The Nightmare Fair / The Ultimate Evil / Mission to Magnus

I have decided to encapsulate all three of these stories together for this entry seeing as they respresent an entire season that was lost to the hiatus of the series in 1985. I have heard of three other adventures that were supposed to be produced in this lost series as well - Penacasta, Made in Singapore, and Attack of the Daleks - but nobody came forward to novelize the scripts when these three were put out by Target books back in 1989 and 1990. Back then Doctor Who novels popped out once a month, usually adapatations by Terrance Dicks based on the televised scripts, and these three were the first of the non-televised ones. The bigger bonus with some of these titles that came later in the line was that they were penned by the same authors who produced the scripts; sometimes this was a tremendous boon to the range to have some fresh voices, and in other cases it showed just how some writers can write incredible dialogue for screen but be absolutely abysmal at prose and narrative.

First up is The Nightmare Fair, seeing the Doctor and Peri enjoying a trip to Blackpool as promised and coming up against the Celestial Toymaker trying his hand at subverting Earth through videogames and amusement park attractions.

BRILLIANT. Graham Williams nails this one perfectly and it is a crying shame that this never made it to the screen. Not only would we have had some magnificent location filming at Blackpool but the confrontation between the Doctor and the Toymaker (who is oddly referred to as The Mandarin ) would have been a classic. It comes across perfectly on the page, you can almost hear Colin Baker bellowing and Michael Gough (yes, he was signed to reprise the role!) with his calm tones which would drive the Doctor even more nuts. And not only would this one have featured the return of the Toymaker, but the sonic screwdriver was to make a return as well.

Somewhere online there is an audio version of this one with different actors playing the Doctor and Peri but trying very hard to sound like them. It's no Big Finish, but they themselves have said that they will never adapt anything that was originally planned for the TV series, so if you can't get a hold of a copy of this book, downloading the play might be the next best thing.

Next up is The Ultimate Evil, penned by Wally K Daly. Here we find the TARDIS taking the Doctor and Peri to the planet Tranquela for a vacation and to visit some old friends of the Doctor's, but they find things not very peaceful at all. An arms dealer called the Dwarf Mordent has set up shop in orbit and has managed to project violent mood swings onto the planet below, causing the people to attack and kill each other and fostering an atmosphere of parinoia.

This one was a bit more cerebral, but by no means unenjoyable. The only thing I was edgy about was how so many elements of this script - a diminutative nasty selling weapons - would be lifted into a script for the 1986 season. The Dwarf Mordent just struck me as a bit of a coward, hiding up in his planetoid and stirring people up. I suppose that was the point, though, but these moral messages seem less effective when they are so obvious.

Last of this little trio is Mission to Magnus, which turned out to be the most disappointing of the bunch. And it shouldn't have been. Why? Because the Ice Warriors came back in it at bloody bloody last. We were cheated out of a fifth Ice Warrior story! That still bothers me to this day, moreso since we have yet to see them back in the new series. As far as the story goes, Sil (from the previous season's Vengeance on Varos) is on the planet Magnus doing deals with the predominantly female population (shades of the Drahvins) and their leader, Rana. But Sil is secretly selling the Magnusians out to the Ice Warriors, who have plans to freeze the planet to make it a new home for themselves. To add to this mix there is a Time Lord named Anzor on the scene, one who used to bully the Doctor during their days at the Academy and who still terrifys him to this day.

I wanted this one to be my favourite. I really did. But something about it didn't do it for me. I'm not keen on Philip Martin's prose style, and honestly I'm not keen on Sil either. So much more could have been said and done in this book, although at the time there were page maximums to observe - this was just 122 pages long. And I don't think Philip Martin was the man to bring back the Ice Warriors; these ones in Magnus are far from the noble Martians previously seen in the series; they could have been anyone. And as producer John Nathan-Turner was so keen to make things flashy and grand they probably would have been painted neon green.

Details are sketchy about what the other three adventures for this skipped season would have been, but Penacasta would see the Doctor dealing with another attack on the TARDIS which would possibly destroy it (after all this was written by Christopher H Bidmead). Made in Singapore was reportedly going to be another Auton invasion story but this time they would be in cahoots with the Rani and the Master (although as the Master turned on the Nestenes at the end of Terror of the Autons it seems a bit unlikely he'd team with them again). And Attack of the Daleks was supposedly going to be a season finale in which Peri was either killed or turned into a Dalek and then killed. Something like that.

The whole hiatus episode really did the show a lot more harm than good; an 18 month delay in episodes would these days just result in automatic cancellation because no-one would remember to be watching when it came back on. The same was partly true of when Doctor Who did return, but it did manage to hang on for three more seasons after. Not to worry, there is an abundance of material to fill the gap between the seasons, besides these stories here.

So let's see some more.

NEXT EPISODE : SLIPBACK