The Space Pirates

It's the future again. Somewhere out in the far reaches of Earth's empire lay navigational beacons made of a valuable mineral called argonite. Space pirates have long been attacking floater convoys of the mineral and have now turned their attention to the satellites themselves, and it is on board one of these that the TARDIS arrives. The beacon is blown apart into sections, and the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie are separated from the TARDIS and rescued by Milo Clancy, an independent miner feeling the squeeze from his bigger competitor, the Issigri Mining Corp. As Milo and the travellers attempt to trace the missing argonite, the local space authority are investigating the shipping routes as well with the co-operation of Madeline Issigri herself. None of this is missed by the space pirates, who have some sort of hold over Issigri, and plan to get rid of the patrolling V-ship to keep their own piracy venture safe. The Doctor's group follow the trail of the pirates to the planet Ta which is the home base of Issigri, and find that the pirates are using the Issigri base as their own, having kidnapped the senior Issigri (Dom), who was also Milo's partner in the old days.

And blah blah blah. This story is kinda lame. 6 episodes and the Doctor and company don't exactly do much except get captured or knocked out. I'm sure the space corps would have figured it out eventually even without the Doctor's help. Only episode 2 exists on the Lost in Time DVD with the balance on CD from the BBC Radio Collection. The incidental music provided is an extension of that made for The Ice Warriors with a high trilling operatic sound here and there, which is a bit painful when you're listening to it at the gym with your headset turned up loud to block out the gay-club-ish thumpa thumpa that they have on too load as it is. I will, however, give snaps for the spaceship design and the in flight effects, which are sharpened up by the VIDfire processing of the DVD. It would have been nice to see how the rest of the episodes effects went with several more minnow-ships in pursuit of the pirate vessels.

At the end of the story the pirates are locked up and good has triumphed, but the TARDIS is still missing, its section of space beacon orbiting the planet Lobos. Milo kindly offers the travellers a lift in his old clunker, the Liz, and off they go. Anything could happen on their way back to the TARDIS, which could make for some interested extended adventures with Milo as part of the crew. But fortunately no-one has tried to do a novel set in there yet.

So we move on.

NEXT EPISODE : THE WAR GAMES

The Indestructible Man

Okay at LAST a book I enjoyed. Leave it to author Simon Messingham to create a frightening vision of Earth's future where an unknown and virtually unseen alien menace terrorized Earth in a nasty war by posessing normal people and driving them mad. And the only way to stop them was to employ the services of the Indestructible Man; a normal human who was duplicated by the alien Myloki but remained human enough to stop them. But 30 years later, an intruder is fatally shot on a secret base, his companions escape, and six months later he makes a complete recovery. The man also appears indestructible, and he muses that he should have changed. The Doctor realizes that there is more going on than a simple invasion and once Jamie and Zoe have been recovered from where they have hidden on Earth he attempts to find the original Indestructible Man and save the world. Again.

I have long been an opponant of revisionist writers taking previous Doctors and companions into dramatic areas they never really touched on screen, and here we have just that, and aside from a few minor points it is actually done quite well. The second Doctor has often had this frown and darker mood that hinted at his murky past (which is in itself a revisionist concept that came from the final days of the seventh Doctor in 1989), and Messingham has capitalized on this. The Doctor broods a lot. He is direct and to the point when he has to be. And other times he exhibits childlike delight and wonder at what he finds. It's all there, and it all works. The failing in this scheme is usually in the companions, and I find the circumstances that Zoe and, particularly, Jamie, end up in after witnessing the "death" of the Doctor to be a bit of a stretch. Zoe's technical skills are realized and she becomes part of a slave class, working in an office and falling in love with her boss. Every now and again she gets flashes of her previous life on the Wheel and realizes that she is slipping back into her more "robotic" existence, and that her time with the Doctor has changed her. As for Jamie, he becomes a twisted nasty sort working for a local military elite, chanelling his rage at the Doctor's death against those he holds responsible. I suppose people do what they must to survive, but it's hard to picture them in these situations. Even when the eventual re-uniting happens it takes a while for them to come back together and become the TARDIS crew once more.

Earth in Messingham's future is a grim place. The entire social order is in ruins from the effects of the first war, and secret organizations hold the answers and the only hope for the future of the planet. One in particular, SILOET, has direct links back to the old UNIT that was created under Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart back in The Invasion. As UNIT figures very prominently in the future of Doctor Who there is a lot of material referenced here (the Earth year in the book is 2096) which would be confusing for a new viewer/reader who has started at the very start with no knowledge of the future direction of Doctor Who. The people running SILOET, though, are nowhere near the kind of solider the Brigadier was; they are desperate, afraid, and feel helpless in the face of what has happened. Especially good is the commander, Bishop, who doesn't go over the edge as a megalomaniac like some would in his position. Of course the central location to start the story off is London, but the Doctor takes a side-trip to Barbados and regions of South America in search of the Indestructible Man, while Zoe spends time on SKYHOME, a massive skybase within the stratosphere, and Jamie goes to an underwater prison. It's always good when a writer can make all these locations work on page, taking us away from the usual corridors and control rooms. In fact, Messingham doesn't even use the TARDIS as a location the whole novel.

Now, of course, comes the real jarring part: this is the last novel of the second Doctor that I am going to review, so I'm back to 1969, back to the televised episodes. And there are only two adventures left for the Doctor...

NEXT EPISODE : THE SPACE PIRATES

The Colony of Lies

I didn't like this one either. I liked it better than The Final Sanction but not by much.

The story opens with the future seventh Doctor and his companion, Ace, discussing events of the past. Questions from Ace lead the Doctor to remember his visit to the planet Axista Four, back when he was travelling with Jamie and Zoe...

Axista Four is home to a colony of settlers who left earth with a "back to basics" approach to life which was supposed to liberate them from the technology-dependent lives they once lived, but has instead marooned them up a cliche cul de sac where the colony is run like a town out of the wild west, and no technology is used at all. Interstellar luddites, in the end. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive as a conflict between the settlers clinging to the original vision, and a breakaway group are coming to a head, but also coming is a massive battle cruiser with its own plans for the planet in its efforts to relocate refugees from the Dalek wars. And if that's not enough, there's a mysterious race of dog-like creatures running about the planet; creatures who aren't impressed with the presence of humans on their world.

Colin Brake pretentiously says in his notes that he was intending to do Doctor Who - The Western, and apparantly this was something we have been waiting for. I seem to remember something called The Gunfighters, which was ill-received in its time, but nonetheless despite it's hokey accents and silly costumes, it was the original western. Now this. For starters, if the cover of the book did not have a small western town painted on it, one could almost get away with saying it was just a colony without technology, rather than have to cling to the wild west notions. Brake isn't very good at setting a scene; I never got a proper sense of where anything was happening outside of it being in some part of a ship, a cave, a control room, whatever; not enough work put into maintaining that wild west idea. And I get the feeling that he doesn't like Zoe, seeing as he has her rendered unconscious a few times and out of the way for quite a lot of the book.

Dipping into the future (or the past, depending on your point of view) and using the seventh Doctor as a catalyst to some of the events is an interesting gamble, though. In the years to come the show would have the odd adventure where the Doctor would cross paths with his past selves, and they would never get along. Here we get to see the second Doctor's outrage at his future selve's tendancy to tinker with the past and set things "right"; he sees it as not only wrong but something that will incur the wrath of his own people, still being referred to as "Them". As for the seventh Doctor, they meet very briefly and he is deliberately coy and vague with his past self; one is also reminded of a seventh Doctor novel where he ruins a crossword game for his third incarnation out of sheer mischief.

Nice try, Colin Brake, but I didn't enjoy this. Writing for the second Doctor is something that only a few have managed to pull off, due to the lack of material available to reference and get a feel for the character. Throwing him into a heap of cliche's and having him say "Oh, my word," a lot just doesn't cut it.

NEXT EPISODE : THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN

The Final Sanction

I'm not going to talk a lot about this one, because I don't like it.

Steve Lyons drags his lacklustre Selachians back up out of the literary mire for another round against the Doctor, but this time it's more complicated than before. With Jamie and Zoe in tow, the Doctor is caught in the last days of the war between Humans and Selachians. Jamie ends up fighting alongside the Humans, and Zoe is taken prisoner and held captive. The Doctor, however, is put in an interesting position, one that has never been examined before. Usually the Doctor and company meet important historical figures and go to great lengths to make sure that history is not changed by their presence. This time, the Doctor encounters a piece of "future history" wherein someone he meets will go on to be an important figure even farther on after the war - but the Doctor is faced with the dilemma of saving his companions by changing that future, or letting them die to preserve it. Interesting.

I still didn't like it though.

NEXT EPISODE : THE COLONY OF LIES