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magiefish · 1 day ago

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The King of Terror: Part 4

The one where Tweedledee and Tweedledum show back up, and nothing that interesting happens.

This chapter is called ‘Kill Surf City’. I have no idea why: it has nothing to do with anything in this chapter. Not a lot of interesting stuff happens but I imagine a lot of it is relevant to the plot so there’s a lot of summary here sorry.

So we pick back up with Barrington and Paynter after they have been slowed in their quest by a search by immigration control because they lost track of Bulyjin and Paynter decided to respond to this by losing his shit with an immigration officer. Really high class secret agent stuff.

Oh boy I sure do hope non-consensual butt stuff doesn’t come up again in this completely normal book.

Paynter also threatens to speak to the manager and get everyone fired because, again, he’s a very reasonable and competent secrete agent.

They meet up with the guy in charge of UNITs Los Angeles office, who’s called Mel Tyrone and is, of course, black because what else do you think Keith would call a black guy. He takes the two of them out to get burgers and also runs a red light because this is AMERICA babey!1!!

Has Keith ever spoken to a black person face to face is my question, because describing a black character as ‘looking like Malcom X or Martin Luther King’ or ‘a black singer’ is usually one of my indicators for someone not understanding how to write or describe a black character. Keith also has a very annoying habit of being able to describe characters only by comparing them to other actors or characters, which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because it relies entirely on the audience either a) knowing who these people are or b) having access to the internet. It’s just lazy, and if you write a character you should know how to describe them. Also got to love how Barrington and Paynter both get extended characterisation as a pair of rogues in a straight guy-angry guy duo, and then we get to Tyrone and he’s just ‘nice’. Thanks Keith.

Tyrone tells them a bit more about InterCom: Paolo Sanger has a frontman called Joyce (who looks like Joseph Goebbels, of course) and a hit man called Shaun Ryman, which is funny to me because Ryman’s is the name of a stationary store near to me. UNIT LA has tried a number of tactics in order to take Sanger down — sex scandals, working with competition, bumping him off, y’know, all entirely ethical stuff — but nothing works.

It is at this point we switch over to a meeting at InterCom between Sanger and Ryman. Sanger mentions the two of them ‘coming here’ so I’m going to wager a guess and say they’re aliens. He calls in his secretary Michelle Stonebringer, who tells them Bulyjin has arrived. This is how she’s described:

Yeah. There’s also a brief cut away to two CIA guys, Frank Greaves and his superior, discussing the UNIT presence in the city, and then another to a girl called Kyla stealing a computer disc from InterCom in Japan. I’m just bringing these up because I imagine they will be relevant later.

Bulyjin has finally reached InterCom, where we meet the head scientist Richard Lewis and the head of R&D Stephen Joyce in person. He delivers the plutonium and (of course) immediately gets betrayed and used for DNA experiments. Yay.

We now cut to France, where there is extended French dialogue I cannot be bothered to translate. A guy named Pavil Luvik meets up with Alain Giresse, who came up as important earlier.

So these guys are definitely aliens. Cool. That was a whole lot of nothing.

Meanwhile, in Chapter 4 the descriptively named ‘California’, Five, Tegan and Turlough arrive in Los Angeles and Tegan also almost immediately spots some police brutality, because AMERICA babey!!2!

Yikes. This whole bit feels quite reminiscent of the moment in ‘Logopolis’ where Tegan points out the city is run like a sweatshop. Unfortunately, it also has a few of the early character treatment Tegan overtones where she’s treated more like a silly woman who doesn’t know what’s going on and inserts herself into situations without understanding the context but uh. She’s right here y’know. She is completely right.

Wow! A normal interaction with a woman! Never thought I’d see the day!

At the hotel, the Doctor does a little bit of recon and finds out the terrorists are some guys called The Sons of Nostradamus (as seen in epigraph 207).

Also more casual racism.

I only note this ending bit because of this weird ending line, and also because of the detail with the half-moon spectacles, which feels like a deliberate parallel to Five’s granny glasses, which suggests to me that Keith might try and pull some sort of ‘we’re the same you and I’ bit later. Oh joy.

We have now passed the section of the book I pre-read before I decided to start this liveblog, so from here on out I am sailing in complete darkness! I have no idea what’s coming for me! I am very afraid!

There is a name oft spoken of in hushed tones within the circles of those who are fans of the Fifth Doctor’s era. It has a rating of 3.5 on the Timescales; it has no plot description; it is the reason why the TARDIS wiki has an article for ‘anal probe’. But, as much as it mentioned and then hushed up, there is at present no further in-depth guide to this novels bizarreness, it’s staggeringly low-quality, it’s unrelenting horniness. If one wishes to understand this horror, one must read it firsthand. Well no more. I, in the name of knowledge and first-hand wisdom, have decided to set out on a journey so that no others may have to undertake it, and with the skills I have honed through my study of English Literature provide a degree of critique and commentary to Keith Topping’s infamous offspring.

I, dear readers, am going to liveblog reading The King of Terror. Starting now.

The King Of Terror Liveblog: Part One

[TW: This being the King of Terror, we will almost certainly be getting into discussions of SA/non-consensual sex. The word ‘r@pe’ will almost definitely come up (indeed it literally comes up on the first page). Also, I will not be censoring it beyond this point because a) this isn’t TikTok, and b) even if I used ‘grape’ or something everyone would still know what I was talking about so there’s no real point. I assume everyone here is a mature adult who doesn’t need to hide behind codes in order to discuss serious and upsetting topics. If you are not, Please God Don’t Read This, it will likely still be here by the time you’re old enough. Go watch the show instead, it’s better and more family friendly (and has well-written violence and kissing in it). If these topics bring up any unpleasant memories for you or will put you in a bad state of mind, then please do not read this live blog, it is not worth it. Furthermore, I imagine various kinds of bigotry will come up in incredibly breezy barely relevant ways (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) because this is the year 2000 we’re talking about. There’s also probably something related to medical trauma in here. I will also probably get Very Angry as a lover of literature and Doctor Who at some point, so we’ll see how that goes. Anyways, onwards and downwards.]

Wow, I feel sorry for these guys

Interesting choice. Wonder how this will be relevant to the ‘themes’ of this work.

Huh. Okay. This isn’t actually a bad start. A bit pretentious maybe, but the descriptions are very visceral and it’s certainly a good hook, perhaps this won’t be so bad-

Aaaaand yep not even a page in and we’re already using the phrase “rape”, really cool Keith, very mature and based. Now, I’m not categorically averse to using the phrase ‘rape’ semi-metaphorically. But it is one of those words that has to be handled very carefully and with a proper understanding of the feelings and ideas that it implies.

‘The Things’ (the 2010 short story based off of ‘The Thing’) uses it towards the end in a way that I feel illustrates my point - the alien is disgusted by humanity and our ‘individualised’ existences and decides to forcefully ‘teach’ us why it’s so much better to be like it via the means of, y’know, infecting people with parts of it and then making them go all schlorp. Right before it assimilates one of the men, he calls it a ‘rapist’ which the alien later adopts in the final line of the story: ‘I will rape it into them’. Now, to me, this works because the aliens convictions are painted in a somewhat religious light throughout the story and also because assimilating people is literally a physical violation, so the use of the word at the stories end seems to be used to deliberately conjure ideas of ‘corrective’ SA in a way that feels intentional given the previously discussed themes. It is also, as I have noted, used right at the end as the final line of the story, in a way that indicates to me that the writer understood the very visceral feelings the word evokes and decided to reserve it to be used to reinforce the bleak, foreboding tone of the ending.

Keith does not do this. Keith decides to use the idea of SA and all its violent implications right out of the gate to, presumably, shock the reader and try to grab their attention. He did not have to do this. His abstract, vague descriptions and in-media-res opening were enough by themselves. What this belies to me is a) a belief that violence or shock are inherently compelling and b) a lack of confidence in the strength of his writing on its own. We shall see if I am correct in both of these estimations.

Now, Keith is certainly not the only writer guilty of a very liberal use of SA in the wilderness years of Doctor Who. It seems, from the little I have read, almost inescapable. I remember reading ‘Goth Opera’ and the word ‘rape’ being used to describe what the Mara did to Tegan within, like, the first 30 pages or something. (Which, okay, some critics have definitely compared the scene from ‘Kinda’ where the Mara possesses her to an SA scene, but within the first 30 pages? And without unpacking any of that? Mr. Cornell??) But that doesn’t excuse any of this it just makes him another part of a rather unfortunate pattern.

Oooo somebody wrote this before ‘The Weddding of River Song’. Keith Hopping JNT just called, he wants you to know that fucking with the UNIT timeline is his domain.

So old Keith is aware of Shadows Over Avalon. I don’t really know how much cross-continuity was going on with the PDA / EDA / VNA / VMA writers, so I’m not really certain whether this reference to stuff that has happened in other stories is complacent or unusual. I haven’t actually read Shadows Over Avalon, I’m not that far into the EDA’s (I got distracted before I could read Alien Bodies :( ).

WILL this man ever get to enjoy retirement!

I was never under the impression that the Brigadier was a straight up Tory but I haven’t seen that much of him so what do I know? Also, ‘a smile of admiration’? What, cause being a Tory is just such good old lovable nostalgic Britain? And patriotism too? Ugh. Anyway, the set-up for this narrative is seemingly that a bunch of UNIT files have been decommissioned. This journalist is initially interviewing the Brigadier about a case involving the Waro (who were in Keith’s last book “The Devil Goblins From Neptune”, so, nice self-repping Keith).

This then moves into the two of them discussing the Doctor and his involvement with some company called ‘Intercom’, setting up the events of this story. I also don’t know what the Brig is on about here with the Doctor being ‘a man of peace’ because *I* definitely saw Three’s Venusian moves but okay. Anyway, this section is attributed to an in-universe book so it seems like Keith is trying to a bit of a meta-textual House of Leaves thing. Let’s see how he succeeds in the next post, which will be a reblog of this one.

#not a lot to say about this one except AMERICA bab- *I get taken out by the FBI*#the king of terror #fifth doctor #vislor turlough #tegan jovanka #doctor who #classic who #past doctor adventures #wilderness years #liveblog

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