Doctor Who: Big Fifth-ish, Part 1

When it comes to the original Big Finish roster of Doctors, the Sixth Doctor was in most need of rehabilitation via Big Finish audio drama (what with his televised tenure being severely compromised) and the Seventh Doctor had the least to prove (due to having a really very good run on television). By process of elimination, this meant that the Fifth Doctor was hovering somewhere between the two – though perhaps a touch closer to the Sixth Doctor end of the scale than the Seventh, since Davison has gone on the record as saying that he’d have stuck it out in the televised role for longer if he’d had more material on the calibre of his last story. But when that last story is The Caves of Androzani – widely acknowledged as being one of the best serials the classic show ever aired – that’s setting a very high bar indeed.

That said, when the back end of his run saw ample signs of the blight which would smother Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor right out of the gate, perhaps solidly entertaining audio dramas which steer clear of the pitfalls of the worst Fifth Doctor tales is a reasonable enough target to aim for? Certainly, that’s the standard which was hit by Phantasmagoria – the first Big Finish audio drama that Davison had to himself without McCoy and Baker butting in. Let’s see whether his crop of Big Finish stories from 2000 improved on that.

The Land of the Dead

It’s just Nyssa with the Doctor here, situating this in between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity during that unexplored bit where they were implied to have had a bunch of adventures together after they dumped Tegan at Heathrow. Nyssa and the Doctor have arrived in Alaska, where the TARDIS seems to have caught wind of an anomalous power source. After a brief blip into 1964, the TARDIS settles in 1994 – where oil baron Shaun Brett (Christopher Scott) is building himself an expansive house, making extensive use of local materials (including animal pelts and the like) in a way which local indigenous folk find deeply obnoxious and disrespectful. The locals may have a point: strange forces have been roused – forces for whom masses of fossilised bone, such as Brett has been collecting, make ideal vessels…

This is an audio drama I couldn’t get into, and a chunk of that is because I just wasn’t able to overlook the elephant in the room. Some of the characters – Gaborik and Tulung – are meant to hail from the Koyukon First Nations people, but their voice actors (Andrew Fettes and Neil Roberts) very much don’t hail from that background. Indeed, one of them seems to be deliberately adopting a stilted speech pattern to indicate “I am playing someone of a particular ethnicity”, and whilst accents are certainly a thing it’s awkward when this sort of mimicry happens. White actors voicing a Black characters and putting on deliberate “Black” accents to play that role is something I think most of us would be uncomfortable with, after all – and I feel like the same principle applies here.

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.

Doctor Who Season 25: Doctor In Remembrance

The story so far: the troubled Sixth Doctor era of Doctor Who brought the show to the brink of cancellation, and the show is now on Death Row – but the BBC have not yet got around to cancelling it, allowing it to exist in a twilight half-life until they decide they need to free up the schedule and meagre budget for something else. However, a dynamic new Doctor – Sylvester McCoy – and an ambitious script editor – Andrew Cartmel – have done a fine job of turning things around with their first season on the show. Now that Cartmel has begun to put together a new coterie of writers for the show, and inject the scripts with more political sensibilities than they’ve had since the Pertwee era, can McCoy and Cartmel bring about a new golden age for the show? Bringing in Sophie Aldred as new companion Ace at the end of last season was a good start…

Ace’s first proper story as the sole full-time companion is Remembrance of the Daleks – an offering from new writer Ben Aaronovitch, who will later go on to pen the Rivers of London series. The Doctor and Ace have arrived in 1963, in the general vicinity of Coal Hill School, a bit after the First Doctor and Susan abducted Barbara and Ian back in An Unearthly Child. But the Doctor isn’t here to drop off a sick note to explain Susan’s absence… as Ace tries to figure out pre-decimalisation currency, the Doctor is investigating a mysterious van, which turns out to be part of a military investigation.

Soon soldiers are being found dead in the vicinity of Totters’ Lane scrapyard, and the Doctor diagnoses Daleks. Yet we aren’t merely dealing with some stragglers from The Chase trying to pick up the Doctor’s trail. It turns out that when he fled Gallifrey, the Doctor took with him the Hand of Omega, a superweapon he decided the High Council couldn’t be trusted with. He’d arranged for it to be stowed carefully away in the vicinity before Barbara and Ian’s unplanned visit prompted his departure from the time period – and now time-travelling Daleks are intent on retrieving it.

The armed forces of 1963 are in no sense equal to stopping a Dalek incursion – why, UNIT doesn’t even exist yet – and the Daleks are not only using brute force but exerting an influence on select local dignitaries. They even have hover-skirts that allow them to tackle stairs now! There are, however, three crucial advantages the Doctor has going for him. The first is that he knows the territory. The second is that there are multiple Dalek factions after the Hand, and this inevitably leads to them working at cross-purposes. And the third is that the Doctor has an Ace up his sleeve…

“OH SHIT, SHE’S BE-HIND ME, IS-N’T SHE?”

After Destiny of the Daleks needed a rescue operation on the part of Douglas Adams to save it and Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks turned into ugly Sawardian grim-fests, some writers would been tempted to simply drop the Davros/Dalek civil war thread entirely and tell a standalone Dalek story. Instead, Aaronovitch and Cartmel end up adopting a well-judged relationship with the past canon here – both of the Daleks and of the Time Lords, given the Hand of Omega stuff. Early on the Doctor gives Ace a quick rundown of the backstory she needs to know – the way the Doctor throws out “they conquer the Earth in the 22nd Century” and treats it lightly is great – and then we’re off.

Doctor Who Season 24: Doctorin’ the TARDIS

The story so far: the Sixth Doctor error era is over, the culmination of three seasons of John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward comprehensively mismanaging Doctor Who. Saward has thrown all his toys out of the pram and quit, and John Nathan-Turner has been left a prisoner of the producer’s chair, unable to quit without killing the show but also unable to run the show in the way he had become accustomed to. There was nothing left for it but to appoint a new script editor – Andrew Cartmel – and to let him have his head. Doing a big clever season-long arc in the form of The Trial of a Time Lord had not had flattering results; maybe just churning out some decent Doctor Who stories and hoping for the best would work?

The reduced running time of season 23 stuck, so with 14 episodes to fill Nathan-Turner and Cartmel went with a four serials per season model, with each season consisting of two four-episode stories and two three-episode stories. In concept, having more three-episode stories is a fine idea: there’s too many four-episode stories which have to spin their wheels a little to fill their running time, and two-episode stories often don’t have the space to fully explore their ideas, so three episodes feels like an obvious compromise which the show had bizarrely failed to explore up to this point.

Legend has it that when Eric Saward quit the show, he took with him all of the scripts in the slush pile, leaving Andrew Cartmel in the position of having to start again from scratch. For the most part, Cartmel took the opportunity to put together a brand-new stable of writers – the Saward-era cadre had clearly not panned out, and whilst Saward’s griping about his time on the show would regularly include moaning about not being able to get good writers, Cartmel’s successes make Saward’s failure all the more embarrassing, though to be fair Cartmel only needed to fill four stories per season. Clearing out the pool of older writers at the start of the Nathan-Turner era was an error, of course – but it’s one thing to dispense of a bank of high-quality writers with a solid track record, another to flush a writing pool which had become contaminated by the misguided Sawardian experiment.

In fact, there’s only one Cartmel-era story which was written by pre-Cartmel writers, and that’s Time and the Rani – a story which Pip and Jane Baker had pitched and had commissioned prior to Cartmel getting the job, and so something he had to make the best of before he could bring about his new era. There’s an aptness to this, though; between the gentler tone The Mark of the Rani offered up in the midst of the nastiness of the rest of season 22 and the way Terror of the Vervoids offered a classic-style Base Under Siege story, and the fact that the latter was actually good, they were the least Sawardian authors of the Sixth Doctor era. But are they up to telling a regeneration story?