#Rafe Wallbank

[thehauntedrocket]

The Doctor

Art by Rafe Wallbank

[downthetubes]

Artist Rafe Wallbank has posted what he describes as “quick piece” to commemorate 15 years since Matt Smith's first full episode of Doctor Who

[being-of-rain]

I'm dumping here my various inconsequential thoughts about the seventh Doctor audio that was just announced.

So Naomi and Harry's travels are coming to an end! Around a year after their first chronological appearance, two and a half years after they started travelling with Seven, and three and a half years after their first release. It's nice to see some interconnectedness between different Doctors I suppose, as well as an arc that went for more than one season and was actually finished. Big Finish has a bit of a habit of just dropping companions without an ending- the newly returning Ray puts me in mind of other '80s characters brought back on board the TARDIS before being dropped. Mags, Mel, and Peri, at last count (with Nyssa being the exception). Also, I've already listened to Ray and Seven together in Classic Doctors New Monsters; at this point it's almost more surprising when Big Finish publishes a companion's story in the right order 😂

I haven't listened to the Seventh Doctor Adventures except for The Last Day, but so far it has seemed like the weakest and least focused of all the Doctors' post-2021 audio lines. So the kind of language they use in the news article about Past Forward interests me: "an important point in [Seven's] ongoing story" and "a pivotal story in the Seventh Doctor’s lifetime." It was The Last Day that made me feel like Big Finish were no longer capable of making big consequential event stories- and I don't know if this changes my mind about that, but it's a little refreshing to see them act like Seven actually has an ongoing story, and not just a series of one-shots.

I think Past Forward is given an important vibe not only by having the companions leave, but by introducing a new companion join in the same story. As someone pointed out to me, companion starts and ends overlapping isn't really done on New Who or Big Finish, so it's an interesting approach, and it makes it feel like this release is actually leading to future things in an ongoing story.

If Big Finish does want to stress that this is an event, it's a little strange that the cover doesn't lean into it more by including the Weeping Angels and Ray. But I'm not really complaining; Rafe Wallbank continues to be my favourite cover artist working at Big Finish right now. Maybe he was consciously trying to avoid the Marvel-Poster-esque cluttered look (that The Last Day is an example of). And hey, Seven has his smiley face pin! Cute.

With John Dorney writing on top of everything else, I'm actually tempted to listen to the Harry and Naomi audios so that I can eventually listen to this one. It's caught my attention, and not in a 'watching a car crash' way that The Last Day did. Sorry to dunk on The Last Day so much, it was relevant.

Other random thoughts: Past Forward means that Big Finish has now paired the Weeping Angels off with all of their surviving classic Doctors (Four through Eight). And when looking at the Seventh Doctor Adventures line so far, I noted that there's been no Ace in it apart from the older Ace in The Last Day. In fact, this month's River Song set is the first audio drama (rather than narrated audiobook) to include a younger Ace since the end of 2020! And the Doctor isn't even in the River Song set.

[gotham-at-nightfall]

Happy 61st Birthday Doctor Who!

By Rafe Wallbank

[pers-books]

As part of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary celebrations, a selection of Big Finish's greatest cover art has been compiled into a gorgeous new coffee table book; The Art of the Audio Adventures. Pre-order at the link above.

A glossy hardback compiling 100 Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama cover artworks into a lavish coffee table book.

Featuring contributions from Ryan Aplin, Lee Binding, Anthony Dry, Claudia Gironi, Clayton Hickman, Simon Holub, Lee Johnson, Anthony Lamb, Sean Longmore, Alex Mallinson, Christopher Naylor, Mark Plastow, Jim Sangster, Caroline Tankersley, Chris Thompson, Rafe Wallbank, and Tom Webster, plus commentary by the artists – as well as actors Colin Baker, Paul McGann, Jon Culshaw and Tim Treloar.

**This book is limited to 1,500 copies.**

[jayhartwinsterling]

The Wordsmith is NOT Auteur. It’s certainly someone that might have had a Elective Semanticectomy. But it’s not any pre-existing characters you can think of.

(To help paint the picture a little bit here without spoiling the future: The Wordsmith was devised not long after I devised two others for an RPG back in late 2021… but they’ve all grown legs and have been slotting into plans for a long while now!)

I also hate to break a hope, but I developed the Unravel off the back of a conversation I had with a uni friend in 2018. This is in the front of the book in the Thanks section! It stuck around in my head, became a solid thing in 2019 (alongside handling language of ropes - the reasons for which will become clear down the line; but are something you could perhaps deduce from the fact that The Book of the Snowstorm features Maritsa being familiar with it in the Library of the Plume Coteries), and it’s just been down to the impact of lockdown, my own busy schedules & other complicated things outwith me with other people that’s pushed things back so many times. Esquivalience itself was about two years of work as a piece within the wider plan.

But no, I got to the thoughts of un/ravel, and ropes before Russell. When I was at the Welsh premiere of The Star Beast, it actually came up that the show was about to go there. And when I was back down for Space Babies, I had a really funny conversation with Phil Collinson about something yet to come that does something with the Doctor that I did in my lockdown story. (And no, it’s not the precise calculation thing; though it is a funny coincidence that Steven does do that in Boom.)

Splice is a hilarious coincidence! In-fact, until I’d read all the fun speculative thoughts here, my techie brain had been outweighing my linguistic brain… so I’ve just been thinking about splicing data. Smelted and spoor are also fun coincidences… my stuff was always going to centre round Belgian Dutch because I needed to go with Dutch. That’s where the contranym comes. (Though, funny story of coincidence in that too… ontrafelen has rafe at the centre of it, and you’ll find that one of Rafe Wallbank’s covers quietly contains the word facsdocksparation.)

Life’s a very strange place to me these days. I grew up with the Meep as one of my favourite childhood monsters… and I’ve now not only sat in a cinema on the 60th watching it with Russell and company… I’ve got perhaps one of the most signed copies of Issue 2 of the US colour reprint ever. And don’t get me started on how Destination: Skaro has jokily namedropped the Klade after I spent two years trying to sort out something involving them…

{{esquivalience}}, The Auteur, and Doctor Who the TV Show

alright so this novella.

First, its provenance: I was googling the Twist at the End song last week because it's catchy as hell. I ended up on the Tardis wiki and realized that there was a song by the exact same name that appeared in a licensed DWU novella that was published April 9th. As in, last month. Which is weird. It's hard to say how weird, but given the timing, it either has to be a) pure coincidence (lol), b) someone who worked on the show abusing their advance knowledge of plot details for personal gain, or c) intentional coordination between showrunner and novella-writer, a la Joe Lidster writing John Watson’s blog for BBC Sherlock.

The likelihood of (a) is decreasing by the week. I feel like I have to entertain the idea of (b) happening, but it's hard to square why a DWU-writing supernerd who is also involved somehow with the production of the show would risk a lifetime of blackballing from DW for a bit of cheap promotion for their extended-universe tie-in novella. I am so sorry to be saying this, but I think (c) might actually have legs.

The novella's title is {{esquivalience}}, which is a fake word invented in real life by editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The invented word means "deliberate shirking of one's official duties", and it was added to the dictionary to protect the copyright of the electronic version. In S9, Face the Raven showed us a “trap street", i.e. a fake street drawn on a map by a mapmaker to identify any copyright infringement of said map -- a dictionary entry for a word made up by the dictionary editors operates similarly as a copy-trap. The definition is apt for a copy-trap as well, because anyone illicitly copying a dictionary is themselves shirking a job they ought to be doing themselves... it's clever, it's very fun, we're off to a great start.

{{a crash course in esquivalience below the cut}}

THE STORY:

The unnamed protagonist applies for a custodial job at this library that serves basically as a databank for the history of everything in the universe. If a book about something is thrown away, that something ceases to have ever existed. Exhibit A: Protagonist works in the Dead & Dying Language Department. They throw away The Book of Belgian Dutch, and a) a couple coworkers with Belgian Dutch heritage either disappear or get completely different names/family trees, and also b) everyone quickly forgets that Belgian Dutch was ever a thing to begin with.

The librarians cover for this accidental deletion of reality by copying/fudging a new book on "Belgian Gerench", their name for what they replace Belgian Dutch with. They try to catch most of the people who were deleted, bring them back, and fit them into that new language/culture/ethnicity bucket they just made up.

(The narration explains that because both Belgian and Dutch still exist separately as concepts, there aren't too many knock-on effects in terms of loanwords in other languages that needed to be modified/recovered. It also explains that time-traveling back to make an exact copy of The Book of Belgian Dutch wouldn't work because of the universe's copyright laws or something.)

Protag then comes after the head of their department, the Head Dictionary Contributor, or Head DC. They find him in a hidden room called the Internal Reference Room. Instead of languages, the books here hold the life stories of every employee, which auto-update as the person lives their life, but can also be edited or destroyed to alter that person's reality. Protag sits down with the Head DC's lifebook and starts adding and erasing things.

It turns out that Head DC knows how wrong editing these books can go from personal experience. Years ago, wanting to leave his mark on the universe, the Head DC chose to add his own copy-trap into The Book of Dutch -- the fake word "esquivalience". This action seemingly created the concept of cutting corners at your job, leading to the insufficient vetting of Protag for this job and therefore their subsequent hiring, which results in Head DC's eventual death.

Head DC pleads with Protag for his life, but Protag is undeterred. They finally tear out the final page in Head DC's book, which kills him. Protag then writes themselves in as Head DC. Settling into their new role, they turn their attention to The Book of English (8th to 25th Century). They first look up the dictionary entry for “esquivalience”, which says it came to English from Dutch, and then flips to the entries for “ravel" and “unravel”, described as contranyms from Dutch roots, both “meaning variably to tangle or to fray”.

This is the central story of the novella. There is also a Prelude and Postlude that describe the lives of two young men, first in a reality in which they never meet, and then in a reality in which they do meet and fall in love (their meeting is enabled by one of them skivving off work in time to make it to see the movie where they first meet -- esquivalience!)

Just before the Postlude, there is also printed the lyrics to a song (see below), and an excerpt from The Book of English, this volume covering the 4th to 5th billionth centuries of history. This excerpt again gives the definition of “unravel”, but refers the reader to an appendix for the full list of definition, and notes they are “largely in usage as reference to Unravel, The” and “N.B. to be used with extreme care and caution”.

NOVELLA-SHOW CONNECTIONS:

Mavity [Wild Blue Yonder]: Mavity happened all the way back in Wild Blue Yonder, so it's not necessarily surprising to see it in a novella published in April 9, 2024, but there's a whole scene establishing that the M has seemingly replaced the G in all Romance languages, while Domhantarraingt in Irish-Gaelic is unaffected.

Rope [The Church on Ruby Road]: We're all learning the vocabulary of rope now! The Unravel is what the novella calls the meta-historical revisions caused by making edits to the books. There are also rope/weaving metaphors everywhere. Again, the rope themes of the TV show predate the April 9 novella just far enough that in theory it would have been possible for the novella to have taken inspiration from the 2023 Christmas Special. Except. The wiki page for The Unravel credits ownership of the concept to Jamie H. Cowan, the author of the novella. Not just that, but The Unravel was used – with credit to Jamie – in a DWU short story collection published December 26, 2023 – the day after The Church on Ruby Road aired.

The Twist At The End [The Devil’s Chord] : Just before the novella's Postlude, there are the lyrics to a song called “The Twist At The End”. Just listed there, no context, like an azlyrics.com entry. They are not the same lyrics as the song in The Devil's Chord, but then, meta-historical revision would kind of be the point, wouldn't it? There's just this sentence to connect it to anything happening in the narration: "Somewhere, in the far distance, as ______ continued to erase, an old 1960s Earth tune began to play."

Dot and Bubble [Dot and Bubble] : At this point, “Dot and Bubble” is a contextless episode title to me, first announced on March 31. In the novella, we get this:

The Chumerian languages of the planet B’llauit, for instance, needed much consideration. Particularly Krulvan. There was still a great deal of work to be done in compiling the post-technoweb aspects of Krulvan. Like how most emotional words and phrases contracted more and more, until finally, they were little more than abbreviations. The old dot-and-bubble effect.

A parent’s love was no longer expressed post-technoweb as “Kal-at lur amoi”, but instead as merely “KLA”. Which needed to be carefully distinguished in the relevant encyclopedia from another abbreviated Krulvan phrase “Kal’ati Lepr’en Acrumpsal” – which was something rather equivalent to the expletives of other languages like “D’Arvit”, or “Bleno”.

It's only a brief mention in the book, so it's possible in theory that it was added after the episode titles were released, or even after the novella’s publication (Amazon allows post-publication changes up to 10% of the text, and it’s not possible to track those changes). I’ve included the second paragraph because it’s interesting that the example they’ve given is the word for a parent’s love, which we can see as a running theme in this season of DW (though Moffat has said before that the only thing he writes about is a parent’s love, so who knows).

Not the strongest evidence of two-way coordination, but we may learn more when the episode airs.

Dutch [Space Babies, Boom]: Yeah, as in, the Dutch language. The words “spoor” & “smelt” both get a "oo, good word!" callout, spoor in Space Babies and smelt in Boom. These words both have Dutch roots. Splice, the daughter's name in Boom, is not only from a Dutch root, but also means the joining two pieces of rope. I read this novella just before Boom dropped on Disney+, so I can personally confirm that this is not a post-hoc addition to the novella. It hardly could have been anyway, this element is much more integral to the novella’s narrative than any of the other pieces.

The Auteur

This is where this all becomes relevant to the “Doctor Who is a TV Show” theory.

While the Protag is shredding the Head DC’s book, the Head DC is in the room, and what follows is an extremely meta narrative-aware pre-death monologue from the Head DC. He's pleading with Protag to stop changing things in his book, but he also refers to an "It" whose power surpasses them both.

He held eye contact with them as they looked up, “You didn’t pick up Belgian Dutch by chance. It’s how it plays. In weaving coincidences.”

“Just stop reading. Stop changing things. Stop, and we can be spared. Be free! If you keep going, then it will get what it wants. It is a happening [sic]. Out there, and in here in the basement. Everywhere. It will win if you keep going.”

“One day, you’ll make the same mistakes. Goddamn, you will. Because it’s all already written. It has already written it all. The paths, the choices. Rewrites, erasures, and even the contradictions. If you don't just... stop... it will... Unravel us all."

The "It" in question is presumably the author. Like an author writing a story, "It" plays by weaving coincidences, "It" gets what it wants when we keep reading, "It" has already written everything.

The Head DC mentions a special disposal chute, which had recently appeared as if by magic, which enabled Protag’s destruction of Belgian Dutch. Head DC’s references to this “It” suggest that his decision to create a word meaning cutting corners caused his eventual death, not by inventing the concept of cutting corners, but by creating a set-up that the Auteur, a godlike being that cares only for the rules of narrative, was compelled to write a satisfying follow-through for. The Auteur changed reality in order to weave a narratively-satisfying coincidence.

The Auteur is a character from the DW-spinoff series Faction Paradox. The creator of the Faction Paradox universe describes it as “on the surface an SF universe, but it works on the same principles as traditional folklore.”

I am but a humble Moffat scholar, so explaining the character of The Auteur is immediately getting into lore that I cannot even begin to decipher.

But it seems plausible that in the show we’re dealing with a godlike being, someone along the lines of Maestro or the Toymaker, but instead of caring only for the rules of play, cares only for the rules of narrative.

And this being, The Auteur, is altering reality and creating the narratively-satisfying coincidences in 14’s and 15’s timelines, possibly starting all the way back with the coincidence of 14 regenerating as David Tennant and immediately bumping into Donna Noble.

And it seems plausible that this season was created in cooperation with these DWU authors to whom concepts like The Auteur and The Unravel are licenced, and the novella is a tie-in text full of references to the current season to lead savvy superfans on a merry chase that foreshadows the season’s big bad.

Because I... don't really have another explanation for the existence of this novella at this point.

[downthetubes]

New Fifth Doctor Audio Adventures announced for 2025 from Big Finish

Big Finish has announced a new audio drama starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures: Hooklight

Big Finish has announced a new audio drama starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures: Hooklight, launching in April 2025. Rafe Wallbank’s unadorned cover art for the Big Finish audio adventure, Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures: Hooklight 1, assisted by Shay Brown Written by Tim Foley, the covers for the series are the work of Rafe Wallbank, with…

[being-of-rain]

Been binging a ton of Big Finish recently. Mostly the UNIT new series, but also some random stuff like the latest Classic Doctors New Monsters. And I just came here to say how fantastic the two Dream Crab episodes are in that!

Together In Eclectic Dreams has some very fun twists. Some of them you may be able to see coming, but I just love an episode that plays with the Dr Who formula a bit. I want to recommend this ep for one surprise character in particular, but the fact that I didn’t know they were coming made it all a bit more weird and fresh and... dream-like I guess!

When I saw that If I Should Die Before I Wake was credited to ‘John Dorney from a story by Jacqueline Rayner,’ i.e. two of the all-time best Dr Who authors, I thought it was either going to be a bit of a mess from having more than one writer, or it was going to be wonderful. And I’m happy to report it was the latter! I don’t know how much of the episode Dorney planned and wrote but he obviously did a heck of a good job preserving the original ideas, because the whole thing just screams Jac Rayner in the best way possible. The combination of those two authors makes for an episode that’s just hilarious line after hilarious line. It made me think how well Rayner’s style fits Eight and Charley, and then made me check her writing credits... she’s written for Charley with Six, but somehow she’s never written an audio for Eight before! Injustice!

I’m very much looking forward to the next set in the series. Not only because of another Jac Rayner episode, but also David K Barnes is writing two episodes about the Silents, presumably with Seven and Eight! Which is exciting for all sorts of reasons. The bad news is that it doesn’t come out for another year. Big Finish why do you announce things so early, just to taunt us??

And one more thing- I dearly wish that Big Finish wouldn’t feel the need to put every TV character possible on every one of their covers so they just becomes promo shot line-ups, but at least they can sometimes do it in ways that are actually good now. Rafe Wallbank is the cover artist for the covers here, as well as the latest River Song and Eighth Doctor covers, and they’re some of the best from Big Finish in ages in my opinion (yes, I have opinions on specific Big Finish cover artists now, something so niche that I haven’t heard anyone else even acknowledge it.)