Time Can Be Rewritten 33 (Continuity Errors)

Back in the dark days of the wilderness years, when I mistakenly thought I had either talent or inclination to write fiction, I had a fiction teacher who cautioned me off of being clever. Cleverness, he gravely told me, is a trap. Once you are pigeonholed as a “clever” writer it is all over for you. Steven Moffat, as it happens, is terribly clever. And this is the source of most of the attention paid to “Continuity Errors,” hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories of the Virgin era, focuses on how clever it is.

This is not wrong. The story is utterly clever. The Doctor meddling extensively with history in order to check out a library book is one of the greatest premises ever. Telling it from the librarian’s perspective so that the shifts in her history happen between the lines is a beautiful little trick. And the cuts away to a lecture about the dangers of the Doctor that casually renders many of the ridiculous premises of the series diegetic add a splendid bit of menace to proceedings, making the familiar trappings of Doctor Who just a bit uncanny.

This, of course, is also the problem. This sort of cleverness comes perilously close to breaking the structure of the series. Yes, it’s terribly fun to have a Doctor who does things like handle a stray attack of evil plants just to make a librarian less angry so that he can stop an alien war. But the entire story hinges on the fact that this sort of thing only works if your perspective isn’t lined up with that of the Doctor’s. The entire point is that the Doctor is having a comically elaborate adventure for seemingly small stakes. This is good for a short story from the perspective of the people affected, but you really can’t build it into an ongoing series where the Doctor is the main character.

In Moffat’s defense, of course, he doesn’t try to. He writes a twenty-six-page short story and then buggers off out of Doctor Who for the next three years, then for another six after that. The fact that he eventually ended up in charge of the entire series does not mean that it’s sensible or valid to interpret his first story as some sort of blueprint for the future. Not even when several of the ideas get used then. Yes, there’s the objection raised by Lawrence Miles to the Graham Williams era whereby granting the Doctor seemingly unbounded power and suggesting that maybe he and Romana can fly “breaks the narrative” or whatever, but that remains as silly in 1996 as it was in 1978. As ever, the issue is that the rules are different in different contexts. It’s much like the old rule of thumb in Marvel Comics that Doctor Doom is a villain that takes the entire Fantastic Four to defeat, except when he’s in a Spider-Man comic, in which case Spider-Man can do it. Or in an Avengers comic, where it takes the entire Avengers. In a willfully silly short story the Doctor goes to these sorts of elaborate lengths to get a library book. But in a more normal adventure he doesn’t.

(Later, of course, Moffat builds this out to more exquisite lengths via his conception of what the Doctor gets up to between adventures, explained in particular detail in the “Night and the Doctor” suite attached to the Season 6 box set. But the basic concept there is clear - the interstitial moments in which the Doctor fits ludicrous chains of non-adventures and preposterous things function precisely because they are untelevised and thus do not impact the long-term storytelling in the same way.)

So yes, the idea that time and history can be so cavalierly rewritten as “Continuty Errors” implies is a mess. There’s a direct line from this to the absurdist reductions of The Curse of Fatal Death, which largely amounts to taking the ideas of this story to their logical conclusions. But there’s a natural defense here based on the fact that a short story collection from Virgin and a Comic Relief special are by their nature marginal texts in which this sort of larking about can be accomplished safely.

But that risks discarding “Continuity Errors” as a piece of mere cleverness - interesting because it has some good jokes, but ultimately something that has to be ignored. And while treating it as the secret decoder ring for the entirety of the Moffat era is overplaying one’s hand ridiculously, treating it as utterly disposable fluff is missing the point as well. Especially because this is Moffat’s first piece of published Doctor Who writing, and the longstanding nature of his fandom is exceedingly well documented. So when given the brief to do a short story with any Doctor, the fact that this is the first thing he went for has to be treated with some seriousness.

Actually, perhaps the first thing we should discuss is that we’re doing this story now. I mean, it’s a solo Benny/Doctor story, so this is the last place we can put it, since we’re doing Original Sin on Friday. But we were going to do Moffat’s first piece of Doctor Who wherever it landed. Why is it landing in the Virgin era itself? It’s certainly not that he was a fan of the Virgin era broadly - the infamous four-way interview establishes that he did not read them regularly, though he had read a few. And yet he did not set it in his beloved Davison era, which is, from most portrayals of Moffat, what you’d expect. Of course, his love of the Davison era is based almost entirely on his love of Davison as an actor, and he wouldn’t have that in prose. One could chalk this up to why he never wrote for Big Finish - they didn’t have McGann on board when they asked Moffat, and Moffat only wanted to write unbound by future continuity. But this came out in 1996, and it’s not unbound by future continuity. Benny stopped being the sole companion in mid-1995. Hence this being a Time Can Be Rewritten entry.

So why did Moffat chose this era? Well, actually, it’s not quite fair to say he chose this era. He chose Paul Cornell. The influence of Cornell on Moffat, broadly speaking, is pretty obvious. Moffat has lifted Cornell’s stuff thoroughly, most obviously in Girl in the Fireplace. Moffat was the best man at Cornell’s wedding. They get along. And “Continuity Errors” is not so much set in the Virgin era as it is in Paul Cornell’s vision of Doctor Who. “Continuity Errors” specifically references Cornell, or, rather, Orcnell, who wrote a book called Four Seasons and a Wedding, which doubles as a concise summary of Cornell’s five New Adventures. The use of Benny as a companion is thus best read in terms of the fact that Benny is Cornell’s creation, and Moffat’s characterization of her draws much more heavily from Cornell than from other writers.

This puts Moffat’s story more firmly in context. The focus on a tiny and seemingly insignificant thing - a single library book and the Doctor’s need to read a copy - is very Cornell, with its implicit valuation of the mundane and the small in the face of the epic. It’s as notable that what the Doctor does is save a marriage, rescue a child, and give a few lectures as it is that he’s wildly rewriting history. It’s easy to miss the fact that “Continuity Errors” is also a story about the Doctor saving a species from genocide by fussing about library rules. The Robert Holmesian equation of the mundane and the cosmic is alive and well here. And while in this case he takes a somewhat larking, silly perspective on that, that’s probably the right angle for a book of short stories.

But what really stands out as one of the defining traits of Moffat’s writing - something that is true for really just about everything he’s done, which is that he’s terribly adept at complex structures. This starts to feed back into the basic pigeon-holing of Moffat as a “clever” writer, but as with most of Moffat’s overt cleverness looks not only can be deceiving, they outright are, and “Continuty Errors” is a prime example of this. Structurally it’s quite complex, cutting back and forth between the librarian’s point of view as her life changes around her without her noticing it and a lecture about the Doctor that sets up the story’s larger probing of the themes of the story - the ways in which the existing gaps in the series’ mythology create a sinister air to the Doctor. The lecture muses, for instance, on “why any military outfit he comes in contact with hands him the keys to the gun cupboard, not to mention supreme command, before they’ve even cleared him of the murder they’ve usually just arrested him for,” before finally musing, “most troubling of all, everyone on record as having known the Doctor insists that he is a good man, a hero in fact. But did they think that for themselves? Or did he think it for them?”

The first thing to point about this structural complexity is that it’s not showing off. I mean, it is to an extent, but it’s mostly about finding a way to focus the story on the right part of the action. The story is about the librarian having her memories changed, but as she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her it needs some sort of focus elsewhere to give context to what’s happening. But if you take the point of view anywhere other than her experience you lose the meat of the story. Moffat’s virtuoso structure thus lets him tell the story from the perspective of an unreliable and limited narrator while also continually highlighting the nature of the gaps in her reliability so we get both her interior experience and the context it exists in. It’s not just a way of being terribly clever, it’s a way to tell a story that can only come out of a structure like that, and a way focused on character building.

That said, Moffat is terribly clever. And he couples all of this with a doozy of ideas. “Continuity Errors” and its associated one-page afterword make the explicit claim that “when, as has happened more than once, a culture extrapolates his existence from his multiple interventions in their history, the Doctor has a favourite ‘panic button.’ He simply slips back in time and introduces himself as a fictional character in the popular mythology of that particular world.” This ties in with the title of the story itself, and the way in which the lecture raising suspicions about the Doctor plays off of the ever-present logical gaps in the series. On one level it’s the most developed form of the paranoid approach to date, in which the gaps and complexities of the documented record subvert the entire heroism of Doctor Who. Except that it’s all so much fun. Moffat takes a calculated risk here, and it pays off perfectly. He enumerates all of the reasons to hate the Doctor, suggests that the entire existence of Doctor Who as a narrative might be a vast conspiracy within its own narrative to get us to like the Doctor, and then trusts, quite rightly, that anyone reading Decalog 3 is going to be a sufficient Doctor Who fan to be utterly unconvinced.

Because, of course, Moffat’s cleverness is simply more fun. It’s far more fun to have a magical figure who fights off giant plants, saves marriages, and prevents genocide with library privileges than it is to have some dour and conspiratorial manipulator pulling the strings for his own twisted agenda. And Moffat, following firmly from Cornell’s work on the Seventh Doctor, establishes that that is, in fact, what he is. That, in the end, is the rejoinder to those who would object that Moffat’s conception of the Doctor is too powerful and breaks the narrative. Much like the sonic screwdriver is largely defensible under its current form of “being able to do anything that it wouldn’t be more interesting to do in another way,” Moffat’s conception of the Doctor is simple: he is, in any situation, the one that it would be by far the most fun to have win.

And so he always does.

Has it Taught You Wonderful Things? (Human Nature)

I’ll Explain Later

Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s May of 1995. Oasis debut at number one with “Some Might Say.” They get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad also chart.

In the news, Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. And Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March.

While in books, Human Nature. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie. Let’s get that out of the way, and then, perhaps more importantly, let’s leave it there. We’ll be back to this story eventually, and we can talk about comparison then. But since I know better than to think I can leave it entirely, the book is better than the movie. So let’s just talk about the book.

To start, it’s good. Better than good. Back with Warlock we played at the idea that the New Adventures could compete with serious literary science fiction, but the ruse was see-through. Andrew Cartmel doesn’t have the prose style for it, though he’s not dreadful by any stretch of the imagination. But go ahead. Put Human Nature up against The Diamond Age. It can hold its own and then some. Are there enough different ways to calmly explain that this novel is an absolute triumph? Perhaps not.

And yet what we have is, on the surface, uninspiring. The plot isn’t just ripped off from Death Takes a Holiday (clearly something in the air, as three years later the movie was remade execrably as Meet Joe Black), it’s unapologetic about it, even still including the Grim Reaper within it. It’s one of those terribly clever novels, and its plot seems to mostly be a canvas stretched out so that Paul Cornell can scrawl his usual enthused claims about the virtues of mundane everyday life, mixed freely, in this case, with stern lessons about the horrors of war that are using World War I, the single easiest war of the twentieth century to demonstrate the horrors of, to make their point. The premise is clever, but almost inevitable: the most obvious novel Paul Cornell could possibly have written at this point. So what is it about this book that sparks so gloriously?

Perhaps the most obvious thing to point out is that it would be difficult for a story with this sort of authorship not to be fantastic. This is Paul Cornell, working from a plot he hashed out with Kate Orman, with a tiny but significant assist from Steven Moffat (who plotted John Smith’s children’s fantasy book). The density of quality around this book is staggering even before Russell T Davies shows up to start rewriting bits. And while it may be an obvious Paul Cornell book it’s worth pointing out that Cornell has never had the freedom to write one of those before. His previous three books were all Big Plot Event books - two wrapping up long-running story arcs and a third doing Ace’s departure. This is actually the first time he’s actually had the freedom to just write a Doctor Who story like he wants to write it without any distractions to speak of.

Like any Paul Cornell book, Human Nature is in part a reaction against the Pertwee era. At its heart it is an alternate version of the question of what the Doctor coming to Earth and living among people would be. Instead of a stand-offish patrician defined heavily by how he separates himself from the world and by his inadequate performance of humanity we get, at last, the alternative: a man who loves being human A man who is, if anything, too good at being human, who does not put himself above the world but allows himself to be pulled into it. And being Paul Cornell, that is not a matter of falling to earth. Far from it, the Doctor finds himself rising to earth.

The parallels to the Pertwee era are instructive, simply because they are so numerous. Not just in the “becoming human” aspect of it, but in a larger set of inversions and parallels. Spearhead From Space is, of course, where the Doctor acquires his second heart, becoming less human than he’d ever been. In Human Nature he sheds it, undoing that mistake. Human Nature reveals itself to have had a Time Lord monitoring the entire situation, turning its events symbolically into a response to The War Games in that it is another test for the Doctor to prove himself in. And, of course, The War Games is heavily concerned with the nature of war, and specifically with the first World War. Instead of landing in early 70s Britain the Doctor this time lands in the lead-up to the same war. If The War Games punished the Doctor for his inability to help the lost soldiers of World War I who were caught up in a mismanaged and disastrous parody of war, Human Nature finally thrusts him in their midst and demands that he find a way to help them. The climax of the book, in which John Smith makes the decision to sacrifice himself, even harkens back to Troughton’s fateful declaration in The Moonbase: “there are monsters out there, yes. Terrible things. But you don’t have to become one in order to defeat them.”

And if this comes perilously close to calling Pertwee’s Doctor a monster, we can at least accept this in the strictest etymological sense. Monster shares a root with “demonstrate,” both deriving from the Latin, and meaning “to show.” Monstrosity is thus primarily a factor of exhibition: of being seen. (This is why the phenomenon of monsters lurking in the shadows is powerful: because the monster must necessarily exit from the shadows and be seen in order to be monstrous, creating tension.) Monstrosity is a visible and spectacular otherness. And that, at least, does describe the Pertwee era, both in terms of Pertwee’s glammed up Doctor and in terms of the era’s conceptual dissonance with the rest of Doctor Who.

This hinges, of course, on something that was invisible to the Pertwee era itself. Following on a mere six years of history, two radically different Doctors and a show that had already wildly and dramatically transformed itself from a broad anthology to a focused weekly roll of Man vs. Monsters, the Pertwee era could throw it all out and reinvent itself. Shows did that. The Avengers, in its first season, had almost nothing to do with the show it became. It’s in hindsight that we see the weird dissonance of it and the way in which an earthbound Doctor was a blind alley that didn’t last two seasons. But the Pertwee era didn’t have the ability to realize that it was, in the larger context of Doctor Who, a narrative collapse.

Cornell knows it going in. He’s not about to hand Andy Lane a human Doctor who doesn’t travel in space and time and lives in the World War I era. The premise of this book is doomed. Everything about it serves to wreck Doctor Who as a concept. And since Cornell knows it he’s able to outright invert it. Instead of threatening a narrative collapse and averting it at the end, Paul Cornell just collapses the narrative at the start and spends the entire book threatening to rebuild it. Much as the Doctor rises to earth here, the narrative does not collapse but reassemble, finding the path by which the Doctor can build himself out of the tattered remnants of his own identity.

The key moment comes two thirds of the way through the book, after one of John Smith’s students has just been violently killed by the attacking aliens and the Doctor. Smith considers grabbing a gun and attacking the aliens, but hesitates, realizing that this simply isn’t who he is, no matter who he is. He asks Benny what the Doctor would do, and she answers, “he’d find a way to turn this all around… He’d make the villains fall into their own traps, and trick the monsters, and outwit the men with guns. He’d save everybody’s life and find a way to win.” And Smith considers, then turns to his students and declares, “There’s another way. Throw away your guns.”

So, the usual for Cornell: triumph of the never cruel nor cowardly. And typical of Cornell, he goes with the Gaiman-esque strategy of tell-don’t-show, giving the Doctor a nice, proper monologue about how this is the core of who he is, as either Smith or the Doctor, and how he doesn’t want to give that up. It works beautifully, as ever. It’s all the sort of unapologetic frockery that defines Paul Cornell. The book even has a joke about it, as Benny, upon reading the Doctor’s instructions on what’s going on, stomps off for the wardrobe room, proclaiming that “this adventure was going to require a serious frock.”

It’s a good phrase, and an important one, as it gets at an easy thing to miss about the frock/gun debate, which is that it’s equivalent to the comedy/drama division, or even the serious/unserious division. Which should be obvious, as nobody would have come up with a whole new distinction just to do comedy/drama. I’ve used the phrase “serious drama” more than a few times, but in general as a sort of mocking phrase that implicates a particular type of drama that is deeply invested in its own self-seriousness. In its most extreme form “serious drama” becomes borderline unwatchable - the sort of thing one watches purely because it’s “serious drama” and thus one has some sort of moral obligation to do so. This was the crux of my ambivalence over Sanctuary - that it was trying for “serious drama.” And more to the point, that Doctor Who just isn’t all that good at that.

But implicit in this critique of “serious drama” is the idea that “serious” and “drama” are in some way inherent allies, or that “unserious drama” or “serious comedy” are non-sensical things that are obviously inferior. And this is at the heart of the gun/frock debate: ultimately both sides are shooting for drama. Even the most comedic of the frocks, which is probably Gareth Roberts, consistently grounds his stories in human drama and experience and tries to tell genuinely moving stories. And this also gets at the ways in which the “gun” side is almost completely outflanked in this debate. The frock perspective allows itself a Terrance Dicks-style ambivalence that recognizes that the dramatic and the over-the-top romantic are not only not antagonistic but actively complimentary. Whereas the gun perspective, by deciding that drama comes out of gravitas, leaves itself wide-open to critique. A critique, it should be noted, that Cornell gives voice to, having a character muse about “how close masculinity is to melodrama.” Which, well, yes. Yes it is. And that’s the problem with the gun side - it so rarely realizes just how silly it is.

The frocks, much like Xena: Warrior Princess, know exactly how silly they are, but decline to accept that this in some way imposes a limitation on what they can do. And this book is Paul Cornell going ahead and demonstrating just how far frockery can go and just how dramatic and effective it can be. A story that is unabashedly sentimental, full of humor and warmth, and nevertheless genuinely and unapologetically dramatic. This also makes sense of the somewhat over-obvious World War I setting. Because this isn’t a book that’s retreading the ground explored by Blackadder Goes Forth about the horrors of war. It’s a book about how a man who is never cruel or cowardly can stand up to those horrors. It needs World War I not as an easy crutch to make a statement about how horrible war is but as the single most horrific moment of war available to it, so that it can show the Doctor as up to the task of outshining it.

And, of course, the real point is that this sort of drama can only happen from Cornell’s approach. A serious-minded dramatic approach could never come close to the emotional impact of Human Nature. The book only works because it openly invites the reader to be an unrepentant romantic about things. It’s not just that this works dramatically, it’s that its sense of levity and joy is the reason it works. This is Cornell killing the gun/frock debate off. And fair enough. Well done. Aesthetically speaking, debate over, frocks win. This is the future: an aesthetic that recognizes that irony, camp, and outright silliness are not only compatible with drama, they make it better and more effective.

In a better world we’d be able to jump ahead here. Not that there aren’t some marvelous books to come in the next decade of Doctor Who, but let’s be honest, because hindsight lets us be ruthlessly accurate here: this is a good enough Doctor Who story to be made for television in the modern era. It was good enough to get a Hugo nomination a decade later, and for a version of itself that wasn’t even as good as this book. In a better world we’d just skip the intervening decade and bring Doctor Who back now while frantically waving this book around and saying “Look! Look! See how good it can be!” We can’t. We didn’t. This is the nasty consequence of that whole gap we discussed about Sliders. Too many people think that Doctor Who is just like Sliders. On a good day it’s just like The X-Files, which is at least a halfway decent show, but is still little more than as well-done as cult television can be done.

When in fact Doctor Who is like this - something more remarkable and weird and beautiful than any of those. But there’s nothing close to this in the vocabulary of television yet. Right now the closest thing on television to a working model for Doctor Who is Xena: Warrior Princess, and it’s utterly, comically limited compared to this. So instead of cutting away to victory we get ten years of Doctor Who second-guessing itself and stumbling around messily while television tries to finally catch up to Paul Cornell. Alas.

Your Researches Have So Little Regard for Human Life (Sanctuary)

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Infinite Requiem by Daniel Blythe. If one were to make a list of the most skippable novels in the New Adventures line, it would easily make the top ten.

Sanctuary, David McIntee’s third and final New Adventure (he wrote two Missing Adventures as well), is the New Adventures’ sole pure historical, and the first such story since Black Orchid. It deals with Christian heretics in medieval France, and culminates in the death of Benny’s romantic interest Guy de Carnac and much emotional trauma. I have an unsettling feeling that somewhere in this entry I instinctively typed Guy Debord, but frankly if I did I’m too amused by it to fix it. Like most of McIntee’s work, it exemplifies averageness: thirty-second on the Sullivan rankings, with a score of 69%. Craig Hinton declares that “even if you don’t like historicals” you should read it, as “you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.” But one page earlier he gave The Ribos Operation one star, so, you know. Trust him as you will. Lars Perason backs him up, though, calling it “one of the best stand-alone books” and proclaiming that “the ending will tear your entrails out,” though this seems intended to be read as a selling point. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s April of 1995. The Outhere Brothers are at number one with “Don’t Stop (Wiggle Wiggle),” which lasts a week before Take That are “Back For Good.” Which turns out to be untrue, though they do make it through the end of the month.  Wet Wet Wet, Celine Dion, REM, Bryan Adams, Boyzone, and a momentary supergroup of Cher, Chrissie Hynde, Nene Cherry, and Eric Clapton also chart. In news, the Oklahoma City bombing takes place in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The recently elected Republicans in the House of Representatives finish passing the bulk of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. While in countries we actually care about… actually, nothing so far as I can tell. This appears to either be a very dull month or a very spotty Wikipedia article on the year.

On to books, such as Sanctuary. There are two kinds of binary distinctions that we’ve drawn up on this blog: ones that have eventually been deconstructed, and ones that haven’t. The latter category is by far the smallest, consisting, at this point, of this binary distinction and the one between Spooner and Lucarotti-style historicals. That’s not to say the distinction is never deconstructed - had we done Doctor Who and the Pirates as a Time Can Be Rewritten entry we would have seen it done. But it is, as distinctions within Doctor Who go, one of the most puzzlingly steadfast, and thus a useful one to turn to as we stumble about

To recap, since the blog has gained a reader or two since the Hartnell days, some of whom might have not bought the Hartnell book, the pure historical episodes of the Hartnell era divide fairly easily into two types. The first to debut is what I call the Lucarotti type, as three of the four historicals in this mode were penned by John Lucarotti: The Aztecs, Marco Polo, and The Massacre. All are serious-minded stories in which the focus is on the difficulties of being out of place in a hostile past. The other type, named after Dennis Spooner, who wrote the first two of this type with The Reign of Terror and The Romans, is often more comedic and is based on running through a bunch of obligatory set pieces implied by the story’s premise - the type of story now often described as a “romp.” The Spooner style is much more common - all of the historicals from The Reign of Terror to The Highlanders save for The Massacre fall into the category. But the Lucarotti style tends to be the more well-regarded, due perhaps to its more serious nature. But what’s striking, as I suggested, is that the distinction largely still holds. Very few of the sizable number of post-Troughton historicals push significantly at the Lucarotti/Spooner distinction.

Part of this is that one side of the debate is strikingly narrow. Lucarotti only wrote his three Lucarotti-style historicals, and nobody else really attempted anything in that style contemporaneously with Lucarotti save, arguably, for Anthony Coburn. And so the entire structure of the Lucarotti historical consists of Lucarotti’s own work and people who self-consciously followed in his footsteps. This is unusual in terms of type specimens of Doctor Who stories. Robert Holmes, for all his distinctiveness, was working in a very similar manner to Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke and at the same time. The wave of innovation that Cartmel ushered in was split among several writers. Even David Whitaker had other writers around the same time, most obviously Dennis Spooner, who shared many of his sensibilities. But Lucarotti cuts an odd figure in Doctor Who’s history: a writer with a wholly idiosyncratic style that nevertheless became utterly standard. Because here we are in the New Adventures and we get the obligitory “return of the pure historical” story. And it’s firmly a Lucarotti-style one - indeed, it’s basically The Massacre for the modern era.

Like The Massacre, its plot hinges on the assumption that the audience isn’t going to be hugely up to speed on the historical era in question. Sanctuary is about the annihilation of a dissident sect of Christians called the Cathars in the thirteenth century. This gives McIntee access to the same trick Lucarotti used in The Massacre, which is to have a horrible tragedy that is both inevitable and invisible to the audience. Like The Massacre, Sanctuary turns on the issue of trying to save one person from the tragedy, and, again like The Massacre, it ends up with that person almost certainly (but maybe not) dying. Unlike The Massacre, it actually bothers to focus on the human reaction to this, with Benny falling in love with Guy de Carnac and having a considerably more developed relationship with him than Steven got with Anne. Also unlike The Massacre, there’s not a horrible ending in which Dodo de Carnac blunders onto the TARDIS as the new companion. But on the whole it’s a very serious-minded, epic, dark historical of the sort that you’d almost stereotypically expect Virgin to publish.

To be fair, it’s one of two pure historicals that Virgin published, the other being Gareth Roberts’s self-professedly Spooneresque The Plotters. Which starts to give us a way into understanding the Lucarotti/Spooner distinction, as, at least within the Virgin line, it maps straightforwardly onto the good old frock/gun distinction, with Roberts and McIntee both being as steadfast representations of their respective styles as can be imagined. And it works well for the historical record, since Spooner’s stories were broad and comical and silly, whereas Lucarotti’s were largely darker and more tragic. So far, so good.

But there’s an odd problem to the Lucarotti style of historical that seeps through at the edges, and to understand it we need to look back briefly to Set Piece. There the central point was the importance of the small-scale and individual in the face of the epic. This is a common enough Doctor Who theme, but it echoes oddly in this context. And it is one that maps intuitively along the frock/gun distinction, with the focus on small-scale and individual dignity being an inherent contrast with the epic bombast of the gun approach. Again, we’re not at anything particularly new or insightful here: this borders on the basic definition of frocks, and is certainly the major point that both Cornell and Orman are pushing throughout their books.

But McIntee outright rejects that here, putting the Doctor in a hardline “not one word” position against making changes to history or saving people. The Doctor flat-out insists that they cannot save any of the Cathars in the besieged Roc, a position that is diametrically opposed to the one Ace takes at the end of Set Piece. And while Set Piece depends in part on the fact that Ace is contrasting herself from the Doctor, there’s still a tacit support for what she’s doing there that is fundamentally incompatible with the basic ethos of Sanctuary, where the pre-existing arc of history reigns supreme and individuals are almost entirely spurious.

But here’s the thing - Orman, at least, demonstrated the focus on the individual in contrast to the logic of big dramatic set pieces - a rejection not only of the dumb cult television approach of Sliders but even of the ironic-spectacle-based storytelling of Independence Day But if we take Sanctuary as a callback to the Lucarotti approach to historicals then we have to take it in part as a contrast to the Spooner style, which was a big, spectacular pile of set pieces. This is not, to be clear, a problem as such. After all, binary distinctions are made to be deconstructed, and just because Lucarotti/Spooner and gun/frock line up in some circumstances doesn’t mean they do in others. But this does, to my mind, set up an interesting debate about the utility of spectacle.

On the one hand spectacle is obviously a big part of Doctor Who throughout its history. Big, dramatic set pieces are the name of the game. And even if Orman critiques the way in which they exclude ordinary and everyday people from the narrative, it’s worth remembering that her book is also built around them. They’re a part of what Doctor Who is. Even Sanctuary relies on set pieces, albeit not of the “every trope of the Cathars you ever expected to see” variety. But McIntee, as ever, is fond of sprawling action sequences, and Sanctuary has several of them.

Of course, part of this is that it’s an error to think that the Lucarotti style is defined by the lack of set pieces. That just gets the order of events wrong. The Lucarotti style of historical came first, and Spooner second. That Spooner’s approach was more prevalent and visibly based on playing through expected genre tropes makes it tempting to define the Lucarotti approach as the opposite of that, but that ends up cutting Lucarotti himself out of the equation. And as we noted, the Lucarotti style is necessarily wrapped up in his own peculiar focuses. What defines the Lucarotti style is not its lack of reliance on set pieces, nor even its lack of humor as such (The Crusade, after all, is a Spooner-style historical without much comedy), but rather its focus on alienation. The Lucarotti-style historical is about the fact that the main characters do not belong to this time, and on the fact that the past is strange and unfathomable. Its lack of familiar set pieces is a part of that, certainly - an unfathomable past doesn’t have familiar set pieces to draw on - but it’s not the point as such.

This is, unfortunately, something that McIntee doesn’t quite get. For all that his historical setting is unfamiliar to the audience, he’s strangely unconcerned with explaining it, generally acitng as though the audience should just be more or less familiar with the various heretical Christian sects of the thirteenth century. The cast he has is exactly wrong for a Lucarotti-style historical: both Benny and the Doctor know their history too well to be alienated from it. It’s a puzzling turn, both in terms of how it fails to mesh with the style McIntee is obviously drawing from and in terms of the effectiveness of the storytelling itself.

Instead McIntee draws on what is probably the most long-term influential aspect of the Lucarotti historicals, their obsession with the unchangeability of history. It is, after all, from The Aztecs that the oft-quoted “you can’t rewrite history, not one line” bit comes from. And this has influenced a host of writers who have done various takes on the Doctor’s grim-faced refusal to alter the web of time, a grim-faced refusal that, of course, applies only to Earth’s history prior to the transmission date of the episode (save, of course, for The Waters of Mars, which is about as clever as it thinks it is on this point). This is one of the big tropes of Doctor Who, and it dates straight back to Lucarotti. And it’s complete rubbish.

First of all, let’s just note how out of step with the rest of Doctor Who it is. There’s an obvious plot reason not to have the Doctor altering Earth’s history dramatically, but the idea of some complete ban on it being one of his most deeply held moral principles is very hard to fit with the more outright anarchic tendencies displayed elsewhere. And Lucarotti’s fondness of putting this supposed moral principle in conflict with more intuitively fundamental principles makes it even rougher. This gets played as the Doctor being alien and having ethics other than our own, and that certainly can be made to work in some cases, but for the most part it just seems weirdly inconsistent. It’s worth noting that Spooner himself rubbished the complete immutability of history, establishing that the Meddling Monk had, in fact, changed history into its current state.

But the second issue is that the immutability of history in Lucarotti’s work is not some vital moral principle that he espouses. After all, it doesn’t port well at all to any real-world issue. There’s no hot debate in the world about changing history, and suggesting that Lucarotti cares hugely about the idea of changing history in and of itself doesn’t make a lot of sense. It makes much more sense to treat Lucarotti’s obsession with history as a factor of his larger focus on the alien nature of the past. For Lucarotti, it’s not that we oughtn’t change history, it’s that we cannot alter a culture that we do not understand. (There is, of course, a second formulation advanced by Whitaker in which the issue is with rewriting one’s own history, making it a problem of identity, but that’s really not Lucarotti’s game.) McIntee draws on little of this.

The result is a book that’s not entirely successful. It deserves some praise, certainly, for an artfully done budding romance between Benny and Guy, and its final moments, in which Benny decides to give up any hope of finding Guy alive just so she doesn’t have to face the possibility of confirming that he’s dead, are quite starkly powerful. But on the whole the book seems faltering, and faltering in a manner that resembles the way in which Sliders is problematic: it mistakenly believes itself to be serious. It mistakenly believes that this sort of doomful tragedy is what Doctor Who is good at. And it’s not. It’s not that Doctor Who is bad at it. It’s that Doctor Who is… adequate at it. And, fine, but there are things Doctor Who is actually good at. There are, in fact, things that it is great at: that it’s one of the best in the world at. Set Piece pointed well in that direction. The next book does not so much point in that direction as demonstrate it with triumphant glee. This… works.

Which has always been the case. The Lucarotti historical was always pretty good. The Aztecs was great. The Massacre had its moments, but was heavily rewritten. Marco Polo has always had its reputation inflated by being the first missing story. But the Lucarotti historical was the most serious-minded approach of its era, and just like the base-under-siege became “what Doctor Who does” because it was the closest thing to serious drama of its era, the Lucarotti historical became beloved less for its quality than for the fact that it was Doctor Who trying to be serious drama, which is automatically better than anything else. But it never was.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 43 (Independence Day, Sliders, Xena: Warrior Princess)

I’ve been batting around the phrase “cult television” for a while, but have managed so far to avoid talking about it in any depth or detail. I mean, we did Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the whole point of that was that it wasn’t cult. We did The X-Files, but had too much fun with paranoia to do its cult aspects. So we should probably slip one more in that deals with cult television. And, perhaps, for good measure, what it’s not. Actually, let’s start with that, simply because “actually successful science fiction of a sort” is probably a more useful baseline to have. So let’s go with Independence Day.

Improbably, and in addition to being an extremely successful movie, Independence Day is absolutely ridiculously fun. And a lot of this comes down to the fact that it is a movie that does not make the slightest effort to be taken seriously. It is not a movie that lends itself to any reading based on its supposed sincerity. Yes, it’s an overtly jingoistic film about how America is the greatest country in the world and Macs are compatible with anything up to and including alien death ships. But that’s not the point. The point is the scene where Will Smith’s dog survives.

The thing about this rather incredible scene is that it’s so spectacularly unsubtle in what it does. So, for those poor souls who haven’t seen the film, the aliens attack with their giant death explosion beam thingy. And Will Smith’s wife, played by Vivica A. Fox, is in her car in a tunnel, and is thus about to explode. So she takes off, with her kids, and runs down the tunnel to find a little nook to hide in and, you know, not explode. Which she does. And to be clear, at this point all of the significant human characters are out of danger. At that point Vivica Fox’s character whistles for their dog, which had been left in the car.

Let us pause for a moment and consider the dramatic implications of this sequence. All danger to the main characters has, at this point, been resolved. Absolutely nobody is in any danger except for the dog, who has been deliberately put into danger. At this point we must pause to consider the tastes of the average American moviegoer who has selected Independence Day for their evening’s entertainment over such options as Phenomenon, The Nutty Professor, and Striptease. These are not people who are going to stand for the death of a dog. The idea that the dog might die is actually slightly more implausible than the idea that Will Smith might bite it. (Will Smith, of course, is the lone black man who is allowed to survive action films.) Which means that this entire sequence has, in effect, been set up to tease the audience with the fact that the dog might die. Needless to say the dog instead runs down the tunnel and scampers into the hiding space just as the shockwave of the explosion rides past. In slow motion. So the film has set up a spurious threat for the sole purpose of giving a big dramatic payoff scene. Not, to be clear, for the purposes of engaging the audience or anything like that, but purely to get a visual set piece of a dog triumphantly bounding away from an explosion into the film.

This is the key thing to recognize about Independence Day. Nothing whatsoever in the entire film is there because it advances the “plot” or anything so pedestrian. No, it’s all there to string together the set pieces. It looks like a plot and acts like a plot, but the movie is not only purely interested in stitching together its big visual scenes, it’s not even invested in hiding that from the audience. This is important for contextualizing the movie’s name-earning scene, in which President Danes gives a stirring speech to the world about, essentially, how America is the best country in the world and will lead the rest of the world so that July 4th is their Independence Day too. If you haven’t seen the film, you’re probably underestimating how ludicrously jingoistic this speech is. But by that point in the film’s somewhat impressive running time the film has clearly sacrificed any goals other than chaining together all of the obligitory set pieces of the exceedingly obvious movie structure that it is. So it has the big stirring pro-American speech, but it’s impossible to take it seriously simply because the movie has been so unrepentant in being an insincere piece of shlock that there’s almost nothing to take seriously.

Almost nothing. As with any good piece of camp it’s not entirely possible to work out how deliberate Independence Day is in its insincerity. Certainly the requirement placed on the BBC Independence Day UK radio play (featuring Colin Baker, among others) that the British were not allowed to save the day is… troubling, especially given that the radio play was hardly going to risk any sort of backlash in the US in 1996. And the further work of Devlin and Emmerich never has them manage the level of self-aware and self-effacing irony that animates Independence Day. The film may well be a case of a bad film that came out at the exact moment where it could be good in spite of itself. It happens.

Nevertheless, Independence Day is another marker in a larger shift that’s going on through here in popular relationship to sci-fi media. Sci-fi has been a part of popular culture as long as it’s existed, but there’s obviously a division between what we might call “cool” sci-fi and “uncool” sci-fi. In 1995, at least, Doctor Who was spectacularly uncool, and Independence Day was very cool, to the point where it was the subject of a lot of “sci-fi is back” covers, because apparently it had gone away. But it’s worth charting a certain arc here. The category of “geek” as a vaguely oppressed category is largely a post-Star Wars invention. I mean, there were geeks before, yes. But the cultural construction of geeks was a phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s. And I can vouch, as a geek growing up in the era, that there was something terribly strange about trying to figure out why liking Doctor Who got me attacked but liking Terminator would been OK. (Not that there weren’t dozens of other reasons I was screwed there.)

And here it’s worth looking at something we’ve mostly avoided, with is an utterly dire piece of American cult television from the 1990s. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Sliders. Alarmingly, this is one of the closest things that the United States has ever made to an American version of Doctor Who. It concerns a group of four people who travel between parallel universes via a malfunctioning machine that they can’t pilot, trying to get back to their home reality. So you’ve got all the tropes of the original premise of Doctor Who, right down to the cast size and basic structure, with the teenage girl demographic being replaced by the token black man. The only difference is that Doctor Who was good, whereas Sliders is the most eminently punchable television show I’ve ever watched.

For the purposes of comparing directly to Independence Day, let’s take “The Prince of Wails” as our episode of choice. There are others that would do, but that one concerns an alternate earth where the British won the Revolutionary War and so democracy never took hold anywhere in the world and every country is just a monarchy. It is difficult to adequately encompass how mind-wrenchingly and horrifyingly stupid this is, but just for the fun of it, let’s try. The idea that democracy is purely an American invention is, of course, absurd. The Founding Fathers were influenced massively by the Enlightenment. Key lines of the Declaration of Independence were nicked wholesale from John Locke. Other thought depended heavily on the French, who actually had their own revolution that was kind of important in global history. The idea that the British were particularly ruthlessly undemocratic is especially rich, given that they were busily devolving power from the king to Parliament at the time. Perhaps the crowningly offensive moment of this episode comes when the characters inform the crown prince of the concept of the “Bill of Rights,” apparently largely unaware that Britain had one for nearly a century prior to the American Revolution. Instead we get a vision of Britain as a tax-happy bunch of lunatics who casually and by royal decree impose tax rates of 80% or more. (In fact this is one of the things that the English Bill of Rights explicitly forbids.)

This sort of default jingoistic American patriotism is made all the worse by the fact that the wise old scientist character is played as British, and yet seems to firmly believe that America invented democracy, individual liberties, and freedom, cheerily dictating the American Bill of Rights to the crown prince as they encourage him to form a fairer society. He only gets through the first six Amendments, however, and hands the rest off as a quick series of notes. The seventh through tenth Amendments, incidentally, turn out to just be the Declaration of Independence. Who knew. Meanwhile, while all this discussion of the roots of government is going on, the lone black character attempts to get amendments added about how people should be treated equally regardless of race, religion, or musical preference, and apparently wants to enshrine the greatness of James Brown as a Constitutional principle.

So this is obviously terrible. But superificially there’s no obvious way to distinguish the ways in which it is terrible from the ways in which Independence Day’s jingoistic “Today we celebrate our Independence Day” speech. Both trade on a pro-American viewpoint that seems to be being expressed not out of any actual evaluation of anything but for the simple reason that a pro-American bias is somehow expected or necessary. It’s an utterly contentless patriotism that exists purely to reinforce a blind cultural default. Except for one thing, which is what we’ve mentioned already: Independence Day is, if not ironic, at least thoroughly camp. Sliders, on the other hand, seems to lack any self-awareness.

This is what makes it the epitome of uncool science fiction, and perhaps more to the point bad science fiction. It has no interest whatsoever in the question of whether it’s doing anything significant or interesting or meaningful. It’s just blithely executing sci-fi genre tropes with the expectation that they are inherently worthwhile and that an audience demographic will tune in and be fans. Which, as Sliders improbably demonstrates, some people will. Sliders hasn’t the slightest sense that anything has developed since Buck Rogers except for special effects. The result is almost unwatchable, and demonstrates what is so deadening about the bulk of self-consciously cult television.

But every once in a while something comes along that presents an alternative. Take, for instance, Xena: Warrior Princess, an unabashedly cult show that is nevertheless thoroughly fabulous. This is despite not actually being “better” than Sliders in any articulable sense. The only thing it has going for it compared to Sliders is that it has a reasonably sound self-assessment of its quality and is content to be a ludicrous piece of sapphism. And yet that turns out to be tremendous. It’s tempting to describe this in bland and cliched terms like “treating its audience as though they’re intelligent,” but that’s both insufficient and not quite accurate. It’s more accurate to say that Xena: Warior Princess, like Independence Day, is honest about what its audience wants. In this regard, at least, it comes much closer to the model offered by Russell T Davies in Dark Season or Century Falls: a show that simply rejects the idea that being campy adventure need be anything other than a source of joy.

But Xena: Warrior Princess opens another front here that has to be addressed, which is that it is so excessively and blatantly sapphic. But this is, in the show, meticulously rendered as subtext, albeit an almost entirely unambiguous one. That Xena and Gabrielle are a lesbian couple is possible to overlook only through willful blindness. But equally, the show goes to great lengths to keep from explicitly confirming it. Part of this is simply that you couldn’t get away with that yet in 1995. But Xena ran for six years, three of them post-Ellen and “The Puppy Episode.” If it had wanted to do a big “Xena and Gabriel are confirmed as gay” episode it could easily have gotten away with it.

A more useful explanation extends from the historical links between the camp aesthetic that Xena: Warrior Princess unrepentantly fits into and gay culture. There are a raft of historical reasons for this, but the point remains: there is something that is actually preferable about the deferred nature of Xena and Gabrielle’s lesbianism. There is a real sense in which it works better for them to be ensconced in a blatantly camp and transparent closet. And this is something that wasn’t hugely visible in Davies’ shows, at least up to this point, but that is important about Doctor Who and how it came back: the sorts of storytelling tools it used to reestablish itself came out of gay culture. And yet they’re tools that obviously apply well and specifically to cult television.

There’s years of untangling of this to do, and we’ve got some more significant milestones that we’re going to cover, but the basic issue should be clear. What does and doesn’t work in science fiction (and in most things) is getting increasingly complex and based on meta-awareness of tropes. A legacy of camp that intersects heavily with gay culture provides a road map out of that, but the overall intersections between gay culture and science fiction are minimal (although I’m sure you see where this is going for our purposes). And most people, or at least, most people with greenlighting powers for television projects, tend to think that Doctor Who is more like Sliders than it is like Xena: Warrior Princess. And while those in the world of books, particularly those with three-syllable names containing the bigram OR, largely see how to make the leap, the fact of the matter is that if Doctor Who were to come back around now it would be a complete disaster.

Like I Could Run Forever (Set Piece)

I’ll Explain Later

Kate Orman’s second New Adventure, Set Piece, is first and foremost notable for seeing Ace’s departure to become “Time’s Vigilante” and patrol a two hundred year period of Earth’s history via Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart’s mostly functional time machine. The book also finds room for ancient Egypt, Napoleonic France, and late 19th century France in the last days of the Paris Commune. Also a very evil spaceship staffed by robotic ants and a cafe that reiterates through space and time. It’s quite fun, and most people agree: Shannon Sullivan’s rankings put it at fourteenth overall with a 77.5% rating, part of that four-book cluster of Kate Orman books that I’ve mentioned previously. And yet the big two reviews are rather equivocal: Craig Hinton calls it “a masterpiece,” but grouses that Kate Omran is “rather self-indulgent on a number of occasions,” and Lars Pearson can only muster “Good, focused, and clear.” Fools. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s February of 1995. Celine Dion is at number one with “Think Twice.” And that’s February for the number one slot, at least. Madonna, Annie Lennox, Bon Jovi, and a bit of Riverdance also chart, as do things I’ve never heard of but that could well be important: Ini Kamoze, N-Trance, and MN8, for instance. In news, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers goes missing. Michael Foale becomes the first Brit to walk in space. Kevin Mitnick is arrested, and Barings Bank collapses after a securities broker loses $1.4 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. And The Independent publishes the first Bridget Jones column.

While in books, Ace (some would say at long last) leaves the New Adventures in Set Piece, largely wrapping up the strange phenomenon of New Ace. And it is, on the whole, difficult to come up with many words other than “strange” to describe New Ace. She was largely the pet project of Peter Darvill-Evans, who is by this time long gone from editing the New Adventures (it’s not quite clear where the transition was. The Whoniverse guide is the only overt claim I can find, and it has Darvill-Evans’s last New Adventure as Theatre of War), replaced by Rebecca Levene. But even Darvill-Evans seemed to have no real idea what to do with her beyond the concept. Her debut novel was, as we saw, a mess. Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore got one good shot out of the concept, Paul Cornell got two more (one years after the New Adventures had wrapped), and Andrew Cartmel did well enough with the character, though mainly by ignoring all of the New parts of New Ace and just writing Ace, older.

So it’s not a surprise that Levene, fairly early in her time in charge, saw to it that New Ace was written out. And tapping Kate Orman, one of the best Virgin debutants around, for the job is the very definition of sensible. But it leaves Orman with what we usually call the “nightmare brief,” namely having to wrap up a character who never worked in the first place. Central to why this is tricky is the basic question of what went wrong with New Ace. After all, while the idea may invoke the histrionic grimdarkness of the era it came from, the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing prima facie wrong with the idea of New Ace. Taking one of the Doctor’s companions, having him drive them away, and then having them return in a form that is less acceptable to the Doctor. It’s a neat idea for a story, but therein lies the problem.

Because New Ace wasn’t a story. Her first two books were, and then there was a sort of awkward arc about the tensions between her and the Doctor, but there’s not actually, over the course of the New Adventures, what you could accurately call a plot arc regarding Ace’s return. As with Warlock last time, much of this is that we’re in a transitional phase in which what we now recognize as the normal order of things is emerging. New Ace is a premise that Russell T Davies would have absolutely killed with - indeed, he played with things along those lines, particularly with Martha and in Journey’s End, though never in an extended fashion. But one of the innovations Davies really got working in Doctor Who that hadn’t worked right was getting story arcs to hang together on something other than its sci-fi trappings.

And New Ace, as a concept, falls between those eras. She’s an attempt at a broad character arc taking place over multiple stories, but it never comes together simply because the writers aren’t, on aggregate, consistent enough in how they handle it. In practical terms this is how Davies managed to get character arcs to work - he heavily controlled the scripting process, farming pre-selected story out to specifically chosen writers and rewriting scripts heavily to maintain a consistent tone. (Those seeking to understand why Moffat us writing an episode less in Season Seven than he has in previous years ought need no real explanation beyond the fact that Moffat attempts to maintain just as consistent a tone, but doesn’t do his own rewrites of other people’s scripts.) There’s simply no way this was ever going to work in the New Adventures. To take a particularly stark example, the idea that Paul Cornell and Jim Mortimore were ever going to offer compatible visions of character development is difficult to swallow. Both are solid writers, but the sort of world that Mortimore writes and the sort of world Cornell writes are wildly different, and without someone whose job it is to smooth them out into a single vision there was no way to ever give Ace a character arc.

Instead she got stuck reenacting a continual unresolvable tension whereby she was just rebellious enough and opposed enough to the Doctor to generate some dramatic tension, but never quite enough to have a payoff. From Lucifer Rising the extent to which the character could go was fixed. She couldn’t completely rebel against the Doctor because it would break the character, but she also couldn’t actually be repaired to where she has a completely functional relationship with the Doctor because the dysfunction of that relationship is the new hook for the character. Like the impossible to maintain “will they or won’t they” romance plots of Moonlighting and The X-Files, this left the character in a sort of unresolvable tension. The only place she could possibly go anywhere interesting was her departure story, which sounds like it’s setting Kate Orman up for a liberatingly easy job in the vein of The Caves of Androzani whereby she can throw out all the rules and break things with impunity - a task that would be disastrous in the hands of a mediocre writer, but that is right up someone like Orman’s alley. Except that New Ace’s departure actually-a-story has, by this point, just been too long in the making. This is the twenty-second book of New Ace. She’s been around nearly two years barely doing anything - it’s been ages since there’s been much interesting to say about her. And so while Orman has, here, the one book where the character can be made to work, she’s breathing life into a long dead fire here.

And yet Orman makes it work. The shortest explanation to give here is that Orman is the Virgin writer most similar to Paul Cornell - it’s not a surprise that they worked together on two books. She has the same skill at tunnelling down into the basic premises of characters and of the show, and of pushing bits of the show to their breaking point and no further. She is also, like Cornell, an unrepentant frock. Where she does differ is in her capacity for psychological sadism towards her characters. The opening chapters of Set Piece, in which we get a reluctant-villain’s-eye-view of the Doctor in a particularly horrible prison as he tries and fails to escape despite increasing torture, are chilling in a way Cornell never really tries. (Again, Orman’s roots in feminist fandom show through - this sort of aggressive torture is a common slash trope, and one referenced cheekily in Orman’s use of the slash term “Hurt/Comfort” as a chapter title.) But this is largely a difference of technique, serving the same purpose as much of what Cornell does: finding moments where the central premises of the show can become more visible via stark contrast. By torturing the Doctor so aggressively the series’ endless cycles of escapes and captures and the way in which the Doctor’s endless escapes are a fundamental part of the character - one that persist even when he is on the brink of death.

This means that Orman is able to deal with Ace, largely, by just going into the things that do define the character. So she splits up the TARDIS crew, stranding Ace in Ancient Egypt, and having her re-enact her start conditions on Desertworld instead of Iceworld. From there she appears to go bad, becoming an uncritical soldier of a cult of Set/Sutekh worshippers (Sutekh, in this case, being a complete red herring). And then she turns it around and becomes a solid good guy again. It is, in capsule form, a reenacting of her entire character history that’s in turn used to explain her departure. But to understand that transition we have to look at the other aspect of the book, namely its title.

The title is, of course, a multi-leveled thing. On the one hand it’s a reference to the use of Set as a metaphor - the book is literally a piece about Set. But more broadly it refers to the notion of the “set piece” in storytelling - big sequences that the story builds to and that are the “point” of the story. In film and television, particularly action-adventure film and television, these are usually the big action sequences. Doctor Who has always been fond of set pieces. The reputations of many of the lost classics of the Troughton era hinge on their memorable set pieces - the Cybermen waking up in Tomb of the Cybermen, for instance, or large swaths of The Web of Fear. Robert Holmes’s stories tend to be built almost entirely out of chains of set pieces. We talked way back in the Androids of Tara entry about how there’s a general bias towards set piece based stories within Doctor Who fandom. And accordingly, Set Piece itself is a big mess of set pieces, with Ace, Benny, and the Doctor all delivered to their own set pieces for most of the story.

The logic of the set piece is, of course, the logic of big, epic things. Set pieces say that single, big moments are the point of a story. And this is ultimately what Orman puts Ace in opposition to. After a story full of set pieces she arrives in Paris around the time of the fall of the Paris Commune, and she decides that she should stay there and try to save lives. Not to save the Paris Commune or alter history or make a big difference. Just to try to save some lives, because it’s the right thing to do. Implicit in this is a rejection of the entire logic of Ace’s big departure story - of the idea that something big has to happen to justify the character.

Instead, after taking the character apart and putting her through all her iconic moments again, Orman goes in almost the exact opposite direction. She finds a quiet dignity in her military service and status as a soldier, establishing her as a figure who, unlike the Doctor’s big, sweeping plans, just goes and tries to help. On the one hand this is the exact opposite of the normal expectation for the final New Ace book. Instead of getting the story that wraps up all her angst and drama we get a story that suggests that we were wrong to ever look for a resolution. It’s not quite a rebuke of the past books so much as it is a quiet reminder that so much of what writers tried to do with New Ace was unnecessary - that she could function just fine as a companion without having to have her soldier-nature be a source of conflict. (To be fair, this is largely an accurate description of how post-No Future Ace worked, but in practical terms the character never shook the reputation of her first year.) Instead of the hard-edged soldier/nice gentle Doctor divide that New Ace seemed to embrace, Orman substitutes a different one, with Ace as the soldier who realizes that nobody deserves to be sacrificed for the cause, and who adds this to the incomplete list of rules the Doctor presented Ace with in Dragonfire, and the Doctor as someone continually at risk of losing touch with the level that she lives on.

Which is, of course, a restatement of the “the Doctor needs his Jackie Paper” idea that Cornell floated in Love and War, only redone to work with New Ace. And it’s a perfectly good set-up for the characters. One that could have worked perfectly two dozen books earlier. And having established it, Orman packs it in, letting Ace roam a small section of time and protecting what she can. Because while the Doctor may need someone like Ace to keep him grounded, at the end of the day Ace doesn’t need someone like the Doctor to give her purpose. Ace can function as a heroic character on her own. It’s a lovely end for the character, full of humanity and grace and dignity instead of epic bombast and violence. And it gets at what’s really the impressive thing about the New Adventures when they’re at their best: not their ability to execute big, dark and epic stories, but their ability to make searingly emotional and harrowing stories out of basic human dignity and decency. Set Piece is, in that regard, a triumph of the line. And once we understand how it works we can start to move towards what is, by consensus, the high point of the Virgin era. There’s just one book of setup to work through first.

Roundsomely Layered on the Bone (Warlock)

I’ll Explain Later

We have skipped St. Anthony’s Fire, Falls the Shadow, and Parasite, all of which are in the bottom third of New Adventures in Sullivan’s rankings.

Warlock is the second part of Andrew Cartmel’s War Trilogy, and abandons the Cyberpunk of the first volume in favor for a thriller about drug culture and animal experimentation. Which sounds like it should piss a lot of people off, but it actually comes in at a cheerily average twenty-ninth place in Sullivan’s rankings, and does extremely well with the critics. Craig Hinton sums it up as “Warlock is nasty, Warlock is unpleasant, Warlock is sick. And Warlock is a triumph for Andrew Cartmel.” Lars Pearson takes a similar tack, saying that “Warlock strikes your chest dead-center, warming you up and making you angry.” DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s January of 1995. East 17 are at number one with their holdover Christmas #1 “Stay Another Day.” It’s unseated a week later by “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex, who round out the month. Celine Dion, Oasis, Boyzone, Mariah Carey,  R Kelly, and Green Day all also chart, the latter with an actually-successful-this-time rerelease of last year’s single “Basket Case.” So clearly we’re in that part of the nineties. More cheerily, Portishead makes it to number three in the albums chart with Dummy.

In news, the World Trade Organization is established. Star Trek: Voyager premieres, to nobody’s particular joy. The Russians briefly panic and think Norway is trying to bomb them. And the first MORI poll of 1995 shows that the Conservative Party is only trailing Labour by about thirty points, a significant improvement of their previous forty points. They still don’t have to actually go get slaughtered at the polls for two more years, however.

And in books it’s Andrew Cartmel’s Warlock. It was easy, with Warhead, to miss what was going on with Andrew Cartmel. Doctor Who itself was straining hard in the face of unexpectedly becoming a series of novels. Whereas Cartmel was actually making his Doctor Who writing debut, having been the first regular script editor since Terrance Dicks not to self-commission, and the only one since Peter Bryant to have never actually written an episode of Doctor Who. So to try to figure out how Cartmel’s writing was evolving in Warhead is to peer through a glass darkly at what isn’t even close to the most interesting thing in view. But now we come to Warlock, the second part of his War trilogy, and it raises some interesting insights both about Cartmel as a writer and about the shifting role of Doctor Who in relation to the larger body of science fiction.

While it is not quite accurate to say that Cartmel is the last Doctor Who writer to decide that the point of Doctor Who is to do “serious” science fiction, with its premise meaning that it can jump around from idea to idea rapidly, it is accurate to say that at the time of Warlock this is something of a dying idea. It would enjoy a brief resurgence of a sort in the latter days of the BBC Books range, but given that this period was as much concerned with the overt jettisoning of all of the obvious markers of Doctor Who continuity as it was with actually telling “serious” science fiction stories. These days, however, there’s no pretense that Doctor Who should be an anthology series of science fiction stories with consistent characters.

And it’s important to recognize that this is a real change. When Doctor Who started this was what it was for. The Hartnell era is an anthology mixing various sorts of science fiction with a variety of historical settings. There were some hiccups almost immediately, of course - the fact that the first two straightforwardly science fiction stories of the series were Terry Nation stories that went not for any sort of literary seriousness but for a sort of jaunty Dan Dare space adventure, for instance, did the long-term ambitions of the series for serious-minded science fiction irreparable damage. More interesting are the non-Terry Nation stories that followed: The Sensorites, with its monster-free attempt at alien cultures, Planet of the Giants with its ecological parable, The Rescue with its elaborate play on the viewer’s default assumptions about what “monsters” were, The Web Planet with its absolutely everything about it, and The Space Museum with its existential meditation on free will. Doctor Who spent its first few years moving through different visions for science fiction. Even the third series, when things began to settle down into a more “standard” sort of approach features ambiences as wildly different as The Celestial Toymaker and The Ark. And what’s telling about most of these is that they aren’t trying to be Doctor Who versions of those types of stories, they’re just trying to tell a variety of different science fiction stories.

And even after that there are several points in which Doctor Who is clearly trying to mimic the approaches of literary-minded science fiction. In the Robert Holmes era, even as Holmes comes to rely on his “powerful foe returning from the dead” formula, you’ve got people like Louis Marks and Chris Boucher doing stories that are obviously attempts to just do good, solid pieces of science fiction within the Doctor Who paradigm. This isn’t just the attempt to do the Doctor Who version of a mummy story as in, say, Pyramids of Mars, but attempts to do real and serious pieces of science fiction that use Doctor Who as their vehicle. Christopher Bidmead’s approach to the series demonstrates a similar approach. But over time there’s a shift away from Doctor Who being a premise that lets you do Out of The Unknown with a regular cast and towards Doctor Who having an identity of its own that’s based on doing Doctor Who versions of a bunch of different things.

For the most part the New Adventures fit firmly into that latter camp. Even something like Lucifer Rising, which owes a clear and massive debt to a huge tradition of literary science fiction, is ultimately a Doctor Who version of that sort of story, which is where its vague embarrassment over being Doctor Who comes from. Whereas in Warlock there’s a very different tone. And it requires us to sort out two distinct aspects of the New Adventures. On the one hand the New Adventures are somewhat infamous for often not having very much of the Doctor in them, and Cartmel’s books are particularly prone to this. But this is distinct from the occasional sense that they’re a bit sheepish about being Doctor Who books that are ostensibly for adults. Warlock has very little of the Doctor in it, but there’s never a sense that it’s because Cartmel doesn’t find the character interesting. Cartmel writes a ton of terribly Doctorish moments, and several of the book’s biggest dramatic turns, most particularly when Vincent and Justine take off running at the sight of the Doctor, depend on the strength of the character. Cartmel clearly adores the Doctor but thinks that a little goes a long way.

Yes, Cartmel is extremely interested in things beyond the TARDIS crew. He spends a lot of time on his world-building, and perhaps more to the point, he luxuriates in it to a degree. This is the longest New Adventure, and it’s far less padded than, say, First Frontier. Cartmel spends time building up his characters, and doing it memorably at that. Every character who spends a substantial amount of time in the book is well-fleshed out. Even villainous characters who exist primarily to do something bad and get killed for it get a good few pages of attention and development, and we get a real sense of who they are from it. Sometimes they’re sympathetic, other times they’re horrifying, but they’re always understandable. The effect is much like that of the much-lauded issue of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles that goes back and traces the life history of a random guard who was casually gunned down several issues earlier. Which would be another example of Cartmel casually nicking techniques from comic books, except for one thing: that issue came out several months after Warlock.

And that’s the key thing that really happens with Warlock and Andrew Cartmel. Cartmel always had the ambition that Doctor Who could be “serious” science fiction, but with Warlock his technique finally gets to the point where he can actually do it. He’s no longer dependent on copying the tropes of more acclaimed stories. Instead he’s got the confidence and skill to just go out and do a piece of successful science fiction. And here we get to the interesting thing about this book. The Hugo Awards for 1996, covering books released in 1995, gave their Best Novel award to Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The Diamond Age, as it happens, is a phenomenal book - one of Stephenson’s best. But let’s be puckish and ask - is it a better book than Warlock?

The question itself is tricky in some ways. The books are, despite some obvious similarities (most notably that they are both working to move on from Cyberpunk), very different pieces of work. Neal Stephenson is a bombastic writer of big ideas, and The Diamond Age is a towering achievement of concepts and explorations of the interactions between imagined technology and people. Cartmel is, as ever, an angry moral crusader, and his book is not so much about the ideas as it is about a seething, righteous anger about animal rights. I’ll admit a preference for Stephenson’s approach, but it’s exactly that - a preference. I’m certainly not going to suggest any sort of definitive judgment of one or the other. Certainly I think a solid argument can be made that Cartmel comes out ahead in a comparison between the two on the basis of characterization. Stephenson, though certainly good at characterization, is prone to equating a character’s intellectual positions with characterization, which isn’t a horrible decision, but seems in many ways more limited than Cartmel, who weaves a generally more intricate portrait. Cartmel uses this to great effect, wringing some absolutely gut-wrenching and excruciating segments out of the subjective experiences of animals, including an absolutely heartbreaking section in which the Doctor’s cat is casually euthanized. And perhaps most crucially, both novels share some flaws, most obviously the fact that their endings are rushed. When push comes to shove I’m largely inclined towards The Diamond Age as the better novel, simply because I think its heady mixture of big ideas is more stimulating. But I think it’s an uphill argument to say that the books are somehow in different leagues.

Not, of course, that you’d know it by looking at the books’ acclaim. Warlock got nominated for no substantial awards ever. Of course it didn’t. Not a single one of the nominees for Best Novel in the entire history of the Hugos has ever been for a licensed property. It’s clearly not that the major franchises of science fiction are unworthy of acclaim - after all, Doctor Who, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Battlestar Galactica have all been nominated and won Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation. But when it comes to books there is an unwavering snobbery against licensed properties. To the point, in fact, where the prize for Best Related Work, in which non-fiction about television series is eligible, has gone to a book about a single existent property exactly once, in 2011, when Mad Norwegian Press’s Chicks Dig Time Lords won it. This is almost amusing, especially given the vehemence with which science fiction fans are usually willing to defend the marginalization of science fiction. But within science fiction fandom there’s a visible marginalization of licensed properties as “less worthy” than “proper” literary science fiction.

I’m certainly not going so far as to claim that it’s some grave injustice that Warlock didn’t get a Hugo nomination. For one thing, Warlock isn’t even the best Doctor Who novel of 1995. But it’s striking that the idea that it ever would is completely laughable, and in a way that has almost nothing to do with the book’s quality. The fact is that there’s no level of quality any of the New Adventures could ever have had that would have gotten them a Hugo nomination for Best Novel. In some ways it’s even more worth pointing this out with relation to Human Nature, a story that got a Hugo nomination when it was remade for television (where franchises do win Hugos), but was never, in a million years, going to see a nomination as a novel. And there’s something a little strange about this. Especially because the Hugo Awards are about the only place where that bias actually exists anymore. We talked in the wake of Star Wars about how science fiction as a genre in the golden age sense was an incredibly narrow era that didn’t port much outside of a few decades. And this is an important point - the sort of literary science fiction that Warlock aspires to just isn’t that significant a factor anymore.

The light of hindsight gives us some context for this, though. Because these days there’s barely such a thing as non-franchise science fiction that makes much of a splash. And what does exist is so overtly focused on playing with the tropes of existing stories that it’s almost impossible to separate it from franchise science fiction. We have, at this point, all but finished the transition to a mode where science fiction plays with its own iconography. And that’s a mode that fundamentally changes how Doctor Who interacts with other science fiction. It very much pushes Doctor Who towards the default approach of “Doctor Who does X,” where X is a known quantity and away from just trying to be another venue for science fiction in general.

As I said, it’s not that Warlock is inattentive to this. Cartmel has a clear passion for the Doctor Who-ish aspects of his story. But Cartmel is, in many ways, providing a last flicker of a dying trend in Doctor Who. This is, in many ways, the most Hartnell-esque story of the New Adventures era simply inasmuch as, had Verity Lambert, David Whitaker, and Dennis Spooner been overseeing Doctor Who as a line of books in the mid-90s, this is the sort of book they’d have commissioned. And while it’s a triumph, that is in many ways less interesting than the fact that it exists at all. We’re now just a decade away from Doctor Who’s return, and when it does come back it does so in a form that simply doesn’t do stories like this anymore. Nowadays a story only makes it to screen if it has something to say about Doctor Who itself. Take the most straightforwardly “literary sci-fi” story of the Eccleston season, The Long Game, where the media commentary angle of the story is cut with a lengthy exploration of the role of the companion. This is inevitable - Doctor Who in the 21st century has to be trope aware and meta simply because that’s where the culture is. And with Cartmel’s New Adventures we get the last great moments of the alternative.

I'm Sorry, Sir, You Have No Clearance (First Frontier)

I'll Explain Later

We skipped the largely disliked Strange England by Simon Messingham. He gets better in the BBC Books line.

First Frontier, David McIntee’s second novel, mashes up American UFO myths with Doctor Who, and then, about halfway through, pulls off the return of the Master. The book is altogether lighter than White Darkness, although maintains McIntee’s fondness for lengthy action sequences, upon which its reputation largely hinges. Craig Hinton proclaims it to be “another winner from Mr. McIntee,” while Lars Pearson, who had been skeptical about McIntee’s first effort as well, says that the book “needed to shed about 100 pages and not end with a whimper.” On the whole this novel is apparently stunningly average - thirty-third out of sixty-one on Sullivan’s rankings, with a 68.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s September of 1994. “Love is All Around,” improbably, is still at number one, having landed there way back in June. They stay there for the first two weeks of the month before Whigfield finally takes them down with “Saturday Night.” Boyz II Men, Blur, Kylie Minogue, R.E.M., and Bon Jovi also chart.

Since last we checked in, a fire wiped out the Norwich Central Library. Woodstock ’94 happened, because nothing commemorates the spirit of the 1960s like a massive corporate remake. And the Provisional Irish Republican Army announces a complete halt to all military options. While during the month this book comes out, Louise Jensen is raped and murdered by British soldiers in Cyprus, the US carries out a bloodless invasion of Haiti, and, in a desperate attempt to let me have three items in this sentence, Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Last Theorem again.

And in books, First Frontier. Since the “I’ll Explain Later” section robs me of any chance to bury the lead, we may as well start with the big deal, which is that this book features the return of the Master. Actually, this is still burying the lead slightly, as the real story is in many ways not that the Master is back but that the New Adventures have decided to regenerate him, with the Ainley version of the Master getting shot down by Ace in one of the novel’s innumerable action sequences. This is an unusual move. For a variety of reasons it is unrealistic to have the novels maintain the status quo of the television series - and indeed they haven’t, both introducing Benny and evolving Ace into New Ace.

Nevertheless, there are degrees of this sort of thing. None of the wilderness years lines ever made a sincere attempt at regenerating the Doctor. The only wilderness year regeneration was on television. And the reason for this is relatively obvious: it’s done so that if the series returns to television it can, in theory, pick up where it left off. Even the aging of Ace in Deceit only serves to advance her age by as many years had passed since Survival, effectively keeping Ace and Sophie Aldred’s ages in line. So if Doctor Who were to have come back with McCoy and Aldred in 1993 it would have already had to age Ace exactly as much as Deceit already had. Doctor Who, having been a television series first, always enjoys a narrative gravity towards television. The canon debates on Doctor Who, tedious as they are, aren’t really about what counts, but about what counts beyond what’s on television. Nobody, for better or for worse, ever proposes a view of Doctor Who canon in which the auxiliary material is all agreed upon but we’re not quite sure about The Stones of Blood. And so very often the job of the books or audios was viewed as “preserving” Doctor Who for when the show eventually made its return to television.

But in 1994 Anthony Ainley was alive and well - indeed, he portrayed the Master again in 1997 for the Destiny of the Doctors computer game. And yet McIntee opted to regenerate the Master. To some extent this still can be read as a net favor to the series, in that it’s no longer stuck with an actor-bound Master who can’t regenerate, but making that argument requires that we both accept that the idea of a regeneration limit is actually binding and, more importantly, requires a whole bunch of assertions about the nature of what happens at the end of The Keeper of Traken that are, while admittedly plausible, in no way the only way to read events. Simply put, the amount of expositional lift needed to justify why the Ainley Master could regenerate is minimal. Indeed, McIntee’s book has little more explanation for it than “aliens! With nanites!” There is little to no favor to the future here, not least because the putative model for McIntee’s Master, Basil Rathbone, had been dead a quarter-century when First Frontier was published, making the regeneration an almost complete dead end for the series.

And certainly its effect was to be the first shot in one of the most snarled messes around for those who enjoy Doctor Who continuity, namely the timeline of the Master from Survival through to Utopia. With the TV Movie (which actually seems to contradict the existence of the Ainley Master for good measure), Mike Tucker’s novel Prime Time, Lawrence Miles’s implied Master in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, and the Big Finish audios Dust Breeding and Master all crowding in, not to mention Scream of the Shalka and, if you’re one of the people who blindly assumes that the Ainley Master couldn’t regenerate, the difficulty in squaring away the status quo of Utopia all crowding in. Which is, in practice, the problem with trying to do bold and definitive continuity changes in a non-television version of Doctor Who is that nobody is going to listen to you. Heck, you’re unlikely enough to get anyone to listen to you if you do it on television unless you’re Robert Holmes, in which case people will take every continuity change you make seriously whether you want them to or not.

This is a standard problem in other ultra-long-form serialized media. In superhero comics, in particular, it’s a common ailment. About half the chapters of my Wonder Woman book have some variation on “and then the writer threw out all of his predecessor’s new ideas and created his own supporting cast.” Doctor Who typically avoids this by having a relatively small amount of continuity - there just aren’t that many things to discard or completely reinvent, and most of those lack a heck of a lot of coherence to begin with. If you quietly change the Cybermen from tricky subversive communists who lurk around space stations into a strutting army of silver badasses nobody’s really going to notice. There’s just not a lot of continuity in televised Doctor Who to dramatically rewrite. Seasons Twenty and Twenty-Two excepted, the bulk of stories aren’t sequels to previous ones.

But because of the differing audience for the novels there are, understandably, a heck of a lot more sequels. First Frontier is the thirtieth New Adventure and more or less the halfway point of the range. And while by definition any attempt to count this is thoroughly subjective, I can get a pretty defensible tally whereby it’s the fifteenth novel whose basic premise positions it in terms of some previous story. (That said, the frequency with which this happens drops off sharply around this point - ignoring internal New Adventures sequels [the back two-third of Cartmel’s War Trilogy, for instance] I get nine sequel books in the last thirty-one. The reason for this is relatively straightforward - those writers interested in doing sequels largely migrated to the Missing Adventures line, where sequel books were exceedingly common, including a five-book run in 1996 in which every single book was a sequel to a previous adventure.) And so the phenomenon of writers throwing each other’s continuity out becomes considerably more common.

Indeed, for all the influence of the Virgin line, and it ought be obvious by this point that there was a lot of it, virtually none of its influence was on the level of continuity. Save for the nod to the Chelonians in The Pandorica Opens I’m not sure anything plot-wise from the New Adventures has been acknowledged by the new series. Certainly there’s no evidence of its largest and boldest claims about continuity: the Looms and the Other and the Gallifreyan Houses and all that jazz. And this is true of most of the Wilderness Years material. Even as it spins increasingly fraught and complex takes on the program’s history and continuity, these inventions are almost all ignored.

I said on Monday that fannish engagement is an inherently paranoid mode. This obsessive and, more to the point, fruitless sequelizing of the fan-run wilderness years demonstrates that. The wilderness years were uniquely concerned with the endless propagation of theories and data, simultaneously working towards a master narrative of Doctor Who and foreclosing the possibility of that with their own tangled mass of contradictions. In this regard its fitting that McIntee makes what is probably the most blatantly and thoroughly overruled change to Doctor Who continuity in a book that is also a celebration of the iconic paranoia images of UFOs and the Cold War. It is probably going a bit beyond what can fairly be described as authorial intent, but it is further fitting that he picks the Master as the subject here, and that he makes a change that, in a fundamental sense, cannot possibly be reflected in many of the later media in that Basil Rathbone cannot possibly be cast in a major role in Doctor Who.

The relevance of the latter is straightforward enough. By making a change to Doctor Who that would necessarily have to be at least partially rejected by future media McIntee is almost inviting paranoid engagement. The idea that a Basil Rathbone Master was ever going to stand long-term was on the face of it ridiculous. (Indeed, it doesn’t even last until the end of the Virgin line.) But the use of the Master is perhaps more complex. I alluded to it partially last entry - there is something intrinsically paranoid about the Master. His prior three entries into the series all came at moments where the series took a paranoid turn. And here he appears again not only surrounded by the paranoid mythology of UFOs, but in a way that drives the paranoid mode of the wilderness years forward considerably.

It is worth, then, sketching out exactly why the Master is such a paranoid figure. A big part of it is the inherent confusion of his name. He may be called the Master, but the one thing he cannot possibly do is actually be the Master of anything. He is, after all, defined as the dark mirror of the Doctor. But this isn’t quite accurate. He’s not just the dark mirror, he’s the inferior mirror. This is the basic problem with any “evil version of the hero” villain. Because the role of the villain is to be reliably defeated they cannot possibly be an equivalent to the hero, whose role is, after all, to reliably not be defeated. (This inferiority is even reflected in his name - the Master has a lesser academic degree than the Doctor) And yet the nature of the “evil version of the hero” concept is that they are, in theory, an arch-villain. This makes the Master a figure of paranoia - he is on the one hand a supposed anchoring part of the narrative, and on the other is always inadequate to that purpose. Like the master narrative sought by the paranoid the Master purports to explain everything, but ultimately fails to explain anything at all.

The Master thus ends up representing many of the show’s worst instincts. His obligatory returns (even before the clues started dropping everybody knew he was back in Series Three), his inept schemes, and the way in which his presence collapses a plot into utter straightforwardness are fundamentally allies with a death-drive obsessed paranoia that is problematic in the context of Doctor Who. And unlike other villains who inevitably return, his concept is grounded in nothing other than Doctor Who itself. The Daleks and the Cybermen are concepts unto themselves that, when introduced, bring their own ideas to the story. The Master is nothing more than the failed master narrative of Doctor Who itself.

And yet he is strangely inextricable from the show. Which is odd. For the most part I would argue that Doctor Who resists paranoid readings. Its anthology-style storytelling intrinsically cuts against the idea of a torrent of information by fracturing the ongoing narrative - up until 2005 Doctor Who simply didn’t have “arc” stories that could provide such a strange and foreign thing as an ongoing narrative. It worked in an altogether more fragmentary style. But the paranoid is always lurking around in Doctor Who, if only as an alternative that it casts itself against. Doctor Who never drew much on UFO mythology - indeed, the ridiculous conceit of UNIT and routine alien invasions goes almost exactly against the secrecy of UFO mythology. When the show has bothered to explicitly address how so many alien invasions go forgotten by the general public it tends to suggest that the general public simply forgets about them in a supreme act of self-deception, not that there’s some shadowy government organization covering them up. It’s not until 2006 that we get one of those. Even the UK cousin of UFO mythology, Quatermass, is more often drawn upon as a contrast than as a model. Doctor Who is a conscious break from this style. (And so it should have been no surprise that it was also a conscious break from the standard paranoid style of cult television.)

And the Master ends up being the aspect of this break that continually haunts Doctor Who. He is the dark mirror of the Doctor in that he comes from the paranoid alternative to Doctor Who from which it is continually breaking from (and thus continually dependent upon). And First Frontier, in both framing the Master in a larger paranoid narrative and demonstrating the extreme paranoia of this era of Doctor Who, captures that perfectly, if perhaps inadvertently.