Drift

The Doctor takes Leela to America for her to meet the natives, but they arrive far too late and instead get lost in a terrible snow storm. Out in the snow, though, is something that spooks the local wildlife and is interfering with the Doctor's ability to locate the TARDIS after leaving it. An elite military force is out in the blizzard looking for the Stormcore, an experimental type of weapon that can control the weather. The Doctor uses his UNIT credentials to insinuate himself into the midst of the group and suspects that there is something else going on out in the blizzard, something that could be alive and intelligent. The storm effectively cuts off a small village from the rest of the area and creates ice monsters that are capable of killing, and will kill everyone unless the Doctor can solve the mystery of what is driving the Stormcore.

Or something like that. Again, it was a while ago that I read this book but it was in the dead of winter and it seemed to have a special resonance with me as I sat reading by the window with snow everywhere. It's actually been coming down off and on today as I was flipping through the book to jog my memory, and I found that it evoked a sense of isolation much like how I felt as a child at my grandmother's cottage at Lake St Peter when the snow would come down so heavy we couldn't see past the front verandah. Everyone likes a good ghost story, but this book is proof that they don't all have to take place in haunted houses.

The White Shadow military group are not exactly as harmonoius as the UNIT organization, but we can blame it on their upbringing (they are, after all, Americans). Leela is teamed up with the psychic native American Kristal, finding that she is the only person she can relate to. The Doctor does his best to keep control of the situation but I sometimes found myself wondering if this was the right material for this Doctor; a certain darkness works its way through the story and I often find that these types of tales are more along the lines of what the seventh Doctor evolved into when his character moved from the screen to page. Only minor though. The relationship between the Doctor and Leela does not receive the same amount of comment that is has in previous novels; perhaps author Simon A. Forward felt that Chris Boucher was the man to dig that deep; he would just get on with telling his story.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK

Eye of Heaven

The Doctor and Leela. Something about an expedition to Easter Island. People knocked out. Journeys on boats. Leela riding a whale. Some other crap.

Why do I choose to review this one this way? Cause it doesn't deserve any better. Any book that has to be presented in flashes back and forward cannot be taken seriously. I mean it reads as if someone dropped the manuscript on the floor on the way to the copier but just jammed it all back together and said it was meant to be that way.

Jim Mortimore should have done better. And he has done better; his first entries into Doctor Who were stellar tales in the Virgin New Adventures line with the seventh Doctor and his companions, but along came something called Parasite, which had some interesting insight into how the Founding Families of the Kaldor City society came to lose their power, but that book was finished off very suddenly when Mortimore decided that he could just tie off his Doctor Who book and write a Star Trek novel instead. It appears he wanted to do something artsy for his return. Jim, if you want to do art, use a paintbrush and leave Doctor Who alone.

NEXT EPISODE : DRIFT

The Talons of Weng Chiang

The Doctor takes Leela to Victorian London to show her how her anscestors used to amuse themselves; in short, he is taking her to the theatre. Their arrival however, is marred by the presence of a sinsister illusionist, the great Li H'Sen Chang and his murederous dummy/cyborg Mr Sin. Chang and Sin are in league with a Chinese criminal organization known as the Tong of the Black Scorpion, the followers of which worship the god Weng-Chiang. With the help of the local theatre owner and an eminent pathologist the Doctor discovers that Weng-Chiang is in fact Magnus Greel, a war criminal who fled from justice in the far future using his zygma beam experiments which left him scarred and disfigured.

GAAAHHHHHH I say. That's a sound of pleasure. This has to be one of the best 6 part adventures ever, neither suffering from any slowing of pace nor from the dreaded 2 episode plot switch syndrome. Where does the credit lay? With absolutely everyone involved at every level - it's absolutely one of the best, most atmospheric tales ever made for the show. There's extensive location work down in a Victorian theatre and in the cobbled streets of old London, and even the sewer locations where giant rats run amok are convincing... except for that one bit, Jay will point out. And the giant rat that we see attacking the Doctor and Leela at the end of part 1 leaves a bit to be desired. But that's about where it ends for the bad stuff.

The Doctor looks every inch the Scotland Yard inspector that he is mistaken for by Henry Gordon Jago, the Palace Theatre proprietor, and Jago himself is a fantastic creation for the show, presented perfectly on page and on screen. At the opposite end of Jago's businessman character is Professor Litefoot, every inch a gentleman and only too flattered to have the Doctor allowing him to assist. Leela is a true fish out of water this time, unfamiliar as it is with most mod cons but absoultely perplexed by the trappings of Victorian society such as smoking pipes, table manners, and tea. Ah but she gets to fight some bad Chinese and she does it well.

Yes, the Chinese. As I have mentioned in past entries it's like Doctor Who has always had some kind of axe to grind with the Chinese, citing them as the chief reasons why there would be a third world war in several episodes in the Pertwee era, almost as often as they poked fun at civil servants. Here though we have a Chinese mob in black running through the streets of Victorian London dumping dead cabbies bodies into the sewers, throwing axes at people, and invading homes in the name of their god. But is it racist to go this far? The folks over at DWIN published a fascinating article on the racist perceptions around the adventure, documenting how the censors at TV Ontario in Canada felt that it would be disrespectful to the local Chinese communities and subsequently did not air the epsiodes. The first time I saw this one was on Buffalo's Channel 17 WNED, and they had no qualms. In 1990 when I was working on the zine Chameleon Circuit with the fan club I was part of I called national broadcaster YTV to ask them if they had any reservations about broadcasting the episodes and was answered with a puzzled "What...?"... which is either to say they had no idea what they were showing (which is likely considering their routine screwups when airing the episodes in order) or they didn't think it would be a problem (which was more linked to ignorance of the programme rather than actually watching it and making a decision). Still, I never heard any massive outcry on either of those occasions so it's probably more a case of TVO not wanting to risk it, being publically funded and all that. And when the adventure hit the DVD release schedule, there were no mobs of angry Chinese Canadians protesting outside Worlds Biggest Bookstore, or demanding a boycott of Amazon for selling it online. Personally I found the jabs made during the Pertwee era would be more offensive as they were set in present day, as opposed to a historical adventure which may have embellished a few concepts just for the sake of entertainment. When Jay and I watched it we were not left clutching the pearls and saying how politically incorrect it was for a Victorian police constable to refer to them as yellow and for Litefoot to say he was dealing with "a pair of inscrutable Chinks" in his morgue for the pure and simple reason that back then there was a lot of ignorance towards any race by white folks. It would be interesting to see a Doctor Who set in the deep south of the States during the days of slavery and see how that was handled and if the dreaded n-word would rear its head in the script.

So. Production wise it's a solid show. Script's fantastic, peppered with the wit that only script writer Robert Holmes could create and only Tom Baker could deliver. Characters great. And Mr Sin - creepy! Nothing says fun like being stalked by a killer midget. Especially if it's Deep Roy in there (who went on to be all the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). "He scares me," Jay said, tucking his feet up on the couch. But funny thing he kept saying his name.. "Deep Roy .... Deep Roy..."

Wait a sec that sounds like a porn name for a famous bottom. But what do I know.

NEXT EPISODE : EYE OF HEAVEN

Match of the Day

The Doctor and Leela arrive on a world where the rules are simple. Sort of. Everyone is a killer, and you can challenge anyone to a duel to the death. And no-one can decline, otherwise it is against the law. Leela creates a stir and then becomes a celebrity when she fights a man but refuses to kill him when she has clearly defeated him. The Doctor becomes her agent while investigating the fate of another agent and his star client, who is on the run, and Leela finds herself in danger from all sides as the powers that be attempt to have her kill ... or be killed.

The society that worships and praises combat was hinted at in Chris Boucher's earlier Last Man Running and as with Corpse Marker takes the Doctor and Leela into the midst of it. Funny thing is the planet itself is never named. The paralells between this place and Kaldor City are there, although there are no robots here, just the odd assassin android, and there are some filthy rich people operating behind the scenes making things go the way they want them. It gets a bit tedious though with the Doctor's constant assertations that this is a "sick" society. He's never been that judgemental before. Leela is perplexed by the bloodlust that is exhibited left and right; as a warrior she only kills when her life is in danger, or to protect someone else. Being forced to kill goes against everything she learned as a warrior, and certainly everything the Doctor has taught her.

I was left feeling though that the whole drama of Match of the Day was a big runaround, like Boucher got so caught up in his own world that the actual story lacked something. It wasn't boring or anything, and the writing style was well thought out but... I suppose the big letdown was the climax. All that for... well, effectively, nothing.

Booooo I say.

NEXT EPISODE : THE TALONS OF WENG CHIANG

Psi-Ence Fiction

The TARDIS is drawn to the woods near the University of West Essex, and the Doctor discovers that the multiverse is frayed at this location due to some experiments in psi-power. Leela senses some gathering darkness around the university, and in the supposedly haunted woods where a young woman was found brutally murdered years earlier.

Yeah. Haunted woods. Students. Bottled water.

Screw it I don't remember this one very well at all. Mustn't have made that big an impression.

NEXT EPISODE : MATCH OF THE DAY

Corpse Marker

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Leela to Kaldor City at the heart of a society they visited before: this is where the human population is surrounded by servant robots, and the Company controls all the wealth. Almost everyone in Kaldor City works for the company, and among those people now live Uvanov, Toos and Poul, the survivors of a classified incident on board a sandminer years ago. Just as they are trying to get on with their lives, and have been for years, the Doctor and Leela return just as more robot killings begin, although this time the robots have evolved beyond the Dum, Voc, and SuperVoc designations; they have been made to resemble humans, which will make a killer robot that much more difficult to detect...

YES yes yes! This is what I wanted to see for years. Chris Boucher himself has returned to one of his best stories to flesh out the backstory and give us a bit more on Kaldor City, it's robots, and the Founding Families that bankrupted themselves starting the whole thing, and it's just brilliant. I remember when this one came out my friend Jamie was in the UK and I begged and threatened him to bring me a copy back. The development of the relationship between the Doctor and Leela is put into thebackground for this one as the story demands us to focus on the survivors of Robots of Death and see how the return of the Doctor affects them. Uvanov sees Leela first and almost goes into a fit of hysterics, believing that someone is setting him up and trying to drive him mad, and when he encounters the Doctor he is outright hostile and suspicious... which one really can't blame him for. Poul's relapse into his brokendown state is triggered perfectly, and Toos... well she'd rather just be left to her new successes as a storm mine captain.

Boucher's Kaldor City echoes the setup of Coruscant from the latest three Star Wars films, complete with soaring towers, metal walkways and even a run-down unused old section where you just know bad things are happening. The people who live there are for the most part easygoing where robots are concerned, treating them like the tools they are, but some of the younger set have developed some odd fashion sense exhibited by some who dress like robots, and even a young girl who imitates a robot's walk. Beyond the trappings of the killer robots there are probably other things going on there as well, an entire world that would be fascinating to explore, but this really is the last time Doctor Who goes here, at least for now.

But where Doctor Who doesn't go, others do, and the people at Magic Bullet Productions do just that with their own series of tales set in Kaldor City, called, surprise, Kaldor City. I haven't been able to get my hands on any of these yet so I have no idea what they're about aside from the blurbs on the website. I hear some people say they're crap simply because they didn't like the hat that Fiona was wearing at a DWIN meeting almost a hundred years ago (okay it did look like a bird but I digress), but I'm still curious myself. The joy of them being not linked to the continuing Doctor Who continuity means I can get them anytime I want and enjoy them later, if they're good.



NEXT EPISODE : PSI-ENCE FICTION

Last Man Running

As their travels continue, the Doctor and Leela's relationship begins to show signs of strain when her warrior instincts to attack anything start to get on his nerves. Arriving on what looks like a peaceful planet, the Doctor decides to talk a walk and get his headspace back, locking Leela in the TARDIS, only to discover that the planet is not as peaceful as it seems and in fact is teeming with savage life forms. Leela's warrior skills come in very handy on the planet and she rescues not only the Doctor but the members of an investigation sqaud who are hunting a rogue weapons technologist. As every predator is killed by Leela, more arrive to challenge her skills, and the Doctor theorizes that they are being deliberately sent out to do this. The Doctor is right and finds an underground complex where clones are made left and right with the sole purpose to fight and kill in a society where public combat and duels to the death are the norm.

Chris Boucher knows his Leela. Having provided her first two scripts for televsion he now begins to delve a bit deeper into her psyche and how her involvement with the Doctor is affecting her development, and vice versa. The Doctor wasn't planning to have her with him as we all saw in the closing moments of The Face of Evil but he is not the kind of man to just dump her, and realizes that he is now responsible for her and must endure her presence in his life. The resolve to educate her starts to come out here, and a slightly different Pygmalion begins to happen over the next few books.

I know I'm not writing a lot about these ones; I read this almost 8 years ago and don't remember as much as I would like to, but as far as character continuity goes, it's right in stride, developing the Doctor-companion relationship a bit further than was seen on television. The teething pains fo getting used to each other was never fully explored in the televised adventures, and Boucher does a good job of illustrating them without rewriting any established mythology.

NEXT EPISODE : CORPSE MARKER

The Robots of Death

Somewhere far off exists a society where all the menial work is done by robots, and humans more or less sit back and watch it all happen. Mineral wealth is gathered by storm mines which drive across desert worlds and refine the ores they catch in airborne particles, and a minimal crew of humans lounges about while the robots monitor the systems. The Doctor and Leela arrive just as one of the humans is found dead, apparantly strangled. Naturally suspicion falls on the time travellers, but as the death toll mounts it becomes obvious that the real culprits are not humans (or Time Lord) but the robots themselves; one of the crew has gone mad and started reprogramming the robots to kills.

Simple plotline, and one of the most atmospheric adventures ever. There is nowhere to run, and no help to call once the robots begin their killing spree. The robots themselves are fantastic; they have sculpted heads like statues and move with an almost eerie precision as they walk. Their voices are calm and polite at all times, even when they're getting their hands around someone's throat. And the shots were just packed with them wandering about on their missions; one could easily believe that the BBC did a mass-hire for the episode and got 20 extras in for the day. A lot of imagination went into the design of the robots and indeed the entire social structure of the society they serve, with Commander Uvanov openly taunting members of his crew who were once part of powerful families who have gone bankrupt and their next generation have to work alongside the real people. The society has a few other problems as well, the chief amongst them being people suffering mental breakdowns after working with robots for so long and developing "robophobia". And those who regard the robots as mere tools can only stand there in shock as they are killed, or, like Pilot Toos, beg pathetically for their lives.

Jay and I enjoyed this one together, and we couldn't help but snigger at some of the more elaborate face painting jobs done on the human occupants of the sandminer. We were particularly amused by the character of dask, who seemed like he would love to follow up some of his lines with "By the way, I'm so pretty," as he lounged about like a cat. We noticed a few breakdowns with the visual effects as well, such as the CSO screen on the command deck obliterating half of the faces of the robots in front of it where they fell into shadow, and some interesting overlap effects where corridors were magically made longer than the sets allowed for.

The Doctor has of course seen almost everything, so none of this phases him, but for Leela on her first adventure away from her home world and thrust into this odd society with what she considers "creepy mechanical men" she does quite well. Even if you can't knife a robot. But she is adept to helping Toos with an injured arm, and when one of the other crew, Pool, starts to succumb to robophobia she handles him quite well.

I remember when I first watched The Robots of Death I was in grade 6. Or something. The show grabbed my imagination and made me wonder if the robots would ever be back. Sadly the BBC never returned the Doctor to that part of space, but many years later a set of audios along the lines of the Big Finish adventures came along under the title of Kaldor City, named after the city where the all-powerful Company runs practically everything. I haven't heard any of these audios myself but the lineup of actors involved looks impressive, with the original Commander Uvanov reprising his role. Sometime after the discs came out, script writer Chris Boucher began to deliver a series of novels that expanded on the relationship between the Doctor and Leela, starting with a return to Kaldor City.

Which is coming up soon.

NEXT EPISODE : LAST MAN RUNNING

The Face of Evil

The TARDIS brings the Doctor to a strange alien jungle inhabited by invisible monsters that are terrorizing a small tribe called the Sevateem. One of their warriors, a girl named Leela, has been cast out for speaking against their god, Xoanon, and when she meets the Doctor she recognizes him as "the evil one". The rest of her tribe also react to him the same way but Leela helps the Doctor escape, showing him a massive carved effigy of his own face in a mountainside. The Doctor suspects that he has been to this planet before, but he also suspects that there is more to what's going on than meets the eye. The Sevateem are in posession of advanced scientific artefacts and their high priest, Neeva, is talking to his supposed god over a two way radio which has the Doctor's voice. The Doctor suspects that the answers lie with the Sevateem's sworn enemies, the Tesh, and with Leela he goes to their base of operations, an abandoned spaceship beyond the tribe's reach. The Doctor has indeed been there before and remembers linking with the computer system to keep it from collapsing, but the computer achieved sentience with its own mind exisiting side by side with a copy of the Doctor's personality matrix, driving it mad. The computer, Xoanon, has been keeping the two factions of humans apart and influencing them separately for generations as an experiment in eugenics, but now that the Doctor has arrived it plans to wipe everything out, to destroy and be free...

Interesting story and an interesting twist to have the entire Sevateem-Tesh struggle run by their mutual god. And the whole regression of the Sevateem, generations of descendants from a lost survey team sent out from a spaceship while the technicians stayed behind to work on their ship, was done logically, although one has to wonder how long that had been going on; it takes a long time to forget things and have them become legend. The same can be said for the Tesh, who live in the drab white hallways of the space ship and are armed with laser weapons but are not at all familiar with how any of the onboard computer systems work. Except for the particle analysis machine they strap Leela into.

Visually The Face of Evil does that same irritating leap back and forth between the television studio and the film studio, sometimes within the same sequence of scenes. The adventure has no location component at all, but the film sequences make it feel like they went outside for them. The jungle doesn't look like it actually could support life; as with the jungle in Planet of Evil this one looks dead or decayed with nothing resembling foliage anywhere.

Leela becomes the new companion to the Doctor at the end of part four, pushing into the TARDIS and accidentally setting it off into flight. The Doctor doesn't really seem to want her as a companion, her primitive ways a bit too much for him and her ignorance of so much could be a hurdle, but he's stuck with her now. Leela is pretty much a savage, preferring to knife anything that she can't understand, and asking a lot of questions of the Doctor. She is quick to learn from him, though, and holds him in not quite godlike esteem like Katarina did the first Doctor, but knows that he has powers and she can learn from him and become a better person. And like much of her tribe she runs around in skins, close to naked. Apparantly this is a big deal, especially if you're a dad in the UK and the show comes on after the football scores. I think they shiuld have just asked Neeva to put some proper pants on; I didn't like seeing the sides of his ass cheeks that much. And the Sevateem seemed like a fairly smelly lot; Leela was the only woman we saw until a split second shot later on, and it was interesting to note that she had access to shaving supplies and the men did not. Funny that.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ROBOTS OF DEATH

The Dalek Factor

A platoon of Thal warriors patrols a section of space looking for possible sleeper cels of Daleks and comes to a hostile planet alive with jungles and danger. The only Daleks they actually find are dead and decaying casings, but they come across a man sitting reading a book in a cave. The man has no memory but asks them to call him "Professor" and joins them on their mission, although he does not know what a Dalek is. The Thals are picked off one by one along the way to a crumbling Dalek stronghold, and once inside with the survivors, the "Professor" remembers everything, that he is the Doctor and that this is a trap; the Daleks have somehow captured him and are using him in their experiments to transplant the "Dalek factor" into other beings, which will create an army of killers all dedicated to the Dalek cause.

This was the last of the Telos novellas published, and what a way to finish the series. Daleks with the Doctor at their mercy and under their control! The alien jungle comes alive on page, complete with the sentry Daleks covered over with creepers and rust from having sat outside in the elements for so long, and the Thals are shown as better more evolved space explorers than their previous mission into space to Spiridon in Planet of the Daleks. Their confidence is high but their fear is real with the realization that their sworn enemies are all around them and watching them.

There is no real indicator that the Doctor in this story is actually the fourth Doctor. There is a theory that his adopting of the title "Professor" suggests that he is in fact the seventh or a later Doctor as one of his later companions would call him that on occasion, but the proof I believe is in the climactic confrontation between the Doctor and his captors once he regains his memory. the utter hatred he has for them, the contempt for the Emperor Dalek is not the stuff of those Doctors, but more akin to the rage the fourth Doctor felt for them, the rage he had to force himself to put in check when he had the opportunity to destroy them forever Genesis of the Daleks. Granted, the ninth Doctor gets pretty intolerant of them at the climax of 2005's Bad Wolf, but at the time that this novella was written there was not yet a ninth Doctor to pattern the character on. So I choose to put it here, giving the fourth Doctor another adventure on his own before he resumes his travels with a companion. That is, once he escapes from the Daleks...

NEXT EPISODE : THE FACE OF EVIL

Asylum

Continuing on his travels alone, the Doctor meets a young woman named Nyssa, who claims to be from the Empire of Traken. And she claims to know the Doctor already, but in his timeline he has not yet met her. The Doctor makes all haste to leave her to herself and avoid any touches with his future, but something Nyssa says to him makes him go back in time; it appears that Nyssa is working on a thesis on Roger Bacon but her information has changed as if time has been altered. The Doctor and Nyssa travel back in time to 1278 to investigate and become caught up with the tide of time once more.

Crap. Peter Darvill-Evans should not be allowed to write. I said as much when his awful New Advetures novel, Deceit, was published and brought confusion and stupidity into Doctor Who lore and also wrecked the incredible character of Abslom Daak, Dalek killer. He might get the Doctor's character right this time but that's where it ends; he turns Nyssa into a nervous wreck despite her strong resolve that she exhibited (or in this case will exhibit) when she joined the TARDIS crew and his attention to historical detail... well okay I have no idea what really went on back in 1278 but I never got a proper feel that Darvill-Evans does either; he just chose a point in time nobody else had touched before and went ahead.

Miracle of miracles, on this one my friend Dan and I are in accord. Mind you he teaches history, so he might have other reasons for not enjoying the book, like knowing if it's accurate or not. Me, I don't know much about history, but I know what I like.

NEXT EPISODE : THE DALEK FACTOR

Millennium Shock

In the last days on the year 1999 the Doctor returns to Earth just as hype and nervousness about the Millennium Bug are at their peak. Everyone is afraid that the world will end, computers will crash, but a computer company that bought up all the reamining stock and product of the failed I2 company claims to have it all covered. The Doctor chances to meet Harry Sullivan again and together they realize that a fragment of the Voractyll intelligence has survived in a microchip inside a pen that Sarah kept, and the alien invasion is on again with the Millennium Bug as the perfect opportunity to conquer Earth.

More fun with Harry returning once more, but this time for the last time. This is the first time that a direct link has been made between the snuffed-out Virgin Missing Adventures range and the new BBC Books with author Justin Richards creating a sequel to his own System Shock. Now we all lived through the New Years Eve in question so we know that the mass power failures and chaos that the book shows us never did happen, but if we want to take the "alternative universe" route and put this one not exactly within the accepted Doctor Who timeline but beside it, it would fit. But hey we're suspending disbelief here, and there are further moments of chaos in the series set on the very same evening that come with their own crises.

Millennium Shock takes place alongside the Fox TV movie that introduced the eighth Doctor, as played by Paul McGann, and at the same time as the novel of the spinoff video production Downtime, although it is more directly linked with the latter. Writers working at Virgin and in the early days of the BBC Books launch seemed to have some kind of conspiracy to wind their tales set in the late 1990s together into a "future history" tapestry, starting with the spinoff Downtime (which has its own immediate links to The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear) and moving to Battlefield from the 1989 season (which was set in 1996 or thereabouts) and tying in with Millennial Rites with the sixth Doctor and his companion engaged in their own struggle against the forces of darkness at the dawn of the year 2000. The links are well maintained throughout all of the stories even if one of them is a bit on the sketchy side when it comes to its actual plot. But I won't give that one away just yet.

So that's Harry for the last time. He hasn't changed, although he's been promoted to Commander with MI5 now, which is a real career switch for a humble naval medical officer who was moved to UNIT in the 1970's. Perhaps the Doctor's influence on his life is what affected him and made him the man he eventually became. The Doctor would like to think so.

But what happens when the Doctor meets a companion from his future who has already left him before he has met her...?

NEXT EPISODE : ASYLUM

Ghost Ship

Shortly after leaving Gallifrey, the Doctor is sinking into an odd sort of mood, a darker place than he seems to have gone before. He attributes this to maybe being on his own as Sarah is no longer with him. He does not get sufficient time to mope, however, as the TARDIS arrives on the Queen Mary in October of 1963 during a crossing of the Atlantic, and after a night spent watching the sea the Doctor realizes that the ship is haunted by ghosts from the past and the future. Whatever force is holding them there is also holding the TARDIS, and the Doctor must discover what it is in order to gain his own freedom and that of the imprisoned ghosts.

Not bad. I'll admit that my immediate recollections of this Telos novella are a bit on the sketchy side, but I do remember enjoying reading it and seeing how the Doctor coped on his own once more. Tom Baker himself is on record saying that he would have enjoyed going it alone for a while, and here we get a chance to see what might have happened with the Doctor operating without a companion to help him out with whatever mysteries he comes across. Baker has recently gone on to say that he would only consider working with Big Finish audio for one of their productions if he could reinvent the fourth Doctor and make him a more dark, brooding character. Ghost Ship touches on what might have been in that regard as well, hinting that the Doctor might be on some kind of road into strange territory, reverting back to his more distanced original ways before his extended exposure to humans (Barbara and Ian specifically) started to soften him.

By the end of the story, though, his resolve is restored somewhat, and he carries on. Good old Doctor. Still lonely, but still the Doctor.

NEXT EPISODE : MILLENNIUM SHOCK

The Deadly Assassin

En route back to Gallifrey, the Doctor is troubled by a vision of the assassination of the President of the High Council of the Time Lords. When he arrives on his home planet in an effort to stop it, he is immediately treated as a criminal due to his past trial and when the assassination goes through he is arrested for it. The Doctor realizes that he has been set up to take the fall for it, and someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to drag him into the conspiracy, including breaking into the Time Lords' ultimate databank, the Matrix, and creating a nightmare world where the Doctor must go to flush out the true killer. The Doctor has his suspicions about who is involved, but the presence of miniaturized corpses throughout Gallifrey confirms it: the Master is back. Deformed and dying, the Master is after the source of all the Time Lords' power in an attempt to revitalize himself, and if he succeeds in capturing the Eye of Harmony, not only will Gallifrey fall, but countless other worlds.

So we're back to the Doctor's home planet for only the second time in the show's history, and we see it as a sterile world inhabited by stuffy old men (no women at this point; their sole function in this adventure is to be computer voices and that's pretty much it) in ceremonial robes and elaborate high collars of office. Gallifrey is not a planet accustomed to violence, which is why the Time Lords were so replused by the Doctor's adventures in the first place, so when it strikes from within the safe society itself, fear is everywhere. Confusion is next. And the Doctor is at the middle of it, but this time on his own with no companions to help him out and one of his deadliest enemies working to destroy him.

The Master is not the same Master we watched during the Jon Pertwee era; as Roger Delgado had passed away during the last of the Pertwee days, there was a sense of reverence about the role and no-one wanted to throw a replacement in right away, and when they finally did there was no attempt to cast a lookalike. The Master here is skeletal and horribly deformed, his face melted away so he has no eyelids, and veins riddle the surface of his skin. He almost looks like he would be sticky to touch. But while the body rots, the mind within is kept alive by fanning the fires of hatred for the Doctor.

The Deadly Assassin has two of the best cliffhangers in the entire series; at the end of part 2 the Doctor's foot is caught in a railway switch while a train comes rocketing down the tracks towards him, and at the end of part three, we see the one sequence that has plagued Mary Whitehouse since its original broadcast: the imagine of the Doctor being held underwater and drowned by his assailant within the Matrix. The entire sequence of events within the Matrix is fantastically done with no real special effects, just extensive location work with the Doctor being hunted by a masked man with a gun and survival gear. Brilliant. And as with dreams themselves, the time that passes within the Matrix feels longer than it is in "real" time, with Time Lords Spandrell and Engin watching over the Doctor while he is within and commenting that he had been inside for over four minutes, while the time passed on screen was much longer than that.

More Time Lord mythology is brought up, this time throwing some light on the history of Gallifrey and on Rassilon, the first of the Time Lords. All of Gallifrey's power is derived from the Eye of Harmony, which is the nucleus of a black hole balanced perfectly against the mass of Gallifrey itself, a gift which Rassilon bestowed upon the Time Lords, so the official history states. Gallifreyan truth, however, is revealed to be a very flexible commodity as the Doctor's old teacher, Cardinal Borusa, demonstrates in his efforts to prepare a cover story for the public to explain the events that unfold. And anyone who remembers The Three Doctors knows that Omega created the power source for Gallifrey by journeying into a black hole, but he ended up stuck there while Rassilon finished his work and took the glory. The Time Lords have also conveniently forgotten the Master despite personally warning the Doctor of his presence on Earth back in Terror of the Autons and later realizing that he had stolen the plans to the doomsday weapon in Colony in Space. Gallifrey, it seems, is not the paradise of peace and truth that the Time Lords would have everyone believe.

And how does the Doctor do without a companion? In this story it makes sense for the Doctor to perform on his own; there would be little for a companion to do except shadow the Doctor and ask questions. This is not to condemn recently departed companion Sarah Jane Smith at all, but even she would be out of place on Gallifrey, and what's more she would be obvious. It does get a bit awkward though when the Doctor talks to himself as a means of filling in the audience where dialogue with a companion was once the way it was done, but it happens very seldom. Tom Baker himself preferred the idea of the Doctor travelling alone without a companion, but the series formula would not allow it and in the next adventure he would take on a new companion, which he would take issue with.

However, before carrying on with the televised series, I'll look at some books that give Tom Baker exactly what he would have wanted; the Doctor on his own, adventuring and exploring just as he did in the days before his trial, but on his own this time...

NEXT EPISODE : GHOST SHIP