The Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm – From Genesys To Revelation

Although the Doctor Who wilderness years of 1989-2005 produced a few chunks of new content directly made or co-produced by the BBC – the TV movie, the two 1990s audio dramas featuring the Third Doctor, and charity skits like Dimensions In Time or The Curse of Fatal Death, plus a trickle of webcasts – it can be argued that the really important developments were happening elsewhere. When Russell T. Davies brought the show back in 2005, he correctly realised that a new approach was needed, and precedents for that approach had arisen not in the bosom of the BBC television production process, but in the various licensed tie-in materials produced during the era.

Perhaps the most seminal of these were the Virgin New Adventures. Virgin Books had bought out Target – the publishers of official Doctor Who novelisations – and had retired the Target branding in favour of their own in the early 1990s. By this point, the editorship of the Target range had been taken up by Peter Darvill-Evans – readers of my RPG blog might remember him as the author of several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, namely Beneath Nightmare Castle, Portal of Evil, and Spectral Stalkers. Darvill-Evans had a problem on his hands: after the classic show was cancelled in 1989, the flow of new Doctor Who TV stories to novelise was drying up, and even a left turn into novelising unproduced stories (like the scripts written for Season 23, before they were all shitcanned in favour of The Trial of a Time Lord) could only delay the inevitable cliff-edge. For the Doctor Who book line to continue, it would need to start producing wholly original material.

Supplications were made to the BBC, and permission was granted to inaugurate the New Adventures – billed as a series of fresh Doctor Who adventures running to longer page counts than typical Target novelisations did and aimed at a more mature audience, Virgin shrewdly calculating that, given that the show was off the air and viewership figures for the last few seasons were lousy, their primary audience was going to be aging fans, not kids newly hooked on the show (and youngsters had the entire Target range to enjoy anyway).

Debuting in 1991 (along with Time Lord, a Doctor Who RPG co-authored by Darvill-Evans), the New Adventures focused on the Seventh Doctor as the current incumbent; eventually a Missing Adventures line would start up to provide a haven for stories about previous Doctors. After the TV movie, the BBC decided to revoke the licence, assigning production of subsequent Doctor Who novels to BBC Books, but their Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures lines would be fairly clearly modelled, both in terms of page count and contributing authors, on the work previously done by Virgin on the New and Missing Adventures.

These new novel lines in turn would be wrapped up after the revived series began, as part of a new approach to make sure new Doctor Who books were tied more closely to the ethos of the TV show and were aimed at the same audience – but by that point, the New Adventures had spread their DNA far and wide. As well as being influential on those other novel lines, they’d also be key to the foundation of Big Finish; the company made its start producing audio adventures inspired by the New Adventure novels which Virgin put out after they lost the licence, which weren’t able to touch Doctor Who canon but could make use of Dr. Bernice Summerfield, a companion introduced in the novel line who’d become something of a breakout character. It was only subsequent to this that they got the Doctor Who licence – but of course their early Doctor Who adventures made use of the knowhow and infrastructure they’d developed producing Bernice Summerfield audio stories, meaning that the New Adventures inevitably shaped them.

Between them the New Adventures, Missing Adventures, Eighth Doctor Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, and Big Finish audio dramas constituted a massive body of new Doctor Who material produced during the wilderness years, and if you were contributing to this morass of tie-in fiction, chances are you were being influenced by the New Adventures. And when RTD was reformulating the show he didn’t focus on the classic series, he didn’t follow the lead of the TV movie, and he didn’t seem to pay much attention to the Third Doctor audios – it was to this hive of creative activity he looked for his new ingredients. Not only did RTD cherry-pick talent from this scene to help him out with the revived show – figures like Mark Gatiss, Nicholas Briggs, Paul Cornell, and even Steven Moffat – but he also was a contributor, writing the New Adventures novel Damaged Goods.

That’s a pretty significant legacy – but the origins of the New Adventures lie in the first four novels of the series, forming a connected series known as Timewyrm. And this, it turns out, is definition of a rough start…

Mini-Review: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

It’s the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, and Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy aren’t feeling celebratory. Grand Moff Steven’s shooting this Day of the Doctor thing and is using their likenesses from archive footage, but is he giving them a guest spot like Tom Baker? No. Is he giving them a fun little minisode like Paul McGann? No! This is rubbish, and something must be done – so the three spurned classic Doctors team up. If Moffat won’t even invite them to participate, they may as well simply gatecrash the filming and sneak their way into the production…

Whilst The Day of the Doctor marked the show’s 50th Anniversary with a continuity-heavy episode which leaned into the show’s mythology whilst also revising it, and An Adventure In Time and Space provided a hagiography of the original production team (and proved fresh for revision in its own way, with the final scene where William Hartnell has a vision of Matt Smith at the TARDIS controls being remixed to show Ncuti Gatwa in the most recent retransmission), The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot might be my favourite part of the anniversary celebrations. It’s a zero-budget, cheap little thing that’s full of heart, and that’s what those three Doctors’ eras were at their best, and whilst it could have gone very, very self-indulgent with the cameos, it actually uses them more artfully.

Peter Davison not only co-stars in this – he also wrote and directed it, and it was produced by Georgia Tennant, his daughter and David Tennant’s wife. This isn’t a Davison family love-in by any means, however – as well as bringing Colin and Sylvester along for the ride, Davison crams in cameos from a dizzying number of actors and behind-the-scenes contributors to the show from over the years, both from the classic era and the revival period, giving a heap of folk who weren’t participating in either of the bigger, fancier anniversary spectaculars a chance to be involved in some small way.

Most of the humour is at Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s expense; Davison is initially set up to be desperate to be involved because he told his younger children he would be, but it quickly becomes apparent that they don’t really care and so he’s only trying to get into The Day of the Doctor to serve his own ego. The dream sequence he has where Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman, and Steven Moffat all heap praise on him as he turns up to take part in the reboot, only for Janet Fielding to show up to tell him he’s fooling himself, is superb.

McCoy overhyping his part in The Hobbit (and Davison dismissing it as a “flash-in-the-pan $5 million dollar picture” and Colin Baker being openly catty about the whole thing) is similarly good – and he even managed to get Peter Jackson and Ian McKellen to film a bit for the special on the set of The Hobbit, which is probably the best thing shot on that set come to think of it. Colin Baker is a particularly good sport here, depicting himself obsessively trapping his family in the living room to endlessly rewatch the Vengeance On Varos DVD extras, but all three Doctors throw themselves into the joke where each of them is fixated on their past in the show.

Having thoroughly made fun of himself and his co-conspirators, Davison has room to take a few pops at others. The joke where they call Tom Baker only to call the Fourth Doctor midway through Shada (at the same instant he and Romana are snatched away during The Five Doctors) is particularly good, because on the one hand, you can read it as praising Tom for being more authentically Doctor-y than any of them, but on the other hand you can read it as razzing him for not taking part in The Five Doctors.

The best jokes, however, are those directed at the showrunners. Moffat at his desk playing with his action figures is about as devastating a slam on his stewardship on the show as you can hope for, and he’s going along with it happily here with all the lack of self-awareness of someone who doesn’t realise how accurate the joke it is. Moffat having a nightmare in which a host of companion’s faces swirl around, like the Fifth Doctor’s dying vision in The Caves of Androzani, is also chuckle-worthy, particularly with the way Matthew Waterhouse/Adric prompts him to jerk awake like it’s a nightmare, and having the final scene showing the Grand Moff in the process of editing The Day of the Doctor and cutting to credits when he says “cut it” is a neat Vengeance On Varos nod.

Moffat isn’t the only showrunner to get it in the neck; the gag where RTD phones up towards the end and it turns out he’s just as desperate to appear in the spoof as the Doctors are to be in The Day of the Doctor is lovely too, as is the shot of action figures on his desk. (It’s even funnier now he’s showrunner again – talk about playing the long game!) Still, at a point when the show under Moffat had lost the sense of effortless fun it had formerly enjoyed, something like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was just what was needed to bring things down to Earth a bit.

According to McCoy, the BBC said no to a sequel for the 60th Anniversary, but really that’s fair enough – between cameos in The Power of the Doctor and episodes of Tales of the TARDIS focused on them, the Fifth to Seventh Doctors have been getting a fair bit of love recently, so the schtick wouldn’t work. Besides, a better comedy concept presents itself – Mark Gatiss has been talking up the idea of doing a sequel to An Adventure In Time and Space chronicling the 1985 hiatus and The Trial of a Time Lord, and that has scope to be an even better farce. Unless and until that happens, this is the Doctor Who equivalent of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace or Cruise of the Gods, in terms of being a comedy about the people behind a beloved show – except this time the show is real.

Doctor Who Series 7: The Doctor Should Be Louder, Angrier, and Have Access To a Time Machine

The story so far: after a patchy first season, there were some signs in Matt Smith’s second season that Grand Moff Steven was righting the ship, albeit with an unfortunate emphasis on convoluted plot arc stuff and an overfondness for using “Doctor who?” as diegetic dialogue. We begin Series 7 with the Doctor having discovered that the Silence – the second of the multiple big teamups out to destroy him he’ll face over the course of his run – were trying to kill him because it was prophesised they’d be destroyed if the Question – “Doctor who?” – were answered on the fields of Trenzalore.

We’ll eventually get there… kind of. But fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a slog. We have a full thirteen episode season, divided in two with a Christmas special in the middle, and then a 50th Anniversary special before the final Christmas special. And for the first time since the revival show began, there’s no multi-part stories, so I have an eye-watering 16 stories to cover here. Pack a lunch, we’re going to be here for a while.

Oh, and content warning: there’s some sexual assault stuff coming up and the Doctor’s responsible this time and I rant about it a lot because, well, it’s the Doctor sexually assaulting people (yes, people, it happens multiple times). It’s not cool.

We kick off with the Moffat-penned Asylum of the Daleks, in which the Doctor is captured by the Daleks, as are a freshly-divorced Amy and Rory, and the trio are dragged before the Dalek parliament… But not for execution. Instead, it turns out that the Daleks want the Doctor’s help, since a crisis has arisen which is well beyond their ability to deal with via the methods they have to hand. Specifically, something’s gone south on the Dalek asylum planet – a place where they dump all the Daleks who are too twisted to be controlled but the Dalek authorities don’t want to simply execute. (Apparently the insane Daleks are so full of hate the other Daleks consider them sacred.) A rogue transmission has been emanating from the planet – the opera Carmen, which it makes no sense for any Daleks to be transmitting.

At the other end of the transmission is Oswin Oswald (Jenna Louise-Coleman), a surviving crew member from the starliner Alaska, which has crashed on the planet. That implies a major security problem: if the Alaska could get on, Daleks on-planet could conceivably get off. Oswin explains she’s been surviving onworld for a year or so, in part by hacking Dalek technology. The Daleks want the Doctor to go down and shut down the planetary force field so they can declare Exterminatus on the place, reasoning that the Doctor, as their nemesis, is just the man for the job. The Doctor just wants to get himself, his companions, and the Alaska survivors away safely. There’s two problems: something is badly wrong with Oswin, and an entire ward of the asylum is dedicated to Daleks with Post-Doctor Stress Disorder…

The Doctor Who AudioGO Dramas: Doctor In a Nest!

There’s an utterly vast amount of Doctor Who audio material out there – soundtracks of missing episodes with narration added, audiobooks, audio dramas, and the like. The Pescatons and Slipback might have represented false starts, but the Third Doctor audio adventures from the mid-1990s were vital proofs of concept, and once Big Finish got their hands on the licence the floodgates opened.

However, for a good long time there was one thing Big Finish was not able to do: tell a Fourth Doctor story with Tom Baker reprising the role. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy were involved right from the start, literally: The Sirens of Time, the first Big Finish Doctor Who story, is a multi-Doctor tale including all three of them. Paul McGann hopped onboard with Storm Warning and has been a stalwart of their range ever since. Yet for a very, very long time, Tom Baker wouldn’t play ball.

Part of this seems to have been down to a reasoned decision to stay away from the role, and in Baker’s case this may be motivated by more than the usual worries about becoming typecast in the role. As the longest-serving and most widely-recognised classic Doctor, and the favourite of a great many, it’s not as though there was any great reserve of untapped potential to delve into. Unlike Davison or Colin Baker, nobody’s saying “What would have happened if Tom Baker had been given decent scripts during his time on TV?”, since his era is generally considered a peak on that front. Unlike Sylvester McCoy, nobody’s asking “What would have happened if that long-term plan for a darker direction had been fully enacted with Tom Baker’s Doctor?”, because there was no long-term plan to make him a mysterious manipulator, no Fourth Doctor equivalent of the Cartmel Masterplan. Tom, quite simply, had nothing to prove by coming back to Doctor Who, and potentially quite a lot to lose if he got involved in a tie-in project and it turned out to utterly stink.

Part of this, on the other hand, may have come down to Big Finish simply struggling to negotiate terms with Tom, who’s infamously prickly. It’s particularly notable that even when he did soften his stance on taking on audio roles as the Fourth Doctor and made his much-anticipated return, Tom Baker didn’t actually do so with Big Finish. He would eventually join them, and has been fairly prolific there ever since, but rather than jumping on the same bandwagon as the other classic Doctors he took a road less travelled.

That road took him through the Nest Cottage Chronicles, a series of some fifteen hour-long audio dramas consisting of three seasons of five episodes each – Hornets’ Nest, Demon Quest, and Serpent’s Crest. Penned by Paul Magrs, these were recorded for and released by AudioGO, a company which took on the BBC Audio line (formerly the BBC Radio Collection) for about three to four years until they collapsed in 2013 and the BBC took back the rights. Amazingly, the entire collection can be dipped into for the price of one shiny, eminently refundable Audible credit, so I decided to check it out to see whether it represents a rich, untapped alternate approach to making Doctor Who audio dramas, or a rather more elaborate take on the “audiobook with a few small dramatised scenes” approach of The Pescatons. (Spoiler: it’s the latter, but that’s being over-simplistic.)

Doctor Who Comics: The Fourth Doctor Anthology

The journal currently known as Doctor Who Magazine began as Doctor Who Weekly back in 1979, before switching to a monthly schedule in mid-1980. The brainchild of Dez Skinn, an editor at Marvel’s UK division, it was an official magazine coming out at a time when fanzines were on the rise, and John Nathan-Turner would pioneer the show’s engagement with the magazine over his tenure as producer, using it as a means to create hype and shape the conversation. Among the episode guides, interviews, news, and other features you’d expect from such a thing, the magazine also incorporated a certain amount of comics content from the start – establishing, in effect, its own strand of Doctor Who continuity which, like the various novels and Big Finish audios, looked to the television continuity as its basis but was otherwise working its own little patch of the universe.

The earliest comics, of course, feature the Fourth Doctor, since it was during Tom Baker’s reign that the magazine began. The Fourth Doctor-era comics had previously been collected – digitally cleaned up and presented in their original monochrome format – in two volumes from Panini (the current Doctor Who Magazine publishers), The Iron Legion and Dragon’s Claw; more recently, to tie in with The Star Beast being used as the basis of the first Fourteenth Doctor special, they’ve put out The Fourth Doctor Anthology, collecting the entire run of Doctor Who Magazine comics from the Fourth Doctor’s era between two covers.

Where the stories fit in continuity is an interesting question. The Doctor and K9 show up, and Romana is mentioned, but Romana isn’t present – whether this is because Lalla Ward wouldn’t sign off on the image rights or because an editorial decision was made not to use her I don’t know. Adric doesn’t show up either, and in general perhaps the best way to reconcile things is to assume that at some point between Shada and The Leisure Hive the Doctor and Romana got separated, with the comics forming a hidden extra Tom Baker season in between Season 17 and Season 18.

By and large, nearly all the strips are drawn by Dave Gibbons, artist of Watchmen; I will mention deviations but otherwise everything is in much the same style. The early strips generally pair him with John Wagner and Pat Mills as writers – two 2000 AD heavyweights, being respectively the creators of Judge Dredd and Nemesis the Warlock. Indeed, out of the gate this reads like a 2000 AD strip that happens to feature the Fourth Doctor. The first serial is The Iron Legion, in which the Doctor finds a parallel universe where the Roman Empire never fell but instead conquered the galaxy at the behest of sinister gods manipulating it from the shadows. (Warhammer 40,000 may have taken some significant influence from this.) We’re regaled with lots of violent action sequences, quirky supporting characters, and a mixture of grimdarkery and humour which is much like what Mills and Wagner were offering in 2000 AD at the time.

Doctor Who: The Slippery, Fishy Early Audio Adventures

Doctor Who audio dramas are pretty much a cottage industry at this point, with Big Finish churning them out in outright ridiculous quantities. As I’ve previously explored, Jon Pertwee and the core of the season 11 gang would team up in the 1990s to pioneer the concept of audio adventures starring past Doctors, which has been Big Finish’s bread and butter ever since – a corner of official Who output which, by virtue of being kept away from the newest Doctors, is obliged to forever carve out a corner for itself which is distinct from what the television show is currently doing.

However, there were a few previous times when presently-serving Doctors were called in to produce audio adventures during the run of the classic series. In the 1960s, Peter Cushing was involved in an attempt to make a Doctor Who radio series which would have had a parallel continuity to the television show (and might or might not have been in continuity with the Amicus adaptations of Dalek stories he’d appeared in as his version of the Doctor), but only a pilot episode was recorded and, after the BBC scrapped it, the recording seems to have fallen into obscurity and may well no longer exist. In subsequent decades, however, two audio adventures of significant did emerge. One of them smells of fish. One of them smells of Saward…

The Pescatons

The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive back on present-day Earth to discover strange things going on at the mouth of the Thames – a meteorite was observed falling into the sea just off the coast, and repeated expeditions to retrieve it have vanished without trace. Eventually, the Doctor and Sarah Jane discover the truth: the meteorite was an advance scout, and an invasion of Earth by the fish-like Pescatons is imminent!

Released as a single LP in the gap between seasons 13 and 14, this is only barely an audio drama; great swathes of it are narrated by Tom Baker in-character as the Fourth Doctor, and the only segments that are actually dramatised as such are a few conversations between him and Sarah Jane and a chat between the Doctor and Zor (Bill Mitchell), leader of the Pescatons.

Performed, then, by Baker, Sladen, Mitchell, and some sound effects, some compromises become necessary. Any scene involving conversations with someone other than the Doctor and Sarah Jane is summarised rather than played out, and occasionally these summaries are brief to the point of being bullet points. A glaring example happens early on: one moment the Doctor and Sarah Jane are fleeing a Pescaton on a lonely beach, the next we’re told about how they ended up discovering the backstory about what went on from this “Professor Emerson” person without being told how the Doctor and Sarah Jane actually got away from the Pescaton or found Professor Emerson.

Doctor Who Season 20: Doctor At a Reunion

The story so far: for about two decades, the Doctor has had several well-received onscreen incarnations. The era of the Fifth Doctor has begun, but things have been a bit shaky, with his first season suffering a slump in quality towards the end that concluded in Time-Flight, the most inept, racist, and incoherent story the show had put out for a long time (indeed, perhaps the first story ever to combine all three of those qualities at once to that extent).

However, season 19 pulled down decent ratings – the twice-weekly airings on Mondays and Tuesdays seeing excellent ratings compared to the tepid numbers that season 18 pulled down. For season 20, the show went out twice weekly again, the experiment having panned out. This time around, it aired on Tuesday and Wednesday, though I don’t consider this to be much of a shift compared to shifting it out of Saturday teatime – if your viewing habits had accommodated watching Doctor Who on a couple of evenings of the week, changing the day will likely not be a dealbreaker (unless, say, you have something regular on Wednesdays – but then your inconvenience is counterbalanced by the extra convenience a viewer who has a regular thing on Mondays enjoys as a result of the show moving away from there).

Johnny Byrne, author of The Keeper of Traken, returns to pen season opener Arc of Infinity. On Gallifrey, a hidden traitor among the Time Lords is conspiring with Omega (Ian Collier), who intends to return to the regular universe by fusing with a Time Lord’s physical body – and the Doctor’s body is the one that has been chosen for the job. When the Doctor survives Omega’s first attempt, he realises that someone’s been leaking his personal data, and whoever it is must have been mucking about with the Time Lords’ records – which means they are tampering with the Matrix itself. For their own part, the Time Lords have become aware of the problem, and send a recall signal, summoning the Doctor’s TARDIS back to Gallifrey – so the Doctor can be executed in order to put an end to this silliness.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, Colin Frazer (Alastair Cumming) and Robin Stuart (Andrew Boxer) are backpacking and have failed to get a room for the night, and so camp out in an abandoned pump house. They are awoken by what we the audience recognise as the materialisation of the TARDIS – but it is clearly not the Doctor’s. What comes out is a strange pterodactyl creature, which blasts Colin and turns him into a zombie servitor. After escaping, Robin fails to get the authorities to take him seriously, but does find a sympathetic ear in the form of our old friend Tegan, who is Colin’s cousin and who arrives in Amsterdam the next day hoping to meet up with him. What do these two enigmatic stories have in common? The linkage between the two can be traced via the Arc of Infinity…

Doctor Who Season 18: Doctor In Entropy

The story so far: after three previous incarnations, the Hammer-inspired horrors of the Philip Hinchcliffe era, and the comic stylings of Graham Williams’ tenure as producer, the Doctor has entered the 1980s and he’s facing the final boss of the classic series – John-Nathan Turner.

John Nathan-Turner – or JNT, as he’d often sign off as – is perhaps the most controversial off-camera figure in the entire history of the classic series. Part of this was because he was the producer for a good long time, and happened to have the job when the show got cancelled; if you pick anything that happened to the show in the 1980s, good or bad, you can probably find someone willing to credit or blame him for that. Part of this was down to Nathan-Turner’s approach to the job, especially his determination to have a clean break from the past. And another part of this was down to him having a unique relationship with fandom compared to any other producer on the classic show.

To tackle the latter part first, the unique thing about JNT’s interactions with fandom was that he bothered to engage with fandom in the first place. Previous producers simply didn’t bother to (at least, not whilst they actually had the job), in many cases because organised fandoms for televised science fiction weren’t really that much of a thing for their tenure. Sure, when Verity Lambert began the show there was an organised fandom of science fiction enthusiasts, but the focus of that fandom was very much on literary science fiction.

It took the original Star Trek to create a fandom specifically based around science fiction television, and that fandom had significantly different properties to that of the literary science fiction fandom, just as in its early days the RPG community had somewhat different characteristics to that of the wargaming community. The preponderence of women in early Trek fandom, and the willingness of fanzines to embrace LGBT+ themes at a time when doing so was incredibly radical, yielded a community with decidedly different characteristics.

With the passage of time, more televised SF shows developed such fandoms, and many such fandoms were strongly influenced by the Trek fandom – in part because the Trek fandom provided an existing model of “how do we grow a fan community”, in part because Trek fans were probably also likely to be fans of other TV sci-fi shows (especially in the wilderness years when there was no new Star Trek airing). Blake’s 7 arguably nailed the whole “BBC answer to Star Trek” thing because it garnered a fandom highly comparable to the Trek fandom, right down to the high levels of horny. The Doctor Who fandom that was evolving was much less horny – witness the howls of pain coming from great swathes of the fandom when the TV movie and, later, the revived series conceded that the Doctor might be horny sometimes. I don’t know whether there’s been any actual studies of its demographics, though the accepted wisdom is that it happened to include (and still includes) a fairly sizable number of gay men.

Doctor Who Season 17: Doctor In a Holistic Detective Story

The story so far: with the Fourth Doctor era now, in terms of number of seasons, exceeding that of the First, Second, and Third, Tom Baker has become synonymous with the role. The first chunk of his tenure, with the dream team of Philip Hinchcliffe producing and Robert Holmes as story editor, was magnificent, but current producer Graham Williams has a patchier record, with his first season in charge finding him and Anthony Read (the new story editor) struggling towards the end due to a horrendous economic crisis and his second season – The Key To Time – being commendable for its ambition but somewhat botched in terms of quality control.

Still, with the new season there was every reason to expect the script editing to tighten up – for Anthony Read, who’d done the job for the back end of season 15 and the whole Key To Time saga, was stepping down, and replacing him was one of the best writers the show had available: Douglas Adams. His first full serial in the role is Destiny of the Daleks, which is notable for being the very last story that Terry Nation wrote for Doctor Who. Put an asterisk next to “wrote”, however: although he was credited with the script for it, Douglas Adams alleged that he didn’t really receive a proper script from Nation for it, merely several pages’ worth of story notes largely rehashing old Dalek plots. Ken Grieve, who directed the serial, has backed Adams on this, stating that what you see onscreen is 98% Adams’ work.

Whether or not you believe Adams or Grieve, nobody disputes that the story was subjected to significant rewrites. K9 is in it, for instance – there’s some business about him staying behind in the TARDIS because he’s ill with robot laringytis, an excuse to replace John Leeson with David Brierley as his voice actor due to Leeson quitting (though Leeson would be back next season in the role) – and Nation has made it clear that he didn’t intend to include K9 in the story at all.

Likewise, Nation probably wouldn’t have been involved in writing the scene introducing Lalla Ward as a regenerated Romana – not least because it was a bit up in the air as to whether Mary Tamm would come back to shoot a regeneration scene. In the end she didn’t, so we have a bit where Romana is trying on different forms for her regeneration before settling on mimicing Princess Astra of Atrios (way to be a creep, Romana). People have griped about this because it seems to treat regeneration as far more relaxed and controlled than when the Doctor does it; my headcanon on this is that the Doctor is simply a bit rubbish at regeneration, largely because he only does it when he’s on the verge of death, whilst more capable Time Lords regenerate at a time of their choosing and are able to exert much more control over the process. (That said, it is kind of a shame Mary Tamm elected not to come back – because there’s a bit in the plot which would be perfect to have her regeneration happen in – and between Leela, the First Romana, and K9 Mark I, Graham Williams is now three for three on companions who get a rubbish exit.)

Doctor Who Season 16: Doctor On a Quest

After three excellent seasons shepherded by Philip Hinchcliffe, the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who had a slightly shaky transitional season as Graham Williams took on the producer role, with Anthony Read replacing Robert Holmes as script editor late in the season just as the budgets utterly disintegrated due to the UK’s economic doldrums. Now that Williams had settled in and the economic situation had somewhat stabilised, he could turn his attention away from fighting fires and try something ambitious – more ambitious, in some respects, than anything tried during the First, Second, or Third Doctor’s tenures: a season-long story arc, in which each serial would tie into one central story, The Key To Time.

We kick off with The Ribos Operation, by Robert Holmes, which is tasked with setting up the overarching plot: the Doctor’s finished building K9 Mark II, and has decided to go on holiday, but his journey is interrupted by a mysterious presence which overrides the TARDIS entirely and forces it to manifest. It’s the White Guardian (Cyril Luckham), a cosmic entity that even the Time Lords defer to, who informs the Doctor that the universe’s forces have been nudged so out of whack it’s necessary to pause time momentarily, adjust everything, and then start things up again.

The White Guardian, protector of the Kentucky Fried Cosmos.

To do that, though, the Guardian needs the Key To Time – a cube whose six components have been scattered throughout the cosmos and disguised as various different artifacts; he tasks the Doctor with finding them and returning them so that they can do the system reset on the flow of time, but warns that the Black Guardian, the White Guardian’s opposite number, will be seeking the Key for an entirely different purpose.

That’s not the end of the surprises for the Doctor at the start of the story; the Doctor will need someone to help him on his quest, and that someone is the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar (Mary Tamm), or Romana for short – a recent graduate from the Time Lord academy, where she aced every semester and she got an “A”. Romana brings to the table three important advantages: a total refusal to let the Doctor talk down to her or treat her as an assistant, a full awareness of how much of a bullshit artist he is, and the core of the Key, which allows the TARDIS to home in on the general proximity of the Key fragments, helps the holder zero in on its precise location, and causes Key components to revert to their true forms when brought into contact with it. Looks like K9 will have to wait for his holiday…