Chapter the 307th, which is super (thanks for asking) - © South Park The Movie.
Plot:
[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] Bath, 1813. The Doctor and Ruby attend a party in regency era Britain to play act as characters in Bridgerton, and they're not the only ones. There's also Rogue, a handsome time-travelling bounty hunter that the Doctor takes a shine to, and a family of shape-shifting Chuldur who are killing party guests and taking their place as a form of cosplay (they are fans of Bridgerton from having caught the TV signals beamed out into space). These are the villains that Rogue is tracking, but unfortunately he believes for a long time that there's only one Chuldur and that the Doctor is it. Rogue takes the Doctor back to his invisible, cloaked spaceship and scans him, discovering his true identity. Having both realised they like one another, they talk about teaming up and exploring the universe together (Rogue may as well have said that he's only doing the one last job, or that he's a day away from retirement.) They both return to the party and do scandalous things - including Rogue proposing to the Doctor - to make the Chuldur want to cosplay them rather than innocent humans. A brief chase ensues, but the Doctor and Rogue elude the Chuldur. The party culminates in a society wedding where one of the Chuldur is going to marry Ruby. The Doctor thinks Ruby is a Chuldur but she's just pretending. He activates a forcefield trap of Rogue's which has been programmed with plot contrivances - it can only hold a certain number of people and it can only be used once. Ruby is caught in the trap with the Chuldur. Seeing that the Doctor cannot make the decision to sacrifice his friend, Rogue jumps into the field, knocking Ruby out, just before everything in the trap is transported to an uninhabited dimension to act as the Chuldur's prison. The Doctor is sad as he has no way of tracking Rogue down. Ruby comforts him.
Context:
On arriving home after a recent holiday abroad, four packaged-up Target novelisations were on the doormat amongst the rest of the piled-up post (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details of the books); only one of the four, Rogue, was of a story I had not yet blogged at that point. A day later, another package arrived; this one contained the Blu-ray box set of Ncuti Gatwa's first series, including Rogue. I often will chose a random episode of any newly arrived box set to blog, and the delivery of the same unblogged story in two different media was enough of a deciding factor: Rogue would be the next story to cover. I proceeded to binge all Ncuti's stories in order from the box set, from his full debut in a Christmas special through to the stories of his first season. When I got to Rogue, I asked the Better Half if she'd join me. She's a big fan of Bridgerton (or Peter Stringfellow's Pride and Prejudice as I like to think of it, with a tip of the hat to Stewart Lee), but she'd been pretty cold on the new Doctor Who stories. She asked how faithful an imitation it was (i.e. if there were any sex scenes - she's honest enough to admit that this is a big reason for watching Bridgeton, don't trust anyone who pretends different); I told her there was not, but that two attractive blokes did a bit of snogging; that was sufficient to sway her.
Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. May and June 2024 delivered seven new stories (six single-parters and one two-part finale) that would postpone the point of catching up a little. This is the fourth of the seven to be covered for the blog in random order. Beyond that, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).
First Time Round:
As with all the stories of this run, I watched Rogue from midnight, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer. It was the 8th June 2024, and I was accompanied by the middle child (boy, aged 14 at the time). This run has prompted more post-screening discussion with fan friends on Whatsapp than before, stories have generally proved more divisive (I don't remember us ever commenting on a story during Jodie Whittaker's era, for example). For Rogue, the conversation was not about the quality of the story, but the quality of each of our powers of facial recognition. A scene of Rogue scanning the Doctor has hologram heads of the Time Lord's past incarnations float around. One of them is Richard E Grant, a fun inclusion to confer some form of canonical status on Scream of the Shalka. Only, it didn't look much like Grant. The images of some of the other Doctors weren't clear either (Capaldi certainly didn't look right), and with no context as to who was the floating head fleetingly on screen, I had no clue. It looked more like Christopher Walken to me (imagine him playing the Doctor - I'd pay to see that!). Some of my fan friends with better pattern matching skills couldn't believe my prosopagnosia, but I wasn't the only one suffering it. There was a long while after the midnight screening before any official confirmation of whose was the extra face, during which speculation reigned. The main alternate theory was that it was Michael Jayston, who played an evil future version of the Doctor in stories in 1986. There was also one fan that thought it was David Warner (an alternate Doctor featured in multiple Big Finish audio plays). In one way, this is all Paul Cornell's fault. One of Grant's most famous features is a big toothy grin. Cornell, though, wrote the Shalka Doctor as consistently grumpy. If Grant had been allowed to smile, I might just have recognised him.
Reaction:
It's taken me a while to catch up with a few of the streaming era shows that were touted as rivals to Doctor Who, or as models that Who should seek to emulate in the years before it relaunched with Russell T Davies back at the helm. My middle child has seen them all, I'm sure; he is the biggest TV sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast in the house, putting even his Dad to shame. He turned 15 years of age recently, and wanted to go with me to see a 15-certificate movie at the cinema for the first time; a nice idea. The movie was Deadpool and Wolverine. I was therefore instructed that - because he'd heard that there was significant plot in the Deadpool sequel concerning Marvel's Time Variance Authority - I would have to watch all of the Disney Plus series Loki, which features the TVA extensively, as homework. I managed to get through both seasons (12 episodes in total) in the week leading up to our cinema trip, and very much enjoyed what I saw. A major creative force behind Loki was Kate Herron, co-writer of Rogue with Briony Redman, and it was indeed one of those series heavily compared to Doctor Who when it aired, and touted by some as a model that Who should seek to emulate. It's understandable to see why: it's a narrative about time travel, it's timey-wimey in its telling, and it has at its centre a charismatic performance by a British actor playing an anti-hero. It's very like Doctor Who, or rather - and here's the rub - it's very like a particular type of Doctor Who: the stories set on Gallifrey. The TVA, powerful but bureaucratic police of the timeline, are just Time Lords without the impractical collars. Maybe its a coincidence, or maybe there was something in the air, but the TVA first appeared in the comics in 1986, the same year Doctor Who was at the height of its love affair with Time Lords and time lore.
The trouble is that the Doctor Who stories set on Gallifrey with Time Lords were not popular, or not as popular as the ones set anywhere and everywhere else in time and space, to the extent that two - two! - separate 21st century showrunners have destroyed the place to rid the show of the Doctor's planet and people. Who wants to see the Doctor in his equivalent of the headmaster's office, when he could be running free on the playing field? Thankfully, Herron brings none of that to this Doctor Who story. What Rogue does have in common with Loki, though, is a lightness of touch with regards to the interactions between its main characters. The onscreen relationship between Tom Hiddleston's Loki and Owen Wilson's Mobius is one of the main reasons Loki is much more entertaining to watch than, say, Arc of Infinity, even though the subject matter isn't that different. The onscreen relationship between Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and Jonathan Groff as Rogue was every bit as engaging (and had almost as much star power) but was romantic. It's a slow burn to start, but there's so many great scenes; their bickering about their spaceships and gadgetry, the Doctor dancing to a Kylie Minogue banger much to Rogue's chagrin, the sequence of them trying to out-scandal each other to distract the Chuldur. Rogue's noble self-sacrifice doesn't tug much at the heartstrings, despite the imploring final line of "Find me"; this may be because it is a fate that was telegraphed to a ludicrous degree. As soon as the Doctor starts talking about taking Rogue for a spin round the stars "when we both get out of this", everyone watching knows the bounty hunter's not making it to the end credits. Gatwa's final scene with Gibson bottling up his sadness sold the emotion better, as did the sequel-hunting decision to keep Rogue's fate offscreen and up in the air (the Doctor still has the ring that Rogue gave him!).
Unlike in Loki, where the lead character's bisexuality is covered in one 'blink and miss it' line, the LGBTQ+ nature of the romance in Doctor Who is full-blooded, out and proud, and it's much more enjoyable for it. None of this would sit well with those fans who like their Doctor to be unsexual, obviously, but that dimensionally transcendental ship sailed a long time ago. Of all the snogs the Doctor's had over the years since he got a taste for it in 1996, the vast majority have been with women, so it was about time to redress the balance. Despite the setting sampling a larger than life TV show in Bridgerton, there isn't much in the way of camp, but lots of colour. Locations, costumes, hair and make-up, all are excellent at recreating the heightened period drama of Netflix's flagship show. The choreography is a perfect replica, but that's not so surprising when the same choreographer Jack Murphy is responsible for both (and does great work here). The chamber music versions of modern pop songs (Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga) are icing on the cake. The script is very clever at keeping ahead of the audience too; just when one might be groaning at how derivative it is, the rug is pulled out from under one's feet with the revelation that it's the aliens themselves that are recreating a TV show. Doctor Who has done tourist aliens before, but cosplaying aliens is a new twist on the idea. Otherwise, the motivation of the Chuldur is the most refreshingly traditional of those included in the stories in Ncuti's first year - they're not misunderstood, or supernatural, or god-like, they're just wrong'uns that want to kill humans. The masks, each one distinct and based on real but exotic birds, are fantastic, and Indira Varma is great as the head of the Chuldur family.
Varma, as a recurring character on 2000s Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, is a link back to the early days after the relaunch of the Whoniverse 19 years before Rogue. This is somewhat apt, as Rogue is not only sampling Bridgerton, but also 2005 Doctor Who. Just like Space Babies echoing a number of scenes from the first journey for companion Rose in The End of the World, but this time for Ruby, Rogue is channeling The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, like Rogue a story from towards the end of the season just before the finale. The character of Rogue, with his invisible spaceship, time travel to Earth's past on a mission, embarrassing slip-ups with the psychic paper, playing popular music, and his desire to dance with and snog members of the regular cast, is so similar to Captain Jack in 2005 that it can't be coincidence. Whatever other reasons there might be for not using the same character, John Barrowman is too old now to be romantically partnered with Ncuti Gatwa, who is more than 25 years Barrowman's junior. Dare we hope that Groff can be tempted back and Rogue can become a semi-regular just as Jack was a couple of decades before? Here's hoping.
Connectivity:
Both Rogue and The Ice Warriors feature the Doctor teaming up with someone (Rogue, Clent) to replace a previous partner who is now gone; it may just be me that can see the Man Love subtext in The Ice Warriors - see the last blog post for more details - but it's definitely there in Rogue.
Deeper Thoughts:
Staying on Target: four more books for 2024. It only seems like a few months ago that the last Target novelisations came out (this is probably because it was only a few months ago - see the Deeper Thoughts section of Wild Blue Yonder from February 2024 for capsule reviews of the previous batch). For many years before 2024, the pattern had been for a handful of books per year to be published, mixing classic series stories (plugging previous gaps or providing alternate versions of existing books) and adaptations of new series stories dotted around in many different Doctors' eras; in 2024, this seems to have changed and now we are just seeing novelisations of the most recently broadcast stories. As mentioned above, with this latest blog post the four stories selected for this Target batch are all covered on the blog. I've also blogged another starring Ncuti Gatwa, The Devil's Chord, but that hasn't been novelised yet - a shame, as it would be interesting to see how the big song and dance number at the end was covered. This is also a challenge for the writer of the first of the four paperback releases, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, capturing The Church on Ruby Road, including The Goblin Song, in prose. The book was previously published in hardback (the first new hardback novelisation of a Doctor Who story for many decades) in January 2024, only a month after the broadcast of the TV version. This version has a new cover by Dan Liles, as do the other three novelisations being published for the first time. His are more detailed photo-realistic covers than those of previous artist for the range Anthony Dry, and depict a complete scene from the story rather than a combination of different elements; for long-term Doctor Who Target fans, it's reminiscent of the switch of styles between regular cover artists Chris Achilleos and Andrew Skilleter in the 1980s.
Jikiemi-Pearson does a Terrance Dicks-like job in effectively and efficiently telling the story. There's very little in the way of new, extended or alternative material: the odd line of dialogue is different and there's a section in the book where the Doctor explains the psychic paper to Ruby based on a short deleted scene. That's about it. The TV version suffers a bit with an overlong period between saving the baby Lulabelle in 2023, and Ruby being erased from existence (and the Doctor then going back to 2004 to fix time). From watching special features on the Blu-ray, I now understand this was because an action sequence with the Goblins attacking Ruby's flat was cut for budget reasons. The book doesn't reinstate that, but it handles the talky dialogue scenes that replaced it such that they don't drag as much as on the telly. A third-person limited narration style is used throughout, with first Ruby and then the Doctor as the viewpoint character. There's a few nice moments where we're presented with a little more detail of both characters' thoughts and emotions, but mostly they are just responding to the events of the plot, and there's no additional backstory dished out beyond what we already know from watching the TV version. As for the song, it is printed in full, in a standard publishing approach of italicised, centre-justified text blocks interrupting where appropriate the prose describing the action. No other explanation is given as to why the Doctor and Ruby are singing, other than the Doctor just wants to join in. The next novelisation is of Space Babies, and as on TV the Christmas story leads directly into the opener of Ncuti Gatwa's first season. In turn, that next book in its early chapters links back with Ruby reflecting on events leading up to her stepping into the TARDIS.
Space Babies has been adapted by Alison Rumfitt; like Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, an up and coming talent who has not been involved in writing Doctor Who in any format before. Again, the book doesn't take any major liabilities with the plot. There's the odd bit of material included that one suspects was cut from the TV version; one part is the Doctor playing the Sugababes' Push the Button on the TARDIS jukebox, linking in to his repeated use of the phrase "Push the Button" throughout the rest of the story, which otherwise seems to come from nowhere. I'm guessing a rights issue scuppered the song being heard on TV, but clearly no such limitation applies to the written word. Another part is an extended set of fart gags at the end after the Doctor has used the built-up diaper gas to propel the station through space. If this was indeed cut from the original script, then those that like their Doctor Who on the more serious side will be dismayed to see it reinstated here, but I found it perfectly fine. Again, Rumfitt uses third-person limited, but cuts between the POV of characters - Ruby, the Doctor, Jocelyn Sancerre and even baby Eric - more frequently. There's small details of extra backstory slipped in there, Jocelyn craves doughnuts in isolation, even though she never particularly cared for them before, and reads the crew's non-confidential files for something to do, as there are no books left onboard. One little embellishment Rumfitt allows herself is occasional cutaways to an oblique passage, a mini-ghost story about finding openness towards the 'other'. I'm not sure I fully understood it, or its relevance to the wider story, but maybe it wasn't intended to be fully understood.
In broadcast order, the next of the novelisations is of 73 Yards written by script editor of Ncuti's first season Scott Handcock. Before that gig, Handcock worked for years at Big Finish. As such, he has most experience of Doctor Who storytelling of any of the authors of this batch. He also has one of the strongest scripts of the year with which to work. Like the authors of the previous two books, he keeps the style simple, managing to capture the intrigue of the original and in places its chills (it isn't possible for the prose to quite match some of the scarier visual moments, but it comes close). His being part of the production team no doubt affords him more leeway than others to invent material. There are fascinating and emotional glimpses into the lives of landlady of the pub Lowri and the regulars, there's an additional sad moment during the sequence where Carla turns against Ruby, there's some asides about how the world has developed politically and ecologically in the years between 2024 and 2086. Handcock confirmed in a Doctor Who Magazine interview when the books were announced that the script for this story had very little cut, so any new stuff is likely invention. This also includes some fan service. There are cameo appearances by a couple of characters from the programme's long and rich history. They're fun, but also fit well within the world of the story that's been established. The ending in prose form is inevitably a bit more spelled out than on TV, but is just as affecting. Given that it was my favourite TV story of the year, it was likely that the book would be my favourite of this batch, and it has indeed turned out that way. The final book, though, the prose retelling of Rogue, gave it a run for its money.
Handcock's book was 20 pages longer than the first two, understandably as the story on TV ran long (it had to eschew its title sequence to fit into its broadcast slot). Rogue is another 40 pages longer again. As the only TV writers adapting their own scripts this time, Kate Herron and Briony Redman had the most leeway to embellish and extend, and they took the opportunity. They also did things in a different style to the other three books. There's more - but not blanket - use of third-person omniscient narration in a Douglas Adams style, including asides and footnotes about various interesting features of the universe. Some of this material is witty, but I feel the tale and the characters are strong enough to tell and sell themselves without these adornments. Where the book is most powerful is in the strong, unfussy passages from the Doctor's or Rogue's POV describing their attraction to one another. A lot of the new material is a prologue and then some later flashbacks to Rogue's bounty hunting past. At this point he is working with partner Art (the authors retain the TV story's mystery of what exactly happened to Art). There's also a sequence that may have been planned then cut for cost or logistical reasons where the Doctor and Rogue hold their breath underwater in a pond in the stately home's grounds, to avoid detection by the Chuldur. This is an excuse for them to emerge with their regency finery clinging to their bodies, a la Colin Firth in the 1990s Pride and Prejudice TV adaptation. There are many chapters told from Emily Beckett's perspective including some of her backstory. Of course, Emily turns out to be a disguised Chuldur, so those chapters - even accepting that the Chuldur have access to all their victims' memories - seemed like a bit of a cheat. Overall, though, it's a good book. All four are worth collecting, but if you only buy one it's a toss-up between 73 Yards and Rogue. 73 Yards just edges it for me.
In Summary:
Colourful and gay (not that there's anything wrong with that - © Seinfeld).
