The Virgin New Adventures: Cat’s Cradle – Prophets, Seers, and Sages

The story so far: the Virgin New Adventures have kicked off with a bang with the Timewyrm tetralogy. Though a bit hit and miss – what with the first book involving John Peel being extremely skeevy about young teenage girls and the third book being pretty bland and unambitious – it did at least offer up a pretty good Terrance Dicks story about the Doctor and Ace foiling the Nazis, and it also offered Revelation by Paul Cornell, a radically experimental book which demonstrated now the New Adventures format and ethos could really push the bounds of Doctor Who. As 1992 came around, line editor Peter Darvill-Evans was tasked with continuing the series, and he did so by inaugurating a new named story arc: Cat’s Cradle…

Before I go into that, however, I’d better explain a bit about how I’m planning on tackling the New Adventures going forwards. Like I said at the end of my review of Season 26, the best way to approach Doctor Who tie-in media (and, quite possibly, the actual show itself) is to not worry too much about being completist but to instead cherry-pick appropriately, concentrating on what interests you and skipping over the bits which don’t work for you. That’s certainly how I intend to tackle these books. I’ll make a game attempt to read at least a representative portion of each one, but I reserve the right to give up after the first few chapters if a book doesn’t grab me. If a book seems to be good, I’ll read it, and if it seems to be bad in an amusing or interesting way, I may keep going, but if it simply doesn’t engage my interest then I’ll just skip straight over it and move on to the next. Life’s too short, you know?

Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt

The Doctor and Ace have stopped over in Perivale for a cup of tea and a fry-up at the greasy spoon in the wake of the Timewyrm saga. Bizarre temporal phenomena break out, and they hustle back to the TARDIS – which is, in fact, the cause of the problem. As the Doctor takes it into the time vortex, so if necessary he can purge it of contaminating matter without polluting London, it becomes apparent that something nasty has infiltrated it, and the Doctor and Ace become separated as the Time Lord heads out to look for the intruder whilst Ace keeps an eye on things in the control room. Meanwhile, aeons ago, ancient Gallifrey rules over a vast space empire. Yet space is not the final frontier to the Gallifreyans; now they are undertaking their first tentative experiments in time travel. A prototype ship – a Time Scaphe – undertakes the most ambitious time expedition yet, only to crash headlong into the TARDIS…

After the collision, Ace awakens in a strange world-city, ruled over by an alien entity known as the Process – the thing which infiltrated the TARDIS – and occupied by the crew of the Time Scaphe. Vael, one of the latter, has become the Process’s henchman, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. What is going on? Where is the Doctor? Where, for that matter is this city? And can Ace and the crew of the Time Scaphe beat the Process? The answers may lie with a bizarre silver cat…

Doctor Who Season 26: Doctor Surviving the Battlefield At the Edge of the Wilderness

The story so far: with his first season being a return to form for the show and his second being an outright triumph, Sylvester McCoy’s reign as the Seventh Doctor should by rights be the salvation of Doctor Who. Alas, Michael Grade is, well, the sort of person he was identified as being on Brass Eye, and had already decided the show’s fate. Only one more season would remain before the TARDIS dematerialised for the last time, and whilst it would rematerialise through comics, novels, audio dramas, and a revived series, these would all, necessarily, be different beasts from the original series.

Our final season opener is Battlefield by Ben Aaronovitch (the Rivers of London chap), a welcome return after he did such a good job with Remembrance of the Daleks. Our old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and his wife Doris (Angela Douglas) are enjoying a pleasant summer’s day. Now that he’s retired, Lethbridge-Stewart can get on with his gardening and trust the future of UNIT to its new Brigadier, Winifred Bambera (Angela Bruce). Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ace have picked up a signal hailing form Earth – and being sent forward, backwards, and sideways in time, crossing the boundaries between parallel universes. It hails from the vicinity of Lake Vortigern – the site of an archaeological dig, and in close proximity to the route of a nuclear missile convoy that UNIT is escorting.

UNIT are not the only troops on the ground – for forces from another timeline have arrived, called by Excalibur itself, which lies concealed in the lake. The good knight Ancelyn (Marcus Gilbert) is here to help, but ranged against him is an entire knightly order serving the sorceress Morgaine (Jean Marsh) – she of the King Arthur stories. Morgaine’s forces know the Doctor of old – recognising him as Merlin, Morgaine’s arch-rival. That’s certainly in-character for this Doctor, who we’ve learned is a bit of an arch-manipulator given to long-term schemes. But there’s one major problem – the Doctor hasn’t been Merlin yet in his personal timeline, which means that for once in their rivalry Morgaine knows more than he does…

In theory, this is another Aaronovitch story which, though it doesn’t overindulge in outright nostalgia, is still riffing on the deep continuity of the show – it’s the first time UNIT and the Brigadier have been seen since The Five Doctors, and even that (and Mawdryn Undead shortly before) was a bit of a nostalgia moment after Lethbridge-Stewart had been gone since Terror of the Zygons. And certainly, Aaronovitch has done his research. There’s a nice bit where, when the Doctor is preparing to reintroduce himself to UNIT, he hands Liz Shaw’s old UNIT identification card to Ace and tells her to use it; the story remembers – for the first time in ages – that UNIT is meant to be a United Nations force, and so there’s at least one Russian trooper represented under Bambera’s command.

(The story even carries on the tradition of further fucking up the UNIT timeline every time a UNIT-connected story is told. We’re told that the time period is a little way in Ace’s future, and Lethbridge-Stewart mentions “the King” at one point when, if Queen Elizabeth had been alive still, he’d have probably said “the Queen”, which means that it’s sometime in the 2020s at the earliest. Yet could 40 years have passed between this and Mawdryn Undead? That’s hardly plausible!)

Nonetheless, it’s much less reliant on continuity than Remembrance of the Daleks was; that story did a fine job getting you up to speed on Dalek history, but the joy of UNIT is that you don’t really need to introduce them in detail, for the purposes of this story you just need to establish that they were a military outfit the Doctor was involved with and they were run by that Brigadier chap that Nicholas Courtney’s playing. There’s exactly three nostalgia bits here of much significance: UNIT, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Bessie. The rest is brief references in dialogue, largely between the Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart, which aren’t dwelled on too much and contextually are clearly nods to old adventures which you don’t need to understand to follow this story.