Let us start the review of The Devil Goblins from Neptune by carrying forward a time-honoured Dale’s Ramblings tradition: talking about a completely separate book entirely. You see, something I have kind of inevitably glossed over in restricting myself to the original, novel-length fiction offerings of the Wilderness Years – and latterly short story-length, too, I suppose – is the wealth of non-fiction guidebooks that also tended to proliferate throughout the same time period.
Of these, it seems difficult to sincerely argue that Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s The Discontinuity Guide is not one of the definitive examples of the form. Published in May 1995 – amid something of a red letter month for members of the distinguished authorial trio, between Cornell’s Human Nature and Day’s The Menagerie on the other side of the fiction barrier in the New and Missing Adventures respectively – it represented a staggeringly detailed effort to catalogue as much of the continuity minutiae surrounding the first twenty-six seasons of Doctor Who as was humanly possible, while also containing copious real-world production details and short but snappy critical opinions on each televised story courtesy of the “Bottom Line” section.
More to the point, it was supremely official, with its front cover rightfully boasting of its featuring a foreword from Uncle Terrance himself, and being published by the company that was, at the time, the unquestioned custodian of the Doctor Who novel license. As far as proverbial high-water marks of the Virgin writer/fan industrial complex’s influence on the way the franchise was perceived are concerned, the fact of the matter is that you can probably do a hell of a lot worse than The Discontinuity Guide.
Of course, among the three writers, Cornell was always going to be the name that stuck out most. With Human Nature, he had quickly cemented himself as one of the most acclaimed and popular New Adventures authors, as evinced by the fact that the novel still routinely crops up near the top of any “Best New Adventures” poll or list that you could care to shake a reasonably-sized stick at. Furthermore, although nobody could have known it initially, the passage of time would prove him to be one of the most influential authors as well, to the point where the revival eventually just caved and adapted Human Nature wholesale in its third season.
Even if an individual reader takes issue with Cornell, three of his first four NAs are ones which you could quite reasonably proclaim to be your favourite and not have anybody look at you weirdly at a party.
(Provided, that is, that you are going to parties at which people routinely sit around discussing the triumphs, defeats and epic highs and lows of 1990s Doctor Who tie-in fiction, at which point I’m really going to have to ask for an invite because that sounds like a great deal of fun. I promise I will be totally normal about The Also People.)
Nevertheless, the sense in which The Discontinuity Guide marks a zenith in the influence of that generation of fans and writers of which Cornell was a part – absent any consideration of the revival series, where that influence obviously persisted – is perhaps reflected in the pattern of his output moving forwards. Where the eighteen-month period leading up to May 1995 had seen no less than three Cornell novels in reasonably quick succession, he seemed to make a conscious decision to scale down the pace of his work, in accordance with a note attached to his rough outline of Human Nature indicating that he intended it to be his final contribution to the New Adventures.
While things may not have eventually panned out that way, foreshadowing many non-departures from the franchise to come, it was true that the “Cornell book” became a truly annual event in the most literal sense of the word from that point on, with both Happy Endings and Oh No It Isn’t! being separated by precisely twelve months from their direct predecessors.
Moreover, while both novels didn’t entirely skimp out on the trademark hard-hitting emotions that had been a staple of Cornell’s work since Revelation – well, OK, I’m more so talking about Happy Endings here, but Oh No It Isn’t! has a few scant moments of seriousness amidst the panto frockery – their tone was noticeably more celebratory, with one serving as a direct commemoration of the fiftieth NA and the other serving to launch a retooling of the series to focus on a popular companion of Cornell’s own creation.
And although it’s quite easy to lose track of this fact when we decided to disrespect chronology in such a crass fashion by jumping forward to cover Dragons’ Wrath on June 19th, 1997, it’s worth noting that for our present purposes we’re treating the date as if it was June 2nd, a mere seventeen days after the release of Oh No It Isn’t!
In other words, we’re arguably looking at the first segment of Doctor Who‘s history since around December 1991 that can credibly be described as “post-Cornell,” even if he will be back every few years to contribute the odd book like The Shadows of Avalon or Scream of the Shalka, and so it seems strangely appropriate that Topping and Day should be the writers who get to usher in said period.
Indeed, it’s worth noting that The Devil Goblins from Neptune began life as a collaborative and constantly evolving pitch for the Virgin Missing Adventures from the Discontinuity Guide trio, being crafted with a deliberate view towards evoking the 1970s, both in terms of the Pertwee Era of Doctor Who – even going so far as to initially include a classic “Doctor Who and…” title, just to evoke the classic Target novelisations with maximum authenticity – and the wider scope of the decade’s popular culture as a whole.
Inevitably, it becomes very tempting to envision what an alternate, Cornell-inclusive version of this book might have looked like, particularly when one considers his historical antipathy to much of the Third Doctor’s era, most visibly expressed in that one infamous review of Terror of the Autons for DWB in which he memorably proclaimed that the potential of Season Seven’s retooling of the programme had been a failure whose most lasting effect was ultimately to “make the Doctor a Tory.”
Equally tantalising is the question of exactly why Cornell chose to leave the project to his erstwhile collaborators, although it’s not exactly a move that feels too out of step with the general sense that he was attempting to branch out beyond Doctor Who at the time.
While one might want to read between the lines with Day’s hinting in an interview for New Adventures fanzine Broadsword that the development of The Guinness Book of Classic British TV‘s second edition saw “tempers [get] frayed and so on,” that feels like a bit too much weight to put on an offhand quote so obscure that I can only readily find it through judicious use of the Wayback Machine.
What’s more, the eventual reunion of the three writers for 1998’s The Avengers Dossier rather puts the lie to any suggestion of an especially acrimonious split, so I think it’s worth simply shrugging and accepting once again that the production history of the Wilderness Years’ BBC Books era will forever remain obscure until someone chooses to do a book in the vein of The Who Adventures or Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story. (Please?)
Regardless, the upshot of this is that we’re witnessing much the same effect that we saw with The Eight Doctors, and that we’ll continue to witness next time in Vampire Science, wherein the shadow of the Virgin line looms large over just about anything that BBC Books might choose to do with its newly reclaimed license.
Certainly, the absence of Cornell exerts a peculiar gravity over this book that Topping and Day, bless them, can’t really hope to match at this point in their careers, such that it resembles nothing so much as a NASA centrifuge trying to go up against a neutron star.
For Topping, at least, The Devil Goblins from Neptune marks his debut within the wacky world of Doctor Who novels. Day, as mentioned, had previously contributed The Menagerie to the Missing Adventures, although being asked to suddenly switch gears halfway through from a New Adventure to the first of the MAs’ Second Doctor novels predictably left it a rather malformed, confused thing, so that’s perhaps not the best advertisement of his talents that one could hope for.
Still, with the passage of time it can probably be said to have attained the rather dubious honour of being one of the better Troughton books almost by default, lacking as it does the bungling, jaw-droppingly ill-informed racism of Invasion of the Cat-People or the sheer, drawn-out 300 page tedium of a snoozer like Twilight of the Gods.
In fact, Troughton and Pertwee exhibited rather similar arcs throughout the course of the Missing Adventures, although it must be said that the dandy seemed, on the whole, to have fared better than the clown. Both were comparatively late additions to the MAs’ roster, with the first Third Doctor novel only seeing print a whopping seven months after the release of Goth Opera, and a mere three months prior to The Menagerie. For the sake of comparison, both the Fourth and Fifth Doctors had managed to headline two novels apiece by that point.
Even when it eventually arrived, The Ghosts of N-Space was a monumentally poor showing, particularly coming from the pen of the man who had held the producer’s chair for every Pertwee story bar Spearhead from Space, and co-wrote all but one of the era’s season finales. Then again, one of those finales was The Time Monster, so I suppose that makes some measure of sense.
Barring the slight improvement of Paul Leonard’s Dancing the Code, which started off as a promising critique of Three’s relationship with the establishment in the vein of Cornell’s own aforementioned misgivings before settling down to be a much more generic runaround with giant bugs, the Third Doctor then took something of an extended hiatus from the MAs, before popping up with at least three separate outings throughout 1996. If you were willing to count Who Killed Kennedy – a defensible enough position, despite its status outside the Missing Adventures’ usual fare – that number went as high as four.
(It’s at this point in the review that most critics would make a suitably analogical joke about Third Doctor novels being like buses, but frankly I’ve already said “three” so much in the preceding paragraph that the thought of saying anything close to “three show up at once” feels like overdoing it. But now I’ve said “three” at least one – make that two – more times than I would have if I’d just run with the bit to begin with, so frankly I give up.)
Perhaps the most promising development that was visible throughout 1996, however, was a noticeable uptick in quality. The Eye of the Giant wasn’t a masterpiece by any means, but it was a typically functional piece of Doctor Who storytelling from Christopher Bulis, faithfully recreating the vibe of classic 1930s adventure serials. Even down to the sexism, although the example of The Eight Doctors ought to remind us that the Pertwee Era and sexism are nowhere near as antithetical to one another as we might like to believe.
Concurrent with this was a rise in an alternative take on the Era that we might feasibly term the “Pertwee Conspiracy Thriller,” with both Who Killed Kennedy and The Scales of Injustice unapologetically taking their cues from The X-Files. And yet, for all that the novels pulled from a blend of styles and trappings that were hyper-specific to the 1990s, the decision to wed these impulses to an adaptation of a 1970s televisual text like the Pertwee years proved a rather inspired one, which should hardly be surprising.
After all, Chris Carter has been quite upfront about how the distrust of authority that reverberates throughout his work was directly inspired by the Watergate scandal, a political crisis grounded very definitively in the early ’70s. Certainly, for those obsessive fans who like drawing parallels between developments in Doctor Who and real-world events – and I think it’s a safe bet that my audience contains more than its fair share of them – there can be few facts that seem like quite as ripe a candidate for this sort of analysis as the fact that, in mid-1974, both Jon Pertwee and Richard Nixon stepped down from their respective roles within two months of one another.
Although this stylistic evolution seemed to hint at a brighter future for the Third Doctor, it must be conceded that he hadn’t exactly bowed out from the MAs on a high note, with Leonard’s Speed of Flight proving rather samey, to the point where, some seven months later, I’m honestly not sure how much I could tell you about its basic plot if pushed to do so. Even so, it at least had the good sense to be rather short and zippy in its pacing, flashing by so fast that it never seriously ran the risk of outstaying its welcome.
So that’s the status quo leading into June 1997 just about covered, and it feels appropriate that Pertwee should occupy such an ambivalent space in the land of the printed page. He is at once a hugely iconic part of the classic show’s legacy, and one of the parts that feels most frequently at odds with the received wisdom as to what makes for a truly great piece of Doctor Who.
One need look no further than the forthcoming 1998 DWM poll to see confirmation of this status; with Inferno placing as the highest-ranked story of his era at number fourteen, he became one of only three Doctors – it seems rather churlish to count McGann here, given his rather obvious disadvantage – not to achieve a single spot in the top ten, placing him in the same camp as Hartnell and Colin Baker. As the magazine hastened to point out, though, he also managed to become the only Doctor to avoid a single one of his stories falling in the bottom ten, and if that doesn’t amount to a reasonably rock-solid validation of the Era’s status as a bit of a critical median for the show, then I don’t know what is.
Certainly, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t really have any idea what to expect from The Devil Goblins from Neptune. Yes, there had been some better Third Doctor books of late, but quite frankly, if Speed of Flight was anything to go by, that was far from a guarantee of quality, and the fact that I’d just come off of reading quite possibly one of the most mind-numbingly tedious and depressing novels imaginable, courtesy of one of the Pertwee Era’s two chief architects no less, left me none too favourably disposed towards the idea of BBC Books tackling the period head on in this fashion.
Imagine my delight then when I can actually report that it is, in point of fact, very good. It manages to combine the goofy fannish indulgence that was perhaps the most endearing part of The Scales of Injustice in hindsight with the genuine insight and intelligence gestured at by the first half of Dancing the Code, suturing them together to create a whole far in excess of the sum of its parts, and becoming the best straightforward Pertwee novel so far, bar none.
We ought to begin by addressing some of the common objections raised against the book, as I do think these serve as a workable jumping off point to help elucidate what I take to be Topping and Day’s general rationale here, especially since that rationale is very clever in its own right.
A reasonably common thread running through a lot of the more negative reactions to the book would hold that some of its additions to “Doctor Who lore” – which, as always, is a slightly dubious and shaky construction at the best of times – are profoundly silly in nature. Now at this juncture, we could very easily give a polite cough and point a finger towards the title of the book and just kind of leave that to stand as our summary judgment on anybody who acts particularly surprised by its committing the cardinal sin of silliness, but I’m feeling indulgent today, so we’ll dig a little deeper into the substance of this claim just for the hell of it.
The part that seems to draw the most ire along these lines is the decision to reveal an alternative history for the Beatles extending into the 1970s, having ditched Paul and replaced him with two new members: Billy and a German called Klaus. Naturally, given Doctor Who‘s general tendency to adhere to the verisimilitude of real-world popular culture and history if possible, this sticks out like a sore thumb, and certainly doesn’t square with the more conventional treatment of the band in books like The Left-Handed Hummingbird, which treats the Beatles’ rooftop concert in January 1969 as their last live performance, just as it was in the real world.
And yes, it’s silly, but it’s silly in a way which is also particularly interesting within the very specific confines of The Devil Goblins from Neptune. As we’ve said, this is a book whose entire raison d’être is to serve as a love letter to the seventies, a decade which a quick Google search for Topping and Day’s respective ages predictably confirms would have fallen smack dab in the middle of the two authors’ childhoods.
The Beatles, on the other hand, very pointedly do not fit within that decade. Their ties to the sixties are as intractable a part of their totemic mythos as you’re ever likely to see in a band of their considerable stature. Let It Be was released just five months into the decade – a day prior, for those of you playing the home game, to the broadcast of the first episode of Inferno on BBC1 – and by that point it was already clear that it was going to serve as a de facto epitaph for the group, given the severe personal frictions that had plagued the Fab Four throughout the record’s protracted, on-again off-again recording sessions.
So while the decision to distort the footprint of such a monumental pop culture event is the sort of thing of which it definitely behooves us to take note, our definition of “take note” needn’t automatically be as simple as “get on the Internet and complain very loudly about it.”
The key clue lies within one of the more surface-level observations that we made, namely that the Beatles are actually a sixties band. To further compound the inanity of this comment, I submit for the consideration of the board that the seventies did, in fact, follow on from the sixties. Stop me if I’m getting too technical, won’t you?
Because as much as The Devil Goblins from Neptune is blatantly and unapologetically concerned with the 1970s in their own right, it also exhibits a keen awareness of that period in relation to its chronological antecedent. The world didn’t go to bed on December 31, 1969 with the conscious thought of throwing out all their Stones and Beatles records and picking up a hankering for glam rock as a replacement, it was a gradual process.
Topping and Day even highlight this in seemingly disposable moments like the Brigadier bemoaning his inability to slap a D-notice on a forthcoming record about Mars which he suspects to be heavily influenced by an illicitly obtained account of The Ambassadors of Death. Even without his subsequent instructions that Yates keep a close eye on “this Bowery chap,” it’s not exactly the stuff of first-rate Scotland Yard sleuthing to deduce that the album in question is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
On the most obvious level, it’s simply delightful to cheekily canonise the Pertwee Era as the secret origin of the glam rock movement, particularly if you’re inclined towards El Sandifer’s proposed dichotomy between Glam Pertwee and Action Pertwee, but Bowie also serves as a fantastic example of an artist whose rise to popularity perfectly straddles the divide between the seventies and the sixties.
Although the release of Ziggy Stardust was the first point at which one of his full-length albums had reached the truly stratospheric cultural heights that we typically associate Bowie’s name with today, his first chart hit, “Space Oddity,” was inexorably tied to one of the crowning moments of the late sixties, namely the Apollo 11 moon landing. Not only was it rushed to release just nine days before the deadliest weapon in the Eleventh Doctor’s arsenal made contact with the lunar surface, but the BBC saw fit to make use of it during their coverage of the event.
(In a spot of cosmically significant irony, it bears noting that said coverage has since fallen victim to the same BBC videotape junking policy that has claimed so many Doctor Who episodes from the Hartnell and Troughton years.)
Accordingly, The Devil Goblins from Neptune proves remarkably keyed into the ebbing optimism of the sixties, particularly as it pertains to the ramifications of events like the moon landing upon Doctor Who.
In keeping with the Virgin novels’ decision to adopt a broad “time of broadcast” dating for the UNIT stories, Topping and Day opt to ground the action in June of 1970. In the history of the Apollo programme’s manned landings, this is a particularly notable year, being the only year between 1969 and 1972 in which no astronauts landed on the moon, with the Apollo 13 mission quickly needing to be aborted in April after the rupturing of an oxygen tank disabled the service module’s electrical and life-support systems.
If Apollo 11 seemed like a crowning achievement that affirmed the triumph of Kennedy era New Frontier-style liberalism in the field of technological progress, Apollo 13 offered a sobering reminder of the degree to which the harsh vacuum of space remained inimical to human life even in the face of technological know-how.
Of course, the novel doesn’t resist the opportunity to puncture the lingering mythos of Camelot and the Space Race. Echoing a quote commonly attributed to senior Churchill aide and eventual Director-General of the BBC Sir Ian Jacob as to why the Allies were able to win the Second World War, the Doctor and Trainor trade snide remarks about the British Rocket Group’s mission to Neptune having been made possible by the collaboration of the Americans’, Russians’ and Brits’ respective German scientists.
Both this and the Jacob quotation, naturally, are not-so-oblique references to the poaching of lead Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun as a part of Operation Paperclip, which has the added bonus of further grounding The Devil Goblins from Neptune within the X-Files playbook, given Carter’s choice to build out the series’ big season-bridging three-parter from that dark chapter in Western history less than two years earlier. Indeed, 1995 also saw a dramatisation of the Apollo 13 mission by Ron Howard, picking up the second-most nominations at that year’s Academy Awards and becoming the third-highest grossing film.
It’s also telling that the book revolves around a mission to Neptune, and picks the planet as the source of the titular devil goblins. It’s obviously supremely cheeky to point out that the British space programme never explored Neptune, but even NASA only ever managed a flyby with Voyager 2 in August 1989. Generally speaking, the planet’s primary symbolic significance is as a marker of the very edge of the Solar System – Pluto’s claims to planethood having already come under increasing scrutiny in the 1990s following more in-depth mapping and exploration of the Kuiper Belt – and it therefore serves as a literal fringe case for the ideological underpinnings of the Space Race.
And what, pray tell, do these knights of Camelot find upon metaphorically exploring these strange new worlds, boldly going forth in suits of armour that would make Lancelot blush? The Waro, a set of monstrous creatures tied so fundamentally to the aesthetics of psychedelia that they can only be described as the ultimate bad trip.
(This is all the more relevant when juxtaposed against the misguided cult of the Venus People, clearly pulling from the long tradition of science fiction treating Venus as comparable to Earth, dreams that had eventually been scuppered by the revelations of Space Age missions to the planet. The misidentification of the Waro as Venusian rather than Neptunian serves to reinforce the sense that an old order of conceiving of space is passing into memory. In the 1970s, there is no life in space, only bad vibes.)
Their intrusions upon the narrative, especially in the first half, are always tied to events and places that are at least vaguely adjacent to the counterculture, starting with a fictitious rock concert directly said to have been modelled on Woodstock.
And this leads us to the other thing that I think a lot of folks get wrong about this book, or at a minimum don’t care to explore in too much depth, namely the sudden introduction of the heretofore unknown Gallifreyan ability of soul-catching. It goes without saying that it’s strongly redolent of the Vulcan mind meld, tapping into a bubbling undercurrent of fascination in sixties popular culture with psychic abilities and the concept of a method of information sharing that is more concerned with emotions and impressions than neat, structured words and sentences.
All of this gets boiled down, in the course of most objections, to a rather dreary summation of “It’s a cheap plot contrivance.” Which, fair enough, it probably is. But let’s be honest with ourselves, this too is perfectly in tune with the book’s ambitions to out-seventies the seventies and out-Pertwee Pertwee.
This is precisely the kind of stunt that the Third Doctor was always pulling to get out of danger, and there’s nothing about “soul-catching” that I find more inherently objectionable than whipping out a convenient Venusian lullaby that inexplicably shares the melody of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” or curing hypnosis with the application of a blue crystal that just so happened to be acquired in an otherwise profoundly non-sequiturish sequence in the first episode of The Green Death. Inded, both ideas are considered veritably iconic, another instance of the Pertwee Era shaping Doctor Who even with some of its weaker tendencies.
Contrary to what you might expect, we’re also not going to lay into it for being another instance of my perennial bugbear, namely Wilderness Years writers attempting to capture the feel of Star Trek, as shamelessly cribbing the mind meld as a part of your attempt to interrogate the changing nature of Doctor Who between the sixties and seventies is at least a considerably more novel and inventive approach to the idea than most.
So the Waro, by dint of their psychedelic nature, very firmly belong to the Troughton Era rather than the Pertwee Era. They are the bad trip that scares you off psychedelics for good, and makes you do crazy things like reinvent yourself to try and achieve a more socially realist brand of heroism. That was, as Sandifer has argued, the entire ostensible point of the Doctor’s exile at the end of The War Games.
But as we’ve hinted at, that isn’t quite how things turned out for the Doctor. Instead, his exile just… made him a Tory. The psychedelic nightmare of the Waro exists so far outside of his sphere of existence that he has to be subjected to multiple attempts at a violent rendition by the Soviet branch of UNIT and trucked off to Siberia before he can actually encounter them directly. Forget crossing the void beyond the mind, he’ll be lucky if he can make it to the Baltic.
Topping and Day add to this through the inclusion of the Interludes. They’re brief things, focusing in on a small cluster of people responding to events in the main body of the story, but they underscore what seems to be a key point of the novel, namely applying Wilderness Years storytelling conceits to the Pertwee Era and showing once and for all that true social realism – insofar as an adventure with devil goblins can ever be said to approach any kind of “realism” – was always entirely possible within the framework of the period, had Letts and Dicks chosen to adopt it.
(It’s telling that the adventures of Pigbin Josh from The Claws of Axos are arguably the closest thing to these Interludes one can really find within the Pertwee Era proper, which is hardly much of a triumph given the extent to which he’s played as an entirely unintelligible comedy yokel.)
It’s very hard not to detect the lingering influence of Cornell’s lambasting of Terror here, but that’s certainly not a bad influence to have. The Devil Goblins from Neptune seems decidedly uneasy with the place UNIT occupies in the programme’s iconography, in a way that hasn’t really been true of any Third Doctor novel to a substantial degree since Dancing the Code, with even otherwise paranoid works like The Scales of Injustice and Who Killed Kennedy both foisting off the majority of the blame for any ignominious deeds on UNIT’s part to external actors like the Master and Department C19.
But here, things are considerably more nuanced. Yes, the basic moral rectitude of fan favourites like the Brigadier, Benton and Yates is more or less preserved, as you’d expect, but there’s a certain scepticism towards the military mindset that one suspects you wouldn’t be able to get away with these days, particularly not in the context of modern Doctor Who wherein Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart has increasingly become a straightforward heroic figure of the most earnest kind.
It’s nothing glaringly terrible, mind; it’s not like Topping and Day have inserted some previously undiscussed part of the Brigadier’s backstory in which he reveals himself to have sympathised with Enoch Powell or something. Rather, it’s a series of little things that remind you that there’s something ever so slightly off-kilter about the way these characters view the world as opposed to the viewpoint we typically associate with the Doctor.
It’s stuff like the Brig remembering spending the Summer of Love serving in the Aden Emergency and condemning a Private to summary execution for cowardice, or the gloriously cynical sequence in which Yates pulls rank and unwittingly sends Benton into an area with a bomb, just so that he can have him complete a self-admittedly menial task, only to immediately sneak off to the Brigadier’s office and drink from the bottle of scotch in his filing cabinet. These touches constantly remind the audience that these beloved, programmatic comfort characters are still military-minded men at the end of the day.
The consequences for the Doctor are interesting in their own right, as Topping and Day seem to lay bare the base hypocrisy at the heart of the Pertwee Era’s frequently lacking politics. One moment he’ll be reprimanding Liz’s erstwhile Cambridge colleague for losing sight of the human element in his scientific endeavours, and the next he’ll be swanning around gentleman’s clubs as a long-time member and name-dropping Wernher von Braun, even if he does describe him as a “sordid little man,” which does feel like a bit of an understatement.
The reader is thus kept ever so slightly off balance once more, even as the novel’s portrait of Pertwee feels perfectly in keeping with that on television. Moments that would otherwise play as simple rejections of jingoism and Anglocentrism like his jovial declaration that you can’t expect all aliens to pop out of the sewers near St. Paul’s – a wonderful line that, as with the willingness on Shuskin and Bruce’s part to trample over the UK branch of UNIT for their own goals, serves to underscore just how much of the UNIT Era was rooted, unwittingly or otherwise, in a vision of the world in which Britain was a legitimate superpower with its own space programme, say – thus become decidedly more ambiguous.
Less ambiguous by far, on the other hand, is Thomas Bruce, who is simply delightful despite being, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, a complete and utter bastard. As far as deconstructions of the romantic spy-fi fantasy that so often animated the Pertwee Era go, it’s hard to imagine one more ludicrously overblown and jagged-edged than this.
Admittedly, there isn’t actually all that much in the way of a narrative reason for him to be in this story beyond getting the UNIT family to link the conspiracy back to Area 51 in time for the climax, to the point where he completely disappears from the final battle between the Waro and the Nedenah and we learn about his fate after the fact, but on a thematic level, he’s a real treat.
While the default assumption might be, given Doctor Who‘s longstanding tradition of serving as a bit of a narratological sandbox, that Bruce is supposed to represent the external narrative force of the James Bond franchise come to wreak havoc upon the structure of the programme, I think you can in fact construct a reasonably solid case for his being an extrapolation of the worst elements of the Third Doctor’s character, stripped of all the redeeming or likeable aspects.
Like the Doctor, he clearly prizes the finer things in life, but he takes it so far as to stop in the middle of a murder to bemoan the loss of a tailored suit, and while Three never openly exhibits the kind of seething, virulent misogyny and sexist objectification with which Bruce regards Corporal Bell and Liz, he certainly had his fair share of uncomfortable, paternalistically condescending moments over the years.
(He is, to pick one example from this very book, momentarily flustered by Liz and Shuskin’s declaration that they don’t have hairpins on them. “What? You’re both women aren’t you?” he exclaims, which is perhaps a trifle overdone on the novel’s part, but after the totally po-faced, unironic espousing of Dicksian sexism that we got with The Eight Doctors, it’s frankly nice to see this failing of the Pertwee Era gestured at at all.)
Even the method with which the unfortunate Billy Donald is dispatched, with a flask of hydrochloric acid to the face, is wonderfully acerbic in a novel so suffused with psychedelia as this one, and almost seems to suggest that Bruce might be staying truer to the spirit of the sixties than the Doctor himself. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.
It is, in short, much the same trick that Cornell pulled with his postulation of the alternative Third Doctor as the leader of the Inferno Earth all the way back in Revelation, but no less effective for its reuse here.
In a way, it also serves to loop right back around to the Beatles. When all is said and done, we also ought to acknowledge that that too was really just a mild twist on a trick the TV show itself pulled with the Jeremy Thorpe gag in The Green Death, a joke which Topping and Day go out of their way to preserve here by having a Liberal Party-inclusive coalition government declared the winner of the 1970 general election, as opposed to Edward Heath’s Conservatives as in real life, and as affirmed by Stevens in Who Killed Kennedy.
(The second time around, Terror of the Zygons chose – with all due respect to the valiant efforts of Paul Cornell to make a case for Shirley Williams in No Future – to pull the same routine with newly-elected Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, and irreparably scuppered the grand tradition of Doctor Who making cack-handed predictions of the future by being right on the money. The joke proceeded to go on for a good eleven years after that, becoming progressively less funny and making things much worse for millions of people I could mention if I happened to have the London telephone directory on my person.)
The Pertwee Era’s politics can, in most key respects, be summed up by that joke: attempting to maintain the façade of a “near future” setting so as to avoid having to confront the problems of 1970s Britain head-on and getting to crack silly little jokes about the Beatles and Jeremy Thorpe instead, but falling headlong into the trap of all conscious attempts at creating “apolitical” art, namely that the prevailing mores and social climes of the time in which a piece of art is crafted will inevitably shape it, even without the authors/producers/directors being conscious of it.
The more astute among you might draw a connection between this and my ultimate conclusion on The Well-Mannered War, wherein it becaming searingly obvious that this half-hearted ambivalence was the ultimate undoing of Gareth Roberts’ fascination with the Williams Era, having seemingly been rooted in no greater moral reason than the sake of a good chortle.
And so here, with the most unexpected of Doctors, the first of the Past Doctor Adventures almost seems to rise to better the last of the Virgin Missing Adventures, making The Devil Goblins from Neptune a more promising debut by far than The Eight Doctors ever was across the aisle in the EDAs.
Crucially, however, underneath all the critique of the Pertwee Era here, there is a sense of giddy excitement at being able to revel in the tropes of the period; and really, no writer who totally loathes the Era and finds it truly irredeemable is liable to have gone to so much trouble to wallow in its excesses like this, and the final product is truly something to behold in all its ludicrous, overblown glory.
Much like the Pertwee Era at its best.
Miscellaneous Observations
Other subtle tweaks to real-world history include Control’s referencing the sixth National Front victory in a by-election in Walthamstow, when the real-world National Front never won a single seat in the House of Commons, though they were pretty routinely attaining alarming shares of the vote in by-elections throughout the early 1970s. It’s part and parcel of that general impulse of laying bare some of the nastiness of the Pertwee Era’s underlying logic.
Also conspicuous is the reference to an “oil crisis.” Yes, people in 1970 were certainly already talking about the possibility of having reached “peak oil,” but in a book characterised by such scrupulous attention to historical detail, it feels strange to evoke the memory of an event most commonly held to have started in earnest a good three years at minimum after the main action of the novel, with the fallout from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It could, perhaps, be an honest mistake, but I find the alternative possibility that time in the UNIT era is just fundamentally wacky to be too tantalising to resist.
Which is also why I’m not super keen on people seizing on a line from Fitz in The Gallifrey Chronicles about collecting records from versions of the Beatles from alternate timelines as a means of “explaining” the five-member Beatles seen here and claiming that the entire book takes place in an alternate timeline, if only because that’s about the most bog-standard and conventional Doctor Who fan theory you could possibly come up with to explain this point.
On to things that can’t be explained, however, and in contrast to my general praise for the other Interludes throughout the novel, I’m still left wondering why the sixth one inexplicably set itself in the depths of the Australian Outback. Yes, I get that Interludes are always going to be at least partially non sequiturs by their very nature, but the other ones in the book are all cases of expanding on the reactions of characters we’ve seen at the periphery of scenes or with establishing new characters’ reactions to existing events.
But for a handful of pages, in a book with action pretty evenly split between the UK, the US and Siberia, we suddenly cut to Australia for no particular reason. And, sure, I’ll give Topping and Day some credit for having seemingly done enough research to actually name a real Aboriginal people rather than just fudging it in the manner of Terence Dudley and the Futu Dynasty of Four to Doomsday, or the “Kojabe Indians” of Black Orchid (which he apparently saw fit to revise to the equally fictitious “Butiu Indians” for the novelisation). They even use an authentic word from the language of that people, so… full marks for that, I suppose?
Yet this does rather have the effect of making the reader wonder all the more why they never once apparently encountered anything in whatever research they did that said “Hey, using the word ‘Aborigine’ is actually really outdated and offensive and has been considered so since at least the 1960s,” however. I mean, really, come on now. Frankly, the only reason this doesn’t manage to be as bad as Invasion of the Cat-People is that, unlike Russell, Topping and Day never blunder into casually using a full-blown slur as if it’s nothing more than a quaint colloquialism. So the bar really is in hell on this one.
It’s also just extra maddening because, like I say, this scene doesn’t even fit with anything else in the book anyway. In no other scene is it implied that the Nedenah came to Earth at any time prior to the Roswell incident in 1947, so there’s no explicit indication that we’re dealing with some sort of “ancient aliens” type premise, which is probably just as well. Actually, even within the scene itself the closest thing we get to hint at that is the presence of artistic representations of the Nedenah in some rock art.
Certainly, we’re not made privy to any new information in this scene that couldn’t have been just as ably communicated by the Brigadier’s conversations with Control, and the Nedenah themselves are a late-game contrivance anyway, only being revealed four fifths of the way through the novel, so again, I ask… why is this scene here? I know it’s a weird thing to hyperfixate on but dammit it’s odd.
Speaking of weird things, the book is strangely invested in getting us to believe in Mike Yates as a red-blooded, heterosexual womaniser of a man, which, I mean… I guess we can all have our improbable headcanons, right?
Final Thoughts
Well, hopefully this’ll put me back in the good books of the BBC novel fans, despite a few minor gripes like I just outlined. I told you The Eight Doctors was just a fluke, I am perfectly capable of enjoying Doctor Who books that aren’t by Virgin, I swear.
Anyway, hope this was enjoyable to read, because I honestly had a blast writing it. It scratched that very classical Dale’s Ramblings itch of “I can easily identify the themes I want to talk about, but how the hell do I make them cohere?” So, y’know, it’d be a pity if none of that fun rubbed off on the final product. Regardless, I hope you’ll join me next time for our second and final full-length novel from Matthew Jones, as Jason Kane returns to the New Adventures with Beyond the Sun. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 