Doctor Who: The BBC Books #72 – Heart Of TARDIS by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#32

Heart of TARDIS

By Dave Stone

Look up there — what’s that light in the sky, above Gotham Police Headquarters? Is that…? Yes, it’s the Silly Goose Signal. And if you look down into the street you’ll see him haring towards us now in his polka-dotted cape and squeaky slippers, blowing raspberries as he goes. Dave Stone approacheth.

Heart Of TARDIS is odd, perhaps even by Stone’s standards. It has multiple story strands, heaps of characters, two Doctors with companions in tow, magic, surrealism, jokes, horrible murders and a preoccupation with TV and movies. (Cheese also crops up a lot.) It’s not for the casual reader.

I don’t know if the book specifically or my attention span was the reason that I got 100 pages in, realised I wasn’t quite following it and started again, this time writing out the different plot strands to keep them straight. This mostly helped, but even then there were important moments I struggled to comprehend simply because they were couched in strangeness or silliness; with this one it can be hard to grab onto the genuine activity of a scene, or even a sentence. (Dave Stone newbies would do well to know that some of his sentences are sort of, optional.)

Stone has always been one for silliness, which is a good thing really: Sky Pirates! is hilarious. He loves a comedic diversion and there are plenty of those here, such as a page or two on the history of the obsessive alien Collectors, or a character considering how Romana would fit into her own class upbringing. But there’s somewhat of a sliding scale when it comes to just how firm a grip he has on the story, vs how much fun he’s having. Pirates! and Death And Diplomacy knew just what they were about — a quest narrative and a romcom respectively — whereas, say, Oblivion is really interested in alternative timelines, but it just sort of paddles around in that idea. I’m not sure what it is that drives Heart Of TARDIS as a story. A collision between magic and science, I suppose, since it’s about a literal nexus point of the two, but then no one in it really engages with the difference. There’s no “Science, Miss Hawthorne!” debate this week; magic is just a thing that demonstrably works.

If that feels incongruous to you within the bounds of Doctor Who, well, it’s just that sort of book: unreality is baked into it on a story level and on a meta one. Literally we have characters losing their faculties and doing strange, horrible things to each other: an American town, Lychburg, has stopped following the normal rules of cause and effect and it is no longer possible to leave. (Think Pleasantville. Just add murders.) Beyond that we have weird attack squads who are, in some undefined way, horrifying to behold, and they use black magic. There are diversions (Stone gonna Stone) where characters compare real life to movies and television, which feels like it’s going somewhere but doesn’t really; we even have quasi-cameos from The Simpsons and Cheers characters, as well as two recurring characters who are a very transparent piss-take of The Professionals. Then there’s what happens to the TARDIS at the end — as in, the Fourth Doctor’s one — being transmogrified room by room and filled with random sights, a sequence that would maybe have more cachet if we hadn’t already been on that sort of toboggan ride for 200+ pages.

We also have some fun and games around canon and continuity. (I think we can infer some deliberateness here, given that one of the villains is literally named “Continuity.”) The Second Doctor’s story kicks off because he’s found a way to undo the security controls on his TARDIS, which are the things preventing him from piloting it properly; this is a retcon new to the book. (To be fair, it’s not a bad one.) The Fourth Doctor and Romana are in the middle of a somewhat breathless search for the Key to Time, but they seem completely happy to put that on pause this week; this is fairly unheard of. (Hard to be mad at this as a concept though, as Romana I deserves more stories, and they can’t all involve the Key.) There’s a gag about the (Fourth) Doctor always leaving K9 behind on adventures and needing to go back and rescue him, sometimes centuries later; that’s hilarious, but again, this is the first we’re hearing about it. The Doctor — both — has a strange inability to be photographed, and cannot provide fingerprint samples unless he concentrates; all very magical, and all new here. There’s even a possible blooper to confuse matters, with Benton still being a Sergeant in the late 1980s; he was a Warrant Officer in his last TV appearance. (Perhaps he got demoted…?)

None of this really matters as such, and by all means other authors can pick them up again, but taken together, in the context of the series so far and combined with the quasi-reality of the plot, it does all sort of push the whole thing into the realm of “is any of this real.” And, pure personal taste here, my investment in a story is somewhat tied to how much the characters are invested in it. If it could all have been a dream then, no offence, but why should I care? It’s a tricky balance.

There are subtler weirdnesses as well — let’s call them, takes. Stone characterises the Fourth Doctor and Romana perfectly, capturing their lofty brilliance, Romana’s indomitability, this Doctor’s irreverence that can turn on a sixpence into grave fury.

The Second Doctor and co are more bespoke. This Doctor he characterises as a chaos demon, utterly impulsive and incapable of listening to anybody before he takes action. This is a bit of a stretch, but at least it’s along the right lines. (His predilection for technobabble is definitely a Dave Stone thing, however. I can’t picture Troughton rattling off some of the convoluted stuff he comes out with here.) Jamie seems to dip below Stone’s interest altogether, although he does get a critical plot moment near the end.

Victoria is where he really goes for broke. Pushed into the centre as the rational protagonist of the trio, this Victoria is no frightened girl: she’s well travelled (after dozens of off-screen adventures) and has become downright cosmopolitan. She has got used to futuristic forms of travel, even been “spoilt” by them; she screams only once, and then it feels like a surprise; seemingly no longer a retiring violet, she recognises and even makes innuendos. It’s also through Victoria — now apparently a keen observer — that we get some of the best Second Doctor writing: “[The Doctor had] a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.” / “Ordinarily, he took the part — was the part — of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it even at all possible. When danger threatened, however — being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example — it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes… a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.” NB: Typical Dave Stone sentence lengths there.

Stone justifies his sharper, less frightened take on Victoria: “given the tenor of her original times, [she] was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude even she had not known she had.” And honestly, she’s an improvement on the person we see in the actual episodes (although the apparently sexual worldliness is a bit odd), but it’s another thing that makes Heart Of TARDIS feel like a self-contained stopover, where this particular author is god and he makes all the rules.

I suppose that only really matters if you need all of these books to feel like they’re part of the same series. I think it’s fine to step outside sometimes. (Look at Campaign.) I’m just surprised that the editorial team were on board with a book that takes so many weird little swings. (Look at Campaign. Okay, that’s unfair: Campaign finally died because it kept missing deadlines, not because it was weird. But there was some resistance from Richards, and I can’t help but wonder what notes he gave for this one. If, indeed, he had time to give any.)

It’s easy to discuss Heart Of TARDIS in terms of ideas — it’s got oodles. (Some, like the K9 rescue, go nowhere beyond “funny bit”. K9 doesn’t return once he’s safe and sound.) It’s harder to crunch it into shape as a story with a point. Or two, really, since this is being sold as a multi-Doctor adventure. (More on that in a moment.) The situation in Lychburg is creepy, often to an extent that seems to be from another book altogether (the woman building a homunculus out of victims’ body parts), but the basic concept of cause and effect going haywire is very interesting. It’s hard to articulate, however, particularly for a word-wanderer like Dave Stone. You soon get the sense that this plot (the Second Doctor one) will be isolated until the Fourth Doctor gets involved. Nothing much really progresses here until it’s nearly over, at which point the grand finale happens virtually off-screen.

Then we have the Fourth Doctor stuff, visiting UNIT HQ to recover a missing Brigadier. This involves the aforementioned black magic practitioners, but again there isn’t much proactively to do for most of it. The weird and wacky characters operate with abandon and eventually, when it’s time to resolve the crisis, the Doctor(s) is only of secondary help. Things are decided by a sort of wizard battle between secondary characters, with the Brigadier (under-written, almost wasn’t worth including him) intervening at a crucial moment.

Heart Of TARDIS gets very close to edging out the Doctor(s) altogether, although it certainly relies on TARDISes for its plot. This is at least themed, although that isn’t articulated until the Epilogue: “We can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role. Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can do as much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect … Great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.” Which is a decent theme for a book… just an odd fit for Doctor Who, and thus, it’s another one-shot Dave Stone “take”. As a reader, as it must have been for the Doctors, most of this becomes an exercise in patiently waiting through each section until the summing up starts, or somebody else does something.

Looking at it as a multi-Doctor story, we must remember that Dave Stone is a silly goose. So, it isn’t one in the traditional sense. I don’t mind that: it’s always difficult to come up with a big enough threat for more than one Doctor to deal with, and it’s equally hard to give each of them something to do. Stone’s approach is more like Cold Fusion, where separate Doctors’ plot lines eventually dovetail. Where this gets really Dave Stone, however, is that they don’t even meet. The Second Doctor is never aware of the other one; the Fourth Doctor twigs fairly late in the story, and then there is a knowingly short scene where the one secretly assists the other.

As you can probably guess, this has all been setup for a funny line, in this case Romana’s: “So that’s it, is it? We get through all this, and our function is to simply open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?” In other words: you all expected a multi-Doctor story, tee hee hee. And honestly, a 280 page setup-punchline is a fairly impressive thing to pull off. But it is quite likely to annoy a few readers. (I think by that point I’d given up any hope/forgotten the possibility of the two interacting anyway.)

I was never exactly mad at Heart Of TARDIS, and I don’t know if I’d describe it as confusing, although admittedly I did put some work in there. (And it’s still pretty convoluted.) It’s more structured than The Blue Angel and less abstract than Campaign; it’s just weird on every other level and very, very busy. It’s hard to say whether I actually enjoyed it. Stone’s rapid-fire ideas can be very interesting, but that dreamlike strangeness makes it difficult to care on any deeper level. This is where comedy usually helps, and to be fair it’s often very funny, but being tinged with the grotesque sort of undermines that aspect for me.

It’s one of those books where, if nothing else, The Author Definitely Meant To Do That, and I think that deserves some respect. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out than an editor had replied with, “Dave, what the hell is this?”

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #71 – The Banquo Legacy by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#35

The Banquo Legacy

By Andy Lane & Justin Richards

At last, we’re getting somewhere. After several books where the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion elude the Time Lords so successfully that you have to wonder if anyone’s even looking for them, The Banquo Legacy introduces the radical idea that the bad guys could put some effort into it.

All of which feels like a spoiler, and indeed I was quite worried that I’d ruined it for myself by listening to a podcast about an earlier book. (It’s been 20+ years, inevitably that sort of thing is a minefield.) But no, The Banquo Legacy makes it clear early on that a Time Lord presence has caused the TARDIS to land in 1898, so it follows that a Time Lord will be lurking nearby. See also the blurb, which straight up tells you that the Doctor is “desperate to uncover the Time Lord agent who has him trapped.” Frankly it would be amazing if you got to the big reveal near the end of the book and didn’t already know.

Too much foreknowledge is unlikely to hurt The Banquo Legacy, since it didn’t begin life as anything Time Lordy or arc-plotty anyway. It turns out that BBC Books had yet another gap to fill, with Rebecca Levene’s novel Freaks sadly disappearing due to work commitments. Enter Justin Richards who — somewhat typically for Justin Richards — had a completed novel just lying around. A non-Who murder mystery co-written years earlier with Andy Lane, it was an epistolary, intended to evoke Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. (Lane wrote one character, Richards the other.) As well as it being terribly nice to get their old manuscript onto shelves, it was simply more expedient to insert Doctor Who elements into this than to write a whole new thing from scratch — especially where Richards had just done so with Grave Matter.

It’s debatable how obvious all of this behind the scenes stuff is when reading the book. It’s not as if epistolaries are unheard of in Doctor Who — Lane’s All-Consuming Fire was a very good one. As that author notes on Pieces Of Eighth, the original book had Who-ey overtones simply because that stuff was baked into its authors; where it is overtly horror, it is arguably by way of things like The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. And Richards, ever the editor, does a convincing enough job of weaving not just the Doctor and co. into this, but the ongoing Time Lord plot as well. It is relevant that this particular murder plot has ensnared these particular characters at this particular point in the run.

While it’s a bit coincidental that we ended up here, it makes for a fun experiment to tell a Doctor Who story from someone else’s perspective, or multiple someone elses. It also allows for an unusual take* on a mystery plot, with one character seeking answers that the other possesses, one character’s scenes filling in gaps from the other’s, and action overlapping. (*I haven’t read any Agatha Christie. Forgive me.) It pays particular dividends about halfway through after a couple of murders in close succession, with the two narrators hurriedly jumping to and fro in a way that satisfyingly speeds up the pace.

There is a downside to this, however, in that the two narrators are not hugely dissimilar. This is awkward to note since it was apparently two separate authors writing them, but Inspector Ian Stratford (Lane) and lawyer John Hopkinson (Richards) are both upstanding chaps of more or less the same type. Neither sounds especially Victorian or egregiously different from one another; if there weren’t two different fonts at work I’d be unlikely to pick either one out of a paragraph.

There is a whiff of cop and criminal about them, Hopkinson having numerous secrets to impart, but — in an admittedly very “Victorian epistolary” way, see Dracula — they end up full of camaraderie anyway, united by chivalry and whatnot. Before long I was wishing that there were more perspectives in the mix. You could even sneak in the Time Lord agent as one of them, and drop hints that way. Agatha Christie did that sort of hide-in-plain-sight thing, or so I hear. (It bears repeating that this book was the work of two quite young writers, and All-Consuming Fire, for example, showed a more pronounced difference between its narrators some years later. Practice makes perfect.)

The murder mystery has enough horror elements to tickle a Whovian’s fancy. The main thrust is a psychic experiment in an old country house which immediately goes wrong, killing the scientist and raising the question of accident or murder. More deaths follow, along with disappearing and reappearing bodies, a gun-toting maniac and — heck, why not — the walking dead. Sprinkle in a fake-out death for the Doctor and the ongoing question of a Time Lord agent and you’re unlikely, all in all, to sit there wondering how this novel ever got stitched together in the edit.

That said, it’s not exactly groaning with plot. Once it is confirmed whodunit and what, for that matter, they dun, The Banquo Legacy becomes a slightly lumbering zombie vehicle, alternating between a really quite amazingly durable killer corpse and a single deranged woman with a gun. I wondered how this presented such an insurmountable problem for the Doctor and friends, but then Richards has done some homework to ensure that regeneration will not work in the vicinity of the house, so dead means dead. (A threat that perhaps loses some meaning in a story that features a zombie.)

The mystery itself is reasonably good, though it’s not without its loose ends. The book opens with a couple of century-old murders that, in the long run, Richards uses to inform the Time Lord plot. I was never clear on why there needed to be two murders in close succession, or why one of them seems distractingly to be the work of a vampire. We never circle back to the details. And the Doctor’s fake-out death leads to a very exciting reveal later on — clearly a nod to The Hound Of The Baskervilles — but his laying low/information gathering doesn’t end up being anything worth hanging around for. These sorts of things tend to suggest the ragged edges of one novel brushing up against another.

For more on that, take a look at Compassion. On the surface this is another neat little solve: there would have only been so much room in the book for new characters (the Doctor replaces one who would otherwise have been killed off), so what do you do with someone as complicated as a human TARDIS? Answer, amalgamate them with someone nearby, and thus create an identity crisis. It gives you an element of danger, not wanting Compassion to be identified to the Time Lord agent, and theoretically it gives Compassion some interesting stuff to work on as she juggles two selves. You can blame it all on chameleon circuits or something.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, Compassion has simply been subsumed by another, markedly less interesting character. Her inner Compassion-ness rarely rises to the surface, and when it does an occasional aloofness or a sarcastic “obviously” will have to do. There’s no especially dramatic conflict at work between the two characters, and no meaningful sense that one of them is diminishing. (It’s not even hugely clear what’s happening.) Yes, the situation has rendered her mortal, but the human being she inhabits was already mortal anyway. Which is certainly handy for the rewrite.

Knowing that she had to be shoe-horned into a pre-existing novel casts a suggestive pall over all this, but even if you don’t know that, where the previous EDA was The Space Age — which had Compassion mentally out-of-it for most of the story — this just looks like another author(s) not wanting to engage with Compassion. Given how many EDA writers would clearly rather dive out of a window than write for Sam Jones, it’s not as if they don’t have form. Honestly, I can see the legwork that has gone into justifying these choices, but the end result still bears an uncanny resemblance to just not knowing what to do with her. Again. It’s disappointing to still be in this position with so little time left.

The Doctor and Fitz are perhaps easier to handle, and sure enough both are creditably written/inserted, with Fitz throwing a very ill-advised (and very Fitz) German accent into a tense situation, then forgetting it; at all times he believably fails to convince. (Stratford notes that he is “about five sentences behind everyone else and struggling to keep up.” That’s him, Officer.) I suspect that the Doctor’s role may have been very loosely Doctorish even in Lane and Richards’ student days, but there’s enough of a whiff of Sherlock Holmes about him to maintain the murder mystery ethos and all at once keep it convincingly Who. He’s very commanding, when he isn’t being (perhaps a little too easily) terrorised.

At least we’re moving the whole Time Lord thing along. The mystery of who the Time Lord agent is, or I suppose if there even is one, might have seemed pretty obvious to me (see second paragraph) but it’s still exciting when the Doctor and [redacted] have a sudden stand-off with a shotgun, all pretence now dropped. It’s interesting to have someone reinforce the Time Lords’ morally suspect argument for capturing Compassion, and for a moment there it did feel like the stakes were higher because her TARDIS capabilities had gone away — even at the potential cost of the agent’s life, since they can’t regenerate either. I especially enjoyed the idea that Time Lord agents had been sprinkled all over the galaxy and are, understandably, running out of patience. (Wouldn’t it be nice if this wasn’t the first we were hearing about it?) The stakes have certainly been raised — or at the very least, reintroduced — for the upcoming grand finale.

Looking at other reviews, I’m clearly less enamoured than most readers, but I didn’t have a bad time with The Banquo Legacy. The epistolary could be better but it’s still fun to read, especially where it’s so ghoulish, and hey, I’m only human — I like zombies too. (NB: I didn’t feel like this was a retread of Grave Matter. Mind you, this one came first.) It’s a good, if patchy example of rewriting something for a new brief, and it inevitably re-energises the EDAs — especially since all the other books have slept on the arc plot. The Time Lords aren’t the only ones tapping their watches.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #70 – Grave Matter by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#31

Grave Matter

By Justin Richards

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Write Novels Quickly Man!

Whilst I can’t exactly prove it, I’m confident that Grave Matter was a last minute replacement for something else. A few things point that way. Justin Richards was clearly very busy around this time, gearing up as range editor, co-writing the next book in the schedule and then fully writing an EDA two books later to soft-reboot the range. I doubt he had time to write another manuscript voluntarily. Then there are the behind the scenes materials in Campaign, which point to the PDA slot after Verdigris being vacant after Jim Mortimore’s book fell through. That was in October 1999, and they needed the next (now non-existent) book at the printers within 2 months. Enter a very frantic Justin Richards, perhaps? (We know he can do it. Look at The Joy Device and Millennium Shock.)

I suppose the other little clue is the book itself. It lacks the sense of a special interest that you get in some of Richards’s books like Theatre Of War or System Shock. For Grave Matter he’s doing a sort of Hinchcliffe-era pastiche which, while very entertaining, could have been assigned to anybody. The pacing also suggests a certain degree of, if not rushing exactly, perhaps not finessing as much as might be preferable. It takes some time to get a real sense of the threat here, and once we’re into the climax there’s a sense of throwing one thing after another just to keep it going for 240 pages.

Not that I mind, of course. The thing to remember about those last-minute Richards novels is that they tend to be very entertaining, almost as if that sense of urgency got baked into the product. If Grave Matter is another one of those then something like that has happened again.

We get some Gothic imagery right away as a strangely corpse-like man flees captivity on an island, then is (literally) hounded off a cliff. Once the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on the island of Dorsill they meet the man, who is frightful to behold, and he prevents Peri from falling to her doom. Once the duo then make it to the town they find a funeral procession by lamp light, which promptly collapses showing Peri the corpse. Even after all that high-level spookery there is Dorsill itself to consider: a strangely old-world place that holds modern day anachronisms.

It’s an arresting start full of memorable visuals, and there’s a lot of that still to come as Dorsill reveals its odd little quirks and — as I mentioned above — its problems, albeit slowly. There have been deaths recently, but nothing in particular links them. Animals have peculiar habits, with the sheep seeming more organised than the sheep dogs. Even the school children have developed odd aptitudes for things in a way that only makes sense if they are somehow psychic. The fact that Dorsill is a modern day (albeit undated) community willingly cut off from technology is the least odd thing about it.

You get the sense though that the Doctor and Peri are investigating a general vague air of mystery rather than anything specific. For instance, the Doctor wants to find out what year it is. (You might think the strange-looking man they meet at the start would be an inciting incident, but they seem to forget about him instantly. Rather odd. He crops up again later.) They are made quite welcome, for once, and this adds an air of comfort to proceedings. Dorsill is very well defined visually and it’s quite pleasurable to follow the characters around it. Not exactly a page-turner in the same sense as Millennium Shock, then, but it’s compelling enough all the same.

Eventually the title starts paying dividends. There’s a marvellous sequence that begins with Peri witnessing an apparent grave robbing-cum-zombie resurrection, which then turns out just to have been grave robbing. (For medical curiosity purposes only.) This is followed by the same corpse actually rising from the grave in the same spot, which is very neat work and would have been horrifying/hilarious if televised. It turns out there are shady experiments originating on Dorsill’s sister island, Sheldon’s Folly, and these connect all the unusual happenings on Dorsill. Suffice to say, the local mad scientists have slightly overstepped, hence the minor problem of the zombies.

Once we find out what’s happening the action re-centres around the Gothic house/laboratory on Sheldon’s Folly, giving us a bit more Hinchcliffian bang for our buck as zombies attack and allies become enemies. This is where the previously mentioned fodder comes into it, particularly in a sequence where Peri runs to fetch help and is variously attacked by possessed seagulls, owls, foxes and (ah why the hell not) a shark. It’s nevertheless fun to watch the Doctor try to figure things out on the fly here, especially when he has to translate the only-brainwashed-a-bit messages of a colleague; everything she says is a deliberate lie to fool the ruling intelligence so he must always infer the opposite. (This feels like a suitably Justin Richards bit of cleverness.)

It’s the kind of story where, once you’ve finished it, there isn’t a lot of substance to mull over. It’s a vibes thing, as da kidz say, coasting along pleasantly enough on spookiness and peril. It does occasionally overstep, in my view. There’s a character who is understandably upset about his brother’s death, who then becomes an antagonist towards Peri for no particular reason beyond presumably being an aspiring rapist. (Which is a very tropey way to treat Peri, on top of everything else.) And there’s a character inveigled in the conspiracy who wants out in the most final way possible, being moved to attempt suicide three times, with a great deal of detail provided in each instance. Got to wonder if anyone other than the range editor could have squeaked that through unedited.

Character voices are otherwise quite strong, with Sir Edward making a memorable accomplice for the Doctor and Peri, and local farmer Hilly feeling like a real-enough person. The two regulars are very well drawn also, particularly a Sixth Doctor still early in his tenure. He’s brash, alliterative and single-minded, but sensitive underneath it all. A moment where he appears to have been taken over by a malign intelligence feels alarmingly plausible when it’s a guy fresh from being in The Twin Dilemma. Peri’s lot in life here is mostly to grouse and try not to be upset when the Doctor is rude, but all of that feels true to where she was at in the series. Although she does experience a brush with the malign influence on Dorsill, at least she’s spared being transformed into something else entirely, which was very much her thing on television.

There’s not a heap more to say about Grave Matter, perhaps for reasons I’ve already speculated about, but the overall concoction is a successful one. Richards kept my interest even when it felt like he was still figuring things out, and he applies memorable little flourishes whenever he can, such as describing a possession as “Her mouth was twisted into a smile, but her mind was in tears.” Spooky, colourful and (perhaps excessively at times) action-packed, it’s a decent enough fusion of the grimdark Season 22 with its similarly nasty ancestors. I’m sure Mary Whitehouse would not have approved.

6/10