Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Dragons’ Wrath by Justin Richards (or, “A Dark and Stormy Knight”)

Justin Richards has always been a figure whose early career is rather difficult to parse without allowing future knowledge, gleaned with the benefit of hindsight, to loom large over the conversation.

This, in and of itself, is not all that noteworthy or insightful an observation to make of an author in this period. Just about everything in the Wilderness Years is haunted to some extent by the lingering spectre of the 2005 revival, as that’s one of the crucial events – a fixed point, even – which serves to define the contours of what exactly it even means for Doctor Who to have a definite “Wilderness Years” to begin with. If it weren’t for Rose, we’d probably still be talking about the programme as if it was just a series of books… or audios, or comics, depending on your taste.

But in the case of Richards, we’re faced with a situation that threatens to turn many of our fundamental assumptions about this era and its creatives on their head. Unlike some of the more star-studded names turned out by the New Adventures like Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, or Russell T. Davies, he never graduated to writing for the television programme upon its return.

Mind you, that certainly isn’t a slight against him, particularly in light of the BBC’s rather logical decision to err on the side of only hiring writers who have proven their television bona fides with prior writing credits for the medium. In fact, Richards is in this regard quite similar to someone like Kate Orman, and by any reasonable yardstick, that’s pretty good company to be keeping.

It’s also not my intention to suggest that he didn’t have an important part to play in the history of Doctor Who. Indeed, I myself can attest to this, as it was a copy of Richards’ 2005 guidebook The Legend Continues that served as my first exposure to the franchise to begin with, even if the fact that it only covered the first season of the revival meant that I remained almost entirely ignorant of the sheer pop cultural impact of David Tennant for the longest time. Hell, I read that thing from cover to cover so often that the spine detached itself.

But this also begins to gesture at the point I’m trying to make, which is that Richards very much came to serve as a reasonably safe pair of hands to whom BBC Books could entrust the larger Doctor Who brand and the cataloguing of its history in guidebook form without fear of his initiating anything quite as Earth-shattering and polarising as, say, the War in Heaven arc. It’s telling that he was chosen to pen the first New Series Adventure upon the advent of the range in May 2005, and he would go on to contribute at least one novel to each of the series’ first three batches of books.

While that might be all very well and good when one is a mere five years removed from the departure of Stephen Cole in the wake of The Ancestor Cell, Richards would ultimately occupy this position of relative primacy in the novel range for a frankly astronomical period of time, with his final NSA being 2014’s Silhouette, written to feature the Twelfth Doctor, fourteen years after he took the reins on the Eighth Doctor Adventures with The Burning and some twenty years after his debut novel, Theatre of War.

In other words, this is a rare situation in which a writer’s future work hangs over their early novels not because of its landing with a resounding impact in the lake of continuity, but simply through the sheer brute force of longevity, and the number of comparable artists I can think of who fit this profile is vanishingly small indeed.

There’s a natural temptation, in light of these facts, to try and map the arc of Richards’ career and thereby determine which novels served as pivots about which that career turned. Because a critic can rarely go wrong with inventing an overly granular and speific neologism – assuming your definition of “going wrong” doesn’t include “being a bit of a pretentious git” – I’m going to tentatively dub the larger process at work here “handsification,” which I’m loosely defining as the gradual transformation of an author into a stalwart and reliable member of a larger pool of writers.

Becoming a safe pair of hands, in other words.

And so we arrive at Dragons’ Wrath, which really feels like the first point at which it’s appropriate to float this subject. Even still, based purely on the information that would have been available to readers in June 1997, and not knowing just how prolific Richards would prove to be in the years ahead, there’s little here that seems to hint at the shape of things to come in a particularly overt fashion.

Scheduling-wise, the thirteen month gap between this and The Sands of Time isn’t too far out of line with established historical precedent, that being the same span which separated Theatre of War from System Shock. A release timetable of one novel per year puts Richards firmly in step with the vast majority of New Adventures authors, which is particularly ironic given that this is actually only his second contribution to the range as opposed to its past Doctor-focused sister line.

Of course, it’s the height of folly to try and pretend that we can ever wholly shut off our knowledge of the future in cases like these, so we might as well just do away with all pretense and note that Richards ultimately goes on to pen another three Benny novels before the close of the New Adventures just two and a half years from now. Given the three year gap we just noted between his first and second NAs, that’s a pretty significant change of pace. If we widen our consideration to include his novels for BBC Books from the same thirty-month period, and include Dragons’ Wrath in our tally, we’re looking at some eight books, all told.

Even if you want to discount all of that, however, there’s still a sense in which Dragons’ Wrath feels rather more casual in its ambitions than Richards’ earlier works. Theatre of War eschewed the traditional structure of the New Adventures in favour of a Bernice-heavy first half, while introducing a mysterious, scheming guest character whose Machiavellian plans even managed to trip up the Doctor. The Sands of Time tried to follow up a classic and well-regarded tale from the Hinchcliffe years. Even System Shock was clearly trying to be a cutting edge techno-thriller with a truly epic, global scope, though that edge was dulled considerably by the decision to focus on rather transitory aspects of the Internet, particularly in the entirely unironic references to such quaint Al Gore-isms as the “information superhighway.”

Superficially, Dragons’ Wrath features all the traditional Richards twists and turns, and it even affords Braxiatel a proper starring role for the first time since The Empire of Glass, firmly establishing the character’s status as a vital pillar of the world of Bernice Summerfield. Yet underneath it all, it’s hard to escape the impression that this is a novel which lands pretty squarely in the “business as usual” camp that typifies the process of handsification.

(Or, well, I’m going to say it typifies it, being my word and all.)

According to Richards himself in the ever-handy Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, this was very much a product of deliberate design on Virgin’s part, who wanted the second post-Doctor NA to contrast against the more out there elements of Paul Cornell’s initial panto-drenched salvo: “They wanted to do something completely off-the-wall and wacky for the first book, I suppose to intrigue people. The second book would then be much more typical of the direction of the series.”

Furthermore, although the first four books in the range – spanning from Oh No It Isn’t! through to Dave Stone’s Ship of Fools – were developed roughly simultaneously with one another, it was apparently Dragons’ Wrath which had progressed the furthest in the initial stages of development, and Richards consequently found himself fielding inquiries from his three authorial compatriots, lending them the first few chapters of his novel in an effort to harmonise ideas and characters across the line’s opening quartet.

With so much behind-the-scenes pressure being brought to bear on the book to serve as an anchor of stability amidst the chaos of a nascent fiction series, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should end up feeling rather workmanlike, and I don’t even necessarily intend the use of that adjective in a strictly pejorative sense.

After all, there exists one more substantial pressure upon the novel that we haven’t quite acknowledged just yet. While Oh No It Isn’t! and the fourth Decalog’s release date in mid-May 1997 occupied a liminal space between the end of the New Adventures’ most relevant form and the onset of BBC Books’ Eighth Doctor Adventures line, Dragons’ Wrath ultimately saw print on June 19, some seventeen days after the twin release of The Eight Doctors and The Devil Goblins from Neptune, placing it squarely in a post-EDA/PDA world.

In such a context, then, it only makes sense that one might wish to establish a certain baseline of normality for any curious readers who might have been lured over to examine the Virgin side of the fence. I mean, yes, one might ask why you wouldn’t do something like this in the series’ very first book, but we’ve already established in my review of Oh No It Isn’t! that I am supremely uninterested in litigating the question of whether or not it was a smart financial decision to lead with something as singularly strange as that novel.

And to give credit where it’s due, Dragons’ Wrath manages to project a reasonable image of normalcy, if nothing else. In presenting a tale of galaxy-hopping and long-defeated warlords having left ancient treasures lying around – that may or may not be all that they appear at first glance – it ends up serving as a far more reliable window into the kind of story that will predominantly be favoured by the Benny range going forward.

In practice, one cannot seriously suggest that every single book in the line will resemble Dragons’ Wrath, and the series will gradually become more comfortable in its utilisation of a more overtly experimental arsenal of literary devices ranging from unreliable narrators and metatextuality through to long-form serialisation and worldbuilding by way of the Gods arc.

Even so, Richards lays a framework here which is not only broadly functional, but is prevalent enough in later novels that it at least bears remarking upon, and if it perhaps seems like the most obvious and basic solution to the rather pressing question of “How do we structure the adventures of a spacefaring archaeologist, sans police box?” then one is left feeling that this is very much the point of the exercise.

In appraising that exercise, there is probably no better place to start than with the most enduring contribution Dragons’ Wrath makes to the future of Bernice’s adventures, namely one Irving Braxiatel. He has, admittedly, been around for quite some time, being concocted by Richards some three years ago in Theatre of War, instantly stealing the show and becoming one of the more fascinating and morally inscrutable members of the New Adventures’ ever-expanding guest cast.

And yet, by all accounts, the character’s genesis was marked from the beginning by a certain pragmatism, coming to take such a prominent role in the novel by sheer happenstance more than anything more deliberate. The Inside Story claims that Theatre of War was always planned to include the Braxiatel Collection as a fannish allusion to a throwaway line from Romana in City of Death – although, as has been pointed out, it seems that Douglas Adams opted for the spelling “Braxiotel” in his original script – with the proprietor himself never being seen.

It was only when it emerged that Gary Russell was intending to close Legacy with Bernice taking a brief archaeological sabbatical from the company of the Doctor and Ace that Richards opted to link the two novels together, and in so doing seized upon the opportunity to put a face to the patronage of the expedition to Phaester Osiris in whose employ Benny would find herself in the opening of the following novel.

This sense of making a rather judicious use of the character bled through into his subsequent appearances. Barring his obligatory participation in the grand celebration of the fiftieth New Adventure in Happy Endings, Braxiatel’s only stint as a guest star pre-Dragons’ Wrath came in Andy Lane’s The Empire of Glass, in which he was very clearly intended as an ambassador of New Adventures lore come to intersect with the Missing Adventures a la Cold Fusion. Much like the career of Richards himself at this point, then, the Braxiatel seen in Dragons’ Wrath seems to exist in a curious state of transition, a bridge between what the character has historically been defined as and what he will eventually be.

Indeed, we’re still several years removed from the establishment of rather crucial pieces of the character’s distinctive flavour. It isn’t until Tears of the Oracle that we’ll become party – in the oblique fashion characteristic of latter-day Virgin’s relationship with Doctor Who continuity – to a certain significant family connection, or get to witness his acquisition of KS-159, destined to become the home of his eponymous Collection and the long-time centre for Big Finish’s own Benny range. Miles Richardson won’t be tasked with bringing the role to life on audio until the recording sessions for Lance Parkin’s The Extinction Event, some four years hence.

In explaining the rationale behind Brax’s return in The Inside Story, it’s perhaps particularly revealing that Richards leans heavily on an argument based on narrative mechanics:

‘In all these sorts of things,’ says Richards, ‘you need some sort of mentor who can explain the boring stuff that you don’t want your hero or heroine to be bogged down with – whether it’s an ongoing character or a new one each time. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s the Marcus Brodie [sic] character for example, who can fill in the background though he doesn’t take a part in the action. […]

And as well as all the other things the Doctor is, he is that character. Sometimes you have somebody else as well who’s got local knowledge, but it’s a role that needs to be played. In a long series that isn’t about the Doctor, it’s not credible that Benny knows absolutely everything about everything. But it is credible that Brax can pop up and say, “Oh, you need to read this book,” or, “That will be when such and such happened.” It’s a nice, easy shorthand way for getting through some narrative strictures.’

This is, fittingly enough, a pretty decent showcase for the virtues of the rather more traditionalist style adopted by Richards when compared to someone like Paul Cornell or Kate Orman. For all that my talk of his “handsified” status thus far might sound like damning with faint praise, it cannot be denied that he possesses a canny grasp of moving a plot from point A to point B, nudging the narrative along with the surgical application of characters to serve the needs of a given moment.

(Wait, I’m still in that “damning with faint praise” mode, aren’t I?)

Moreover, it’s obvious to even the most casual observer that this discerning view of plotting extends to a pretty intimate familiarity with the most enduring pop cultural touchstones for the broad genre of archaeology-based adventure fiction into which the Bernice Summerfield series neatly slots on its most conventional of days.

(On the other days, you get something like Dead Romance, so good luck trying to figure that one out.)

Richards’ retroactive citation of Raiders of the Lost Ark is hardly surprising, given Indiana Jones’ pretty indisputable status as a titan among fictional archaeologists. It’s not even the first instance of the Benny novels taking some level of inspiration from the whip-toting adventurer, with Oh No It Isn’t! not-so-subtly namedropping Raiders in one of its chapter titles. Anyone who thinks it isn’t liable to happen past this point deserves to be rather publicly and vociferously laughed at.

But equally, there’s one other character who will inevitably prove significant in any attempt to start a series focused around a female British archaeologist in mid-1997. It is ultimately immaterial that Bernice has existed as a character in her own right for almost five years and more than forty novels at this point, because it seems virtually preordained by now that you’re eventually going to have to consider the influence of Lara Croft.

The Sega Saturn version of the first Tomb Raider game was released by Eidos Interactive in Europe on October 25, 1996 – just one day after Damaged Goods and Speed of Flight hit British bookshelves, if like me you’re the type of madman who seriously contemplates keeping track of history by means of Doctor Who books – with a hugely successful PlayStation port soon to follow in November.

In fact, the PlayStation version was so successful that it is frequently credited with having substantially boosted the console’s popularity, and it wasn’t long before a sequel was rushed into production, cementing Croft’s adventures as a fixture of the gaming world. And, y’know, pretty much wearing out the entire development team through a brutal six-to-eight month crunch period, but such are the depressingly prosaic realities of the modern video game industry, I suppose.

The vagaries of publication schedules serve to obfuscate just how much inspiration Richards could have feasibly taken from Tomb Raider, but it’s certainly not impossible that it influenced his thinking somewhere along the line. Whatever the case may be, Dragons’ Wrath would eventually find itself at the nexus of a fleeting hypothetical intersection between the two series.

When Richards wrote to the editorship at Virgin in December 1997 to propose that the company should make overtures towards acquiring the license to print original Tomb Raider novels from Eidos, he also offered a logical corollary by suggesting the development of video games based on Bernice’s adventures, possibly adapting existing novels in the New Adventures range.

One might quite reasonably be tempted to write off his specification of Dragons’ Wrath as a prime candidate for this treatment as a simple case of an author hyping up his own work, but once again we’re forced to contend with the apparent fact that Richards’ aforementioned strong grasp of narrative structure would seem to extend beyond the world of the written word and into that of the printed circuit, which probably shouldn’t be too surprising coming from a man whose pre-Theatre of War day job was writing technical manuals for IBM. Then again, I guess that only serves to further highlight just how dated and strange System Shock‘s whole “information superhighway” spiel really was…

In short, even allowing for the drastically different constraints and expectations faced by video games as compared to prose, the contention that this is a novel which would be well-suited by such an adaptation is broadly supported by the actual text of the book itself.

(Actually, given how seismically amateurish the Big Finish audio drama adaptation of the novel is – trying to cram the entire story onto a single CD and completely omitting Braxiatel in the process – it would be very difficult indeed for such a video game to be a worse adaptation, even if the plot were somehow operating on levels of complexity and incomprehensibility that would make Inland Empire blush…)

It’s all too easy to imagine the plot of Dragons’ Wrath transposed to a game in the same vein as Tomb Raider, containing as it does mysterious billionaire benefactors with hidden agendas, centuries-old secret societies, double-crossing “allies” lurking around every corner, and a stronghold riddled with secret passages in the heart of a volcano which erupts at a suitably climactic moment in the action. Of course, all of these are pretty standard and well-worn elements of the general adventure fiction playbook, and you could just as easily point to most of the items I just mentioned within the Indiana Jones films, say.

In the event, it’s the differences between the two series that prove most enlightening, and ultimately most complimentary, to the New Adventures’ general handling of Bernice as a character.

Certainly, it seems uncontroversial to assert that the presentation of Lara Croft within the Tomb Raider series has always been a bit of a fraught one when viewed through a feminist angle… although having said that I now realise that there’s definitely a very vocal subset of gamers for whom such an assertion will prove quite controversial indeed, but fortunately we never really pay serious attention to them anyway so they can sod off at the end of the day.

While creator Toby Gard might have professed his intention to make the character sexy “only because of her power,” Croft very quickly became one of the earliest examples of a video game character to merit serious consideration as a mainstream sex symbol. Given the stereotypically masculine bent of the gaming world for much of its history, this status comes with all the thorny baggage you might expect.

One of the biggest cultural stirs surrounding the first Tomb Raider game, after all, was the purported existence of a cheat code which would remove Croft’s clothing, all-too-predictably rendered real thanks to the proliferation of a so-called Nude Raider patch for the game. As late as 2018, the casting of Alicia Vikander sparked outrage from gamers across the world for the profound sin of checks notes not having large enough breasts. I think that one speaks for itself really.

More often than not, Croft arguably seemed to exhibit a very superficial form of supposed female empowerment, an empowerment that was nevertheless carefully cloaked in copious amounts of sex appeal so as to limit any potential alienation among heterosexual male members of the audience.

Yes, she certainly deserves credit as a relatively groundbreaking female protagonist in the genre of action games, but the tailoring of her appearance to that male demographic seriously undermines any attempt to argue for her being an unambiguous paragon of feminist empowerment in gaming culture, to say nothing of the way in which the sexually appealing “power” of which Gard spoke so glowingly seemed equally tailored to conventional masculinity’s taste for the violent expression of such power from the barrel of a gun, if you’ll permit me to echo an aphorism credited to Mao Zedong. And, y’know, in the form of a boatload of inherited aristocratic wealth, just to really tick off every box on the power fantasy checklist.

(This is also probably the only time in human history that the creator of Tomb Raider and Mao Zedong will be mentioned in the same breath, but really, what else are you reading Dale’s Ramblings for at this point?)

Given my willingness to credit the New Adventures for extrapolating from the television programme’s treatment of Ace in the final two seasons of the classic run and bringing a heretofore unexplored depth to the role of the female companion – provided you weren’t reading a book by someone like John Peel, I guess; and yes, I’m also obliged to note that it still would have been nice if there were more women on the writing/editing staff at Virgin than Kate Orman and Rebecca Levene, incredible as the pair of them are – it should really come as no surprise that Bernice fares much better in Dragons’ Wrath than was ever true of the Tomb Raider games.

As the book progresses, she’s every bit as engaging, compelling, proficient and intelligent as you’ve come to expect, without ever succumbing to the sort of leering objectification that so frequently dogs the Tomb Raider series. It’s nice to see Richards’ recurring passion for the minutiae of archaeology shine through once more, while never becoming so overpowering as to rob the plot of any incident.

All of this might sound rather simple, and in fairness I have observed in the past that Benny is quite a difficult character to get offensively, jarringly wrong barring some catastrophic ineptitude, but given the fact that this novel is the first of the post-Doctor NAs not to be written by the good Professor’s creator, proving that the series could continue to consistently do right by her character was still a pretty important task, and they just about pull it off.

Speaking of authors writing for their own creations, while we’ve already talked at some length about Braxiatel as a symbol of the New Adventures’ new lease on life, it bears mentioning that he’s also just plain delightful in his own right. I mean, once again, we kind of knew that to start with, but it’s nice to have it reaffirmed all the same.

Even though we’re technically witnessing a Braxiatel who is, by all indications, some fourteen hundred years younger than the version we met in Theatre of War – though as ever, time travel complicates things significantly, and I’m still not entirely sure if we ever get an answer as to whether the character really does sit his way through the entirety of the twenty-sixth through fortieth centuries – he slips back into his old rapport with Benny pretty readily, and even if the character might have simply been brought across to fulfil a narrative function usually allotted to the Doctor, he’s a charming enough addition to the cast that you can’t really begrudge Richards his decision.

Regrettably, not every aspect of the novel can lean on such strong characterisation to hide the seams in the narrative logic, and the overwhelming majority of the guest players can be aptly summarised as “functional.” That’s far from being a worst case scenario, mind you, but it only serves to reinforce the sense that this is a far more standard-issue Richards novel than something like Theatre of War.

While both novels require some pretty heavy-duty exposition as to the significance of their respective MacGuffins so as to ensure the eventual twists actually have an impact, Dragons’ Wrath feels significantly more stilted. The Benny/Braxiatel conversations are predictably a pretty safe bet, but a character like Nicholas Clyde, say, simply lacks the necessary charisma or interest for the audience to realistically see him as anything more than the rather transparent – although marginally more traitorous – Marcus Brody stand-in that he is.

Even among the antagonists, Nusek, Webbe and Mastrov are all perfectly serviceable villains with clear and coherent arcs, but there’s not too much more meat to them beyond that. Perhaps the most interesting member of the guest cast is one Commander Skutloid, an Ice Warrior in all but name with a liking for tea, which is such an inherently delightful idea that it’s easy to see why he continues to pop up in Richards’ later novels like The Medusa Effect and Tears of the Oracle.

In truth, the plot of Dragons’ Wrath plays more interestingly as a collection of off-hand moments that hint at greater depth without necessarily committing wholeheartedly to any one direction above the others. So yes, we’re again in “damning with faint praise” mode, but it must be said that these snatches of interest are certainly more than sufficient to prevent things from becoming overtly tedious.

For starters, while Nusek himself may not exactly set the world on fire, he does at least offer a chance for the Benny novels to take advantage of the fixity of their setting and flesh out the background details of galactic politics, and the results speak rather well to the post-Cold War status quo in which the novels were originally written.

As hinted at earlier, Nusek superficially fulfils the role of the obligatory shady billionaire that reliably crops up in stories like this, but Richards adds significantly more depth to his part in the proceedings by describing him as a “warlord.” This is a very purposeful epithet which could only have been feasibly interpreted in one very specific manner by readers in 1997, evoking as it does all manner of discussions about the rise of warlordism in regions which had been heavily scarred by the legacy of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example was to be found in Afghanistan, which had spent the first half of the nineties gripped by a fierce and tumultuous civil war among the local mujahideen warlords following the withdrawal of Soviet support from the government of President Mohammad Najibullah in February 1989.

Shortly after Najibullah’s resignation in April 1992, attempts were made in the Peshawar Accord to proclaim an interim coalition government comprised by members of the various mujahideen factions, to exercise authority over the newly-created Islamic State of Afghanistan. However, infighting among the factions ensured that the nascent government was effectively hamstrung from the very beginning, and the resultant turmoil would directly motivate the foundation of the Taliban by Mohammed Omar and Abdul Ghani Baradar in 1994, pledging itself to the institution of a strict and harsh interpretation of Islamic law and the removal from Afghanistan of the influence of “warlords and criminals.”

Certainly, such conflicts were not isolated to Afghanistan by any means – it’s worth noting that Nusek is said to number among the “Gang of Five,” bringing to mind the history of China, a nation with a Warlord Era all of its own – and the term “warlord” was just as frequently applied in coverage of the First Chechen War, say, but this only serves to underscore the sense in which warlordism was a prominent ingredient in the makeup of international relations in the nineties.

Even Nusek’s willingness to employ archaeology in a strictly pragmatic and self-serving manner recalls the extensive damage done to the cultural history of Afghanistan in the early nineties, with Kabul’s National Museum being so frequently subjected to attacks and looting that it is estimated to have lost some 70% of the artifacts on display at the time. Much like the attempts to redress some of the more imperialist undertones of Pyramids of Mars within The Sands of Time, or even Benny’s objections to the Heletians’ plans to blast their way into the Menaxan theatre in Theatre of War, it’s nice to get the sense that Richards’ self-confessed fondness for archaeology extends to an attentiveness to the accompanying cultural and social implications.

And yet it’s not Nusek who’s responsible for the biggest act of archaeological destruction, but rather the Knights of Jeneve, who probably deserve an exploration all their own. While the whims of copyright might prevent the novel from making the identification in any but the most circuitous of terms, it seems pretty clear what is intended to be inferred from the revelation that the order had its roots in a certain “scientific-military organisation.”

Perceptive readers might note that this is the second recent attempt to offer a vision of UNIT’s future, following shortly on the heels of the religious-tinged Unitatas in So Vile a Sin. In five months’ time, Lawrence Miles will take his own crack at the concept by introducing UNISYC in Alien Bodies. As with all instances in which multiple writers hit upon the same idea at almost the exact same time, it behooves us to try and take a look at the underlying reasoning in the hopes of clarifying it somewhat.

Certainly, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to link this pondering of UNIT’s future to a contemporaneous evolution of the real-world United Nations’ role in the post-Cold War realities of the new decade. Spearheaded by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the organisation increasingly shifted its focus towards peacekeeping initiatives, but in spite of early successes in such countries as El Salvador, Namibia, and post-apartheid South Africa, these initiatives would come to be overshadowed by continued friction with the United States government, with the administrations of both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton repeatedly proving reticent to commit American troops to such peacekeeping missions.

This, in turn, contributed to a number of high-profile failures for the UN, most notably in Somalia and Rwanda. Even those missions which managed to secure American involvement, such as that formed in response to the breakup of Yugoslavia, were liable to face international derision for their vacillating and conflicted response to widespread acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Indeed, So Vile a Sin, Dragons’ Wrath and Alien Bodies all saw print less than a year after the United States had controversially vetoed Boutros-Ghali’s bid for a second term as Secretary-General, arriving at what would thus seem to be the perfect opportunity for Doctor Who to reflect upon what it meant for one of its most popular and enduring pieces of iconography to be so strongly tied to the United Nations.

(Ironically enough, the solution arrived at – that the two organisations would gradually become less explicitly intertwined – seems to indirectly hint at the new series’ eventual genericisation of UNIT’s acronym as the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, although that was of course driven by objections from the UN themselves.)

The legend of Hugo Gamaliel, on the other hand, seems to represent a decidedly cynical perspective on American mythmaking. Where he’s initially portrayed as a bold and rugged individualist making a break from the encroachment of Earth’s government for valorous reasons, it eventually transpires that his motivations may have been more crassly economic in nature, mapping relatively closely onto one of the popular rebuttals to the grandiose folk narrative of American history that has sprung up since at least the time of the Revolutionary War.

Even though it transpires that the Knights of Jeneve have themselves exaggerated Gamaliel’s unscrupulousness, Reddik contends that there is still some measure of truth to the documentation of the period uncovered by Braxiatel.

The very choice of “Gamaliel” as a name also can’t help but seem pointed, evoking the memory of Warren Gamaliel Harding, an American President whose own popularity at the time of his untimely death was subsequently shaken by a series of posthumous scandals, perhaps most notable of which was the revelation that Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had accepted bribes from private oil companies in order to illicitly lease US Navy petroleum reserves in California and Wyoming to them.

It is, admittedly, a rather tenuous connection, but Gamaliel is an uncommon enough name – without just being plain-old made up like, say, Braxiatel – that it feels worth commenting upon. Unless of course Richards really had some pressing things to say about a first-century Jewish Pharisee, but that somehow feels even less likely than the possibility of a link to Harding.

Still, Dragons’ Wrath never seems overtly interested in digging into these issues in earnest, instead using the rough framework of the topics at hand as a springboard to provide big plot twists and even bigger action-adventure thrills. The final product is far from being objectionable, and if it isn’t an out-and-out masterpiece, then that feels excusable for these early stages of the NAs’ Benny-oriented form. And really, when you consider the alternatives, there are far worse ways to start a new novel line.

On an entirely unrelated note, how’s Terrance Dicks getting along over at BBC Books?

Miscellaneous Observations

No, my skipping the release of The Eight Doctors by a couple weeks was not a fluke or a mistake, for what it’s worth. Going forward, in those months where it’s applicable, I’ll stick to the pattern of talking about each month’s New Adventure, followed by the EDA and PDA, even though that does kind of entail jumping about in the release order in most cases. As was the case when discussing So Vile a Sin, I’m going to err on the side of elegance and consistency rather than anything more sensible like the actual chronology of the novels in question.

One thing I do appreciate about Dragons’ Wrath is Richards’ ability to ground the mechanics of his plot twists’ revelations in aspects of the characters involved. He certainly doesn’t manage it every single time, but he does it frequently enough that it bears commenting upon.

I can’t actually decide whether I’m more fond of the way Braxiatel uncovers the Gamalian Gambit as a sham by the simple expedient of assuming that Gamaliel couldn’t possibly have been smarter than him, or Benny’s realisation that the coffee in her lodgings is so difficult to find that “Kamadrich” could only reasonably have known where it was if she had been responsible for the earlier break-in, so I’ll just leave that to the reader to decide.

Speaking of the reveal of Kamadrich as a villain, I’ll also just note that one of the more egregious shortcomings of the Big Finish adaptation has to be the complete squandering of the twist in the very first scene by making no effort to disguise the fact that Mastrov is played by a woman, which wouldn’t be nearly as big a problem if Jane Burke’s Kamadrich wasn’t quite literally the only female member of the guest cast. Kind of says it all, really.

With that being said, I do want to stress that very little blame can reasonably be laid at the feet of Jacqueline Rayner, who by all accounts did the best she possibly could with the profoundly silly “compress this 250-page novel into a single 70-minute compact disc” brief that she was handed. Still, the adaptation of Dragons’ Wrath stands out as the one clear and unambiguous mess from that first season of Benny audio adaptations, with the closest runner-up being… oh, Beyond the Sun, actually, so more on that when we get back to the New Adventures I suppose.

Final Thoughts

It perhaps says a lot that I spent the bulk of my time here talking about Dragons’ Wrath in relation to other things, which is usually a pretty good sign that a story falls somewhere in the realm of comfortable competence. Then again, I suspect that we’re about to enter a period of the Wilderness Years in which that becomes a significantly less reliable litmus test, as the sprawling and behemothic nature of the Eighth Doctor Adventures does make it rather difficult not to adopt that tone by default, even in the absence of comfort or competence.

And… oh, I already did the whole “Boy, I sure do hope The Eight Doctors isn’t a mess” schtick, didn’t I? That’s supremely awkward. Well, join me next time regardless, as I’ll hopefully have become significantly less reiterative by then. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper