The Highlanders

It's the Jacobite Rebellion of 1746, and the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Polly and Ben to the Scottish moors. The Scots have been routed by the English, and the time travellers fall in with a fugitive band hiding out in a cottage. Polly and a Scottish lass named Kirsty are separated from the others, who are taken to Inverness only to be sold into slavery. The Doctor does a bit of clever dodging and gets free, Ben causes trouble for his captors and gets a good dunking from the bow of the ship for his trouble, and Polly and Kirsty blackmail an English lieutenant into helping them find and rescue their friends. And in the end, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper, joins the TARDIS crew under the condition that he teaches the Doctor how to play the bagpipes (which he never does, but whatever).

This is the last of the purely historical adventures until 1982, so every other time the TARDIS lands in the past from here on, there will be some alien menace hiding in history. The Highlanders is a very enjoyable story, full of all the things that make for fun in the past. The Doctor practices his talents for adopting disguises, first as a German official, then in drag as a cleaning woman. Polly gets to be the modern girl this time and berates Kirsty for being reduced to tears in helpless situations. Ben... well Ben gets locked up a lot with the prisoners and is exploited by being dunked underwater but only escaping by remembering to flex his muscles before being tied up... or something ("body contours" ahoy, Gary Russell!)

The addition of Jamie, played by Fraser Hines, puts the TARDIS crew back up to four, the magic number on the show that always leaves one of the regular cast with too little to do. Jamie's character is a departure for the show though in that everyone else to date, barring Katarina, has been either from the modern (or as modern as the 1960's were) era or from the future. Here we have a period character, through whom we can see all the joys of time travel again, but not from the perspective of scientific curiosity and wonder, but from confusion, and even terror. Jamie will stick around for a while and become a very popular character with the fan base (and Fraser Hines is a very nice man - I met him at a convention we threw in Toronto in 1993).

Alas, The Highlanders is missing from the BBC archives, save for a few scraps of censor footage from episode 1. I enjoyed the adventure on the BBC Radio Collection CD over the last two days, with Fraser Hines providing the narration. The myth centre claims that there was an alternate ending to episode 4 with Jamie staying behind in Scotland rather than coming along with the TARDIS crew, but who can say for sure without even the broadcast version to see for ourselves.

Maybe one day.

NEXT EPISODE : THE UNDERWATER MENACE

Wonderland

We're back with another of the fantastic Telos novellas, this one set is 1967 San Francisco. I was originally going to prelude this one with a BBC novel called Dying in the Sun, which was set just a bit south of this in Los Angeles and a few years before, but I changed my mind because a) my CD copy of The Underwater Menace came in at last and I didn't have to stall, and, b) Dying in the Sun is such an awful book I am doing it more service than it deserves by even mentioning it here.

The Doctor, Polly, and Ben encounter young hippie girl Summer in San Fran during the Summer of Love when the new age movement and cries for peace by a younger generation were scaring the crap out of parents and politicians alike. A lot of this movement was centred in California, and we come across Summer in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Fran looking for her boyfriend, Denny, who has gone suspiciously missing. Our regular cast are caught up in her plight almost immediately (with less than 100 pages, as I have said before, these books move fast) although the Doctor senses something more happening and spends most of the story in the shadows trying to figure it out. His distance is accentuated by the story being told from Summer's point of view, and she resents that he is only interested in her problems because maybe he can solve his own by helping her. And he does indeed, as do Polly and Ben, despite the crazy goings on of a massive Woodstock-esque festival and the various sides who are working to either enslave or destroy the human race from their respective corners.

With Wonderland, Mark Chadbourn shows us a side of the second Doctor that people often forget was there: his darker side. A lot of fans don't like it when this is brought up in any of the Doctors but the point of the matter is we are dealing with an alien being here, and aside from maybe the third and fifth Doctors he has always had a dark nature that surfaces from time to time. The second Doctor doesn't do anything uncharacteristically cruel to Summer but his indifference to her plight is testament to him having bigger problems and he has to make a choice about what he is going to care about. Everyone loves to remember Patrick Troughton's Doctor as a clown, a comedian, a shabby hobo who outwitted his enemies by letting them think he was too foolish to be a threat, but there are times when the darker more serious side presents itself, as it will in the upcoming incomplete adventure The Moonbase. (I'll probably recruit Jay again for that one - he does so enjoy seeing his name here. I'll bet Ira wouldn't mind a nod here right now as well for being a faithful reader.)

Darker Doctor. Does it work? Handled properly, yes it does. The new series has momets just like this where the Doctor's approach to situations puts him at odds with his current companion, Rose, and one can't not mention how the seventh Doctor was almost made into a sinister shadow of himself towards the end of his television days and well into his days of print and audio CDs. The second Doctor doesn't go mad and kill anyone with an axe or watch without pity as someone drowns, but he does come across as very cold when dealing with Summer's demands for him to help her find Denny. Summer herself tries to come to terms with him, as this is the first impression she gets of him, and she calls him on it repeatedly, and for his apparant lack of concern for Ben and Polly when they are threatened, although we know how deeply he does care for his companions and that he knows they are strong enough to not need constant coddling.

And I will also say I was really impressed with the final moments of the story. Summer is granted a lot of new potential which would be interesting to explore given the right circumstances, and since this is Doctor Who, anything is possible.

Onwards.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HIGHLANDERS

Invasion of the Cat People

Um. Yeah. Total b-movie title for starters, although somehow in Doctor Who it's allowable, and one can almost see it on the screen if one closes ones eyes. Unfortunatlely, I don't see Jude Law in a starring role as per Gary Russell's fantasy cast list on page 261.

But anyways.

I didn't like it.

Ben and Polly suffer the usual displacement anxiety that the early companions exhibited in the series when arriving in the future; it is 1994 and they marvel at the price of things, and have their requisite encounter with McDonald's while the Doctor tries to make some sense of time experiments in a house somewhere in the English countryside. Clever references are made throughout to the Doctor's past, and even into his future with a mention of special books from "home" - a future reference (or retroactive continuity - "ret-conning") to a fourth Doctor adventure in 1979.

Cat-People. Yep, they're cats. Cliche cats, hissing and spitting, and despising humans, and of course to make sure they're really bad cats they're all females. Another reference to cat-kind is made, this time ahead into a 1989 story. Clever cross knitting of the elements of the series, but not really enough to save the story from getting a bit tired. Oh yes, they're out to conquer the world. And invade. Hence the title.

I didn't like. Did I already say that? Well I'm saying it again. I didn't like it. There are references back to Vulcan and the Daleks again, but to be fair this book was written before The Murder Game. Yes, this is another of the fabled Missing Adventures from Virgin Publishing back in 1995, so as far as Gary Russell was concerned when he wrote it, this was the bridge novel between two televised stories and he could treat it as such, so we get a bit of a hiccup with the recaps from Vulcan, but the story gets back underway without dwelling on it. Good point on the TARDIS crew dynamic: Polly and Ben are already feeling out of place having gone into the future, and the concept of them leaving gets brought up quick. Bad moment, though: both Polly and Ben have nightmares and get night sweats, but Ben's is perhaps dewlled upon a little too much for comfort, until he arrives in the console room a sweaty stinky mess with his pyjamas "clinging to his body contours".

Jude Law and sweaty Ben in the same book. Okay Gary, welcome to this side of the closet door. Sheesh. And I can say this as a gay man myself. Shamless sexploitation of the companions? Well to be fair around the time this book was written, the New Adventures featuring the seventh Doctor and company were really pushing the envelope and breaking new ground, and there was a hot young companion always being deprived of his clothes; it just feels wierd to ret-con that new style of writing into the classic (we have to call it "classic" now because of the new series) era.

So. Done. Relatively painless. On to the next book, then we're back to televised stories, I promise.

NEXT EPISODE : WONDERLAND

The Murder Game

With the events of Vulcan behind them, the Doctor, Polly and Ben are travelling together again, although Ben is still edgy about the Doctor's recent regeneration. The TARDIS receives a distress signal and takes the team to the Hotel Galaxian, which was once posh but is now a run-down space station/hotel orbiting Earth (and I'll say right now I wrote Offworld Vegas before this came out) to find a murder mystery game being played out, very much the game of "Clue" set in space. Rather than rock the boat, the Doctor and company willingly take part in the game when they are mistaken for late-arriving participants, but when someone is found murdered in the corridors of the hotel, it appears that there are other forces at work than a bunch of space tourists playing a game. It gets worse, though, when the savage Selachians arrive at the station looking for a hidden weapon, and threatening to kill anyone who does not help them.

Selachians. Hm. A guy I chat with online once had the the tag line "sharks with friggin lasers" on his bio and for a while I thought he either meant the Selachians or the Sharkticons. Turns out it was neither. But that's beside the point. The Selachians are nasty aquatic predators who have designed life support and travel mechanisms that resemble walking robotic sharks. With friggin lasers. One of the supporting cast tells Ben that the Selachians are mean, but not up to the same league as the Daleks or the Cybermen, and that pretty much sums them up. They are driven by the simple desire to kill, very much like sharks, although they have a more reasoning intelligence and a bit of a temper (and a glib line in threats which includes referring to humans as "miserable human plankton"). I found that Steve Lyons played them mostly for laughs; I never got a real sense of a threat, just fish-faced bullies that even he undercuts with chapter titles such as "Attack of the Killer Sharks". Still, when it comes to novels, it is not uncommon to have cheesy chapter headings, and to this day there is always some joker calling one chapter "Escape to Danger" or "Explosion!".

All told though The Murder Game is a good addition to the adventures of the Doctor, Ben, and Polly. Anyone who knows the series knows that they will soon be joined by another companion to bring the crew up to four, which will see some characters left out of the action from time to time. Peter Davison, the fifth Doctor, would comment in the 2005 documentary series Doctor Who Confidential that he felt that three companions was just far too much for the Doctor to deal with, and rather than have meaningful bonds between the Doctor and his companions one would get the sense that the Doctor was leading a school outing. Books such as The Murder Game and the next few to follow allow a bit of expansion into the relationship of the current crew; Ben and Polly would no doubt feel completely alienated by the Doctor's recent regeneration for starters, but when the next crew member joins up the Doctor will form a much closer bond with him, pushing Polly and Ben further away and adding a bit more justification to their joint decision to leave eventually.

But on with the current group. Meow.

NEXT EPISODE : INVASION OF THE CAT PEOPLE

The Power of the Daleks

Imagine it from the companions' point of view: you've been travelling with this mysterious old man through time and space for a little while, you've seen other worlds, aliens, historical figures, and the wonders of the TARDIS itself. And then one day, your guide, your friend, falls down in front of you, seemingly dead. And when you blink your eyes, there's someone new in his place. Someone who knows your name, knows the TARDIS, claims to in fact be the Doctor, but bears no resemblance to him whatsoever. But you saw it happen. But you don't believe it. It is this myriad of conflicting thoughts that faces Ben and Polly now as they are faced with the second Doctor. He's visibly younger than his predecessor, and acts in a mischevious fashion, and plays a recorder now; he doesn't need glasses anymore, and the ring that the first Doctor used to wear and guard against all as if it were sacred has been casually discarded as if it were nothing more than a trinket. Ben is suspicious, he can't come to grips with this concept, but Polly, who was first to embrace the reality of what the TARDIS was capable of, is ready to believe that the Doctor is capable of changing his form on top of everything else she has seen him do in past.

With this uncertainty hanging over them, the TARDIS crew are thrust into the political upheaval of the Earth colony called Vulcan. The Doctor is mistaken for an official from Earth who has come to investigate the goings on in the colony, and through the course of his exploration of the colony he discovers a mysterious capsule that was dragged out of the mercury swamp. The capsule is not empty though, and inside are two inert Daleks, and a space on the floor where a third one was. The chief scientist of the colony has secretly removed and reactivated the third Dalek, and believes that the Daleks are nothing but machines and can be made to serve the colony, and others in the shadows believe that they can be used to aid in the coming rebellion. The truth, of course, is that the Daleks will allow this charade to play out while they quietly establish themselves and feed power to their capsule, which is a Dalek seed ship capable of building an army of machines and placing mutant creatures inside. The Doctor warns everyone of the Daleks' plans but the colonists will not hear any of his protests and blindly allow the Daleks access to everything they request, and by the time they do heed the warnings it is too late and mass exterminations follow.

I really REALLY wish this adventure had some better representation in the BBC archives than the few clips that survive today. Not only is this the historic first adventure of the new Doctor, but these Daleks are cunning mean ones, at their best for the time. I enjoyed all six episodes on audio while in the car and making dinner at a friend's place the other night, and found myself feeling truly cheated for the first time by the stupidity of the BBC when it came to preserving their shows. From all accounts, Patrick Troughton's new Doctor reacted with sheer fear and terror when he came face to face with one of the Daleks, which is something no other Doctor ever did until this season's Dalek from the new series. And the Dalek in question itself appeared to recognize the Doctor right away but continued to play out its role as a servant of the human colonists. A few times through the story you can hear the Daleks restraining themselves and submitting to the humiliation of being servants to an inferior race, biding their time until they can start the killing that they so enjoy. I actually found myself noticing dialogue similarities when it came to Polly rationalizing why Daleks do what they do, and the lines the ninth Doctor himself would say later on in the 2005 series; the truth is, the Daleks are just plain bad, they see no good in anything else, and they're determined to wipe out everything that is not of their creed. They are the ultimate in racial hatred, no conscience, nothing. It's best summed up by one of the Daleks, when it says "We are not yet ready to teach these humans the Law of the Daleks!" which is something no other Dalek ever really says; in future they will just exterminate, or they will be planning some conquest, there will never be any indicator of this being a conscious way of life for the Daleks. Maybe that's down to David Whitaker's writing, which is reportedly something that Dalek creator Terry Nation was not pleased with. Mind you, I personally find that Nation's future criticisms of what other writers would do with the Daleks seemed to stem from some kind of jealousy that his creations were evolving out of his hands; Nation publically condoned the way author John Peel would handle the novelizations of four Dalek adventures into target books, but those books were not really that good. Future scripts from Eric Saward and Ben Aaronovitch would be met with scorn by Nation, but they would demonstrate some good initiative and take the Daleks into the future. I sometimes wonder what Nation would have said about the Dalek scripts for Big Finish's audio range, and indeed about the "new" Daleks on the new series. Probably nothing good, in the end.

One can see (or hear) Troughton trying to find his role as the Doctor after taking over from William Hartnell, but having the Daleks in the script to distract the audience from what has just happened works quite well, so the Doctor doesn't need to do any soul searching and can more or less just deal with the Dalek menace and worry about who he "is" later on. And it won't take long for him to be established and in character; the next televised episode will see him pretty much right where he will be for the rest of his time in the role.

But before we go there, some more adventures in the world of printed fiction. Polly may have accepted that this is indeed the Doctor, but Ben is still convinced, so why not see what effect that suspicion has on the team dynmic in between episodes...

NEXT EPISODE : THE MURDER GAME

The Tenth Planet

The TARDIS arrives at the South Pole in the year 1986 just as a standard orbit by a manned space capsule starts to go awry. The Doctor, Ben and Polly encounter a hidden base in the ice where an international team commanded by the growly General Cutler and tracking the capsule and trying to guide it back to Earth. The Doctor discovers a power drain affecting the capsule and accurately predicts that another planet is about to appear in the sky, and then he predicts that they will receive visitors from that planet. Cutler doesn't care and is suspicious of the time travellers, but he has bigger things to worry about when the base is overrun by natives of the planet, now known as Mondas; they are mechanical with visible human hands, their faces wrapped in fabric but their eyes and mouths still disturbingly visible as if they are rotting beneath the coverings. All emotion has been removed from their brains, they are the Cybermen. Their planet is Earth's twin but has drifted off its orbit, and desperately low on energy it has returned to gather energy from Earth. Mondas does indeed begin to suck at Earth's power but times have changed since they were twin planets and there is a lot more energy going around in industry and technology, and under the overload, Mondas burns out and the Cybermen are destroyed. The Doctor becomes steadily weaker as the adventure unfolds, only barely managing to set the TARDIS in motion before he collapses onto the floor. Ben and Polly rush to his side, and as they watch, he regenerates into a completely new person...

Oh where to begin.

The big news is the regeneration. William Hartnell has been the Doctor for the last three years at this point, and he wants to leave the role, citing health reasons for the most part but in a letter he apparantly sent to a fan he states that he was having creative differences with the BBC about the direction the show was moving in, and then left. Regardless, the problem of replacing the lead character was solved by introducing the concept of regeneration, a process unique to the Doctor's people wherein an old worn out body can undergo a complete cellular renewal and continue to live, but completely altering its physical appearance as a side effect. This would be a big risk on any program, but as Doctor Who is still very much on the go here in 2005, obviously one that the fans were ready to buy into. The regeneration is handled well on screen, slowly blending the face of William Hartnell into that of his successor, Patrick Troughton.

Then there are the Cybermen. It is hard to believe that these mummified creatures would go on the be one of the series' most notorious monsters, but they would indeed return numerous times over the series, seeming to update their appearance every time. These Cybermen were a very primitive breed, with bits of their previous human physionomy still very much visible as stated above. One of the Cybermen alludes to them still very much posessing organic brains, just with their emotions surgically removed along with their hearts and most of their organs to ensure their survival. There is a tremendous opportunity to explore the background of the Cybermen, and it will come in the Big Finish audio Spare Parts, but that's not for a while. One of the creepiest things about these Cybermen is the dull dead processed voices that come from their mouths; the mouths open but do not actually move with the words they speak as if there is a speaker buried within them.

I recruited my friend Jay for viewing purposes once more, and we noted the stylized titles for the adventure, but realized that the computer sounds of the control room were provided by the same effects that were used for WOTAN so recently inThe War Machines. Jay made note of a more professional look to the opening of the show, but that goes right out the window when the snow machine is parked right beside the camera to simulate a blizzard as the TARDIS arrives. The staff of the Antarctic base are all from different nations and are played a bit too over the top, with some not-too-convincing American accents and a really lousy Spanish dude complete with girlie mags and pin-ups by his bunk. Polly is of course ogled by the men seeing as there are no women on the base (so it's 1986 but there are still no women in the military eh? Actually that's really the only thing that was inaccurate about the social dynamic in the episodes, at least from what I can remember of 1986) and reverts to her typical 60's girl role by offering to make evryone coffee in a time of crisis. "Why doesn't she just take a dictation and be secretary too," Jay says from his chair. The concept of the United Nations working as one on a space program is interesting, even if they appear to have Americans running the bases, but then come the scenes at the UN buildings in Geneva where everyone wears distinctive tribal outfits to represent their nations and show us just how multicultural the world is in 1986. Uh, yeah.

The Tenth Planet is unfortunately incomplete, with episode 4 missing somewhere in the ether (although it is suspected that someone somewhere has it and is hanging onto it just to be a dick... dude, if you're reading this, you ARE being a dick, give it back to the BBC dammit). For the VHS release episodes 1 through 3 were cleaned up and episode 4 reconstructed using the intact audio tracks, stills, and a few choice moments of moving images recorded with film off a television screen during the original broadcast. The regeneration clip did mercifully survive as it was used in another program and lifted from it, so at least the first glimpse of the Doctor's truly alien ability is there to be seen. The reconstruction was done very well, and if enough material had been available a similar approach to the missing episodes from The Reign of Terror would have been a nice project, rather than forcing Carole Ann Ford to sit and read from a teleprompter.

So that's the end of the first Doctor. Gone. On with the new. The BBC are rolling the dice that people will still watch the show even though the character they have been with for three years is as good as dead to them, with a strange newcomer at the helm of the TARDIS. What better way to keep viewers onside though than to pit the new Doctor against his oldest foes....

NEXT EPISODE : THE POWER OF THE DALEKS

Ten Little Aliens

Wow. This was a great story, complete with creepy little devil-monsters on the cover of the book.

Stephen Cole totally dismisses the notion of The Smugglers leading right into The Tenth Planet in Ten Little Aliens, and goes so far as to have Polly and Ben allude to having had many more adventures with the Doctor so far. This would certainly account for how tightly-knit the three regular characters have become in such a short amount of time. Or maybe it's just the Doctor, who is looking a bit worse for wear these days, his initial outrage at having two new companions thrust upon him now fading so fast he is almost welcoming of their presence. Together they step from the TARDIS in full space gear into a chamber on an asteroid with no air. That is, until the life support systems kick in, and it becomes clear that this is not just an asteroid but a trap and a half. A platoon of space marines from Earth's empire have also come to this place on a training mission, to find not only the Doctor and company but ten of the most wanted alien terrorists all preserved in their final moments of death behind a stasis field. Coincidence? Surely not - there's no such thing in Doctor Who. And then people start to die, in horrible ways.

Stylistically this is one of those novels that I have trouble dealing with when placed back during the old black and white days of the program. What's my problem? The sheer scale of the science fiction in it. In The War Machines, the Doctor examines supercomputer WOTAN with an expert eye and some glib phrases that had Jay and I laughing our asses off, seeing as there is more power in my PC now than WOTAN could have ever posessed. Here now we have the Doctor totally adept to technology that allows users to experience each other's thoughts on a closed neural network. Okay, so it's just because times have changed, and there should be no dumbing-down of stories set during the series' early days just to accomodate my gripes. There's also the military unit itself that is unlike any other seen in Doctor Who to date (and I speak in a linear sense now, from having just viewed stories made in 1967); they're all misfits, they're all mean, and they're all desperate to survive. My heart went out to the horribly scarred and voice-boxed character of Frog. Poor girl, she got a raw deal growing up.

The TARDIS team are done magnificently. Cole has nailed Ben and Polly's characters flawlessly, even touching on their dubious flirtation with each other (Polly seems to be a bit of a party girl in her days hanging at The Inferno club, and has a few wild nights under her belt, and she was apparantly fancying her chances with Ben that fateful night she took Dodo out) in much the same way that Ian and Barbara's relationship was brought to light in The Eleventh Tiger. This time, though, times have changed and even though it's only been a few years since Ian and Barbara first arrived on the scene, social dynamic has changed to an extent where Ben and Polly's attraction can be a bit more pronounced, and even a bit on the lusty side. Cole craftily makes a future reference to The Caves of Androzani from 1984, and in an early exchange between Polly and Ben on the subject of cat people and dog people alludes to events to come in Gary Russell's novel Invasion of the Cat People. And the Doctor? Close to perfect. He's fading, though, getting older. He still musters up his indignant pride and takes control of situations, even sits back and chuckles a bit watching those who would know better fumble their way along until it is time for him to admonish them and put things right. But he's still feeling the strain of his adventures, and appears to need a rest. He assures Ben, though, that soon he will feel a completely new person.

So I liked it. A lot. If anyone else is going to try and add more adventures to this era of the show I really hope they look to this book as a guideline of how to proceed, at least where the characterizations are concerned.

And now, back to the TV series. And into TV history...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TENTH PLANET