The Virgin New Adventures: Nightshade To Deceit

The story so far: after kicking off with the Timewyrm saga in 1991, the Virgin New Adventures novel line spent early 1992 with the Cat’s Cradle trilogy, in which the TARDIS was damaged due to a crash with an early Gallifreyan time machine. At the end of Witch Mark, the final Cat’s Cradle novel, the repairs were completed using demonic protoplasm – causing the TARDIS to become corrupted, with consequences for the Doctor due to his symbiotic relationship with it. By the end of the chunk of novels I’m going to cover here, that problem will be resolved. Will this new plot arc turn out to actually be prominently relevant over these six novels, developed according to a consistent and thought-out plan? Or will authors just pay lip service to it whilst writing the book they want to write anyway, like they did with the previous seven books? Place your bets now…

Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

With the TARDIS mended, you’d expect everything would be fine – but just as a speck of contamination has made its way into the fabric of the machine, a kernel of discontent is nagging at the Doctor’s psyche. In fact, he’s outright snappish and irritable, to the point where Ace is shaken by one of his moments of bad temper. The Doctor realises it’s high time he and Ace slow down and did some mental stocktaking, so he lands the TARDIS in December 1968, near the sleepy Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham; elsewhere the Sixties are getting really exciting, but here they’ve almost entirely passed the village by. As they take in the surroundings, the Doctor discloses to Ace that he’s feeling his age, and badly misses the people from his past (when he loses his temper at Ace it’s because she’s messing with some of Susan’s stuff), and he’s seriously contemplating retirement. (He will, of course, eventually get around to acting on that in The Giggle.)

Meanwhile, Edmund Trevithick is trying to make the best of his own retirement. With his wife having died and his daughter having dropped out of society, Edmund now resides in the local old folks’ home. From 1953 to 1958, Trevithick was known up and down the country as Professor Nightshade, star of the science fiction show Nightshade – a Quatermass-like affair in which the heroic Professor investigated strange enigmas and thwarted alien monstrosities. With a chap from the BBC coming up to interview him in conjunction with the repeats currently airing, Trevithick is quite enjoying being back in the limelight again. What he doesn’t enjoy is people breaking his window late at night – people who call him by the name of Nightshade…

Trevithick is not the only local to be haunted by the ghosts of the past right now – nor, for that matter, is the Doctor with his maudlin thoughts of Susan and the other companions he’s left behind. And with these ghost encounters turning fatal, it’s clear that there’s something here for the Doctor and Ace to look into. The only prior association the village has with ghosts hails from strange stories about the old tumbledown Norman castle that used to loom over the village – long since destroyed in the Civil War, in a story which has its own peculiarities. Yet the site of the castle has now become home to a large radio telescope – and the research group there, led by Dr. Christine Cooper, has started receiving readings which they cannot make head or tail of. Clearly, the Doctor’s going to head down to the radio telescope (brushing aside his Post-Logopolis Stress Disorder) and get involved again – and perhaps this time he’ll be able to count on Professor Nightshade’s help!

Doctor Who Series 8: Doctor In the Thick of It

The story so far: the first half of Grand Moff Steven’s reign has seen the Eleventh Doctor era begin full of promise but ultimately go to pieces, weighed down by a mixture of quirks and gimmicks that wore increasingly thin (Moffat writing somewhat for the TVTropes generation) and more problematic themes and recurring issues which became increasingly obvious as Matt Smith’s tenure dragged on.

The arrival of a new Doctor is usually the opportunity for the show to change its approach, so when Matt Smith declined to do an entire season based around the Doctor being stuck on Trenzalore, the Grand Moff was obliged to wrap the Eleventh Doctor’s plotlines up quickly, reconfigure the show, and bring in a new face in the form of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor. Would this be a renewal or a further descent into the depths? Brave heart, readers, we’ll have to push on and see…

Capaldi’s first episode is the Moffat-penned Deep Breath. Like a goof, like a complete and total dunderhead, the Doctor’s regenerated with the TARDIS in mid-flight again, and just like the regeneration before this problems arise. We pick things up in the Victorian period, and a Tyrannosaurus has shown up having a splash-about in the Thames. It turns out it swallowed the TARDIS whilst it was mid-flight, and ended up being carried here through the Time Vortex. The Paternoster Gang take swift action to secure the TARDIS, and it’s a good thing – the Doctor’s got that post-regeneration goofiness going on and he’s having trouble with memory, object permanence, all of that stuff you really need a functioning brain to get to grips with.

As the Doctor recuperates, he feels really bad about leaving that poor dinosaur stranded far from her time of origin, and slips out to promise her he’ll take her home – only to witness her being consumed in flames. Meanwhile, a strange clockwork droid (Peter Ferdinando) is stalking London and harvesting body parts. It seems like there’s a task for the Doctor here after all – but can he handle it when he’s figuring out who he is and how the world works all over again from first principles?

Doctor Who Series 6: Doctor Under a Death Sentence

The story so far: the Eleventh Doctor era has begun with a bit of a shaky season, in which Grand Moff Steven’s attempts to foreground the season arc more than it was in the RTD era (in which the “season arc” largely amounted to very brief phrases or hints at the existence of such rather than major plot dumps sprinkled throughout the season) let to mixed results. Still, Smith doesn’t seem bad as the Doctor, and after some hiccups the Amy and Rory companion team seem pretty excellent. Perhaps things will pick up with Series 6?

In a bit of a shift from the norm, the season opens with a two-parter – The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, penned by Moffat. After spending two centuries (from his perspective) travelling solo, the Doctor summons Amy, Rory, and River Song to a remote desert locale in the USA. He declares he’s going to take them to 1969 for a particular purpose, but before they take the trip he treats them to a lakeside picnic, during which someone in an Apollo astronaut spacesuit emerges from the lake. Telling the others to stay back and not interfere with what happens next, the Doctor approaches the astronaut – who shoots him dead, double-tapping him to prevent his regeneration. Shortly afterwards, the Doctor’s guests realise their invitation envelopes are numbered – and none of them have number 1. Returning to the diner at the rendezvous site, they encounter a younger version of the Doctor, who’s oblivious to what just happened.

There’s your season plot arc – “Who killed the Doctor and how does the Doctor get out of this one?” – and that’s an awesome setup in principle. In practice, there’s issues with running this story now. A “future version of the Doctor apparently dies” gambit was used fairly recently in The Big Bang, and that’s the sort of schtick you really need to let rest a bit before you use it again. Moreover, it’s going to turn out that the Doctor was shot due to the machinations of a big conspiracy that exists to stop the Doctor doing a thing which, as a result of them trying to stop it, eventually ends up happening, which is basically the same concept as the Series 5 season arc.

Still, the immediate story is fun! It’s got President Nixon (Stuart Milligan) troubled by strange phone calls, terrifying Grey-like aliens known as the Silence secretly puppeteering humanity from the shadows and editing themselves out of witnesses’ memories, and so on. It’s clear that Moffat loves this X-Files-adjacent stuff, and possible that he did a fair bit of research for this one; the idea that the Silence have ancient tunnels running under the ground and have been manipulating humanity for centuries is reminiscent of nothing less than the Shaver Mystery, the big paranormal flap that preceded the modern UFO movement, and if that’s not deliberate then Moffat has at least been discerning about picking out long-standing undercurrents in UFO conspiracy theory lore.

In addition, the older Doctor manipulating the others into witnessing his death, and River Song’s warnings that if they tell the younger Doctor what’s going to occur they risk significant cosmological damage to the universe, adds a pinch of interesting friction within the TARDIS crew, which isn’t a terrible concept. Dialling up the manipulativeness – which also ties into the conclusion of the story, in which the Dcotor broadcasts the existence of the Silence to the whole Earth and sparks off a mass genocide which humanity then immediately forgets they did – adds a big dose of Seventh Doctor to the mix, which in principle I am supportive of, though in this case I think the solution is more problematic than, say, the Doctor tricking Davros into blowing up Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Doctor Who Series 5: Doctor In a Fez

The story so far: after Russell T. Davies resurrected Doctor Who with the Ninth Doctor’s sole season and then had a massively popular and generally quite good run with the Tenth Doctor, he abdicated the showrunner’s throne. The incoming regime would be led by Grand Moff Steven, Moffat having earned his stripes writing some of the best episodes of the RTD era, and the figurehead would be the Eleventh Doctor, as played by Matt Smith.

After appearing for a minute or so at the close of The End of Time, Matt gets to make his proper entrance in The Eleventh Hour. The Doctor only went and regenerated whilst the TARDIS was in mid-flight – a bone-headed move which I am sure we will never see him do again – leading to a certain amount of interior damage as he messily spaffed his regeneration energy everywhere. The TARDIS crash lands in the back garden of a little girl called Amy Pond (Caitlin Blackwood), who just prayed to Santa to send a policeman to her house because there’s a crack in her wall that’s weirding her out.

The Doctor finds the crack perturbing enough to require his attention – but the TARDIS repair process is ongoing, as is the internal process of his regeneration. Popping out to give the TARDIS a quick calibratory spin, the Doctor promises to be back in five minutes – but it’s more like 12 years. The now grown-up Amy (played now by Karen Gillan) has been troubled by the presence of the crack and the absence of the Doctor all that time, an entire room in her house has been commandeered by an alien force, and her boyfriend – Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill), a nurse at the local hospital – has been noticing coma patients bilocating around the village. When aliens show up demanding that Earth hand over “Prisoner Zero” on pain of planetary demolition, the Doctor has about 20 minutes to save the world…

This is largely an excuse for Matt Smith to showcase his style as the Doctor, and for Moffat to showcase his style as a showrunner. In Smith’s case he’s several notches weirder than Eccleston or Tennant ever were, more mercurial and prickly. Perhaps crucially, he pulls off the trick of being compelling without necessarily being charismatic – he’s great to watch and has these great monologues but he isn’t necessarily as loveable or endearing as Tennant was. As for Moffat’s style as a showrunner, we’ve got the Amy and Rory double act set up (reminiscent of Sally and Larry from Blink, as I mentioned when I reviewed that), we’ve got a fun alien concept (the “multiform”), and we’ve got a big sense of the mythic, with the Doctor being a fairytale figure and a childhood imaginary friend who turns out to be not so imaginary.

Moffat’s certainly got his quirks as a writer – he likes using the phrase “the Doctor in the TARDIS” a lot, which I think he thinks sounds mythic but to me just sounds like a KLF/Timelords reference. There’s also the bit at the end where he has the Doctor give that really smug speech to tell the aliens to leave. I realised watching this that I’ve been misremembering how that pans out; I’d misconceived it (as have others) as the Doctor solving the whole thing by simply smugly declaring he’s the Doctor, which isn’t the case because it’s just a bit of flair he does after he’s solved the crisis. On the other hand, doing that bit of flair is, in and of itself, kind of a big moment of hubris in its own right.

Doctor Who 2008-2010 Specials: Doctor At the End of Time

The story so far: after a season with Rose, a season with Martha, and a season with Donna, the Tenth Doctor’s revolving door of companions is about to come to an end, along with his life – for Russell T. Davies and David Tennant are leaving Doctor Who, and a new Doctor and new showrunner are incoming. Yet despite the Series 4 finale being called Journey’s End, the Tenth Doctor has been given a stay of execution; as the next showrunner draws up his plan of campaign, RTD and Tennant spend a run from Christmas 2008 to New Year’s Day 2010 offering up a sequence of special episodes to round off the Tenth Doctor’s story. In terms of total running time, this ends up a shade less than that of the classic seasons from season 23 onward – indeed, there’s four stories told by these specials and the last four classic seasons told four stories each – so we may as well give them an article of their own.

Note that all of the specials are written or co-written by RTD, which on the one hand kind of makes sense but on the other hand I feel sets a bad precedent – surely there’s scope for Doctor Who to occasionally put on special episodes which don’t need the showrunner to write or co-write them? It’s never happened, and I think RTD has needlessly crafted a stick for his own back and that of other showrunners by doing it this way.

First up is the 2008 Christmas special – The Next Doctor, penned by RTD by himself. The Doctor lands in Victorian London, where he soon discovers that the Cybermen are up to no good. Encountering a gentleman who calls himself “the Doctor” (David Morrissey) and his companion Rosita (Velile Tshabalala), the Doctor wonders if he’s blundered into a future incarnation of his. He hasn’t – but experience, the mechanism of how Mr. Jackson Lake came to believe he was the Doctor, and how Lake behaved when the Cybermen’s conception of what the Doctor is like was imposed upon him afford a major invitation for the Doctor to mull over who he is and who he might become in the future.

Of course, this also gives RTD a chance to mull on directions not taken with the new series. Jackson Lake, being essentially a Victorian adventurer with a dress sense to match, is basically the sort of Doctor you’d get if you looked at Hartnell or McGann’s costumes and the surface trappings of the classic show but didn’t really go much deeper than that. There’s an arrogance and paternalism to him which fits the Victorian adventurer mould but is really what Doctor Who needs to steer away from, despite it having slipped at points during both the classic era and the revival.

The idea of the Cybermen having to adopt a more steampunk approach due to working with Victorian technology is grand, and it feels like you could do a really solid Victorian Cyberman story, framing them as the union of industrialism, materialism, and Darwinism (biological and social). Unfortunately, I think RTD drops the ball this time. For one thing, the Cybermen are for the most part just generic Cybermen, in the generic costumes – it would have been more flavourful seeing them having had to replaced damaged parts with steampunk-styled components of the sort we only really see on their beastlike pets. The biggest “steampunk Cyberman” we get here is the CyberKing, which is basically a CyberKaiju. It’s fun, but it feels like the possibility to tell a more nuanced and clever story is passed up in favour of flashy spectacle, and that’s exactly the reverse of the choice I want to see Doctor Who making.

Doctor Who Series 4: Doctor In a Library

The story so far: after a strong first season in the role, David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor has encountered a little turbulence, in part because of Russell T. Davies more or less entirely wasting the potential of Martha Jones as a companion. Still, he’s got another full season in the role to go and then a sort of mini-season of specials running from Christmas 2008 to New Year’s Day 2010 – so we’ve got another couple of articles with him yet. (And then a while later we’ll deal with the suspiciously similar-looking David Fourteennant.)

Before we get to the meat of Series 4, of course, it’s time for another Christmas special – Voyage of the Damned, written by RTD himself. Martha Jones (and the Fifth Doctor) have literally just said goodbye to the Doctor, the TARDIS is in mid-flight, and the Titanic just bumped into it. Boarding the ship, he finds it’s not the original Titanic, but the Starship Titanic, presumably because Russell T. Davies decided that if Chris Chibnall was going to import blatant Douglas Adams references he was going to do the same. The Doctor can’t get behind the name – apparently chosen because the Titanic was Earth’s most famous cruise liner – but he soon gets into the flow of things and starts to enjoy himself, chatting up Astrid (Kylie Minogue), one of the waitresses.

Not all of the serving staff are biological, however. Some of the more menial aspects of looking after the guests are taken care of by robots, dressed as angels, but they’re beginning to glitch out. Why, between that and the somewhat art deco-ish aesthetic of their face plates, these might not just be robots… they could be cousins to The Robots of Death! On top of all that, Captain Hardaker (Geoffrey Palmer) is apparently intent on engineering a collision between the ship and a rain of meteorites which will surely destroy it and kill off all the passengers. It transpires that Hardaker – terminally ill and promised ample payments to his family if he goes through with this – agreed to engineer this disaster. It’s down to the Doctor to help the survivors get off the ship alive, stop the ship crash-landing on Earth (since if its engines blow it’ll wipe out all life on the planet), and discover the reasons behind this hideous waste of life…

In other words, it’s “Doctor Who does The Poseidon Adventure“; once the meteorite strike happens the focus is largely on the Doctor trying to rally the survivors as one by one they fall victim to the perils of the broken ship and the stalking robots. This is fairly solid, standard stuff which is difficult to get wrong, and for the most part it’s entertaining in an enjoyable, unchallenging way which makes this pretty decent Christmas fare. There’s not much to complain about beyond a few more fat jokes than is really appropriate and some pacing issues.

Doctor Who Series 3: Doctor, Allons-y!

The story so far: after emerging from the wake of the Time War, the Doctor found a new lease of life after regenerating. In Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, he had to fight simultaneous invasions of Earth by the Daleks and the Cybermen; by the end of Doomsday the Doctor had lost Rose but hit on “allons-y!” as a catchphrase, and also encountered a random woman in a bridal dress who’d somehow appeared on the TARDIS whilst it was mid-flight…

The Christmas special which precedes Series 3 proper is The Runaway Bride, penned by RTD and directly addressing that enigma. It turns out the titular bride is Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and she has no idea why she is here either – she got teleported in right in the middle of her wedding ceremony. Donna is outraged because she thinks the Doctor’s kidnapped her – the Doctor’s confused because someone teleporting into the TARDIS when it’s in mid-flight is very weird indeed, and it’s unprecedented for an ordinary human without whizzy technology or an unusual power source to do it. Can the Doctor and Donna figure out what’s going on and get back to the church in time to finish the ceremony?

Tate’s wonderful here – it’s no surprise they brought her back as a full-time companion for Series 4. Donna’s emotional tenor is different from most companion we’ve seen before – she’s more outraged and annoyed to be whisked off on this bizarre adventure than she is thrilled by the possibilities, which is new for the revived show and was only rarely the case in the classic show (Tegan, Barbara, and Ian spring to mind). The difference is that Tate made a splash as a comedian before she was cast here, so she can play that for laughs the way previous companions couldn’t. She can play scenes more seriously when necessary, but whenever a scene is meant to be funny she enhances it a lot, and since the RTD era leans into comedy more than any since Douglas Adams was script editing this is a major asset.

It’s not all about Donna – Davies works in some nice moments for the Doctor to feel his feelings about Rose, just enough to avoid the sense that he’s not simply got over there but not so many as to disrupt the flow. And of course there’s the actual plot – stuffed with secret Torchwood facilities, shafts dug to the centre of the Earth (avoiding the complications encountered in Inferno), and a great foe in the form of the Empress of the Rachnoss (Sarah Parish), a big scary spider mommy.

The demonic aesthetic of the Empress, combined with the imagery around her raising her people from the Earth’s centre with this being heralded by a wandering star in the night sky, smuggles a fun Hammer Horror Satanism spin to a Christmas special – complete with a wandering star heralding a malign second coming. The spider aesthetic makes the resolution (a spot of genocide, though as in The Age of Steel it’s directed against folk who were plotting a genocide of their own) a grand-scale retelling of Insy-Winsy Spider. And the final destruction of the Empress is not at the hands of the Doctor but the British military, ordered in by Mr. Saxon – who we’ll get to by the end of Series 3. RTD intertwines all of these thematic elements and makes the juggling act look easy, yielding the best story he’d personally written since Series 1.