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