead) people, and this action causes a traumatised scientific man to articulate his faith, the fake gods helping him to believe in real ones. It’s the best part of the otherwise slightly hectic “Heaven” sequence.

As fantastical as all this is — and next to some recent Eighth Doctor books it looks positively loopy — it does at least take place within a specific character context. Steven is still hopping mad about the Doctor’s apparent complacency at the end of The Massacre; guilty and angry, when presented with all powerful and perhaps benevolent gods he is more easily swayed than the Gallifreyan. There are some great moments where the Doctor is forced to contend with what he has and hasn’t let pass before now, as well as Steven being forced to contend with the limits of power and the uncomfortable truth that sometimes it’s right to let things unfold. Steven’s role is somewhat minimal in Salvation, perhaps too much so given the arc he’s facing at this point in the series, but it serves a critical point for the overall story, bringing us down from the enticing promise of all your wishes granted. Apart from that, in the shadow of Dodo’s hurried arrival it’s easy to forget that Steven dramatically left the TARDIS for all of three minutes there; as well as softening Dodo’s landing, Salvation lets that Steven moment play out more naturally.

The Doctor is written well, unsurprisingly for Lyons. He manages to win over an irascible military type with equal forces of will and argument, sort of prefiguring the easy influence he would have in The War Machines. There’s something quintessentially this Doctor about having the cheek to risk a fireball from the gods, confident that his logic will win out. He engages with Steven’s possible departure with more maturity than bluster here, keeping it an open question for the whole book. (Since he, as well as Steven, is granted proper time to consider the point by Salvation’s setting.) And he’s pragmatic, as well as quietly sympathetic about the new arrival — another thing he now has time to think about. It’s nice to give her a proper offer to travel with them. We’re still stuck with clumsy Massacre stuff like his comparing her to Susan, but I found this inadvertently reminded me of his openness to accept Vicki the last time needed a friend. He’s quite soft under all that bluster; Steven, we ought to remember, wasn’t the only one affected by the events of The Massacre. (And The Dalek Masterplan, while we’re at it.)

I can’t find many specific negative things to say about Salvation, and indeed there’s plenty of commendable stuff going on in it. But as a novel, which it must be on top of all the fine-tuning of character journeys, it was still more fun to think about than to read. Somewhere between the characterisation and the huge concepts — and, I suppose, that jarring introduction to Joseph — the story never seemed particularly to charge ahead. I was sort of just waiting for them to answer the fundamental question rather than following what happens next. Still, despite some pretty obvious fan tick-boxing it manages to be another interesting choice from Steve Lyons, and in a range of books that sometimes rests on its laurels I appreciate any strangeness.

6/10