“My next question is a very simple one. Why?”
~ The Doctor, speaking for many a reader
Writing an ongoing set of book reviews for well over five and a half years is bound to change some of your outlooks on the way you approach and respond to art. This is especially true when you’re a few days shy of your fifteenth birthday when you post the first instalment in said series.
Like so many things in life, however, one is frequently not particularly conscious of these changes as they’re actually happening, and it’s only as you begin to look back that you notice just how far your opinions have evolved.
To pick a totally arbitrary and not at all thematically appropriate example, if you had asked me about a year or two ago whether I preferred the prospect of having to dream up an ending to a series of reviews, or to forge a new beginning and start afresh by discussing a whole new subject, I would pretty unequivocally side with the latter.
After all, endings are emotionally fraught things at the best of times, representing a sense of closure and the deprivation of entire avenues of possibility. No matter what, once I reviewed The Dying Days, that would represent the last chance I would ever get to offer my first-blush opinions on a New Adventure featuring the Doctor. Yes, I could theoretically go back and do a re-review at any point in the future if I so chose, but that would by definition be a fundamentally different experience, perpetually positioned in contrast to my original review, even if the underlying analysis remained the same and was merely expressed in slightly updated terms.
With all of that being said, at this present moment, I am forced to disagree pretty heavily with my past self’s judgment, as I now find myself staring down the barrel of deliberately fashioning a beginning almost from wholecloth for the first time since starting the increasingly inaccurately named Virgin Adventures Reviews in March 2018.
We can, of course, quite trivially raise the expected pedantic objections to this claim. What about Goth Opera, you ask? Well, it tied into that month’s New Adventure and was written by one of the line’s most acclaimed and popular authors, softening the impact of its status as the first Missing Adventure. Oh No It Isn’t? Same author, actually, and consciously written to build off of the sixty-one prior New Adventures, while at least pantomiming the motions – sorry – of a series’ first novel so as to get the BBC’s copyright lawyers to look the other way.
Perhaps the closest thing to a real “beginning” in the sense that we mean it here would be my decision to go back and cover the first Decalog, requiring as it did a complete adjustment to my usual format so as to better fit the context of a short story collection as opposed to the countless novels I had covered at that date.
And so we arrive, at long last, at The Eight Doctors, the first of BBC Books’ Eighth Doctor Adventures range. You might think, given everything I’ve just said, that I consider finding an angle with which to start – the most important part of any Dale’s Ramblings post, as the rest is really just an extended improv session trying desperately to masquerade as a well thought-out and considered review – to be an exceedingly difficult task, requiring us to jettison all of the assumptions we’ve built up throughout the VARs.
This is, of course, ludicrous. While I very plainly couldn’t keep the “Virgin New/Missing Adventures Reviews” title, I feel pretty confident in declaring that the overwhelming majority of my readerbase is not going to exclusively view this post in a vacuum. Everything I’ve written so far, and will go on to write, inevitably exists in the shadow of the last one hundred and one books.
In hindsight, this was even true of Genesys, the first full-length original novel ever to feature the Doctor, with heartfelt apologies to any fans of Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space who might be tuning in for the first time. The only reason I didn’t treat it in a manner in accordance with that observation was, once again, that I was fourteen and clueless.
At a bare minimum, the presence of the Seventh Doctor and Ace clearly signified that the book was conceptually nested within the final two seasons of the classic show, including the rather salient contextual point that said show had been cancelled barely eighteen months earlier.
The novel’s lens was only further widened by the strong sense that John Peel really would rather have been writing for any incarnation other than the Seventh Doctor, given his tendency to write the character more in line with Pip and Jane Baker’s original take in Time and the Rani, to say nothing of the rather extraneous cameos by the Third and Fourth Doctors.
And funnily enough, talking about a writer who clearly wishes they were writing for any other Doctor and has seen fit to include a bunch of extraneous cameos is pretty much the perfect segue into talking about The Eight Doctors itself.
These days, people who are sufficiently interested in the Wilderness Years novels to actually bother reading some janky old WordPress site on the topic are certainly well aware of this book’s premise, and those who have blundered their way to this corner of the Internet unbidden are probably either A. well-acquainted enough with the classic series that they can look at the fact that this is a novel written by the man whose final televised scripting credit for the franchise was a twentieth anniversary special uniting the first five Doctors entitled The Five Doctors and take a pretty good guess at its central idea, or B. are primarily familiar with the post-2005 revival and are almost certainly totally lost.
For the benefit of this latter group, and anybody vaguely adjacent to said group, The Eight Doctors basically amounts to a magical mystery tour set immediately after the 1996 TV movie in which Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor, in a frankly unheard of turn of events, develops amnesia and has to restore his memory by wandering through incidents from his past and meeting each of his earlier incarnations, with the point at which he meets each incarnation mapping oh-so-conveniently onto whichever script Dicks happened to have written for said Doctor, wherever applicable.
This hints at the real issue with trying to fashion a beginning from The Eight Doctors. It is not that it is necessarily inherently difficult to accomplish this task; rather, the book is structured on a fundamental level so as to provide the reader with such an overwhelming glut of content that it becomes genuinely difficult to know where to start.
But that is, in and of itself, an adequate enough beginning, and it’s especially noteworthy that I felt moved to use the word “content” here to refer to the specifics of the novel and what passes for its plot. Ordinarily, I find it a rather loathsome word when applied in the generic to refer to the sphere of human expression of which books, film and television are distinct subsets. I will almost always prefer a term like “art” or even, at a push, “media,” so long as the angels and ministers of grace defend us from the soulless, unfeeling tyranny of “content.”
It is difficult to escape the impression, however, that The Eight Doctors is a novel where the moniker is entirely apropos. If we completely reject the “content as an end unto itself” interpretation, it becomes indescribably tough to make sense of baffling decisions like, say, the presence of a State of Decay sequel and an attempted redemption of Borusa, seemingly hoping that the audience will completely forget that Dicks has not only trotted out both of these ideas before, but in the same book to boot.
In the midst of all this, it’s hard not to become mildly dispirited by the whole thing, which sets up one of the more obvious angles one can take when a figure so broadly beloved among Doctor Who fandom as to have acquired the affectionate nickname of “Uncle Terrance” suddenly turns in a book of frankly execrable quality.
It is not quite the worst-performing of his novels for Virgin or BBC Books, because we will eventually be forced to contend with a world in which Warmonger exists, but it is certainly the least-loved to date, falling third-from-last on the Sullivan rankings. It’s only beaten out by John Peel’s Legacy of the Daleks, whose panning is reasonably explicable as part of the lingering fallout from War of the Daleks, and Simon Messingham’s The Infinity Race, which is on the whole a more unexpected choice for “consensus worst novel,” but these things happen I suppose.
Still, when you consider that the lowest-ranked of his three New Adventures was Shakedown, ranked at a comparably respectable forty-fourth out of sixty-one novels, and his highest-ranked novel, Exodus, actually manages to crack the top ten, the sudden drop-off here is notable.
If this fact is depressing enough in its own right, however, it becomes crushingly so once one realises that its awfulness really isn’t that hard to explain. There’s very little here that is so far removed from the usual shortcomings of Dicks’ novels as to be completely unexpected; the only shock stems from the sheer magnitude at which these shortcomings have been allowed to run rampant through the book.
Because really, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves Dicks has always tended towards this kind of self-congratulatory and self-sabotaging sequelitis, ever since the earliest days of his engagement with the New Adventures. Exodus may have been the best NA at the time of its publication, but it was far from perfect, and the decision to treat the horrors of Nazi Germany as little more than window-dressing for an alternate history tale that picked up on the spellbinding continuity question of “What happened to the War Chief after The War Games?” was one of the novel’s tackier and cheaper elements, albeit one that Lance Parkin largely managed to retroactively redeem through the construction of Just War as a direct response to that flippancy.
Blood Harvest, meanwhile, opted to combine a sequel to State of Decay with a mercifully brief yet perplexingly anomalous last-minute follow-up to the political intrigue(?) of The Five Doctors. Given the rather mind-numbing tedium that naturally accompanies such briefs, it’s no surprise that the most entertaining parts by far were the wholly original Prohibition-era segments. Well, give or take a few rather alarming blips of typically Dicksian myopia like having the Doctor speak in defence of Al Capone, or the casual employment of rape as a particularly cheap and sordid means of putting Ace in danger.
Even Shakedown, while not overtly structured as a direct sequel to one of Dicks’ television scripts, was still centred around the return of a monster that originated under his tenure as script editor, and saw fit to include one of the few substantive appearances of said monster’s eternal nemesis, following in the footsteps of the first such appearance, that being… oh, Dicks’ own Horror of Fang Rock. Now there’s a surprise.
And that just about sums up the appropriate reaction to so much of The Eight Doctors‘ self-indulgence: “Of course.” Of course Dicks was going to ensure that we got to read the all-important tale of how the Master managed to get back to his TARDIS at Devil’s End after his escape in The Sea Devils. Of course he would not-so-subtly try and restore the primacy of The Five Doctors as the One True Vision of Gallifrey through the redemption of Borusa and the return of Flavia to the presidency. Again, the only legitimately surprising part of any of this is that he would have the sheer foolhardiness to try and do all of these things at the same time.
But OK, let’s back up for a second, because I recognise that I might very well be opening myself up to accusations of being needlessly cynical and mean-spirited towards a beloved and influential figure within the history of Doctor Who.
Sure, the obvious kneejerk rebuttal to that might be to say that The Eight Doctors gives every impression of being a needlessly cynical and mean-spirited book itself, what with the almost instantaneous decrying of the TV movie in the third paragraph as “a weird, fantastic adventure, full of improbable, illogical events,” but we might as well try and give Dicks something resembling the benefit of the doubt and try and construct a redemptive reading for what he’s trying to do beyond “taking cheap shots at the TV movie,” which was, let’s face it, not exactly an uncommon or difficult pastime among fans at the time.
The crucial clue lies, perhaps, in the amnesia, and the notion implicit therein that the series has somehow strayed from its base fundamentals, necessitating the TARDIS taking the Doctor “back to the beginning,” as it were.
In this, the most charitable reading of Dicks’ intent that I can really muster, the resulting continuity fest is meant to allow the Doctor to engage on some grand psychological, soul-searching odyssey, with each incarnation allowing him to reconnect with some core tenet of his ethics. You know the kind of thing, never cruel or cowardly, hate is always foolish and love is always wise, don’t go about smashing cavemen’s skulls in.
Profound stuff, like.
It’s worth noting that this “Take the Doctor back to the start” ethos bears more than a passing resemblance to that which Dicks had previously used as the very loose foundation for The Five Doctors, as most notably lampshaded in the “Why not? After all, that’s how it all started” line at the conclusion of the special.
(I mean, it’s also a significant ingredient in the composition of Hell Bent, although making this comparison with a straight face requires us to overlook the rather important fact that part of what elevates that story to the status of a masterpiece is its willingness to actively place itself in opposition to stories like The Eight Doctors and their obsession with Gallifrey as a sanctified and untouchable bastion of lore, but that’s by the by.)
If this feels like a very slim construction, dear reader, then that’s no accident. While I’m just about willing to consider that this might have been Dicks’ intent, it very quickly runs aground once you actually start considering the way in which he’s chosen to go about accomplishing this task. The prologue is, as we’ve discussed, already bad enough with its thinly-veiled authorial griping on points of continuity in the TV movie’s script, even going out of its way to make a point of having the amnesiac Doctor reject Richard Hudolin’s grand Victorian console room in favour of the classic design.
Any hope that the quality of these passages might just be an aberration is almost instantly dashed once we launch into the first chapter, however, because the obligatory “return to Coal Hill” sequences – exhibiting a characteristically bloody-minded literalism in the interpretation of “back to the beginning” – might actually be a shoo-in for the worst thing Dicks has ever written as a part of one of his novels.
Even in this, a small subset of the book, it’s tough to know where to begin. Sure, it’s not as if anyone expected biting social realism from the man whose idea of “Let’s make the new companion a feminist” seemed to extend no further than giving her a few condescendingly trite conversations about Women’s Lib in The Monster of Peladon or The Time Warrior, but the sheer awfulness of his attempts to capture the youth culture of 1997 and address hot button issues like the rise of crack cocaine has to be seen to be believed.
It’s a rot which extends so much deeper than the decision to cast all the drug dealers as escapees from a particularly middling public school production of West Side Story that saw fit to mash itself up with a rejected pantomime adaptation of The Wire exactly five years too early, even as that description actually serves as the perfect encapsulation of the problem: there’s just such a crashing lack of subtlety to the whole thing that it honestly beggars belief at points.
Which means that we get the obligatory Dicks moralising about the evils of crack cocaine, delivered by our requisite Ian and Barbara stand-ins – one of whom seems, quite sincerely, totally unaware of the mere existence of said substance; this being Dicks, it is perhaps unsurprising that it is the woman – with all the ethical sophistication of… well, I suppose the snarky comment to make would be to say “of your average Terrance Dicks novel,” but because I really feel like flexing my “absurd simile” muscles today, we’ll just say that it lands at some undefined point on the spectrum between Nancy Reagan and that one Pee-wee Herman PSA and leave it at that.
Even the amnesiac Doctor starts to get in on the action at one point, ranting about how “[there] was nothing like that going on in Coal Hill when [he] used to live [there!]” Which would all be terribly stirring and affecting – he said, tongue planted firmly in cheek – if it didn’t flag the rather pertinent question of “Wait, how exactly do you even remember that you used to live here?” on account of the whole amnesia thing.
(And the book establishes in no uncertain terms that the Doctor only regains memories upon meeting his past incarnations, so it simply doesn’t make sense that he’d have any memories of Coal Hill prior to meeting the First Doctor.)
As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also got the trademark Dicks sexism, which finds its most alarming expression in a frankly appalling moment in which the Ian stand-in cracks wise about one of his pupils having an “outstanding… personality,” swiftly followed for any of the audience members who missed this hilarious joke with a bit of internal monologue from Sam in which she reflects on how “well-developed” said pupil is for her age. Oh yeah, and said pupil is also referred to as being in “Year Five.”
It’s unclear whether this is just a slip of the misogyny on Dicks’ part, and he actually meant to say “fifth year” – certainly, the references to this student being “a dedicated weekend raver” would seem to support this, although the image of Uncle Terrance reading an article about ten-year-olds attending raves in The Sun and believing in it wholeheartedly is depressingly plausible – but I mean… it’s not as if it’s meaningfully any less creepy just because a teacher is joking about a fifteen-year-old’s breasts rather than a ten-year-old.
No, what we’re left with, in either case, is a sickening bit of “boys’ club” sexism from a figure clearly constructed to evoke one of the series’ original companions. It’s not, as we’ve said, that this is really a surprise from Dicks – I direct you once more to The Time Warrior and The Monster of Peladon – but if this is what he thinks counts as “going back to basics,” then frankly maybe the franchise deserved to be killed by the TV movie to begin with.
And this issue predictably bleeds into the rest of the book as well. It’s perhaps telling that the Barbara stand-in’s protestations that her colleague is a “chauvinist oaf” are echoed later by Romana when she bridles at the patriarchal ambience – the chauvinism, even, chortle chortle – of the planet from State of Decay, and that this desire to prove that she’s just as capable as the Doctor almost immediately sees her walk into a trap.
To anyone familiar with the Pertwee Era, it feels especially nasty, as this is yet another instance of the same shortsighted conception of the companion’s role that led Letts and Dicks to jettison Liz Shaw from the programme. The very idea that the female lead could play a part other than the bland, ditzy damsel in distress who’s there to ask the Doctor a lot of questions is pretty much greeted with snorts of derisive laughter, which is a mindset that only becomes all the more insulting when applied to such a groundbreaking companion as Romana.
(Aaaand actually I wrote that part of the review right before I read this paragraph-long “gem” of gobsmacking misogyny, which I’m just going to quote in full because it really does have to be seen to be believed:
The trouble with Time Ladies, thought the Doctor rather guiltily, was that they were far too independent. He had a brief pang of nostalgia for the kind of female companion who stayed glued to his side and screamed at the first sign of danger.
That’s great, but please, tell us how you really feel, Terrance.)
All of this apparently led the editorial staff at BBC Books to conclude that it would be a totally cool and normal idea to assign the task of introducing the range’s new female companion to the only regular contributor to the novels who’s actually old enough to remember living through World War II. Surely nothing bad can come of this.
Well, if the initial characterisation of one Samantha Jones can be said to avoid being actively offensive, then that probably speaks more to the fact that Dicks barely features her outside of a handful of brief scenes than it does to anything in the way of overly skilled or deft characterisation on his part.
Indeed, it’s hard to get much of a handle on her character at all here beyond the helpfully blunt “I don’t smoke – I don’t even drink Coke. I’m a vegetarian…” line. As it turns out, “It’s difficult to get much of a handle on Sam’s character” will in many ways also prove to be a very consistent throughline among the writers themselves throughout her tenure in the novels, to varying degrees of literalisation depending on whether you’re reading a novel by Lawrence Miles, Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum or… well, basically anybody else, really.
Equally, however, the striking lack of engagement with the mere existence of Sam throughout The Eight Doctors means that it simply doesn’t make much sense to talk about that whole furore until at least the time of Vampire Science, so for now it will suffice for our purposes to say that the fact that she’s introduced in a book that is positively drenched in a particularly noxious brew of regressive gender politics does rather mean that she’s hampered a bit right out of the gate. So while Dicks may have earned the slenderest shadow of a stay of critical execution on this one point, it’s very slender indeed.
Case in point being, well, the rest of the plot, such as it is. “Such as it is,” in this case, basically translates to “one of the single most dreary experiences I’ve ever had in reading these novels.” I found myself really struggling to care a jot about the ceaseless cavalcade of infodumps and continuity references that, for the veteran fan, are simply extraneous, and are certainly none too welcoming for any newcomers in the audience either by virtue of their sheer overwhelming magnitude.
Just about every introductory scene for each new Doctor routinely sees a conversation halt mid-flow in order to dump exposition on the viewer, the absolute nadir of which has to be the moment where Tegan is able to ask precisely one question of the Doctor before Dicks feels it necessary to explain, in page upon page of copious detail, the plot of The Five Doctors and vast swathes of Time Lord lore besides.
The best thing that can be said about these sequences is that they are almost enough to make you long for the bewildering awfulness of the Coal Hill segments. As I’ve said, “Terrance Dicks takes on the crack cocaine epidemic” is an unequivocally awful premise, but it is at least supremely entertaining in the unfathomable depths that it’s willing to plumb, even if only ironically.
By contrast, what am I really supposed to make of “The First Doctor learns a very important lesson in not braining cavemen?” What am I supposed to find gripping in the scintillating tale of “The Second Doctor is reluctantly persuaded to contact the Time Lords?” Yes, there’s marginally more depth to these scenes than that, but at this point I’m leaning on the word “marginally” hard enough to leave a bruise, and what little depth there is is so blatantly and bold-facedly stated for the reader that it undoes virtually any possibility of finding anything resembling deeper or more sophisticated thematic interest, let alone general entertainment value.
No, for my money the most revealing portions of the novel are those of the Third, Fourth and Sixth Doctors, and none of them reveal anything particularly complimentary. Firstly, the fact that Dicks should give the appearance of showing preferential treatment to the only era of the programme that he served as script editor for is, as we’ve hinted at, wholly unsurprising, but even if we bite the bullet and fully embrace our cynical perspective on his motives – as it’s becoming increasingly likely that we might have to – the way in which he’s chosen to go about it feels strange at best, and downright incoherent at worst.
As others have noted, the listing of every one of Three’s adventures up to the time of his appearance in the wake of The Sea Devils is rather insipid, and it’s also hard not to read a little bit of egotism into smaller moments like the Doctor being able to recall his Venusian karate lessons even before meeting the first of his past selves, considering the martial art was only added to Don Houghton’s scripts for Inferno in accordance with preliminary notes supplied by Letts and Dicks.
In a similar vein, the decision to have Eight’s encounter with the Third Doctor mark the point at which his brain begins to break down the remaining barriers locking off his memories is governed by a logic which appears wholly arbitrary, unless one reads it as being of a piece with a larger effort to position the Pertwee Era as the crux of Doctor Who.
Sure, calculating the Doctor’s age is a mug’s game at the best of times, but if we’re using the airdates of the episodes as a rough approximation, what possible sense does it make to position this turning point in the middle of Season Nine, when there are at least seventeen further seasons’ worth of memories to come? Honestly, even the State of Decay segments would seem a more logical choice, especially since, as we’ll see from the subsequent sections, there’s no love lost between Dicks and the Nathan-Turner years.
But in the end it all comes down to the fact that The Sea Devils is a rather more iconic story, replete with all the things most people love about the Pertwee Era, and so it gets lumped with the privilege of being a lodestone for The Eight Doctors‘ weird attempts to offer up a Grand Exhibition of Doctor Who history.
(Actually, while I was going to make a point about The Sea Devils being more beloved than State of Decay, the results of the 1998 Doctor Who Magazine poll reveal the margin in contemporary fandom opinion to be rather slim, coming in at #40 as opposed to State‘s forty-fifth place. So, again, Dicks probably could have gotten away with shifting the focus if he’d really wanted to, which leaves us with the conclusion that he simply… may not have wanted to.)
At the same time, if the Third Doctor segment is supposed to be exceptional in its laudatory status, then it’s tough to know what to make of the decision to have Three pull the Tissue Compression Eliminator on Eight and threaten to steal his TARDIS. It’s not something I really object to on principle myself, and it’s certainly no more jarringly wrong than any of the other stuff I’d been subjected to by that point, but it’s interesting nevertheless to view the roughly contemporary reviews over at the Doctor Who Ratings Guide and see the extent to which many of them zero in on this moment.
And that’s indicative of the cruellest irony of The Eight Doctors. Even if we’re willing to take the book on its own terms as an attempt to reconnect to the important parts of Doctor Who‘s legacy, even if we’re willing to accept the extent to which this seems to coincide with being a bit of a personal vanity project for Dicks and a rejection of developments that came after the periods in which he was most deeply involved with the programme, the points that it’s trying to make remain frustratingly incoherent.
There’s no better example of this than the aforementioned Fourth Doctor segments. On the one hand, the decision to do a sequel to State of Decay in spite of Blood Harvest already having played that particular card feels part and parcel with other aspects of the novel seeming to exist in tension with the New Adventures, like the rejection of the Romana Presidency that had been reaffirmed as “the present” as recently as Lungbarrow, or the presentation of the Seventh Doctor as a mopey, despondent wreck in later chapters.
Yet it’s hard to imagine that any of this would have been especially satisfying either to diehard critics of the New Adventures or to newcomers. For the latter, we run into the same problem wherein there is just too much continuity dumped on top of the casual reader for them to care. The former, on the other hand, would likely end up disappointed by the degree to which Dicks seems to have interpreted “do a sequel to State of Decay” in a functionally identical manner to the last time he took on that brief, with the Doctor and Romana embroiled in the machinations of a vampiric lord who survived the downfall of the Three Who Rule.
Even some of the stylistic flourishes of the earlier novel are preserved, whether that be the copious amounts of vampire decapitation – another aspect which isn’t likely to play too well among the anti-Virgin crowd – or the reduction of Romana to a rather generic damsel in distress.
(Which, to be fair, also happened in the original State of Decay, so I guess there’s something to be said for textual faithfulness in sequels after all, huh?)
So what we’re left with is another mess. Adopting “reject some of the more controversial elements of the Virgin novels” as your mission statement is all very well and good, and even if it was never likely to score many points with someone like me who actually rather liked the Virgin books, well, it’s not as if The Eight Doctors can meaningfully erase the sixty-one New Adventures from existence. But if you’re going to do it, commit to it, because there would seem to be little point if you’re going to try to throw out the contributions of novels like Blood Harvest while simultaneously rehashing irheir plot and overall aesthetic in just about every sense that matters.
We’ll gloss over the Fifth Doctor segment, as the grandest aspiration it seems to possess is to correct the alleged searing error of having left out the Sontarans from The Five Doctors the first time around. Predictably, the solution Dicks reaches is to simply reprise the scene in which the Raston Warrior Robot mows down a bunch of Cybermen, only with the substitution of said belligerent potatoes, to the point of going out of his way to have Ryoth actively consider and reject the idea of Timescooping a Cyberman to kill the Doctor.
And then we have The Trial of a Time Lord, Redux, at which point my eyes don’t so much glaze over as they do spontaneously enrol in a summer semester pottery course because they really just need the extra credits.
It’s simply interminable. Honestly, I know I’m coming very close to exhausting the thesaurus’ arsenal of synonyms for “bad,” but the decision to spend a good fifth of the novel’s length on a piece of turgid dross that only exists to wrap up some plot holes in Trial‘s basic structure is so woefully ill-conceived that it just about marks the point at which any of my goodwill is exhausted.
The convolutions which the narrative undertakes truly have to be seen to be believed, involving as it does a Sixth Doctor from an alternative timeline, an attempted explanation for the throwaway bits of lore that were cursorily cobbled together as a part of the original Trial – most notably the passing references to the deposition of the High Council and insurrectionists on Gallifrey – and a deeper exploration of how exactly the Doctor was “deposed” as claimed by The Mysterious Planet.
Naturally, it involves a whole other heretofore unknown presidency from some chap named Niroc who overthrew Flavia with the help of backing from the Celestial Intervention Agency in order to cover up the organisation’s dastardly deeds on the planet Ravolox – which is, we ought not forget, an alternate name for a devastated Earth – only to get undone by the timely intervention of Rassilon and a restored Borusa and… sweet Jesus, why are we doing any of this?
I mean, sincerely, why? Who thought this would be a good springboard for a line of original novels? I’ll say this for John Peel, he at least had the decency to try and give the semblance of a plot structure to Genesys beyond “Let’s rehash a bunch of tired continuity debates and explore past glories.”
(And thankfully, none of his own books could ever possibly be described in such terms, no sir.)
Yes, that plot structure was stultifyingly dull in its own way, and was filled with crass sexual assault apologia under the guise of enlightened historical relativism, but as we’ve discussed at length, it’s not as if Uncle Terrance can really be said to be a paragon of feminist virtue with this one either.
I genuinely can’t remember the last time I had to actively struggle quite this hard to convince myself to pick up a book after putting it down. It’s simply flooring to see a novel so committed to inundating its readers in a ceaseless flow of pure, unadulterated content, precisely all of which is devoid of any kind of deeper or more profound meaning than “It appeared on television a couple of decades ago, and it might have been written or edited by Terrance Dicks.”
No, a book like Oh No It Isn’t! might not have been the most financially savvy step for Virgin to take, and it might have doomed any chance of the New Adventures having a long-term future post-Doctor Who, but I simply can’t bring myself to say that it is a materially weaker novel than The Eight Doctors. I can’t even say it of a more middling and traditional outing like Dragons’ Wrath, much as nobody would have been able to compare the two immediately at the start of June.
Based solely off of first impressions, the only conclusion to draw was that the ground-breaking, innovative brilliance that the New Adventures achieved in their prime had been sacrificed in order to bring the world a series of novels which, it seemed alarmingly possible, would be of a piece with the quality of The Eight Doctors.
It’s hard to call this anything but the very definition of “trading down.”
The Eight Doctors is ultimately just a tedious, unrelenting literary void of a novel whose continuity-drowned monotony is only ever broken up by the odd embarrassing flare-up of Dicks’ distressingly sexist tendencies, or the utter laughability of the attempts to capture 1990s London, and the latter of these two points offers small comfort when one considers that it’s virtually absent from the bulk of the book. The other offers precisely zero comfort, on account of its being, y’know, sexism.
Still, I suppose the saving grace of starting out at rock bottom like this is that it becomes very difficult to dig yourself any deeper into a hole. Plus, the second EDA is an Orman and Blum production, and they’re always a delight, so let’s just call this an initial speed-bump, shall we? After all, it’s not as if we’re going to do anything quite so potentially disastrous as hiring John Peel to do a Dalek story, so it should be pretty smooth sailing from here on out.
Wait, why are you smirking?
Miscellaneous Observations
In addition to everything else wrong with the Sixth Doctor bits, we get some typically horrendous takes from Dicks on the nature of democracy and politics. Witness his sense of righteous indignation as he has the Doctor stress how imperative it is that the High Council turn itself to the business of reform rather than of revolution, citing the example of Napoleon as a cautionary tale. Truly, Edmund Burke would be so very proud.
And yet again, incoherence in the novel’s thinking raises its ugly head. If it’s bad for the Master to take over and become Dictator of Gallifrey, why is it suddenly OK for Flavia or Borusa to emerge as strongman leaders out of this time of crisis? Beyond the fact that the two of them were in The Five Doctors, of course.
Let’s not forget that Flavia’s immediate response here to the Master’s threat to expose the misdeeds of the Agency and the High Council on Ravolox is to suggest that the revelations in Glitz’s testimony can be suppressed, which makes the novel’s apparently sincere investment in the character as the last best hope for political transparency on Gallifrey all the more strange.
Oh yeah, and Dicks also makes use of the “Democracy is the worst system of government” quote from Churchill, having previously done so in Blood Harvest. Did he just… totally forget that he wrote that book? At least the latest reiteration of Raymond Chandler’s famous line in The Simple Art of Murder is just about charming enough that I can excuse it. By my money, I’m pretty sure Exodus is the only one of Terrance’s novels to date not to feature some riff on “down these mean streets,” which makes it hardly surprising that his next book just throws all caution to the wind and titles itself Mean Streets.
Not much to say about the Seventh Doctor segments, as they present a massive contrast to the endless Trial rehash by feeling comparatively rushed to the point of seeming like an afterthought. It’s a deeply weird experience, as we’re still so close to the EDAs and the TV movie having struck a deathblow against the New Adventures that it’s obvious nobody really knows what to do with the elements of the earlier range.
As befits the general lack of acknowledgment afforded Lungbarrow, what we get is an unsurprisingly half-hearted attempt at NA angst, stripped of all the nuance and subtlety that actually made the books compelling and boiled down to “The Doctor has depression and might be mildly suicidal,” because Dicks has never been a writer for whom “brooding malaise” is a preferred mode of operation.
There are vague nods to Seven’s status quo leading into the TV movie, but while he bemoans having no companions, the book studiously avoids mentioning Chris, so you can quite easily just choose to believe that Ace departed somewhere along the line, presumably in a manner quite unlike Love and War, and that the NAs didn’t happen. Which, like the rest of the book, is as disappointing as it is entirely unsurprising.
Also, was Dicks channeling Spock’s Brain by featuring a group of skin-clad cavemen called the Morgs as the source of the Master’s sudden snake powers? Bold choice of source material, but fitting in its own way for this book, I suppose.
The “Why can’t companions just be useless again?” paragraph is obviously bad enough, but there are plenty of other offenders for your consideration for the Academy Award for Best Sexism, from the unintentionally hilarious bit where Terrance reuses the description of Zoe as a “very small, very pretty girl” verbatim by way of describing Jo just one chapter later, to the frankly stomach-turning moment in which the Doctor proclaims that Sam is unlike his past companions and that “they must be breeding a new kind of human female.”
Sometimes there are things in these books that I really just wish I had never read, and I think I’ll leave it at that.
Final Thoughts
So I didn’t really like that, then. Yeah, with the sincerest apologies to any Eighth Doctor Adventures fans, there was so much here that simply didn’t work for me. And yes, the continuity is overpowering, but frankly I think people don’t talk nearly enough about the horribly regressive attitudes towards women and the “given place” of the companion within the ensemble, such that even if I were to just turn off my brain and get into the swing of things, these elements would just bring me crashing back down to Earth every time.
Still, onwards and upwards, I suppose. Next time, we see if the Pertwee Era can put in a better showing, as Martin Day returns with frequent collaborator Keith Topping, but absent one other very important comrade, in the first Past Doctor Adventure, The Devil Goblins from Neptune. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 