We’ve already gone over the standard operating procedure for these early reviews of the Past Doctor Adventures in some considerable detail. The crux of it, basically, comes down to a desire to maintain a degree of continuity between the Virgin and BBC Books lines of past Doctor fiction, at least in these early stages where we’re in the business of tackling PDA debuts. It generally helps to be able to use the former company’s novels as a springboard to inform my opinion on these latest efforts, rather than maintaining the illusion of starting completely from scratch.
With Illegal Alien, however, we’re faced with a superficially different situation. For the first time in just over a decade, and nearly eighteen months after audiences bore witness to the advent of Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor on television, we have a past Doctor novel focused on the Seventh Doctor’s tenure as a firmly historicised object.
Even in the case of the nearest comparable story to date, Lance Parkin’s Cold Fusion, the presence of New Adventure lore like the Adjudicators and the Other were very deliberately signposted as unwelcome intrusions by the franchise’s present into an otherwise perfectly normal Peter Davison story, climaxing with McCoy’s Doctor knocking Five unconscious and running back to the TARDIS for good measure.
Those of you playing the home game can perhaps begin to see where we’re heading with this one. For all that I might want nothing more than to drag out the pretense of BBC Books’ Seventh Doctor novels not having any obvious antecedent in the Virgin years, such a premise would rapidly end up descending into the realms of unconscionable falsehood on account of one very simple fact: the existence of the New Adventures.
This preamble, then, serves to capture the strange position that these latter-day Seventh Doctor books occupy. On the one hand, with sixty books headlined by this incarnation of the Doctor, none of the other six Doctors featured in the PDAs could ever hope to compete with the level of documentation and prestige afforded the McCoy years. No matter how BBC Books chose to engage with this period of the show, the mere act of that engagement would unavoidably have constituted a tangible commentary, one way or another, on their recently delicensed predecessors over at Ladbroke Grove.
Yet paradoxically, there remains something liberating in the idea of acknowledging the long shadow cast by the weighty bulk of established precedent. Most obviously, sixty novels is rather too large a number to give the basic PDA review treatment and adequately summarise in the beginnings of this post, even with my prodigious appetite for overextending myself.
(Honestly, without intending to get too far ahead of myself and spoil my Eye of Heaven review, I rather suspect that even the eight Fourth Doctor Missing Adventures published by Virgin will end up being too much to handle in that format. Between Jim Mortimore and the arrival of Leela though, I imagine we’ll have to enough to talk about that we can pick up the slack.)
But more significant by far for the PDAs themselves are the myriad ways in which this precedent is, if not entirely unhelpful, at the very least ill-suited to the comparatively disjointed context of what is effectively one of seven sub-series in a larger line of novels. Which is to say that a not inconsiderable part of what made the New Adventures such a refreshing and, dare I say it, novel experiment for Doctor Who was the one thing that the PDAs couldn’t really be – an interconnected procession of new, original novel-length Doctor Who stories being released every month.
Accordingly, faced with such a conundrum, BBC Books took what was arguably the most sensible course of action to resolve this underlying tension, and chose to roll back the clock some eight years. Rather than trying to grapple with the controversial and oversized legacy of the New Adventures, the Beeb’s Seventh Doctor offerings largely opted to focus on the character’s adventures with Ace at some indeterminate period following the duo’s last televised outing in Survival, but before their initial sojourn to ancient Mesopotamia in Genesys.
Sure, there were one or two exceptions to be found in the form of the odd novel set during the televised McCoy years, like The Hollow Men or Relative Dementias, but for the most part Illegal Alien serves as a reliable indicator of what’s to come from BBC Books and, latterly, from Big Finish.
Naturally, being the sort of person who has spent the better part of six years poring over every last New Adventure in increasing amounts of detail, this decision provokes somewhat conflicted feelings in me. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an instinctive temptation to simply label Illegal Alien as a creative retreat on the franchise’s part, and there exists a reasonably substantial body of evidence to support this argument.
In a very undeniable sense, the novel is in fact a blatantly regressive move. Not only does it resurrect the final Doctor-companion pairing of the original television show – dutifully freed from the more controversial “New Ace” direction in which Sophie Aldred’s character was taken post-Deceit – but it even serves as an adaptation of an embryonic script that Tucker and Perry were working on for consideration as part of the programme’s ultimately cancelled twenty-seventh season.
Indeed, the mythos of Season 27 is one which we probably ought to unpack here. The pull that it exerts over fandom’s collective imagination is understandably quite considerable, and that was all the more true in the dark and uncertain times of the Wilderness Years. It provides all manner of fuel for speculation, akin to the act of Star Trek fans picking over the scraps of the abandoned Phase II series to see whether it might have provided a different sort of revival than that brought about by The Motion Picture.
If we fast-forward a few years, that franchise found itself gripped by a much more directly comparable question, as the cutting down of Enterprise after a mere four seasons of life naturally left Trekkies’ imaginations to run a little wild. Witness the fanciful – but not, I hasten to add, entirely unwelcome – suggestions put forth in subsequent years by various creative figures as to the possibility of adding Jeffrey Combs’ Shran or J. G. Hertzler’s Kolos to the primary cast. This kind of speculation is largely just part and parcel of how fandoms cope in the face of the cold, harsh realities of their favourite series’ cancellation.
In the context of 1997, mind you, these musings took on an altogether different tone. Not only had Doctor Who been cancelled for well over half a decade at this point, but it had recently stumbled its way through a high-profile attempt at a revival in association with a major American network. By all accounts, this experiment had resoundingly failed to produce the desired results, with the TV movie commanding only nine percent of the television audience during its original broadcast on Fox. It seemed fair to argue that Doctor Who had, with this manoeuvre, somehow managed to consign any revival efforts to an even deeper circle of development hell than they were in before.
All of which serves as handy background information to explain why, in late July 1997, Doctor Who Magazine felt it imperative to construct an alternative history in which the programme improbably managed to survive Jonathan Powell’s infamous “Fuck off… or die” attitude towards John Nathan-Turner and limped on for two additional seasons. This was, first and foremost, an exercise in the “warm blanket against the howling void of the Wilderness Years” tradition. Unsurprisingly, given the inherently comfort-focused nature of such schools of thought, this came saddled with a hefty dose of nostalgia, complete with the affectation of regular editor Gary Gillatt handing over the reins to Sophie Aldred herself for an issue.
It’s easy, from the perspective of a world in which Doctor Who is less than a month away from the airing of its fortieth televised season, to poke holes in Dave Owen’s vision of the Seasons That Never Were. Actually, by far the more revealing fact is that it’s incredibly easy to poke holes in that vision from the perspective of October 1997, barely two months later.
Owen’s account begins with a description of the cliffhanger to the putative The Last of the Daleks, in which the Doctor and his new companion Kate find themselves surrounded, shockingly enough, by Daleks. The best rejoinder to this is undoubtedly still to be found in El Sandifer’s piece on the 2011 Big Finish adaptation of Marc Platt’s Thin Ice in which she quite rightly points out that “There are Daleks in this story with ‘Dalek’ in the title, folks!” is actually one of the most standard-issue Doctor Who cliffhangers imaginable. For our purposes, of course, coming as we are directly from the truly abysmal War of the Daleks, the idea that such a rote and monster-fixated cliffhanger would constitute a turnaround in the series’ fortunes in the public eye only seems all the more laughable.
(It’s worth reiterating at this point, lest you think I’m making an associative leap too far, that John Peel also claimed to have originally developed War as a script for the television show before its untimely end.)
There are other oddities, too. Owen proves peculiarly enamoured with the idea of Doctor Who‘s survival having been cemented by the production sensibilities of John Birt, whose efforts as Director-General of the BBC to “modernise” the venerated broadcaster were intensely topical at the time. Consider the following excerpt, directly following his extolling of the virtues of Dalek cliffhangers:
The arrival at the BBC of executives with a business-based approach, most notably Michael Checkland and the man who would replace him as Director-General, John Birt, has been blamed by Corporation employees and rival broadcasters alike for much of what is seen to be wrong with British broadcasting in the nineties. Yet it was the politics of localised cost accountability that, in 1990, had just persuaded BBC1 Controller Jonathan Powell to allow Doctor Who to continue for one more year. Specifically, a detailed financial breakdown of the series showed that although it was expensive to make, and performing poorly against ITV’s Coronation Street, it paid for itself twice over through syndication overseas and merchandise licenses.
So in essence what we have here is an apparently broadly sincere argument that Doctor Who would have survived if everyone behind the scenes had been willing to be a bit more Thatcherite about the economics of the situation. In case you’ve missed my general political leanings throughout the course of this project, I’ll note upfront that this is the kind of conclusion that I’m not very likely to entertain all that seriously. More to the point, it’s a conclusion that I doubt the production team responsible for The Happiness Patrol or Paradise Towers were ever going to give the time of day either, so I think we can pretty resoundingly dub it a bit of a non-starter.
It is, naturally, simultaneously wrapped up in the usual tendency of 1990s Doctor Who fandom to assume that the way forward for the franchise was for the BBC to fob it off to an independent production company, probably with the eventual goal of turning it into a movie. That this line of thinking persisted even after the BBC had tried to fob the series off to an international network and turned it into a telemovie that landed with a deafening yet inconsequential thud is proof, if proof were needed, that fandoms don’t always think of these things in the most logical of terms.
In practice, Doctor Who‘s return was eventually secured by methods that developed largely as a counterreaction to Birt’s Conservative-aligned sensibilities, taking advantage of the BBC’s gradually strengthened regional divisions to land a surprise hit for BBC Cymru Wales. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the foundational elements of this approach were already taking root at the BBC.
The first web pages dedicated to BBC Wales were launched in 1997, while the broadcaster began to make inroads into television production with the launch of Boyd and Jane Clack’s Satellite City in October 1996. This would be followed up in 1999 – just in time for a turn-of-the-millennium uptick in Welsh devolution with the opening of the Senedd – with Belonging, affording future Doctor Who and Torchwood alum Eve Myles her first major leading role.
In the accompanying interviews with key creative figures provided by Owen as a means of explaining the reasoning behind his rewriting of history in this particular fashion, it’s perhaps also noteworthy that the closeness of the then-forthcoming Illegal Alien to Mike Tucker and Robert Perry’s original scripts was heavily stressed. As Tucker explained:
Illegal Alien was originally written in script form. When I was writing the novel, the early part of that I was working from our original screenplay to get all the dialogue for the novel, so that was quite nice for me – it was novelising an unmade story in effect. The opening two parts of Illegal Alien, when it finally hits the bookshelves, is damn near what was the scripted version. When it does come out it may show some of the problems, in that it would have been a very expensive production, which could ultimately have been its downfall.
All of these facts, taken in the aggregate, paint a picture of a novel wedded to a rather fanciful and dated vision of the direction from which Doctor Who‘s salvation would come. If we chose to rag on War of the Daleks for representing a particularly nasty dead end for a certain approach to the franchise, then we should admit that Illegal Alien, at first glance, shows all the signs of adhering to that same approach, complete with a starring role for the other iconic Doctor Who alien. Whether the novel in question is riffing on an imaginary Dalek story dreamt up by Dave Owen or an almost-finished Tucker and Perry Cyberman script, there exists the same fascination with the totemic power of that unmade twenty-seventh season.
Certainly, this isn’t an entirely untroubling prospect, but the fact of the matter is that as far as sensible contexts in which this particular artistic preoccupation could sit are concerned, the Seventh Doctor PDAs are probably a much more comfortable fit than the theoretically forward-looking Eighth Doctor Adventures.
Crucially, for all that the two novels might exhibit a broadly similar raison d’être, there remain telling differences. Whereas War of the Daleks never rose above the level of a petty attack on Remembrance of the Daleks, the story most often singled out as the starting point of the Seventh Doctor’s NA characterisation, Illegal Alien takes great pains to avoid an outright erasure of the New Adventures.
Ace might have reverted to her televised characterisation, but certain choice Virgin-original elements of her backstory have been retained. She still worked at the McDonald’s on Tottenham Court Road as suggested by The Crystal Bucephalus and Head Games. Her friend Manisha is explicitly identified as having died, favouring Blood Heat‘s version of events rather than the more ambiguous account suggested by Ghost Light and Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation of Remembrance. Even the most prominent element of discontinuity, the rewriting of the character’s surname to “Gale” in a nod to The Wizard of Oz, won’t be properly introduced until Tucker and Perry’s short story Ace of Hearts in five months’ time.
There’s a care and attentiveness taken here to avoid completely foreclosing on any future authors that might wish to play around in a more overt fashion with the trappings of the NAs, of the sort that’s completely lacking from decisions like the casual manner of Ace’s death in Ground Zero. I mean, that’s not an especially high bar to clear, but the point still stands.
What’s most interesting about this, really, is the fact that it doesn’t actually seem all that remarkable from the perspective of a 1997 reader. While Tucker and Perry are primarily remembered nowadays as two of the chief architects of a sort of ersatz Season 27 running throughout the BBC Books line – not to mention Tucker’s early contributions to Big Finish in the form of The Genocide Machine and Dust Breeding – that’s largely an image which doesn’t actually begin to take shape until Illegal Alien itself, if not later.
To date, they’ve only had one major writing credit for the series, contributing Question Mark Pyjamas to Lost Property, the second of Virgin’s Decalog series of short story collections. Far from trying to roll Doctor Who back to December 1989, the story offered perhaps the most logical extension of the collection’s central conceit of “homes owned by the Doctor” by centring its action around the house in Kent introduced to the New Adventures by Andrew Cartmel in Warhead.
Furthermore, much of the comedy of its “trap the Doctor and his companions in a cheesy domestic sitcom” premise derived from the fundamentally dysfunctional and jagged edges of the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny as a TARDIS crew. It seems, in retrospect, the type of story one might expect unabashed frock Paul Cornell to write, with Tucker and Perry probably being better suited for something like The Trials of Tara, constructed as it was to serve as an extremely loose sequel to an actual televised Sylvester McCoy story.
But while we could very easily continue to harp on in this vein about Illegal Alien‘s not being as resounding a rebuke of the New Adventures as we might initially imagine it to be, the DWM quotes alone make it apparent that Tucker and Perry aren’t particularly interested in pretending that this is anything that much more complex than a lightly reskinned “Season 27” script. As such, it probably behooves us to put aside all our talk of Time’s Champion and the Other and dust off the Cartmel Era analytical playbook for another trip around the block.
Handily enough, the Cartmel Era calling card which most immediately jumps out is one which Owen devotes special attention to in his What If? feature. Rather than using the Cybermen as little more than generic robots in an equally generic space opera world, as had become the norm throughout the Saward years, Illegal Alien chooses to ground its action in November 1940, at the height of the London Blitz.
This is, going by the standards of What If? at least, a highly significant shift. If the piece can be said to have a general thesis on the way forward for Doctor Who beyond slightly bizarre attempts at John Birt apologia, there are worse candidates for the title than Owen’s repeated emphasis on these final two imaginary seasons’ turning away from the garish space opera milieux of the Williams and Saward Eras. These would have been supplanted, he suggests, by an embrace of more readily comprehensible historical or (near-)contemporary periods of human history, which certainly seems a logical enough extrapolation from the overwhelmingly Earthbound Season 26.
Owen, for his part, partially casts this hypothetical sea-change in precisely the light that you might expect for a writer who seems so enamoured with Birtian accountancy as a valid mode of televisual production:
The production team had realised that a regular cast comprising the Doctor and one young female companion was the most workable, that serials set in recent British history brought out the best from the BBC’s designers, and that odd stories exploring the dark side of human nature were an area it could inhabit without fear of comparison with blockbuster science fiction films.
Granted, this isn’t a line of reasoning that’s been snatched out of thin air by Owen. Marc Platt, in the segment of his interview printed as part of 27 Up‘s commentary on Ice Time and Crime of the Century, seems to allude to it in a particularly choice observation, to give just one example: “You can have resonances within [period pieces], whereas it’s so difficult to create an alien culture in depth on a BBC budget. The designers just want to spray everything silver and light it like a Christmas tree.”
This is, in short, the same argument underpinning Russell T. Davies’ oft-quoted line in his pitch for the 2005 revival on the tedium of having to listen to stories about the Zogs on planet Zog and their turbulent relationship with the great Zog-monster. It’s particularly revealing, then, that What If? chooses to foreground the more prosaic argument as to the believability of the costuming and special effects that one one can achieve in a period drama, even as it does make a few nods later on to what we might call Planet Zog Theory.
(Care should be taken here to distinguish Planet Zog Theory from the ZOG Theory, a dime-a-dozen antisemitic conspiracy theory of the kind that is much less fun than overanalysis of an endearingly hokey British science fiction series. And, for that matter, from King Zog Theory, which I’ve just made up.)
What it reveals, as we’ve already said, is mainly just the unhealthy preoccupation in certain corners of fandom with a cinematic adaptation of Doctor Who. The idea that Doctor Who should even routinely be compared to “blockbuster science fiction films” is itself just a slightly more evolved form of the argument that Warriors of the Deep would have been a perfectly watchable story if the Myrka were a little less dodgy. Which is, y’know, rather unconvincing as arguments go, and also fails to consider that the decision to imitate big-budget blockbusters was in many ways the thing that set the series down the path to the Myrka to begin with.
While Tucker’s comments as to the feasibility of producing Illegal Alien as originally scripted may be seen to nod towards a similar filmic sensibility – and to be sure, one imagines that the Cybermat-heavy set pieces would have been a particularly tall ask, Cybermats never having been one of the more convincing creature designs in the Doctor Who arsenal – it’s clear from actually reading the finished novel that its televisual roots have been meticulously preserved.
Yes, you’ve got the more obvious signifiers like the book’s being split into four “Parts” as a means of keeping up the pretense of its being transmitted as an actual episode. Dutifully, the cliffhanger to the first part is the revelation of the Cybermen, though the novel goes the extra mile and manages the impressive feat of spoiling that surprise not just on the front cover, but on the back as well. And in a story that doesn’t even have “Cybermen” in the title, no less!
Even on a subtler level, though, the book’s origins as a script for the classic series are readily apparent. Its basic structure, with the Doctor and Ace becoming separated and pinballing between the same handful of places as they gradually ascertain the full scope of the plot and encounter as many action set pieces along the way as is necessary to get the job done, should be recognisable to any reasonably adept viewer of the original show. To finally circle back around to my original point, however, it’s really the Blitz that most firmly marks Illegal Alien as a Cartmel Era effort.
The Cartmel Era was, we should point out, not the first era of Doctor Who to be routinely made by people too young to have any meaningful memories of the Second World War; Eric Saward would have been just shy of nine months old when Japan surrendered in September 1945, while John Nathan-Turner was a little less than two years away from being born at all. Yet it was, in Ben Aaronovitch, the first to get a writer who was born after the series had debuted on television, and this proved by and large to be an equally important distinction.
Free from the cultural memory of the post-War, pre-Who status quo – or at the very least, freer than had been the norm for past Eras – there was a sense that that memory could be interrogated and played with in a more probing way. Stephen Wyatt’s Paradise Towers included a memorable – for better or worse – turn for Richard Briers as the eponymous housing project’s plainly Hitleresque Caretaker.
The following season, Remembrance of the Daleks brought the horrors of sixties neo-Nazism home to roost in the form of long-time BUF supporter and Cable Street veteran George Ratcliffe. All of this built logically to the first story to actually be set in the thick of the Second World War, The Curse of Fenric, to say nothing of Season 26’s marginally less direct grappling with fascist thought in the form of Ghost Light and Survival.
(This, incidentally, also hints at the main reason why Illegal Alien was held back from production to begin with, as Aaronovitch quite reasonably pointed out to Tucker and Perry that the production team already had a “Britain in the 1940s” story in the works. Now, with six years’ worth of New Adventures separating it from The Curse of Fenric, the novel can be advantageously reframed as a pleasantly nostalgic throwback rather than a demonstration of the law of diminishing returns.)
Although the New Adventures undeniably went on to broaden their identity beyond their beginnings as an outgrowth of the Cartmel Era, they nevertheless inherited their antecedent’s fascination with Nazism. Exodus saw the series use the horrors of fascism to make some early stabs at moral complexity and maturity, though those efforts were ultimately stymied by the basic difficulty of trying to get Terrance Dicks to write anything that could be described as “complex” or “mature.”
To their credit, the books eventually followed up with Lance Parkin’s Just War, which took the basic brief of Doctor Who and the Nazis about as far as you could feasibly go before forcefully exposing that idea as horrifically broken and unworkable.
If Just War saw the series offer up the most direct engagement with the horrors of Nazism that was tastefully possible within Doctor Who‘s intrinsically British frame of reference – that being the German occupation of the Channel Islands – then Illegal Alien has, with the Blitz, seemingly opted for the second-most direct engagement.
The Blitz, as far as the Second World War is concerned, is a bit of a curious thing. As a matter of course, Dale’s Ramblings tends to react with a certain well-honed scepticism towards parts of British history that readily lend themselves to nationalist myth-making, and there are a couple of searingly obvious reasons for this.
For one, the blog has always been the product of someone growing up in a post-Brexit world, and indeed someone whose adolescence and larger political awakening coincided almost perfectly with the fateful referendum. The Leave result was announced a mere three months after my thirteenth birthday, and is one of the key moments that really whipped me into an utterly confused sense of wondering what the hell had gone wrong with the world, coming just four months before the second such major shock.
Secondly, it’s just the type of thing that I feel it probably behooves me to acknowledge, as a white cisgender Australian man, Australians being a not-so-distant runner-up in the “Which former British colony can make an absolute imperialist hash of its own historical narrative?” stakes to the United States.
(Really, this unspoken competition is the true Commonwealth Games, only considerably more depressing and without the benefit of only occurring once every four years. And with more Americans. Lose-lose, really.)
We will, in due course, get to talking about the shortcomings of that myth-making, but at the same time I’ll concede that it would frankly take a much more foolhardy critic than myself to entirely downplay the sense of the Blitz as a hefty and tangible intersection between the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany. Conventional estimates generally place the number of London civilians killed in the eight-month bombing campaign at somewhere above 40,000, and that’s a big enough number that it would be in exceedingly poor taste to entirely dismiss out of hand.
The nature of this intersection, of course, remains substantially different from the harsh realities of occupation and collaboration which marked the experiences of continental European states, or even, as we’ve said, of the Channel Islands. The very nature of air raids as impersonal military operations provided precious little opportunity for actual, physical interaction with Nazis. Provided one of them doesn’t try to do something stupid like parachute into Scotland and get himself sent to Spandau Prison, I suppose, but that surely falls under the umbrella heading of “exceptional circumstances.”
For the purposes of drama, then, it’s easy enough to see the appeal. It provides a practically ready-made means of getting at the atmosphere of a war raging around the lives of the individuals caught in its wake. In effect, it’s not too dissimilar to the mood of your standard “War in Heaven,” only without the additional obligation of having to hammer in a less conventional sort of warfare.
It is, indeed, such a winning format that it’s hardly a surprise that the revival opted to revisit it for the purposes of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and Torchwood‘s Captain Jack Harkness. I mean, it’s not an instant win, as is proven by the example of Victory of the Daleks and (obliquely) The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, but hey, the nature of an ongoing series like this is that they can’t all be winners.
Illegal Alien, thankfully, largely manages to fall on the good side of this divide. Tucker and Perry manage to create a pervasive sense of eeriness through the imagery of a sparsely-populated London beset by bombs, helping to ensure that the geographical linking tissue between the novel’s numerous set pieces actually has some measure of character to it
Perhaps the most striking idea that arises from this use of the Blitz, however, comes when Ace regards the towering urban inferno from the heights of Hampstead Heath (curiously free, in this time period, of anti-capitalist German shepherds named after Italian Marxists). Rather than viewing the city’s fate as an inspiring moment of British resilience through the so-called “Blitz spirit,” Ace instead sees a testament to the awe-inspiring power of anarchy at sweeping away a rather decrepit social order.
It’s an interesting moment, and one which seems to properly grasp the appeal of doing this particular story with this particular Doctor and companion. Ace’s reaction here is fundamentally tied to her nature as a character, and is all the more remarkable for the fact that the novel initially seems to be giving her an unadorned lesson in learning about the horrors of the Second World War; one couldn’t casually rewrite this scene for Rose Tyler or Amy Pond, because it really wouldn’t make any sense at all in that context without some major tweaking.
But there’s a delicate balancing act to be had here, as an uncritical valorisation of the Blitz as a “good thing” is quite clearly woefully short-sighted. Tucker and Perry are, if nothing else, seemingly aware of this, as evidenced by Ace’s subsequent guilty recollection of Manisha’s own fiery fate at the hands of neo-Nazis.
Granted, the sad reality of these abhorrent ideologies’ historical recurrence is hardly groundbreaking stuff, even if you’re confining the stories under your consideration to the McCoy years, but the novel does at least hint towards something a tad more nuanced.
More than any other Doctor Who story to handle the Blitz, Illegal Alien seems particularly concerned with the disproportionate impact of the German air raids on London’s East End. This is, it probably goes without saying, a demonstrable historical fact, occasioned by the area’s historical status as the home of the city’s main shipping facilities.
Even before the war, the East End had also acquired a longstanding reputation for crime and poverty, the latter of which wasn’t exactly helped much by the whole “houses constantly getting bombs dropped on them” situation. More often than not, this reputation found itself accompanied by a rather unfortunate streak of racism and/or anti-Semitism on account of the area’s sizeable migrant population. To put it in Doctor Who terms, well, all we have to do is ask “Where was The Talons of Weng-Chiang set again?” in order for you to get my point. I hope.
Throughout Illegal Alien, Tucker and Perry emphasise this sense of a much-maligned area of the city which has suddenly found itself the focus of a great calamity, and they just about manage to stay on the side of good taste to boot. Much like Greel’s nefarious activities in Talons, the “Limehouse Lurker” is explicitly likened to the lingering memory of Jack the Ripper, a parallel which also serves to indirectly foreshadow next year’s Matrix.
The guest characters themselves are also rather pointedly chosen. Sharkey is a bit too much of a stereotypical portrait of a shifty, crime-prone and mildly alcoholic Irishman for me to ever feel entirely comfortable singing his praises, but even here there is some minimal lip service paid to his theft-based activities being a response to his impoverished circumstances. The initial tension between Mullen and McBride, meanwhile, is partially fuelled by the former’s distrust of what he sees as the tendency of Irish Americans towards the cause of the IRA, which is a rather more shrewd piece of historical detail than the TV series was typically willing to delve into.
In this light, the scepticism shown towards characters exhibiting stereotypical “Englishness” becomes rather more telling, particularly in a story featuring the only then-extant Doctor not to be played by an English actor. What’s more, Illegal Alien repeatedly draws attention to the sense in which it is essentially moving through the extensive corpus of British, and more specifically English, popular culture to which Doctor Who owes a debt in one fashion or another.
The most blatant reinforcement of this sensation comes in the form of a number of nominal homages to fictional and real personages scattered throughout the novel. It’s hardly the height of critical sleuthing to figure out that Major Lazonby might possibly be named as a tip of the hat to a certain James Bond actor, while Dr. Peddler somehow manages to be an even more obvious nod to the Cybermen’s real-life co-creator.
Of Mullen’s underlings, PC Dixon seems destined to evoke Jack Warner’s eponymous character from Dixon of Dock Green – a series which, we ought not forget, Doctor Who spent an awful lot of its early years scheduled in close proximity to – and I’d be willing to eat my hat if PC Quick wasn’t named in deference to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, particularly with the East End setting and all.
But of the guest cast, it’s George Limb who is most frequently framed as a creature of narrative and of fiction. Ace’s initial trust of him is explicitly positioned as a result of Limb’s resemblance to “dotty old vicars and headmasters in 1970s English sitcoms,” while the man himself later ruefully compares his actions to Doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein.
On the whole, this serves as a sensible extrapolation of Limb’s presentation as a foil for the Doctor. Illegal Alien is hardly subtle on this point, with Tucker and Perry introducing the character by the sobriquet of “the Professor,” which predictably draws Ace up short on account of her own longstanding nickname for the Doctor. Even outside of these more obvious points, the novel makes an unselfconscious return to the “duelling chessmasters” school of adversary construction so favoured by stories like The Curse of Fenric for the first time in what feels like forever.
More specifically, and somewhat predictably for the Wilderness Years, Limb most directly evokes Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. He’s a high-level civil servant with powerful connections – and indeed, Victory of the Daleks retroactively makes it even easier to draw parallels between Limb and the Doctor on account of their mutual friendship with Churchill – and insider knowledge of all sorts of secretive governmental/military projects, who just so happens to have chosen to employ his skills for the benefit of London’s criminal class instead.
What’s most compelling about the inevitable critique of Pertwee embedded in this characterisation, then, is the decision to cast the kind of uniformity promised by Limb – itself a rather natural choice of subject matter for a Cyberman story – as something of a twisted funhouse mirror reflection of the national myth of the “Blitz spirit.” Sharkey’s reflections on the changing nature of the London underworld, as a formerly diffuse structure which has pulled together to the point that the individuals caught in the system are reduced to being “the eyes and ears of a single great organising mind,” prove particularly evocative of the language of solidarity which is often used to describe this period of British history.
The reality, as is so often the case, is rather more complex. Writing in response to renewed calls for the British populace to “keep calm and carry on” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, historian Richard Overy summarised the oftentimes conflicting evidence that is so often erased by the simplistic “Blitz spirit” narrative:
The “blitz spirit” was nevertheless an invention at the time. There was doubtless evidence of stoic behaviour during the second world war. Psychiatrists at the time worried that there would be an epidemic of “air-raid phobia” and hospitals prepared for an influx of psychiatric casualties, but there were fewer admissions to psychiatric hospitals in 1940 than in 1939. One leading psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, published a Penguin Special in 1940 on how to conquer fear. His recipe was a simple pat on the shoulder and some firm words. He suggested carrying a packet of sweets or some biscuits, or a flask of brandy, to cheer up those unnerved by the bombs.
These banal solutions masked the reality of being bombed night after night. In the heavily bombed cities – Plymouth, Southampton, Clydebank – tens of thousands of people trekked out of the city into the countryside or neighbouring villages for shelter and food. Their understandable reaction was fear. Endurance was unavoidable, and survival their chief priority. Exhibiting the “blitz spirit” was not. Government researchers found that what people wanted most was sound information, the promise of welfare and rehabilitation, and somewhere to sleep. The sight of destroyed buildings, corpses and body parts was utterly alien to daily life. The trauma this produced was largely unrecorded, and certainly untreated.
This complexity was similarly reflected in the effect of the bombings on existing class structures in the United Kingdom. It’s perhaps quite pointed that one of the most widely reproduced Blitz-time anecdotes concerns the Queen Mother’s response to the bombing of Buckingham Palace, saying, “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”
And sure, that would all be terribly moving if it didn’t gloss over the slightly inconvenient fact that the Royal Family were – and, let’s be honest, still are – the beneficiaries of a financial arrangement that would almost certainly see the palatial home restored at the expense of the taxpayer. Indeed, on her initial visits to the area, she had been met with hostility for turning out in her finest and most expensive garments, which is really only a few rungs above “Let them eat cake” as the kind of thing to which people suffering from an acute case of “having bombs dropped on their houses every night” are liable to respond poorly.
At the same time, however, the carnage of the Blitz did go on to bring about a genuine shift in the attitude towards poverty and social welfare in Britain. In June 1941, about a month after the Luftwaffe’s last major raid on London, the wartime coalition government formed a committee to, in the words of Arthur Greenwood, “undertake… a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen’s compensation, and to make recommendations.”
The committee’s final report, dubbed the Beveridge Report after its chief architect, Liberal economist William Beveridge, identified “five giants on the road of reconstruction” and proposed wide-ranging reforms to the nation’s existing welfare apparatus. Following the conclusion of the War and the elevation of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party to government after their landslide victory at the July 1945 general election, the document went on to prove a key influence in the expansion of National Insurance and the creation of the National Health Service, effectively paving the way for the modern British welfare state.
Out of the classist spectacle of the Royal Family bemoaning the loss of their stalwartly safeguarded palaces, in other words, came a marginally better world. Illegal Alien is at least incisive enough to recognise that this cannot ever entirely erase the very real historical suffering that the Blitz caused. Indeed, Tucker and Perry even get in a few token jabs at the state of London in Ace’s time, a world shaped by the twin pressures of Thatcher’s 1986 dissolution of the Greater London Council and the gaudy redevelopment of the London Docklands under the auspices of Michael Heseltine. Just in case you were in any doubt as to the British public’s general appetite for New Labour and the possibility of change at this time.
What ultimately dooms Limb, in other words, is his desire to bypass all that history and skip straight to a point where the arc of time has bent towards a future that is a little less crap. It’s not, notably, an active desire to alter or hasten that arc, which would conceivably run the risk of carrying a slightly unpleasant subtext of “Don’t try and bring about the welfare state before its preordained time.”
It’s a purely self-centred move, prioritising Limb’s own perspective over the experiences of any of the other people involved, and in proving unable to properly encompass the whole scope of history, he winds up spread across all of time and space in a rather horrific fashion that leaves me with a genuine sense of intrigue as to how on Earth he’s going to possibly return for Loving the Alien in about four and a half years’ time.
Where the novel stumbles, unfortunately, is in its final “Part,” which is really one of the more unfortunate places to have your artistic cock-ups. After the first three parts had conspired to keep the horrors of Nazism at a respectful distance, the final act sees very real and heinous figures of the Nazi regime like Reinhard Heydrich drawn into a pulpy runaround involving Cybermen. It’s not a failing unique to Tucker and Perry by any means; like we said, this was basically the tack taken by Dicks in Exodus, and countless adventure stories besides, of which the Indiana Jones films are probably the most salient example.
(Even there, Steven Spielberg at least had the decency, in making Schindler’s List, to realise that he didn’t quite feel comfortable continuing to use the Nazis as pulp villains, explaining the presence of the Soviets in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)
In a post-Just War world, though, this approach feels severely blunted, especially with the decision to set the third act on the Channel Islands. There’s nothing in Ace’s experience of imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis that can even hope to come close to Bernice’s ordeal. Indeed, the fact that this treatment is extended to the TV iteration of Ace, a figure who has always been closely aligned with the spirit of children’s television, sets up a sense of fundamental wrongness which is to a certain extent deeply upsetting, and not even a dramatically satisfying kind of upsetting.
Parkin’s novel ultimately derived much of its power from its status as a rare example of the pure historical in a post-Gunfighters Doctor Who, and this is a power which can never earnestly be replicated in the context of a Cyberman novel. The underlying message of scenes like Ace’s conversation with fellow prisoner Sid Napley – that one should remember the names of the victims of fascism and/or genocide – is a sound one with which it isn’t honestly worth arguing unless you’re, y’know, a fascist, but Napley never really becomes much more than a name, and the whole exercise consequently ends up feeling dangerously cynical.
When your handling of Nazism is less deft than the “intentionally broad sex farce masquerading as standard-issue time travel dilemma” of Let’s Kill Hitler, you’ve made a misstep somewhere along the way. (This maxim also serves as an adequate rejoinder to Spyfall, Part Two, funnily enough, just for those of you who were expecting me to reference The Timeless Children in our discussion of clunky, poorly-delivered retcons last time.)
For a book which seems to aspire more often than not to the basic precis of “Silver Nemesis done right,” the Nazis who populate Part Four of the novel aren’t honestly much more sophisticated than Anton Diffring’s turn as Hans de Flores.
Still, for much of its length Illegal Alien is a perfectly serviceable return to the simpler days of the Wilderness Years, and as someone who admittedly harbours a great deal of baseline affection for the pairing of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, I can’t help but find it a relatively enjoyable time, even as it isn’t the deepest or most consequential work in the world. It’s also helped in no small measure by the juxtaposition of its workable handling of an iconic Doctor Who menace against the travesty of War of the Daleks, leading to a rare instance of a Cyberman story that’s leagues ahead of its nearest Dalek counterpart.
Perhaps, for the moment, that’s enough.
Miscellaneous Observations
The writing style of Illegal Alien is actually strangely inconsistent, with the bulk of it unfolding in a very economical, no-nonsense kind of fashion, only to be interspersed with occasional turns towards a more lyrical and flowery kind of narration. It’s a bit of a fool’s errand to definitively try and separate a given author’s contributions in co-written productions like this, but my gut feeling based on having listened to Tucker’s two Big Finish audio dramas and experiencing their distinct lack of overly flashy scripting is to detect the hand of Perry at work in these aberrations. I could be wrong, though.
One of the more humorous moments to be found in Dave Owen’s What If? piece, barring those I already touched upon, comes in his off-handed description of an alternate New Adventures line beginning with Neil Penswick’s The Pit, of all things. I can only assume, based on the dire quality of that novel, that this is a somewhat playful concession to the need to work in a mention of the unmade Hostage somewhere in the piece, but it winds up sitting at odds with the generally serious tone in evidence elsewhere.
Final Thoughts
Well, that’s another month down. And now, right before we get into the big month that’s going to end up redefining just about everything… I’m going to take a bit of a break. Truthfully, I’m just very exhausted at the moment, so I need to take some time off from the constant business of writing for a little while. When I get back, though, we’ve still got one more roadblock separating us from Alien Bodies, as Simon Bucher-Jones returns to introduce Clarence to the New Adventures with Ghost Devices. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 