All Grey And Misty (Cat’s Cradle: Warhead)
I’ll Explain Later
Andrew Cartmel’s Cat’s Cradle: Warhead is the second part of the loose Cat’s Cradle trilogy, and the first part of the tighter but non-consecutive trilogy by Andrew Cartmel, which continues in Warlock and Warchild. Cartmel’s contributions are straight-up near future thrillers, typically referred to as cyberpunk, but in practice somewhat more diffuse than that. This one is about an evil corporation and massive pollution that threatens to destroy the world, and introduces the two characters who link the three books together, Vincent and Justine. Vincent has psychic powers and can channel strong emotion into physical forces, whereas Justine is impulsive and pissed off. Gary Russell was at the time in awe of the story, but only as “a one-off journey through the ultimate dark-side of Doctor Who,” a viewpoint that stands in stark contrast to I, Who’s adoration of it as “brilliant, but only as the first part of a trilogy encompassing Warlock and Warchild.” (Pearson views it as “a drawn-out, snarled mess” that is difficult to follow.) Sullivan’s novel rankings have it as the best of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy at 42nd out of 61, with a 62.7% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s April of 1992. Shakespear’s Sister are still at the top of the charts, but are unseated after two weeks by Right Said Fred’s “Deeply Dippy,” because they’re not a one-hit wonder in the UK. They remain at number one for the rest of the month. Eric Clapton, Annie Lennox, Erasure, Def Leppard, Vanessa Williams, Iron Maiden, and ZZ Top also chart. Clearly we are firmly lost in the 90s now.
In real news, since Time’s Crucible we’ve had the Bosnian War get worse as Bosnia and Herzegovina declares independence from Yugoslavia, leading to lots of people shooting each other. Euro Disney, now called Disneyland Paris, opens in, shockingly enough, Paris. Manuel Noriega, former head of state of Panama, is found guilty of drug crimes in Florida. And the Los Angeles riots break out. But the big news for the UK is another general election, in which Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party puts a solid dent into the Tory majority, but is still defeated by John Major. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun claims credit for the victory, because he’s charming like that – an event that will lead to Tony Blair repeatedly selling what fragments of his soul actually still exist to win the paper’s endorsement in 1997. But more about that next year – for now, books, and specifically Andrew Cartmel’s Cat’s Cradle: Warhead.
If Time’s Crucible explores the idea of sidelining the Doctor from the action a la The Christmas Invasion or Turn Left, Warhead seems like the first real antecedent of stories like Love and Monsters or Blink, in which a Doctor Who story plays out with the camera primarily focused on someone other than the Doctor. There’s an accusation against the New Adventures in general, and often Cartmel in particular that they are prone to leaving the Doctor out of too much of the story. We’ll see how much water that claim holds when we get to the point where there’s a pre-existing thing you can talk about as the Virgin style that the novels are living up to, (we’re almost there – I’d put the transition at somewhere around Love and War or Transit) but in terms of this novel it’s rubbish. This novel doesn’t suffer from a lack of the Doctor – it revels in it.
It’s ironic, given that Platt’s novel set up large swaths of the so-called Cartmel Masterplan, that Cartmel should pen the middle novel of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy and have essentially nothing whatsoever take place that ties in with the larger trilogy. We discussed last time how the Cartmel Masterplan is a flagrant misnomer, but it’s not really until you see Cartmel’s novels for the line that supposedly built out his Masterplan that you get a sense of just how disconnected from that idea and approach he is. It’s not only not what he’s interested in, it’s an almost complete 180 from what he does. The so-called Masterplan as embodied by Platt in Time’s Crucible is a clanking epic about the dawn of time and ancient space empires. Warhead is about people living in a dystopic near-future. It’s as stark as the difference between The Daleks’ Masterplan and The Massacre.
But, of course, both of those stories shared an underlying similarity of approach. They were both stories that advanced John Wiles’s larger theme of suspicion about the Doctor’s heroism. Yes, one was a soaring twelve-part epic about Daleks and the other a small-scale historical piece about Steven in a time he doesn’t understand, but looking at them, they’re clearly coming out of the same basic vision of what the show is. And that applies here as well – Time’s Crucible may do all the things that Cartmel wouldn’t let Platt do on the series, and Warhead may turn its nose on the entire notion of a cosmic epic, but there’s an underlying similarity of approach. This isn’t a surprise, of course – Cartmel commissioned Platt, and was seemingly set to do so again in Season Twenty-Seven. Obviously they have some common interests and approaches.
But in a lot of ways these two books, with Timewyrm: Revelation before them, play out as a sort of reverse dialectic. After Cornell demonstrates how to do a truly, properly alchemical epic the New Adventures proceed to show us the two components in isolation: the sweeping ambition of Time’s Crucible and the human scale of Warhead. Reading them back to back is an odd experience, but this entire four-book stretch before Cornell comes back on the scene with Love and War is a bit odd. Cornell has already changed Doctor Who completely, but there’s a lag before the books quite catch up. Once we pass Love and War we get a string of novels by writers more associated with the New Adventures than the classic series: Gareth Roberts, Andy Lane, Jim Mortimore, David McIntee, and Peter Darvill-Evans all make their debut in the second set of ten books, with Kate Orman writing the twenty-first book. But thus far we’ve had books by John Peel, Terrance Dicks, Nigel Robinson, Marc Platt, and Andrew Cartmel, with Ben Aaronovitch appearing within the first ten novels as well.
That list is somewhat deceptive – Cartmel, Aaronovitch, and to a lesser extent Platt all end up being very NA-style writers, with another five-and-a-half books among them. But it underlines the way in which this period of the New Adventures features them running to catch up a bit. Still, if Time’s Crucible and Warhead are treated as the two component parts of the Cornell approach then it’s pretty clear which one of them is the more important. Because while Time’s Crucible felt on the whole a bit pointless, this book absolutely sings.
This shouldn’t be surprising. The human element of Doctor Who is baked much deeper into the series’ DNA than the space opera epic. The show was originally about two ordinary people who fell out of the world into a set of adventures that they were actively not the right protagonists for. Its only successful period of discarding or minimizing the human element of its cast came under Graham Williams, who made up for it with unusually solid characterization in the guest characters. Whereas grand epics were actively prevented by the original conception of the show, in which the Doctor’s origins were wholly obscure and the TARDIS couldn’t ever return somewhere to provide a sense of continuity. About all you had prior to The War Games was “Daleks! Again!” Whereas a story about two ordinary schoolteachers being put through absolute hell? Take your pick of the first season.
But Cartmel still has a big innovation in Warhead that moves beyond the “focus the story on a human” approach – something that Time’s Crucible does, after all, if less successfully. Although there certainly are lengthy stretches of the book in which Ace takes center stage, there are also multiple chapters that are structured around telling us about an ordinary person in the world Cartmel sets out, giving details from their perspective, and then having the Doctor cross their path. Over and over again we get vignettes about what it’s like to meet the Doctor, and for large swaths of the book the Doctor’s scheme plays out in the background. It’s not that the book isn’t about the Doctor – it absolutely is. But it’s about how a world responds to him, not about what he does and what his plans are.
Let’s look at a specific instance. The third chapter of the book tells the story of Maria Chavez, a night-shift janitor at the villainous Butler Institute who is suffering from terminal cancer. A third of the chapter goes by before she even meets the Doctor – instead we get her life history, her love of dancing, the ways in which her life hasn’t worked out, and of her deceased lover. Then, finally, she stumbles upon the Doctor doing some light computer hacking. All told, the Doctor is only around for half of the chapter, and for much of his appearance we see Maria trying to figure out what she should do about him and whether she should alert security.
Eventually she decides to cover for the Doctor, and we get a brutal glimpse of human cruelty, as she pulls up a fake e-mail to an ex-lover in which she talks about missing him at night, in response to which the security guards belittle her, telling her that a “woman your age should be ashamed.” It’s ugly and mean, and one of the most compelling moments in the chapter. The drama isn’t whether the Doctor will be caught (really, who cares if he will be – it’s a Doctor Who story, and a series of captures and escapes for him are standard issue), but about Maria’s humiliation and shame, and her willingness to help a man she’s just met.
This makes the chapter’s resolution, in which Maria asks the Doctor to take her with him and is turned down, all the more brutally compelling. The Doctor flatly refuses, because of something that’s been going on on the fifty-first floor that she knows about, saying “you’ve known for years, and you’ve let it happen” before walking off and abandoning her. The chapter ends a page or two later with Maria dying in what sounds like a seizure, still narrated from her perspective. The result is a chilling and uncertain view on affairs in which it’s difficult to tell who, if anyone, are the good guys.
An even more chilling moment comes at the end of the next chapter, where the Doctor, after getting information from a child killer, leaves him to be murdered by gang members without any seeming remorse or issue. It’s a dark and cynical moment – and not the only one in the book. The Doctor later declares that “Ordinary people don’t have the ability to alter the course of events. Only the big corporations and the very rich have the power to do that.” This latter comment is a fascinating moment. On the one hand, it’s easy to bristle at, even if there are reasonably compelling arguments for its practical truth. On the other, and perhaps more interestingly, it jars with a novel that has, up until that point, been meticulously focused on ordinary people and their world. The result is that the Doctor gets put in the same category as corporations and the very rich – as one of the forces that changes the world. He’s one of the good guys, certainly, but looked at from this angle he becomes as uncanny and monstrous as the things he fights.
And this is clearly the angle on the Doctor Cartmel is interested in. There’s a fabulous scene around the two-thirds mark of the book in which Justine shakes Ace’s worldview by pointing out that the Doctor could just as easily be a sorcerer as an alien, and that nothing would change about her life except for the language she uses to describe it. This gets at a fundamental aspect of Cartmel’s approach to Doctor Who here. He’s not interested in the particular mechanics of the Doctor. He’s interested in the question of what happens when a good monster – a figure who is at once utterly Other and yet fundamentally on our side – is unleashed into a world. The explanation for the character is, by and large, just window dressing that dodges around the issue of his nature.
Quietly and meticulously, Doctor Who is changing out from under us. And though the next two books do little to advance things (a mediocre book that tries to do outright fantasy in Doctor Who, with a resolution to the damaged TARDIS plot bookending it, and a upstanding but ultimately very staid number by Mark Gatiss), the ninth New Adventure would prove to be another massive turning point for the series.
August 27, 2012 @ 5:08 am
Another wonderful essay, Phil. My thanks as usual, don't even need to be said were it not that this seems to be the first comment (though someone else might be typing faster than me right now). The way you explain the book's take on the Doctor is fascinating. It reminds me of two things.
One is your essay on Remembrance of the Daleks. You wrote about the Doctor having become a fixed property that is an agent of change in the world where he moves. The expression you used, as I remember it, was that the Doctor's mercury has been pushed outward. Warhead seems to extend those themes: ordinary people are characters that can develop and change, while the Doctor seems to have a fixed nature, separating him from them. The Doctor plays games that are bigger than ordinary people, and that people tend to get lost in when they involve themselves without his guidance (just like Maria the custodian, who knew of her employer's nefarious activities, but didn't do anything — she was a janitor, so maybe she just couldn't conceive of what she could do).
Back when you put forward your plan for the NAs, I recommended Sky Pirates!, and while you didn't have time to include it, it fits snugly into that path of making the Doctor alien. If anything, I think it brings Doctor Who to a point from which it couldn't go on. The Doctor's nature in Sky Pirates! is revealed to be so alien and strange that he becomes utterly cut off from any quotidian level at all.
Doctor Who couldn't continue with a protagonist like that: it's inherently alienating from the people he loves. Accepting the vision of the Doctor that the implications of Remembrance, Warhead, and Sky Pirates! lay out and escalate would destroy the show. He's an architect of universes, not an adventurer. If the Time Lords function as gods to us ordinary folk, then someone who's "more than just another Time Lord" would be god squared. The vision is seductive because it makes the Doctor so cool, but it's also destructive because he doesn't have any authentic relationships with his friends anymore. Friendships like his with Barbara become impossible under this vision of the Doctor.
It's a path that, with their freedom to experiment, the NAs explored, but which thankfully didn't survive — it couldn't survive without destroying the fundamental premise of Doctor Who itself.
August 27, 2012 @ 7:20 am
" The Doctor later declares that “Ordinary people don’t have the ability to alter the course of events. Only the big corporations and the very rich have the power to do that.”"
Interesting. I'd like to know the context of that, because it seems one of the most un-Doctor Who things one could say.
August 27, 2012 @ 7:25 am
Except when he's in "Time Lord Victorious" mode.
August 27, 2012 @ 8:18 am
I like your take on this. I always thought Warhead was unfairly dismissed. It's interesting that you link it with Ian and Barbara, since these days it seems to me that this is like a story from a parallel universe in which the pilot episode rather than An Unearthly Child was broadcast, leading to a series that embraced the alien and sinister sides of the Doctor a little bit more, and the silly and childish sides a bit less. Such a series probably wouldn't have lasted this long, I suppose, but it's nice to imagine; not least because it would have been harder to get away with the weaker companions over the years if it had been (even) more necessary for them to function as audience gateways.
August 27, 2012 @ 8:25 am
Fuller excerpt.
"Okay," she said. "You need a weapon. Those two kids are the weapon. I don't know what the target is, but I can guess." They were in the homeopathy section of the drugstore now. A smiling boy in an apron was offering samples of an all-natural toothpaste. "That girl's got a thing about cars, pollution, the environment. She's a bit psychotic."
"Perhaps. But she also happens to be right," said the Doctor. "This planet is reaching the point of no return. Ordinary people don't have the ability to alter the course of events. Only the big corporations and the very rich have the power to do that."
"Yeah, but eventually they'll have to do something," said Ace. "They have to breathe the same air we do."
"Not necessarily," said the Doctor.
August 27, 2012 @ 8:57 am
Well… there's no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish, sometimes. 😉
August 27, 2012 @ 9:01 am
I'm pretty sure it survived into the new series; the RTD years, most notably with Paul Cornell's "Human Nature", seemed to revel in making the Doctor "angry" and "epic". Lots of walking towards the camera stonefaced while explosions go off behind him; lots of lashing out at "little people".
Fortunately, Moffat's been taking two whole series to back away from that awful tack, and I think it's been worth the journey.
August 27, 2012 @ 9:16 am
I don't see this as putting The Doctor on the same level as corporations as much as it is just seething cynicism. After all, this is staunch anti-Thatcherite Andrew Cartmel. The Doctor is pointing out, rightly I might add, that the most prominent harbingers of change on Earth in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries are the drive towards industrialism and free-market neoliberalist dominance. And they are: Centuries of dangerous industrial practices left chronically unchecked have resulted in real, measurable, tangible and probably irreversible harm to the planet and its ability to sustain life.
Historically, no attempts to raise awareness about the effect of such practices have been able to gain any lasting ground or make any meaningful strides to turn back the process, due in no small part to those in positions of extreme power more interested in short-term economic gain than the long-term consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, the nature of power structures dictates that those trying to instil change at an individual level will face insurmountable opposition because they don't have the backing of powerful industrial and economic forces and it doesn't seem like this is a trend that will change anytime soon.
I don't see this as making The Doctor monstrous so much as I see it as him pointing out some uncomfortable truths about life on Earth in the twilight of Modernism, which is exactly what he ought to be doing in a contemporary Doctor Who story. It's not a utopian or fun observation, but it is a realistic one.
August 27, 2012 @ 9:23 am
Except that the Doctor says it in the context of changing the world. I mean, I share your sympathy for the sentiment – I am, after all, terribly skeptical of individualism. But I think there is something monstrous about that statement when uttered by the person who is just a few dozen pages from altering the course of events, and who is in the midst of talking about his plan to do just that.
August 27, 2012 @ 10:49 am
Hmm. Steven Moffat's Doctor:
"We're in the biggest library in the universe … look me up!"
"I'm the Doctor. And basically … run."
Yes, now the Moff has moved away from that, but I don't see it as two seasons of gradually backing away. It's more like taking off the brakes, and charging in the current direction as fast as possible, until he hits something that spins the show around.
In "The Wedding of River Song", we get a Doctor who is so epic and angry, he simply cannot function as the Doctor any more, so he has to stop doing that. And I get the feeling that this is not because Moffat disapproved of the epic Doctor, but because he enjoyed writing him too much and wanted to try moving out of his comfort zone.
August 27, 2012 @ 12:14 pm
While it has survived into the Modern Series it comes across IMHO in a different way. To me both the 10th and 11th Doctors are "angry and epic" but in a more human sort of way. It is more like the "epic" is in the frame of look I am the Doctor and I am famous so watch out! The 7th Doctor's "epic" was grounded in the fact he is "alien."
The best example of this is the differences in how the 7th and 10th Doctors chose to become human in Paul Cornell's Human Nature (and I think we will get into these details more when we discuss these works). It is this 7th Doctor that unseats the 4th as my favorite.
I guess, unlike most, I miss this alien Doctor and it is why I have a love, hate relationship with the Modern Series take on him.
August 27, 2012 @ 1:26 pm
Casting plays a big part in that – or at least, in determining what kinds of characterisation are possible. David Tennant is a fine actor, but his performance style is humanistic and relatable – showing us the inner life and common humanity of larger-than-life characters like Casanova or Doctor Who. Whereas Sylvester McCoy has an essential strangeness about his performances, a fundamental eccentricity that he can turn to comic or sinister effect in such characters as Lear's Fool, Michael Sams or Doctor Who.
There are things Tennant can do that McCoy can't, and vice versa, and if you want to emphasise the alien strangeness of the Doctor you want McCoy not Tennant.
Smith has a different kind of performance again. I haven't seen him in much else, but as Doctor Who he does an amazing job of portraying an incredibly old person in a young body, in all his jollity and sadness. It's possibly my favourite ever performance in the role, and I'm looking forward to seeing how he is able to explore the role further this year.
August 27, 2012 @ 1:56 pm
What Iain said.
Personally, I really prefer the modern series Doctor, someone who's alien and immortal but has human emotions and flaws, over an inscrutable presence whose universe-spanning plans can never be truly understood.
August 27, 2012 @ 1:58 pm
Hm. See, this sounds more like the he's saying that society is careening towards taking more and more power away from "normal" people and giving it all to the rich and powerful – not that such a disparity is natural.
August 27, 2012 @ 3:40 pm
the drive towards industrialism and free-market neoliberalist dominance
Hmm, I guess free-market neoliberalism like Jewish Nazism. Or Islamic atheism.
August 27, 2012 @ 4:00 pm
Neoliberalism of course in the Thatcherite, Reaganite sense, though I get the feeling the word carries different connotations depending on the discipline it's used in?
August 27, 2012 @ 4:01 pm
Actually, I suspect his objection is that Thatcher and Reagan aren't actually pro-free markets.
August 27, 2012 @ 4:03 pm
I suppose it would do me no good to stake my position on the opposite end, or at least at some kind of median? I appear to be increasingly outvoted, both on this blog and within fandom at large…
August 27, 2012 @ 4:07 pm
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August 27, 2012 @ 4:11 pm
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August 27, 2012 @ 4:41 pm
Well, one of the big Neocon manifestos has always been economic deregulation, hasn't it? Of course, when they talk about free market capitalism it's always to emphasize how important it is to keep the government from interfering in the economy at all, in spite of evidence that governments can provide needed competition. There is the train of thought that what Thatcherites and Reaganites espouse is not a true free market system as such (see Naomi Klein and Kevin Carson). I suppose technically what we have now is an oligopoly, whether that's the result of a truly free market or not.
I guess the contention comes down to how you use the term "free market": I was half-sarcastically using it in the way the neocons do to emphasize my point, rather than in a Carson-esque "free market anti-capitlaist" sense.
August 27, 2012 @ 5:46 pm
I really enjoyed this book when it first came out, but I also remember thinking, "Is this a parallel universe?" I was fairly new to DW, and the book's grim and gritty near-future world doesn't seem to have much in common with what I'd seen on TV, whereas Cornell's Revelation seemed to me like a natural (if far deeper, psychologically) extension of season 26.
August 28, 2012 @ 4:50 am
Right, neoliberalism is about attacking regulations within the corporatist system, not about attacking the regulations that sustain that system in the first place.
August 28, 2012 @ 9:54 am
Josh, I'm with Ununnilium on this, but I encourage you and anyone else taking the Other position to stake it and keep talking about it. Don't feel shouted down, in other words…even if you don't change my mind, you'll still say interesting things on the subject.
Does the "inscrutable presence" description really match any Doctor, modern or classic, other than the Seventh? Maybe the First or Second at a pinch? I ask not to argue against you, I'm just wondering whether that conception begins and ends with McCoy.
August 28, 2012 @ 10:45 am
Very much agreed! Debate and different opinions are good things!
(Way back when, I read the Mary Whitehouse entry and the part about the reason Enlightenment liberalism wants a plurality of viewpoints versus the reason postmodern liberalism wants it, I thought, "What about those of us who see multiple viewpoints as a good in and of itself?")
Also: I'd say that they can all be inscrutable presences from time to time, but not as a standard operating procedure. Except maybe Two – and he's a lot subtler about being subtle than Seven.
August 28, 2012 @ 1:03 pm
Well, thank you both very much for your words of encouragement!
Actually, I'd even object to the use of the word "Other": I'm not sure whether or not encyclops intended it, but that immediately evokes Mark Platt's elaborate Ancient Gallifrey mythic structure to me which, believe it or not, I'm not really in favour of either (though admittedly mostly because it explains far too much and rather defeats the purpose of introducing mystery IMO). I guess I prefer some kind of median between Iain's and Ununnilium's view and Platt's.
My Doctor would probably be rather like a strange, mercurial hybrid of Homer's Athena and Calliope: A subtle background character who serves as a trickster mentor and guide to heroes; Something probably close to Lambert/Whitaker-era Hartnell (as he's the only one part of a true ensemble) but with Troughton's mercury and Cartmel-era McCoy's presence and ability to disappear. Notably, the eras of Doctor Who I'm least interested in are the ones where The Doctor becomes a charismatic leading man, a cosmic horror or just another human character.
I could very well be misreading the entire point of the show and character as it exists now, but that's just how I imagine a character we've come to associate with the Master of the Land of Fiction: A guide, companion and mentor to heroes, not a hero himself.
August 28, 2012 @ 1:31 pm
There can be quite a lot of visions of the Doctor: some are more interesting than others to some folks rather than others, and some allow the narrative to probe one kind of problems, while others open other kinds of narrative spaces.
The alien/other vision of the Doctor opens up some really interesting narrative possibilities. Some examples would be feelings of alienation between the companions and the Doctor, being able to watch the Doctor operate on a cosmic scale, understanding the different planes of reality the show can move around.
What most concerns me about that vision of the Doctor is that it limits the kinds of relationships he can have. It's difficult to create a character who can learn from his companions the way he learned from Barbara, or love them as friends and, well, companions like Donna and Amy. The cosmic/alien/other vision of the Doctor wouldn't work with a character like River Song in his life. Right now, we can explore what happens when the Doctor interacts with his friends on this very personal level, because that's what Steven Moffatt is good at.
Settling on the cosmic/other vision of the Doctor would preclude these kinds of storylines, which, however you may think about how they're playing out aesthetically, are still interesting territory for Doctor Who to explore. In a way, I'm glad that we've never had to settle on one single overarching vision of who the Doctor is, and the visions of the show and characters can shift with the problems that the writers want to explore. Alien/cosmic Doctor happens to be, I think, one of the more limited interpretations in terms of what kind of stories can be told. So I'm glad Doctor Who never settled on it. But I'd be sad if Doctor Who ever really settled on anything.
August 28, 2012 @ 2:10 pm
Right, and ultimately this comes down to personal opinion. The great thing about Doctor Who is how everyone who writes for it brings a unique perspective to the table and finds new ways to explore the show's premise and structure. That's where its underlying mercury comes from: Mercury cannot be fixed into a specific form, rather, it adapts to fit whatever container its placed in.
That's why I made a point to say "My Doctor": However problematic that phrase might be in certain contexts, the underlying point in me using it was to say that's how I see the show and character and the approach I would personally use if I was ever lucky enough to get a shot at writing a Doctor Who story. That's not to say I'm trying to claim this is the only way The Doctor should be; I personally think it's a both pointless and arrogant to demand Doctor Who always be a certain way. As long as the inherent liminality and mercurial nature of the show and the character is preserved, it's a valid take the way I see it.
That's not to say I can't and don't take issue with certain interpretations of the show, I do, and am usually very loud about it. However, I always try to make a point and critique the show by its own merits at any given point in time and look for ways the mercury can be maintained in each specific context. And plus, fans just like to argue, don't we?
August 28, 2012 @ 5:42 pm
Personally, I can't stand the scene where Justine shakes Ace's worldview, because that isn't Ace's worldview. This is a woman who has held the sword Excalibur while being threatened by the sorceress queen Morgaine and her bound demon, and she's saying "There's no such thing as magic"?
Basically, Ace is transformed for this one scene from an actual character into an exemplar of an aesthetic that Cartmel personally disagrees with, solely because there's nobody else there to fill that role in the novel. It is the sign that Cartmel is all about creating distinctive set-pieces at the expense of everything else (plot, characterization, coherence)…and while I can intellectually accept that this is a valid form of storytelling, and Cartmel is really creating a piece of free-association on various themes, I still can't stand the freaking thing. 🙂
August 28, 2012 @ 5:54 pm
Surely Battlefield supports Ace's position that the Doctor's use of a magical explanation is just him covering up the real sci-fi explanation. I mean, yes, she held Excalibur while facing down Morgaine, but it still turned out the Arthurian legends were just space aliens. Just like vampires and her old Victorian haunted house were.
I'll grant that Battlefield does have a line that contradicts this – the discussion of Clarke's law. But that wasn't part of any version of Battlefield that anyone had seen in 1992. Indeed, the Justine scene could be seen as Cartmel taking the lost Battlefield scene and redoing its main point, with Ace expressing Clarke's law before having Justine make the same observation the Doctor does – that the reverse is also true.
August 28, 2012 @ 8:07 pm
I'm likewise bugged by Sarah Jane's insistence in SJA that there are no ghosts. Because she certainly knows that there are sciencey-things-that-almost-anyone-would-call-ghosts.
August 28, 2012 @ 9:00 pm
However the "alien" 7th Doctor is close to his companions and learns from them. The Doctor is very close to Bernice to the point of becoming human (in Human Nature) to more understand a loss in her life.
In someways the human companions are more important to the 7th Doctor because they help him evolve from this master manipulator to a more "human" Doctor.
I do understand that the 7th Doctor as he evolved in the NAs wouldn't work in the Modern Series, but it doesn't mean I don't miss this take on the character.
February 14, 2013 @ 3:54 am
I'm running to catch up myself – with this blog since the end of the TV series. It's been years since I read Warhead (probably 16 years), and I have to agree with you: it sings. After the rather academic and aloof Time's Crucible especially, it feels like this is my kind of Doctor Who. The Doctor falling out of the sky, and small, intimate lives suddenly opening up into something vast and astonishing. Bigger on the inside indeed.
And the moment you highlight, when Justine rocks Ace's worldview, suggesting the Doctor's technobabble explanations are just that – senseless technobabble, that the Doctor is in fact a wizard, Merlin. Well, it's the McCoy era in a nutshell. The Doctor battles sorceresses and demons, vampires and angels and werewolves, and yet if you stick a flashing light on it and drop in a reference to evolution it's sci-fi.
Lovely review of a magical book.