Bloodheat

The TARDIS is attacked by an unknown force and Benny is ejected from the craft into the vortex. The Doctor and Ace lose the TARDIS in a tar pit, finding themselves on a parallel Earth where the last remnants of humanity have survived a deadly plague and are pitted in a desperate battle for survival against the resurrected Silurian race. It's an alternative reality, and not only has the war against the reptilian race turned Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart into a hard and ruthless man, but it has claimed the Doctor as a casualty years ago.

Bloodheat begins a 5-novel cycle of alternate reality, and it starts it off with the extreme of actually going to a parallel Earth (which until the time it was published had only been done in Inferno but has since popped up as a theme in the 2006 season of the new series) and seeing the contrasts between what we consider as is and what could have been. Things all go wrong for humanity when the third Doctor is unable to escape the Silurian base and work on an antidote to their bacterial weapon, and in the days of the war that follows the Doctor is killed as a prisoner. UNIT is unable to stop the Silurians and Sea Devils as they emerge from hibernation and the Earth is overrun. When the seventh Doctor eventually crosses paths with the Brigadier and Liz Shaw, they are suspicious of him, never entirely trusting him to be who he says he is. And it's not just the Doctor who has to deal with the rejection of people he knows as friends; in this reality, Ace's friend Manisha has not been the victim of a racist attack on her home (as described in the novelization of Remembrance of the Daleks and more vividly in her soliloqy in Ghost Light) but the circumstances of their friendship are not the same this time.

Benny has the more interesting perspective when it comes to dealing with the Silurians, and when she is captured by them and used as an experimental subject they too notice it: she has no race fear of them. When pot-holing scientists from the Wenley Moor underground project first encountered the reptile species they were driven mad with fear and reduced to gibbering maniacs scribbling pictures on walls, but by Benny's day, the Silurians were an integrated species that shared the planet with humanity and contributed to its defence against the Daleks during one of their many wars. It doesn't exactly make her a sympathizer, but she does go out of her way to stop a nuke aimed at the Silurians' capital city in Africa.

And the Silurians despite everything that has happened are not portrayed as total monsters without an ethical code; they're doing what any of us would do if our homes were overrun by pests and exterminating the lot of them to make it liveable again. Granted, humans do rank a bit higher than cockroaches - or so one might hope - but the principle is the same. And there are those in the Silurian hierarchy who would once have seen humanity die out who tire of the war as well and realize that maybe there could have been another way.

Style-wise it's a good solid tale, it starts the alternate universe cycle off quite well. The Silurians had not been seen or heard from since Warriors of the Deep when this was published, and it was good to see them treated with a bit more respect. I don't have the time to go back and look at all of the stories of the alternate universe cycle, but if anyone reading wants to check them out they were, in this order: The Dimension Riders, The Left Handed Hummingbird, Conundrum and No Future.

But I am going to look at how the cycle ends, because it's kind of brilliant.

NEXT EPISODE : NO FUTURE

Iceberg

The Doctor takes a side-trip away from the TARDIS on board a life-boat within the time machine; it outwardly resembles a Chinese version of the London Polive Box the rest of the ship is modelled on. Leaving Ace and Bernice, the Doctor arrives on Earth in 2006 just as a team called FLIPback is working at averting a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field in Antarctica. Nearby is the pleasure cruise ship SS Elysium. And even closer, under the ice, are the Cybermen.

Loved it. LOVED it.

It's a different kind of take on the Cybermen this time, and despite the action taking palce in Antarctica and the family tradition of military service in the Cutler family, this one actually owes more to The Invasion than it does to The Tenth Planet. Chronologically, Invasion would have been the first real Cyberman attack on Earth as it was contemporary to when it was broadcast - the late 60's - whereas Planet was placed in the future (at the time) in 1986. But hold up - wouldn't the Cybermen on Mondas have been recognized? And how would Cybermen have made it to Earth ahead of the planet? And the vast differences in technology (despite the passage of time on television) are a bit jarring as well.

David Banks explains it all. At least, in his words. There's never been a deep look into the Cybermen and their origins in the classic series; they came from Mondas, Mondas went boom, they took over Telos, they started to die out, and then the Doctor wiped out what was left with the Nemesis statue. David Banks, however, having played a Cyberleader on television in every one of their appearances from 1982 to 1988, wanted to get into the heads of the Cybermen more than he already did, and he began to draft his own history of the Cybermen in a book called, simply, Cybermen. Iceberg, his only contribution to the New Adventures range (and the one with the most gratuitious use of the word "fuck"), takes his theories on Cyber-evolution and Cyber-proliferation and winds them into the threads left dangling from the two 60s invasion stories, with brief revisits to each of them from the points of view of simple citizens at the time. And then he takes a Cyberman survival unit that escaped Zoe's deadly rocket strike, drops them under the Antarctic ice, and then brings in the Doctor without companions to deal with them.

Yes, Iceberg was actually written to run parallel with another novel, Birthright, where Ace and Benny are stranded with a dead TARDIS and have to reconclie some of their own differences plus Ace's lingering distrust of the Doctor. But that's about all that I can say about that one; the actual story escapes me. The Doctor always needs someone along for the ride, though, so enter one Ruby Duvall, journalist, along on board the cruise ship to report on the work of the FLIPback team. Ruby's not a bad one to have along; she's plucky, she's smart, she knows how to pull her t shirt down to cover her bum (so the book says) and she's the first companion in any continuity to visit the loo.

And speaking of innovation - the concept of the Jade Pagoda as a sort of half-TARDIS for the Doctor to leave in when he pleases is an interesting one. It must be a character quirk of his, though, as nothing on Gallifrey resembles anything vaguely Japanese. It only comes up again one more time in this series before the idea is forgotten in the mists.

I never really found any flaw with Iceberg. It was enjoyable right through to the end. It drew a lot of fire for the swearing, most of it from fanboys (yes, the term includes girls too) who actually thought it made the series too adult. This from an audience largely in their 20s and early 30s by this time. I was 22 myself when it was published and I found it refreshing to be treated like an adult. But, hey, I was never one to sit around at fanclub executive meetings and giggle when someone said something naughty - I think one time when I did show up someone took exception to my Madonna Blond Ambition World Tour t shirt because she was cleverly naked on it.

But what do I know. I just liked Iceberg.

NEXT EPISODE : BLOODHEAT

Deceit / Lucifer Rising

Ace is back, and she's not happy. After serving a few years with Spacefleet and being part of the Dalek war that was brewing in the pages of Love and War, she's a battle-hardened war vet, and her unit is being shipped off to the planet Arcadia to sniff out more Daleks. The Doctor and Bernice are also headed to Arcadia for reasons of their own, and to everyone's surprise there are no Daleks to be found there, but there is one Abslom Daak, a mercenary also simply known as "Dalek Killer"...

That's a brief gloss-over of the high points. I don't remember a lot of details, as usual. I'm really just including the review of Deceit as a continuity point, with Ace finally making her anticipated comeback. In relative terms she was away from the Doctor and Benny for almost 5 years, so the story would tell us, but her absence from the printed page was something less than one year given Virgin's publishing schedule at the time. But the Ace that returns to the TARDIS this time is not the same one everyone voted as fan favourite; she's meaner, she's got little respect for the Doctor after what went down on Heaven that made her leave in the first place, and she isn't too keen on Benny either. Her choice to rejoin the TARDIS is questionable at best.

The other character worth mentioning is Abslom Daak, a creation of the comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly back in the 70's. He's a total wild card, uncontrollable, all he wants to do is kill Daleks. His exact motivation is probably out of revenge or something; exactly what his motives are remain unclear at best because author Peter Davrill-Evans simply can't write for him. or for Ace. Or for Doctor Who, effectively.

Now I can see why something as mediocre as The Pit made it to print. Actually I have two theories: the first is Darvill-Evans was too wrapped up in his own book to care about the quality of the one coming just before it. The second theory is he was very aware that his book was substandard and he deliberately put one in front that was worse so blunt the impact. Either way... Deceit is far from a glowing example of what can be done.


Lucifer Rising, however, is much better. Or at least I remember it to be so. The bonds between the TARDIS crew start to come together again, slowly, as they join a group of workers from IMC (think back to 1971's Colony in Space) on the planet Lucifer to first solve the mystery of who or what killed Paula Engado, and then confront the bigger issues beind IMC's interest in the planet.

Again, memory shorts out at fine details, but much better characters, much tighter pacing, much more credible motivation. The first joint effort of Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore is indeed a good one, and puts some quality back into the line that (to be fair) wasn't entirely missing from the last two novels, but was certainly decreased.

So rather than waste time with half-assed reviews starting with "I don't remember," (which is sounding more and more like Tom Baker commenting on the VHS compilation of The Tom Baker Years) I'm going to leap ahead a bit here and just pick up the high points where the series breaks new ground or goes back to revisit some old events... or just stories I remember better...

NEXT EPISODE : ICEBERG

The Highest Science / The Pit

The TARDIS is drawn to the planet Sakkrat by a large temporal fluctuation, and the Doctor and Bernice discover that it has hijacked a group of invading Chelonians, a group of drug addicted teenage music fans and an entire commuter train. While investigating, the truth of the planet comes out, that its original inhabitants were destroyed by their own creation: the Highest Science.

That's about all I remember of the basic plot. I read it just as long ago as I read Transit and it didn't leave as much of a mark in my mind. I remember that the story follows some pretty traditional patterns, with the Doctor being caught up with the baddies (in this case the xenophobic giant-turtle-people, the Chelonians)and Bernice stuck with the drugged up kids, who even get her to partake of their poison of pleasure : Bubbleshake. And the poor commuters on the train, they just want to go home. Bubbleshake is one of those drug drinks that triggers memory loss in the user, so for her second adventure with the Doctor, Bernice is once more not exactly herself.

Author Gareth Roberts has a distinct writing style all his own, and one I did not immediately enjoy. I can't remember exactly why, maybe because the contrast with Transit was so harsh; we go from gritty and nasty "cyberpunk" to a more comedic way to telling a story. Robert's style would not be lost during the days of Douglas Adams as script editor in the Tom Baker era, and in fact three of his later efforts would be missing adventures that take place in exactly that timeline (I didn't review them, no). Roberts later went on to write episodes of Coronation Street and co-write the pilot episode of spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures with Russell T. Davies.

As for The Pit... there's not a lot to say aside from it's terrible. It's awful. The plot is so vague and thin on the ground that I can hardly remember any of it aside from what was written on the back of the book. But I remember thinking that I was not enjoying it at all, from the presence of a supposedly menacing Time Lord from ancient Gallirey right to some weak reference to UNIT. Not inspirational stuff by any means, and author Neil Penswick gets the dubious award of First Crap Novel of the New Adventures Range.

Everything had been going so well until this one came along. Series editor Peter Darvill-Evans had been doing such a good job, and then this. What was he thinking?

Oh right, he was too busy writing his own novel for the series. It's next.

NEXT EPISODES : DECEIT and LUCIFER RISING

Transit

Just as they get their new friendship going, the Doctor and Benny are separated from each other and from the TARDIS in a freak accident in the King's Cross station of the Sol Transit System, somewhere in Earth's future. Benny is blown down the stunnel to a far distant stop across the solar system leaving the Doctor to search for her amid an Earth culture reeling from a recent war against the Ice Warriors. But the true nature of the accident is not random; something is chewing its way through the system, destroying everything in its path; something that has possessed Benny and recognizes the Doctor for the threat he poses to its plans.

This is a brilliant novel. BRILLIANT. Author Ben Aaronovitch previously brought us the cracking script for Remembrance of the Daleks and has summonned even more creative energy to describe an Earth of the future down to such detail that you can smell it on the page. And I am not just talking the people he has populated the story with - even the mysterious Kadiatu Lehtbridge-Stewart - but the whole culture of Earth and the effects technology have had upon human society. I'll put it this way: when the novel actually comes with a glossary you know you're dealing with something different, and when the terms within are not just a collection of glib phrases but an actual lexicon of a future society ... fantastic.

The first time I read Transit I was... well, I was younger and really was aching for escape. The future vision created in the book is not the stuff of utopia - far from it - but it's alive, it's energetic, it's so different and still so the same. Is this a groundbreaking novel? For the series, I would say yes. The term "cyberpunk" got bandied around quite a bit when the book was being reviewed back then (1992 ... "back then"... oh hell...) and it met with the usual kind of decrying of fan snobs who said it was nothing like cyberpunk - but there's always going to be the elitists in any movement who want to be more radical than anyone around them. Is Transit radical? It's certainly different, with its unabashed commentary on sexuality in the future (the joyboys, and the small child prostitute with condoms tied into her dreadlocks by her mother), its insane level of violence (with one character even named Verhoeven after the director of the ultra-violent, and perhaps somewhat inspirational in this sense, movie Total Recall) and for the first use of the word fuck in a Doctor Who novel.

Yes. The f-word! OH MY GOD THE F-WORD. If the DWIN executive ninnies of the time weren't already all squirrelly about the vanilla sexuality in Timewyrm : Genesys you can imagine what this did to them. There was still that element of fandom that refused to grow up, and refused to let the series grow up in case it forced them to, but there it is, right there on page 41: Maybe time travels fucks with your mind, thought Benny. Of course this just opened the floodgates and the dreaded f-word would just fly out of every mouth in the series, until it got to a point a few years later where the word was dumbed down to the less harmful "cruk". Yeah, gee, I wonder what THAT means? Give me strength.

Transit set into motion a new movement of future history in Doctor Who where the new authors would go to play from time to time - most notably Kate Orman and Craig Hinton. Yes, there would still be alien places, and there would be adevntures back in history, but the future would look a bit different now. And so would Doctor Who.

NEXT EPISODES : THE HIGHEST SCIENCE and THE PIT (a double bill because I promised Jay we'd be ready for the 8th Doctor by autumn...)

Love and War

It's the 51st century and the Doctor and Ace come to the planet Heaven. They are there just to relax while the Doctor looks for a book, but soon it becomes evident that the Doctor has some other agenda and Ace is once more a pawn in his plans. While she becomes involved with a Traveller named Jan, then Doctor crosses paths with one Professor Bernice Summerfield who is on Heaven for an archaeology dig, until she and her group are threatened by the monstrous Hoothi, and eventually by the plans of the Doctor himself.

Paul Cornell is back with one of the most intricate looks into the future that the series has had so far. Heaven is a massive cultural melting pot of different species, most notably though it is a refuge where Humans and Draconians exist together in peace sometime after a Dalek war, but the threat of attracting the attention of the Sontarans remains. And the Silurians have come out of hiding and also live alongside Humans, having taken on the new name of Earth Reptiles. And the Hoothi have plans for all of them.

Odd name, yes, but it's not actually Cornell's own. The species name is borrowed from one line from The Brain of Morbius way back in the Tom Baker era, when Maren says "Even the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi I felt in my bones while still a million miles distant,". Cornell, being a fan himself, has taken that one line and fashioned his whole story around it. Just who are the Hoothi? The best way to sum them up is intergalactic fungus that spreads through spores, and they're ready to invade, with Heaven being their first stop to conquest.

In dealing with them, the Doctor pushes Ace too far, and she finally leaves him in a rage, her life having been subject to his whims and under his control for too long. Ace has grown far beyond the 16 year-old girl she was when she met him in Dragonfire, and she can see what he has done to her and to others he has met along the way.

Assuming the role of new companion is Bernice Summerfield, a professor of archaeology from Heidelberg Unversity on Earth who prefers to go by "Benny". The first companion of many who does not appear on televised episode, Benny is older than Ace (late 30s is the best guess) and more mature, but still with parental issues of her own (mother killed in the Dalek war, father missing, presumed dead)and a bit of wariness around the Doctor after seeing what being with him has done to Ace.

At the time of the book's printing, Ace had been the sole companion for 6 years, and her departure was felt through fandom the same as any others who had been with the Doctor for a long time. There was a lot of complaining, and there was also the usual amount of "Thank god she's gone," from fans with nothing better to do than criticize everything about Doctor Who and not enjoy any of it (the Fat-Assed Anti-Fans as they are known). Myself I was annoyed that she was leaving, as the whole Doctor-Ace team had been one of the most successful in the series, right along with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, and the fifth Doctor and Tegan, and with the show off the air for 5 years at this point letting Ace go seemed like another admission that there would never been any more episodes made. But change is good; and although Virgin Publishing were not allowed to regenerate the Doctor, they changed the companions and made good choices doing it. I would eventually grow to really enjoy Benny's wry comments in the TARDIS, and she would become a fan favourite in her own right and earn not only her own spin-off series of novels and audios (the latter with Big Finish) but eventually the character would be cast to appear in some of Big Finish's Doctor Who range as well, alongside Sylvester McCoy and Sophia Aldred in their roles.

But before we get there, we have some more ground to cover.

NEXT EPISODE : TRANSIT

Nightshade

I've been trying for weeks to get something to say about this one, because Mark Gattiss is a fantastic writer, and really knows his Dotor Who. But do I remember this book? Vaguely, at best.

What I do remember is English countryside in the 60's, and a retired TV star from a show called Professor Nightshade, and an alien invasion. A deep space monitoring station not unlike Jodrell Bank. The Doctor acting all defeatist and gloomy - the first time we see him really start to dip into his own inner pool of misery.

And then there's Ace. Falls in love, sort of, and then chooses to leave. But the Doctor won't let her go; he still needs her. And the rift between them starts to form, and it's not going to take much more before Ace has enough...

Ah well. Maybe reviewing all of these is a mistake if I do not remember everything. Just hit the high notes, maybe?

NEXT EPISODE : LOVE AND WAR

Cat's Cradle

Following the example set before with The Timewyrm, the second "series" of novels in the new range were all united under the collective title of Cat's Cradle, but the three novels under its umbrella were much less connected on a story-to-story basis. The linking theme was something that was alluded to in Timewyrm : Apocalypse with the basic functions of the TARDIS starting to break down; the scanner not responding and then the doors, and Ace mentioning having seen an animal on board the ship. Cat's Cradle goes into a new territory where something catastrophic happens to the ship, and the Doctor and Ace are forced to exist without it for a while.

Cat's Cradle : Time's Crucible

The TARDIS comes under attack by an unknown force that actually penetrates the ship's outer hull, the psychic shock of the invasion causing the Doctor great pain. His attempts to move the ship and expel the invader result in its destruction, and Ace comes to on her own in the wasteland of a ruined city where the laws of physics are up for grabs and a small silver cat turns up. Ace is without the Doctor, but she is not alone; a group of time travellers from Gallifrey's early days of experimentation are drawn into the World City as well, and all come under attack from the malevolant Process, the creature that attacked and destroyed the TARDIS. And, by all accounts, the creature that killed the Doctor.

This book is phenomenal in its scope, creating a hideous twisted nightmare world where time is running sideways across three distinct zones where everyone exists at a different point in their own history. The Process enslaves the travellers and attempts to destroy Ace, meanwhile back on ancient Gallifrey an upstart called Rassilon and his followers challenge the rule of the Pythia with their ambition to become Time Lords. It's not often we are afforded a glimpse into Gallifrey's past beyond the odd mention of "the Dark Times", but here we are shown the people of the planet unsure of the newcomers, the Time Lords, fresh from their failures on Minyos. And the Pythia will have none of it; it's her world and if she can't have it, she'll curse it and leave the Time Lords a barren race.

Absolutely great. I loved it.

Cat's Cradle : Warhead

With the TARDIS reclaimed, the Doctor and Ace come to earth in the near future where industry and capitralism have ruined the planet. The air stinks, natural resources are dwindling, social decay is spreading in the form of supersition born on the streets of the inner cities, and a powerful elite make a bid to preserve themselves and leave the planet to die. The TARDIS is out of commision after its ordeal, and the Doctor and Ace travel the world by conventional means, spearated at times by oceans, to combat their enemies and to assemble a weapon that the Doctor can use to stop the madness. And in the midst of it all are thrust two unsuspecting lynchpins to the Doctor's plan; a young boy named Vincent who has some terrifying powers, and an angry young woman named Justine who brims with unbridled anger.

This is the first of the really graphic and pretty much disturbing adventures Virgin would put out in the series. Written by the television series's scipt editor, Andrew Cartmel, we get to see the Doctor recede back into the shroud of mystery, pulling even more strings than before to manipulate events. Ace has become tougher, and sees herself as an agent of the Doctor's plans, trusting him implicitly. Awful things happen to Ace in this one; she is routinely beaten up and meanced but she carrys on with her mission to help the Doctor. If there was ever going to be a theatrical film of Doctor Who during this yawning gap of the years between television series, this should have been it.

Cat's Cradle : Witch Mark

The final and I found to be the weakest of the three novels. Exact details of course evade me, which is a bad way to write a review, but I remember unicorns, and some link between Welsh folktales and aliens. Maybe the unicorns were the aliens, and the horn was an extension of their brains. Something like that. Some real sloppy mention on UNIT in the final pages. The damaged TARDIS storyline is finally wound up as well, but again, sloppy.

Now that the series had been established in print the novels would not be as bound together by theme from this point. There would still be a "future history" arc, an "alternate universe" arc and a few others, but the novel series would proceed under the watchful eye of series editor Peter Darvill-Evans for the next while, even including his own contribution to the stories which would turn out to be... well, you'll see.

NEXT EPISODE : NIGHTSHADE

The Timewyrm

"Full length science fiction novels; stories too broad and too deep for the small screen. Produced with the approval of BBC Television, the New Adventures takes the TARDIS into previously unexplored realms of space and time,"

You have to really imagine what a thrill it was to hold a copy of the first New Adventures novel in my hands, knowing that although the series had been off the air for about a year, it was about to go entirely new places. And I was going along quite willingly. It's not as if the Doctor's adventures had never been on printed page before; without those old Target novelizations when I was growing up I daresay I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the series as much as I did, carrying the adventures beyond the TV screen and in some cases replacing the missing on-screen episodes entirely. But whereas the Target books only novelized adventures we had already seen (or as I say, not seen) on 144 pages or less, the Virgin books were not bound by any regular length and would all run over 200 pages each, some of them with very small text. The rules were simple: do not go against the spirit of the show, do not regenerate the Doctor, do not lose the fan base. And so it began, with a four-story cycle that would define the success of the novel range to come.

Timewyrm : Genesys

A pre-recorded message from the fourth Doctor sends the seventh Doctor and Ace to Earth on the trail of a creature from Gallifrey's myths and legends: the Timewyrm. A creature able to slide through the vortex unchallenged, she could wreak untold havoc throughout space and time. When they do track the creature down, she is masquerading as the goddess Ishtar in ancient Mesopotamia, and the Doctor and Ace meet the epic hero Gilgamesh in his quest to rid the land of her.

We star out very well with Genesys, even if it is penned by Terry Nation's chief ass-kisser John Peel. The Doctor and Ace come across well on the page even after an absence of a year from our screens, and the tone of the novel sets it apart from everything that came before: the Timewyrm is downright vicious, the city of Urak is dirty and Peel is no afraid to tell us how it looks and smells. And then there's the sex. It's not like there's humping going on all around but the slave girls in the palace are described as going topless and Ace catches the eye of Gilgamesh. Someone in the UK capitalized on this and wrote a big scary story in The Sun which managed to get over here to North America and precipitated one of the biggest farces in the history of organized fandom: the high and mighty self-righteous then-executive of the Doctor Who Information Network decided to take it upon themselves to put an insert into their fanzine, Enlightenment, warning the parents of members about the content of these books. I was 20 at the time, and can only imagine if I had been part of DWIN and that came through the letterbox. Idiots. And it wasn't even that bad. What it was, was good. A good start to the series, and even a good book in its own right.

Timewyrm : Exodus


Following the Timewrym's trail, the Doctor and Ace arrive in 1951 England, but in a version of time where the Nazi regime won World War II and had conquered Britain with ease. The Doctor and Ace travel further back in time to infiltrate the Nazi ranks themselves and see where things went wrong and find the sentience of the Timewyrm itself trapped inside the mind of Adolf Hitler, and the War Lords at work behind the scenes giving the Germans the edge to win the war.

Exodus does some good old fashioned storytelling, and who else better to do it than Terrance Dicks; script editor, writer, and novelist for years. I am one of the many who have been critical of Dicks' writing skills when it comes to a lack of description, and oft accused him of just photcopying the scripts from the televised series and throwing "he said" and "she said" after the lines, but here I find there's something good going on, something much better than any of those Target novelizations he put together. Exodus is amazing. Dicks should get it right easily, though, seeing as the War Lords are his own creation from the Patrick Troughton finale The War Games, and they're up to their old tricks in World War II. And it's the first time Dicks writes for the seventh Doctor and Ace, their televised episodes being novelized by the original script authors, and he gets them bang on.

Timewyrm : Apocalypse


The pursuit of the Timewyrm takes the TARDIS farther into the future than ever, right to the end of time and space to the planet Kirith. The Doctor can't detect the Timewyrm but he knows she is there, and in searching for her he'll discover the end of everything is about to come about, and it may be his fault.

Nigel Robinson, former editor for the Target line, steps up with the shortest novel in the Timewyrm series, which was supposedly a rejected script he had put together for the televised series. As Genesys featured a cameo of the fourth Doctor in hologram form, the seventh Doctor comes across his second self for a little chat, and even Polly is referenced for Ace's benefit. Apocalypse keeps it simple this time, with the Timewyrm hardly featuring in events until close to the end, which sets up for the big showdown.

Timewyrm : Revelation


The Timewyrm is ready for the Doctor and sets trap after trap for him, as well as for Ace, bringing a childhood bully into the play to kill her before she even met the Doctor. The stakes are high for both of them, and if the Timewyrm wins, she'll be free to destroy all of creation for her amusement.

New writer Paul Cornell closes the cycle with his book, and it's a brilliant read. Everything gets tied off nicely, but the road to the conclusion is a grim one with the Doctor and Ace separated, beaten, humiliated, almost destroyed. Yes, that Timewyrm is a bitch and a half.

So you'll have spotted that these are not as in-depth as they could be. I simply haven't got time to read them all over again. Some of these novels left better impressions than others, usually because they really pushed the envelope and went somewhere new and did something different with the characters that could never been done on television. As the books would go on, the elements of the supposed "Cartmel master plan" would start to emerge as they might have on television, but in this medium they wouldn't be bound by budget or censors, which was the first real admission that the fans of the series had grown up and needed something more to enjoy the Doctor with. Even at this early point with only four novels on the store shelves, it was obvious that Doctor Who was not going to be back for a long time, if ever, and certainly it would not be able to return in the usual format.

NEXT EPISODE : CAT'S CRADLE

Survival

The Doctor takes Ace back to Perivale after she idly wonders what her old friends are up to. Far from status quo for the sleepy suburb of London, it appears that Ace's friends are all missing, and the town is being overrun by stray cats. The Doctor realizes that the disappearances are actually abductions, and young people are being transported to the planet of the Cheetah People to be hunted and eaten. This, though, is the least of the Doctor's worries; the Master has turned up on the Cheetah Planet and contrary to his claims of being able to control the animals there, he himself is falling under the planet's thrall...

And that is the finaly story of a 26 year run on television. It's not the most original or complicated plot, but the real strength of Survival stems from first time writer Rona Munro's fantastic script and some really solid direction. It's shot entirely on location, with just the right amount of special effects to make the Planet of the Cheetah People appear a tad more exotic than the quarry it was shot in. The Cheetah People costumes are pretty much what one would expect; actors in fur suits but the faces and heads are worthy of Cats. (Remember Invasion of the Cat People? Those feline anatagonists were linked to these ones in that novel as being a different branch of evolution, and it would come up again in 2006 and 2007 in New Earth and Gridlock respectively).

Being set in Perivale, Survival gets another kick at the mythology that is Ace's backstory, this time bringing her back together with her old chums Ange, Shreela and Midge. The boorish self-defence instructor Sgt. Patterson recognizes Ace and refer to the police having ler her off with a warning for some bit of mischief or another; it's hard to believe that a warning is all she would have gotten for burning down Gabriel Chase as was revealed in Ghost Light, so she's obviously been in trouble outside of that incident. Her friends are surprised to see her, but she is not immediately keen to tell them where she's been. Survival is actually the first story to really devle into the effects travelling with the Doctor can have on the companions' lives; Patterson admonishes Ace for leaving and having her worried mother list her as a missing person. This would start the ball rolling for the return of the series in 2005 and how companions Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble would deal with worried families when they themselves went missing.

Anthony Ainley makes his final appearance as the Master. Trapped on the Cheetah planet he is in danger of becoming an animal himself, with his eyes mutating to cat-like irises and his teeth beginning to grow into fangs; all brought about by his midn link with the animals there. Being a Time Lord, though, he resists the change and fights it, maintaining his dignity and even a sense of style as always. But the desire for revenge against the Doctor does not help keep the powers at bay, and the process begins to speed up and make him more feral as the story progresses. Not having met this incarnation of the Doctor before, he is wary of him, perhaps sensing there is more to this incarnation than there has been in the others.

As for the Doctor, he manages to figure out what is going on relatively quick, as is the norm with him this season. He grasps the danger posed to Ace by her growing bond with one of the Cheetah People, Karra (played by Lisa Bowerman who would soon return as the voice of companion Bernice Summerfield in the Big Finish audio range). And as he walks off into the sunset with Ace at the end, he has a fantastic soliloqy that was dropped in to wrap up the series and leave it open for its return... one day.

Had the series carried on for another season plans had been made to write Ace out halfway through and send her off to Gallifrey to inject new life into the Time Lord society. The Doctor would have continued to walk on the darker side of his nature, with the production team aiming to re-establish some mystery around the character and make him less a victim of his own circumstances. Elements of this "master plan" eventually did begin to surface in the stories that followed; Virgin Publishing, under contract from the BBC, began to publish all-new Doctor Who fiction under the banner of "The New Adventures" in 1991, taking the Doctor and Ace to places they had never been before, and places we could only dream of seeing them go. Virgin's new steps would eventually give rise to Big Finish and their success, and eventually the show would return in 2005, but not until after a lot of changes...

NEXT EPISODE : TIMEWYRM

The Curse of Fenric

The Doctor and Ace arrive at a top secret naval base in 1943, but while they come in through the front foor and bluff their way into the confidence of the genius Dr Judson, a group of Russian commandos have arrived on the beach with a mission of their own. The area is steeped in mystery, all of it coming from old Viking rune stones in the cellar of the local church, St Jude's. But there is an evil rising from the sea, and a lethal poison has been seeping out of the ground. And before the day is over, the opposing military factions will be battling ancient monsters from the future, and the Doctor will be confronted by a nameless evil intent on destroying him and the world.

From the very first minute, The Curse of Fenric establishes a fantastic air of mysery and fear through a combination of atmospheric incidental music, rolling fog across the sea and an underwater shot of a sunken Viking ship. And from then on it's go go go. The production never stops throwing new elements at the viewers through a dialogue-heavy script with a good balance of action to words, and some of the best moments ever for the seventh Doctor and Ace as a team. The production is also packed with incredible characters aside from the regulars, starting with the Russians led by Captain Sorin, and moving to the British soldiers under the command of Millington (note a very young Christien Ainholt from Relic Hunter as private Perkins), the incredible Kathleen Dudman. and carrying right through to the civilian characters such as Dr Judson, the stuffy Miss Hardaker and her two charges Jean and Phyllis, and reverand Wainwright. And then come the Haemovores; hideous bloodsucking monsters that the Doctor says are what humans will evolve into towards the end of their time on Earth as the pollution of industry ruins the world.

Fenric adds another layer to the whole backstory of Ace, not by delving back into her past again but with her coming into direct conflict with the Doctor when she realizes that he is starting to play games on the side wherever they go and she's starting to feel like one of his pawns. And when the people around them start to die, she lashes out at him and makes him explain what he's doing, and why.

And what is he doing? Fighting evil, pure and simple. But not just something evil, an evil that has no name, although Commander Millington has created a bit of mythology around it and named it Fenric. But Fenric and the Doctor go back a long way to what one might assume is the Doctor's first incarnation where Fenric failed to solve a puzzle the Doctor had made for it and was thus imprisoned like a genie in a bottle. But over time Fenric has made plans and spread its influence, quietly playing its own game and using agents of its own as pawns to set it free. And now there's hell to pay.

Excellent. Brilliant. Fantastic. Not flawless, mind you; there are a few science fiction cliches in there that we could do without, and the Haemovore masks could have looked a bit better (yes I know, BBC budget and all that). Easily the high point of the season, almost tied with Ghost Light.

BBC Video released an extended version of the show on VHS back in the early 90's by dropping additional footage back into place and then re-scoring the whole adventure with a new soundtrack, resulting in some freakishly long episodes. On the DVD release, the original broadcast versions are presented on one of the discs in the set, and the second disc holds yet another remix of the material, this time in a feature length movie format. The material is edited again and the music is done again, but the end result is something that could be on par with the feature-length Christmas episodes we have been enjoying with the new series. I just hope they don't get it in their heads to start doing this with every episode; the old VHS titles at the very beginning were made into feature length shows and it wasn't as much fun to watch. This time it works quite well; Jay and I enjoyed it a few weeks ago. Actually, I think he requested we watch the movie version.

And that's the second last classic adventure done. One more to go.

NEXT EPISODE : SURVIVAL

Ghost Light

Ace doesn't like haunted houses. Imagine her reaction when the Doctor takes her to an old Victorian mansion in 1883, on a dark night when the Reverand Earnest Matthews has arrived to give Josiah Samuel Smith a good talking-to about his support of Darwin's theories of evolution. But there is more to it than that; in a house shrouded in darkness there is a stone spaceship in the cellar where a creature named Light is asleep, and on the floors above the halls are stalked by the explorer Redvers Fenn-Cooper, his mind snapped by something he has seen on his travels. The Doctor realizes that there is something evil and alien at work in the house, and Ace realizes that this is no ordinary house - it is the same house in her home town of Perivale that frightened her so much as child in 1983...

Ghost Light has the distinction of being the one story that gets almost the same reaction from anyone who watches it: nobody quite understands what's going on. I'll admit when I first saw it in 1990 I had no idea where the story was going or what was supposed to be happening. My friend Brian watched it with me back then and despite seeing it a few times afterwards he still has the same reaction, which is to look at me after episode 3 and go "Huh?". The big joke to this day is to say they will explian everything is episode 4, but there is no such thing. Writer Marc Platt could have done with an extra episode to get all his points across, although to me part of the magic of the script is that it does everything it wants to do in 3 episodes, even if we don't exactly get it.

Here's how Jay and I saw it when we watched it: Light came to to Earth in his spaceship, but for whatever reason ended up hibernating. His original mission was to study life on the planet and create a comprehensive catalogue, but as soon as he has got everything down, life on Earth began to evolve. The survey creature assisting him broke free of its bonds while Light was asleep and became Josiah Samuel Smith, invading the house known as Gabriel Chase in Perivale and taking over the people who lived there. The Control creature in the spaceship was imprisoned and kept in the basement while Josiah went about establishing himself, even going so far as to plot an assassination of Queen Victoria (timeline note here: this is 4 years after the events in the 2006 episode Tooth and Claw). Along come the Doctor and Ace, and after he realizes what's going on, the Doctor awakens Light to sort out the mess, but things get even tricker at that point.

Ghost Light has so much going for it. All the confusion aside it is a beautiful production set entirely inside the mansion, all done in studio as a sharp contrast to the extensive location work in ther est of the stories of season 26. The BBC do this sort of thing so well, right down to the period costumes on the creepy night time maids of the house. The set itself is huge, with the main hall dominated by the central staircase, and the hallways filled with all manner of creatures stuffed and put on display. All those critics of Doctor Who who go on about bad production values and wobbly sets need to take a look at this one and take back their comments.

Character wise, we are given even more insight into Ace's backstory as she is forced to confront the source of the evil that would terrify her as a child, and as she faces the consequences of her actions after the fact. The Doctor risks their friendship by taking her back to this place, but his interest is piqued, and there are more revelaing moments about him, most notably how he admits to hating unrequited love. Exactly what happened to make him say that is never revealed, but it's out there now.

The DVD release of Ghost Light comes with a fantastic supplemental piece where the cast and crew are all interviewed years later and all of them go through the same pains to say how they enjoyed themselves on the production, and how great it was to have some of the biggest names in British television in the same studio, and how, in the end, they had no idea what they were doing on set. There's no sense of that in the final production, though; everyone performs with such conviction that it feels like we the audience are not paying close enough attention. That is a risk as well; let your attention wander during this one and you'll be wondering what you missed.

NEXT EPISODE : THE CURSE OF FENRIC

Battlefield

The TARDIS is drawn to Earth in the mid 90's by a strange signal that is causing widespread radio interferance through the Carbury area. Upon arrival, the Doctor and Ace encounter a UNIT missile convoy that has run off the road, and opposing parties of warring knights in armour - armed with laser weapons and grenades. The Doctor's presence brings Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart out of retirement, but also draws the sorceress Morgaine in her quest to posess the mythical sword Excalibur and lead the war against King Arthur. The Doctor realizes that the knights and Morgaine have come through from another dimension where the Arthurian legend and its players are very much real people, and their presence here now jeopardizes the safety of the planet, for Morgaine has brought with her the Destroyer, the Eater of Worlds.

A good start to season 26, although compared to the rest of the scripts that would make up the final televised season of the classic era it is pretty simple and straightforward, and full of things blowing up. Oh yes, there are fights galore in this one, a reminder of the days when the UNIT action was performed by the stunt crew HAVOC, although here the action is not as limited by the size of the studios; the location work beside a lake and the surrounding forest is perfect for this scale of combat. Too bad the sword fighting isn't top notch - Jay and I were perplexed that for a production company where mideval action should be their forte, the BBC and its actors really lack the finesse to fight with swords.

It's good to see the Brigadier back with the Doctor, and for the first time he meets the seventh incarnation. The Brig is older now; as his own continuity goes this is set after the sixth Doctor audio The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, but that audio manages to blow the gaffe about the Brigadier's marriage to Doris, the girlfriend alluded to in 1973's Planet of the Spiders. Doris is a nice lady, and obviously wealthy as there was no way the Brigadier could have afforded the huge house they live in off his UNIT pension and whatever he made as a teacher at Brendan School. UNIT has moved on over the years as well and the new head honcho is Brigadier Winnifred Bambera (whose presence on the UNIT roster was retconned in the novelized version of Downtime), pulling UNIT out of the days past where women were either ditzy spy-wannabes like Jo Grant or they simply answered the phone and made coffee like Corporal Bell. Bambera's quick move from tough military woman to love interest of blond hunk knight general Ancelyn is a little hard to swallow though. Jay and I both thought she looked like a man. Maybe Ancelyn did too, he is kinda pretty.

The Doctor undergoes a bit of a character change here. In the previous season there were hints at his darker nature, but here he is really going new places. His costume has changed for starters; the jacket is now dark brown, the bandana around his hat and his scarf are darker colours as well. But there's this air about him now that wasn't there before. It doesn't exactly fly when Sylvester McCoy takes it too far and snarls through his teeth at times, but you forget about that when everyone starts to call the Doctor by another name: Merlin. Given that a lot of the cast have come from some parallel dimension, it is quite possible that the Doctor settled down for a time as Arthur's magic advisor, much like he did when exiled by the Time Lords and landed in the company of UNIT in the early 70's. The fact that Morgaine defeated him by sealing him in an ice cave, though, is a bit unsettling.

Battlefield has a lot of other interesting things going for it. Notice that in the beginning of episode 1 the TARDIS console room is deliberately shot in the dark to hide the fact that the walls are not there. The set was only going to be used once for the whole season - much as how it was only used for The Greatest Show in the Galaxy previously - and reportedly the walls were starting to wear a bit thin, so rather than rebuild it there were some hasty bits of wall thrown together (they actually look like curtains) and circles cut out, the then the lights dimmed to hide the fine details. Ace looks different too with her hair grown a bit longer and her clothes a bit more mature than before, and this time there is no mention of her backstory; there is just too much going on in the script to throw more of her into it, but this is the only time this season that it happens. The Destroyer is a pretty good monster although he salivates way too much. He's played by Marek Anton, who will appear later in the season as a Russian soldier. In interviews Anton says that they were sunning themselves on the beach between takes on that story and producer John Nathan-Turner noticed his physique and offered him the part of the Destroyer. Yeah. Casting couch. And they said it was all an ugly rumour.

So one down, three to go and we're done the longest stretch of the show. Not that I am excited about this - Jay and I are left wondering what we'll do in a few weeks when we're out of episodes, although the next season of the current show is about to start so we will talk about that. Not on here, though; not yet.

NEXT EPISODE : GHOST LIGHT

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

An advertising satellite tempts the Doctor into visiting the planet Segonax, where the Psychic Circus - the self-proclaimed Greatest Show in the Galaxy - if holding its talent festival. Ace doesn't want to go; she thinks clowns are creepy. They join other travellers making their way across the planet to see the revels, and at the same time some of the founding members of the circus are trying to escape from some unseen force and dying in the process. Far from a happy family atmosphere, the circus is now shrouded in menace with robot clowns doing the bidding of the crazed Chief Clown, and the Ringmaster sending act after act into the centre ring to meet their deaths when they fail to perform. The Doctor detects an ancient evil lurking in the shadows and knows me has to stop it before he and Ace are thrust into the spotlight, and towards their deaths.

Brilliant. Clowns have always been a source of fear and terror in fiction, made up faces lerring away and insane laughter punctuating unspeakable acts. Like, hello Joker? Hello any serial killer in a cheap slasher film. And now, hello nasty robot clowns. Of course they were never meant to be evil; they were built by the talented and gentle Bellboy, whose joy at performing for people has been eroded away. Bellboy is not the only one, though; Flowerchild dies trying to make her escape, and Deadbeat loses his mind. The rest of the circus alumni have fallen under the thrall of the dark power that has consumed the circus, and they are barely clinging to their own lives. They see the likes of vistors such as the grunting Nord, the irritating Whizzkid, and the pretentious windbag Captain Cook as fodder for the ring, to keep the powers that be at bay for just a bit longer, until the next act can be sent in. And the next. And the next.

Captain Cook is a fantastic character. He's very much the spirit of the old British Empire, looking down on everything in a jaded seen-it-all-before kind of way, and travelling with his own companion, the mysterious and beautiful Mags, who has her own secrets. The Captain is no fool, though; he's a survivor and a coward, shopping the Doctor to the killer robot driver of the hippie bus, and then ultimately betraying Mags in the ring just to save himself.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has some fantastic stylistic touches to it which are not entirely planned; just as the series was about to be recorded asbestos was found in the studios and had to be removed, which threw all of the BBC television centre into a tailspin. Talk shows were broadcast from the lobby and a lot of television programs were simply stopped in production. Doctor Who, however, was not stopped, for doing so would have meant the whole script for Show would have been scrapped, and instead its studio component was recorded entirely inside a circus tent set up in the television centre car park. This results in a different feel to the TARDIS interior with the lighting being more direct as opposed to overhead, and the camera movements somewaht differently handled as the Doctor and Ace investigate the intruding ad satellite. Shooting a show set in a tent actually inside a tent only adds to the effectiveness of the rest of the production, even if it's obvious that there is not a lot of floor space to deal with which results in some odd close-up shots here and there - shots which are actually handled quite well and give the show an almost artsy look. The location work is nothing to shout about at first, with Segonax presented as a quarry, but when the first long shot of the Psychic Circus is presented with a ringed planet hanging in the sky overhead it is actually quite striking. Topping the whole thing off is a rather brilliant score by Mark Ayres, including atmopsheric calliope music for the circus scenes and some fun little cues here and there such as the sample of the series theme when the Doctor and Ace arrive on the planet.

Could it have been improved? Well... who's to say if improved is the right way to look at it but the introduction rap done by Ricco Ross as the ringmaster dates the program somewhat, even if it does serve as a different way to start a show. Jay and I had a bit of a giggle at some of the interior scenes; it seems that even in tents there are corridors to run down, but they're done cleverly, the fabric of the walls billowing in the wake of all those clowns charging about hunting for Ace when she tries to escape. There's also this bit of continuity that you only know if you're looking for it; Ace finds one of Flowerchild's earrings in the sand near the bus and attaches it to her jacket with the other badges she has there, but as production for the season was done out of order, the earring was already there on her jacket in the previous episode, Silver Nemesis. Still, no-one is going to re-shoot the whole thing for the sake of one earring, and it actually does become a plot piece.

This is actually one of Sylvester McCoy's best performances, with the Doctor slowly realizing what's going on and going into his confrontation with the controlling powers behind the circus knowing that he might not survive. Still, as he goes through a long repertoire of magic acts to entertain the powers, he keeps looking at his watch, knowing that Ace is coming with something to help him win the fight. The Doctor has slowly changed in the two seasons so far, his character going from happy-go-lucky to more brooding, and in the next, and final, season he would become even darker still, with his own set of agendas that could rival those of his enemies.

After the schlock that was season twenty four, the series has started to revive itself and the writers have come together to build their vision of where the Doctor should go next. Unfortunately, though, the dice have already been thrown in the background and the series is on its way out; producer John Nathan-Turner wants out and he's been told that if he leaves the show will be cancelled. It's debatable if anyone else knew this at the time; interviews with writers and the script editor certainly don't seem to indicate that they knew their ship was sinking and they went ahead planning the twenty-sixth season, which would be one of the best of the classic series, garnering all sorts of critical praise from those who were still watching it.

And that's next.

NEXT EPISODE : BATTLEFIELD

Silver Nemesis

In the year 1988, a comet called Nemesis draws ever closer to the Earth in a decaying orbit. The Doctor knows all about it; he originally launched it into space from Earth in the year 1638 to keep it safe from the power-mad Lady Peinforte; for inside is a statue made of a living silver metal fashioned in her image. Using black magic, Lady Peinforte travels forward in time to 1988 to reclaim the statue, but its legend has attracted a group of neo-Nazis and an advance party of Cybermen; all three determined to have the power of the Nemeis for themselves, and to destroy the Doctor and Ace.

It sounds better than it actually turned out.

The approach of the comet makes from page news of a tabloid that Ace is seen reading in a garden, but when the comet actually makes planetfall there's no-one there to see it; the police arrive after the fact, the area isn't cordoned off, there's no media, and if as the script claims the crash site is outside Lady Peinforte's country home and just a few yards from Windsor Castle, why was no-one evacuated? There's tourists and everyone wandering about as if everything is fine, and the Doctor and Ace even have a chance encounter with the Queen so lax is the security there.

Speaking of tourists, why the Cybermen? They contribute absolutely nothing to the story, except to fall victim to one of the Doctor's little games to draw them out so he could wipe them out with some old Gallifreyan technology... exactly how he "nailed the Daleks" as Ace puts it. Sure they have a fantastically loud gun battle with the neo-Nazis which manages to fail to attract the attention of the military with its supposed proximity to Windsor Castle, but come on surely the Cybermen deserve a little better than this. And lo their whole vulnerability to gold is back, like an old cliche, and now just touching it kills them (Lady Peinforte shoots arrows at them with gold heads) whereas before the fifth Doctor had to absolutely grind gold into the Cyberleader in Earthshock and the results were not as immediate. The Cybermen we're seeing in the late days of the classic series are nowhere near the quality of the ones we saw in the 60's, but thankfully when they returned in 2006 all was not lost.

The clever bit I do like, though, is the whole idea of the statue itself. It is fashiond out of a living metal, as I already said, called Valedium, which was supposed to be the ultimate defence for Gallifrey. None of it should ever have left the planet, according to the Doctor, but I think we can all guess who was responsible for that. My continuity-obsessed mind wonders if maybe we're going to hear about this stuff again when the new series mentions the Time War again.

Jay and I watched this together, but it was a "special" version released on VHS with previously cut material restored to the edit, but in a pretty sloppy way without the music being redone to cover the edits. And Jay pinged this little gaffe right away: in the early moments of episode one a neo-Nazi somewhere in South America manages to plot the landing point of the comet, but the actual co-ordinates are way off given that Windsor is close to the Greenwich meridian. Boo, I say. And for the sake of nostalgia, since this is the 25th anniversary story, the comet's landing date is 23 November 1988. November in England looks fantastic; everything green and verdant almost as if it was the height of summer. I realize even an effects powerhouse like the BBC can't change the weather, so why even bother with the whole 23 November thing?

Included with the "special" version of the story is a behind the scenes special made for PBS about the making of the serial, full of all sorts of technical wonder and humourous moments with the cast and crew. We're wondering if this little gem will make it to the DVD release whenever that happens, or if they'll just go ahead and shoot an all new feature. The special has a lot of moments where we can get comment from then-producer, the late John Nathan-Turner, the man everyone wants to blame for the decline in the quality of the series. It's easy to blame the dead, but when JN-T is there on camera saying that the ultimate responsibility for everything the show ends with him, then I think it's warranted. Silver Nemesis is complete and utter crap; it's not well thought out, it's boring and thankfully it's only three episodes long. Even the cover of the VHS is terrible, totally out of whack with the the rest of the series, which is why I used the cover from the Target novelization.

I'm done.

NEXT EPISODE : THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY

The Happiness Patrol

Acting on what he calls "disturbing rumours", the Doctor takes Ace to Terra Alpha; an Earth colony in the future. Alpha is governed by Helen A., a strict woman who wants only one thing from her people: for them to be happy. And to keep them happy, she has had smily faces painted everywhere, cheerful music piped out from speakers everywhere, free candy for everyone. And if that doesn't make the people happy, the Happiness Patrol will find them, and make them disappear for the good of everyone else.

Doctor Who dips back into the surreal here, to an extreme length. We all know a political system like that could never really work, so writer Graeme Curry is calling for not just a suspension of the viewer's disbelief but a total incarceration and exile of it for the story's three episode length. Maybe it's possible to accept Helen A's megalomania and the cowardice of her whipped husband Joseph C (some say this is a Margaret Thatcher comment, and perhaps it is), and the fanatical Patrol members Priscilla P and Daisy K, but along comes the Kandy Man, which is exactly what the name suggests: a villain made of candy. Something to upset the makers of Basset's Allsorts.

The colonists of the planet are not the only ones under threat from Helen A's programme of happiness through terror; humanoid rat-creatures that used to live in the sugar fields have been driven out of their native habitat and forced to scrounge in the underground pipe network beneath Alpha's capital (and like so many other planets in the Who universe, only) city. The colonists call them the vermin, a typical colonist slant towards indiginous life that gets in the way of progress, but they are an intelligent species aware of their plight and desperate to find a way out. When the Doctor meets them, he realizes they are on the brink of starvation, and as such extinction as well.

Even though this is only Ace's third adventure it's easy to see how well she is going to go over with such a totalitarian regime. Her black jacket with all its badges raises the ire of the Patrol, as does her refusal to smile, sing or dance. It's a given that Ace would rebel against any authority, but when she encounters it to this extreme she almost goes out of her way to court the danger. And yes, she has more explosives with her and blows up Helen A's vicious pet Fifi when it corners her in the pipes.

Jay and I enjoyed this one on the weekend, and as he had not seen it before we were not as verbose as usual. There were the usual comments when we found something silly or puzzling, like the way the Kandy Man's eyes were constantly spinning, or why he kept his lemonade in a wine bottle. There are a few actors in Patrol who we had seen before - one in Caves of Androzani and another from Frontios - which made Jay ponder why they recycled actors instead of finding new talent. And we wondered why go to the trouble of making the TARDIS pink for one episode, or, indeed, how the paint stuck.

My usual complaint with studio bound stories like this is I never get the feeling of it actually being a city, or a large one come to that. Sure they've rearranged it and shot from different angles and darkened the shadows to make the night time setting more menacing, but if you look too closely you recognize the background and become too aware of the studio limitations (something they just manged to avoid in Paradise Towers). The answer is probably to not look too close, as with all things.

Back in 1990 I first saw this on YTV when they had the rights to Doctor Who in Canada. Littered with commercials, sound levels shot to hell and shown out of sequence it didn't make much of an impression with me at the time. It doesn't help when you've got an adventure that has already been trimmed to fit into a shorter format that it gets sliced a bit more to make room for the ads. The novelization of the story came along within a couple of years and as was the fashion at the time it expanded greatly on what the writer really wanted to achieve. Who knows how much of what was presented in text actually made it to being recorded, and therefore might end up on a DVD release. A friend of mine said at the time that The Happiness Patrol would never be released on VHS due to its use of the Kandy Man and there would be lawsuits from Bassett's as it resembled their mascot, Bertie, but it happened, so the DVD is not an impossibility. The schedule for 2008 releases looks a bit packed for now so it is unlikely we'd see it in the near future, but despite it's slightly oddball status, it would be a good one to put out.

NEXT EPISODE : SILVER NEMESIS

Remembrance of the Daleks

It's November 1963 and the army are on patrol in Shoreditch around Coal Hill School and a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. The Doctor and Ace arrive and find two different Dalek factions lurking in central London, both after the same thing: the Hand of Omega. During his stay on Earth with Susan, the Doctor had intended to bury the Hand on Earth and use it as bait but when Ian and Barbara pushed into the TARDIS he was forced to leave before completing the job. The Hand of Omega is what it implies: a tool used by Omega to craete the black hole that became the centre of the Eye of Harmony, and it will give the Daleks the power that the Time Lords have. But the Imperial Daleks, under the command of their Emperor, have to overcome the Renegade Dalek army which has enlisted the aid of local facists. And that means all out war.

Welcome back to Doctor Who.

Now I know a lot of people will get mad at me for saying it, but THIS is what the show is about. It's about the Doctor, the alien man with an agenda, who has had enough of the evil he finds in the universe and is going to do something about it. And the trusting companion, who believes in him totally, and even though this is their first full adventure together now that Mel has left (she never would have survived this one) one gets the feeling that a lot of time has already passed just from watching them together. There are of course moments where Ace's questions to the Doctor sound more like she's interviewing him from cue cards, but on the whole they've got it stitched up between them.

Word is Terry Nation did not like what writer Ben Aaronovitch did with the Daleks. I can't imagine what his beef was; they're at their most innovative here, with the Black Dalek's renegade army laying clever plans to use a small child's mind as a battle computer, and the Imperial Daleks evolving beyond their usual means and creating a super weapon in the form of the Special Weapons Dalek which is just an engine of destruction. I got annoyed at Ace's little soliloqy about the cause of the Dalek conflict though; she saw the fight as a parable of racial intolerance until it is revealed that Davros has become the Emperor Dalek and the Renegades are the last remnants of the Dalek race who would not follow him.

The commentary on racism continues with the xenophobia displayed by the character Mike, an army sergeant, who takes a shine to Ace, and she does to him until she realizes not only is he inadvertanly selling everyone out to the Renegade Daleks but he's the same racist scum she has always hated. The reasons for that aspect of Ace's character would come out later on in the television series but the novelization of the story illustates it beautifully; Ace had a best friend named Manisha who was from a Pakistani family, and racist white kids firebombed her home. And to further reference the novelization, there is some internal strife amongst the Imperial Daleks who view the special weapons unit as an abomination to their own purity.

So now with a companion who is more real than several of her predecessors who never really evolved beyond their character summaries, we also have a Doctor who is dramatically different from any of his previous selves. Sylvester McCoy has said he wanted to draw on characteristics of the previous Doctors but none of them ever had the same air of danger and menace about them as his Doctor would. The Doctor has deliberately drawn the Daleks to Earth and put it in danger, he engages in deceit to keep the humans involved out of harm's way, he gives Ace a superweapon by having the Hand of Omega imbibe her aluminum baseball bat with destructive energies (which she uses with great skill against a Dalek in episode two), and when it comes down to crunch time, he allows the Daleks homeworld to be obliterated without a qualm, precipitating what would eventually be known as the Time War and putting his own people in jeopardy.

Visually too this story is top notch. The Daleks are all rebuilt to look sturdier although Jay didn't like them; they're obviously pulled from a plastic mould as opposed to built in smaller bits. The Black Dalek, though, is made in the old way and is slightly bigger than the others. The Renegades are coloured in the traditional grey and black scheme and the Imperials have adopted the white and gold first seen in Revelation of the Daleks. A lot of the story is shot on location in the streets of London, including an incredible firefight between Dalek factions that apparantly set off alarms. The Daleks have new ray gun effects, and the mothership seen hovering over Earth maintains basic elements of the Dalek battle cruiser from Resurrection, and the shuttle... wow! As an outer space effect it looks pretty bad, but when they land the full scale version in the playground at Coal Hill School it is almost flawlessly done. The Emperor is more mobile than it was in Evil of the Daleks; now it is more like the Emperor Dalek of the 1960's comic strip versions with a bulbous head and no "arms", rolling along on a standard Dalek base.

I could go on at great great length about Remembrance of the Daleks. When I saw it back when I was 17 years old I was so fascinated by it I started seeing elements of it in my dreams, and eventually wrote a massive 150 plus page story for one of my classes where the fallout of Skaro's destruction forced the Imperial Daleks to adopt a plan devised by the Renegades (before they were deemed as such) involving their duplicates from Resurrection of the Daleks. I told Jay about it while we were watching this one and he seemed interested; maybe I'll dig it up and include it in my ideas here as I did with Offworld Vegas.

As a matter of fact, I think I will.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HAPPINESS PATROL

Dragonfire

The Doctor and Mel arrive at the space colony of Iceworld, on the planet Svartos, where they encounter Sabalom Glitz in a bit of a cash crunch. Having sold his crew off and in debt for a delivery of rotten fruit, he is contemplating searching for the fabled Dragon's Treasure as a means to regain his fortunes. Glitz is unaware that he is being played by Kane, a notoroius criminal who can only survive in extreme cold temperatures. Mel befreinds a waitress named Ace and together they join the Doctor and Glitz in the ice catacombs beneath Iceworld, dodging Kane's deep-frozen mercenaries, and the Dragon itself as it protects its treasure...

Dragonfire is by far the best story of the 24th season. The mood is set right away from the opening moments of episode one when Kane's newest recruits are brought in to be frozen in the gloomy control centre. Again, as with Time and the Rani and Paradise Towers the sets are built on a large scale and there is a lot of overhead work done, with action happening on more than one level at a time. The ice catacombs, though, aren't really that well realized; anyone looking close enough will see that it's not even solid stuff, it's guaze or taffeta or something stretched out ceiling to floor. The colony feels like a proper spaceport comeplete with aliens of all shapes and sizes hanging out at the milkshake bar (shades of the Mos Eisly cantina from Star Wars) including a long Argolin last sen in The Leisure Hive.

When Jay and I watched this he had forgotten that Glitz was back, and often pondered aloud why they had brought him back. True, he could have been anyone but when you're dealing with a 3 episode story it cuts down on a lot of trust-gaining if you go off looking for treasure with someone you already know. Also, the story is rich in new characters already: Kane and his fixation on revenge all brought on by his broken heart - oh and he can kill people with the touch of his freezing cold hand; Belascz disillusioned at how Kane's previous affection for her has faded; and Ace, the plucky streetwise waitress from Earth who arrived on Iceworld as a result of a freak time storm. Glitz gets some better treatment this time around, although he does still speak in mad fluting ways.. and his musical cues from The Mysterious Planet are used again for his scenes.

The real triumph of this episode though is the Doctor. Sometimes the clown, still the mysterious friend, he has finally come into his character this time, with good chemistry between himself and all the other characters.

Oh there's a dragon. Sort of. It's a biomechanoid. Looks like the BBC's attempt at Alien just more rubbery. Initially it's a monster to be feared, but the truth of its existence reveals it to be not as hostile as originally believed. In the end, it too becomes a sympathetic character to be mourned when it meets its end, right along with Kane who would rather die than face eternity alone.

Mel. The screaming. THE SCREAMING. You can see at the climax of episode one when she and Ace come face to face with the dragon how pained Sophie Aldred (Ace) looks at having this shrilling right in her ear. The other climax to episode one, with the Doctor stupidly allowing himself to dangle over a sheer drop by the end of his umbrella, is just stupid. And how the hell did he and Glitz get down without getting killed?

Where was I going here... oh right. Mel. Out of nowhere, she decides to leave. A sudden impulse takes her and she decides to leave the Doctor and run off adventuring with Glitz. The Doctor is hurt and sulks initially but then wishes her well. After all if Glitz sold his crew off just for doing their job she'd be up on the block pretty quick after one scream. But the companion transition happens right away; at Mel's suggestion the Doctor offers Ace a place on board the TARDIS rather than take her back to her boring life on Earth. And Ace literally jumps at it, forming what will be remembered as one of the most dynamic Doctor-companion teams in the history of the show right along with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, the second Doctor and Jamie, and these days the tenth Doctor and Rose.

So after starting on a pretty lame note the series regains some of its footing and the fan base would start to rebuild. The production team would start doing new things with the Doctor and Ace for the 25th anniversary season, starting with pitting the new duo against classic enemies...

NEXT EPISODE : REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS

Red

The TARDIS suffers a telepathic attack, bringing the Doctor and Mel to a controlled colony where all the inhabitants of the Needle are monitored by a system called White Noise. The system is breaking down, though, and something is driving the inhabitants to kill ... something Red. Every colonist in the Needle has been fitted with a chip that inhibits violent actions, but over time the chips have deprived the colonists of the ability to feel anything. White Noise needs to stop the killings in keeping with its function, but something Red has other plans...

Every utopian setup has something wrong with it, although the problems with the Needle are all there for anyone to see: the building itself is for all intents alive, and White Noise acts like a god using chips to curtail the violent impulses of the people who live there, and when they experience a thought outside the parameters of White Noise's functions, the computer edits them out. The Doctor, of course, won't stand for it, and when he is fitted with a chip against his will he is able to resist White Noise's intrusions but he becomes linked to Red and witnesses the killings first hand. Red, in turn, is able to see into the Doctor's mind and comes up with more creative ways to kill.

The whole identity of Red is a bit unclear for the longest time; is it a collective manifestation of everyone's repression? Is it a telepathic alien? It is a rogue computer virus? Whatever Red is, it knows what it is doing and speaks through its agents as it kills, chanting the word red over and over as it throttles the life out of whoever is nearby. And seeing as only White Noise identifies the behaviour as "red-lining", it is obviously somehow part of this process.

Melanie falls in with people who have left The Needle; people who realized that surrendering their control of themselves to White Noise was a mistake, but they are all still chipped and vulnerable to the influences of Red. Their recreational escape from the otherwise dull reality is a drug called "slow" which places them out of synch with time around them, slowing everything down to their perception and leaving them vulnerable to attack.

I'm going to have to admit though that as clever as some of it sounds, I fell asleep through this one. A lot. Maybe it was a bad week. Or maybe it just wasn't that gripping. I do remember enjoying bits that I was awake for, but the rest... I think I'll need to go back and see.

Later.

NEXT EPISODE : DRAGONFIRE

Flip Flop

The Doctor and Mel arrive on the planet Puxatornee not once, but twice at separate intervals some thirty years apart. Both times upon their arrival they discover that they are already wanted persons, either as dissidents undermining the rule of the slug-like uber polite Slithergees, or as Slithergee agents attempting to spy on the human population. In both threads of time, the Doctor and Mel are forced to travel in the TARDIS and assist in altering time for the betterment of the planet's human population, and in both threads the Doctor warns that changing the future can have unforseen consequences...

Flip Flop is actually pretty brilliant storytelling; it is a 4 episode story that has no defined beginning or end and more or less puts the Doctor and Mel into a loop of time as they try to free themselves from the goings on of Puxatornee. As their own understanding of the events around them unfolds they begin to realize that they are now in a race against time themselves to get off the planet before their alternate selves arrive in their own TARDIS.

I really picked the wrong days to try and listen to this audio, though; working nights you really need to have all your brain cells firing when concentration is required and I just kept dropping off and having to go back and listen to sections again. Flip Flop, like many of the other stories inserted into the background of season 24, maintains some elements of the televised episodes of the time; there's no real feel of a threat to the Doctor and Mel and the villains of the piece are hardly scary at all. The Slithergees are a bit of an absurdity, humbly requesting sanctuary on one of Puxatornee's moons and then gradually insinuating themselves into the power roles of the colony's government through political correctness. And the hint of nuclear war. And when the humans are in power and struggling to deal with the fallout of exactly that war, they are desperate and ugly, convinced that going back in time to stop the war is what they need to do, even though it may well land them under Slithergee control again.

This is actually the sort of thing I could see the new televised series trying to achieve; it's a clever premise, it's handled well and even if the Doctor seems to be a bit too calm throughout the show, he is still very much on form where his defence of the web of time is concerned. Mel is as always Mel, with more clever dialogue and still no screaming. I'm actually going to miss her. Or this new version of her.



NEXT EPISODE : RED