Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 55 (Coupling)

There’s an oddity to some of these Pop Between Realities entries. Once again, we’re on a show that we’d never have talked about if we didn’t know that Steven Moffat was going to be one of the central architects of Doctor Who’s revival. But he is, and we do, and so here we are.

Coupling is, of course, sex comedy. It’s more to the point sex comedy about gender essentialism. Precedent suggests I should be infuriated. I mean, let’s be honest: a substantial number of the jokes in Coupling trade on stereotypical depictions of women. And yet somehow Coupling escapes that. There are two aspects of this worth extrapolating a bit. The first is a bit theoretical, but still worth discussing given some of the reactions recent blog posts have gotten. Simply put, just because there are a lot of horrifically imbalanced and oppressive power relations surrounding gender doesn’t mean it can’t be good fodder for humor. Indeed, humor is almost necessary here.

Put another way, as socially constructed, oppressive, and artificial as contemporary gender stereotypes are, they also exist and influence people’s lives. The socially constructed is still real. Put a third way, just today a bemused conversation about why our sofa was functionally reupholstered in blankets led to my showing my fiancee the pillow bit from “The Melty Man Cometh.” Because it applies. It’s solid observational comedy about a real part of contemporary society.

But what’s the difference between it and outright sexist comedy? The main one is something we’ve previously noticed in Moffat’s work. Coupling skewers stereotypes of both men and women, but, crucially, in the grand scheme of things, women win. Or, more to the point, Moffat is far more willing to stick it to the people in his stories who are authorial stand-ins for him than he is to other people, and particularly to women. Coupling makes gestures at the absurd foibles of modern femininity, but it’s nothing like the depiction of men as essentially helpless buffoons.

This is perhaps most obvious in comparing Jane and Jeff, the representatives of each gender who are treated the most absurdly. Both of them are fundamentally absurd and profoundly misunderstand the entire world. But their treatment within the narrative is starkly different. Jeff is all but designed to be a fan favorite character, but he’s the eternal fool. When a plot line happens such that Jeff actually gets a girlfriend, it is in and of itself surprising, and he still manages to bungle everything. Jane, on the other hand, is the oddly charmed fool. No matter how incompetent she’s shown to be, and she’s shown to be at least as incompetent as Jeff, she’s also always given a strange power over the narrative. This pays off in spades in the final episode, where Moffat suggests that she’s actually entirely self-aware and is not actually the fool in the narrative but the character who best understands everything that’s going on.

So men are essentially helpless prats, while women hold both all the power and, as the overall plot regarding Steve shows, the ability to redeem men. It’s overstating it by a little to suggest that this puts Moffat in the same tradition as William Moulton Marston: an outright female supremacist. But on the other hand, Moffat increasingly writes openly kinky dominatrix-types and talks in interviews about how he has a fetish for powerful women who cheat people. So, you know. Emphasis on “by a little.”

Is this perfect? God no. For one thing, it’s basically the formula of every Judd Apatow film. Though Moffat does deserve some credit for working out the formula independently and years before The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and while it’s difficult to call the formula played out in 2001, it’s not exactly a plus either. Moffat’s approach ends up putting women on a pedestal, which is still a form of objectification. His attitude ends up with a strange denial of responsibility for men, who are helpless prats waiting for a woman to redeem them with her feminine wiles, which still perpetuates the dramatically harmful idea that women have magic powers that men can’t resist, which is, in turn, inevitably a justification for why women must be repressed.

But since I’m on the subject of Wonder Woman, let me port over one of the maxims of that book: progress is usually making new mistakes. By balancing a mercurial power over narrative with the sort of dominatrix-esque “women helpfully control men into being better” he ends up with a new one: what we might call the manic pixie dream dominatrix. Yes, it’s a combination of two forms of “put women on pedestals and worship them through objectification” ideas, but it’s a relatively new one. And perhaps more importantly, it’s one where the worst instincts of each of the tropes cancel each other out.

This sounds like damning with faint praise: not bad for a heterosexual bloke’s treatment of women in mainstream television. But I don’t mean it that way. Because it is real progress. Moffat writes better women than his peers do. He represents real progress in straight dudes writing television. He’s imperfect, yes. So is the status of feminism in contemporary society. Flawed isn’t equivalent to “not progress.” At the end of the day, there’s more to celebrate here than there is to condemn.

If nothing else, the narrative of straight blokes being redeemed by strong women with their own distinct desires and both the will and capability to achieve them is, in fact, exactly what most sane models of feminism want to happen. The line between the story Moffat writes in Coupling and the story of men learning to check their privilege from feminists is a thin one at best.

Which is perhaps to say that Coupling is more interesting in terms of Steven Moffat’s development than it is in terms of Doctor Who’s. Fair enough.

From a technical perspective, there’s something Coupling does that’s terribly clever and interesting. Actually, there are a lot of them: Coupling has at least an episode per season that is aggressively and self-consciously eccentric in its structure. Starting in the first season with an episode in which a large swath of the dialogue is in Hebrew, and where the episode rewinds at one point and reshows a section with the dialogue switched (that, is, with the person who spoke Hebrew now speaking English and the main cast speaking Hebrew), Moffat began flexing his structure muscles.

It wasn’t the first time he did things like this. Press Gang had a bunch of unusually structured episodes too, and Joking Apart was full of it. But those, for the most part, were simply matters of telling a story with flashbacks. It’s a tricky structure, and it involves keeping a very good handle on what’s being revealed to the audience instead of merely what’s happening. On top of that, you usually have to make sure the plots of two separate events mirror each other in a non-obvious way. So stuff like the Press Gang episodes “Monday-Tuesday” or “The Last Word” is complex because the events of one time period need to reflect the other. The order of events at the funeral has the added and artificial constraint that people have to show up within the funeral in an order that maximizes the tension back in the hostage situation. You can’t have Lynda at the funeral too early, or even have the funeral guests talk about her too directly, because that would muck up the main plot. But there’s no inherent reason the funeral has to be structured that way beyond the plot constraints. And balancing that is genuinely, properly tricky.

But that sort of thing is nothing compared to what Moffat starts to do with Coupling. Sure, it makes it less of a surprise that he does it, but it’s still very different. What’s key about what he does in Coupling is that he’s not simply telling a story along a non-chronological order. It’s closer to what he did in “The Last Word,” where events at the funeral or in the hostage situation obliquely affected one another in non-literal ways. But it’s more complex than that, because in Coupling Moffat starts playing not with chronology but with point of view. He doesn’t generally tell a story out of order so much as he tells it more than once, according to different characters’ experiences of what happened.

There are several things to point out here. The first is that this positions Coupling as a meaningful point in Moffat’s development as a writer. There’s a shift towards a philosophical approach that is consistent in his Doctor Who material. The decision to make storytelling less about what happens and more about what people experience and remember. There’s a tacit link between stories and human experience involved in this: a key step on the road to “we’re all stories in the end.” Coupling starts to discard the question of what really happened in favor of the question of what everyone’s story is. The truth isn’t subjective so much as it’s irrelevant. What matters is the intersection of our individual subjectivities.

The second thing is that if non-linear storytelling is hard, this is absolutely jaw-dropping. And It’s especially difficult to do it in comedy. Comedy, after all, relies on a gap between what is expected and what happens. On the one hand, the sorts of structures Moffat plays with would seem useful to that end. After all, nothing builds expectations as straightforwardly as rewatching something you’ve already seen. Equally, however, it’s terribly difficult to find any space in this to subvert expectations, and astonishingly so to successfully do setup and resolution like this. The first episode to play with this, “The Woman With Two Breasts,” is breathtaking in this regard. It does a conversation with Jeff and the Israeli woman, in which there are frequent moments of proper comedy. Then it goes back and does the conversation again from perspective. And that’s funny too. More to the point, much of the humor relies on the assumption that the audience is going to remember what Jeff really said and what was going on in the conversation from his perspective. The joke, frequently, is how badly Jeff misread the conversation, with a side of how badly the Israeli woman is misreading Jeff. But all of this has to take place in the gaps of a conversation that was already saturated with jokes the first time. So almost every line has to pull double duty as a genuinely funny line in its own right and as an expectation-setter for another funny line. Plus Moffat has to keep the conversation varied and mobile enough that the audience has enough visual cues to remember which bit they’re in. It can’t just be two people at a table talking; it has to involve movement around the bar and actions so that the audience can keep their place.

What we have, in other words, is the point where Moffat becomes ready. Up to this point he’s been a somewhat compelling figure - a fan who made it into the halls of power, and who has done some interesting and quality bits and bobs of Doctor Who. But we also know that at the end of Coupling Moffat is a year away from a revelatory script that single-handedly pushes him to a new level as a television writer. He’s not ready to run Doctor Who yet. But he’s ready to write for it, and ready to be a great writer for it. And if nothing else, that’s part of the story of the Wilderness Years too. Doctor Who’s return was in part the shifting of large, cultural forces. But it was also in part the personal development of a couple of particularly skilled writers who happened to be fans of it and of the right age to take it over in 2005. That story is part of the Wilderness Years too. The first writer we saw hit that point was Paul Cornell with Human Nature. And for all the flaws of League of Gentlemen, we saw Mark Gatiss hit that point there. But now we get one of the two biggest players. Creatively, only one person remains. Although he is the most important one.

But we’ll come back to that in two months or so.

I Said, "I Hope You Enjoy Your Meal." (Minuet in Hell)

It’s April of 2001. Hear’Say are at number one with “Pure and Simple.” Emma Bunton unseats them a week later with “What Took You So Long,” which lasts two weeks before Destiny’s Child take it with “Survivor.” Lil Bow Wow, Janet Jackson, Gorrillaz, Robbie Williams, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Madonna, and O-Town also chart. In news, a Chinese fighter jet crashes into an American one, resulting in an international incident, which leads to George W. Bush’s first major foreign policy crisis. He manages not to completely whiff this one. Give him time. Also, Slobodon Milošević surrenders to the police, and the Netherlands become the first country to legalize same sex marriage. All of this happens on the same day, April 1, at which point the month gets tired and overworked and decides not do anything else.

Oh, yes, and Big Finish releases Minuet in Hell. Let’s start with the bit that if I ignore I’ll be rightly scolded in comments, and that if I pay attention to everyone will say that I’m being tiresome and imposing my personal issues and values on the story. The story is frightening in its internalizing of misogyny. Charley is kidnapped off the streets and turned into a “pretty little satin bottom,” where she’ll cater to the whims of the customers of a “gentleman’s club” and submit to their physical punishments whenever they want to administer them. This is treated as little more than another obstacle for a plucky adventurer to overcome. As is usually the case with things like this, the problem comes when the fantasy horror is far too close to a real one. Human trafficking and sexual slavery happen to real people. Treating a thinly sanitized forced prostitution as generic adventure filler is grotesque. And it sets a nasty tone for the whole piece.

That admitted, let’s move to the other thing that jumps out about this: its portrayal of the United States is ludicrous. I’m actually not quite as bothered by this as the consensus is. Yes, the accents are awful, but I avoided skewering Nicola Bryant or the entirety of The Gunfighters on those grounds, so starting now seems silly. The premise rather painfully strains credulity - I’m at a loss for why the subplot of forming a fifty-first state called Malebolgia is included, as it is at once ludicrous and pointless. But under the surface is an idea with some teeth, particularly coming four months after the inauguration of George W. Bush. This was surely on Gary Russell’s mind as he revised Alan Lear’s Audio-Visuals script during the 2000 campaign.

The Bush administration, barely four years in the ground, is a difficult thing to historicize, not least because it was, in fact, so disastrously bad. Its failures were in many ways worse than even the most pessimistic predictions in 2000. And thus in many ways the horror of what was has erased the sense of horror at Bush’s election in the first place. On top of that, the election itself was overshadowed by the fact that its results fell within the margin of error of voting itself. And, for around half my audience at least, and, for that matter, myself, there’s a difficulty in seeing outside the country. But from an external perspective, the very prospect of electing Bush was an existential nightmare.

It wasn’t merely that Bush was an idiot, although he was. Rather it was that he conformed to a particular American stereotype: someone who was proud of their ignorance. What was terrifying about Bush was that he didn’t know much about the world and, more to the point, didn’t care to. He was eager to play the cowboy: decisive, independent, and beholden to nobody. While the rest of the world stared, slack-jawed, and tried to figure out if America realized that westerns were works of fiction. Added to this was the bizarre system of power Bush represented. The very fact that he was a contender for the Presidency was clearly down purely to the fact that he was the eldest son of someone else who had been President. There was no other way that a failed businessman and drunken frat-boy fuckup was going to have ascended to those levels of power except for the basic fact that when you’re from a family as rich and powerful as the Bush family the rules don’t apply to you.

Fine. Aristocracy is hardly unfamiliar to the international audience. It’s not like anybody is labouring under the illusion that Prince Charles’s qualifications for anything whatsoever extend beyond what uterus he incubated in. But Prince Charles at least has the common decency to consistently act like a rich, entitled aristocrat. What was bizarre and terrifying about Bush was that he not only acted like a common “man of the people” sort, he seemed to genuinely believe that’s what he was. The idea of an upper class twit is easy enough to deal with, as is the idea of an ignorant yokel. But their combination and equation seemed, to anyone outside the US in 2000, a particularly unnerving and dangerous prospect. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who was at least blatantly an actor, Bush gave every impression of being sincere in his identity, despite hte identity being an incoherent impossibility. And so to most of the world the biggest story of the 2000 election was how this was even happening in the first place.

All of this feeds tangibly into Minuet in Hell. The main antagonist, Brigham Elisha Dashwood III, is at once a populist with mass appeal and tangibly a scion of old power. His citation of the historical British Hellfire Club as inspiration and his touting of how he’s descended from Sir Francis Dashwood positions him firmly in the George W. Bush tradition. And there’s a careful play with religion here. Dashwood’s style is firmly in the American Protestant tradition that Bush hailed from, save for the detail that he’s a Satanist. But that really I just a detail - as Penn Jillette is fond of pointing out, Satanism is just Christianity where you knowingly pick the losing side. That is, in the end, the point the audio makes, contrasting Dashwood’s foolish credulity and belief in his Satanism against Sir Francis Dashwood and the original Hellfire Club’s use of the “black mass” as little more than an ostentatious acting out in an attempt to be shocking and decadent

On paper these ideas are gorgeous, and they come close to justifying all of the over the top portrayals of America. If the point is that Dashwood is a ludicrous figure who reflects a fundamental failing of American society then the grotesque exaggeration of America makes sense. I mean, if we’re basically accusing George W. Bush of being the Reverend Harry Powell then we may as well go whole hog. The details are perhaps a bit sloppy, but there are moments of real cleverness in amidst it all - particularly the litany of deranged killers in the asylum and their “ripped from bad American tabloids” crimes.

So where does it go wrong? For the most part because as good an ideas as all of that is, it gets lost in a smorgasbord of other ideas, not all of them as good.

Like The Sword of Orion, Minuet in Hell is an adaptation of an old Audio-Visuals story. But there’s a difference. The Sword of Orion was nearly a line-by-line remake of its source material that matched the structure more or less perfectly. But the original Minuet in Hell had what could only be described as an idiosyncratic structure: its first episode was nearly forty-seven minutes long, followed by a seventeen minute episode that hurriedly squared away the plot. Unlike The Sword of Orion, which ran at about the two hours Big Finish shoots for, this meant that Minuet in Hell was too short in its original form. On top of that, its second episode was bizarrely mispaced, packing its revelations in far too tightly.

On top of that, the Audio-Visuals Minuet in Hell was set in the 18th century, around the original Hellfire Club in London. This is a “five minutes in the future” style story set in the United States, and with the Brigadier thrown in. Clearly this is going to take some reworking. And yet the level of reworking was in some ways strangely minimal. The original cliffhanger is maintained as the cliffhanger of episode two. This results in an absurd mushrooming of the story: three of the episodes are over half an hour long, and the first one is a brutal forty-four minutes, almost all of which is just introducing the profusion of plot lines and characters that the story trades on.

The problem is that for all the plot lines,  there’s not actually a plot as such. Structurally this works like a bad regeneration story: a crisis brews on one end, the Doctor wanders around trying to become the Doctor on the other end, and as soon as the Doctor gets his act together he dispatches the villain pretty effortlessly. So for three episodes and change - the length of most Big Finish stories - all the Doctor spends his time doing is conspicuously failing to encounter the plot or deal with it. He spends the whole story amnesiac and in an asylum, in fact. Charley gets the plot together faster, but that mostly means she gets to fail to find the Doctor at great length. And the Brigadier mostly serves to have the plot explained to him. The story this all resembles most? The Twin Dilemma.

All of this means that you have an audio with too many things going on. The original Minuet in Hell was mostly a psychological character piece about the Doctor having an identity crisis. And this seems to have been the angle they pitched to McGann. Fine - it does sound like a meaty acting role. But that sort of high concept “let’s do something challenging” ethos drags the production away from Big Finish’s actual strengths, which is storytelling. The Doctor locked up having an identity crisis is a neat concept, but it’s not one that has a story. There’s nothing for him to do while he’s fretting that he might not actually be the Doctor. In this regard doubling the length of the story is a staggeringly poor idea because there’s not actually story.

But more to the point, this doesn’t match up with the over the top camp satire of America. One is grotesque and overplayed, the other is supposed to be intimate and psychological. They just don’t go in the same story. Doctor Who can do both, and that’s its strength, but they aren’t going to work in the same story. In this regard, quite unlike The Sword of Orion, the decision to be based on an old Audio-Visuals script is where it goes wrong. Freed from the confines of being a remake this could have been a modern day The Happiness Patrol. But the need to retain fealty to a story structure that doesn’t serve it just kills it.

On top of that there’s the Brigadier, whose presence is flagrantly down to the old logic of “The Brigadier should meet every Doctor.” That’s the only reason he’s here: to tick off a box. He’s delightful, because Nicholas Courney is, and he gets all the best bits, but he’s only there because they didn’t know if they’d get McGann again, so they wanted to give him a Brigadier story. It’s easy to criticize this logic, but we’ve been doing it since at least Dimensions in Time, and really since the Saward era. It’s still around, it’s still occasionally influential, and this time it adds more straw to an already paraplegic camel.

So what we have here is an odd artifact. The things that were advantages for Big Finish in the first three audios turn to disadvantages. Part of that is just bad luck. It’s certainly possible that someone could have been given the brief “This old Audio-Visuals, a commentary on America’s relationship with aristocracy, and the Brigadier” and made something that worked. Instead we got Gary Russell, who was never going to manage that. But it still highlights the fundamental problem of overtly traditionalist Doctor Who. “Just like you remember, only in a way you’ve never seen before” is still beholden to a long memory of the series. What Minuet in Hell direly needed was someone to take the actually quite interesting new ideas that they had and rescue them from the burden of the old ones.

Instead we got a flaccid mess of ideas that didn’t know what to do with each other: a troubling confirmation that the old demons of Doctor Who that have haunted it since the 1980s still apply. And this is the paradox of the early aughts for Doctor Who. The framework was snapping into place faster and faster, but no matter how much progress was made the problems of Doctor Who seemed progressively more and more intractable, finding ways to reassert themselves again and again. So much so that the point where the show’s revival was announced and the point where it looked the most utterly hopeless would end up coinciding almost exactly. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

I Can Swim (The Stones of Venice)

It’s March of 2001. Atomic Kitten are “Whole Again” at the top of the charts. That lasts a week more before Shaggy takes over with “It Wasn’t Me.” That gives it up to Westlife’s “Uptown Girl,” which goes down to Hear’Say’s “Pure and Simple,” which lasts the rest of the month. Outkast, Melanie B, Nelly Furtado, Ricky Martin and Christina Aguilera, the Gorillaz, and Manic Street Preachers also chart, the latter managing to take both the 8th and 9th slot in a single week.

In news, the Russian space station Mir crashes into the Pacific Ocean. It does not hit the target Taco Bell floated in the ocean, which meant that Taco Bell did not have to give out free tacos for a day. Notably, they did not float the banner anywhere near where Mir was expected to land. The Real IRA detonates a car bomb outside BBC Television Center. And Mac OS X is released.

While on CD racks, The Stones of Venice. This marks an odd milestone for McGann’s Doctor. The character, as we’ve previously discussed, had been developed considerably over the nearly five years since the TV Movie aired. This development, however, had taken place without McGann, since it was all in novels. And more to the point, whatever development McGann has put into the character since 1996, it’s not influenced at all by the Eighth Doctor Adventures, which McGann has surely never read. And while there’s a clear production fork between the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Big Finish line, that fork was only sort of in the writers, in that each line had their own stable of primary writers. (Admittedly more of the Eighth Doctor Adventures’ “primary” writers crossed over to do Big Finish work than visa versa.) And this is one of the subtler but significant differences between the two lines: one of them had the Eighth Doctor as a literary creation inspired by maybe five minutes tops of McGann’s performance in the TV Movie, and the other had the Eighth Doctor as created by Paul McGann in a frenzied five-day stretch in which bits of the stories were recorded completely out of order.

On top of that, we have McGann not having been terribly thrilled with the part as he was forced into it for the TV Movie. In the twelve years since Storm Warning McGann has made his desire to reinvent the part clear, perhaps most notably in his active attempts to get a new costume created for his Doctor and his documented dislike both of the Victorian costume and the wig they put him in. So these two approaches had a really fundamental point of divergence. The Eighth Doctor Adventures frantically picked over the TV Movie for any hints of a usable Doctor and came up with the particularly romantic, free-spirited Doctor. McGann, meanwhile, was looking to break with the TV Movie and start over. The schism here is fundamental.

And with The Stones of Venice we have the moment where McGann first encounters a script written by one of the mainstays of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. And it was written with no real knowledge of what McGann would want to do with the part - indeed, this and The Sword of Orion were the two scripts given to McGann when recruiting him for Big Finish. To Magrs’s credit, he seems instinctively aware of the issue, and stops well short of writing the Doctor as the over the top adventurer of, say, The Scarlet Empress. Perhaps more to the point, Magrs goes without Iris Wildthyme, thus capping the extent to which he can go completely gonzo. (And it is worth noting that in both of his novels it is Iris, not the Doctor, who’s really the impetus for Magrs’s more over the top flourishes.) But this doesn’t erase the root problem, which is that Magrs has thus far been a champion of an Eighth Doctor that’s very different from what McGann wants to play.

The most telling is the sequence in which the Doctor, after exploring Churchwell’s gallery for a bit, realizes that he’s misplaced Charley. As written it’s clearly intended to be a scene playing off the novel-established trope of the Eighth Doctor being passionate and easily distracted. It’s the audio equivalent of the bit in Vampire Science where the Doctor leaves Sam at a political rally and comes back two years older. But McGann, playing it, seems not to quite know what to do with it. Largely this seems because the Doctor McGann wants to play is a bit snarky, whereas the Doctor Magrs is writing is excessively earnest. They don’t quite go together, highlighting the extent to which there are very much two versions of the character developing.

Elsewhere, however, McGann and Magrs seem thoroughly in sync. McGann audibly eats up the material in which he’s providing slightly snarky meta-commentary on events and his role in them, such as his banter with Churchwell where the Doctor tries to reassure him by saying that he does things like this all the time. But there’s still a tension simmering under it. Magrs, as ever, is writing with a camp, frockish sensibility. The Doctor is enthusiastic about getting locked up and escaping and mortal peril because these are the things he enjoys. He’s a man whose hobby is near death experiences. McGann, on the other hand, seems to want to play it with a bit of irony.

Both approaches are based on an interest in literary self-awareness and meta nods at the reader, but they come from very different places. Magrs envisions the Doctor as the sort of person who is perfectly suited to be the main character in a Doctor Who story. As such he’s aware of genre tropes, but, crucially, unaware of his own fictionality. (Again, we must say “hence Iris Wildthyme” here.) But McGann seems to want to play it with a little more self-awareness - something more akin to the bit in The Impossible Astronaut about Saturdays, which is itself a variation on the joke in the Buffy musical episode about how it must be Tuesday, since Dawn’s in trouble again.

This sort of postmodern self-awareness is often accused of being a “send up” of the program, although the particular terms of that are always a bit contested. But what we can see in the difference of approach between McGann and Magrs is that this is clearly not necessarily the case. Magrs’s approach is visibly not a send-up of Doctor Who. It’s self-aware, but that self-awareness is channelled into a sort of hyper-fidelity to the genre tropes. If anything it’s a demonstration that the storytelling can work even if you lampshade every trope in sight.

McGann’s comes closer to parody - it certainly does seem like McGann is having a bit of fun laughing at the tropes of Doctor Who instead of earnestly playing along with them. But then again, he signed up for the audios on the basis of this script and The Sword of Orion, the latter being an intensely earnest and straightforward script. And in interviews McGann plays up how much fun he finds the Big Finish stories. So there too the sense of parody is loving. This was, of course, one of the major inventions of the late 90s, as everything became ironic and self-aware.

But the influence of this persists today. Two paragraphs up I used the phrase “lampshade every trope,” a bit of vernacular owing a tremendous debt to TV Tropes. And while we’re not strictly speaking up to TV Tropes yet in the chronology of the world (it launched in 2004), we’re in the period where the logic of TV Tropes starts to take hold. Back in the Queer as Folk post I suggested that one of the central lessons of Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who was that ironic detachment was optional. But the early aughts also led to the counterpart of that: the fact that just because someone is obsessively over-analyzing something and dismantling it doesn’t make it any less fun or thorough an enjoyment.

In this regard, Magrs and McGann are, despite their obvious differences in approach, on the same page. Yes, Magrs revels in the same frockish Edwardian adventurer approach that McGann bristles at, but under that they have a fundamental point of alliance in their desire to combine meta-awareness with an untroubled embrace of the fun of Doctor Who.

As a result, The Stones of Venice ends up working quite well. Magrs turns in a script that is straightforwardly trying to have fun. Admittedly, at least if Lawrence Miles is to be believed, this is not what you’d call a well thought through script on Magrs’s part. Miles recounts Magrs telling him that this was a two-night job aided by a bottle of vodka. That said, it seems to have helped him. After two novels in which Magrs spends his time constructing narrative-form arguments about how Doctor Who should be magical realism, here he finally just lets go and writes some magical realism. It would be overstating the case to suggest that Magrs is better when he’s working fast, but it does impose a satisfying directness on him, forcing him to tell a story instead of telling us how a story should be told.

Combined with Big Finish’s “just get on with doing good Doctor Who” ethos this pays rapid and satisfying dividends. Like Storm Warning and its dealing with changing history, or The Sword of Orion and its handling of the Cybermen, there’s a lot of thought bubbling under the surface here. But as with both, the thought is into how to do stories like this, not into manifestos about how Doctor Who should be.

As a result, we get something that it’s difficult to honestly say we’ve seen much of in Doctor Who: a love story. It’s important to note how carefully Magrs gets to the point of doing a love story in Doctor Who, however. The structure of the adventure is, by its own admission, bog standard: characters early on who give portentious warnings and turn out to be significant in the final act, lots of chases and captures, some mad cultists, an ancient secret, an antagonist who has hidden in the shadows for ages, et cetera. The Doctor is mainly concerned with figuring out what sort of plot he’s in. But by the end it turns out that the answer is, in fact, that he’s in a love story.

It is not, to be clear, merely that there’s a romance here. Rather, it’s that the entire premise of the story is based around the interaction of two lovers. The destruction of Venice is entirely a product of a romance gone sour, and the way in which the Orsino and Estrella do or don’t reconcile is directly what the fate of the city revolves around. It is a love story in the same way that The Sword of Orion is a sixties-style Cybermen story. Its entire plot is based around exploring people in love and what they do.

It’s difficult to think of the last time this happened. Happy Endings had a romance as a central element, and it was well done, but the plot wasn’t structured around Jason and Benny as such. The television series certainly had romances, but did it ever have one where the nature of the couple was what the story hinged on? The closest equivalent I can think of after some brain-racking is Love and War, where the Ace/Jan relationship really is at the heart of everything the story is doing.

That Magrs can make this work comes directly from his decision to do Doctor Who as magical realism. It works because Magrs has opted for a system where the destruction of a city can be tied to a love affair, as opposed to a straight science fiction model where you’d need to come up with some explanation involving psychic energy. Or, really, some explanation at all. Magic realism doesn’t need to explain. It can just declare. And because we’re still familiar with the underlying logic it works. We get love affairs, and so if we’re told that the city works like one we basically understand it.

Again, there’s a real extent to which you can simply see the future of Doctor Who at work here. This is absolutely standard issue stuff for the new series, and listing the stories where the same trick is pulled is absolutely trivial. And it’s a distinct transition to where Doctor Who can be about emotional storytelling. The debt to Buffy the Vampire Slayer is absolutely huge here. Magrs’s “the city works like a love story” trick is the same trick Buffy pulls every week with “the supernatural horror works like this bit of teen angst.” And, more to the point, it works in a large part because of the trope awareness. The fact that everyone can lampshade the love story means that it’s possible to explain the city in terms of it. Because the Doctor and Charley can look at the Orsino/Estrella romance and say “that’s an epic love story” they can introduce the concept of the epic love story into the story, and then point at it again to explain how the flooding of Venice works.

It would go too far to suggest that Magrs is the inspiration for this in the new series. After all, this approach is basically what Davies did in Damaged Goods with the mother/son relationship. But again, there’s the audible click of the framework of Doctor Who as we know it today snapping into place.

A Journey to the Edge of Space (The Sword of Orion)

It’s February, 2001. Limp Biskit are at number one with “Rollin.” A week later it’s Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again,” which manages the of-late unheard of feat of actually staying at number one for more than one week. In fact, it rides out the rest of the month. Whetus, Dr. Dre, Usher, Jennifer Lopez, U2, Mya, Papa Roach, Dido, and the Backstreet Boys also chart. In news, over four hundred people die in El Salvador following an earthquake. Ten people die in a high speed train crash near Selby, North Yorkshire. And a massive outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spreads over the UK, causing quarantines and a culling of cattle so massive in scope that the British Army was required to assist.

While in audio CDs we have The Sword of Orion. As we’ve already discussed, the Big Finish line has an overt focus on being “classic” Doctor Who. But with The Sword of Orion that gets downright literal: this feels like it was written in 1988. Mainly, as it happens, because it was. But the history of that, as well as the fact that it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb in 2001, is worth looking at in more detail. Which means that we have to do the actual history of Big Finish, which we largely skipped last time in favor of some remarks on style.

The first thing to understand are the origins of Big Finish as a company. A fair amount of their personnel had originally worked on the Audio Visuals line in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Audio Visuals line were fan-made Doctor Who audios that starred Nicholas Briggs as an alternate version of the Doctor, and featured several names that are of obvious future relevance to Doctor Who: Garry Russell, Jim Mortimore, and Andy Lane all worked for them, as did Bill Baggs, who directed The Airzone Solution and whose company put out several other almost-but-not-quite Doctor Whos, including audios featuring K-9 and Lalla Ward as “The Mistress,” and ones featuring “The Professor and Ace,” and, later, a run of Faction Paradox audios by Lawrence Miles.

So eventually a chunk of the Audio Visuals folks formed a proper company and got the rights to do a run of Bernice Summerfield audios, which they did a good enough job with to persuade the BBC to give them the rights to do some actual Doctor Who audios. Initially only Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy signed up. Tom Baker declined because, well, that’s the sort of thing Tom Baker does. And Paul McGann didn’t so much decline as not even have the offer forwarded to him because his agent at the time was Janet Fielding, who was in a period where she vocally disliked Doctor Who and didn’t think doing the audios was the right career move for him. Then McGann changed agents and ended up doing the Big Finish audios after all, and now you’re more or less caught up.

Unsurprisingly, when Big Finish started up they turned to the Audio Visuals line and remade a few of their greatest hits. Two of these remakes ended up in the first four Paul McGann audios, and the first of them is The Sword of Orion, which is a remake of a 1988 story from the third season of Audio Visuals. Given that it’s a thirteen year old fan production with a barely altered script, in many ways the most surprising thing about The Sword of Orion is that it doesn’t suck. It’s not a staggering classic by any measure, but it comes off as a competent piece of Doctor Who.

Much of this comes from the inherent tension involved in the Audio Visuals. They were being made at the same time that Doctor Who was, and inevitably this meant that they were competing with the televised Doctor Who. Not in a direct way - the Audio Visuals were careful to stay under the radar and work as polite fan productions that tried to avoid getting sued. But Gary Russell, in interviews, has been open about the ambitions involved, boasting that the Audio Visuals “Dalek stories knocked spots off Saward’s,” taking swipes at the BBC’s attempts at Doctor Who audio, and generally making no secret of the fact that he thought the Audio Visuals were better than the official Doctor Who of the same time.

And there’s nothing that illustrates this better than the handling of the Cybermen. The Cybermen are in a strange way the most interesting of Doctor Who monsters simply because their real definition is “the second choice Daleks,” and thus don’t actually have a single coherent concept. There were, over the course of the classic series, essentially three versions of the Cybermen. The first appeared in The Tenth Planet and then never again, and were the twisted and dark mirrors of humanity. The second were the Troughton-era Cybermen, who made a return in Revenge of the Cybermen. They were primarily metaphors for Communism, and were skulking, sneaky monsters who infiltrated and subverted. Then, finally, in the 1980s we got Eric Saward’s Cybermen, who stomped around a lot and had David Banks in charge of them.

The Sword of Orion is interesting, then, because it came out in 1988, amidst the Sawardian Cybermen (though after Saward himself), but features the Cybermen of the Troughton era. There’s a straightforward fight being picked here. It is perhaps a silly one, as the truth is that the Cybermen aren’t hugely inspiring in either iteration. But it’s a clear shot across the bow. The plot is carefully assembled out of the best bits of Troughton Cybermen stories. Tomb of the Cybermen is the most obvious source, but as with any decent nostalgia the focus is on the tone of the original rather than the specific content. As ever, this is blended with other standard tropes of Doctor Who - most notably a bunch of Robert Holmes-style grumbling working class con men. The result is something that isn’t quite like the Cybermen of yore that nevertheless owes a tremendous debt to it.

The biggest trick, and it’s a key one, is that it’s clear that Nicholas Briggs has thought about the Cybermen in the larger context of science fiction. The Sword of Orion doesn’t just nick from bits of Doctor Who, it grabs shamelessly from Alien and other science fiction around at the time it was written. The human/android conflict that it builds its plot around may be a science fiction cliche, but nobody has actually paired the Cybermen up with the “robots that can think are people too” idea before this. Typical of Big Finish, the interest here isn’t in the philosophical debate as such but in the shape of the story and the way in which the Cybermen can be used to spice up the sci-fi standard. And it works decently, coming out as a well-oiled Cybermen story that’s, as a Cybermen story at least, genuinely better than anything else of the 1980s.

But what’s more puzzling is that it still worked in 2001. And not only did it still work, it still worked in basically the same way. The Sword of Orion’s cover consciously displays the Cybermen in their Invasion/Revenge of the Cybermen forms instead of in their Earthshock redesign, actively stressing the retro nature of these Cybermen. This is still, thirteen years later, a story about returning the Cybermen to an older model.

Admittedly, part of why this idea still has legs is that the Cybermen have been almost wholly neglected in those thirteen years. I may be missing something or other, but I’m fairly sure that there’s only three appearances by the Cybermen in the Wilderness years prior to this: Iceberg, Killing Ground, and Illegal Alien. That’s not nothing, but it’s striking that the Cybermen, ostensibly one of the classic Doctor Who villains and ones that both Virgin and the BBC had the rights to, have been through fewer reinventions during the Wilderness Years than Gallifrey or the Doctor’s origins.

At the heart of this is the fact that the Wilderness Years have been, as we’ve discussed before, startlingly obsessed with the question of the nature of Doctor Who. That’s not to say that there haven’t been revamps of monsters, but if one stops to think about it, there’s been surprisingly less of it than one might expect, especially given how often writers have embraced self-consciously radical and controversial reinventions of Doctor Who. But within the Wilderness Years there really haven’t been any huge reinventions of monsters. I think there was a big thing of Ice Warrior history in one of the Virgin books I didn’t cover, but that’s about it. Not even the C-List monsters got anything. For all the influence of Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore over the time period, that seemingly obvious idea got skipped.

Which means that a nostalgia-laced revamp of the Cybermen was potent in 2001 in a way that is a bit surprising. The idea of a story that’s thinking through the Cybermen not so much as “what are they a metaphor for” but rather in terms of “what’s the basic shape of a Cybermen story” is novel. This isn’t some high concept reboot, but it feels like more of a reboot than most revivals of old monsters that we’ve seen in the last decade of Doctor Who simply because it does go back to brass tacks regarding the storytelling of the Cybermen.

Like Storm Warning, The Sword of Orion has relatively basic problems in that storytelling. The most glaring is that it retains so much of the Audio Visuals version’s narrative structure that it gets in the way. The Audio Visuals version consisted of two forty-five minute episodes, with the cliffhanger being the revelation of the Cybermen, who, significantly, aren’t mentioned or depicted anywhere in the packaging of the original story. (In this regard they do nick from the Saward era, since this is blatantly the same publicity used for Earthshock) Retaining this structure means that the first and third episode cliffhangers are relatively weak - secondary characters get menaced by things, and in both cases the resolution is essentially “the secondary character bites it.” Meanwhile, the Cybermen don’t make a proper appearance until the end of episode two, at the halfway mark.

The problem is that The Sword of Orion, having marketing concerns that the Audio Visuals didn’t, put the Cybermen on the cover. Which means that we’ve got the stupid cliffhanger of Planet of the Daleks Episode One, only stretched out over two episodes and several decades after people should have known better. And beyond that, the monster reveal as a concept is fundamentally visual. Shouting “Cybermen!” doesn’t have anything like the impact that a shot of Cybermen does. And unlike the Daleks, where you can get a rough equivalence of their image by having the familiar voice shouting about extermination, the Cybermen need either an explicit confirmation of their identity or the visual of those jug handles to work. Doctor Who has always been a fairly intensely visual show, and a large part of what constitutes “traditional” Doctor Who is visual grammar. And, perhaps somewhat puzzlingly, even after fifteen years of doing audio Doctor Who the Big Finish crew hasn’t quite figured out the implications of that for how they tell their stories.

But as with Storm Warning, Big Finish is, through the simple business of doing decent quality Doctor Who that’s not quite like anything we’ve seen before, revealing how limited the past decade of Doctor Who has been. We’ve talked a lot about the big ideas that Virgin introduced, and the intense characterization, and how that’s an influence on the new series. We’ve talked a lot about the grand ambition of the Eighth Doctor Adventures line. And that’s all true. But it’s not just that the Big Finish line has refocused on the workmanlike task of actually making decent Doctor Who on a regular basis. It’s that the reversion to a model of finding space within the realm of “traditional Doctor Who stuff” is in its own right as radical and substantive a change as the high concept madness of past eras. Once again, Big Finish are demonstrating just how little the past decade of Doctor Who has focused on the business of storytelling. It’s not that there hasn’t been some damn good storytelling in there. But it is perhaps telling that Paul Cornell somehow found himself better known for wild ideas about the Doctor’s psyche than he did for being able to put together a successful story. And it’s the latter, in the end, that was his real asset. Big Finish, at least, understands this.

Which isn’t to say they were without their own radical streak.

I Move So Fast, I Don't Exist Any More (Storm Warning)

It’s still January of 2001, so I suppose I’m kind of stuck not having much of an intro here. This marks the point in the McGann era where we jump tracks. Thus far we’ve focused primarily on the Eighth Doctor Adventures. We’re still going to cover another six of those (well, five, technically), but for the next month and a half or so we’re going to focus on the other McGann era: the Big Finish audios. This means a couple of things. First, these posts won't have the "I'll Explain Later" headers, for the simple reason that all of the Big Finish material can easily be bought on their website, making it less necessary to get people up to speed. Go buy these, basically. They're cool. Second, it means that we have something today that we haven’t seen, or, rather, heard since the TV Movie itself: Paul McGann’s Doctor as played by Paul McGann.

This is a strange thing. McGann at once has a nearly blank slate and years of expectations and assumptions that he has to contend with.. The script does McGann few favors here, making him talk to himself for almost a full episode in the most “and now I will explain the plot to nobody” manner imaginable. It’s unfortunate, and more than a bit amateur hour. Yes, this story is meant to introduce a new companion, but the natural consequence of that should have been a start in which the Doctor arrives and gets into the action, not an episode of solo TARDIS scenes. It butchers the episode’s momentum, but worse, it butchers McGann, who rings in the sixth year of his tenure as the Doctor still trying to figure out how to play the part.

Already, though, some cross purposes are arising. McGann is in the deeply awkward position of stepping into a role that’s been defined in his absence. Momentarily, at least, the flaws of the Eighth Doctor Adventures are helping him slightly: his role may have been defined, but not with any consistency. And while it’s absurd to suggest that Big Finish wasn’t influenced by the BBC Books portrayals, they’re also reacting against BBC Books and creating their own version of the Eighth Doctor. Still, there’s a tension between what the script wants, which is for the Doctor to be the proper Edwardian Adventurer that allows Charlie to be the Edwardian Adventuress she proclaims herself to be, and what McGann seems to want, which is to play the Doctor as Ford Prefect: blasé and a bit snarky, rolling his eyes a bit at the plot around him.

If one wants to try to classify Doctors, one could do worse than dividing between leading man Doctors and reactive Doctors. The leading man Doctors are the ones who are played as active figures at the center of things: Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Colin Baker, and David Tennant. The reactive Doctors, on the other hand, are the ones who flit about the edges of the story and tend to react to what’s going on. This isn’t, to be clear, a comment on charisma so much as one of the ways in which a Doctor acts. Sylvester McCoy is a reactive Doctor for all his manipulations and power simply because he tends to manipulate by letting the person he’s talking to think they’re in control of the conversation. Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, and Matt Smith are among the other reactive Doctors.

And McGann ends up in an odd place. Because his debut came out of the American cult television model he got cast firmly as a leading man Doctor to start. And that’s not what McGann seems interested in. Back in the TV Movie post we talked about how he’s visibly more engaged in the audition tapes than he is in the TV Movie. Yes, the audition tapes were off of the dreadful Leekley script with its father issues, but in those scenes he’s getting to be reactive. The scenes are about him being told information, and while they’re fundamentally about his character, they’re about his character’s reactions as things happen, not about his character taking charge and doing things. It’s when he’s put in the straight leading man role of the TV Movie that he visibly gets bored, because he doesn’t seem to want to flounce around being the hero. This makes sense. The reactive approach is the larger acting challenge, and is one of the things that makes the Doctor unique as a role: the fact that he's reactive and the hero. Unfortunately, McGann is mostly on his own in wanting to play the part that way.

But in Storm Warning he starts to find a way to subvert that, continually underplaying lines or adding a sort of bemused detachment to them that plays more towards a reactive approach. The script, again, doesn’t quite know what to do with him here. Nor could it - Alan Barnes is necessarily writing for generic Doctor here. (It’s telling that two of the first four Eighth Doctor audios are simply adaptations of stories written for another Doctor entirely, but we’ll talk more about that on Wednesday.) But it’s an interesting aspect to McGann’s Doctor, and reveals vividly how little of what we think of as the Eighth Doctor actually stems from the man who plays him.

But the context of this story is strange in other ways. Back in the Virgin era I considered and ultimately rejected a division of Doctor Who that was commonly cited at the time - the famed and foolish “rad/trad” debate. My argument which I still stand by in the general case, was that there’s an illusion at the heart of the distinction given that every classic era of Doctor Who was, at the time it was being made, terribly radical. But as we reach the Big Finish/Eighth Doctor Adventures fork it becomes impossible to ignore this issue, simply because it is, in practice, the fundamental divide between the two lines. The Eighth Doctor Adventures were weird and written by Lawrence Miles, whereas Big Finish was proper Doctor who with actors.

More to the point, the Big Finish personnel were sober, safe pair of hands types. The fact that they were able to work up Big Finish and get the rights to make Doctor Who in the first place is a testament to their considerable professionalism - as is the fact that they’ve mildly improbably held the rights and continued their line with no end in sight as the new series kicked up. Equally telling is the number of people involved with Big Finish who have been gifted jobs on the new series. Barnaby Edwards and Nicholas Pegg, who both provide stirringly mediocre voice acting on Storm Warning can be unseen in any Dalek story. Alan Barnes and Gary Russell got the plum of doing The Infinite Quest, and Gary Russell was script editor for the new series (a far more menial and paper pushing position than on the classic series) on the last few Tennant specials, as well as on a few episodes of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. And, of course, Nicholas Briggs voices all of the monsters.

So, we hit one of these points where I need to be clear that I don’t mean something as an insult: with the exception of Nicholas Briggs (who really does do some phenomenal voice work with his monsters), none of these people were hired on the new series for their talent. They’re mostly sinecures given to people for faithful service to Doctor Who over the years. And they’re deserved. It’s absolutely wonderful that Doctor Who hires Barnaby Edwards and Nicholas Pegg to be Dalek operators. But they got the jobs by being reliable and professional. Which sums up the nature of Big Finish pretty well: they can get a cast together to produce professional quality Doctor Who on a monthly basis.

When compared to the gibbering shambles that the Eighth Doctor Adventures often are as a line, the difference is striking. It’s not that the two lines have a ton of differences in their creative staff. There are a few writers who did work for the Eighth Doctor Adventures and not Big Finish, and visa versa, but they’re mostly the same crowd. It’s not as though Big Finish and the Eighth Doctor Adventures represent a massive schism in Doctor Who’s creative staff. Heck, the third and fourth Big Finish audios were written by Stephen Cole and Justin Richards: clearly there’s not some intractable factionalization involved here. But where the Eighth Doctor Adventures constantly strove and angsted over a desire to find the future of Doctor Who, Big Finish just got on with the task of making it.

Which is the other facet of the rad/trad division. If the so-called rads could defend their inherent superiority on the grounds that every classic era of Doctor Who was radical, the so-called trads had an equally good defense.Because the overwhelming ethos of Doctor Who on television was “shut up and get the thing made with a reasonable level of professionalism.” Robert Holmes may have been a genius, but the bulk of his classic scripts in the Hinchcliffe era came out of him throwing his hands up and rewriting an unworkable script from scratch. He didn’t aspire to creating televisual classics that would be beloved for generations. He aspired to not missing the deadline. It is, in other words, not that the rads are clearly correct whereas the trads are boring. It’s that the entire distinction is absurd: Doctor Who at its best has always been innovative, and it’s always been driven by an unpretentious desire to make pretty good television.

In the early part of the Wilderness Years, specifically in the Virgin era, it was the latter desire that threatened to get out of control. The prospect of Doctor Who as a series of bland but competent tie-in novels loomed large until writers like Paul Cornell, Jim Mortimore, Kate Orman, and Ben Aaronovitch pulled the line towards something more ambitious. But by 2001 the pendulum swung the opposite way: the last thing Doctor Who needed, as we said, were more people being bloody clever about it. And so in early 2001 the steady hand of Big Finish was in many ways exactly what the series needed.

Certainly in terms of experiencing the history in hindsight there is a sense of relief that one gets upon reaching the Big Finish material. From the vantage point of the guy behind the keyboard, there’s something a bit frustrating about the stretches of the series’ history where the historical context alone can eat up two thousand words. I go stir crazy for the sorts of entries where I can get into the weeds on details of stories instead of framing general case issues and history and production. Which is, perhaps, an ironic thing to say 1600 words into an entry in which I’ve mostly done just that, and its not as though there aren’t other aspects of the production history of Big Finish to sort out over the next three entries, but the transition is still there.

So what we have here is a familiar set of Doctor Who tropes. Angst over changing history, the idea that humanity ruins everything it touches through greed, alien species with distinct sub-factions. But crucially, they are put together in a way we’ve never quite seen before. The R101 disaster is obscure enough that we’re back in the territory of The Massacre - a terrible thing that the audience is unlikely to know the details of. (Indeed, even the writer seems not to know the details, deciding that everyone on board died instead of having six survivors.)

Furthermore, we’ve never had the “you can’t rewrite history, not one line” idea joined up with the companion before - the idea of a companion who is intrinsically wrong and against the Doctor’s ethics is clever, and manages to find a way to make the whole changing history idea actually have some consequences that don’t feel theoretical. When it’s just a bunch of supporting characters who the web of time says have to die we pretty much know how it’s going to play out - some angst and then them dying. But the idea of a companion who history says should have died is an interesting unknown. It’s in many ways surprising that it’s taken until 2001 to actually explore the whole fixed points in time business as anything other than a tragedy founded on an abstract ethical point. Even So Vile a Sin, the incumbent best dealing with these issues to date, had an element of the abstraction to it. Roz’s death is part of a larger philosophical point about the nature of history.

But that’s not what’s going on with Charley. Indeed, the philosophical aspects of it are absolutely threadbare. There’s nothing to this beyond the basic trope of “angst over rewriting history.” It’s self-justifying - the only reason the Doctor can’t change history is that the idea of the Doctor being unable to change history is an established bit of Doctor Who. There’s no idea to it. But in an odd way that makes it more fascinating, simply because the “you can’t change history” idea was never that good to begin with, reflecting as it does a bafflingly ethnocentric view of the world. It’s an idea that’s usually played as a big sci-fi idea, that here gets played for its narrative consequences instead.

There are two things to note here. The first is that there’s a surprising maturity to that. It’s characteristic of the new series, where the point isn’t whether or not you have a cool sci-fi idea but whether you have an interesting story around it. The companion the Doctor knows he isn’t supposed to save. That’s a story in a way “the Doctor can’t save an airship” isn’t. But second, and perhaps more interestingly, this jump in the sorts of stories Doctor Who does comes purely out of the decision to go back and play with the old tropes of the series without feeling obliged to in some tacit fashion apologize for the use of the tropes. It’s classic Doctor Who, but not quite as it’s ever been done before.

Storm Warning is, of course, imperfect. The voice acting is spotty, the writing doesn’t always know how best to accomplish its goals, and the aliens are terribly unoriginal. But it’s enough to show the potential of this as a future for Doctor Who, and more than a bit refreshing after the fruitlessly overambitious antics of the Eighth Doctor Adventures.

A Timehead or Something (Father Time)

I’ll Explain Later

Since we’re skipping an awful lot of books from now on, I’m not going to attempt to summarize those. Father Time is the penultimate book of the earthbound series, and tells the story of the Doctor and his adoptive daughter Miranda, a mysterious and, one might say, unearthly child with two hearts. Over the course of a decade the Doctor raises Miranda and eventually stopping some aliens who are sworn to kill her and helping her take over the universe to boot. Nobody has a poor word for it. Lars Pearson calls it “one of the most mature Who books,” and Doctor Who Magazine’s new-look review column proclaims that Parkin “nails the character” of the Doctor. Fitting for the seventh-best story in Shannon Sullivan’s rankings.

——

It’s January of 2001. Bob the Builder is at number one with “Can We Fix It,” which is holding off Eminem’s “Stan” in one of the most entertaining musical battles imaginable. Rui Da Silva takes over with “Touch Me” as week later, then Jennifer Lopez with “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” and finally Limp Bizkit with “Rollin’.” S Club 7, Westlife, Destiny’s Child, Leann Rimes, Britney Spears, and the Baha Men also chart in what may be the worst month for music ever.

While we were out, Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, informally known as Long Kesh prison, closed in Northern Ireland. Slobodon Milošević left office. A local gang attempted to steal the Millennium Star from the Millennium Dome, but were foiled spectacularly. The dome also shut down to visitors after a year, now being part of The O2. And the 2000 US Presidential election played out, seeing the election, or, at least, Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush. While this month, Bush is actually inaugurated President, Wikipedia launches, and the AOL/Time Warner merger is approved.

While in books, Lance Parkin is back with Father Time. Parkin’s books have an odd tendency to start from a position that can almost be described as trolling. He begins with a premise that is tailor-made to piss off and alarm fans, or, alternatively, one that seems self-evidently impossible. His books consistently feel as though they were written in response to dares - he takes ideas that sound like they cannot possibly work and tries to make them work. In this regard he is perhaps the most high concept writer of the Wilderness Years - more even than Lawrence Miles and Paul Cornell.

But there’s a cheek to Parkin’s iconoclasm. He writes unwritable stories not quite by formula, but at least by a simple and reliable method, which is to find an escape route from the premise itself. The Infinity Doctors is perhaps the definitive example of this: a story that reconciles all the disparate takes on Gallifrey through excessive fealty to all of them. In a similar spirit, Father Time takes on the “impossible” premise of “what if the Doctor had a daughter” and proceeds to carefully avoid the major reason the story is impossible, which is that it’s a premise that should completely alter how Doctor Who works, and that any failure to allow it to do so opens up another Problem of Susan, only a bigger one that can’t be hand-waved with the “well, the show drifted slightly from its original premise” argument that ultimately avoids, if not removes, the problem. I mean, yes, the Problem of Susan is huge, but ultimately it’s the same thing that means that Barney Google basically never appears in his own comic anymore. Repeating the problem in 2001 would be daft. So Parkin ends up spending a lot of Father Time avoiding painting himself into the obvious corner, to the point where the bok is as much about avoiding that corner as it is about its ostensible subject.

Nevertheless, it works. The first thing to say is that Parkin found the second story of the earthbound arc. This is the Silurians of that cycle - the book that finds something else you can do besides watching the Doctor from afar. This is the only one of the earthbound arc to meaningfully take advantage of the time allowed by it: despite having over a century to play with, most of the books of the earthbound arc take place over a day or two. Parkin is alone in realizing that he has all of the space from 1951 to 2001 to himself, and deciding to open the book up to take place over an entire decade. The earthbound arc is really one of the few places in all of Doctor Who where you can have the Doctor spend an entire decade in which he’s not constantly in search of the TARDIS, and yet Parkin is the only writer to tackle it.

This strangeness embodies a general case for the earthbound arc, however. There’s something that it’s difficult to explain why the earthbound arc never touches: UNIT. The Doctor’s time on earth coincides with the Third Doctor’s exile and a massive wave of alien invasions, and we never see so much as a hint of how the Eighth Doctor’s life through this period goes. Yes, there are obvious difficulties with this such as exposing the Eighth Doctor to answers about who he is before Escape Velocity, but it’s as massive a question as the interplay between Torchwood and the Pertwee era, and unlike that can’t be squared away by the impossibility of shooting a Pertwee/Captain Jack story and the fact that Torchwood is a spin-off with an oblique connection to Doctor Who. More than once over the course of this blog I’ve suggested that part of the value of a given story is that its era wouldn’t feel finished without attempting the story. Here we get that repurposed as a problem: a story whose absence does, in fact, make an arc feel unfinished and not thought through.

And a lot of that seems to be that the writers simply aren’t there. Of the six writers on the earthbound arc, only Parkin and Richards seem primarily interested in a story idea that could only work as part of that arc, instead of one that, with some light revisions, could function elsewhere. To some extent this just follows up on what we talked about with The Burning: that there’s no point in doing a big arc when you don’t have enough writers who want to work with the ideas of that arc. And with the earthbound arc, as with virtually everything else in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, they didn’t.

Another part of it, obviously, is that the line has a terribly anxious relationship with its past at this point. As I said, one of the major problems with the idea of a UNIT story in the earthbound arc is that the books are committed to throwing away the past and creating a new continuity for the Doctor. That this is a ludicrously overwrought way of accomplishing what could have been accomplished with an editorial directive to the effect of “no more Gallifrey” is neither here nor there. But Father Time demonstrates the futility of that as well. The book is shot through with with engagement with the past of Doctor Who, albeit engagement with it as an absent force. The fact that the Doctor exists in a universe that knows him even if he doesn’t know himself is crucial to the book’s plot, and Miranda’s origin is deliberately made such that she’s plausibly a Time Lord. It’s notable that the book uses the language of Factions and Houses to describe Miranda’s people. The chronology is just rough enough to make it tough to be definitive about intent. Father Time predates the first Faction Paradox spin-off book by twenty-one months, although it’s certainly plausible that Miles had begun reworking the mythology in time for Parkin to work in the reference. But why should we be slaves to authorial intent? Whether a deliberate reference or not, it deepens the novel’s already existent tendency towards making Miranda’s origins blur with the Doctor’s obscured ones.

But more to the point, the past of Doctor Who is inescapable. That dealing at all with the fact that Doctor Who has already done an earthbound arc that overlaps this one in time period is completely unthinkable demonstrates just how odd this period and arc really is. And there ends up feeling like a particular anxiety about the Pertwee era, especially with the earthbound arc, which is on the one hand indebted to it up to its eyeballs (note also that three of the stories involve the Doctor wrapped up in the military in some fashion) and on the other hand terrified of engaging with it. Which perfectly summarizes the situation that the novels in general find themselves in. They only exist because of the extensive legacy of Doctor Who, but they’re so petrified of engaging with it that they’ve gone out of their way to blow it up.



What’s odd about Father Time is the degree to which, for all that it took an idiosyncratic moment in the series’ history and did a story where the entire premise is self-consciously antithetical to how the show can possibly work, it is, more than anything in the entirety of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, and possibly more than anything in the Wilderness Years that wasn’t outright adapted for television, reminiscent of how the show works today. The iconic plot of the new series is “the Doctor experiences some aspect of ordinary human life,” and the most recent iteration of that has been exactly the material Parkin plays with here: marriage (not that the Doctor actually marries Debbie) and kids. Parkin has quietly hit on the future of Doctor Who here.

There are, of course, problems. Miranda is thin as a character. It’s too important that she be worthy of being the Doctor’s daughter for her to really be developed as a character in her own right. Everything about her in the book is really just  part and parcel of a conveyer belt designed to get her to the ending where she can suddenly become an intergalactic empress of peace. She’s not so much an interesting character as a character we’re told is interesting.

One of the things that hobbles her is instructive: she’s a character in a book. Although Father Time is superior to The Doctor’s Daughter in almost every way, it has a major comparative disadvantage simply because Miranda doesn’t have Georgia Moffett playing her. For all that Moffett’s character is an underwritten bore, it’s impossible to understate the utility of her being able to smile winsomely at the camera and say “hello, dad” in terms of getting an audience to like her. It’s a small thing, but it’s crucial to how film and television can get audiences to care about characters with a ruthless efficiency novels can’t: films and television have people and charisma involved, and those are key aspects of how we come to invest in other people. Putting a human face on Miranda would have made all the difference in the world.

So even though Father Time, unlike The Doctor’s Daughter, has interesting details and deals with the concept of the Doctor as a parent in a real, lived way instead of as a vapid sketch, there’s a necessary sterility to it. It’s just not possible to do the story of the Doctor becoming a parent in a 288 page novel, simply because that’s not enough pages to earn that kind of relationship. The book has too much to do in getting us to invest in both Miranda and Debbie, moving through a decade of Miranda’s life, telling us how the Doctor feels about all of this, and sorting out its actual alien invasion plot. And so the novel leaves the reader in the strange position of wanting all the annoying bits about space ships and intergalactic war to go away so we can get back to Miranda at a party having her heart broken, simply because those are the bits where the book actually earns its premise. It’s doing what the entire earthbound arc should have done - dealing with the amount of space that the premise gives and allowing the idea of the Doctor simply living his life to be explored. And instead, because it’s crammed between Endgame and Escape Velocity, it has to rush itself and fail to quite earn its premise.

I recognize that this is counter-intuitive - we do, after all, usually think of novels as the medium better suited to extended character studies and the like. But this is too simple. Novels can accomplish this in part because of their length and in part because there are a lot of things a novel can do efficiently. But a good actor can communicate internal emotional states with an efficiency and skill that prose is simply poorly suited to. Lengthy descriptions of internal emotional states are banal, while a skillful actor working in close-up can convey subtleties that are nearly impossible to make come alive in prose. A novel in which there are no aliens and the Doctor just raises a daughter would be a tough sell within Doctor Who - the sci-fi plot has to be there. But that means that the book is in many ways unable to do what it needs to do. It can only tell us that the Doctor loves his daughter, whereas Paul McGann himself could show it to us in five seconds.

So the book simultaneously ends up calling the future direction of Doctor Who and illustrating a fundamental shortcoming of it in its current form. It’s a phenomenal idea for a Doctor Who story - one that is rightly hailed as one of the highlights of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. But a novel series in which it’s one story in a larger plot arc is the wrong medium for it. It’s not where this approach can thrive. Which is ironic, as it’s specifically the oddities of that plot arc that allowed the story to make its first appearance. But in practice, even if The Ancestor Cell hadn’t done grievous damage to the Eighth Doctor Adventures as a line, this book reveals a basic problem, which is that television is just a better medium for multi-author long-term serialization than novels are.

But interestingly, the same month this came out there was a major development with Doctor Who in a different medium. Which brings us around to the other Eighth Doctor line.

Sacred Fire, Sacred Flame (The Burning)

I’ll Explain Later

The Burning is the start of the six-book Earthbound arc, in which the Doctor spends a century hanging around Earth waiting for the TARDIS to finish regrowing itself and to meet Fitz. Its plot is thoroughly straightforward and simple: the Doctor stops a fire elemental from killing people in Victorian England. Although in practice things are a bit more complex than that. It was at the time terribly well-regarded: Lars Pearson called it “a striking, contemplative story of Victorian terror,” while Doctor Who Magazine deigned to give the Eighth Doctor Adventures a cover feature for it and said that it “confirms the vast improvement in the Eighth Doctor novels of late.” Still, it only makes it to thirtieth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings.

——

It’s August of 2000. Craig David is at number one with “7 Days.” Robbie Williams unseats him a week later with “Rock DJ,” then comes Melanie C with “I Turn To You,” and finally Spiller with “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love).” Ronan Keeting, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Eminem, and Storm also chart. In news, riots break out on a council estate in Portsmouth as over a hundred people attack the home of someone named as a pedophile by News of the World. Dora the Explorer debuts. The Confederate submerine H.L. Hunley is raised to the surface, and four days later the Russian submarine Kursk sinks to balance the scales. And Reggie Kray is released from prison due to his expected death from bladder cancer. (He’ll die in October, just over a month later.)

While in books, The Burning: the big relaunch of the Eighth Doctor Adventures’  fabled new direction after the excesses of Lawrence Miles. Written by newly installed editor Justin Richards, it was a huge deal as a novel simply because, well, in the previous book the Eighth Doctor Adventures blew up everything they had been doing so far and most of what defined Doctor Who, and everyone was understandably curious where they were going with all of this, if somewhat less than enthused.

Given all of this, what is striking about The Burning is its traditionalism. The novel goes out of its way to include the standard elements of Doctor Who, including a military whose failure to trust the Doctor exacerbates the situation. The story is self-consciously the most traditional Doctor Who story imaginable. In many ways the real giveaway is the Victorian setting. There aren’t actually a lot of Doctor Who stories set in the Victorian era, but because Doctor Who has so many roots in Victorian imagery and concepts it feels iconic and proper to put the Doctor in a Victorian setting. So we have a Victorian setting, a pool of secondary characters who are steadily killed off, a military whose effectiveness is damaged by their failure to trust the Doctor enough - it’s basically “put the Hinchcliffe era in a blender, then cook at medium heat until a thick reduction forms. Serve over 240 pages.”

Which begs the question of why anyone bothered. I mean, there’s something genuinely startling and difficult to explain here. All of the effort of The Ancestor Cell was intended to lead to this? The point of the exercise was to create a radical break such that Doctor Who was no longer beholden to its past, and what we get for our trouble is the most traditionalist plot imaginable. Why break from the past if all you want to do is recreate it? It’s not as though every writer other than those touching the War arc weren’t churning out generic Doctor Who.

Underneath all of this traditionalism, however, is a fascination with the tone and texture of the novel. The Burning, if taken at a level of plot, is, as we noted, spectacularly pointless. It clears the deck only to set up the chairs exactly the way they had been. But what’s remarkable is the novel’s sense of tone. Not necessarily its prose style, which is functional, but its narrative style. The Doctor is a black box within the story - we get nothing of his thoughts, and only watch him through the eyes of characters who do not understand him. Since we also don’t understand him at the moment, this is compelling. The story builds towards a decent surprise as the Doctor opts to let the villain drive, having decided that the villain cannot be redeemed, actively lets him die. Which is a generic twist, but it largely works here because it stems out of the degree to which we do not know this version of the Doctor or what he’s going to do.

Equally interesting is the book’s beginning, which repeatedly teases the reader with the possibility that the Doctor is arriving in the narrative before finally slipping him in the back door so that we don’t realize he’s there for several pages. On the one hand this reinforces the idea that the Doctor has power over the narrative. But more fundamentally, it makes the Doctor a source of mystery. And the entire novel is tuned to this purpose, with repeated discussions about the nature of free will that foreground the question of whether the Doctor, stripped of all of the trappings of his identity: the TARDIS, his knowledge of history, and his identity, will still be the Doctor.

So yes, the book is terribly traditional, but its purpose is a sort of modernist reinvention of the traditional tropes. It’s trying to show us a traditional Doctor Who story from an uncomfortable and uncertain position. And it largely succeeds and manages to be an interesting and engaging book. But there’s an obvious problem underlying this. The point of comparison that we’re obviously meant to go for is An Unearthly Child. Richards is trying to take Doctor Who back to a point where we didn’t know what it was, just like it originally did. Which follows. Even the decision to have the Doctor let Nepath die parallels An Unearthly Child and its skull-bashing incident rather neatly.

But let’s recall, briefly, how long Doctor Who actually stayed in that state. By the most generous of estimates the Doctor was a known and predictable character as of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which aired its first episode two days before the show’s first anniversary. In reality there’s reason to draw the line a bit earlier - The Sensorites, perhaps, where the Doctor for the first time opts to stay and help people for reasons other than wanting to get the TARDIS back. But let’s be generous: with a completely blank slate the show managed to make it a year before the basic mystery of who the Doctor was had faded and the audience defaulted to being able to predict what he would do in any given circumstance. Ten stories.

And that’s the best case, starting from scratch. The better point of comparison, when it comes to a traditional sort of story where we don’t quite know what the Doctor’s up to, is Power of the Daleks. That, after all, is the original “story immediately after a story throws everything we think we know about the Doctor out the window.” And how long from there to the Doctor being a galavanting hero who always wins? The Moonbase. Four stories. Heck, one later and it goes even worse: Spearhead from Space makes it to about episode three before the Doctor is a predictable hero figure. The expiration date for this sort of thing is not long.

Even if the writers were good enough to share Richards’s vision of a close focus on a mysterious Doctor, the approach would run out of steam simply due to the fact that after a thousand some-odd pages of close focus the character stops being mysterious. And that’s about four books. And in this case there’s a double expiration date because we know Fitz is going to be back in six books, which means that the reversion to predictability practically has a set date. And since you’ve got a Terrance Dicks book between now and then, and God bless Dicks, but he’s not going to write a mysterious and unknowable Doctor because that’s simply not what he does, you’re looking at a pretty short period of enjoying the returns of this approach. No matter how you cut it, however good the ideas Richards has here, they simply don’t have a heck of a lot of shelf life.

So we get one of those basic misunderstandings that crop up occasionally with serialized fiction. Richards has a neat idea for a story. Singular. A tone piece in which we see a traditional Doctor Who story but never quite trust it or the Doctor. It’s good and worth doing, but there’s no “and then” for it. Which is a problem when your lead-up is “so first we throw away virtually the entirety of Doctor Who’s past.” A tremendous amount of what Doctor Who is got jettisoned for an idea that only went one book out.

It’s not the first time. Indeed, it echoes the story Terrance Dicks likes to tell about The Silurians, whereby Malcolm Hulke complained that the earthbound setting of the Pertwee era only allowed for two types of stories: alien invasions and mad scientists. And Dicks shot back with the premise of The Silurians. Which, to be fair, if we believe this story (I don’t, really), good for Dicks. He did, in fact, come up with a third type of earthbound story, and it’s one of the best premises Doctor Who ever had. But in the rush to pat him on the back for that we should not forget that Season Seven otherwise consisted of two alien invasions and a mad scientist, at which point they brought in the Master to spice things up and still ended up quickly abandoning the earthbound format because, as it turned out, there were only three types of stories it allowed for: alien invasions, mad scientists, and The Silurians.

And we have the same problem here. Great, you’ve got the Doctor with no memory and trapped on Earth. What does that let you do? A story where we don’t trust the Doctor, a story where he adopts a daughter, and… exactly. To Richards’ credit, he doesn’t overstay the welcome on the “stuck on Earth” plot excessively, but go ahead. Come up with the compelling list of stories you can do with an amnesiac Doctor and no Gallifrey that you couldn’t do before.

And this is, in many ways, a systemic problem in the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Lance Parkin once drolly described the line as exciting in much the same way that being on an airplane with no pilot is exciting, and this is basically the same phenomenon. Seemingly nobody had actually managed to think more than a couple of books ahead, and nobody had managed to get everybody to agree on any sort of direction. Despite people making huge changes to the line and to the nature of Doctor Who. So you’ve got everybody making huge changes to Doctor Who and nobody bothering to make sure that these changes are good ideas for the future of Doctor Who. It’s a calamitous situation that shouldn’t hold together at all.

And yet the funny thing is, despite it all, Justin Richards arriving as editor had an immediate positive effect on the quality of the line. The dozen books after this contain four of the top ten. Yes, it also contains the some stinkers, but that’s an impressive record. For all that this moment in the books’ history is a smoldering train wreck in terms of “stuff that is a good idea for Doctor Who,” it manages to tell some really good Doctor Who stories. But those stories stand alone as terribly interesting moments in a line that’s clearly gone completely off the rails.

And that’s something that it’s important to stress about Doctor Who, and something that nobody since Rebecca Levene in the Virgin era has actually managed to understand about it (and nobody until Russell T Davies actually will). It’s a serialized narrative and a line. It’s not going for individual moments of genius, or, at least, it shouldn’t be. It’s going for consistent quality. Doctor Who hits “brain-meltingly brilliant” occasionally almost no matter what. There’s never been an era that managed to blow it at every outing. Even the Eric Saward era managed Kinda, Snakedance, Enlightenment, Caves of Androzani, and Vengeance on Varos. Taking care of hitting “quite fun” reliably is, as a result, generally more important. The brilliance usually takes care of itself.

And nobody with the BBC Books line was managing that. Editor after editor seems to have adopted the “herding cats” model in the hopes that the authors would sort it out amongst themselves, which they were never going to do on their own because, well, they’re writers and we just don’t work that way, dear reader. We shall only be herded with openly fascistic and brutal editorial action. If then, because we’re probably going to get huffy and talk about “vision” a lot. This is actually hard. But the model as it stands here is unworkable. It’s not that there aren’t interesting directions to take things, but everyone is setting up their own directions and assuming that other authors are going to want to follow them when, in fact, the other authors aren’t interested and want to come up with their own directions.

This is a common problem in shared universes, to be clear. The Eighth Doctor Adventures aren’t breaking new ground in mistakes here. It’s a frequent issue for writers to come up with big ideas that they’re interested in and to just assume everyone else will be as well. And what it needs is, to be less cheeky about it, an editor who is willing and able to pick an idea that everyone is reasonably interested in and to help teach them to work to the idea. It’s what a good editor does, it’s what a good show-runner does, and it’s what the Eighth Doctor Adventures needed to recover from the crippling stupidity of The Ancestor Cell.

Instead they got the last thing they needed: another clever writer with some good ideas.

He Still Possesses The Moment (The Ancestor Cell)

We’ve skipped The Fall of Yquatine, Coldheart, The Space Age, and The Banquo Legacy. One’s got a giant worm, one’s rapey, one got credited with capturing the Eighth Doctor perfectly despite being adapted from a twenty-year-old TV script that didn’t even have him in it, and one’s West Side Story in space. The Ancestor Cell is the big one - the novel that wraps up all of the plot lines that have been running since Alien Bodies. In it Gallifrey is destroyed, the Doctor loses his memory, Romana turns very evil and dies, and Faction Paradox is thoroughly dealt with. As one might imagine given the adamance with which they hated this entire plot line, Doctor Who Magazine called it a “surprising success” and “essential.” Lars Pearson wrote the politest and most supportive review ever to compare a book to “surgery without any anesthetic.” And the fan consensus dumps it at fifty-fifth, with a 60.2% rating.

——

It’s July of 2000. Kylie Minogue is “Spinning Around” at number one, which is replaced a week later by Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” That goes a week later to Corrs’s “Breathless,” then Ronan Keating’s “Life is a Rollercoaster,” and finally Five and Queen with “We Will Rock You.” S Club 7, Coldplay, Oasis, Limp Bizkit, Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child, and Savage Garden also chart.

Since The Shadows of Avalon the Playstation 2 came out, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia, the whole Elián González thing wrapped up, the Tate Modern opened, India’s population reached one billion, and the Human Genome Project was finished. While during the month this book came out, France wins the European Championships in football. In shuffles of power, the delightfully oxymoronic Institutional Revolutionary Party sees seventy-one years of power in Mexico come to an end, Bashar al-Assad takes over Syria, and Alex Salmond resigns as the head of the Scottish National Party. Big Brother premieres, and the News of the World pushes Sarah’s Law, the UK version of Megan’s Law, which would continually disclose the residences of all convicted sex offenders.

And in books we have The Ancestor Cell, a book that is almost universally recognized as a bit of a bad move, in the “invading Russia in winter” or “watching Timelash with your new girlfriend” sort of senses of that phrase. This is all completely true. This is not a good book on any level. Its prose is turgid, its plotting is awkward at best, and its ideas are bone-headed. It consistently insults the reader’s intelligence while cheerily driving its plot forward as an outright idiot plot. (I particularly love the moment where the Time Lords forget that putting a Klein Bottle in the time vortex flattens it and lets the contents escape, which on the one hand misunderstands a Klein Bottle and on the other hand assumes that Time Lords are prone to forgetting basic facts about how four-dimensional objects work.) It is an absolutely awful book. But the particulars of why it’s bad are almost immaterial. What’s more interesting is that this is the book that pays off nearly three years of plot threads and speculation by finally wrapping up the War arc introduced in Alien Bodies, which is still, I should remind you, the fourth-most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure ever. What’s interesting here, in other words, is not that it’s horribly stupid to have the Doctor destroy Gallifrey and promptly acquire amnesia, it’s that this is what they mustered as a response to all of the big ideas that the novel line had come up with thus far.

Yes, these are the same ideas I’ve been saying for a month could never work. But what’s striking about The Ancestor Cell is just how much they didn’t work. It’s one thing to blow the ending of a doomed arc. But The Ancestor Cell isn’t just bad. It’s a story like The Twin Dilemma, The Eight Doctors, and the TV Movie - a story that’s bad in such a way that it did long term damage to the series that required healing and repairs. That the War arc was going to end badly is in hindsight obvious. But even still, it’s not obvious that it had to end this badly.

In the broad case, beyond the fact that the book is terrible, there are two flavors of objections to be had here. The first is that Miles was uninvolved. This was due to a number of factors. For one thing, Miles wasn’t going to wrap up this arc, having flounced off and quit in a puff of Internet drama. (An impressive feat given that Miles, at the time, did not use the Internet.) His stated reason for this was his belief that he’d “lost his mandate,” which is to say, nobody really wanted the continuity to go in the direction he wanted it to go. By his later admission, this wasn’t true - he didn’t realize that he had a sizable fanbase that just wasn’t in charge of any of the magazines that posted reviews, but at the time he’d made a break from the novels. Beyond that, there’s no particular sign Miles was interested in paying off the War storyline now, or, you know, ever. The closest he’s come to talking about a plan was a Dalek novel to be called Valentine’s Day that dealt with the idea that the Eighth Doctor had become corrupted, and a proposed six-book cycle that dealt with the War from the perspective of alternate universes, from which he claims Cole nicked several of the ideas for The Ancestor Cell, particularly the idea of a giant bone artifact floating above Gallifrey. Neither of which were clear-cut endorsements of the idea of actually writing an ending for the War arc.

But equally, there’s a case to be made that this book was mad to even attempt without Lawrence Miles. Every one of the major ideas in this book, after all: sentient TARDISes, a future War, Faction Paradox - they’re all Lawrence Miles’s. To do a wrap-up of these ideas without Lawrence Miles seems fundamentally mad, especially because Miles was virtually the only one to deal with them substantively. Orman and Blum used Faction Paradox as a sort of embellishment in Unnatural History, there’s the skipped but apparently quite good The Taking of Planet Five, and obviously there’s the bit about Compassion in The Shadows of Avalon, but none of these come anywhere close to Alien Bodies or Interference in terms of how much of this mythology they set up. This is, at this point, firmly Lawrence Miles’s mythology, and it’s one that other people haven’t really touched. To take it away and give it to someone else just in time to conclude it is a fundamentally doomed endeavor.

“But wait,” I hear a commenter say, “didn’t you say on Wednesday that Miles needed to have the arc taken away from him to prevent the horrible rape of Compassion story he intended? You’re contradicting yourself!” Well, yes, I did say that, but it’s not a contradiction at all. Miles did need to not be in charge of the arc due to the bad direction he wanted it to go in. And, furthermore, the arc was impossible to resolve without Miles. But this isn’t a contradiction - it’s just a situation that ensures that the arc cannot possibly resolve well. Which, to be fair, I set up way back in Alien Bodies.

But none of this explains how shockingly bad The Ancestor Cell is. The crux of it, I think, is that there’s a fundamental mean-spiritedness to this book. This isn’t just the book that wraps up Lawrence Miles’s plotlines. It is, as he points out, a book whose sole purpose is nuking every trace of Miles’s influence from the line so that it could go in a new direction. It’s not just that the line loses Miles right before it gets to the conclusion of his arc, it’s that the arc concludes in a way that feels like a u-turn: a tacit admission that the whole thing had been a disastrous idea.

But if the arc was completely doomed - and it was - what’s so bad about that? I mean, the whole thing was a disastrous idea. Why is its abandonment such a searingly awful moment in the series’ history? The answer is something that’s been obscured by our particularly selective approach to the Eighth Doctor Adventures: because every other idea the line had was worse.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate, in that it suggests quite wrongly that the line actually had other ideas. In fact the bulk of what we’ve been skipping is some of the most generic Doctor Who imaginable. Going through the Virgin books exhaustively would have been a struggle, and I’d probably have had to abandon the two thousand word minimum I impose on my posts, but to do the Eighth Doctor Adventures exhaustively would have been the most mind-wrenching slog imaginable. I honestly don’t think it possible to get an interesting critical essay on every one of the books in this line, simply because they didn’t have anything to say. So as flawed as the War arc was, it was, if you wanted interesting and stimulating ideas in your Doctor Who, the only game in town. So whatever the flaws, seeing it completely sold up the river as a bad idea to be systematically nuked from the novel line is a depressing moment simply because it feels like an admission that the novel line is, upon careful reflection, completely opposed to the prospect of having any interesting ideas.

Of course, this book does have some interesting implications for the future of the series in that it’s the first work to officially destroy Gallifrey. As Lawrence Miles points out, of course, this was a staple of big epic fan fiction, which tended to nuke Gallifrey from existence as a sort of standard way of immediately becoming “epic.” Nevertheless, the destruction of Gallifrey in a big reality-breaking Time War is one of the cornerstones of the new series. Heck, the fact that the Eighth Doctor was in some fashion involved in a big reality-breaking Time War that destroyed Gallifrey is one of the cornerstones of the new series. And here we have a book where, well, I’m not typing it all out again.

Except that Russell T Davies goes out of his way to make it clear that this is not the same Time War at all. I mean, I suppose the nature of a reality-breaking Time War is that it can simultaneously be a war against a bunch of angry petri dish cultures mutated by an empty bottle of cheap chardonnay and a bunch of angry petri dish cultures mutated by Davros, but it’s nevertheless telling that the way that all of this plays out is that the Eighth Doctor Adventures end by bringing Gallifrey back so that Russell T Davies can destroy it in a different way and have the Doctor be endlessly guilty about that one instead of the first one. I mean, nobody writing the new series ever gives the Doctor a line where, after moping about his guilt at destroying his entire species, he mutters “again” or anything like that.

No, for all that the new series vaguely copies the outline of the Eighth Doctor Adventures in destroying Gallifrey and leaving the Doctor as the only one of his kind, the most notable thing about this book is how much it’s rejected. Much like the half human revelation of the TV Movie, this book manages the rare feat of anti-canon - so radioactive and universally considered a bad idea that it’s been actively rejected; people have gone out of their way to dig it up just to shoot it and make sure it’s dead.

And this is, of course, the third blow of this sort to happen in just over four years. And if War of the Daleks was the point where the idea of an official Doctor Who suffered a mortal wound, this is the point where it finally collapses under its own weight. There is, at this point, no way to even attempt to make a definitive statement as to what the proper continuation of Doctor Who was. Ever since the debut of the Big Finish line Doctor Who Magazine blatantly and publicly switched their allegiance over there. On the one hand, this was a decision that made at least some intuitive sense to people because, well, Big Finish had proper actors and was a performed medium, which was closer to what Doctor Who historically was. On the other, however, it came off as a huge swipe at the Eighth Doctor Adventures, since Big Finish came along almost in sync with Interference and a bizarre period in the reviews in which Vanessa Bishop essentially slagged off a year’s worth of novels on the grounds that she hated Interference.

The only problem was that Big Finish only had the 5th-7th Doctors. But that wasn’t as big a problem as it might have been, given the inherently contested status of Paul McGann. If anything Big Finish made itself even more appealing to traditionalists by being, in this regard, more old fashioned. But more to the point, even if you did want Paul McGann in the mix, just six months after The Ancestor Cell came out that’s exactly what Big Finish gave you with a run of four Eighth Doctor stories. So the moment where the Eighth Doctor Adventures make a spectacularly compelling case for just giving up coincided perfectly with the moment when Big Finish made a real bid to take over.

This created an interesting situation. My understanding, at least, is that the lowest-selling Eighth Doctor Adventure still solidly outsold Big Finish’s offerings (though the years since in which the Eighth Doctor Adventures have mostly been out of print while Big Finish can be downloaded easily may well have swung that). So while The Ancestor Cell marks the point where the Eighth Doctor Adventures lose their clear mandate as “the one Doctor Who line tracing the future of Doctor Who,” it manifestly doesn’t mark the point where that mantle transfers anywhere else.

Instead we get to something of a paradoxical point. The lens of history tells us that Doctor Who’s return is well provided for at this point. Although it was near invisible at the time, it’s clear that the momentum for return was in place. But equally, we’ve entered a point where Doctor Who’s coherence as a concept is, in fact, completely shattered. As of the start of 2001 there’s no clear thing that is the “official” Doctor Who. In a very real sense a continually serialized narrative that had run since 1963 came, at this point, to a shuddering halt. Or, more accurately, to a dispersal. Doctor Who, obviously, survived The Ancestor Cell. It’s just the idea that there’s a continually told story that got decimated.

In an odd sense, then, the Time War does in fact happen to Doctor Who at this juncture. Suddenly everything is in play - the entire post-1989 series has a massive question mark, everybody is picking and choosing the bits of Wilderness Doctor Who that they actually like and crafting rules to make those the canonical bits, and there’s no clear sense of what the state of play for Doctor Who is. And with several lines, most notably the Eighth Doctor Adventures, making rather massive changes like “oh we nuked Gallifrey so that it never existed in the first place,” it actually was necessary to discuss this. Suddenly anyone writing Doctor Who had to start with the metaphysics, squaring away exactly what they meant by Doctor Who in the first place. Even writers who wanted out of that and to just do “the TARDIS lands somewhere and an adventure happens” sorts of stories had to pick a team, which became increasingly hard as this period wore on and the Big Finish line made a weird turn into an idiosyncratic plotline that largely prevented doing untroubled, straightforward Doctor Who. And if you decided to jettison it all and go start over you had the same problem because you were just setting out another stall in an already too crowded field of visions of Doctor Who.

In hindsight this seems like a cathartic moment in which the last of the existing order of Doctor Who finally blew up and cleared the deck for Russell T Davies to bring the series back. But again, all of the processes there were already in place when The Ancestor Cell came out, and it’s difficult to argue seriously that The Ancestor Cell was needed. I suggest an alternate reading, if you will. Let us for a moment assume that Doctor Who works according to its own narrative principles - that, in other words, time can, in fact, be rewritten. After all, in an era in which Faction Paradox, Time Wars, and dramatic rewritings of Doctor Who’s own narrative history are the norm, why not treat The Ancestor Cell as exactly what it looks like in hindsight: a strange and early mirroring of the new series.

The effect of the Time War, after all, was to create a point of searing trauma in the Doctor’s own narrative from which he could be freshly defined. It’s a very soft reboot, but more importantly, it is a case of getting the Doctor’s narrative to coincide with the series’ narrative. Because the series experienced, from 1989 to 2005, an upheaval that required a clean break in reaction against it, the Doctor got one too. This was savvy on its own merits, as was the decision to pinch the destruction of Gallifrey, which, whatever flaws it may have had in the Eighth Doctor Adventures (and it had many, and we’ll discuss them over the next two and a half months), at least allowed the new series to opt out of all of the mythology of Gallifrey and the Doctor’s past (as well as the Hero’s Sodding Journey, although it obviously makes a different sort of appearance in the new series), all of which the Wilderness Years had rendered unusable. I am not convinced that there was no way to do a retooled Gallifrey in 1990. By 2000, however, so many people had screwed up trying it or fruitlessly contradicted one another that there was no longer a workable way to do Gallifey In a very real sense the Time War is exactly what the Wilderness Years were: a traumatic event in Doctor Who that necessitated the destruction of Gallifrey.

In which case The Ancestor Cell seems oddly useful in its shattering of the unity of Doctor Who. Not because the unity was something Davies was going to have to fight against: Davies would have been able to do the Time War stuff exactly the same even if the Eighth Doctor Adventures had conclusively kept the crown of “proper Doctor Who” in the early aughts. No, its use is because it literalizes the chaos of the period in the Doctor’s life. It made it, in other words, so that continuing with the Doctor reeling post-traumatically from a reality-breaking event was what continuing the series entailed in the first place. By shattering the unity of Doctor Who here, in 2000, and in a way that stemmed out of what the Time War is really a metaphor for, The Ancestor Cell provided for the reconsolidation of that unity in 2005. In a very real sense, the last survivor of the War isn’t the Eighth Doctor at all: it’s the Ninth.