BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures Reviews: The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris (or, “The Stingers of Weng-Chiang”)

Starting a new line of multi-author tie-in novels is – I imagine, having never been placed in a remotely comparable situation in my life – a rather daunting prospect for any editor to face. Where wrangling a single author into submission in order to get them to meet a deadline can be a struggle at the best of times, attempting to achieve something similar for multiple different writers, each with their own very particular style and temperament, drastically increases the number of chaotic and unpredictable elements that one needs to keep track of.

These issues are only further compounded in instances where the audience have come to expect, for one reason or another, a certain level of coherence and shared continuity between books, to say nothing of the possibility of nods towards long-form storytelling and the serialisation of common plot threads across multiple instalments.

Under such circumstances, it makes sense to play things safe and stick with writers who have already proven themselves capable of meeting deadlines and a publisher’s general editorial standards. Indeed, for all that we have quite rightly sung the praises of Virgin’s open submissions policy to date, Paul Cornell’s Revelation remained a bit of an oddball exception among the early New Adventures.

Of the range’s first six novels, the first three volumes of the Timewyrm saga were all penned by established Target Books veterans, one of whom had served as script editor for one of the most iconic eras of Doctor Who imaginable, while the first two books of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy were handed off to writers from the dying days of the original programme. Perhaps tellingly, the second writer to make his full-length novel debut in the NAs, Andrew Hunt, would never write for the series again after he concluded the aforementioned trilogy with Witch Mark.

This is, of course, a part of the natural ebb and flow of such creative endeavours, and over the next few books the series would play host to any number of influential and lasting talents, from Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts through to the Lane/Mortimore two-hander that was Lucifer Rising. When this policy of encouraging burgeoning young talent seemed to fall rather dramatically flat on its face, as in the case of Neil Penswick’s The Pit, this felt like little more than a minor imperfection in a pool of writers that was becoming increasingly diversified and reliable.

(It is admittedly rather difficult, following this line of argument, to entirely account for the runaway success and staying power of Christopher Bulis off the basis of a book as poor as Shadowmind, but A. that’s probably a topic best saved for next time and B. as we’ve argued before, this success was probably considerably bolstered by the arrival of the Missing Adventures and the realisation that Bulis could pretty consistently be counted on to offer up a solid replication of a particular regular cast’s dynamic and, perhaps most importantly, could do so with a turnaround of about five or six months, give or take. Art and commerce, that eternal tug of war.)

As long-time readers of the blog are probably well aware, however, with some 107 books and six years behind us, the tenor of the Wilderness Years has undergone a rather dramatic shift since the modest beginnings of Genesys, and there exists no better exercise to illustrate that shift than a comparison of the respective beginnings of Virgin and BBC Books’ novel lines.

Even allowing for their persistent influence on the shape of post-2005 Doctor Who, after all, the slow march of time has increasingly consigned the Wilderness Years fiction to a sort of hazy realm of half-remembered truths and blind avenues long since boarded up, and it becomes more and more difficult to entirely wrap one’s head around the status quo as it stood in June 1991.

(To put the revival’s longevity into perspective, as I write these very words at about 1:30 in the morning from the dehumidified safety of my bedroom in the most ungodly, sweltering summer Brisbane has ever known, and wreak unconscionable havoc on my sleep schedule in the process, it has been exactly 6877 days since the broadcast of Rose. If we transplant that into the timeframe of the classic series, that would take us roughly to late September 1982 and the gap between Seasons 19 and 20. So, if nothing else, Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson can probably rest assured that it’ll be tough for Series 14 to fail to meet the meagre bar of quality for season premieres set by Arc of Infinity.)

So to reiterate for the sake of anyone who’s only just joining us, the Virgin novels were, at their inception, a rather flimsy construction. By all accounts, they came about when Peter Darvill-Evans’ impassioned pleas to be allowed to extend the company’s remit to publish original novel-length fiction – having run out of serials to novelise under the Target imprint – were met with an affirmative gesture sitting a few rungs above a non-committal shrug from the BBC management.

If the books turned out to be a massive commercial flop, well, that would probably only serve to vindicate the decision to cancel Doctor Who less than eighteen months prior, and it would certainly be no skin off the Beeb’s nose. This rationale, more than anything else, serves to explain the rather strange decision to entrust the series to a company like Virgin Books – which seems nowadays, if we envision the self-same Branson media empire as something akin to a human body, to have been equivalent to the appendix – and to underline just how much the show was not really considered a “going concern” in the post-Survival gloom of the early nineties.

With the benefit of hindsight, one can’t help but wonder if this rather low-key beginning was something of a blessing in disguise, providing the New Adventures with some much needed leeway in the eyes of fans while the novels worked through their rather messy beginnings. The pronounced failure to hit the ground running with the release of Genesys wasn’t as insurmountable an obstacle when the simple novelty of an undertaking like the New Adventures was factored in, to say nothing of the cause for further optimism occasioned two months later when Exodus turned out to be surprisingly decent.

(I mean, I’m still not convinced that it’s the seventh-best New Adventure of all time as the Sullivan rankings would have you believe, but we’re also talking about a fandom that would apparently quite sincerely argue that books like GodEngine and The Death of Art are more worthwhile forms of artistic expression than Transit, so maybe I’m just an idiot.)

And yet by 1997, the comparatively leisurely bimonthly release schedule enjoyed by the first two years of the New Adventures – nearer one-and-a-half, if we’re insisting on being sticklers for the calendar – had well and truly been supplanted as the default mode of publication for new Doctor Who novels. Not only did the NAs opt for a monthly timetable starting with The Highest Science in February 1993, but the launch of the Missing Adventures as an NA-adjacent home for past Doctor fiction in July of the following year would solidify the tradition of releasing two Doctor Who novels every month, effectively meaning that Virgin had quadrupled their yearly output when compared against the humble beginnings of the Timewyrm saga.

Barring a few exceptional circumstances in which a given month would have no new or past Doctor novel to speak of, this two-a-month pattern would be upheld for some considerable time, with BBC Books maintaining the policy set by their esteemed predecessors until the start of 2003, at which point the publisher would switch to alternating between Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventures until the broadcast of Rose put the kibosh on the novels’ continued relevance once and for all.

For the nascent EDA and PDA ranges, the most immediate consequence of this relatively accelerated beginning was to largely rob them of the grace period that had been afforded the Virgin novels. At present, it’s only been a mere two months since the publication of The Eight Doctors and The Devil Goblins from Neptune in June, but whereas the New Adventures were just barely getting around to their sophomore instalment by this point in their own life cycle, The Bodysnatchers and The Ultimate Treasure were going out as the fifth and sixth novels to be published under the seal of BBC Books, and this rapid pace inevitably disinclined fandom to be as lenient as they might have been some six years prior.

This is by most reasonable estimations rather unfortunate, as the early days of the BBC Books line were certainly not short on reasons for fans to find what meagre leniency they possessed sorely tested. We’ve gone over most of them in the course of the past few reviews but, to wit, the Eighth Doctor novels were fighting an uphill battle almost from the word go on account of their having replaced the generally quite popular – albeit equally controversial – New Adventures series, and these difficulties were only further compounded by the behind-the-scenes chaos caused by the departure of original editor Nuala Buffini shortly after The Eight Doctors hit shelves.

As if to add insult to injury, this was quickly followed up by a moment of collective pained realisation on fandom’s part when people actually picked up The Eight Doctors from said shelves and found it to be, to put it mildly, not very good at all, with Terrance Dicks ironically finding himself on the opposite side of the Genesys/Exodus dichotomy entirely this time around.

While some of these more unfortunate developments couldn’t feasibly have been known to Buffini and co. during the pre-publication stages of the new series, there remains a sense that the gruelling realities of scheduling played no small part in influencing the selection of writers for this initial batch of novels.

For all that received fandom wisdom would generally have us believe the BBC Books line to be wholly insulated from what came before, the first few Eighth Doctor Adventures are striking in their willingness to pull from Virgin’s pre-established pool of writers. Kate Orman is perhaps the most obvious example, but people like Genocide author Paul Leonard were certainly no stranger to the Missing Adventures of old, even if the idea of pitting books like Speed of Flight or Dancing the Code against The Left-Handed Hummingbird seems more than a little laughable.

Furthermore, while Alien Bodies might have quickly become Lawrence Miles’ career-defining opus – and inarguably a pivotal moment for the EDAs as a whole – he was, at the time of its initial publication, primarily notable as “that guy who wrote two really whacked out New Adventures.” Even in commissioning battle-seasoned Target alumni like Terrance Dicks and John Peel, Buffini seemed to be consciously harking back to the days of the Timewyrm saga.

(Some might quite reasonably make the argument that the fact of their books meeting with the most hostile critical reception since sliced Eric Saward only serves to further underscore just how far the franchise had evolved in the intervening half a decade, but that’s by the by.)

Across the aisle in the Past Doctor Adventures, the story was much the same, with the first few months of the range playing host to any number of old favourites of the MAs, from Christopher Bulis to Gary Russell. Even Mark Gatiss returned to offer up his first Doctor Who novel in three years with The Roundheads.

What meagre pickings existed for those in search of “new” authors were heavily asterisked affairs. Keith Topping may have never written a full-length Who novel before The Devil Goblins from Neptune, but he was sharing authorial privileges with his erswthile Discontinuity Guide colleague – and scribe of The Menagerie, to boot – Martin Day. Illegal Alien, similarly, was the product of Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, who had already contributed the short story Question Mark Pyjamas to the second of Virgin’s Decalog anthologies.

And then we have Mark Morris’ The Bodysnatchers, the only BBC Books novel of 1997 to be written entirely by an author with no prior involvement with Doctor Who to speak of. In fact, it will manage to stand as the only such book for the next seven months, only being knocked off that pedestal by Stephen Cole’s decision to extend a pseudonymous toe into the EDAs’ murky waters with Longest Day in March 1998.

Mind you, even this distinction comes with a rather substantial caveat of its own. While Morris may be a first-time Doctor Who novelist, he is by no means a stranger to the publishing world. In fact, well before putting pen to paper on The Bodysnatchers, Morris had made something of a name for himself as a writer of original horror novels, with 1989’s Toady providing the foundational stone of a bibliography that encompassed no fewer than six such horror tomes all up as of August 1997.

(And yes, that figure does in fact include the suspiciously familiarly titled Longbarrow a mere two months prior.)

So clearly, for all that this marks the first intersection with the franchise of a figure who goes on to build up a respectable number of writing credits across the length and breadth of the series’ tie-in fiction – and while we’re largely going to be passing Morris by with the exception of The Bodysnatchers and Deep Blue, the most recent of these credits saw him dignified with the task of novelising Russell T. Davies’ Wild Blue Yonder as a part of the sixtieth anniversary celebrations, so he’s certainly not doing too poorly for himself – any attempts to paint Morris with the same “fan turned novelist” brush that we applied to Cornell and his contemporaries can’t help but feel rather misjudged.

Still, while it may be a trifle premature to so cavalierly slap such a label onto Morris, The Bodysnatchers nevertheless retains a certain fannish aura that proves equally difficult to dispel entirely, revelling as it does in the trappings of continuity and, if you happen to be of a more uncharitable persuasion, sequelitis.

What we’re witnessing here, then, would seem to bear all the hallmarks not of a Doctor Who fan getting their foot in the door of the industry, but rather an established author using the series as a vehicle to explore their own pre-existing stylistic and thematic interests. Sure, this places Morris at a remove from people like Paul Cornell and Kate Orman, but in this respect he’s also joined by writers like Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, and given how things turned out for them it’s certainly hard to label them “bad company” or anything of the sort.

The specifics of what Morris chooses to foreground as his objects of nostalgia are, in this case, probably rather predictable when taking into account his well-established horror bona fides, pulling heavily from the Gothic-tinged halcyon days of the Hinchcliffe Era and, more precisely, from Terror of the Zygons and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

It’s hardly difficult to trace the thought process at work here, with both stories numbering among the most popular and iconic instalments in the era of the classic show most routinely held up as a “Golden Age” for the programme. In the case of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, at least, we’ve already tread this ground in some detail when we looked at David A. McIntee’s own foolhardy attempt to offer up a redemptive sequel in 1996’s The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, noting the perennial fan-favourite status of Robert Holmes’ original script even as many an anorak chose to withhold comment on its unabashed Yellow Peril storytelling in favour of pointing at a dodgy rat costume.

(About the only development of note since the posting of that review, actually, is the slightly heartening realisation that Doctor Who Magazine‘s big sixtieth anniversary poll to determine the show’s best stories finally saw Talons edged out of the top ten for the first time, which strongly suggests – alongside the preponderance of Capaldi stories in the top ten – that nature might, in some small way, be healing, and that the Doctor Who fandom can still positively surprise me on occasion. On occasion…)

Terror of the Zygons, meanwhile, has largely avoided our attentions thus far, but this should certainly not be taken as an indication that the story is any less iconic or memorable. Although its original broadcast achieved rather meagre viewing figures by the lofty standards of the Hinchcliffe Era, being the lowest-viewed serial of Season 13, it eventually enjoyed a new lease on life when it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster just three months later, becoming only the second Fourth Doctor story to receive the Target treatment.

In many ways, the most endearing aspect of The Bodysnatchers is the sheer level of glee with which Morris has set about mashing up the Zygons with a setting more explicitly rooted in the aesthetic concerns of the late Victorian period that proved such a fruitful breeding ground for the Gothic horror of the Hinchcliffe years. It’s a manoeuvre which seems all but inevitable in retrospect, but which is certainly no less effective for its logicality.

Appropriately enough given the subject matter, Morris adopts a consciously stylised narrative voice that feels quite unlike anything BBC Books have been willing to dabble in to date. Far from offering the bland-but-readable prose of Dicks or the Virgin-esque playfulness of Orman/Blum and Lyons, The Bodysnatchers is replete with adjective-laden descriptions of nineteenth-century London streets and uncomfortably fleshy Zygon technology.

While it’s quite understandable that this is the type of creative decision liable to draw negative reactions from those fans less inclined to what might be described – not entirely inaccurately – as purple prose, it’s just about fresh enough this time around that I’m willing to cut it some leeway. Then again, my general tolerance for this sort of thing would seem to be considerably higher than the average Doctor Who fan’s to begin with, so such leeway should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Yet with all of that being said, I would be lying if I tried to sincerely claim that there wasn’t some small part of me that balked at the novel’s decision to so directly and wholeheartedly embrace a Victorian artistic sensibility, and a not inconsiderable part of this discomfort can be laid at the feet of the prominent guest spot afforded to Professor George Litefoot of The Talons of Weng-Chiang fame.

In and of itself, the prominence of Victoriana as a piece of Doctor Who‘s creative inheritance is only sensible, and not necessarily indicative of anything much deeper than its roots as a direct descendant of a long-standing tradition of British children’s literature from that very period. There exist any number of examples of the series choosing to pay homage to its literary forebears and reaping fruitful results, from The Evil of the Daleks through to Ghost Light.

Even if we restrict ourselves to the Wilderness Years, the New Adventures were generally thoughtful enough to at least attempt to gesture at a deeper examination of the more unpleasant underbelly of Victorian society. Scratching off the Victorian veneer, if you will.

All-Consuming Fire, while undoubtedly imperfect, was far more attentive to issues of imperialism and cultural elitism than one would expect of a novel seemingly pitched on the basis of “The Doctor teams up with Sherlock Holmes to fight monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos,” and even Strange England suggested that the nostalgic façade of domesticity associated with the period in the British cultural imagination was an inherently fragile one, prone to giving way to intense violence and horror at a moment’s notice.

By the same token, however, there also exist points in the franchise’s history at which it has  seemingly allowed itself to be overpowered by a certain uncritical reverence for aspects of this era that would seem to merit a more careful handling. All-Consuming Fire‘s occasionally awkward and over-earnest attempts at critiquing the worldview of the Conan-Doyle canon seemed positively acerbic when placed against John Peel’s bizarre insistence on having the Doctor fall all over himself to sing the praises of Rudyard Kipling, imperialist poet extraordinaire, in Evolution.

And in due course, discussions of these moments will inevitably gravitate back towards The Talons of Weng-Chiang. As I hinted at earlier, we have already pretty extensively litigated the subject matter of Talons‘ general racism and fandom’s long-standing unwillingness to meaningfully critique said racism in past reviews, but the subject of Jago and Litefoot’s intertwining with this tendency towards the indiscriminate veneration of Holmes’ original script – or, indeed, of Jago & Litefoot, as the case may be – has largely gone untouched until now.

There exist a few necessary clarifications in any discussion of Jago and Litefoot, much as is true of just about any element of genuine quality in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. While the default position of any sort of fan writing that at least tries to keep some semblance of an eye on matters of social justice might be to quite reasonably look askance at the popularity of the two characters, there is certainly a case to be made for the genuine chemistry enjoyed by Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter, to the point where it can hardly be considered surprising that Big Finish would eventually cave to fan demands and get a full thirteen seasons’ worth of mileage out of it. Equally, it goes without saying that Robert Holmes’ typical gift for scintillating dialogue and building endearing comedic double acts was on full display.

Hell, to give credit to Morris where it’s due, there are even aspects of The Bodysnatchers that could be seen to signal the writer’s consciousness of some of the issues inherent in trying to treat Litefoot as a beloved legacy character. Most obviously, of course, there’s the wise decision to refrain from actually having him return in the context of any sort of revival of Talons‘ Fu Manchu homages, substituting Magnus Greel and Mr. Sin for the Zygons and the Skarasen.

Even on the level of characterisation, however, there’s a sense that Litefoot’s background has undergone some rather purposeful expansion in order to tie him slightly less firmly to an aristocratic Victorian perspective and all the attendant baggage that comes with it:

Despite his gentlemanly appearance and rather formal behaviour, by Victorian standards he was actually something of a rebel. He had outraged his parents by leaving the army, in which his family had a long and honourable tradition, and becoming a doctor in one of London’s poorer hospitals in the East End. For the last twenty years of his life, his father had refused to speak to him, a situation which Litefoot regarded as eminently regrettable, but which nevertheless had not swayed him from his chosen path.

Revealingly, the basic thrust of this newfound backstory bears more than a passing resemblance to the suggestions made by Marc Platt in Lungbarrow as to the Doctor’s own past, having disappointed Quences in his plans to become a physician rather than stepping into the cutthroat arena of Gallifreyan politics and achieving the lofty rank of High Cardinal.

Coupled with the eerie resonance inherent in hearing Sam, a companion already positioned by Vampire Science as a spiritual successor to Ace, address him by the admittedly entirely accurate honorific of “Professor,” one does get the sense that The Bodysnatchers aims to cast Litefoot in a more straightforwardly heroic light akin to the Doctor himself, and this might at least partially explain the conspicuous absence of Jago – papered over as it is by the excuse that he’s visiting his sister in Brighton – what with “theatre manager” being a profession that’s a bit harder to honestly sell as performing any sort of altruistic service to the more impoverished or disadvantaged members of Victorian London.

The cynical perspective to take here, mind, would be to suppose that the character is simply there as a bit of fan-pleasing fluff, and that Morris has merely engaged in the minimum amount of tweaking necessary to avoid the thornier aspects of Talons. Certainly, it’s not exactly as if Litefoot really contributes much to the plot beyond offering a place for the regular cast to regroup between expeditions to the Zygon ship and commenting in a scandalised manner upon the impudence of Sam, and it’s not as if these functions couldn’t have just as easily been assigned to a wholly original character.

At a certain point in any attempt to “reclaim” Litefoot, after all, one is bound to run up against the simple question of… well, why? Why bother trying to find a workable “angle” on a character who, on at least one occasion in Talons alone, quite explicitly drops a racist slur against Chinese people? There’s a curious paradox underlying fandom’s treatment of Litefoot here, with fans simultaneously making the rather unconvincing excuse that Holmes is merely setting Litefoot up as a mouthpiece for outmoded Victorian ideals, while in the same breath sanding away those viewpoints in order to hold the character up as some entirely wholesome and value-neutral recipient of fandom’s tendency for nostalgic reverence.

Much like The Shadow of Weng-Chiang fell flat despite its admittedly far cleverer decision to transpose the action to 1930s Shanghai on the eve of the Japanese invasion, then, we’re left with the impression that The Bodysnatchers‘ decision to have Litefoot fighting fictional alien shapeshifters rather than a perennially vilified ethnic minority is not as subversive a response as it might appear on a superficial glance. Rather, it smacks of nothing so much as a simple attempt to sidestep and avoid the problem entirely.

This is a bit of a shame, as the Zygons themselves do feel like a more successful instance of Morris capitalising on very deeply rooted horror tropes. While the basic premise of the species – alien climate refugees, in essence, even if Lester Brown wouldn’t propose the term “environmental refugee” until 1976, the year after Terror of the Zygons originally aired – would seem to lend itself all too readily to a xenophobic reading, The Bodysnatchers‘ treatment of the Zygons is notable for the way in which it feels specifically tailored to the concerns of popular culture and science fiction in the 1990s.

While the title of Morris’ novel might owe a conscious debt to the classic 1950s Red Scare-tinged paranoia of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers – indeed, Morris is really just returning to the title employed by the original Jack Finney story, simply labelled The Body Snatchers – and the vaguely plant-like and organic iconography of the Zygons seems practically ready-made for comparisons to be drawn to the so-called “pod people,” the presentation of the aliens themselves never feels like a throwback in the manner of some of the more blatant nineties homages to the B-movies of yore like Brannon Braga’s Cathexis over on Voyager.

The horror of the Zygons here – would you believe me if I said that pun wasn’t intended? – stems more from their subversion and replacement of an individual’s personhood, rather than the direction of an existing individual’s energies towards the end goals of some nebulous, malevolent outside force. (Space communism, obv.)

In one of the nicer little instances of Morris capitalising on his Victorian setting, Nathaniel Seers seems to undergo a transformation after his replacement that can only realistically be described as a twisted reversal of Ebenezer Scrooge, going from a kindly and compassionate industrialist – however fantastical such an image probably is – to a mean-hearted tyrant of a boss who will fire an employee for mangling their hand and being unable to work.

In spite of what one might expect of a loose sequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang set in Victorian times, it’s notable that the vast majority of the Zygons’ chosen targets for impersonation are not immigrants or the lower class. In fact, the most prominent working class characters in the novel are probably Albert and Jack, who have been blatantly lured into the practise of graverobbing by the promise of a stable income, and unwittingly end up providing the Zygons with food for their Skarasens.

Ultimately, The Bodysnatchers largely avoids devolving into some sort of ill-advised, paranoia-drenched story of an insidious minority seeking to destabilise the fabric of English society – the type of story, in other words, that Dave Stone was directly mocking in the Sandford Groke segments of Ship of Fools – but instead exhibits a profound unease at the potential for capitalist, colonialist systems of authority to be employed in service of nefarious and oppressive ends. In that respect, it feels like a natural companion piece to other contemporary examples of prominent shapeshifters in nineties genre fiction like Deep Space Nine‘s Changelings or the Bounty Hunters over on The X-Files.

Putting aside the guest characters, however, The Bodysnatchers is also notable for continuing the early efforts of the EDAs to afford the Eighth Doctor and Sam some actual characterisation of which to speak after the series had kind of dropped that particular ball with The Eight Doctors, and it forms the second part of a very loose trilogy with Vampire Science and Genocide. Just as Orman and Blum went out of their way to single out Morris and Paul Leonard as being of especial assistance in defining the new Doctor-companion duo as part of the acknowledgments to their own book, Morris opens The Bodysnatchers with a similar dedication, affording the quartet the affectionately hokey nickname of “the Sam squad” and reinforcing the sense that these three books were the product of close collaboration.

And the traces of that collaboration are plainly visible in the form of the finished novel. The idea of the Eighth Doctor as a chaotically spontaneous force who enters situations with only the vaguest semblance of a plan is present here in full swing, getting embroiled in the Zygons’ plan to invade the Earth on account of something as trivial as his desire to replace a ruined copy of The Strand magazine.

Sure, it probably goes without saying that Vampire Science manages to make use of the concept in a more consistently satisfying fashion, but Orman and Blum are the kind of writers who routinely set such a phenomenally high bar that it feels almost churlish to complain that an otherwise generally competent novelist like Morris can’t meet that standard, especially when this is his first ever foray into the world of Doctor Who.

Even allowing for the different level of finesse on display, The Bodysnatchers does a solid enough job of following up on the hints dropped by its direct predecessor as to the possibility of this spontaneity being a character flaw just as serious as any that afflicted the Seventh Doctor in the NAs.

To a certain extent, this is couched in the same kind of barely-veiled passive-aggressive swipes at the TV movie for which we took The Eight Doctors to task, with the Doctor reflecting on the possibility that the trauma of his recent regeneration has brought deeply-buried character traits to the fore.

In specifically citing the examples of the infamous kiss from the telemovie’s closing moments, as well as the character’s tendency to be very open about his life and history as a Gallifreyan, Morris keys in on two of the biggest talking points in fandom in the wake of the failed 1996 revival. All he’s really missing is some scepticism over the Eye of Harmony’s presence in the TARDIS and outrage at the “half-human” line and he’s got a completed Fanboy Griping bingo card.

And yet where Dicks allowed these grievances to overwhelm the voice of his novel, such as it was, Morris just about manages to scrape by here, and he’s helped in no small part by his shrewd decision to implicitly tie the most egregious failing brought about by the Doctor’s newfound haphazard relationship to forward planning – namely the Zygons’ inadvertent fatal reaction to the anaesthetic with which he doses their lactic fluid – back to the traumatic circumstances of his own “birth,” drawing a parallel and wisely allowing it to hang relatively unarticulated.

Admittedly, there does occasionally exist a certain inelegance in the handling of these themes when compared to the high points of the New Adventures. It’s kind of tough to get past moments like the Doctor’s surprisingly low-key and almost casually blunt reflection that “[he has] committed genocide on more than one occasion,” and it feels like a weird beat to largely brush past at the three-quarter mark of your novel in favour of a big action-packed climax where the Skarasen terrorise London, a sequence I can only truthfully describe as Doctor Who‘s answer to Spielberg’s then recent The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Still, the Doctor remains infinitely more compelling here than he ever was throughout The Eight Doctors, and we oughtn’t to lose sight of that.

Sam is a bit more of a mixed bag. I’ve already kind of reconciled myself to the idea that I’m probably going to wind up with a more favourable impression of the character than a fair number of EDA readers seem to almost by default, if for no other reason than that I don’t… totally despise her? Shocking, I know.

Much as the characterisation of Eight clearly builds off of the precedent established by Vampire Science, Sam is presented in accordance with the false bravado-slinging, painfully idealistic teenager that she was established as in the earlier novel, and I honestly kind of like that The Bodysnatchers gives her the space to be vaguely obnoxious and ever so slightly inept at reading the room in that perennially teenaged kind of way.

Her immediate response upon being confronted with the wounded, terrified and dishevelled figure of Tom Donahue is to sidle up to the Doctor and almost salaciously ask, “Is he a crackhead?”, which feels like a bit of a pointed jab at the over-earnest “Just Say No” tone of Dicks’ chosen manner of introducing the character.

Even in her more tasteless moments, like cracking wise about the resemblance of her cell on the Zygon ship to a gas chamber, Sam remains painfully believable as a portrait of a teenager lobbing off what she sees as witty bon mots with a bit of an edge to them, not knowing any better. It’s hardly liable to make her an especially likeable character in any sort of straightforward sense, but if we can look past the jagged edges of an individual like Roz Forrester and find something compelling underneath, I see no reason why the same logic can’t be applied here.

Yet in that ever so contradictory EDA fashion, there are still some irritating flies in the ointment  of Sam’s characterisation that may not have yet metastasised to truly troublesome proportions, but which are slightly troubling nevertheless. The most pressing of these concerns, as it happens, are probably the first proper rumblings of her latent – and eventually blatant – attraction to the Doctor.

There will inevitably be better places to talk about this development, most obviously in the arc running from Longest Day to Seeing I, but for now I’ll at least drop the obligatory disclaimer that I’m not necessarily inherently opposed to the idea of exploring the idea of a Doctor-companion romance.

And yes, it’s probably slightly troubling that the franchise should make its first proper steps into that arena with a companion who is, y’know, seventeen, but the intent of the books is quite clearly to have Sam move past these feelings as a part of asserting her own agency and moving out of the Doctor’s shadow, realising that he can never – and, quite frankly, should never – reciprocate those kinds of feelings given the realities and dynamics of their relationship.

The best one can hope for, I suppose, is the kind of handling that these hints were given in Vampire Science, with Orman and Blum pointedly highlighting the Doctor’s complete lack of understanding of the truism that, as Kramer put it, “chicks dig the time machine” and having him take time out of stopping Slake and his vampires to repair the damage he’d inadvertently wrought to James and Carolyn’s relationship.

While the earlier novel definitely nodded towards a certain rivalry between Sam and Carolyn, this was juxtaposed against the latter’s subtextual role as a stand-in for Grace, with the arc clearly being designed to close with an affirmation of Sam’s status as the rightful companion.

This deftness of touch is sorely lacking from Morris’ own attempt at a “Sam gets jealous of the Doctor lavishing attention upon a female guest star” plotline, trotting out such tired sequences as “Sam reacts poorly to the Doctor comforting Emmeline.” Things eventually reach a nadir with a moment where Morris outlines Sam’s emotions in response to the sight of Emmeline running up to the Doctor in her water-drenched underwear after having escaped the Zygon ship, specifically noting “how clearly the outline of Emmeline’s breasts could be seen through the wet material.”

So that was… definitely a sentence I had to read. And I guess you did too now, sorry about that.

Look, without getting too bogged down in all of this, when the only comparison I can really think to make is to bring to mind the dark, dark days of John Peel introducing us to Ace in an amnesiac and disrobed state in the opening sequences of Genesys, you can’t help feeling that, somewhere along the line, things have taken a very bad turn indeed. Coupled with the rather trite and tired Ben/Polly/Terri love triangle from The Murder Game, it does rather create the unfortunate impression that the BBC Books lines are already showcasing a tendency to dip into the whole jealousy angle a mite too frequently in characterising their female companions.

The Bodysnatchers is a strange book, and I’m ultimately not quite sure how to best summarise my feelings towards it. It’s certainly not bad, and there are aspects of its style I quite like, even as none of those aspects ever feel wholly original. “Doctor Who as gothic horror” is always nice to see, yes, and infinitely preferable to anything Terrance Dicks or John Peel were choosing to offer at around this time, but as Morris’ directly taking inspiration from the Hinchcliffe Era shows, it’s definitely been done before – even as recently as the Virgin days – and it’s probably been done better.

But this is perhaps another instance where we need to be patient, as mildly infuriating as my repetition of that refrain might be. The fact remains that the Eighth Doctor Adventures have a much higher batting average, three books in, than the New Adventures did at the same point in their lifecycle. The Eight Doctors aside, the range can now boast two books that are at least OK, and in the case of Vampire Science, very good indeed.

It’s probably slightly telling that I’ve lapsed into talking about other books entirely at this point, mind you, and I can’t imagine that The Bodysnatchers will really be the sort of novel I find myself itching to revisit in the distant future when I’ve finished up this project. It’s respectable enough, but when the Benny novels are turning out books of the quality of Ship of Fools, “respectable” feels strangely inadequate, somehow.

Miscellaneous Observations

In the spirit of following up on Vampire Science‘s characterisation of Sam, Morris reveals the identity of the former occupant of her rooms in the TARDIS, and as if to make an absolute laughing stock of my impression that Orman and Blum seemed to be implying they were Ace’s old rooms, it’s apparently… Nyssa. Bit of a curveball, that. I’m game enough to admit when I’m wrong, mind you, even if it does make a lot less thematic sense. Oh well.

There were also a few elements in The Bodysnatchers that take on a more interesting resonance in light of the post-2005 revival, most notably in the general idea of “Victorian Gothic-tinged horror throwback as the third story to feature the new companion” feeling rather close to The Unquiet Dead, with Sam even reflecting early on that her primary source of information about the period comes from old adaptations of Dickens novels. In a similar vein, Thin Ice gets bonus points for hitting on the same effective image of “big alien/spaceship lurking at the bottom of the Thames” about twenty years later.

Between proudly emblazoning Mr. Sin all over the front cover of The Shadow of Weng-Chiang and now pretty clearly foregrounding a Zygon’s features when it takes nearly half the book for the Doctor to go “Ooh, these are Zygons actually,” I’m starting to wonder if there’s something about Hinchcliffe Era homages in particular that leads to a miscommunication between the writer and the cover artist as to how much they want to reveal.

I mean, it’s money. The miscommunication is because of the ability for the book to make money.

Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it, folks, the BBC Books line has taken its first step into the brave new world of hiring some newer authors, however fleeting and slender a step it might be. In fact, however transitory you thought it might have been, I’m going to need you to actually jettison those preconceptions right now, because it turns out that it’s at least ten times more so than you could have imagined. Yup, next time we’re back with yet another Christopher Bulis novel, as he finally manages to complete his grand plan of writing for each of the first seven Doctors, and sends the Fifth Doctor and Peri on a quest of their own in search of The Ultimate Treasure. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper