Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor Stories ...
New Series 1:
Honorable Menshes:
The Day of the Doctor (The tiniest hint of a regeneration into the Ninth Doctor)
In Summary:
The northern one.
Showing posts with label Christopher Eccleston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Eccleston. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 June 2026
Monday, 23 December 2024
Dalek
Chapter the 317th, a singular Dalek adventure.
Plot:
Answering a distress call, the Doctor and Rose arrive in an underground complex in Utah where tech billionaire Henry van Statten keeps his private collection of alien artefacts. He has one living exhibit, which he's never been able to get to speak, no matter how much his staff torture it. Finding out that the Doctor has alien knowledge, he lets the Time Lord enter the 'cage' in which the creature is kept in chains. The Doctor panics and asks to be let out when he sees that the creature is a Dalek. It's weaponry is non-functional, though; the Doctor attempts to kill it by electrocution, but Van Statten's security guards intervene. Rose has meanwhile been talking to Adam, an employee of Van Statten's from the UK. Adam hacks in to the cameras in the cage, and Rose sees the Dalek being tortured. She goes there and talks to the Dalek, and it plays on her sympathy. When she touches its dome, it suddenly comes back to life having absorbed her DNA, and breaks free from its chains. Adam and Rose run for it. The Dalek absorbs energy from the local grid, renewing its battered and aged armour. It then proceeds to kill every person it comes across. The Doctor closes bulkhead doors to trap the creature, but Rose is left on the wrong side when they close. The Dalek does not kill her; it is starting to change because of the influence of her DNA. The Doctor arms himself with a big space gun from Van Statten's collection and confronts the Dalek. The Dalek shoots a hole in the ceiling to let in the sun, and opens its casing to bask in the light. It then kills itself, not wanting to live as an 'impure' mutation. The Doctor and Rose leave, Rose having persuaded the Doctor to let Adam come with them.
Context:
I watched this one afternoon close to Christmas Day 2024, in a bit of a rush as I'd realised how close it was getting to the big day. I wanted to get a post written up and published before the 25th. I viewed it alone from a DVD copy, the individual disc release of episodes 4 - 6 of the new 2005 series that came out before that series had even completed on television. When I'd finished and took the disc out of the player, I noticed it was looking very scratched after all these years. Should I invest in the upscaled Blu-ray boxset of the new series stories originally broadcast in SD (the first four seasons plus specials)? Maybe in the new year I'll have a look for it in the January sales. Are there still January sales?
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. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, the ninth Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth in the 'Done' pile. It also marks the completion of another season of Doctor Who; I have in total completed 32 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, 13 and 14).
First Time Round:
In the UK, there was a public holiday for May Day on Monday May 2nd 2005; in the long weekend this created, I - along with the Better Half and friend Phil, mentioned many times before on the blog - travelled up from the south to Shropshire to visit long-term fan friend David (also mentioned many times before on this blog) and his Better Half. One of the things we did, as all of us were fans of the recently relaunched series, was sit down to watch a TV Dalek story (the first for 17 years). It had been very much hyped, but nonetheless exceeded expectations. It was enjoyed by everyone. Over that weekend, I remember we all went to a Birmingham cinema to watch the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie that had just come out. This was not enjoyed much by anyone. The other thing I remember was my being extensively and frustratingly poor at the board game Ticket To Ride, and not getting any better no matter how many times I was resoundingly defeated playing it. This was enjoyed by everyone (except me).
Reaction:
This viewing of Dalek came shortly after my watching the season 25 Blu-ray boxset (which came out in late October 2024). The first story on that set, Remembrance of the Daleks, has a scene towards the end where the Doctor confronts a lone Dalek and persuades it to kill itself. I know that essentially Dalek does a plot with those same basic beats over the course of 45 minutes, but the scene and the 2005 story could not be more different. Remembrance is one of the very best Dalek stories from the classic era, but it still includes a scene of a lone Dalek wobbling and fretting, rather than being a scary evil force. Many Doctor Who stories featured moments like this, or worse scenes where the Daleks were mocked; and, Remembrance aside, the inclusion of Davros in all their latter classic era stories tended to relegate them to fulfilling a role as henchmen rather than top-billed villains. Plus, there were many sketches and adverts sending them up (the last time the Daleks had a mass audience on TV before 2005 they were flogging chocolate biscuits). Dalek exists to empathically change the perception of the Daleks in the minds of the audience, annihilating any sense that they're pathetic, and reinvesting them with menace and import. Though it wasn't the most festive story written by Robert Shearman that I watched in December 2024 (see the Deeper Thoughts section to see what was), it was still somewhat apt. The story's raison d'etre is to roast some old chestnuts: each aspect that might seem silly about the Daleks - the sink plunger, the bumpy hemispheres on the skirt section, their seeming inability to go up stairs, etc. - is used to dark or murderous effect in the story.
A key way to do this that costs less but is more effective than effects work (though there's no slouching in that department, with great moments like the 'bullet time' scenes where the Dalek's forcefield stops a spray of rounds aimed at it, or where it effortlessly elevates itself floating up multiple flights of stairs) is to deploy the story's not so secret weapon, the intense and brilliant acting powers of its leading man. Christopher Eccleston is so good in this story that he burns through the TV screen. The Dalek prop is expertly given voice by Nick Briggs, in his first of many times behind the ring modulator doing vocal duty for Skaro's finest. But, it is how Eccleston reacts to Briggs that sears this story into one's imagination. Eccleston incendiary work is supported by sympathetic but still showy direction from Joe Ahearne. It's obvious why Ahearne was invited back to direct so many times in this season; every moment is framed expertly, from all the magnificent close-ups to set pieces like the Dalek dispatching dozens of security guards by setting off the sprinklers and letting the water conduct his electrifying shots. As I've said before on the blog, nobody can capture moving images of Daleks as well as Joe Ahearne. The script is also giving Eccleston a boost; the sprinkler scene and its aftermath alone delivering some of the best dialogue of the year, from the Doctor noting of the Dalek that "It wants us to see" the devastation it is wreaking, to the Doctor's tirade urging the Dalek to end its own life "Why don't you just die?!" followed up after a beat with the Pepper-pot's devastating "You would make a good Dalek".
As well as delivering a big dollop of the time war backstory that had been hinted at in the first few episodes of the series, the story also focusses on the Doctor's duality, the aforementioned war having left him more like a Dalek that he'd like to admit. This gives Billie Piper's Rose some good material too, calling him out regarding the unthinking hatred that the metal meanie has brought out. The moment where the Doctor thinks she's been exterminated hammers home the bond that exists between these two characters. Given that it's already obvious that the two of them together are something special, it isn't necessary to introduce Adam to highlight this by failing in the companion role (as I detailed in the 2020 blog post for following story The Long Game). That's not an issue in this tale, though, so the only real criticism I have is that the budget doesn't quite match up with the material; if the story had been the following year, it would have a full orchestra performing the wonderful score, rather than just Murray Gold's synths and samples, for instance. Mind you, if it had been the following year, it wouldn't have starred Eccleston, and I don't think Tennant - or indeed anyone - can do the Doctor's anger quite as well as Eccleston. The Dalek having bonded with Rose when it took a sample of her DNA to revivify itself, and hating the changes this brings on in it, its end is a quiet one rather than being in the heat of battle. There are excellent practical effects showing the mutant feeling the sunlight shine upon it before it dies. Exciting and clever, emotional and thoughtful, but with lots of action: watching Dalek in December made for a nice little early Christmas gift.
Connectivity:
Both Dalek and The Legend of Ruby Sunday see the Doctor accompanied by a single female companion visiting a base that has equipment beyond the capabilities of technology in the rest of the world at that time. In both stories, the Doctor is fearful at being confronted by a lone - and massively destructive - survivor of a race he'd previously encountered and thought was wiped out.
Deeper Thoughts:
The Shear brilliance of the man: a quite timely but really not timely at all review of The Chimes of Midnight. Robert Shearman, the writer of Dalek, comes to many of the BFI Doctor Who screenings that I attend. He always hangs around after the screening in the bar and talks to other fans (he is a fan himself, as he's made clear in many interviews and writings). He was in the BFI Riverfront bar after the first of the two BFI events for The Happiness Patrol this year; there, my friend Scott embarrassed me slightly by informing Shearman that I wanted to tell him about how much I enjoyed something he'd written. The reason Scott particularly wanted me to be brave enough to tell him, and therefore forced my hand, was because the thing I enjoyed that he'd written had nothing to do with Doctor Who. It was a radio play called Forever Mine that Shearman wrote for broadcast in 2004 (on the BBC's radio 4), which starred Richard Briers and Pauline Collins. I only listened to it once, but its themes, plus some moments in the narrative and the mental images they provoked, have stayed with me since. A darkly comic play constructed around the difficulties that remarriage would present to widower and ex if the afterlife turned out to be real, it is haunting in its dramatisation of love and relationships, memory and identity. People at BFI events praising Shearman's Doctor Who work are probably ten a penny; I hope it was at least refreshingly different for him to meet someone extoling the virtues of an example of his other work. He certainly seemed a little surprised (maybe even bemused?) that it was Forever Mine in particular that had taken my fancy.
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| Shearman and friend |
I couldn't, though, tell Shearman how good was his body of Doctor Who work, because - Dalek aside - I had never experienced any of it. Shearman came to prominence in Doctor Who circles because of his work for audio adventures company Big Finish. Long term readers of the blog will know that I've sampled only something like 0.001% of Big Finish's output, none of that smidge including any of Shearman's stories. Until very recently, that is. Wanting to listen to an example of his Big Finish work, I had seven audio plays to pick from, which he penned for the company between the years 2000 and 2007. All of them were well regarded at the time and to this day. One of the seven was Jubilee, the story that he adapted to create Dalek. To pick that one would, of course, have been most thematically aligned to this blog post, but instead I went for a story that was apt in a different way. The Chimes of Midnight, though it was first released in February (of 2002), is a Christmas ghost story. It may be Shearman's most popular work for Doctor Who audio. People are still talking about it: the 2024 Christmas edition of Doctor Who Magazine, issue 611, included an article on Big Finish's Christmas stories that didn't include Chimes because "people bang on about that one all the time". Perhaps the journalist imagined every Doctor Who fan had listened to it by now, but I had not. To rectify that I bought and downloaded Chimes, listening to it - rationed to one episode a day - in a week of late December 2024. The story sees Paul McGann's Doctor with his first audio companion Charley Pollard arrive at a house where some Sapphire and Steel style time anomalies are occurring.
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| The Original CD cover |
The story deserves its reputation, it's got the whole package: intrigue, chilling scenes, and the same haunting quality that Forever Mine had: some of the moments where people within a somewhat artificial reality are altered as their memories are manipulated are very similar to the radio play, and similarly effective. It's also very Christmassy. The feel of the piece samples greatly from 1970s series Upstairs Downstairs, or half of it at least: the Doctor and Charlie can't ever get to the Upstairs and spend their time dealing only with the servants of the house, all of whom are beautifully written and performed (and a couple of which are in-jokingly named after the 1970s series' cast or crew). There's a repeated refrain that is used for both funny and increasingly eerie effect, "Christmas wouldn't be Christmas" without the cook Mrs. Baddeley's plum pudding, as many characters aver. Reportedly, Shearman indulged himself a little by making each cliffhanger moment a callback to previous 'rock star' classic series cliffs, part one ending like the first episode of The Space Museum, then the subsequent episode endings harking back to Kinda episode three and Horror of Fang Rock three. If that makes it sound like it would be clunky or artificial, I can tell you that the writing is sophisticated enough to perfectly assimilate any such material, no matter how geeky. Everything pays off, and a contained story with few characters and locations turns out to be even more bounded than it first appeared. It's good that the 0.001% of Big Finish audios I'd experienced before included the first 'season' of Eight and Charley audios (this story is from the second) as a little knowledge of her backstory is useful for the ending to have the weight that it should.
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| An online listening party for the story took place in 2020 |
Even though Shearman never wrote a story for Doctor Who on TV again, The Chimes of Midnight shows that his Who work for other media is just as imaginative and excellent. I may be wasting my effort with this quick capsule review, however: the chances are if you're reading this that you - unlike me - listened to the audio in question ages ago. If not, though, then I hope this seasonally apt but 20+ years late write-up has persuaded you to give it a listen. Merry Christmas!
In Summary:
Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without an obligatory "Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!". (And, presumably, you don't need me to tell you that Dalek is great.)
Friday, 28 April 2023
Boom Town
Chapter the 263rd, is set in a city not a town. (Did people online in 2005 call this a plot hole, and ask for RTD to be sacked because of it? Probably, the silly billies.)
Plot:The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack travel to present day Cardiff to charge up the TARDIS using energy from the time/space rift that runs through the city. Anticipating being there for a couple of days, Rose contacts Mickey who comes from London bringing Rose her passport in case she needs it on her travels with the Doctor. While hanging out, the four of them discover the new mayor is Margaret Blaine, a disguised Slitheen family member who survived the destruction of 10 Downing Street. Her proposed plan to build a nuclear power station near the city centre is really a scheme to blow up the planet and power her extrapolator device (space surf board) to escape the planet. The Doctor takes her into his custody, planning to return her to her home planet (where, she says, she will be executed). Jack connects the extrapolator to the TARDIS to speed up the refueling. With the evening to wait, the Doctor takes Margaret out for dinner at a local restaurant, where she tries to persuade him to let her go. Rose and Mickey go out on a date, the passport request having just been Rose's ruse to get Mickey to come to see her. It ends up in an argument as he is tired of her leaving him behind. There's an earthquake; the Doctor and Margaret rush back to the TARDIS, as does Rose, abandoning a glum-looking Mickey. Margaret had booby-trapped the extrapolator - it has connected to another power source (the rift energy pumped into the TARDIS), and she is about to surf to freedom on a wave of destruction. This interference causes the TARDIS console to open and the telepathic vortex force released links to Margaret's mind and gives her what she wants, a second chance at life, by regressing her to an egg.
Context:Watched from the DVD (single disc version alongside the following two episodes rather than from the giant TARDIS box-set of the whole season). I was accompanied only by the eldest (boy of 16); the Better Half and the other two children having better things to do seemingly. The eldest couldn't remember ever having seen the episode before, but he definitely has at least once. At the end, we both agreed that it had made us want to carry on and watch Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways (but we didn't, as we then had better things to do seemingly).
First Time Round:The first series of the relaunched Doctor Who was broadcast in the UK after the Better Half and I got married (which was on a day in late August 2004 when production had just got underway and the earlier Slitheen episodes were being filmed in Cardiff). Our first year of wedded bliss, we lived in Gillingham, Kent where the BH was teaching, but our parents and a lot of friends were all still in the Brighton area where both of us had grown up. Late in 2005, we'd move back there, the better to have support when starting a family. Before that, without any dependents to worry about, there was a lot of travel around to visit people for weekends during 2005, and - me being me - usually watching Doctor Who on the Saturday with whomever we were visiting. During the course of Christopher Eccleston's season, we visited Worthing (twice), New York, Telford, and Brighton. This final visit was to stay with old friend Phil, mentioned often previously on the blog, for the weekend of Boom Town's debut on BBC1 (on 4th June 2005). Throughout the Saturday I remember feeling more and more poorly with a cold. Boom Town perked me up a bit, but then the three of us went out for dinner and I remember almost falling asleep in my first course.
Reaction:A criticism of some of the early Doctor Who relaunch stories in Russell T Davies' first year as showrunner was that they had Deus ex Machina endings. What does that mean? Well, literally it means 'god from the machine', and links to a practice in ancient Greek theatre to introduce an actor playing a god into a play at the end using some kind of mechanical device (winching them up on a rope suspended above the stage, say), to decide the fate of all the other characters. It has come to mean an ending that comes from nowhere, not resolved by the characters themselves, cutting through the knotty complications of the plot in a way that makes things perhaps simpler for the author. I don't think there are any endings truly like that in the 2005 run, but Boom Town comes closest. It's hard to see it as anything but intended (probably playfully): I mean, there is a machine, and a glowing force with god-like powers comes out of it and decides what happens to Margaret. It looks at first glance that Davies has side-stepped the Doctor's moral quandary about whether he's responsible for Margaret's capital punishment if he delivers her unto it. A magical get-out has seemingly made things easy on him. But watch closely at how Eccleston plays it: it's clear that the Doctor is a few steps ahead of everyone else, and he is actively choosing to let things play out, allowing Margaret to get her wish. In the end, he's decided to let fate, in the form of the TARDIS, decide. It can see into her soul, after all, and knows even better than he whether Margaret could be rehabilitated.
Eccleston is great at commanding a scene by doing very little, and the writing, perhaps responding to the way he's played earlier stories before, works with him. Future Doctors would be more active, and the endings would get more obviously un-Machina, but there is something interesting and strong about this Doctor who tends to influence people and events around him indirectly. We know that Davies wrote this knowing something of how Eccleston would play it, as he's on record saying that the story exists only because, when they were filming the earlier Slitheen story, Eccleston and guest actor Annette Badland as Margaret worked well together, but didn't have much shared screen time. Boom Town exists to give them the multiple two-hander scenes when the Doctor takes Margaret out for a 'last meal'. The surrounding material (implausible plans for nuclear power stations, local government cover-ups, brief pyrotechnics as Cardiff gets shaken up by the extrapolator and the rift) is just window dressing surrounding those scenes. And they are great, the two actors riffing off each other comedically and dramatically. Margaret's rejoinder "Only a killer would know that" is one of the great lines of this period, and another small hint about the background character arc of the Doctor's survivor's guilt over his destruction of his own planet and people. As well as that, there's the biggest reference to the "Bad Wolf" series arc tease, and the wonderfully grounded scenes of Mickey and Rose arguing about his hooking up with Tricia Delaney from the estate, a counterpoint to the unearthly goings-on.
Seeing this story in isolation probably does it less favours than the last story blogged The Lie of the Land. While that story worked better in many ways as a stand-alone, Boom Town might be a bit anti-climactic without progressing directly on to the big finale of Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways. Davies was here creating on the fly a format he'd reuse in future years, a more quiet and intimate prelude just before the big events kick off. Boom Town risks being a bit too quiet and intimate, with only one significant guest speaking role and lots of talky scenes. Director Joe Ahearne, supported by the crew, makes up for this by getting great performances out of everyone, and shooting things in an interesting way. The Slitheen costume (used sparingly in Davies's script, again learning the lessons from earlier in the season) looks positively scary in its appearances in Boom Town. The vistas of Cardiff are attractive, and nicely accompanied by a lovely score by Murray Gold with lots of mournful motifs played on the oboe, or probably on an oboe sample anyway. Boom Town is one of a very special set of episodes, the first season of Doctor Who's magnificent relaunch. With this blog post, I only have the one left to write about; Eccleston stories are precious and scarce. While this might not be the biggest or most showy of them, it's never less than watchable, and has some moments of greatness. It's also good to see the new series, only 11 episodes in, confident in revisiting its own recently-created mythology and doing something different with an established character.
Connectivity:Boom Town, like the Lie of the Land, is a story that follows on from two earlier episodes in its season, with action taking place six months after the events of those previous episodes. Both involve aliens in a position of power over humans, using a false narrative about being a benefactor while they plan for their own nefarious ends.
Deeper Thoughts:Fame! He's going to live (well, regenerate) forever! Around the beginning of April 2023, there was a spirited social media discussion about the relative fame of the different actors cast in the role of Doctor Who over the years. Someone (or maybe more than one person, I didn't necessarily catch the very beginning of it) stated that as he is a globally known star (I believe the term 'megastar' may even have been used), Ncuti Gatwa must be the one with the highest level of fame on first getting the job. This was around the time that the full trailer of Hollywood film Barbie, in which Gatwa appears, had been released. A lot of people disputed this professed opinion, with various levels of annoyance or rage; indeed, I suspect that tweets like this are designed to provoke such responses. There's no foolproof way of gauging relative fame, of course, particularly not across the changing TV and film landscape of the six decades the programme has existed. Nonetheless, I think it can be said with authority that the professed opinion is wrong. Gatwa is well known to those that like the only significant thing he's been in that's actually out and viewable, Netflix series Sex Education. It's hard to know the show's exact global reach as Netflix isn't fully transparent with its success metrics, but it's definitely done well with a certain demographic and not just in Gatwa's home country. Beyond that demographic, though, people did not know his name or his face, and if they do know either now it's likely because he's been cast as Doctor Who, not because of Sex Education. This isn't a bad thing: he's still very much the relative newcomer, and is young and talented - his future's bright.
I don't mean to express judgement saying Gatwa is not a globally recognised name, as I don't think anyone who's ever taken on the role of the Doctor has been a globally recognised name. John Hurt and Hugh Grant are the only possible contenders to my mind, and they both were cast as one-off rather than ongoing versions (and the latter in a skit for Comic Relief rather than the show proper). It's not that sort of part, I don't think - you don't want a megastar, you want a good actor who most people will see and think "Oooh, it's him / her". Having said that, a couple of the classic series Doctors were star names on taking the role, but in the UK rather than across the world: Peter Davison, definitely, and Jon Pertwee. Maybe William Hartnell falls into that category too. He'd had a long and prestigious career in UK films and TV before being cast as the first ever Doctor Who, but usually in supporting character roles, a little way (but not too far) down the billing. It probably depended on the household, but it was more likely than not that he was a household name to those watching in 1963. It's well before my time, but it strikes me that Patrick Troughton was well respected in the business, and audiences would have recognised him, but not necessarily known his name. Colin Baker had some renown based on a showy turn in a series called The Brothers, and Sylvester McCoy would have been known by younger audiences as he'd done a lot of children's TV, but probably wouldn't have been known to adults unless they had been fans of the Ken Campbell Roadshow.
It's only after the series paused in 1989, when Doctor Who ceased to be made as a multi-camera studio affair, that anyone would be cast in the lead role who had more global presence. Paul McGann when cast was regularly getting lead roles in UK TV programmes and had done a couple of Hollywood films. Matt Smith was young and had been in a few UK TV series, but wouldn't be getting Hollywood work until after he'd played the Doctor. Capaldi was similar to Hartnell but a bit more international, having done lots of good work over a long period of time in both films and TV. Jodie Whittaker was successful in UK film and TV (and theatre too, of course - I don't mean to diminish anyone's theatrical profile, including Gatwa's, but it doesn't really factor any longer into global fame, for whatever that's worth). Having considered all this, I think the most globally famous actor at the point of taking on the Doctor role is probably the star of Boom Town, Christopher Eccleston. When he started shooting the relaunched Who, he'd just finished a decade of high profile work, with leading roles in UK TV and parts in internationally seen films (starting with Shallow Grave, but including many, many titles like The Others, 28 Days Later, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Existenz, Elizabeth). The parts were of different sizes, but he was always recognisable, often burning through the screen with intensity. There's your answer.
If not the most globally famous, Ncuti Gatwa probably is the most up-and-coming. He's been cast in a hit series and a small role in a big Hollywood movie before Doctor Who, and everything looks nicely lined up for him to make a big impression playing the universe's favourite Time Lord. He's also young and exciting, and clearly has the potential to move on to greater things (hopefully not too soon). The previous Doctor actors he's most like in terms of profile are probably David Tennant and Tom Baker. Tennant took on the role when he was doing good work and had just had his first big TV role in Casanova, plus a small but important appearance in a major movie with international reach (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). Sounds familiar. Baker was older than both the other two, but hadn't broken through, even though he had appeared in a few movies and TV shows. He needed something that was a good fit for his mercurial genius, and Doctor Who came along and proved to be just that. There's no foolproof way of gauging these things, but a lot of people would agree that Tom Baker and David Tennant are the most popular Doctors there have ever been. That may be a big thing for Ncuti Gatwa to live up to, but I think he's more than capable of meeting the challenge. I can't wait to see it. In Summary:Boom shake shake shake the Cardiff Bay area.
Wednesday, 23 November 2022
Father's Day
Chapter the 248th, where the past is another country, but 2005's just the Isle of Wight.
Plot:
In 1987, Rose's Dad Pete Tyler was hit by a car on the day of a family friend's wedding. He died alone, and the grown-up Rose wants to be there with him. The Doctor, somewhat reluctantly, takes her to the Powell Estate on 7th November of that year (two days before the broadcast of Delta and the Bannermen episode two in another reality). She bottles it, running away after Pete gets knocked down, and asks the Doctor for another try. They go back again, hiding round the corner from themselves, the plan being for Rose to wait until her earlier self runs away and then slide in and comfort her Dad in his last moments. Instead, she rushes out past the earlier Doctor and Rose, and shoves her Dad out of the path of the oncoming car, doubly transgressing the laws of time. This makes the Doctor very annoyed indeed, and also makes time and space a bit screwy. Anachronistic songs play on the radio, all the phones have Alexander Graham Bell's first ever phone call playing on a loop, and winged creatures (Reapers) are flying around devouring everyone in sight.
The whole area of space/time has been isolated - a wound in time, which the Reapers are sterilising. The Doctor finds Rose at the wedding with her Dad and a young Jackie Tyler. He gets everyone - including a young Mickey and Rose as a baby - into the church, and shuts the doors. He sets something up to link out of their time bubble to the TARDIS and help everyone to safety, but Rose accidentally comes into contact with her younger self. This creates a paradox, which lets in a Reaper that swallows the Doctor and breaks any link with the TARDIS and the outside universe. Pete pieces together that Rose is his daughter grown up, and that he's supposed to be dead. He looks out of a church window to see that the car that was meant to hit him is still circling as if in a time loop, and knows what he has to do. Saying an emotional goodbye to his grown-up daughter, he runs out of the church and into the path of the car. As he's knocked down, the reapers disappear and everything is brought back including the Doctor. Rose gets to be with her Dad in his final moments, and time is put back (almost) as it was.
Context:
Watched from BBC iplayer (still haven't fixed the Blu-ray remote) accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). The boys have re-found their enthusiasm for Doctor Who of late, and have even watched episodes - or at least youtube videos about episodes - on their own. The youngest was not quite so keen, mainly because of the particular Doctor; "I like him, but I kind-of don't like him" was how she put it. All of them watched and enjoyed the episode from start to finish.
First Time Round:
I watched this on its first BBC1 broadcast in May 2005 at my sister's old flat in Worthing, with my sis, her partner (now husband) James, and the Better Half. The BH and I had been married less than a year and didn't have kids yet, so we were able to travel around, meet up and stay with people, fancy free, and not just be exhausted piles of detritus trying to gather themselves together every weekend as we are now. During that exciting and impressive first year of renewed and returned Doctor Who in 2005, we were away (and usually watching the episode with the group of people we visited, as everybody seemed to be watching Doctor Who that year) half a dozen times. After Father's Day had finished, I remember the other three all leaving the room promptly, and me shouting to them that the trailer for the next episode with its WW2 planes and barrage balloons looked amazing.
Reaction:
The gap between the historical setting of Father's Day (November 1987) and its broadcast in May 2005 is 17 years and a few months. The gap between my writing this in November 2022 and that original broadcast is 17 years and a few months - there's only a few weeks in it. The first series of 21st century Doctor Who is now a historical artefact as old as the brick-sized mobile phones, shoulder pads and big hair that were gently mocked in writer Paul Cornell's script. It's customary when viewing old Doctor Who stories, particularly when looking at the classic series period, to either comment on or - depending on the particular fan's sensibility - to reframe and ignore the parts where those stories are outmoded in terms of production sophistication or pacing. When the series came back a lot of commentators thought the stories were too breakneck, with no time for reflection, but Father's Day is evidence to refute that. It's remarkable watching it back how deliberately slow the scenes in the story are, one after another: the Doctor talking to the bride and groom about how they met, Rose talking to her Dad who's realised who she is, the Doctor asking Rose for an apology. There's very little in the way of action scenes, just a couple of moments where Reapers attack someone. At first, their activity is presented as tinted POV shots as they stalk their prey, very old school but nonetheless effective. The climax of the story is just the simple act of a man standing in the path of an oncoming car. The story is half horror-inflected build up and half small, emotional beats including lots of talk. This is not a bad thing.
In terms of production sophistication, the CGI of the Reapers still looks good to my eyes, maybe not quite as seamless as more modern work, but perfectly fine. Murray Gold's incidental music is played on synths rather than by an orchestra as it would be in later years, so it's not as expansive a sound accompanying Father's Day; the score is nonetheless evocative and emotional. Costuming, hair and make-up are relatively restrained; as someone who went to family weddings as a kid in the 1980s, it looks like how the decade actually was rather than too much of a comic exaggeration. The script is good with some nice lines of dialogue for all the characters. There's a central problem that it has to address, though. Why is it not okay for the Doctor and Rose to interfere with events and save someone in 1987 when they do this all the time in other stories, in the past and in the future? The solution to this is for the Doctor and Rose to visit the same time-space event twice, which is interesting as it's not something the series had ever done before in the classic era. The two sets of time travellers being in the same place weakens time and gives a reasonable enough reason why Reaper creatures didn't appear when the Doctor and Rose made changes to history in The Unquiet Dead earlier in the season, and wouldn't in the very next story in wartime London. What's wonderful about this solution to the plotting problem is it acts very effectively to ramp up the tension leading up to Rose's inevitable act in saving her Dad. There's a real feeling of dread building up to that moment.
For such a story with an emotional arc, the performances are most important. Casting Shaun Dingwall as Pete Tyler was a great choice. He embodies the optimistic 80s wide boy perfectly, and slots right in to the established Tyler family dynamic. The scene of the grown-up Rose aghast at her bickering parents, because of the romanticised version of their relationship that the widowed Jackie chose to remember and impart, is particularly good. It is, incidentally, exactly how my parents interacted, both before and after their divorce, so for me there was both a shock of recognition and the warmth of a universality of experience. The scenes of Piper and Dingwall as he gradually pieces together what's happened are all perfectly played by the two actors; particularly fine is Pete's moment of self-awareness after hearing Rose telling him how devoted and reliable a father he was, lying to prevent him realising the turth of his non-existence in the future, where he replies with a simple: "That's not me". Eight episodes in, there can be a bit more conflict within the TARDIS team's ranks than before too: Eccleston is great in glowering form, angry at Rose for using time travel for personal benefit, but the script has her give as good as she gets. Props to director Joe Ahearne for getting these powerhouse performances out of the cast (every small guest character is beautifully portrayed, my favourite being the East End Dad talking the groom out of getting married in haste) and for framing them so well - lots of lovely close-ups of emotional faces.
Everything works - the novelty of a personal time travel story based in a relatively close period, the fun of the chaotic time slips (hearing The Streets 'Don't Mug Yourself' coming out of Pete's car stereo is a nice moment), the Doctor finding the TARDIS has been reduced to the shell of a police box, the sheer chutzpah of creating an entirely false subplot of the Doctor's escape plan that comes to nothing, because ultimately Pete can't cheat time and death. It's one of the best stories in one of the best seasons of Doctor Who.
Connectivity:
Both Father's Day and The Vampires of Venice feature the death of a parent, and a group of people trapped in an old building. In both, the monster is not named on screen (in the Vampire story, the creatures' planet is named but not their species, and the word 'Reapers' does not appear in Father's Day dialogue).
Deeper Thoughts:
For my Dad (TW: Indulgent Personal Story Incoming). The first time I watched Father's Day my father was alive, the second time, he had died. It was a very sad time, but slightly unusual circumstances made it a family story too. I've never told the story in writing, but thought I would finally write a little about it here, as Doctor Who features in a small but significant way. The barnstorming 2005 season starring Christopher Eccleston came to an end on the 18th June 2005. A couple of weeks before that I'd had Sunday lunch with Dad for his birthday, and he'd told me he was watching and enjoying the series. He wasn't particularly a Doctor Who fan in the 20th century, but - as I said above - it did feel like everyone was watching the show that year. Immediately after the series ended, Saturday nights went back to being dull again (the following week the BBC went almost as far back into their archives as the Doctor and Rose had gone back in time, and put on an Only Fools and Horses special from 1989 in the Doctor Who slot); world events, though, were still interesting. The next weekend saw Live 8 concerts around the globe, and a few days after that London - the city in which I was based for the day job at the time - was awarded the Summer Olympics for 2012. I was watching the announcement with many other colleagues on a big TV in the staff canteen at the top of an office building in Royal Mint Court, and a few minutes later, we saw out of the windows the Red Arrows fly by trailing red and blue smoke. The following day, I was at work early, but before long was seeing messages from people who couldn't get in because of what were then thought to be either electrical problems or fires on the underground system. In fact, it was the terrorist activity of '7/7' where various bombings took place in London. There was a very London flavour of stoic resolve displayed by people that I talked to on that particular Thursday. They would not be cowed, they averred. They would not let the terrorists win by letting this action in anyway change how they would go about their lives... but, if all this meant they could have Friday off, they weren't going to argue.
The idea was that the hospital in Brussels would contact me for any change, but I'd remain at home until they did. On the Monday, I went into the day job to show willing (I'd been out for a week's unplanned leave suddenly, which put pressure on my colleagues, and I was going to need more leave as soon as things changed). I'd not been there many hours, though, when I took a call from the hospital calling me back over there. I couldn't find the shared language to ever find out from the hospital exactly what happened, but things had taken a turn for the worse. I flew over the following day with my sister. I don't know if my father had ever been aware of my presence in his room the previous week, nor of any of the words I said to him. The room had undergone a change since I was last in it: all the many different machines whose rhythms of bleeps and lights had accompanied those words were gone. My father was only connected now to one machine, and this was switched off once his two children were there to witness. His date of death was Tuesday 19th July. If he could understand anything said to him in the previous week, he knew before he died that my sister was pregnant (she's only just found out herself), but he never got to meet my niece, and he never knew about any of my children, the first of whom wasn't conceived until a couple of months after he died. He was never to be called Grandad. All these thoughts and more come to one later. It's a commonly expressed thought, but true, that immediately after the death the work that the grieving have to do pushes those other thoughts temporarily away. We had to now arrange a cremation and a return flight home with the ashes, all in a foreign language (which involved ringing a dozen places from the local directory and asking in haltingly bad French "Qu'es qu'il ... un person ... parlez anglais ... d'ici?"; only to get the response "Non" from each and have the line to go dead).
In Summary:
Doctor Who's The Daddy?
Wednesday, 15 December 2021
The End of the World
| Chapter The 213th, in which we witness the end of the world. So it's not just a clever name. |
Plot:
The Doctor takes Rose on her first TARDIS journey through time to an Earth-orbiting observation station, Platform One, 5 billion years into the future. An elite event for mega-rich space tourists is being held there, to witness the end of the world as the sun expands and destroys the abandoned planet. Many aliens arrive including The Face of Boe, the Moxx of Balhoon, a tree person called Jabe, and the 'last human' Cassandra, who has had so much cosmetic surgery that she's just a flap of skin on a frame, plus a brain in a jar. There is a ceremonial exchange of gifts between the attendees, but some of the gifts exchanged are little four-legged bots that come to life unseen and get into Platform One's circuits, sabotaging them. As Earth death approaches, the shields that protect the platform from the destruction of the sun's expansion fail. This is all the work of Cassandra, who teleports away from the platform leaving everyone else to die so she can reap monetary rewards (she has shares in their competitors companies). Rose is trapped in a room, nearly killed by unfiltered sunlight coming in, but the Doctor saves her. Then, he and Jabe go to the manual shield controls in the engine room, which the Doctor activates just in time, but the heat is too much for Jabe who catches fire and dies. The Doctor reverses Cassandra's teleport, and returns her to Platform One. With the heat, and without her aides to moisturise her, her skin starts to dry out. The Doctor won't step in to help, and watches her die. The Doctor returns Rose to Earth when it's still in one piece, and they have chips.
Context:
The family are just not into Doctor Who at the moment. Two out of the five of us (Better Half and boy aged 15) have not watched any of Flux yet, though the eldest child does plan to at some point. The younger children (boy of 12, girl of 9) watched and enjoyed Flux as it went out, but it hasn't caused any increase in enthusiasm for watching old stories, even those of a 2005 onwards vintage, with their old man. They are still enjoying their weekly episode of The Box of Delights (it's a Christmas tradition to watch this 1984 BBC serial in the run up to Christmas every few years), so it does seem just to be that they're Doctor Who-ed out, rather than against old television in general. Maybe a new Jodie Whittaker festive special with Daleks on January 1st will rekindle things. Anyway, this meant it was me on my own watching the DVD on an evening in December 2021.
First Time Round:
On Saturday 2nd April 2005, the day of The End of the World's debut BBC1 broadcast in the UK, the Better Half and I were visiting friends in New York and New Jersey; we stayed for a week and didn't get back to Blighty until the following Friday. Of course, this was only the second episode of the relaunched Doctor Who, and in those days it had not gathered enough momentum outside of the UK to be shown on BBC America simultaneous to, nor quite frankly even shortly after, being shown at home; the US premiere on the Sci-fi channel was not until the spring of 2006 when in the UK Christopher Eccleston had bowed out and David Tennant taken over as the titular Time Lord. This was before the days of the iplayer too, so I had to rely on the VCR timer that I'd programmed before we flew out to record this exciting new instalment (the first second episode of a new Doctor Who series since 1989). Before we went out for dinner with our friends that Saturday I went online (on my friends' home PC as this was a time before smartphones too) to various fora to check what the initial reaction was, trying not to get too spoilered; but that was the extent of what I could do to satisfy my curiosity until the following weekend. Fairly jetlagged, we came back to our home in Kent (where we lived together for a brief period while the Better Half was teaching in a school in the Medway), and I watched the recording. It was such poor quality (a fuzzy picture due to atmospheric interference) that I couldn't tell that the Doctor shed a single tear when talking to Jabe. Even through the fuzz, the story shone out, and I only had to wait a day for the next instalment.
Reaction:
There had been advance pictures of the Moxx of Balhoon from this story seen before the series started; he even made the cover of Doctor Who Magazine in the month the series returned, as I remember. I saw the significance immediately; as the opening story Rose had used an old monster, the Autons, and the only previous attempt to relaunch the show (the Paul McGann TV Movie in 1996) featured the Master, this was the first new Doctor Who monster / creature for 16 years (since the slightly underwhelming Cheetah people in final 1980s story Survival). When one's watching the episode, though, the Moxx turns out to be just one of dozens of new aliens. There's a catwalk scene, where each one is introduced and makes an entrance: tree people, a big head in a jar, a lady made of skin stretched across a frame, bird people, creatures made of wicker, creatures made of gas masks. This sequence is making a statement, I feel; like the Doctor taking the TARDIS further and further into the future in the first scene to impress Rose, the writer Russell T Davies has clearly decided that being tentative is not required. The previous episode had shop-window dummy creatures, i.e. beings that could just be people dressed up, to allow the audience identification figure Rose to be plausibly skeptical. Now, it's time to bombard her, and the viewer, with how weird this programme can get - it's not going to be gradual, it's going to be very much 'in your face'. The programme is proud of its weirdness, and confident to express this. It's a bold move, and clearly worked as people kept tuning in.
This isn't the only bold moment in the story. There are a couple of uses of diegetic pop music, big signifiers that what we're looking at is something new. Doctor Who's always had weird aliens, but we've never seen the Doctor dad-dancing to Soft Cell before. Even better is the dramatic moment of Rose in peril being underscored by Britney Spears' Toxic, including a sweeping CGI shot of Platform One. It's thrilling. I was thrilled the first time I watched it, and this latest time too. Other new concepts introduced here that would endure are the psychic paper (minimising any wasted moments of the Doctor getting locked up or mistrusted by authority), and - biggest possible stamp of the new - the removal of the Time Lords from Doctor Who's overarching mythology. Of course, it's not just a tidying up exercise, it is used by Davies to drive the Doctor's character and actions, just as the cavalcade of aliens is used to highlight Rose's culture shock. Eccleston and Billy Piper are just so right for these characters and give it their all - every frame they appear in, together or apart, is a joy. The two-shot of their reactions to the increasingly outre aliens and their gifts - more and more shock writ on Rose's face as the Doctor's grin of glee gets wider and wider - is just one wonderful moment. I think you could freeze frame on any scene here and they'd look like heroes (I love, as another example, the late scene where Rose is looking out at the remains of the Earth floating in space, and Eccleston stands far behind across the vast room, framed leaning in the doorway). All the performances are great (Yasmin Bannerman is great as Jabe the tree, flirting with Eccleston, for example).
The story is visually sumptuous. As well as the costume and make-up of the many aliens, there is great effects work, and clever use of locations to create the five-star interiors of Platform One as well as the industrial maintenance tunnels and engine room - it really feels like the characters are interacting in a vast space. Murray Gold's music is just as effective as the pop songs used, with the waltz-time theremin theme for Platform One / Cassandra a favourite. Marshalling both performances and visuals is Euros Lyn, one of the directors consistently asked back during this era, doing his earliest work on the series: he makes every scene fizz with energy. Providing the basis for all of this, though, is a magnificent script. There's such effortless world-building in Cassandra's thrown away references to the "Arctic desert" or "The Los Angeles crevasse". There is also so much wit: "Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation and religion.", "How did you get in? This is a maximum hospitality zone.", Cassandra believing a Wurlitzer is "An i-pod", "Whatever I am, it must be invisible, do you mind?", "Quick word with Micheal Jackson", "What you going to do, moisturise me?", Cassandra's last words: "I'm... too... young!", and many more. Beyond the zingers, though, there are quieter moments of true emotion, like Rose and the Doctor challenging one another, or Rose talking to her Mum on the phone across millennia, or Rose's chat with the plumber Raffalo (a lovely scene that was just added as padding when the episode was running short). Then, there's the coda where the Doctor takes Rose back to the intact Earth of her time. Interestingly, Rose doesn't answer the pertinent question of whether she's happy with the dangers of her new life; she gets distracted by chips. It's a question to which the series will return.
The script is great conceptually too. Cassandra became an instant hit, so it's easy to miss how 'out there' such a character concept was: a flap of shin stretched out on a frame, with masked attendants moisturising her every few minutes? It's pretty bizarre. Zoë Wanamaker gives the character such life and verve, and has such fun with the bitchy dialogue. Just when you think it's all a bit of laugh, though, she says something about being the last pure human, and you realise queasily the fat streak of racism that cuts through her thin, thin self. Davies constantly undercuts at precisely the moment we might be getting too comfortable. The Doctor waxes lyrical about optimism, but also watches stony faced letting a character die in front of him. Eccleston plays the trick a lot, in this story and throughout his brief time as the Doctor, bit it's always enjoyable to watch his happy face (mask?) disappear to be replaced by a cold, hard, focussed look. When the story comes to an end, it's straight in to a trailer with Victorian costumes and theatres and a coach and pair. We've done mad, it seems to say, and now we're going to show you trad. 1860s baby, old school. With two episodes done, 2005 Doctor Who had by that moment won the whole of television. It's no surprise it's still going to this day.
Connectivity:
Both this story and Logopolis involve characters witnessing the destruction of celestial bodies in space. Both stories involve the villain attempting to engineer a hostage situation by sabotaging technical equipment. Cassandra's plan in The End of the World is more sensible than the Master's in Logopolis, but that's not much of a stretch.
Deeper Thoughts:
Early Christmas Gifts (of Peace in all Good Faith) - Part 1. In blog posts passim, I've tried to explain the mentality of the collector as objectively as I can from my position trapped fully within that madness. Here then is another cautionary tale that sometimes the gift of completionism just keeps giving. This year, I have had rekindled my obsession with collecting the Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories. I'd gone for decades with almost all of these, but it didn't matter to me that the collection was not complete, as there wasn't a novelisation published for every story, so the collection couldn't ever be complete anyway. This was rectified by BBC Books in March of this year, though; the last remaining TV titles (a couple of 80s Daleks stories by Eric Saward, the prose version of Douglas Adams Tom Baker story The Pirate Planet, and an updated version of the TV Movie novelisation) were finally published on the Target imprint alongside some novelisations of stories from post the 2005 relaunch too. I bought these, read them, and reviewed them (see Deeper Thoughts sections of The Pirate Planet and The Awakening for the details and my reviews of that batch), and that was that. Ah, completion! Except, no. That threw the spotlight on the last couple of books that I did not have. These were long out of print and therefore reasonably expensive to obtain, and could be argued to not be Target books as they were released when the publisher Virgin books were adopting a new cover style under their own name. But they did have the Target logo on the inside cover, and they were versions of two TV stories broadcast between 1963 and 1989, when all the other stories of those years were present in my collection.
This internal argument - were these titles part of my overall target (see what I did there) or not - continued at the back of my mind for a while. My resolve weakened after a few months, and I bought, read and reviewed both books (prose adaptations of the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, Evil and Power) by August - see Deeper Thoughts of The Sun Makers for more details. So. glorious completion ensued and I was finally satisfied? Again, no. Even as I wrote the review, I was minded of one last novelisation (this time of a radio serial The Paradise of Death starring Jon Pertwee from 1993), and wrote in the blog the following words: "I wonder how long I'll hold out before I crack and buy that too." Up to October 2021 as it turned out, by which time I had bought, read and reviewed that title (see Deeper Thoughts of The Sea Devils). All the novelisations were done now, but you can probably guess where I headed next. There were a few Target books that weren't Doctor Who broadcast story novelisations per se. There were novelisations of unproduced scripts, but I had all those; there were quiz and crossword books, but I had all those too; there was even a travel book (see the Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details) that I also already had in my collection. But. There were also three books in a short lived offshoot "The Companions of Doctor Who" that Target published in 1986 and 1987. I didn't have those. Now I do. It seemed neater and tidier to my completionist mindset to finish off my collection before 2021 was out, so I bought second-hand copies of each (they're not nearly as expensive as the Troughton Dalek stories or Paradise of Death, and - let's face it - are much less likely to ever get reprinted either).
The Target novelisations had been a minor publishing phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s, but as that second decade wore on, and less stories were being made for the TV per year, it became obvious that the revenue stream would eventually run dry. A full range of original novels was the obvious replacement, and it would come to pass in 1991 with the Virgin New Adventures, only when the TV show had been put into mothballs indefinitely. In the middle of the 1980s, though, as more of a supplement to the main range, this short run of original novels set in the world of Doctor Who, but not featuring the Doctor, was tried out. The first of these was Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma by Tony Attwood, published in May 1986. I remember flicking through the book in a shop with curiosity when it first came out. I read a part of the introduction by Turlough actor Mark Strickson where he said that any actor would rather play the Doctor than a companion - that stuck in my mind. Back then, though, I decided to save my pennies for Doctor Who books that featured Doctor Who, and did not buy it. Had I done so, I'd have found that it was the longest Target book published up to that point. It was also the first ever original Doctor Who novel (only short stories and novellas had previously been published). As such, it is a definite precursor to the Virgin novels to come. It's also very similar to some examples of that range in that it's convoluted, impenetrable, and - both tonally and in story structure terms - completely unlike Doctor Who.
It gives me no pleasure to say this, but Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma is not only the least enjoyable Doctor Who book I've read, it's a contender for the least enjoyable book I've read ever. The one thing of note that ever cut through about the book as part of the history of Doctor Who is that the main villain was called Rehctaht (i.e. Thatcher backwards, a reference to the UK Prime Minister in 1986, Margaret Thatcher). That might have indicated a playful nature regarding the story, but alas this would be a false impression. The book takes itself very seriously. It's a space opera where Turlough roams to various planets and time zones (he's invented his own time travel mechanism using knowledge cribbed during his time with the Doctor) to investigate a link between his home planet Trion and Earth, which he thinks is due to nefarious activity by a race called the Gardsormr. This is all described using some no doubt thoroughly researched science about gravity and time and nuclear force that just left me cold. Turlough's backstory is fleshed out: he is part of the elite intelligentsia on Trion who engage in study for practical purposes. This doesn't really fit with the Turlough seen on TV, but that's fair enough - this is a different medium. It does mean though that he has dialogue such as "Do me the honour of at least realising that I too have studied a little of ultimate unified theory", and that he realises a key character is not who they say they are because "When I said 'G equals M to the power minus one by L cubed by T to the power of four'" the interloper corrected him and said it was actually T to the power two. (I'm not shitting you, that's an actual plot point and section of dialogue verbatim.) There's also extensive use of slow scientific method painfully described in microscopic detail, when what this reader craved was for something to happen, anything to happen, with some rapidity.
There are no real monsters or villains featured. The Gardsormr turn out not to be monsters at all, but instead are a quirk of time travel, people from the future trying to repair damage done by others (which they do in a long-drawn out way involving breeding and burying creatures to fertilise soil, and this is all revealed agonisingly slowly). The main villain Rehctaht was the person who took over Trion and caused Turlough to be exiled to Earth in the TV series, so she logically has to be out of the way before the start of the story. In the book's one concession to adventure story tropes, Rehctaht returns from appearing to be dead, having been manipulating events secretly before that. This means though that the forces of antagonism are diffuse and seemingly uncoordinated through most of the narrative. Rehctaht is revealed only about 20 pages before the end, the climax of the story, and Turlough kills her without much difficulty. There's then a resolution where Turlough uses his time machine to avert the damage that Rechtaht has done (nuclear explosions on Earth and Trion) that goes on for pages and pages with Turlough creeping about a maze, and being experimented on. Of course, there are no absolutes in writing, so what I really mean is you'd have to be very clever to structure a narrative like that and have it be satisfying, but I'm going to use a shorthand for my position thus: you can't do that! You can't have the climax be easy and swift, then have the post climax resolution long and drawn out. You can't go from the reveal and defeat of the antagonist to long passages where the hero creeps around mysterious corridors. Mysterious corridors are best used earlier in a narrative. It's just another of the terrible pacing problems that the story has from beginning to end.
It doesn't quite end there. The Time Lord that has accompanied Turlough through his adventures, the Magician (yes, really), who I've not mentioned before as he adds nothing to proceedings up to this point apart from gnomic utterances that irritate Turlough (and this reader too), takes Turlough to another timeline where he can live happily ever after with his love interest, who got killed in his prime timeline. I don't think it makes sense by any of the usual rules of time travel stories, but anyway it's a terrible cheat: if one can do that, why bother with any consequences at all? Just hop over to another timeline whenever things get rough. There's other issues too: loose ends and odd asides that make it feel like the text needed more editing before publication, odd choices of POV where events that are happening to one character are recounted or reacted to by other characters who are less close to the action, or less interesting, or both. It almost seems like it's a deliberate act to keep the reader at a distance. When I compare this to The End of the World, another space-set story that might alienate an unwary audience, it just hammers home how good the choices were in the TV show's script to make things immediate and witty, and to make the jeopardy meaningful. I had to start in on the next book, Harry Sullivan's War by Ian Marter, immediately after the Turlough book just to check that they weren't all going to be as bad. Thankfully, based on its first couple of chapters, it's much better, though it does have its own flaws (more about them next time...).
In Summary:
Full of aliens, but not alienating; in fact, it's rather "Fantastic!".
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