Virgin Missing Adventures Reviews: The Plotters by Gareth Roberts (or, “King James and the Cold Gunpowder”)

Biblical literalism is just an early form of fandom.

~ Brian David Gilbert, discussing the ramifications of a Sonic the Hedgehog game based on the (writers’) Bible

It’s time for us to talk about fandoms. Yes, I suppose you can quite readily argue that any blog that devotes its time to talking about the tie-in fiction of a sixty-year-old science fiction series is always going to be talking about fandom in some way or other, but I want to go about that task in a more thorough and direct way than we typically do here at Dale’s Ramblings.

So, in the history of Western literature, the idea of a “fandom” that conforms in the strictest sense to our modern understanding of the term is a rather, well, modern phenomenon. Nowadays, it’s generally accepted that the first works of fiction to really generate this kind of organised, wide-spread fan following were the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Starting with the 1887 publication of A Study in Scarlet in the pages of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Doyle would ultimately pen fifty-six short stories and four novels featuring the character across a forty year time period.

Ironically enough, though, one of the most important contributions that the Holmes stories made was to be found in a period where there were no new Holmes stories. Having tired of the staggering popularity of his intrepid consulting detective, Doyle made the decision to kill off the character in The Final Problem at the conclusion of a battle with the nefarious Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls.

The reaction of the devoted Sherlockians to this manoeuvre was swift and forceful, with thousands of readers cancelling their subscriptions to The Strand magazine. According to legend, members of the bereaved fanbase even took to the streets of London attired in black to signal their mourning. This presented a marked contrast with the established paradigm of interaction between reader and audience, namely that there had usually been very little. As Jennifer Keishin Armstrong put it in a 2016 article for the BBC:

This sounds, of course, like just another day on the internet in 2015. But at the time, Conan Doyle had every reason to be shocked by the torrent of vitriol. Fans simply did not do this before then. (In fact, they weren’t even called “fans” yet. The term, short for “fanatic”, had only recently begun use in reference to American baseball enthusiasts.) Readers typically accepted what went on in their favourite books, then moved on. Now they were beginning to take their popular culture personally, and to expect their favourite works to conform to certain expectations. They seemed to actually expect a reciprocal relationship with the works they loved.

This expectation also manifested itself in the publication of numerous pieces of what we would today consider early examples of Sherlock Holmes “fan fiction,” and finally in Doyle’s caving to public pressure and returning to the late lamented detective with the release of The Hound of the Baskervilles in August 1901.

With this example, then, we can begin to see the formation of a new status quo. Not only did fans now exercise a much greater and more visible influence upon the decisions of creators, but these same fans were also beginning to realise the feasibility of their own capacity to define and shape the direction of a dormant franchise, however unofficially. The fan fiction craze was so widespread that even future Peter Pan creator J. M. Barrie got in on the action, dramatising his own opera-writing partnership with Doyle in The Adventure of the Two Collaborators, and even parodying the detective fiction genre as a whole in an unpublished play by the name of The Reconstruction of the Crime.

In the face of this shock to the established fictional order, there also came the need to differentiate between official and unsanctioned continuations of an author’s characters and world, and this brings us to the final major innovation of Holmes fandom: canon.

The first use of this term in reference to the novels and short stories written by Doyle is generally credited to English Catholic priest Ronald Knox’s 1911 essay, Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes, but scanning the actual text of the essay reveals that references to a “canon” are conspicuous by their absence. The closest Knox comes to drawing a Biblical parallel to the Holmes stories comes in the form of a comparison to the Synoptic problem of the first three Gospels of the New Testament; even this, however, is couched in the context of a more generalised list of some of the great preoccupations of critical analysis, a list which also includes references to Shakespeare and Aristophanes in the same breath.

As Jon Lellenberg notes in The Ronald Knox Myth, Knox was not even the first to apply these traditional analytical methods to Doyle’s work, with the writings of both Arthur Bartlett Maurice and John Sedgwick predating Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes by about a decade. Whatever the true provenance of these attitudes might have been, however, they still went on to set a precedent by proving that objects of fan curiosity could be treated with the same analytical rigour as more conventional, “high-brow” works of literature. In a very real sense, there’s a chance this blog wouldn’t exist without the foundations laid by people like Knox, Maurice and Sedgwick.

Now, if you’ll permit me to wind the clock forward a good fifty to sixty years or so, we’ll talk about another fandom, and it’s a choice of subject which probably won’t be surprising to any avid Dale’s Ramblings readers. In September 1966, there was a little show by the name of Star Trek. You may or may not have heard of it.

Although former Army Air Forces veteran Gene Roddenberry was lucky enough to be given a second chance after the mixed reception of his original pilot script, The Cage, NBC had seen the programme’s initially promising ratings dwindle. By the end of the programme’s first season, it ranked 52nd out of the 94 shows in the 1966-7 television season, and the network originally tried to have it cancelled at the end of its second season. Here, however, we witness another intersection between fans and the creative trajectory of cult franchises, as the fandom – under the leadership of Bjo Trimble – were able to procure a stay of execution by means of a vigorous letter-writing campaign to the network’s headquarters.

This stay may have ultimately turned out to be a temporary one, and the series would eventually wrap its third and final season with the disastrous Turnabout Intruder in June 1969, but it further proved what you might have begun to suspect from the example of The Hound of the Baskervilles well over half a century earlier. The business of creation was now just as much the province of the viewers themselves as that of the more traditional writers and network executives.

In the realm of acerbic and snarky fan criticism which Dale’s Ramblings could arguably be said to occupy, there perhaps exists something of a temptation to quote the purported reaction of Richard A. Rowland to the founding of United Artists and make some supremely snide remark about the lunatics having taken over the asylum, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. At this point, the trend towards a greater influence on the part of fandom was, by and large, of a neutral character. I don’t doubt that you would have been able to find corners of the community that were as toxic as any modern Twitter cesspool, but those sects were generally left to stew in their own filth until they begrudgingly quietened down.

The real problem, I think, came in the aftermath of the cancellation. Just as with Sherlock Holmes before it, Star Trek entered into a proverbial Wilderness Years after Turnabout Intruder. With the exception of the twenty-two episodes of The Animated Series from 1973 to 1974, it would not be until the release of The Motion Picture that fans would be treated to another live-action instalment in the adventures of the Enterprise, and it would take another eight years for the franchise to return to television.

In this strange liminal space – a period of dormancy which Star Trek has never rivalled in the 43 years since – a number of small but important shifts happened. Most immediately, the series found a surprising new lease of life in the world of syndicated re-runs, and this helped to ensure that the show would continue to attract new generations of fans. Keen to capitalise on this belated streak of good fortune, Roddenberry tirelessly toured the convention circuit throughout the 1970s. These appearances provided the bedrock that would underpin a new mythology of Star Trek, one in which – by happy coincidence – Roddenberry took centre stage as the architect of the final frontier.

The truth is naturally far more complicated than these narratives will admit. The appeal of mythology is, after all, in its explanatory capacity, and people tend to like simple explanations. Roddenberry unquestionably played a crucial role in the creation of Star Trek, and as such deserves to be mentioned in any narrative of the series’ history. At the same time, when you look at the man’s creative output in the decade after Turnabout Intruder, you begin to get a sense that he got very, very lucky that NBC liked The Cage enough to stick around for Where No Man Has Gone Before.

His television filmography in the 1970s, besides the aforementioned animated Star Trek series, consists almost entirely of failed pilots like Genesis II, The Questor Tapes or – in a move which cannot help but smack of a deep-seated desperation to recapture the success of The Cage, to the point of hiring its director, Robert Butler – the rather familiarly-titled Strange New World. He also picked up his lone screenplay credit for a 1971 sexploitation comedy, Pretty Maids All in a Row.

So Gene Roddenberry exists in the shadow of Star Trek just as much as the inverse. What’s more, a scan of Roddenberry’s contributions to the show – whether you consider The Omega Glory, The Savage Curtain or Assignment: Earth – would seem to suggest that the man was actually frequently responsible for some of the show’s weakest material. The myth of Roddenberry’s status as the lone innovator behind the vision of Star Trek is just as shaky as the myth of Robert Knox’s canon, neglecting as it does the vital contributions made by other writers like Gene L. Coon – who sadly passed away before Star Trek‘s syndication explosion and was therefore unable to provide any kind of workable counterhistory – and D. C. Fontana.

And yet, funnily enough, it’s a myth which actually intersects rather neatly with questions of canon. One of the more infamous chapters of the franchise’s history is the reign of Richard Arnold, a fan who happened to cross paths with Roddenberry at the first ever Star Trek convention in 1972, and the two would subsequently develop a close working relationship which saw Arnold being afforded a number of official franchise-related duties.

To draw a parallel to the history of Doctor Who and finally bring this discussion back on track, you could quite feasibly view Richard Arnold as something of a proto-Ian Levine. If that doesn’t set off all sorts of internal alarms, I don’t know what will.

Granted, there are some key differences between Arnold and Levine. To the best of my knowledge, for instance, I’m pretty sure that the former never released an embarrassing charity single – and with that remark, Dale’s Ramblings is two for two in mocking “Doctor in Distress,” folks – nor did he throw a hissy fit and declare himself to be done with Star Trek upon the casting of the franchise’s first female leading captain in Voyager. Perhaps more alarming, though, is that the types of duties Arnold was assigned were arguably far more substantive than Levine ever achieved in his heyday as Eric Saward and John Nathan-Turner’s “continuity advisor.” All licensed Star Trek tie-ins were ultimately subject to Arnold’s approval, and his decisions became notorious for their apparent arbitrary and illogical nature.

Levine could never have achieved this level of power, for the simple reason that the world of Doctor Who tie-ins just wasn’t all that developed in the mid-1980s. There was no Big Finish, and there were no New Adventures. Perhaps the two most prominent pieces of “Extended Universe” material at that time were the Target novelisations and the ongoing monthly Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. However, of these, the former was inherently dependent upon the existence of new televised Doctor Who scripts, and there never seems to have been any serious suggestion that the bigwigs at Marvel were labouring under the illusion that the magazine was ever going to be anything but a supplement to the TV programme.

If we bring the discussion further forward into what we will consider the “present day” for the purposes of this review – i.e. November 1996 – I think we can use this framework both to shed some light on the nature of Doctor Who at this point in time when judged in relation to some of its contemporaries, and also to help make some sense of this month’s Missing Adventure, The Plotters.

Most obviously, Doctor Who is currently in a leave of absence of its own, directly comparable to that stretch between The Final Problem and The Hound of the Baskervilles, or between Turnabout Intruder and The Motion Picture. Barring scattered aberrations like Dimensions in Time, the 1996 TV movie, or the 1999 Comic Relief special, the franchise would be consigned to the very fringes of pop cultural relevance for fifteen years, longer than either of the examples I just cited.

More important than that, however, is the fact that Doctor Who has adopted a method of living in those fringes which speaks to the shifting relationship between fans and writers in the 1990s. The New Adventures were renowned for having an open submissions policy, and it’s a policy which gave rise to some of the best new talent that the franchise had seen in a long time. What’s more, these new talents were almost wholly comprised of fans who had grown up with the original programme as a cornerstone of their childhoods.

Due to the influence of Levine, it’s too much to claim that the Cartmel Era and the Virgin novels represented the first time that the reins of Doctor Who were held by fandom, but it was almost certainly the first time that this change in ownership coincided with an actual high level of quality. As the 1990s dawned, it was also the first time that these shifts felt in tune with the wider pop culture landscape.

Virgin’s open submissions policy wasn’t some weird, peculiar blip, but was emblematic of the apparent default mode for many high-profile cult television properties at the time. After Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s writing staff was utterly devastated at the end of the second season in 1989, incoming Executive Producer Michael Piller had opened up the production office to speculative scripts from budding writers; this proved to be a decision which almost immediately bore fruit when it led to the discovery of Ronald D. Moore through his treatment for The Bonding, and genre television was thus introduced to one of the most enduring and influential writers of his generation.

On The X-Files, Chris Carter and his fellow producers were quite candid about their reading fans’ discussions on the fledgling Internet, to the point where the show is often cited as a defining moment in the development of a predominantly online mode of fandom. Certainly, discussions about “shipping” would go on to shape the contours of fandom in a way that had arguably not been seen since the original Star Trek introduced the world to so-called “slash fiction.”

Of course, all of these discussions did have something of a dark side. With the increased connectivity of the 1990s, it seemed, had come a concurrent growth in the persistence of those more argumentative sides of fandom. As we’ve said, these strains of fan thought had always existed in some form, but they were largely treated as something of an annoying irrelevance that most reasonable people ignored in order to get on with the business of… living life as an ordinary human being.

Sure, films like The Wrath of Khan or The Empire Strikes Back had been pretty controversial in certain spheres of their respective fandoms in the 1980s, but there was a sense that the weathervane of fan opinion had eventually swung around to the point where these works were now largely praised. Compare this to the fierce and hostile reception that Voyager, Enterprise or the prequel trilogy would be forced to endure, and it’s quite clear that something had changed.

Even Deep Space Nine, which was often unfairly overlooked at the time, seemed more likely to be discussed in disparaging terms of “to boldly sit” or as a betrayal of “Gene’s vision.” At the time of The Plotters‘ publication in November 1996, these complaints were soon to reach a fever pitch with the looming advent of the two-year Dominion War storyline at the end of the programme’s fifth season. The first substantive effort to tell a war narrative within the confines of Star Trek, it would draw condemnation from figures as diverse as Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, George Takei and Rick Berman.

(A notable exception to this rule is D. C. Fontana, adding what must be at least the 785th piece of evidence to the pile of “Reasons Why D. C. Fontana Was An Awesome Writer.” That’s all I have to say, carry on.)

And here we come to a bizarre truth of the historiography of Doctor Who fandom – and I think that’s the ultimate direction my recent reviews have been trending towards in regard to what they see as their chief business – which is that one key part of the trends one would expect to find in fandoms of this ilk has often been absent; that is to say, the business of mythologising Doctor Who‘s origins and creation is not nearly as systematised and industrialised as it has been in the case of something like Star Trek or Star Wars.

You’d never hear someone sincerely talk about Sydney Newman’s vision for Doctor Who as an ideal worth striving for in the same way as you would in the case of Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek, or at least, not anyone worth listening to. This is due perhaps in no small part to the fact that that vision would fundamentally exclude core pieces of the show’s iconography like the Daleks, but it also speaks to one of the central appeals of Doctor Who over other franchises.

To a certain extent, a lot of major media franchises are collaborative in nature, especially in the realm of television, but Doctor Who‘s ability to literally incorporate a philosophy of constant change into its very DNA has provided it with a peculiar, unique endurance all of its own. Because of that same sense of endurance and fluidity, however, it becomes very hard to pare the show down to a single “creator.”

And without a creator, can there ever truly be a definitive creation myth?

Well, yes, as it happens. Even if Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson and C. E. Webber might not make for convenient deity analogues in the world of fandom mythology, one figure who has proven almost as useful as any showrunner or executive producer is the leading man himself, William Hartnell. If and when you see a Doctor Who fan make an argument that brushes up against territory akin to “Gene’s vision,” it’s Hartnell’s name that they will most likely invoke.

The use of the actor in this manner is rather convenient for those who wish to retroactively mythologise the franchise’s past. He provides a clear link to the original state of the series, but he also passed away before Doctor Who fan culture really began to crystallise into the form that we recognise today, dying about two years before the organisation of the first Doctor Who convention at Battersea in August 1977. Because of this, you can avoid most of the pesky contradictions that might be thrown up if he had been around to give his opinions on the subject of fandom or what have you.

All of this perhaps serves to illuminate exactly why Virgin’s final two First Doctor novels are as strange and idiosyncratic as they are. While Venusian Lullaby, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Empire of Glass may not have slotted perfectly into the budgetary and tonal realities of the Hartnell years, The Man in the Velvet Mask and The Plotters still feel as if they are operating on another level.

In the case of those earlier works, there were bits and pieces that could probably be worked into actual Hartnell Era stories with a little bit of care: a sprig of 17th-century Venice here, a dash of Golden Age sci-fi conceptions of Venus there. In contrast, there is absolutely no way that the kind of grimy, Gothic alternate history hellscape exemplified by The Man in the Velvet Mask would ever grace the small screen, and it would take a fundamental reworking of the book’s identity to properly integrate it into its intended surroundings.

On the surface, The Plotters doesn’t seem quite as subversive as Daniel O’Mahony’s macabre slice of surrealism. Even if we concede that just about any Doctor Who novel can look like a gritty, grounded crime drama when put up against The Man in the Velvet Mask, we’re still dealing in the realm of the pure historical here, and that’s a wheelhouse that the Hartnell Era can virtually claim exclusive license to on television. In some respects, it’s kind of surprising that it took until the fifth book for the Missing Adventures to give it a try.

Whatever the reason, it gradually becomes clear over the course of the novel that there beats a cheeky, subversive heart underneath the superficially familiar exterior. This is perhaps most visible in the incorporation of queer themes in such a way as would never have been possible on British television in 1965.

As we’ve discussed in the review of Damaged Goods, the gap between The Space Museum and The Chase that this ostensibly fits between was still a good two years removed from the decriminalisation of homosexuality between consenting individuals aged 21 and over, and even this legislation was far from being some magical panacea that erased all hardships faced by the LGBTQ+ community in the United Kingdom. Lest we forget, the draconian Section 28 was still on the books in 1996, and the country had yet to equalise the age of consent for straight and gay couples.

This is the context in which we must read decisions like the focus on King James I and VI’s speculative homosexuality, or the presence of a plot thread combining the pseudo-theatrical crossdressing forced upon Vicki in The Crusade with the uncomfortably aged “Nero lustfully chases Barbara” sequences from The Romans. Even the uncharacteristic decision to prominently feature Hartnell’s tendency for line-flubbing in the Doctor’s dialogue hints at a playful spirit of subversion.

The significance of these revisions is only heightened by the decision to release The Plotters in the month of November. Not only does this date hold a particular resonance with regard to the historical Gunpowder Plot itself, but it also means that this book, with its slyly askew take on the trappings of the Hartnell Era, saw publication just two days before Doctor Who‘s 33rd anniversary.

In a way, it’s almost a shame that this proves to be the last First Doctor novel for almost eighteen months, given just how much promise is showcased in the approach favoured by these final two Missing Adventures to feature the character. By the time Steve Lyons comes around to offer us The Witch Hunters, we’ll be presented with a much more conventional pathos-drenched “pure historical” in the vein of stories like The Aztecs rather than The Romans or The Reign of Terror, meaning that this strand of experimentation largely dies a quick, quiet death before it can even really get going.

Indeed, from this point on the books seem to prove rather disinterested in the First Doctor. Across the nine year span of the coming Past Doctor Adventures, we’ll only be treated to a total of eight novels featuring the incarnation, representing a marked decline from the standard five Missing Adventures we’ve received from Virgin in a little over two years. For comparison, even the Second Doctor, having headlined only four MAs in all, would feature in a whopping eleven PDAs after making the transition to BBC Books.

This is all squarely in the future, however, and we’ll cross those particular bridges when we come to them. For now, let’s return to the present. As Elizabeth Sandifer notes in her 2011 essay on The Plotters over at TARDIS Eruditorum – a piece which you should definitely read and which, I concede, also provided much of the initial impetus for this review, even if I like to think I’ve taken that inspiration in my own particularly unfocused direction – it is The Plotters‘ use of this subversive tone which allows for a truly reclamatory reading of the Hartnell Era’s shortcomings. If the tyranny of Arnold and Roddenberry represents the more unsavoury impulses of fandom, then this perhaps offers a substantive portrait of the potential benefits.

Or, at least, it did once.

Yes folks, here’s the point at which I’m forced to pull the rug out from under you a little bit. Anybody used to reading Dale’s Ramblings at this point will probably have grown accustomed to long-winded dissections of peripheral nonsense before I try tying it back into a deeper discussion of the book’s characters and themes. Y’know, like a review or something. Crazy.

But, to be blunt, I don’t really want to do that here. It wasn’t a conscious choice when I set out to write the first portions of this post, just as it wasn’t a conscious choice that I haven’t so much as uttered the name “Gareth Roberts” until this point. As I got deeper into the piece, however, I found that those peripheral details were far more interesting to me than anything to do with The Plotters itself.

Don’t misconstrue my meaning here. The Plotters is a very good book on its own merits, and if you really require me to hew rigidly to the strictest definition of a “review,” I guess I can give you something of a lightning round of my opinions, broadly speaking. At the end of the day, I can’t wholly begrudge the acclaim with which this book is generally looked upon – with one very major caveat that we will discuss at some length in the Miscellaneous Observations, dear reader, don’t you worry – even if it is very much less prominent in the collective memory of fans than Roberts’ Season 17 novels. There’s a reason it routinely tops lists like Shannon Sullivan’s novel rankings, just as there’s a reason why all of Roberts’ Missing Adventures are ranked squarely within the Top 10.

There is, as I’ve said, a cheeky humour and intelligence to the proceedings that proves rather endearing, and Roberts proves a dab hand at evoking the language of the seventeenth century. All the regulars are in character, even as the plot around them develops in directions which it never would have done thirty years earlier. Appropriately enough for a book entitled The Plotters, the various twists and turns which Cecil and Catesby’s machinations take are plotted with a great deal of intricacy and cleverness.

However, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I have really just reached a breaking point in talking about Roberts’ books. This probably won’t be surprising at all if you recall the tone I took in my recent reviews of The English Way of Death or Fegovy, but I think it’s still worth signposting. In a world where trans people’s rights are continuously coming under siege from conservative lawmakers, I can’t bring myself to continue to act as if things are business as usual when it comes to perhaps the most prominent transphobe in the world of Doctor Who writers.

Now you might well object, protesting that this is a case of me letting my personal feelings on a book’s author cloud my appraisal of its merits. Maybe it is, but at this late stage of the game I simply do not rightly care. What you need to understand is that it’s been nearly four and a half years since I first covered Gareth Roberts’ work as a part of this project.

When I reviewed The Highest Science, fifteen and blissfully ignorant of his transphobia as I was, I had no qualms about singing the praises of his books. As the years have dragged on, however, he just keeps getting worse and worse with the intervening months between each novel. Whatever you think of my decision to analyse The Plotters in this fashion, I hope you’ll at least understand that this is not a snap, sudden decision, but the product of years of cumulative exhaustion finally getting the better of me.

Whatever the case may be, I still believe this latest instalment in the continuing saga of Gareth Roberts at least allows us to glean some important truths about the nature of modern fandom, even if they’re not especially uplifting ones. Underpinning all of my musings in this post – be they on the subject of Knox, Roddenberry, or Hartnell – and even filtering through into the book’s own portrayal of the translation of the King James Bible and the legacy of the Gunpowder Plot itself, is the idea of mythology. More importantly, I believe that there’s an even deeper acknowledgment from both corners of the ways in which the use of mythology often serves to shore up existing power structures, whether within fandom or the wider social landscape of the United Kingdom.

(After all, once you enshrine a failed coup in the form of a celebration in which you burn effigies of one of the chief conspirators, you’re trading pretty heavily on the mysticism of monarchy. These themes of history and mythology being dictated by the victor are only reinforced once you take into account the novel’s deviations from the established facts, and the way in which the contributions of Firking and Hodge are so quickly disregarded by Cecil.)

The Plotters, then, is ultimately most interesting to me as a window on a transitory period in fan culture, a time in which someone like Gareth Roberts, a gay man, could exercise more artistic and creative power over the mythology than may have been afforded him in years past. This was a power to engage in a redemptive reading of the Hartnell years, even in the face of anecdotal evidence that the series’ first leading man may have held some deeply problematic opinions on minorities, gay people and Jews.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we know how the story ends. When faced with the passage of time, and having been confronted by people saying “Hey, maybe that Tweet was out of line,” Roberts promptly dug his own heels in and refused to admit any kind of fault. At the risk of engaging in some dubious armchair psychoanalysis, I think that once fandom affords an individual with a great deal of power, visibility and relevance they’re naturally incredibly resistant to give up those things. When they’re challenged, or believe themselves to be challenged, they’ll end up going to great lengths to avoid any such “concessions,” even if it means spewing hatred against other less privileged groups in the process.

(Are we good to just briefly bring up the whole “Ian Levine quitting over Jodie Whittaker’s casting” thing again? Cool, we’ll just park that right over there and move on.)

I think this is ultimately what drove Roberts to where he is now, and it is this insight that I find to be the most interesting thing about The Plotters. Irrelevant, alienated from a franchise he once helped to shape, and writing for a reactionary tabloid, it’s a fate that would almost be pitiable if it weren’t for his continually using the remnants of his meagre platform to publish utter dreck that only serves to contribute to a deeply toxic political culture nested at the heart of Britain.

If there’s one thing I think you should take away from this “review,” though, it’s this: fandom is just a modern form of mythology at the end of the day. It might be cloaked in directors and producers rather than gods and demons, but the underlying structure is the same. As such, if we’re going to keep the current model of fandom – and to be perfectly honest, I think it’s become a bit too firmly entrenched to wholly overturn at this point – we need to be mindful of exactly who this mythology imparts power to.

As much as it pains me to admit it, Gareth Roberts is not an isolated case. The ranks of fandom are unfortunately stocked with scores of “fans” just like him, for whom movies and television exist only as cudgels to be wielded in an effort to legitimise and sanctify their own power as the ultimate and unquestioned authors of the narrative, like the dogmatic theologians of old that The Plotters itself so aptly evokes in the form of Haldann and Otley.

To paraphrase a certain wise man and apply his words to a totally different context – which, come to think of it, is also a good description of most theological enterprises throughout history – these efforts must be fought. And if we don’t endeavour to resist these attempts to further silence and disenfranchise already marginalised voices within the realm of fandom, and allow them to continue unabated?

Well, I hope you remember the example of the proverbial gunpowder, treason and plot, folks…

Miscellaneous Observations

For all that the association with Roberts has unfortunately tarnished my enjoyment of an otherwise superb book, the book has still aged rather fantastically in view of Joy Wilkinson’s The Witchfinders. I couldn’t help picturing Alan Cumming as King James in my head while reading this, which I guess just goes to show what an immaculate piece of casting it was. And the next First Doctor novel is entitled The Witch Hunters, you say? Hmm.

Speaking of “hmm,” there was originally going to be an entire bit here analysing the whole “Vicki crossdressing” plot thread in light of what we now know about Roberts’ rather regressive and reactionary takes on gender identity. My thoughts were basically going to be rather non-committal, acknowledging that it’s aged poorly but that it’s not as if Vicki’s identity as “Victor” is ever treated as at all analogous to the experience of trans people.

If anything, it’s clearly riffing on The Crusade as we discussed earlier, and if anyone is at fault it’s really the British comedy and theatrical establishment which still finds the whole “What-ho! That’s a person in different clothing from their gender assigned at birth! We must point and laugh at them post-haste, Horatio!” schtick to be so uproariously funny for reasons so fundamentally esoteric and impenetrable to me that they might as well be written in Enochian for all I understand them.

And, uh… and then all of that just kind of goes out of the window with the revelation that one of the villainous Hay’s numerous guises is that of a meek-mannered serving girl named Sybil. Again, the same provisos are in place here; none of this is really equatable with trans people, and if this were any other author I might just let it slide under the heading of “Well, whatever.” Here, though, this development seems to so uncannily mirror the standard sorts of fearmongering transphobic rhetoric that Roberts himself has gone on to peddle as one of the resident dross merchants over at The Spectator that I simply couldn’t bring myself to do that.

Yes, Roberts didn’t really seem to start buying into this nonsense until long after the publication of The Plotters, and yes, Hay does adopt male disguises as well. But, yet again, I am forced to return to the theme of this review, which is that I just don’t fucking care anymore. For all that The Plotters had some admirable qualities, it was this late revelation that really just clinched the deal and affirmed my decision to barely give Roberts’ books the time of day going forward.

So yeah.

Final Thoughts

I am profoundly split in two with regards to my feelings on this review. On the one hand, I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I hope I managed to communicate some decent points about the wider context in which The Plotters sits. On the other, though… this is easily one of the most soul-crushingly miserable creative experiences I’ve ever had to endure in all my work on Dale’s Ramblings.

I’m really just getting more and more fed up with Roberts’ nonsense as time goes on, and if you think that made me unreasonably angry and harsh on him throughout this review, I care so astronomically little that I’m going to have to redirect you to NASA’s Deep Space Network if you want to find the single, minute fraction of a rat’s arse that I have to give you.

Anyway. With a book title that is in no way ironic considering how bitterly cathartic the tone of this review has been – OK, well, maybe just bitter – join me next time when we will hopefully be able to cleanse our palates with the full-length debut of Matthew Jones in Bad Therapy, as Chris and the Doctor cope with the sudden and tragic loss of Roz, and a familiar face returns. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper