The Select Few, All With Their Stories of the Doctor (Return of the Living Dad)

I’ll Explain Later

Return of the Living Dad, Orman’s second novel in five months and one of a staggering three-and-a-half novels she releases in a one year period (with another half coming out four months later, and another full one coming eight after that), features the return of Bernice Summerfield to the New Adventures after a… three month absence. So not really that big a gap, actually. It squares away the old plotline of what happened to her father during the Dalek wars. The answer is that he got time warped to 1983. So that’s unexpected. It’s a Kate Orman book, so everyone loves it. With Paul Cornell providing plotting assistance to boot, so, you know, even better. Lars Pearson goes with “one of Orman’s masterpieces,” Dave Owen at the time said that Orman provides “many profound insights into the lives of her characters, and indeed, people in general.” It’s eighteenth on Sullivan’s rankings, squarely in the narrow range Orman’s books all occupy.

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It’s August of 1996. The Spice Girls are at number one with “Wannabe.” Manic Street Preachers, the Fugees, Los Del Rio, Alanis Morissette, Robbie Williams, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Underworld, Backstreet Boys, IMC, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, R.E.M., George Michael, Bryan Adams, and Ant & Dec all fail to unseat them despite making it into the top ten. Alanis Morissette at least manages to dominate the album chart for the entire month. In news, NASA tentatively answers David Bowie with “yes.” Bob Dole wins the Republican nomination for President. Prince Charles and Princess Diana are officially divorced. Osama bin Laden declares a jihad against the United States.

While in books, Return of the Living Dad. But let’s jump forward a bit. Let’s have a look at last month’s Doctor Who Magazine - issue #453 if you’re reading this from the future. In it is a four page feature commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Love and War and thus of the creation of Professor Bernice Summerfield. This is, to say the least, extraordinary. It is, of course, too soon to know for certain, but it is unlikely that Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester are going to get a four-page feature in a 2015 issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Even the Eighth Doctor Adventures’ major companion, Fitz, whose six-year tenure as a companion is second only to Ace in sheer length, is unlikely to be so honored. There is, in other words, something extraordinary about Benny.

Part of it is simply that she is an enduring character. From 1992 to 1996 she was a regular companion. Even after her “departure” in Happy Endings she made three  major appearances in the eleven subsequent books, plus a brief one in So Vile a Sin. Then came a two-and-a-half year run as the lead character in the Doctorless New Adventures line from 1997-1999. Concurrent with the tail end of these were Big Finish’s audio adaptations, which were where they proved their credentials and managed to get the Doctor Who license in 1999. The Bernice Summerfield audio line continues to this day. Plus there’s Big Finish’s book series, including both novels and short story collections, one of which features a story from Steven Moffat. So when we speak of the twentieth anniversary of Bernice Summerfield it should be noted, we do not simply mean that twenty years ago the first major untelevised companion debuted. We mean that a twenty-year running franchise began. The unlicensed Doctor Who spinoff so massively important that Steven Moffat wrote for it.

Return of the Living Dad has to be taken in this context. Several months after Benny’s ostensible departure from the novels we get a book in which she comes back. That’s not entirely unprecedented - Ace, after all, has appeared twice already since her departure. What’s surprising about Return of the Living Dad is that it’s not only a book that features Benny three months after she departed the series, it’s a book that is firmly and unequivocally about Benny and her long-running plotlines. This is partially explained by the fact that this book came out around the time of the announcement that BBC Books would be taking over the Doctor Who license, and that the Virgin line would be continuing with Benny-focused novels. (The August 1996 issue of Doctor Who Magazine contains the announcement, but they lagged a month or two behind the already Internet-connected fandom, so the announcement was surely already out. Likewise, the August 1996 issue of Time-Space Visualizer, the fanzine of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, contains an interview with Paul Cornell in which he discusses the Benny line and the early plans for it.) The return to Benny and to her plot lines was, in that regard, a signal that she was more than just a supporting character. She’s a character with long-term plot strands that get paid off. (The central tension of Return of the Living Dad, after all, being details about her father first established back in Love and War)

But why is Benny able to sustain that? Paul Cornell, in the more recent Doctor Who Magazine piece, suggests that “she became the voice of the readers in a lot of these texts. That when something huge and science-fictional was going to happen to a bunch of people, she would come along rather like an Eric-Idle-in-Monty-Python figure, and just sort of point at it until it was ridiculous. I love the fact that she got to meet things like Nazis and Daleks, and point out how ridiculous such pomposity is when compared to the wonders of domesticity.” Which, I mean, he would say that. But equally, there’s something to it.

We’re not doing Buffy the Vampire Slayer until early January, but it’s still worth noting that the turn in the late 90s was towards increasingly trope-aware science fiction. We’re heading into a period where it becomes standard for protagonists in genre shows to comment self-awarely on their own conventions. Even The X-Files was doing it, with 1996 bringing the memorable “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.” So the “point at it until it was ridiculous” approach was perfectly mainstream. What’s ostensibly different about Benny is that she does so in pursuit of the small and the domestic. There are other characters like this - the protagonist of Ursula Vernon’s (quite rightly) Hugo-winning graphic novel series Digger, for instance, is fantastic in a large part because it has a properly reluctant hero who wants nothing more than to get away from this vexed and busy life of adventure and go build a nice root cellar. Benny, it is true, is still inclined towards adventures, but in an essentially relaxed relationship towards adventuring. She enjoys adventuring, but in the manner of a hobbyist, linking her to the British ideal of, as Cornell described it back in No Future, “the creative amateur.”

Return of the Living Dad is, first and foremost, about establishing some of this about Benny. Its central conceit is the introduction of Benny’s father. Contrary to the widespread belief that he turned coward and fled the Dalek wars, in reality he was just pulled through a time rift and has been providing a halfway house for stranded aliens that the Doctor has overlooked in his various world-savings. Eventually he turns out to have also gotten himself involved in an ill-advised scheme to change history and prevent the Daleks from invading Earth, which turns out to have been a con by an evil Navarino (that would be the species that operates the tour bus in Delta and the Bannermen) who’s actually working with the Daleks. Crucially, Isaac Summerfield means well, even if his actual plan is completely foolish.

Isaac, clearly, is meant to be contrasted with the Doctor, Benny’s surrogate father who gave her away at her wedding in Isaac’s place. And Orman, typically, writes a marvelous Doctor, including a gorgeous moment at the start of the book where he simply takes a few weeks and volunteers in an Australian hospice. I admit to some bias here - my girlfriend is a hospice nurse, and so the image has particular resonance. But it’s also a perfect image of the sort of thing the Doctor, at his best, would do with downtime between adventures. More than that, it’s a perfect moment for the Seventh Doctor. Hospice is at once a very serious, weighty place and a human place, and the Seventh Doctor, always designed to work in the space between those two images, seems conceptually at home there. Perhaps more to the point, it is very difficult to imagine any other Doctor spending a week mopping floors in a hospice. Even the Eleventh Doctor, in many ways the most similar to the Seventh in how he embodies that division, is simply too eccentric and zany to function in that setting. No, McCoy’s “sad little man” demeanor is uniquely suited to the moral seriousness of the setting.

Not, of course, that the Doctor is entirely at home in that setting. Roz catches him out on this, both accusing him “only doing it to make yourself feel better” and, privately, of not being able to understand a woman who he met in hospice. Which is also fitting. For all that the Doctor is concerned with the individual human level, after all, he doesn’t understand it directly. That was the point of Human Nature. The Doctor loves the small moments of humanity, but he loves them from a remove and a distance. They are, perhaps, as much his hobby as adventuring is Benny’s.

The Doctor and Isaac, then, form mirror images. The Doctor is at home with the business of saving the world, but can’t quite get the domestic, human level right. Isaac picks up after the Doctor’s mistakes and helps stranded aliens get home or find places in the world, but when he confronts the epic scale of saving the world bottles it. And Benny gets to exist at the midpoint between them, capable and adept in both spheres. The book, in other words, is very much about her graduation to the full role of hero and main character, putting her into a position where she could anchor her own line for sixteen years thereafter.

Since this is a good book to talk about companions, we should perhaps spare a few paragraphs for Roz and Chris, who spend the book shagging in a development that is both obvious and, at least at first glance, inadvisable. The problem, of course, is that it’s an obvious cliche that by its nature implies that the characters are outliving their usefulness. It’s one of those plots that one turns to when one is out of actually creative things to do with characters. Of course Roz and Chris have a romance plot - it’s the most obvious thing on the planet for a pair of cops to do eventually. That they’re not just a pair of cops but a cliched one - the cynical veteran and the bright-eyed newbie. On any American television show they’d be a straightforward will-they-or-won’t-they setup, which is the heart and soul of why, on paper, they should never, ever go anywhere near that.

But what’s striking about Roz and Chris getting a romance story - and it is just a story, as at the end of it they decide to settle on being “friends who fancy each other” - is how well the line did at avoiding it for so long. Indeed, they did well enough that when it finally rolls around it’s not the cheap attempt to wring one more plot out of the characters that it normally would be. Roz and Chris are an obvious pair because they’re one of the hyphenated companion pairs a la Ian-and-Barbara or Ben-and-Polly - ones who come on and depart together. (Yes, Chris gets a few novels after Roz’s finale, but they both go out in the same general “end of the New Adventures” period.) But what’s notable, given that, is that in none of the books we’ve looked at since Sky Pirates! have Roz and Chris actually shared a plotline. For all that they’re mutually defined characters, they’ve been given a lot of room to develop separately. And this means that by this point in the series they’re actually more defined in relation to the Doctor than they are by each other. Roz, in particular, has steadily developed a particularly nuanced relationship with the Doctor, and with the departure of Benny she’s graduated to being the character who calls the Doctor out on things. But where Benny was typically the moral center who kept the Doctor from playing too extreme a game with people’s lives, Roz is a more practical center: she calls the Doctor out because she can understand him. It’s a good and interesting role, particularly for the Seventh Doctor. The character who best understands who he is and why he’s the way he is is the jaded and world-wearied cop.

Chris, on the other hand, has increasingly been given an entertaining variation on the role of peril monkey. Chris’s job in most stories is to get into trouble. But he does so in a satisfying way. He finds his way into trouble because he’s a naive and over-eager cop, and thus both a thrill-seeker and someone with a strong sense of justice. This lets him take what is usually a sexist role given to the (often lone) female character and largely redeem it, getting all the useful plot functions of the peril monkey with none of the icky bits. The Doctor has largely formed a standard paternalistic relationship with him, but it’s one that avoids the tacit sexism of the Doctor/Steven or Doctor/Jamie relationships (where they often did the overtly dangerous stuff while the female companion was marginalized) and instead works very much like the standard Doctor/Companion relationship. And in doing so it partially redeems the occasionally sexist moments of those, making it clear that the reason the Doctor has a paternalistic relationship with young female characters is down to casting directors, not to the Doctor himself.

Once these characters have been developed well in their own directions, then, throwing them together and carrying off the obvious romance plot has a very different tone. Instead of feeling like the point where the characters run out of ideas it feels like a fresh expansion of them - one that deepens Roz and Chris as characters, especially because the book also avoids the easy choice of just making them a couple. It would be a good move any time. Doing it as the novel line visibly winds down and as we head into So Vile a Sin is a wicked, brilliant bit of cruelty.

If all of this sounds a bit functional, however, it is perhaps because, well, it is. Return of the Living Dad, perhaps more than any book in the closing period of the New Adventures besides Lungbarrow, is a book that exists to perform a specific job. It’s very good, mind you. And that job is a crucial step both in winding down the line and in setting up Virgin’s future plans. But the end is near, and the moment is being prepared for.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 46 (Our Friends in the North)

We’ve alluded a couple of times to the changing nature of the BBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you start from 1984, when Michael Grade took over at BBC1, and go to 1995 there are only two instances in which a BBC1 or BBC2 program wins the BAFTA for Drama Serial or the nearest equivalent award. Obviously Grade was only in charge of BBC1, but let’s use his ascent to mark a particular attitude about what the BBC was. There were two more instances where BBC Scotland won, but let’s for the moment also treat them as a separate thing. Then, from 1996 to 1999 BBC1 and BBC2 had a straight sweep of the category for four years, and won seven of the twelve from 1996 to 2007. And inaugurating that sweep was Our Friends in the North.

Clearly something changed. And yet it’s difficult to straightforwardly identify what, exactly, it could have been. John Birt made a major reorganization of the corporation in 1996, but it’s difficult for a variety of reasons to just hand him credit for a revitalization of the BBC’s drama efforts. And after all, the BBC remained top notch in the world of comedy. Nor is it even accurate to say that Our Friends in the North marks the point where the BBC returned to the top of its game in producing prestige dramas: that’s clearly 1995 and Pride and Prejudice.

It is tempting to allude to a nebulous idea of a broader cultural swing. The Labour Party was, at this point, seemingly all but certain to regain power whenever the next election happened. There certainly was, in the broad sense, a swing towards a more leftist vision of the country, although the question of how leftist New Labour was is vexed to say the least. The swing back to a more confident and prestigious BBC coincides thematically with that even if the actual causality is borked. And that causality works well, in particular, with Our Friends in the North, a story largely about the material arc of leftist politics in Britain over a stretch of time that coincides almost perfectly with that covered by this blog.

But there are some fundamental issues in play here, and ones that we’ve only ever touched on in passing, so let’s slow down and look at the component parts of this. First is the BBC itself. One of the fundamental mantras of this blog has been that it is a terrible mistake to treat the BBC as though it resembles a commercial television station of the sort that produces virtually all of American television and most of the rest of British television. This is due to the fact that the BBC is not only a public service broadcaster as opposed to a for-profit channel, but also to the fact that there are decades of history of the BBC that have given it an entrenched vision of its role in Britain that stubbornly fails to be completely erased.

A key aspect of this role is that the BBC maintains a complex relationship with the notions of the mainstream and the marginal. This is perhaps most straightforwardly exemplified via Top of the Pops. Top of the Pops was, in one sense, a straightforward show: a musical live-ish performance show featuring currently popular songs. But the BBC, being the BBC, had a wrinkle that other shows in this tradition didn’t have to contend with: it couldn’t be seen to be influencing commercial taste directly. So instead it set up a strict set of rules for what could make it onto Top of the Pops and took an overtly curatorial role, featuring whatever was popular instead of trying to be tastemakers. The practical result of this was to foster a closer relationship between the counterculture and the mainstream than exists in, say, the United States. The Sex Pistols appeared on Top of the Pops in 1977. Whereas the idea that a major commercial network in the US would talk about punk in 1977 in any terms other than how punks were going to eat your children is flatly ludicrous. But the Sex Pistols were popular, and so onto Top of the Pops they went, and there wasn’t a lot considered beyond that.

This is a viscerally different experience than existed in the US, where the line between the mainstream that could be viewed in publicly authorized culture and the counterculture, which had to actually exist in marginalized spaces. And it’s a consistent trait of the BBC, which has historically consciously viewed its mandate as being to provide something for everybody in Britain, and thus to have a wide variety of programs that are actively marginal for no other reason than that the country had margins.

But the example of Top of the Pops also points towards the biggest flaw in this model, which is that the margins are still being represented by an institutional structure. We talked about this way back in the Mary Whitehouse entry in terms of the fundamental problems of the Reithian model of the BBC, which is roughly what I’ve been describing for two paragraphs here. The BBC’s vision of serving everybody is based on the idea that it can “improve” everybody, and thus has a fundamental condescension and paternalism towards the marginal segments of society. Even if it’s representing them - indeed, in some ways precisely because it’s representing them - there is still a fundamental power imbalance that means that the BBC will always be serving the needs of power. And for the horrific effects of this one need look no further than Jimmy Savile, who turns out to have been casually raping hundreds of underage women during his decades working at the BBC.

But more to the point, he was doing this in a way that was blatantly known to those in power. Everybody, it seems, knew Savile was a pedophile. But nobody stopped him, and those that raised the issue failed to push it to resolution. A similar bit of monstrosity recently arose in the US around the Penn State football team, where it turns out that Jerry Sandusky, defensive coach and serial child rapist, was protected for years for no reason other than that the alternative would mean endangering the entrenched structures of power that are a major college football program. (For British readers who do not inherently grasp the sheer and maddening size of college football, it may be helpful to realize that Wembley Stadium is the twentieth largest stadium in the world. The twenty-first is Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, the stadium used by the University of Florida’s football team. Wembley, of course, is in London, which has a population of around eight million. Gainesville, Florida, where Ben Hill Griffin is located, has a population of 125,000. And Ben Hill Griffin is only the eleventh largest college football stadium in the country. It sells out every game.) In much the same way, Savile was allowed to rape people for decades largely because the alternative was to damage the BBC, which was, of course, far more important than protecting people from a serial rapist. After all, the BBC was a pillar of Reithian values, and Savile’s accusers were just teenage girls who couldn’t keep their legs shut.

This is, of course, the fundamental problem with the halls of power embracing the margins. It’s always a matter of the fox getting the keys to the henhouse. You can’t put powerful people in charge of serving the needs of the powerless without it turning abusive. The BBC is, at the end of the day, still blatantly a tool of entrenched power. The best that can be said for it is that it serves a slightly different version of entrenched power than most things that serve entrenched power serve.

Which, actually, brings us rather cleanly around to New Labour. There’s a line Slavoj Žižek is fond of about how the nature of ideology is that we blindly accept modern capitalism, with the extent of political dialogue being about which subtly different flavor of it we want. As he puts it, “can we have a few more rights for minorities? A little more health care?” There are few better illustrations of this basic concept than New Labour, a movement that largely amounted to rebranding the Labour Party as a slightly nicer version of the Conservative Party. New Labour’s central tenet was the straightforward acceptance of neoliberal economics combined with the belief that maybe a bit more money should be given to social welfare issues. This was, of course, fairly big business in the nineties. In the US, Bill Clinton achieved similar success by promising to “end welfare as we know it,” in effect completely ceding all ground on the issue to the Republican party and their completely fabricated mythology of “welfare queens.” (The next stage of this evolution, of course, is the right’s realization that one can just completely dissociate governing and campaigning by framing brutally conservative policies in the language of triangulation. But George W. Bush and David Cameron are going to have to wait their turns to come up in the blog.)

Perhaps the best way to frame New Labour is in the terms we used to frame Thatcher, namely Warren Ellis. Ellis’s comments on Thatcher amount to a quite good monologue in an issue of Planetary and a nice bit in the documentary interview Captured Ghosts in which he describes living in Thatcher’s Britain as amounting to waking up every day expecting to see that she’s installed Daleks on the street corners. It’s a vicious critique, he clearly hates her with a passion, and he’s genuinely witty about it, but it’s still two good lines. Whereas Tony Blair gets Transmetropolitan, an entire sixty issue comic series devoted to the basic theme of how much of a terrifyingly evil fucker he is. Which isn’t quite fair, but still captures an essential truth about Blair, which is that he’s a terrifyingly artificial figure. From his perfectly coifed public image and style to his meticulously message-tested politics, Tony Blair was a blatantly opportunist figure, and New Labour always existed in the shadow of that.

And yet there’s something to be said akin to Terrance Dicks’s beloved Churchill quote about democracy being the worst system of government except for all the others that have been tried. New Labour was the worst option on the ballot except for the other one. Put another way, New Labour was absolutely horrible from any principled leftist perspective, but what would you have preferred? Five more years of John Major? The debased spectacle of an ostensibly leftist party whoring itself out to Rupert Murdoch is a horrifying concept worthy of a sixty issue Warren Ellis diatribe, but at least it’s not the Tories.

(I recognize that I have a substantial contingent of Lib-Dem readers who are, right now, about to raise a host of very reasonable objections. I, at least, am not particularly interested in a debate about the merits of voting for third party candidates who are not going to win general elections. But I will note that in a purely pragmatic sense, due admittedly to an appallingly unfair electoral system, the Lib-Dems were at no point a plausible winner of the 1997 election. In practical terms, "a viable third party that escaped the false dichotomies of the two party system," while self-evidently the correct answer to "what would you have preferred," is more or less equivalent to picking "a unicorn." While alternatives to the two-party system are surely worth building towards in the future, the question "who do you want running the country as of May 2nd, 1997" had only two answers that had any chance of happening in reality.)

Which is actually the crux of what Our Friends in the North is about: the agonizing imperfection of politics, and the way in which both radical politics and working within institutional structures fail, often painfully, to be adequate to the task. In one sense it is emblematic of what a BBC approach to the political would have to be. On the one hand the plot acknowledges the vast margins of British society, most obviously in Nicky’s flirtation with radical anarchism and Geordie’s stint in the Soho porn business. (Oh, fine, the Doctor’s radical anarchism and James Bond’s stint in the porn business. Which actually works, as phrases go.) On the other, it ultimately rejects radicalism, punishing Geordie with homelessness and wholly disavowing Nicky’s anarchist stint. It’s deeply flawed and cynical, wrapping everything up in a pappish bit about how “tomorrow’s too late” while Oasis instructs us not to look back in anger, which is, it is safe to say, a tough ask regarding the eighteen years of Tory government that were barreling towards their close at this point.

But what do you want? The nature of broadcasting - and thus of television as a medium - is that structures of power are going to run rife in it. There’s only so radical television can be. And anyway, why embrace any sort of pure radicalism? The sixties ended. The good guys lost. Our nostalgia for their near victory doesn’t change the fact that they got their asses kicked and their tactics discredited. We came to this conclusion way back in The War Games, itself a collaboration between a political radical and the very embodiment of institution fetishism. And yet somehow the gravity of the 1960s still drags us towards this, our own version of the absurd belief that The Web of Fear was the pinnacle of what Doctor Who could be. Which is to say that for all that Our Friends in the North is deeply flawed, its lack of knowledge and certainty and its willingness to present a muddle as a muddle is oddly satisfying. This is the crux of the postmodern liberalism this blog has been touting for over a year now: all things being equal, better to be confused and uncertain than not.

And for better or for worse, the BBC enables this. It’s the moral debate I set up between All-Consuming Fire and Blood Harvest redux, really. All-Consuming Fire may have been more aware of the horrors of paternalism, but its very moral clarity gave it too easy a road towards blindness. Whereas Blood Harvest was paternalistic as all hell, but had a view of the world that made it suspicious of any sort of certainty. The BBC is similar. Yes, it’s a corrupt bastion of entrenched power that does horrible things like protect and shelter serial rapists for decades. But of the many corrupt and rape-enabling institutions in the world, it’s one of the most beneficial. It’s certainly better than any other broadcaster I can think of.

And so Our Friends in the North marks a strange sort of turn in what the BBC is. For all its flaws, Our Friends in the North is a good program worthy of celebration. That the BBC can make well-written drama with a complex and nuanced worldview and high production values is, on balance, a good thing worth being proud of. And if we compare it with the TV Movie, which is just two months down the road from its final episode, the virtues of Our Friends in the North immediately become clearer. Given the choice between this and farming a cultural institution out to a Canadian liquor company so that Rupert Murdoch could air it in the US, the choice is clear: this. Absolutely this. At least Our Friends in the North is something we can have some pride in.

Which is to say that we are not, as we head into fourteen years of Labour and a revitalized BBC, entering some new golden age of culture. But we are, at least, entering a measurably better one than the horrific mess that we’ve spent the last year tracking. I’ve occasionally attempted to divvy this blog up into distinct acts. Act I ran from the creation of the series through to where Mary Whitehouse successfully bullied it into impotence. Act II was the story of how it slowly learned ways to fight back. And we are now, at last, among the final and fading embers of that phase of things. And now, over the course of the next month or so, we do the slow transition to Act III. That’s not the same as moving to some phase in which everything is magically good again. But if you squint and hold the world at just the right angle, it might just be that we’re halfway out of the dark.

The First Settlers Called it the Crystal Feast (Christmas on a Rational Planet)

Speaking of Christmas, and the general season of gift-giving it implies, have you considered just how much all of your friends and family want copies of the first two volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum in book form? You should probably make their dreams come true.

Unless, of course, you don't think they'd want a copy. Then you should think about just how good family or friends they are, and whether they deserve to have their dreams come true. Then you should get them copies anyway.

Volume 1 (William Hartnell): (US) (UK). Volume 2 (Patrick Troughton): (US) (UK).

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I'll Explain Later

We skipped GodEngine, to someone’s sorrow, I’m sure. It had Ice Warriors and lots of continuity references.

Christmas on a Rational Planet is the debut book of Lawrence Miles, which is almost certainly the most important thing about it. It features the intrusion of the raw forces of chaos into our universe and Chris making the decision as to what the fundamental nature of the universe should be, albeit manipulated by the TARDIS. It also introduces the idea of Eighth Man Bound, a Time Lord game about previewing your future regenerations. Lars Pearson, still a number of years away from employing Lawrence Miles, calls it “delicious, but a bit text-heavy and fragmented as hell.” Dave Owen, at the time, bemoaned the release schedule, saying that if the book had “been among the first handful of New Adventures it would have been immediately seized upon as radical, unprecedented, and exhibiting a fresh approach to Doctor Who storytelling,” but suggesting that the disposable nature of the novels means that it won’t get the second reading it deserves. Shannon Sullivan’s rankings have it embodying mediocrity - at thirty-first out of sixty-one it is the median New Adventure with a 69.1% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide (worth it for the attempt to figure out if fan rumor of a reference to every Doctor Who story is true. It's not - Miles misses thirty-three even by a sympathetic count).

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It’s July of 1996, one of those months where the number one single changes weekly. Baddiel, Skinner, and the Lightning Seeds start us off with “Three Lions.” Then we get The Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly,” Gary Barlow’s “Forever Love,” and finally the real news in The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.” Los Del Rio, Underworld, Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Belinda Carlisle, and Mariah Carey also chart. While in news, Dolly the sheep is successfully cloned, Boris Yeltsin is reelected, and Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-abortion domestic terrorist, bombs the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

In books, it’s Lawrence Miles’s debut novel, Christmas on a Rational Planet. Which means we finally have to do Lawrence Miles. Except he’s not Lawrence Miles yet. Which is an odd thing to say, but bear with me. Lawrence Miles, the grand figure of myth who provided the primary creative vision of the Eighth Doctor era, has his debut novel with Alien Bodies. That’s the book with which Miles immediately seized the crown of “most interesting writer in the line.” But that title relied in part on just how dire the early chunk of Eighth Doctor Adventures were on the whole, and, for that matter, how utterly uninspiring the entire Eighth Doctor thing was.

But in July of 1996 we were in an altogether more ambiguous point, as I’ve already observed. The Virgin line was already the past of Doctor Who. And Lawrence Miles embodies that tension perfectly. For all that he’s, creatively speaking, associated primarily with the Eighth Doctor line, aesthetically he’s a much better fit with the Virgin line. Indeed, he’s said in interviews that the Virgin era is outright his favorite period of Doctor Who. And, not to flip too far ahead, for all that he’s the major creative figure of the Eighth Doctor range, his time there is enormously fraught and comes to a crashing and unsatisfying close. Miles is, in many ways and for many reasons, an oddly liminal figure that doesn’t quite fit into any era. As such, this liminal period in which Doctor Who lacks an era is actually perfect for him. This truly is Lawrence Miles’s native era - not so much a part of Doctor Who as a figure haunting Doctor Who with the uncanniness of its alternative histories.

And haunting perfectly describes the role this book plays. For one thing, no matter how much Miles disclaims the book (he’s visibly not fond of it in interviews, suggesting that the correct acronym for it is CRaP), the truth is that several of his Big Ideas show up here: Grandfather Paradox, a bottle universe, Eighth Man Bound, the possibility of something uncanny regarding the Third Doctor, a fascination with the notion of Time Lord biodata. And they show up in ways that are oddly coherent. The idea that Grandfather Paradox is loosed upon the world because of a conflict regarding the teleology of the universe that occurs within the frisson between the Seventh and Eighth Doctor’s eras is, for instance, aggressively, perfectly right. Even though, in 1996, none of that future was visible in the least, Miles’s larger aesthetic siege on Doctor Who seeps out from this book.

But perhaps the more important thing to observe is that the notion of alternative mythologies haunting the narrative is in fact Lawrence Miles’s primary concern not only throughout this book but throughout Miles’s work. Here the central idea is that the rational universe established by the Time Lords is continually haunted by a sense of irrationality. This, of course, is just a rejigging of what Marc Platt did way back in Time’s Crucible, but here the idea goes subtly and wickedly further. Miles explicitly presents irrationality as a literary, narrative logic, having, at one point, irrationality’s avatar, the Carnival Queen, challenge Chris, asking “do you have a sense of justice? A sense that somehow, sometime, there has to be a happy ending and a way of tying up all the loose ends?” Which, of course, there is, in point of fact, in Chris’s world given that he exists inside a novel that is broadly governed by Aristotelean structures.

Implicit in this is one of Miles’s great hobby horses, which is his firm belief that Doctor Who is not a science fiction series. A cursory glance over his various published Internet musings reveals this, particularly his insistence in the time before Russell T. Davies brought the series back that the only way it was ever going to come back was as a cult television show in the model of Babylon 5, where it would fail spectacularly and kill the series off forever. Wrong, clearly, but instructively so both in terms of how accurately he diagnoses a particular version of fandom’s vision. During that time, however, Miles was taking to the letters column of Doctor Who Magazine (issue 233, specifically) arguing that this completely misunderstood the nature of Doctor Who, which, in his view, has its roots “in Arthurian romance and European mythology” but that uses science fiction props. This, at least, pretty accurately describes, for instance, the Hinchcliffe, Bidmead, and Cartmel eras, but it cuts against a huge swath of thought about the show that we’ve been characterizing as the Whoniverse approach. Needless to say, that’s largely fine, at least in terms of this blog’s agenda. We have, after all, never been fans of the Whoniverse.

But what Miles does here is considerably more interesting and nuanced than just suggesting that Doctor Who is actually fantasy and not science fiction, which was at least part of the problem with Platt’s approach - it went as far as noticing that the Time Lords could just as easily be magical, but then said “ah, but they picked science fiction” and left it at that. Instead Miles jams the two together, staging a confrontation in which the irrational universe reasserts itself as an irreducible Other to the supposedly rational universe that Doctor Who, as a series, is prone to insisting that it is. And Miles is ruthlessly consistent in this, even in his choice for what the irrational forces call the Time Lords, namely the Watchmakers. On the one hand this invokes one of the common arguments for the existence of god, typically phrased as “if you found a watch lying on the beach you would assume that there is a watchmaker because it is too complex to have arisen naturally.” But this, of course, frames the Time Lords in terms of the supposed irrationality of religion, trapping them in the very logic their nature resists.

But there’s an added sting involved in the label “watchmaker” for the Time Lords, which is that it’s a backhanded demotion for them. There is a world of difference between the idea of Time Lords and Watch Lords. If they are mere watchmakers than all they have done is created a tool and a system of measurement for time. They rule it only because they’ve used language to describe it, and language, as a tool, trends inexorably towards the forces of irrationality. They don’t rule time - they rule a particular framework for understanding time.

Indeed, one need only look at the peculiarities of how the term “watchmaker” is used to signify the Time Lords. On the one hand, it’s clearly a reference to the argument for god. But that argument was most famously advanced by William Paley in 1802, whereas the term “Watchmakers” within Christmas on a Rational Planet is framed as part of a primordial conflict about the nature of the universe. Which is to say there’s no way that the Carnival Queen could have been referencing Paley when she picked the epithet. And yet the name is an obvious reference to Paley. The name itself, in other words, defies causality, illustrating exactly the sort of thing that the Time Lords’ perspective cannot grasp.

Again, the underlying trick here is that the universe of Christmas on a Rational Planet really is running according to the grounds it stakes out as irrational. Being a novel, things really do work according to a metaphoric logic. The nature of things really does vary depending on context and circumstance, as opposed to things having fixed and absolute definitions. There is no such thing as atheistic fiction for the simple reason that the “world” of any given work of fiction really was created by an intelligent and (in terms of that world) all-powerful being. And thus no matter what the Time Lords try to do they cannot impose a “life of ordered calm” onto  the world they live in because the underlying principles of their world are ordered towards a logic that isn’t just imposed by an external force, but one that exists from a different universe entirely. (This is central to the notion of the bottle universes that Miles plays with at such length in future books)

For instance, look at Eighth Man Bound. Ostensibly it’s a Time Lord game about seeing future regenerations, with the eighth regeneration being, apparently, the first one that is impossible to foresee. That’s a reasonable enough concept that has an internal logic within the narrative, much like “watchmaker” makes sense as a swipe at the fact that the Time Lords do not control time but instead control the description of time. But much like “watchmaker” is obviously a reference to the external logic of William Paley (who writes three years after the novel is set, making him doubly inaccessible as a reference within the book), Eighth Man Bound is also clearly a reference to the external logic of Doctor Who as a television show that got cancelled while on the Seventh Doctor such that, within the confines of the Virgin line, the Eighth Doctor was unforeseeable. But this logic is completely foreign to the Time Lords if we treat them as imaginary people - it’s wholly impossible that they have even the slightest concept of this. That’s what the threat of irrationality imposes - not illogic, but a logic from another system entirely.

This is terribly clever, especially for Doctor Who, a series that is, historically, all about pulling code switches such that what looks like one sort of story suddenly starts working according to the logic of another sort. The idea of haunting Doctor Who itself with a logic that is necessarily outside of its own comprehension is absolutely brilliant. And what’s really brilliant is that it puts the Doctor (and, by extension, the TARDIS) in the position of not being able to understand how they work. Both believe that they can only function as creatures of rationality. This makes sense for them - they, after all, have no way of recognizing the genre tropes and literary conventions that in fact explain how they work. (Or, rather, they can, but it requires that we zig instead of zag within the series’ history, picking The Mind Robber instead of The War Games.) The Doctor cannot understand his own actions as the intrusion of one genre on another, and thus mistakes himself as working rationally. It’s a glorious deconstruction of the concept - and for once I mean deconstruction in its proper sense where, once dismantled, the concept continues functioning not just in spite of its contradictions but because of them.

But there’s a larger problem here. Well, two, actually. The first is that Miles inexplicably and ill-advisedly ties these principles to gender essentialism, having men be the forces of reason while women are the forces of irrationality. “The male and the female of the species, in every humanoid species, have completely different psychologies,” Miles has the Doctor mansplain. “Men build… their fundamental purpose is act as architects. Towers. Pillars. Bridges. All men’s things. In a man’s world, everything has to be defined, named, planned with precision… the female psyche has no need to construct, no need to control… no need to define. The female psyche is adaptable, mutable. That’s why little boys dream of killer robots and little girls dream of faerie queens.” Which, you know, great. Thank you, Lawrence Miles, for making stereotypical gender essentialism a fundamental principle of the universe. Brilliant. Now we can move on to Dave Sim’s vision of Doctor Who, I hope. What’s particularly frustrating about this is that it mucks up what would otherwise be a fantastic idea, namely the Gynoids, which are robotic creatures who are not built but who simply are. It’s a great, chilling concept, and even plausibly an antecedent to the existential horrors of the Silence and the Weeping Angels, except that Miles frames it in a shockingly sexist manner that just poisons the concept.

The second problem, however, is the tying of history to rationality. Rationality, throughout the book, is repeatedly tied to the progress of history, with the development of human warfare culminating in the atomic bomb being explicitly presented as one of the consequences of allowing the universe to remain based on Reason. (Miles does distinguish between the capitalized and uncapitalized versions of the word, with several jokes throughout the novel hinging on people noticing the capital letter in ostensibly spoken dialogue) To some extent this makes sense, serving as an extension of the critique I made about why science fiction in its classic Golden Age form is an irreparably flawed genre. And given that the bulk of the novel is set in the past there’s a wicked cleverness to this. On the one hand, as a matter of practical reality, the atomic bomb is the inevitable teleology of 1799. But if we accept that as an inevitability then the novel’s system of belief forces us to also accept the sci-fi teleology of things like Babylon 5 in all its oppressive horror. Which is quite clever.

But the idea that irrationality, as presented, lacks any necessity or teleology is fundamentally flawed. The rest of the time the book trades heavily on the fact that it is a novel and thus has the irrationality of Aristotelean narrative structure. The whole point of Aristotelean narrative structure is that the ending of the story is made inevitable by the beginning and that the beginning is necessary setup for the ending. This is part of a larger incoherence in Miles’s system that depends on the assumption that art and Reason are a coherent dichotomy. He avoids the worst form of this assertion by having irrationality continue to persist and haunt the edges of the Rational universe, thus showing that the dichotomy cannot be absolute. In many regards this isn’t a huge problem - art and Reason don’t have to be 100% opposed in all contexts to work as a thematic division in a novel any more than the White and Black Guardians had to be a perfect division. But as one might expect from someone who doesn’t really like The Ribos Operation, Miles doesn’t quite manage to paper over the gaps within his metaphor so as to build an even temporarily workable frame.

My objection here is not, of course, that Miles does not tie everything off into a neat structure. That would cut against what’s so interesting about what he’s doing in the first place. But for a novel that is self-evidently trying to make a point about the nature of history and of totalizing ideologies it’s a fairly substantive problem. But equally, it’s a first novel. Miles will do better with these concepts in future works. Paul Cornell didn’t get his definitive statement of what he wanted to do with the Doctor together in Timewyrm: Revelation either. Which is an apt comparison, because this is the single biggest infusion of new ideas Doctor Who has seen since that book. Much is made of Alien Bodies and how Lawrence Miles swept in and provided a direction and vision for Doctor Who at a point when it was otherwise floundering badly in the disastrous start of the BBC Books line. Not nearly enough, however, is made of how Christmas on a Rational Planet, as the Virgin era wound down towards an uncertain future, showed that there was, at least, such a thing as post-Virgin ideas.

Time Can Be Rewritten 35 (Happy Endings)

Technically, actually, everything until Boxing Day should either be a Pop Between Realities or a Time Can Be Rewritten post, but we’re not going to do that. Still, it’s worth starting by making this point explicit, since we’ve been sidling up to it for two weeks now. This is the book that came out the same month as the TV Movie. This creates the single biggest whorl in the timeline of Doctor Who. The TV Movie aired in May of 1996. The final New Adventure didn’t come out until May of 1997, and for the purposes of this blog we’re actually going to go to September of 1997 and Lawrence Miles’s novel Down before we tack back and do the TV Movie.

I went back and forth on how best to do this, and ultimately went with this. The main reason is, honestly, that I’m organizing the book versions by Doctor, so it makes sense to keep the blog organized that way. (Though ironically this does mean I’m breaking Benny’s timeline somewhat badly by covering Oh No It Isn’t! and Down prior to the TV Movie. This is because, on the whole, it makes more sense to keep those in the same book as the majority of the Virgin material.) And more broadly, because the TV Movie didn’t have that much influence on the tail end of the Virgin line except conceptually - through the very fact of its existence and what that meant for Virgin.

Which was, of course, that the party was over. Remember that the Virgin line was actually a fluke. Virgin Books had bought out WH Allen, and thus acquired Target in the process. The New Adventures came when they realized they were out of television stories to novelize and asked if maybe they could do some original novels, to which the BBC, having just cancelled the series, basically said “yeah sure, whatever” to. And so they did, and they turned out to be successful and actually alarmingly good, and so the BBC used the TV Movie as an excuse to take the rights back. So the Virgin line went into a year in which the Doctor they were using had already been regenerated on television and the line itself was facing cancellation.

This isn’t the first time that the future of Doctor Who has consumed its past. The Five Doctors and all of Season Twenty-One, for instance, aired after the announcement of Colin Baker as the next Doctor, rendering all of those stories the lead-up to an already-happened ending. The way in which the big press launch of Matt Smith preceded the 2009-10 specials season made this even bigger, with David Tennant’s regeneration happening as a cultural event nearly a full year before it actually got televised. But this is by some margin the most extreme: Sylvester McCoy regenerated into Paul McGann on television, and then we went back to Sylvester McCoy stories for a year.

It was, of course, not immediately clear how everything would play out. In theory, at least, there was a chance that the McGann movie could be successful enough to lead to a series pickup on Fox - it was, after all, intended as a backdoor pilot. But odds of that fell quickly as the ratings were, while respectable, not good enough to go to series. But until that happened nobody could make firm plans for the future of the Eighth Doctor. (A similar phenomenon impacts the end of the BBC Books line, where The Gallifrey Chronicles pointedly avoided wrapping everything up in case the 2005 series was a complete disaster and the books had to step back into the gap.) So the New Adventures were, as of May of 1996, left in an odd position: their time as the present of Doctor Who had clearly ended, but no future had yet emerged.

The main theme in this analysis is going to be eschatology and the frantic drive towards the apocalyptic that constituted the tail end of the second millennium. It’s a good metaphor, and there’s more to do with it, but what we have here is more straightforward and, as a result, all the more fexing. Happy Endings is a book that self-consciously commemorates the New Adventures line that, by pure luck, managed to come out the exact same month that the line was effectively killed off. (And it is clearly coincidence, as the ostensible occasion for Happy Endings is that it’s the fiftieth New Adventure, a fact that could not have been synced up with the movie’s transmission.) It’s not an engagement with the looming uncertainty of The Wilderness Years Part II, but rather an uncluttered celebration of the New Adventures line and what it was, told by its then most-prolific author (although Kate Orman will, by the end of the line, pip him by half a book).

Happy Endings is a deeply, exuberantly silly book. It picks up on Gareth Roberts’s idea of a Fortean Flicker from The Highest Science and absolutely goes to town with it, spinning an outrageous series of coincidences and contrivances to justify the sort of overblown plot that a big anniversary story calls for. Cornell has said in interviews that the model for the book were issues of comic books in which heroes get married, which is a venerable and deeply silly tradition characterized by preposterous numbers of guest characters and continuity references coupled with a gleefully silly villainous threat (in this case using the most obvious character for such a plot, the Master). It’s got a writer’s jam in which every past New Adventure writer save for Jim Mortimore contributes a scene, references to absolutely every New Adventure to date, and a song, with sheet music, as an appendix. Also a human/alien cricket match. As I said. Silly.

But there’s something a little bit strange here. Yes, Paul Cornell’s style of “it’s the little things” frockery was a major influence on the New Adventures, but we’ve been spending months working our way around the fact that the New Adventures’ most visionary writer largely goes against the aesthetic that the books are most associated with. On the one hand if you told people to pick the biggest creative force in the New Adventures almost everyone would pick Cornell. On the other, if you asked what the New Adventures were like you’d get a picture of a bleak and violent world dominated by a ruthless and callously manipulative Doctor. And Happy Endings is where those two viewpoints really come to their least reconcilable point. At least in Human Nature or Love and War we could talk about how the books revolved around that conflict, and that Cornell needed the Doctor to be pushed to the edge in order to show just how much frocks could be trusted to stand up to. But that’s not an option here. This book is just unrepentantly larking about. And more difficultly, it’s larking about while simultaneously positioning itself as the capstone to the entire New Adventures line.

To be fair, it’s not as though the book is without criticism of the past. Cornell does frame things throughout the book so as to suggest some real reservations or objections to what has gone before. Most obviously, he goes out of his way to retcon Neil Penswick’s characterization of William Blake from The Pit. While it’s difficult for me to object to this, given that Penswick’s approach to the character was so mind-wrenchingly inappropriate as to make me decide not to cover the book despite it having Blake in it, there’s something a little bit remarkable about Cornell taking active measures to retcon the book for the sole seeming reason of not liking what it did, particularly in the course of an anniversary celebration. Even if it is nice to read William Blake written by someone who gives any sense of having read any Blake.

But this isn’t the only point where Cornell feels as though he has an objection to the entire enterprise. He makes quite a point of suggesting that Benny and Jason are a terrible couple who shouldn’t be getting married. Here there’s at least some ambiguity that might salvage matters: they do get divorced in just eight months, and that may well have been planned even from Happy Endings. But that doesn’t diminish the sense of Happy Endings kicking and screaming a bit at the prospect of marrying Benny off. The book feels unhappy with its project even as it’s having a tremendous amount of fun making it happen.

But this largely gets back to the way in which the Seventh Doctor has, over time, drifted. Certainly the manipulative aspects of the Virgin Doctor have roots in the Cartmel era, but they’re not a part of it as such. And tellingly, the key difference is visible in Love and War. Prior to that, the Doctor had never manipulated an innocent to their death. Yes, he’d nuked Skaro and set up Ace for a Freudian encounter with underwater vampires, but come on. The Cartmel era was repeatedly and self-consciously riffing on the fact that it was a children’s show, and these are all children’s television examples of a dark, manipulative figure. McCoy’s Doctor wasn’t a ruthless cosmic chessmaster, he was a twelve-year-old sci-fi fan’s idea of what a ruthless cosmic chessmaster would look like. That was what was so shocking about Love and War: that the Doctor would go that far. Nothing like Jan’s death had ever happened before. It was a sudden and shocking shift of narrative codes: suddenly the Doctor wasn’t just a children’s television manipulator, he was a dangerous and scary figure who really might not be on your side.

Furthermore, as we saw back in the Warchild entry, the real lasting innovation of the Cartmel era was the overt connection of the material and the epic in the specific frame of human experience. Cartmel’s big idea was taking the Holmesan epic and telling it with the narrative focused specifically on the small and everyday end of the pyramidal hierarchy that stretches through time and space. The Ribos Operation told from Binro’s perspective, if you will. The Doctor was pushed towards a mysterious and manipulative role not because Cartmel was fascinated with grimdark antiheroes but because it provided the contrast for the human sphere of things to really stand out.

And this is the part of Love and War that everybody missed. Everyone seized onto the sheer dramatic weight of the Doctor betraying Ace, which, yes, remains simply one of the greatest moments in Doctor Who’s history, but they miss the fact that Cornell framed that betrayal in terms even more children’s television than Cartmel: Terrance Dicks’s “never cruel or cowardly” mantra. Cornell wasn’t trying to establish the Doctor as an untrustworthy antihero. He was just pushing the existing tension within the character further, in a manner wholly appropriate for a series of books “too broad and too deep for the small screen,” a phrase that, properly taken, points not towards rejecting the structure of televised Doctor Who but towards looking at what happens to the idea when you take the boundaries of television away.

Which is to say that while Paul Cornell is largely responsible for the decisions that gave the New Adventures their reputation and ostensible legacy, it’s a legacy that was always at cross-purposes with what he wanted to do. And while some writers did take the New Adventures down the path of having the Doctor defined primarily by his manipulations and questionable morality, that certainly wasn’t ever what Cornell saw the point as being. This is, in many ways, similar to what we saw in The Shadow of the Scourge, where Cornell overtly tried to rework the legacy of the New Adventures into something more like this. But here we see him do it more completely and thoroughly, making a declaration about what the New Adventures are in the course of them coming out. It is on the one hand a more thorough and complete statement about the books, and on the other a more limited one, in that it is not a retrospective declaration so much as the staking out of a position within the books.

What is perhaps most striking about this, then, is how non-confrontational it is. Despite a host of books with very different approaches than what Cornell values he only ends up being really aggressively contradictory on the point of Blake. Instead he applies his own method to the darkness of the other New Adventures, subsuming the writers who disagreed with him into his own vision, as differing versions of the Doctor’s betrayal of Ace and sacrifice of Jan. And in the face of all of that, he simply reaffirms the joy he views the Doctor as representing. He’s even explicit about it, giving Annie Trelaw a sermon at the wedding that says all of this bluntly:

“In the last few years, we’ve all seen enough strife. We’ve seen a new set of rules drawn up, rules under which it was fine to cheat your neighbors, to make use of violence, to kill. We’ve all had to live in the darkness, and, in that time, we’ve all had the opportunity to see that darkness within ourselves. It’s there. We can’t ignore it. To do that is naïve. But what we discover, when we look into the pit of ourselves, is this… that though we are often caught up in violent situations, we are creatures of piece. Although we find ourselves in a world where darkness is all around, we persist in shining. We cannot help but shine. That’s the great thing about us, about us all, not just the humans here. That’s why we’ve survived the naïveté of childhood, and the terrible awakening of these recent years. That’s why we’ll keep on going, and keep on having new adventures.”

One is tempted to simply wrap up Paul Cornell’s contributions to Doctor Who here, using that as their epitaph. Certainly Cornell seems to have intended that - after this book he took a four year hiatus from writing Doctor Who, with the only exception being the first Benny-only New Adventure Oh No It Isn’t!, which, of course, isn’t Doctor Who and that’s the whole point. But for better or for worse, Cornell returned to Doctor Who in 2000 for another round. That is, of course, another story and another entry. But just as Happy Endings seems to, inadvertently, draw the Virgin line to a perfect close eleven books before its actual finale, it also seems to step in gracefully as Paul Cornell’s last Doctor Who story. That he has five more that we’re going to cover is, like the fact that we’re doing the New Adventures for another month, almost beside the point. This is the definitive statement of one version of what Doctor Who is, and the one that most actively kept the flame of the series alive for five years. The rest is footnotes.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 45 (Babylon 5)

There is a moment familiar to everyone who has ever enjoyed Babylon 5 in which they make the cataclysmically dumb mistake of trying to get someone else to watch it. It goes like this: “It’s a huge five-season story arc that was planned out from the start. The first season is mostly crap, but the second one has some really good stuff in it. And the third and fourth are quite good…” and then somewhere around admitting that the fifth season is also a trainwreck you realize that the case for Babylon 5’s quality is actually enormously strained.

And it’s true. It’s much, much easier to list the things that are very wrong about Babylon 5 than it is to articulate the case for it. I mean, the case isn’t that hard: the show’s basic conceit, a five year novel in television form, plotted from the beginning to lead towards a pre-defined endpoint that would pay all of its threads off, is impressive. Yes, the use of television for a multi-episode story arc had precedent, but J. Michael Stracyznski was the first person to really try plotting an entire multi-season arc out and executing it. It’s a sprawlingly hubristic little number, but it’s also the first stab at the sort of thing that is these days taken for granted: of the things that Vince Gilligan is praised for in Breaking Bad, the fact that he had a coherent plot for the whole thing barely makes the list. It’s expected these days. Even if you don’t have one (*cough* Lost *cough*), you’re supposed to pretend that you do. (The zenith of this is the almost completely [and rightly so] forgotten Fox series Reunion, which featured a murder mystery as part of its central premise. When the show was cancelled the producers promised they’d reveal who did it before, a few months later, admitting that they hadn’t actually worked that out by the time the show was cancelled.)

Which, actually, is largely what Straczynski did. The original five-year-arc was reprinted in one of the volumes of the Babylon 5 scriptbooks, and basically completely diverges from what happened in the series somewhere in the rage of season four. Some of this, at least, was caused by Michael O’Hare departing at the end of the first season and a new lead character being created, but only some of it. The larger arc that Straczynski mapped out could well have played out with Bruce Boxleitner’s replacement character. Furthermore, whole major story arcs are missing. In the original outline the plot about the war with the Shadows (then still called the Shadowmen) spilled out past the five year mark and into the sequel series. In practice Straczynski wrapped it up towards the beginning of Season Four. This is partially down to the fact that it looked like there wasn’t going to be a fifth season and thus that Straczynski had to accelerate his plotting, but the compression isn’t quite as dramatic as people say - Straczynski has said that if he’d known for sure there was a fifth season then the eighteenth episode of the fourth season would have been the finale, involving only four episodes of compression. The storyline that occupied most of the fourth season, regarding the corruption of the Earth government and the bulk of Babylon 5 fighting to liberate the planet, wasn’t even in the original outline at all.

Which is to say that Straczynski, in practice, did what any decent writer would: he changed things as he went and developed new ideas. Nobody knows how their five-season television series is actually going to end when they start. Some writers - Straczynski apparently among them - write better when they have an outline and a defined end that they’re going for, but nobody gets to the end and finds out that their outline held. So if that’s the show’s claim to fame it’s a dodgy one to say the least.

Which brings us around to the host of obvious problems to identify with Babylon 5. The acting is stunningly uneven. Through to the final season the show veers back and forth between getting rock solid actors and ones that leave you staring at the screen wondering why on Earth they cast them when Matthew Waterhouse was available. The writing is similarly dodgy. Straczynski has Aaron Sorkin’s love of lengthy monologues without Sorkin’s ability to actually write them. This means that he’s drawn with alarming compulsiveness towards the straightforwardly moralistic. There’s a moment in his more recent film The Changeling where he self-plagiarizes a bit of Babylon 5 - a speech with the end advice “never start a fight but always finish one.” What’s notable here isn’t the self-plagiarism itself - after all, the overlap between the audiences of the two is actually pretty low. No, what surprises me is that Straczynski found it worthwhile to self-plagiarize such an embarrassing piece of moralizing tripe. Even Terry Nation had the good sense not to recycle “the only alternative to living is dying.”

Actually, Terry Nation is a decent point of comparison here, since both Babylon 5 and Nation’s work have their roots in the same pulp tradition. Which may seem odd at first blush, given that Nation’s major influence is clearly Dan Dare, while Straczynski’s biggest debt is to Robert Heinlein. But Heinlein and Dan Dare both belong to the same ultimately similar tradition of the pulp scene from which the Golden Age of Science Fiction extended. And while we’ve been asserting the terminal decline of science fiction in its Golden Age style for something around a year now, it’s worth looking at the legacy that it left on science fiction and the way in which that legacy poses a real problem going forward.

In many ways the biggest piece of prior reading for this, then, is the post on Survivors, a show that’s much more similar to Babylon 5 than anyone would normally remark upon. There the big criticism of the show - indeed, the iconic one for which the show is infamous - is that it’s the most preposterously middle class thing ever filmed. Babylon 5 isn’t quite that bad. It does actually acknowledge the working class, both in character backgrounds and in actual episodes. But it’s telling the way in which this is done. The key episode is one from the fifth season called “A View from the Gallery,” which shows a standard issue crisis on Babylon 5 from the perspective of two working joe maintenance guys. The problem is clear from the title alone. The gallery - i.e. where the working class people are - exists primarily as a perspective to view the real events of Great Men as they make history. Even when acknowledging them - and Babylon 5 goes further than space opera really had before in acknowledging the working class - their position is inherently and intrinsically marginal. Even in “A View from the Gallery” they’re just that: the comic relief peanut gallery that gazes upon the real plot.

And the real plot is, as ever, white dudes being historic. Because Babylon 5 is dominated by white dudes. Let’s pause here and note that Babylon 5 is actually one of the most impressively progressive shows of its time in terms of strong female characters and a diverse cast. It really is. But its lead is still a Great White Man of History both times such that the decision to have every single second in command be a woman is frustrating in the extreme. The only one of its three main alien ambassadors to be a woman is the one from the touchy-feely spiritual race. The chief of security position is always male. The station doctor is a man. Its female characters are reliably defined either by how they’re violated and used by men (either of the two main psychics) or rescued by dashing male heroes (Ivanova). And while it’s reliably colorblind in its casting, it’s colorblind in that frustrating way where they’ll cast any actor as long as the actor plays the part as if the character could just as easily be white. It’s telling that Straczynski freely filled in Ivanova’s Russian background as a major character trait, whereas Dr. Franklin, played by the (African American) Richard Biggs, never gets a single character trait that implies anything about his cultural heritage. And yes, of course this is all filed under the header of “but in the future we’ll have eliminated racism,” but that’s the whole point - racism is eliminated by collapsing every culture into white European culture.

The show tries to be progressive in other ways, but similarly misses the mark. It tries to be brave and do a “lesbians are OK and people have fluid sexualities” plot between Ivanova and Talia, but ends up burying it so deep in the mix that it feels like the show is ashamed about it, and furthermore seems to only do it so that it can then tragically destroy the couple because, after all, lesbian couples only exist for searing tragedy. And the show twice attempted to play with transgender issues with similarly tepid results. First there was the idea of having Delenn be male for the first season and only having Mira Furlan play the part in her own gender after her transformation at the start of Season Two, which was abandoned when they couldn’t get a male Delenn to look persuasive enough. (Because, apparently, it’s unpersuasive if the gender presentations of alien species don’t perfectly match human ones.) Then, later in the season, Straczynski waged an elaborate practical joke on Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas in which he wrote a fake set of scenes in which their characters became lovers after Katsulas’s character transformed into a woman. Because, of course, trans people are funny. That Straczynski had a woman working on the show come up to him during the course of this joke and thank him for writing a positive portrayal of trans people on television only to be horribly let down when it turned out he was using trans people for a cheap joke is one thing. He had already done the damage there, and revealing the joke wasn’t going to fix anything. The problem is that it appears that Straczynski took no lesson whatsoever from the fact that his joke actually hurt someone. Instead he gleefully tells the story in the Babylon 5 scriptbooks, even including the anecdote about the person thanking him, and showing nothing resembling contrition. Which is… predictable, really.

Because that’s the problem with this sort of progressivism. It’s the same problem that the BBC is continually plagued by in many ways - it cannot escape a vicious paternalism that undermines all of its attempts at progressivism. Babylon 5’s heart is in the right place, but it simply can’t get past its creator’s privilege. It’s telling that Babylon 5’s idea of the most horrifying thing imaginable consists of witch hunts, brutal interrogations, and propaganda. Put another way, it’s clear that Straczynski thinks the absolute worst thing to happen in America in the twentieth century was the McCarthy era. Which, yes, that sucked royally, but it’s also the most privileged answer imaginable. And yet it makes total sense within Straczynski’s larger worldview. Straczynski is following almost directly from Heinlein, and is thus absolutely in love with individual liberty and self-identity as the greatest principles imaginable. So his nightmare scenario are things that make a man deny who he is, and his idea of virtue is that “never start a fight but always finish one” sort of steadfastness. You know. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you” and all that. So of course he has everybody in the show taking up the white man’s burden. This is, at the end of the day, a show that believes in an end teleology of humanity in which we ascend to become higher evolutionary beings. And, more to the point, one that believes that this is a fate reserved only for the good species, and that other species and cultures are irredeemably flawed and cannot ever achieve that. Which, given that his alien species are flagrantly based on various Earth cultures, whereas his version of humanity is a triumph of western secular humanism, is very difficult to take in an even remotely sympathetic way.

The problem is that this approach is wedded in very, very deeply in science fiction. Because it is the default position of virtually all of a key generation in the genre’s development. Science fiction as a genre was driven by well-educated secular white men, and the ethos they put into it doesn’t come out easily. I’m thwacking Babylon 5 here, but the critique extends to an entire style that, in the mid-90s, was still hugely prevalent. More to the point, it extends to a style that’s still prevalent. This is at the heart of why the cult television model is sustained by middle class white men. The logic is that cult television can afford smaller audiences for more expensive shows because the audience it brings in are all middle class white men who are worth more to advertisers. And of course it does. Look at how it’s written. Even when it’s trying to be inclusive of women and minorities and the working class it’s blatantly, painfully a genre for white middle class American men.

The problem is a fundamental rot. It’s a rot that impacts anything whatsoever that tries to play off of the existing structures of sci-fi fandom that stretch back to the Golden Age. Because those structures have entrenched ideas and attitudes that simply cannot be separated out from their ideas. The only viable relationship left to have with it is open confrontation and parody. And, to be clear, that existed in the 1990s and well before. The feminist fandom tradition that Kate Orman comes out of was doing exactly that, and it was terribly important. And when, in early January, we get to the next stage of development of this line of thought that tradition is going to take center stage.

But for now we have Babylon 5. Which, ironically, despite its flaws is actually exactly as good as its fans say it is, albeit not at all in the way they mean, or, at least, not in the way they admit. Because it is the greatest sci-fi series of all time in, at least, the sense that it takes a particular vision of science fiction and the epic space opera  as far as it can reasonably go. You could refine the dialogue, perhaps, and hire some better actors, but that’s just trivial refinements. The biggest thing you could try to fix is to smooth out the seasons where the show is either figuring out what it wants to do or where it’s recovering from having done most of it and still having a season to fill. But even there one has diminishing returns. The truth of the matter is that Babylon 5 is really just a standard space opera show that bothers to show the sort of thing that most space opera shows push off to the backstory. So what you get is a standard issue space opera that slowly gets interesting as it does stuff that space opera on television is usually scared of, then, once it’s done, slowly settles back into being a slightly different standard issue space opera. That’s the real problem with Seasons One and Five - the first is the mediocre show that Seasons Two through Four disrupt, and the other is the mediocre show that spins out of Seasons Two through Four. It’s just that without the creativity to actually do the sprawling epic the fact that the show is poorly cast and has mediocre dialogue is a lot more obvious than it is when it’s doing something interesting.

But in finally accomplishing the massive epic of space opera on television and at a gloriously detailed length that even the most epic run of novels couldn’t hope for Babylon 5 ends up showing the fundamental limits of the approach. It does everything, conceptually speaking at least, as right as it can be done and still falls fundamentally short. The root problem is one that should be utterly familiar to anyone who’s read this blog at length: this model of science fiction believes that humanity has a destiny. That’s the impossible-to-remove problem. It believes that there is such a thing as what humanity will inevitably aspire towards, which is, in practice, indistinguishable from the belief that those forces privileged by contemporary ideological power are inherently good and are the future. And to be clear, this is more than the fact that television, as an instrument of power, is always going to tacitly support those forces. What’s uniquely pernicious about the shambling remains of Golden Age SF is that it weds that inherent institutional bias to a belief in historical teleology. That’s the trap that, despite its good intentions, Babylon 5 simply cannot find a way out of. Because, simply put, there’s not a way out without completely abandoning the western secular humanist tradition that underpins the entire genre. Which you can’t do without also aggressively abandoning the entrenched fandom structure that keeps genre shows afloat.

All of which is to say that this is where engagement with this line of thought ends on this blog except for where it actually enters Doctor Who. We’re not done with American sci-fi media, or even cult shows. But we are done with the specific style of fandom they cater to: the sort where the stereotype, at least, is middle-aged men who can’t find a girlfriend and have bad personal hygiene. (Which is not to say that this is actually what those fans are like - just that it’s what the stereotype of this sort of fandom is like.) Doctor Who’s association with that sort of fandom has always been oblique anyway; it’s vaguely what Eric Saward tried to chase during the period where Doctor Who was aggressively courting an American audience in the 1980s, but at every other point in its history Doctor Who has been at best openly hostile to that sort of fandom and at worst only incidentally connected to it. But shows that largely belong to that tradition, and I include several sacred cows that I’m sure chunks of my readership want me to cover, aren’t going to get posts simply because after the mid-90s this just isn’t the direction Doctor Who goes in anymore. There are plenty of other sci-fi shows we will cover, but they’re ones where there’s a clearly articulable way in which they break from the Golden Age tradition - much like Doctor Who does after 1996. To paraphrase its third season, Babylon 5 was the Golden Age’s last, best hope for viability.

It failed. Let’s move on.

Let Your Mind Wander When You're Handing It Over (SLEEPY)

I’ll Explain Later

Kate Orman’s SLEEPY is the book that actually kicks off the Psi-Powers series in any meaningful sense. Which is still not all that meaningful, as the Psi-Powers arc is infamous for its loose connections and lack of general coherence. SLEEPY tells the story of an Earth colony plagued by a mysterious outbreak of psychic powers and the various conspiracies that led to this state of affairs. These latter conspiracies dovetail out beyond the book and take us through almost to the end of the line. Being a Kate Orman book, everyone loves it. Dave Owen called it “one of the most memorable New Adventures to date.” Lars Pearson says it “has Orman at her prime, carving characters and sub-plots with the finesse of a sculptor.” And yet it’s the weak point in Orman’s oeuvre from the Shannon Sullivan poll, coming in at “only” 26th with a 71.8% rating. Of course, another way to put that is that Orman is one of four writers (Cornell, Lane, and Parkin are the others) to have put out multiple New Adventures and had them all in the top half of the charts. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s March of 1996. Oasis are at number one with “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” That lasts a week before Take That enter with “How Deep is Your Love.” That lasts until the end of the month when Prodigy take the number one spot with “Firestarter.” Celine Dion, Boyzone, Bon Jovi, Garbage, and, actually, The Beatles, or, rather, their creepy zombie “record over John Lennon’s old demos” version all also chart. As does the X-Files theme.

In news, John Howard wins election as Prime Minister in Australia. The Dunblane massacre takes place where you’d expect it to as Thomas Hamilton kills sixteen people, fifteen schoolchildren aged five to six. The mad cow disease furor properly breaks out as the British government admits that BSE has likely been transmitted to people, resulting in a ban on the export of British beef. And three British soldiers are sent to prison for life in Cyprus over the death of Louise Jensen.

While in books we get SLEEPY, which, as mentioned, properly kicks off the extremely loosely connected Psi-Powers arc. Perhaps the first question to ask is why there’s such a thing as a Psi-Powers arc in the New Adventures. They’d gone since 1994 without an arc, after all, and it was hardly like people were clamoring. On top of that, there seems like a bit of a letdown in the concept. I remember this being tangible at the time, although it’s difficult to disentangle that from the general sense of limbo that the New Adventures were, by early 1996, firmly in. They were pre-emptively superceded by the TV Movie, which, by the time SLEEPY came out, was only two months away. But there’s something more fundamental than just the fact that this was a plot arc that made its debut under a certain measure of erasure. Simply put, psychic powers feel like a dumb topic for an arc.

It is not clear to me that anybody actually likes psychic powers as a trope. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them as a concept - it’s merely that there’s also not a lot inherently right about them. They just sort of are. Unlike a lot of sci-fi concepts there’s no real link from them to an interesting insight about human culture or relations. Psychic powers don’t really connect to any larger cultural concept - they don’t instinctively lend themselves as a metaphor for anything as such. And yet they’re remarkably popular. The last big explosion of them that we tracked was in the mid-1970s, when the revived popularity of The Uncanny X-Men and The Tomorrow People coincided across continents. There the image of psychics was linked, in the conscious and deliberate sense, to the fading embers of glam rock’s starchildren (The Tomorrow People, recall, explicitly quotes Bowie’s “Oh You Pretty Things” in its central premise), and unconsciously to homosexuality (The Tomorrow People, recall, explicitly quotes Bowie’s “Oh You Pretty Things in its central premise). But this is an incidental characteristic - the “future evolution of mankind” image, a few decades earlier, was most readily linked to the Nazis.

The connection between psychic powers and a vision of evolutionary teleology is perhaps oblique, but it is nevertheless there. We’ve talked about Doctor Who’s increasingly fraught relationship with the idea of teleology, both in the evolutionary sense and in the broader historical sense, but in this case this should be put in the broader context of the 1990s and the steady deflation of any sense of the future in the first place. We’re at least getting to the point where a new eschatology cropped up, but like the current wave of 2012 doom-mongering that suggests that Oh No It Isn’t will be the last thing I’ll be posting about, it’s really just a placeholder - an apocalypse penciled in like that doctor’s appointment you know you’ll cancel when the actual week of it rolls around. The odometer is ticking over, so we’d best wrap it all up and hastily make some excuse about Fortran.

So on the one hand, there was a flare-up of psychic powers in 1990s media: The X-Files did quite a bit with them, Millennium, and Chris Carter’s next show, played with them too. Babylon 5 had a huge plot about them, which we’ll get to in a few entries. There’s also things like Contact or Phenomenon, a sudden surge in the popularity of the X-Men, and the like. Psychics, in this milieu, were another source of paranoia and conspiracy. The instinctive link between psychic powers and surveillance is obvious enough, but it’s in the 1990s when this really began to emerge, converging inevitably with the rise of the Internet as an implement of paranoia and surveillance. The contemporary descendent of these ideas is the Singularity - the idea that the emergence of the future is a fundamentally eschatological event.

This, then, is the context of SLEEPY and the Psi-Powers arc. This is oddly fitting for the state of affairs in the context of Doctor Who, which was itself facing something of an eschatological future here, with the end of the New Adventures looming, but looming due to what at the time still appeared to be a viable future in the form of the Fox movie. The New Adventures, by and large, are ending with one last engagement with the prospect of the future and reiterating the basic themes of the 1990s.

But SLEEPY in specific adds a further wrinkle to this pile of iconography. The other place where psychics were big business was in the New Age community, where the mid-to-late nineties contained another wave of popular mysticism. And this time the most popular thing was to talk to the dead. And for that you needed a psychic medium. Notably, this is a very different sort of psychic than the psi-powers sense - they don’t read minds, but instead have a nebulously defined access to the afterlife and to spiritual beings. But there’s still the same sort of teleology. The role of psychics as an evolutionary teleology of the species is primarily based on an aggressively anti-materialist strain of thought. That’s why I included Contact on the list up above - because it posits empathic sorts of communication as a trait of the higher species that we’re ostensibly progressing towards. And so even though Contact, as a film adapted from a Carl Sagan book, has a basically skeptical worldview that is openly hostile towards mysticism, there’s still a tacit alliance between its interests and the interests of New Age sorts who want to talk to the dead. Both are discarding the straightforwardly material world in favor of a non-physical or quasi-physical one.

But there’s a big difference between the new age approach of the 1990s and the 60s/70s, and it’s one that goes beyond the specific bits of floofiness that come up. The new age movements of the late 60s and early 70s were largely focused on the pseudoscientific. Von Danniken’s appeal was in part that he had a completely crackpot new age theory that more or less sounded like science and could pretend to be argued that way. And while you’ll still get reams of fake science in mysticism: homeopathy is a particularly and deliciously egregious example, there’s a different relationship with existing science. Von Dannikenism believes that science, done right, can show the way towards the mystical. But 90s New Agers and their descendants tended to be actively hostile to science, viewing science as a poorly conducted process that makes mistakes and, as a social practice, is likely to be full of lies.

Another way to look at this is that sci-fi psychics and New Age psychics reach in different directions. Sci-fi psychics collapses the future towards the present, New Age psychics collapse the past into the present, making the dead immediate and concurrent with our day-to-day life. Sci-fi psychics augur the looming and emerging future, whereas New Age psychics highlight the unerasability of the past.

And SLEEPY firmly has its feet in both sets of iconography. On the one hand it’s got not just psychic powers, but psychic powers that are tied to artificial intelligences - a veritable cornucopia of nineties science fiction iconography. On the other, it’s also got a world in which an ancient religion with a bunch of pyramids and a “cycle of death and rebirth” built around a religious figure called the Turtle. And while for the most part the Turtle’s direct influence on events grows more and more minimal as the story goes on, proving to be a bit of a red herring, Orman still uses the title “Turtle and Phoenix” for the third and final section of the book, indicating that there is a significant weight to the central metaphor.

All of this is lashed to another exploration of the gun/frock distinction - something that becomes explicit late in the novel when Roz comments that “sometimes it’s hard to go from guns to frocks so quickly,” and Benny proclaims that “frocks are the purpose of life… frocks are what it is all about.” But the more important moment comes a few pages earlier when the Doctor confronts the closest thing the story has to a villain, Colonel White, and asks him how he became “so fascinated by ships and guns and orders that you forget about real life,” to which White responds by declaring “this is real life, Doctor. Real history. History is ships and guns and orders.”

The connection between this and the gun/frock debate is straightforward, but there’s a new wrinkle to it that was only alluded to in Set Piece or Human Nature, the last two novels to really get involved in the gun/frock debate. The wrinkle is simple enough: the gun/frock debate is here being tied to one of the more longstanding debates in Doctor Who, which is the nature of history. And Kate Orman, building off of her own approach in Set Piece and some of the inherent point of Human Nature, is finally coming out and saying it: that the material social progress that is the secret of alchemy is not, in fact, big clanging military history. It’s the small and everyday meanderings of life.

This begins to make sense of the otherwise disjointed and strange Psi-Powers arc. It is, as we noted, an arc framed within a series facing a defined terminus. Even if the license weren’t being taken back by the BBC imminently, the degree to which the novels could serve as an extension of and expansion on Cartmel’s version of Doctor Who and McCoy’s performance of the character was going to be dramatically reduced in the near future. The TV Movie was, for better or for worse, about to change what Doctor Who was. And so in the face of a collapsed future they began the Psi-Powers arc, exploring a specific metaphor for the future. But what’s crucial is that the Psi-Powers arc is itself a collapsed arc that does not hold together. Instead of giving a coherent vision of the future it meanders about oddly and awkwardly.

This is the one thing that explains why Cartmel’s novel is what kicks off the Psi-Powers trilogy. The central premise of Cartmel’s trilogy, and indeed his entire oeuvre, was that the important thing to focus on was the lives into which the Doctor intrudes. So to have the end of his contribution to the present of Doctor Who dovetail into the Psi-Powers arc makes perfect sense. Indeed, many of the authors of the Psi-Powers arc seem uncanny in hindsight: two representatives of the past from which this era extended (Aaronovitch and Cartmel), the writer who most defines the Wilderness Years as a whole (Orman), and the defining writers of two of the next phases of the series (Lawrence Miles and Russell T Davies). For an arc that begs to be read as a metaphor for the uncertain nature of Doctor Who’s future, this is almost as perfect a set of writers as could be imagined. All you really need is a book by Dicks or Robinson in there and you’ve got the perfect metaphor.

And so SLEEPY forms the opening salvo in this. On the one hand it presents a world that faces an uncertain or even collapsed future. And it does so within both of the metaphoric frames that Doctor Who has always hung itself: the science fiction frame and the fantasy frame. The story highlights both the uncertainty of an onrushing future and the fact that the past never quite goes anywhere. And then, crucially, having done both of these things it reveals its real point: that the celebration of the ordinary present, as opposed to the vast narratives of the past or of future, is the appropriate answer in the face of these visions of history. Let the history of the program advance. The Virgin era will always be a part of it now, and more to the point, will always be terribly, terribly fun.

Some Planet Called America (Warchild)

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Shakedown, Terrance Dicks’s novelization of his direct-to-video project with added framing story featuring the Doctor, and Just War, which is absolutely phenomenal and will get covered in the book version.

Andrew Cartmel’s Warchild completes the trilogy began with Warhead, and features the final fate of Vincent and Justine, who were introduced in that book. It also ostensibly kicks off the Psi-Powers Series, an infamously loose series of books that runs over the final year or so of the New Adventures, but as it has next to nothing to do with any of the other books in that series we can largely leave that alone until Monday. Like all of Cartmel’s books it is neither loved nor hated, slotted at thirty-sixth in the Sullivan rankings with a rating of 65.8%. At the time Dave Owen gave a more or less positive review that largely declines to provide anything like a good pull quote. “The writing style is mature and restrained,” perhaps. Or “Warchild holds the readers interest.” Lars Pearson gushes more usefully: “An incredibly mature, humanistic book.” DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s February of 1996. Babylon Zoo are at number one with “Spaceman.” They remain there for the entire month. Blur, Bjork, Joan Osborne, Mariah Carey, Cher, George Michael, and Radiohead also make the top ten, while popular albums include Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele, Radiohead’s The Bends, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, which is on average an astonishingly lovely month for albums. I’d give you the lower chart data, but the absurd fact that it is possible to control the publishing of factual data means that the website I use to get chart data just got a takedown notice from the Official Charts Company, and the Official Charts Company’s own site doesn’t offer data past the top ten. Not, mind you, it doesn’t offer data past the top ten for free. No, it doesn’t offer it at all. Period. Bastards.

Wikipedia, meanwhile, still happily offers a summary of the news. What we’ve missed: The Dayton Agreement, which brought an end to the Bosnian war, was signed in Paris, which is a very poor definition of Dayton, Ohio. The European Court of Justice made a big, important rule that football players who have reached the end of their contracts may transfer for free to another club. And Calvin and Hobbes ended. Whereas in the month this book came out, Deep Blue defeats Gary Kasparov for the first time. The IRA ceasefire ends as the IRA bombs Canary Wharf. Prince Charles and Princess Diana agree to divorce. The Conservative Party manages to fall to a two-seat majority. And Pokemon Green came out in Japan, beginning that whole thing.

While in books, Andrew Cartmel’s Warchild. This is one of those properly strange moments in writing the blog: the last time we deal with Andrew Cartmel. This is strange in several regards. First of all, there is something odd about the passage of his era. The Cartmel years proper are only a three year run of the program, although the New Adventures have been existing in his shadow and running out the clock on his supposed masterplan since day one. So the fact that his time with the program here reaches its end feels odd, as though it’s both been too long spent in a single era and too short for the amount of time that has passed.

But secondly, the relationship between Cartmel and Doctor Who has always been an odd one. On the one hand, Cartmel is largely less central to Doctor Who than he might appear. That’s not to say that he wasn’t crucial, but so much of what we might call the long Cartmel era (that is, the period running from Season 24 to the end of the New Adventures) is due to the work of people around Andrew Cartmel. Furthermore, Doctor Who is perhaps more central to Andrew Cartmel’s work and career than Cartmel might like to suggest. Yes, Cartmel moved on from Doctor Who, but the truth is that after being head-hunted by Casualty in 1990 his career largely stalled and he kicked around the tie-in novels for Doctor Who and other properties. Cartmel unequivocally had ambitions beyond Doctor Who, but they largely weren’t realized.

I’m not terribly interested in the question of whether that’s just or not (though I mostly think it’s not), but I think these facts do go a long way towards explaining the strange status of Andrew Cartmel: the influence he did have on the program is blurred on both sides. On the one hand, Cartmel is quick to downplay Doctor Who as the focal point of his career (even as he, ever the self-promoter, hypes his own contributions to the program). On the other, his contributions to Doctor Who are simply less visible than those of other people working contemporaneously with him. The result is that Cartmel’s influence on the series is at once visibly massive and strangely hard to account for directly.

But in many ways that’s fitting for a script editor. Terrance Dicks, after all, only had one credited script during the period in which he was actually a major creative force on Doctor Who itself. His most visible influence on the program comes from his role in the prose novels, and that is a major role, but it’s not a role in which he shaped the creative direction of Doctor Who. His major influence on the program was far more invisible, establishing the style of intelligent but action-packed stories that are the bread and butter of successful Doctor Who after that point. To see Dicks’s influence, though, we have to compare things he didn’t have any hand in: for instance, the way in which The Sea Devils and Fury from the Deep are both sea-focused action-adventure stories, but one is packed with ideas and implications for the world, whereas the other is just six episodes of killer seaweed.

Dicks, of course, oversaw twenty-eight stories over seven years, whereas Cartmel oversaw twelve over three years. So even in this regard it’s harder to pin down exactly what he did. Especially because, unlike Dicks, Cartmel took over the program when it was in a position of complete chaos, whereas Dicks inherited a comparatively stable program even accounting for the upheavals of the format shift. So while there are visible differences between Paradise Towers and Vengeance on Varos (picked because they’re two openly political and satirical stories), it’s more difficult to identify exactly what the difference is beyond a general “Cartmel did a better job than Saward” claim which, while true, seems unhelpful.

But Cartmel’s work in the Virgin era goes a long way towards illustrating what one of the key innovations of Cartmel was. The War trilogy is defined heavily by its focus on the experience of people into whose lives the Doctor intrudes. The linking material of the entire trilogy - the lives of Vincent and Justine - point towards this. There have been other linked series in Doctor Who, but they tend to be defined by big picture elements, whereas this trilogy was defined by the lives of a couple who, yes, had some psychic powers, but who mostly lived ordinary human lives that got repeatedly thrown into chaos by the Doctor. The story of Davies having a script rejected with the instruction that he should tell a story about “a man who is worried about his mortgage, his marriage, and his dog” also points towards this concern. It is also where the difference between Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers comes in. For all that Vengeance on Varos did to include the two viewers at home, the fact remains that it was a story about interplanetary politics and Paradise Towers was a story about a shithole tower block.

It is sad, then, that this is the aspect of Cartmel’s work that gets overlooked. After all, it is visibly this that influences Cornell’s love of the Seventh Doctor. The crowning moment of the Virgin era, Human Nature, clearly stems from this exact source: the way in which the Cartmel era refocused the Doctor on the small and the domestic instead of the big and epic. And since it’s visibly Cornell’s influence that’s all over Davies and Moffat, this lineage is straightforwardly Cartmel’s biggest legacy. And yet in practice we fetishize his supposed masterplan, despite him saying he never had one and it being the portion of the long Cartmel era with the least actual impact on the series.

But Warchild also points to something else that is interesting: it appears to be the case that Cartmel was actually one of the most radical forces in his own era. Cartmel’s New Adventures are widely criticized for their marginalization of the actual regular cast. Certainly that’s an accusation that sticks against Warchild, where the Doctor and Bernice spend most of the story sitting on the sidelines and Chris is an almost entirely minor character. Only Roz has a sizable plotline. Cartmel has, in other contexts, complained about how the New Adventures evolved continuity and said that he’d have preferred they just stuck to the Doctor and Ace, so most of this isn’t a huge surprise. Indeed, once you know this it’s difficult not to get the sense that Roz only has a sizable plotline because the book was originally outlined for Ace, and Roz was the character who it made sense to transfer the plot to.

This would, of course, have never happened on television. John Nathan-Turner would never have stood for it. Indeed, the moderating effect of Nathan-Turner on Cartmel’s instincts is still visible here: one of Nathan-Turner’s most common demands to Cartmel was that the scripts needed to have moments where the Doctor got to “be Doctorish.” And while the Doctor sits on the sidelines for most of the story, idly nudging events to keep them on track, the end, in which he calmly and casually pipes up in the midst of the final confrontation with Vincent and says a few words that bring Vincent’s world crashing down is one of the most perfectly Doctorish moments in the book line.

Even still, it’s easy to argue that this was a poor decision for the context. The New Adventures were, for better or for worse, being marketed to existing Doctor Who fans who were buying the books because they were Doctor Who books. Throwing one Doctor-lite novel into that mix is risky. Doing it routinely and serially, as Cartmel did over the War trilogy, was spectacularly aggressive. And borders on completely mad. As ever, the fact that it was even allowed to happen gestures to the peculiar beauty of Virgin’s editorial practices. Yes, the fact that Cartmel had a pre-existing connection with the series surely helped him get his books published, but that Virgin would so routinely try its readership’s patience like this shows again why this line and this era is so special.

All of which is to say that it’s not accurate to call the marginalization of the Doctor a bad idea. Sure, it probably would have been in the specific context of the television series in the late 1980s, when its audience was also very fannish, but you’re arguing uphill if you want to argue that a show like Doctor Who can only work if the Doctor is always the center of attention, not least because that’s exactly what it did for its first few years. Cartmel’s approach is perfectly viable from a storytelling perspective: it’s only from a “being Doctor Who” perspective that it’s flawed, and that’s a perspective that deserves our active suspicion at this particular moment in time. Amusingly, of course, the non-existent Cartmel Masterplan’s real nature, namely Cartmel’s desire to make the Doctor a mysterious figure again, plays into this: the Doctor, when made mysterious, is better suited to flit around the outside of the action instead of being at the center of it. Making the character mysterious creates a sense of alienation from him, making it easier for him not to be quite as central.

But a corollary to Cartmel’s apparent interest in the people around the Doctor instead of the Doctor himself is, for our purposes, more interesting. The other thing that really happened in the Cartmel era was that the program returned to its roots of using its premise to explore unusual places. The Cartmel era put a lot of weight on the variability of concepts, and the show returned to an attitude whereby if you didn’t like what it was doing one week that was fine, because another radically different premise would be along shortly. That’s the attitude that leads to things like Delta and the Bannermen, The Happiness Patrol, and Ghost Light existing, and it’s certainly one I’m inclined to endorse. This also helps to explain Cartmel’s willingness to be so iconoclastic within the Virgin line. Simply put, treating the War trilogy as Cartmel’s vision of what Doctor Who should be is misleading. Cartmel wasn’t in charge of vision at that point. Cartmel was in charge of writing what he thought would be an interesting story, and he dutifully banged out a distinctive novel for 1992, 1995, and 1996. For Cartmel’s approach, the goal was to be as different from the books on either side as possible, not to be Virgin-styled as such.

But if this viewpoint - that Doctor Who should be judged in part by how different it is from story to story - was prevalent in the Cartmel era proper, it entered something of a decline in the Virgin era. That’s not to say that there isn’t a wild and joyful difference in tone between, say, Gareth Roberts and Kate Orman, but there’s also a clear degree to which the Virgin writers influenced each other and played off of each other’s ideas in a way that moved towards such a thing as a coherent “Virgin style.” More to the point, the fact that so many books were written consciously for an audience of Doctor Who fans means that there aren’t a lot of books where the most notable thing about them is the freshness of their ideas. Many of the freshest are simply pastiches of existing literature such as Sky Pirates! or The Also People. We’re visibly drifting away from being the sort of series where Delta and the Bannermen or The Happiness Patrol would ever happen.

And that’s a drift that never gets undone. For all that the new series is very, very good, and for all that it jumps around among premises and genres, the fact is that there’s more thematic and tonal unity to Doctor Who these days than there ever has been before. The most recent mini-season demonstrates the point perfectly: for all its aspirations to being five “movie poster” Doctor Who stories it turned out five stories of almost indistinguishable quality and tone. These days a Doctor Who story can do anything it wants as long as it makes it feel like a Doctor Who story. With fifty years of variations as to what exactly that means there’s still plenty of room to maneuver, and I’m hardly going to suggest that the series is stale in the least. Indeed, its consistency is undoubtedly part of what makes the series successful in 2012.

But it means that, as Cartmel departs the history of the series, we can see him as an oddly transitional figure. On the one hand, his successful focus on the human scale of the Doctor’s adventures was unbelievably influential, and there’s a clear sense in which everything subsequent to his time on Doctor Who stems from his work. On the other, he serves as the last flourishing of an old model of Doctor Who that we will probably never see return in full. More than any other figure, Cartmel embodies the transition from what the classic series was to what the new series is. As a result, he doesn’t quite fit into either paradigm, despite the bulk of his time on the program being crucial to the definition of each of them.