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#9 Love and War by Paul Cornell

THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR OBSCURE 25 YEAR OLD DOCTOR WHO BOOKS!!

Heaven is a place where Humans and Draconians alike send their dead to be buried. A beautiful planet with lush, grassy plains, little tactical value to either party, and few signs of any indigenous race, it seems the perfect place to represent that vision of bliss that people so desperately want to believe in. But surely we should have realised by now that Heaven doesn't exist...

Love and War is momentous for its impact on the Virgin New Adventures range of books. Written by Paul Cornell (the first author to contribute a second book to this fledgling series), the story sees the departure of Ace as a companion as the Doctor finally goes too far in his manipulation of events, and also introduces us to Professor Bernice Summerfield, a character that is much loved to this day and is still having new stories written about her 25 years later. It is a true statement of intent for the New Adventures line, shaking up the status quo so early on (only 9 books into what would become a 61 book series!) and exploring just how far you can take the concept of Doctor Who without completely breaking the format. As unsettling as this can be at times it is undeniably a good thing, change being the key to Doctor Who's longevity and success over the past 55 years, change which we will witness again in just a couple of weeks now with the start of the 13th Doctor's era.

Let's keep our focus firmly on the past, though. Or maybe the future, considering this novel is set in the 26th century. You may remember that Nightshade left us hanging, with Ace distraught as the Doctor kidnapped her and refused to take her back to Robin, the man she wanted to stay with in 1968. The initial anti-climax here is that this story takes place a few months after the events of Nightshade, with Robin getting just the one mention and Ace seeming to have forgiven the Doctor of any wrongdoing. It's a bit jarring all told considering how upset she was at the end of the last book, but ultimately I got the feeling that that turn of events pushed along the story beats here and elevated them, going a long way to rationalising how quickly things escalate in this book. Namely, Ace falls in love again with a gypsy type 'Traveller' called Jan, who has mildly pyrokinetic powers after submitting to drug testing during the war between the Daleks and the peoples of both Earth and Draconia. Ace decides pretty darn quickly that Jan is the be all and end all of her life, and whilst she wants to stay with the Doctor she is willing to give that up, albeit regretfully, for Jan. It's sort of implied that her past feelings for Robin have made Ace realise that she needs more from her life and she is ready to settle down with someone who can return her love. At least, that's a nicely redemptive way to consider things rather than thinking that two books in a row went with an 'Ace falls in love' storyline with little thought from the powers that be that that might be a little bit one-note for the character.

Unfortunately for Ace, the Doctor is going to get in the way of this romance as well. In what really should be the ultimate possible development in the exploration of the Doctor as an anarchic manipulator, our Time Lord hero manufactures a series of events that lead to Ace's new lover giving his life to save the planet and quite possibly the universe. It transpires that the Hoothi, an intelligent fungal race that can use their spores to infect and transform any biological matter into servants of their hive mind, have been lying in wait for an army of corpses to be assembled on Heaven for them to utilise in a war against the universe and, in particular, Gallifrey. The Doctor soon realises that himself, Jan, and many of his Traveller friends have become infected by dormant spores of the Hoothi, but rather than warn anyone about this he goes about ensuring that the spore inside Jan is activated first, at just the right time for him to be taken to the Hoothi base before anyone else. At which point the Doctor utilises a psychic connection to Jan to momentarily free him from the hive mind and coerce him into using his fire powers to blow up the Hoothi and, naturally, himself. Upon realising that he must have been planning this all along, Ace walks away, betrayed and refusing to see the Doctor ever again.

It's now that we can really appreciate the extreme that this novel reaches. Undoubtedly the Doctor does an horrendous thing here, possibly the most cruel and immoral action he takes in any medium of Doctor Who. The relationship between the Doctor and his companions is the heart of the show and he decides to neglect that relationship wilfully. Ace has to leave him after this. The Doctor cannot be allowed to break down the barriers of what Doctor Who is without facing any consequences. Importantly, Paul Cornell stays firmly on the Doctor's side throughout despite what he has done. Reference is made to the millions he has saved by sacrificing just one person, and most of the other people involved with the conflict celebrate him as the hero we are used to. And he brilliantly talks up the Doctor as a great champion throughout the book to brace us against what happens, most tellingly with the Doctor describing himself to Bernice - "I let little children sleep safely at night, because I've searched through all the shadows and chased the baddies away. I'm what monsters have nightmares about!" All of this is there to reassure us. This is still the Doctor, he had his reasons for doing what he did and he saved the day like he always does. But he broke the rules and for that he has to pay. This is as far as the Doctor can go without ruining Doctor Who. But he has definitely changed it. Even at a time when Doctor Who didn't really exist anymore except for in the minds of its most hardcore fans reading its spin off material, Doctor Who was still doing what it has always done best - evolving.

Considering everything else going on I haven't really had much opportunity to talk about poor Benny, so I'll make sure there's a special focus on her next week when I'll be reviewing the full cast audio version of this story released by Big Finish back in October 2012. It's going to be very interesting hearing what Sylvester McCoy himself manages to do with such a game changing story!

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#8 Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

THIS BLOG MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR OBSCURE 25 YEAR OLD DOCTOR WHO BOOKS!!

Christmas 1968 in the little Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham. Retired actor Edmund Trevithick revels in the fact that the BBC are repeating his Saturday night science fiction detective serial ‘Nightshade’. Soon though, he starts being terrorised by some very familiar looking monsters. In fact many of the locals are also starting to glimpse figures from their past. Relatives, friends and acquaintances that should be long gone are suddenly returning and trying to tempt people away with promises of better times. Impossible, surely? But what’s the harm in a little nostalgia?

Nightshade is an absolute joy. Written by Mark Gatiss (who will of course have a lot more to do with Doctor Who when it returns to television a good 13 years later), the story is packed with interesting characters who I really came to care about as I progressed through the book. The aforementioned Edmund Trevithick starts off as seeming old and bitter, wanting nothing more than to return to his glory days back on the TV as Inspector Nightshade, but as he begins to find himself playing the hero in a real life monster movie he becomes a lot more personable and selfless, almost becoming the character that he so desperately wanted to return to. Upon investigation, the bulk of the strange sightings of people that shouldn't be there seem to have started after the building of a huge radio telescope on the nearby moor, tended to devotedly by Dr. Cooper, Professor Hawthorne, Vijay and Holly. All of them have a worthwhile part to play in the story and the interplay between the characters creates an intriguing dynamic, with Holly and Vijay having recently started a romantic relationship, Dr Hawthorne being a massive 60s racist who is opposed to Vijay having a job at the site, and Dr Cooper trying to keep everything as professional as possible within the team. Things get a lot more serious in the village when people start to go missing and bodies are discovered. Enter, the Doctor and Ace.

Funnily enough the Doctor is also feeling nostalgic and Ace is worried about him. She sees the Doctor becoming short tempered and irritable, snapping unnecessarily over things she doesn’t understand. He’s pining over his granddaughter Susan’s old Coal Hill school uniform and questioning whether anything he has ever done to help really made a difference. Arriving in Crook Marsham he begins to wonder if it’s time to finally retire to a place like this, putting his weary battles with countless enemies behind him. Although the Doctor does have some frankly outrageous moments of mean spiritedness towards Ace that could seem out of character, Gatiss works hard to ensure that outside of these moments the Doctor still comes across as a likeable hero. And as we have come to expect with Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, he probably has good reason for doing the things that he does in the long run.

Gatiss freely admits to drawing on many of his own experiences in the process of writing the book, and you can feel this coming through strongly as we read passages where the characters remember elements of their childhood. Whether it’s the rituals they followed with their families on a Christmas morning, or the memories they have of wolfing down their tea, having a bath, and then settling down to watch Nightshade on the TV on a Saturday night, the descriptions are so vivid and steeped in nostalgia you can tell they are Gatiss’ own memories. Gatiss even goes so far as to name characters and places after things in his own life, with Dr Shearsmith and Old Man Pemberton sticking out in particular for any League of Gentlemen fans out there. And yes, getting a little bit meta about things, 'Nightshade’ the fictional TV series in this book is an obvious stand-in for Doctor Who itself. With the series no longer on the air and these books being the only official continuation at this point, they are starting to become nostalgic for the good old days of Doctor Who being the main attraction on Saturday night telly!

For a book that is so obviously fuelled by nostalgia its ironic that the overall message of the story is to not trust those feelings. The apparitions appearing to the residents of Crook Marsham are all a part of one larger entity, living inside the moor and awoken by the activity of the radio telescope, and upon tricking its targets into giving in to the tempting vision of the past they see before them the entity drains their life force and leaves behind an empty husk. A neat allegory for living in the past I suppose, so intent on looking back on what was, never grasping the opportunities available to you in the present, and ultimately becoming an empty, miserable creature. Taking things to the extreme there of course, but it’s effective nevertheless.

Upon outsmarting the creature by managing to confront demons in the Doctor’s own past, Ace decides she wants to stay behind in 1968 with Robin, a dashing young man she grows close to over the course of the novel. The Doctor reluctantly feigns happiness for Ace but manages to convince her to take one last ride in the TARDIS to watch the entity get swallowed up by a black hole. The Doctor ponders to himself that under normal circumstances he would let Ace go as he has done with countless other companions, but that there is “more at stake now”. He withdraws into the TARDIS, leaving Ace pleading for freedom in the console room. Our hero has now kidnapped his young female companion! I feel this may have something to do with that pesky demon particle that infected the TARDIS and quite possibly the Doctor himself back in Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark, but we’ll have to wait and see how things pan out from here!

Next week we’ll meet Professor Bernice Summerfield for the first time ever in Paul Cornell’s Love and War!

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In Remembrance by Guy Adams

Ahhhh poor, unloved Class. I recently heard someone say, "Doctor Who is for kids, Torchwood is for adults, Class is for nobody." It always seemed that Class came about at completely the wrong time, just towards the end of the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who when big changes for the franchise as a whole were on the way, both in front of and behind the camera. On top of this, the series was announced as a BBC Three exclusive in October 2015 and almost immediately afterwards in November it was announced that BBC Three would be relaunched as an online only channel. By the time Class was launched in October 2016 it was done relatively quietly online rather than being a big blockbuster event worthy of a Doctor Who spin off. Probably seen as the trailblazer of a new era for BBC Three, the series then failed to make the top 20 viewed programmes on the iPlayer at any time in its first seven weeks. The ratings when repeated on BBC One in horribly late night double bills were even worse. That can only be classed as a failed experiment (ho ho).

Regardless of any of this Class was always a strange concept, taking the iconic Doctor Who location of Coal Hill School/Academy and making it the centre of an ongoing Buffy style series featuring monsters, aliens and teen drama. I feel I enjoyed Class more than many others did, although it certainly had its problems (the over-arching Shadowkin storyline being mostly uninteresting was one of them) but the characters really grew on me over the series with the strength of each of the actors really shining through. Unfortunately Class was cancelled after the muted response from its potential audience, but as ever Big Finish audios are here to resurrect any tiny corner of the Doctor Who franchise that they possibly can. And we love them for it. Released last month, the two boxsets each feature three 45 - 60 minute stories set within the first series of Class.

As a whole the boxsets are really strong, avoiding anything but tiny references to the Shadowkin and instead telling more constrained, character driven stories that the actors can really get stuck into. What we are concerned with here on Stories Can Be Rewritten though is the final story of Volume Two, In Remembrance, a sequel of sorts to the hugely popular Seventh Doctor story from 1988, Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch (Ben will be popping up on this blog again very soon!) This audio adventure brings Ace (Sophie Aldred) and the Daleks (Nicholas Briggs) into the present day world of Class, with Ace encountering both Charlie (Greg Austin) and Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) as she wanders into Coal Hill Academy one night to exterminate a lone Dalek. Big Finish do seem to specialise in crossing over different eras of Doctor Who with each other, often with varying levels of success. Thankfully In Remembrance is one of the more satisfying examples of the trend.

Without going into too much detail of the plot of Remembrance of the Daleks, that story is set in 1963 around and about Coal Hill School and focuses on a civil war between two different factions of Dalek. In Remembrance sees one of these Daleks do a temporal shift into the future to find out how this all pans out and learn anything that might help its unit of Daleks be victorious. For the purposes of this story it is claimed that upon beating the Daleks in 1963, the Doctor and Ace picked up signals warning them of the time travelling Dalek and meant to check it out but got distracted by another adventure. Ace, having left the Doctor, spent time on Gallifrey, and now returned to Earth, remembers the Dalek is about to show up in 2016 and goes to investigate. Charlie manages to get caught up in the tear in time and sends himself back to 1963, leaving the brilliant combination of Ace and Quill to exchange hugely entertaining barbs at each other whilst trying to defeat the Dalek trapped in the school.

The set-up is fairly convoluted then, and relies on retcons to Remembrance of the Daleks and the ability of Ace to be in the right place at the right time in 2016, despite spending most of the last few years on an alien planet. It is absolutely worth it to get Ace and Quill together though because their world views are completely at odds with each other and they immediately start to wind one another up. The constant cynicism of Quill versus the open minded, fun loving Ace is a great match and there's joy for the audience as it dawns on Quill that Ace knows the Doctor, whom she states is "a pain, and not be relied on" and storms away. "Yep, she knows him", malignes Ace with a knowing tone. Sophie Aldred is on top form, even briefly managing to do a convincing impression of herself 30 years ago as she puts on a higher, chirpy voice in a small cameo of young Ace meeting Charlie in 1963. Charlie really does draw the short straw here, getting stuck alone in the past with nothing much to do except run away from Daleks and talk to himself. It's a bit of a waste of Greg Austin's talents to tell the truth, as he really shows his worth in Volume One's Tell Me You Love Me.

The only thing I can really pick on here is the trope of the over-talkative, slightly comic Dalek that seems to come up every so often. The Daleks really are more effective as an unstoppable destructive force. When they stop to have chats things can sometimes go awry. Admittedly, you often need to do this kind of thing to build up a story and stop all Dalek episodes just being exactly the same (as much as that is possible) but sometimes it works better than others. Here Quill ends up trying to repair the Dalek so that it can take her back to 1963 to rescue Charlie, but accidentally harms it in the process. "Arrrrgh! Be more careful!", the Dalek exclaims. Excruciating for me as well as the Dalek. Quill then goes on to mock the Dalek repeatedly which is fine and quite funny, but does mean the Dalek has to rise to her and acknowledge the silly things she is saying about it. Again, this kind of thing should really be above the Daleks, although there is a history there of Daleks being slapstick - a Dalek feeling all sorry for itself and deciding to self destruct because it loses it's captive in Death to the Daleks for example, or the Dalek emerging from underneath a sand dune at the end of episode one of The Chase, coughing and wheezing as it does so!! There's probably room in Doctor Who media for all forms of Dalek to be fair, but there were a couple of moments here were the Dalek seemed a bit too pathetic for my tastes. Having said that, there's also some interesting interplay between Quill and the Dalek, giving us a glimpse at how the Daleks think of themselves other than just the usual "we are the supreme beings!"

Overall the story is a really nice tribute to Remembrance and the 1963 scenes even have some excellent incidental music which sounds very similar to that used in the TV story. The sound effects of the Dalek guns and the exterminations are also those that were used in the late 80s, so it does a great job of putting you back in the mindset of the Seventh Doctor Era, with new twists and wrinkles added of course. With the 30th anniversary of Remembrance of the Daleks coming up in October of this year, it's very satisfying to have this little throwback to my favourite Doctor Who story. Here's hoping the Class crew can return again on audio in the future, maybe even exploring that Weeping Angels plot that was so cruelly teased at the end of Series One. And, with a bit of luck, Ace can join them in the battle too!

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#7 Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark

SPOILERS OF OBSCURE 25 YEAR OLD BOOKS MAY BE PRESENT IN THIS BLOG

Strange things are afoot in the sleepy rural village of Llanfer Ceirog, Wales. Unexplained sightings of mythical creatures such as unicorns and centaurs are being covered up by the local authorities with even less explanation as to why. As Torchwood is a concept yet to be invented in the real world at the time of this books publication (1992), I guess the Doctor and Ace are going to have to visit Wales...

Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark completes the Cat's Cradle trilogy of books with a story that is once again almost completely separate to anything that came before it. Here the focus is unusually high fantasy for Doctor Who at this point, delving into a conflict between centaurs, trolls, unicorns and humanoids on the planet of Tir na n-Óg. There happens to be a gateway to the planet within a stone circle close to Llanfer Ceirog and with the sun of Tir na n-Óg having being suddenly extinguished, the humanoid rulers of the planet plan to evacuate to Earth, leaving behind the other species due to them not fitting in very subtly with the life already present on our world. The book does a fairly good job of detailing the intricate infrastructure of the alien world but is perhaps a little convoluted, tying in many extra characters and plot threads that really don't need to be present. This isn't helped by the need to resolve the 'TARDIS is damaged/dying' plot of the Cat's Cradle trilogy, adding an extra wrinkle to the story and further complicating matters. A couple of these storylines even seem to end suddenly with no further explanation - a friendly old couple who take in the Doctor and Ace near the start of the book are later brutally murdered by two shape shifting demons who escape to Earth and take the form of our heroes. The Doctor and Ace never even find out about this, too busy upon their own return to Earth at the end of the book to go and check in on poor Hugh and Janet, meaning there must still be evil doppelgangers of the Doctor and Ace roaming around somewhere once the book ends. Weird!

This appears to be Andrew Hunt's only novel, hinting at him being more of a fan writer than a career author. Certainly he seems to be a big fan of the show, referencing many different TV stories from the Third Doctor's Planet of the Spiders to Seven's own Dragonfire. The characterisation of the protagonists meanwhile is a lot lighter than we have become used to in the New Adventures range so far. The Doctor is quite happy making jokes about spam and traffic wardens. Ace is immature enough to think that playing rock music at 2am in Hugh and Janet's house is OK. It doesn't gel with the previous novels, especially coming off Warhead in which the Doctor was particularly calculating and ruthless and Ace straight up had to murder a guy (admittedly in self defence). The New Adventures is somewhat infamous for the drastic changes forced upon Ace's character in future novels so it is odd to have her be so childish here, although interestingly she does tap into some deep primal instincts at one point, referencing her time as a Cheetah Person in Survival (the final broadcast story of the original run of Doctor Who). We shall have to see if the lingering effects of that transformation have any further bearing on her behaviour in these novels.

Happily the TARDIS is indeed repaired at the end of the novel, using some sciencey technobabble that restores it's link to the Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey, the power source for all TARDISES. Unfortunately it seems as if some speck of a demon particle has infected the TARDIS in the process, unbeknownst to the Doctor for now. The TARDIS really just can't seem to catch a break in these books.

Next time I'll be taking a slight detour from the regular New Adventures schedule to look at the new Class audio boxset released by Big Finish, which interestingly features a cross-over with Ace and the Daleks. Can it live up to the fantastic legacy of Remembrance of the Daleks? Well, probably not but it should be a bit of fun at least!

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#6 Cat's Cradle: Warhead

After a recent meeting with the lovely Andrew Cartmel (Script Editor for Doctor Who during the Seventh Doctor era of 1987-1989), I have been inspired to finally complete a full read-through of the Virgin New Adventures range of Doctor Who books that ran through the early to late 90s in the so called 'Wilderness Years' when Doctor Who was off TV. I'm starting here, having read the first five books in the range previously, with Cartmel's first contribution.

Cat's Cradle: Warhead stands as the middle chapter of the Cat's Cradle trilogy, a very loosely connected series of books. In the first, Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, the TARDIS becomes damaged after a collision with an Ancient Gallifreyan time ship piloted by the first time travelling pioneers in Gallifreyan history. I only vaguely know the intricacies of the over-arching plot threads of the New Adventures range, but I can assure you that details of Ancient Gallifrey and the Time Lords will be in abundance throughout. Stay tuned if that sounds of interest. For right now, all we need to know is that the TARDIS characterises its own damaged status with a silver cat (which we see Ace holding on the cover up there) and this cat appears precisely ONCE in this book. Elsewhere, Ace mentions precisely ONCE that the TARDIS is still damaged and...that's about it. As I say, it's loosely connected.

Warhead focuses on the Butler Institute, a company doing research into freeing humanity from the restraints of soft and weak fleshy bodies by taking the mind and transferring it into machines. Which sounds a lot like the Cybermen now that I actually write it down. The book introduces two characters in Vincent and Justine, whom I understand also appear in Cartmel's other two books in the New Adventures range. Vincent is possibly best described as being telekinetic, however his ability can only be triggered by contact with a person experiencing a fit of emotion, which in turn causes an explosive release of his power. The Doctor plans to take down the Butler Institute by bringing Vincent together with Justine, a girl who has experienced a lot of trauma in her life, stemming initially from a harrowing traffic accident when she was a child. Passages describing awful incidents in the early lives of both Vincent and Justine were the most effective scenes in the book for me, and you can easily understand the determination and drive of both characters. Quite why the Doctor wants to use two emotionally scarred kids to blow up the Institute rather than some other, less ethically meniacal method, isn't really explained.

The darker motivations and scheming of the Seventh Doctor are probably something that is going to be explored a lot more throughout these books, for better or worse. Andrew Cartmel's time as script editor for the show was driven by a desire to make the Doctor a much more mysterious character with ambiguous motivations. This resulted in some great TV stories and these books pick up on the general idea of making the Doctor a more omnipotent, controlling persona, spinning many plates at a time and nudging plans into action from behind the scenes. We'll see how far this goes in books to come but even here some of the Doctor's actions are very questionable. I don't think you're going to see the Doctor walking away from a gang of kids brutally killing a serial child murderer on TV any time soon.

Sticking with the theme of mystery, the Doctor and Ace take a backseat for much of the novel, the Doctor primarily flitting in and out of the other characters stories for the first half of the book. These seemingly disconnected scenes come together satisfyingly later on as you realise how they have all been contributing towards the Doctor's plan and playing into the larger story. But you couldn't really say that the book is focused on the Doctor's plan, it's more interested in the people affected by the Butler Institute. The Doctor is always there in the background, but seen from the perspective of those people around him. In this regard, I did find a problem in characters disappearing for large swathes of the book and reappearing intermittently. It's easy to lose track of who everyone is when they don't appear for over 100 pages of a 262 page story. Although admittedly part of the problem may be on my side here, spreading my reading over too long a time period and forgetting certain details. Nevertheless, once you remind yourself of who is doing what, the ultimate conclusion is satisfying, and I look forward to seeing what Cartmel does with Vincent and Justine in his sequel, Warlock, the 34th book in the range. We'll get there in time, I'm sure.

Join me again to finish the Cat's Cradle trilogy with Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark, which seems to promise Unicorns, demons, alien worlds and Wales. Hmmmmm.