#roz forrester

[verloonati]

VNA #52 Christmas on a rational planet, Lawrence Miles 1996

So this is my first Lawrence miles book and my god it has everything I'm looking forward to in the EDAs and faction paradox. It's a convoluted, neo-gothic, acidic sometimes frankly means and maybe sometimes a little self-indulgent writing style that I get is not to everyone's taste but is definitely to mine.

The problem is that Miles bases the premise of that particular story on very mysoginistic bioessentialist bullshit (the idea that men are "rational architects" and women "sensible") and although most of the racism is for the period characters who all suck deeply as people's inner monologue, Wich imo is not handled with as much care as it should but it really becomes a problem when it bleeds into the events of the story and then it's not just narrating racism but well just racism innit.

Despite these flaws the story is really solid the side characters very well written and most of the ideas concerning the main characters and gallifreyan lore are fascinating. We get a brief scene of timelords prying out with fucking knives their inner irrationality, a description of academy student playing psychological warfare for funsies on each other, Roz confronted to how fucked up she was and how much she has grown by fighting a version of her past self, Chris getting deep inside the TARDIS. And the carnival queen (despite the mysogyny) is a really interesting and threatening villain. The notion of her just latching onto catcher's delusions and ascribing her meaning onto it really adds layers.

Also, the feast of Steven gets referenced at the very end

8/10 I would have given more but the misoginy and racism really bring this down

Since i've started reading trough the vna again, here's my opinion about each and every one of them because it's my blog and i do what i want with it

VNA #1 Timewyrm: genesys (1991, John Peel)

Okay, this book is bad, like it's a disaster. The idea of "dr who meets gilgamesh" is pretty good on paper, but damn does this miss the mark at every term.

Every single scene with ace is gross mysoginistic mischaracterisation, Gilgamesh is insufferable, Ishtar is a completely uninteresting antagonist and her motives are cliché af.

At the very least, the stranded Anuans are an interesting twist and the introduction of avram makes for an interesting Change of Pace.

2/10, that was Five hours of my life i'm never getting back

[wgough42]

Discuss

[legok9]

Doctor Who cover art by Jon Sullivan

The Death of Art

So Vile a Sin cover

The Room With No Doors

Oh No It Isn't!

Ship of Fools

Deadfall

Oblivion

Dry Pilgrimage

Where Angels Fear

via Jon Sullivan's ArtStation

[dalesramblingsblog]

Why do the first three EDAs of 1998 seem to decide all of a sudden that Sam is a chronic fingernail-biter? As far as I can recall there was no hint of that trait from The Eight Doctors through to Alien Bodies. It almost seems like an attempt to set something up for Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum to use as a signifier of how far she's moved on in her four-year absence from the TARDIS in Seeing I but from doing a quick scan of that book it's not mentioned at all.

Really does sum up the recurring issues they're having with defining Sam. When they're not focusing on her body in a very MenWritingWomen kind of way, that is.

(There's a passage where Sam recognises "the line of her breasts" and frankly with how often the authors like bringing them up or putting her in a wet T-shirt or having her be exposed to creepy leering sex pests - or both, as happens in Option Lock, woo! - I can't blame her. God it's just so weird, how have we gone from Roz Forrester, Bernice Summerfield and Ace to... this, in a little over a year.)

[familyparadox]

The Fact that Chris Cwej is in “Last Day: part 2” is so funny because he was also in Lungbarrow, both stories see the seventh Doctor being sent of to collect the Master remains. Lungbarrow is actually the story in which Cwej leaves the Doctor. Like how does that work? Roz being there is even more ridiculous because she should be dead by this point? Is this Post Lungbarrow Cwej? If so is this is First, Third or Fourth Body? Is is just some random Cwejen rocking up like the ones in the Bernice Summerfield audio? Not to mention how is Roz there? She should be dead? Benny being there was already wild but Cwej and Roz being here? How does that work? Are they going to bring Roz back to life somehow? Is Cwej on a mission from the Time Lords to kill the Doctor to alter some key event in the War in Heaven? Will Christine Summerfield get a name drop? Will this audio finally solve the mystery of the Seventh Doctor’s encounter with Faction Paradox? I am so excited for this mess.

[vikingschism]

Continuing my readthrough of the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures, I finished reading Damaged Goods the other day. This book was Russel T Davies' first published foray into Who and it was an absolute banger. Many of these novels don't really hold up to much scrutiny as a reader, but this is one of the few that I think really stands out - not just as a Doctor Who novel, but a novel that is worth reading.

The Doctor and companions find themselves on earth, trying to ingratiate themselves with the residents of a working class housing estate - given what RTD would go on to write in the main show, this sort of setting should sound instantly familiar. However, we cannot forget that these are the VNAs and thus there is a level of grit and grime that feel more like they come from Torchwood. This book gets dark. I can handle that, but it's definitely something to be wary of if you're interested in reading the book.

The main enemy of the book was a really fun concept, definitely one that special effects would struggle to keep up with but in prose can really shine. And speaking of the prose the novel is written well - there's some great lines in here. I particularly love The Doctor describing the challenge of ingratiating themselves with the different households on the estate as having to "breach 76 fortresses". That's a wonderfully evocative bit of dialogue.

And I really have to give RTD praise for the characters - they're well drawn and compelling. One of them is a gay man who is roiling in self-loathing, there's a mother desperate to give her children a better life than her, and a teenage girl who saw something many years ago (as well as The Doctor) but wants nothing more than to have nothing to do with it. And that's only naming a few - all of the characters have their internal struggles and these are all well done.

In all, I highly recommend the novel. I will caveat that it is dark and not for the faint of heart - expect a similar level of grimness as Torchwood: Children of Earth had. The book was a great time though, and I will look forward to seeing how So Vile A Sin continues this little arc that's developed over the past few books.

[st4rshiptr00per]

new favorite piece of roz characterization actually. boomer who thinks its bullshit youre not allowed to smoke indoors anymore

[thebraxiatelcollection]

I love Chris and Roz's relationship in the vnas so much. Chris is the definition of a golden retriever, and Roz Forrester reminds me of a Siamese cat.

[seven-times-champion]

So BF’s latest post they say that in an upcoming Seventh Doctor boxset; “the Seventh Doctor is reunited with all of his companions”

https://www.bigfinish.com/news/v/early-bird-offer-for-classic-doctor-pre-orders

I doubt they actually will live up to that statement. Because even if we only include companions who have been in audio before and only ones who have been in more than one episode that would still give us... *deep breath* Mel, Ace, Hex, Sally, Aristedes, Raine, Mags, Klein, Will, Benny, Chris, Roz. No way is that happening, cool as it would be if it did!

[dalesramblingsblog]

The thing to understand about Chibnall (well, there are several things, but we only have time for one) is that, first and foremost... he writes cop shows. Broadchurch is the obvious one, yes, but he also wrote for Life on Mars, and parlayed his work on Torchwood into showrunning Law & Order: UK, which ironically served to prevent Children of Earth and Miracle Day from having Freema Agyeman return as Martha so lol. And I think that's really at the heart of his rather chronically milquetoast/centrist political outlook. Even beyond Yaz, you can see this in Flux, with Vinder's whole backstory basically being a lost episode of Line of Duty, complete with a guest spot from Craig Parkinson.

And honestly "cop as Doctor Who companion" was done much better thirty years ago and her name was Roslyn Forrester. Then again, it helped that she was very pointedly a futuristic space cop in the vein of Judge Dredd, a series which comes with anti-cop satire practically baked in. Roz is a cop, and not a very nice one at that, but the novels at least recognise that fact and give her the designated role of "person in the regular cast who will go along with whatever awful thing Seven has decided he's going to do this month, even if she argues with him about it a bit."

(It also undoubtedly helps that it's a consistent throughline in the New Adventures that Seven has strayed from the Doctorly ideal, so picking up two cops as his latest companions feels a bit more pointed than it does in the case of Thirteen, who was just one regeneration prior telling Clara "I'm not the police, that's just what it says on the box.")

The Roz/Seven dynamic is spiky and toxic, but it never pretends to be anything else, and it's also complex and challenging in a way that Thirteen's era and its handling of Yaz could pretty much never dream. If there had been a moment on par with "History kills people and sometimes even you can't save them" in the Chibnall Era, I'd probably be a lot less hard on it.

But then again I guess that's why Kate Orman remains the GOAT.

i really did enjoy the 13th doctor HOWEVER, if i could change anything (other than chibnall's flmisy political messaging) i wouldve made yaz a social worker in training. it literally made no sense to make her a cop, especially when she was constantly comparing herself to the doctor, who is literally the opposite of a cop in every way. and if she had to start off as a cop, she should have resigned and pursued social work or something similar that matched her backstory as a trouble teen AND the doctor's pacifist ideology. the idea that she felt a renewed interest in becoming a cop was sp dumb. why the fuck did he make the doctor's companion a cop when they fucking hateeee people of authority. wwtdd? not be a fucking cop

[michelada12]

Just an average night at KFAM 189.16 📻

[dialogue from Frasier]

[dalesramblingsblog]

On the subject of Chris and Roz ('cause I didn't want to hijack the other post more than was strictly necessary), I will say @st4rshiptr00per that it definitely takes them a little while for the writers to get to grips with them. Having gone back and re-read Sky Pirates! only recently, actually, what struck me is that, for all that Dave Stone's comparatively sidelining the duo in their own subplot stood out to me when I first read it back in 2021 (God I've been doing this thing for so long), he... kinda nails the dynamic and banter between the two of them.

I would say that the first truly great book with Roz and Chris in it that's great *because* of Roz and Chris (I like Head Games but it's a very broad and archetypal book; not that it misrepresents the characters, Steve Lyons captures them pretty well, but it's a book about the nature of storytelling so the characters don't really drive the plot as much as they would in a traditional Doctor Who story) is... well, predictably for Mr. Also People Stan, it's The Also People. Cannot stress enough how much I love that book, and Ben Aaronovitch is the first to *really* get Roz on a fundamental level, his portrait of her is sketched so damn vividly that it hurts and she gets a climactic monologue that is just utter perfection.

Past that, Shakedown is... well, it's Terrance Dicks, but throughout all of 1996 you generally have a pretty solid run of writers knowing how to write for Chris and Roz. Books like GodEngine or The Death of Art stand out a lot more for their poor handling of the duo - though admittedly part of that is that they don't even have Benny to fall back on at that point - than they would have a year earlier.

But yeah I love those two, they're definitely not always perfectly handled but the best books featuring them are very much engaged with the question of what it means to be a cop travelling in the TARDIS. I wrote a whole other post on the subject of the NAs, policing and Chris/Roz vs. Yaz back when I was finishing up the series (or at least the Doctorful instalments) with The Room With No Doors about a year ago when I first joined Tumblr, I think it was a pretty decent encapsulation of my thoughts (tho there's a mild spoiler for The Also People I suppose but eh it's a good enough book that it can withstand it.)

[familyparadox]

How does one think the 7th Doctor’s first meeting with the Faction went down. We know Seven met the Faction Paradox before Alien Bodies but we have no details of this encounter.

Out of universe is is clearly a reference to the VNA version of Alien Bodies but I often wonder how the in universe meeting happened. To me it seems that Roz and Cwej would have been with them and involved the Klade as mentioned in Father Time (however is could Fitz and Anjie with eight)

[dalesramblingsblog]

Genuinely surprised that it seems no-one's mentioned Roz Forrester as of yet. One of the most fascinating and ambiguous characters the New Adventures ever turned out, and it's a testament to the talents of (most of) Virgin's writers that they allowed the audience to make up their own minds about her. Her climactic speech in The Also People still gives me chills, and So Vile a Sin made me *bawl*, folks.

Honestly, the fascinating thing is that the NAs very thoroughly reversed the traditionally gendered power structure inherent in the companion role. I guess we can kinda thank Kate Orman for a lot of that, like with so many other great things in life.

The regular cast is practically full of great female characters - Benny being the most obvious example, but Ace is great too, and yes I'm including New Ace, tired of pretending that she isn't wonderful - and Chris is the least-developed companion by far, at least until the final few books. So yeah. Interesting.

Reblog this and tell me about some of your favourite Classic Who/EU female characters ♥

[vikingschism]

Continuing my readthrough of the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures I finished reading The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones the other day. Set in Paris in the late 19th century, the TARDIS crew are trying to avert some catastrophe that is due to happen (which will destroy history, naturally) and The Doctor thinks psychic powers might have something to do with it.

Not going to bury the lede on this one, it was a bit of a confusing mess. By the end it resolved itself into a fairly clear story, but along the way I was constantly unsure what was going on. The experience of reading it was almost dreamlike in a sense; scenes would shift with little to no connection and characters come in and out of prominence with no fanfare. I don't think this was fully intentional however, and it made the book very slow to read.

The concept behind the aliens in this story was cool, however it didn't help with the confusion as there was a lot of jargon introduced very quickly. Again, later on this became more obvious when it was clear what they actually were, but the first few scenes appear so unconnected to the other scenes going on that it's hard to latch on to them. I think that a concept like this could only really be done in a book if executed like it was here - it would definitely be hard to do in a visual medium.

The Doctor and crew were fine here, Chris gets a fun plotline where he has to infiltrate the Parisian police, and ends up needing to pretend to be The Doctor. The Doctor has his fingers in many pies and gets to engage in a bit of scheming. Roz, meanwhile, seems to get the short end of the stick and doesn't get a ton to do. There is some insight on her past though which is interesting. The other supporting characters and villains aren't too interesting overall.

The book does bring back The Shadow Directory from Christmas on a Rational Planet, however they don't seem to do all that much here. The callback does make sense at least seeing as the book is set in Paris.

The next book in the series is Damaged Goods by Russel T Davies, and I'm already halfway through. It's a good one. Expect a review for that one soon.

[thebraxiatelcollection]

This is a Roz Forrester appreciation post. Just want her to know I love her, and she deserves more love.