Elizabeth Sandifer

I’ll Explain Later

EarthWorld is the first book after the stuck-on-earth cycle, and features a futuristic earth colony, a museum, and some evil princesses. It’s the second book featuring Anji Kapoor, the latest companion in the BBC Books range, the first being Colin Brake’s Escape Velocity, where her boyfriend died horribly and she inadvertently got abducted by the Doctor. EarthWorld’s reputation is middling: Lars Pearson calls it “a drastic misstep for the eighth Doctor line,” while Doctor Who Magazine calls it “an accomplished and enjoyable debut.” It’s forty-sixth on the Sullivan rankings, in any case.

It’s March of 2001 again. These things happen.

So it’s EarthWorld today – one of the myriad of books that takes as one of its major themes trying to square away the amnesia plot. This is a problem, as the amnesia plot is more or less impossible to actually square away. The biggest problem is one Lance Parkin pointed out: amnesia isn’t a concept that motivates someone. Or, rather, the only motivation it provides is memory. That’s a pretty solid problem, and one with a meaningful general case: a lack needs to be filled. This is the central logic of a mystery. Or really, of a lot of things. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever seen on the subject of puzzle-writing is “leave blanks for the solver to fill.” There is a deep-seated desire to fill in a blank. And while the Doctor’s memory isn’t a mystery for the audience, keep in mind that the structure of the genre had long been stretched by things like Cracker where we know who did the crime and just wait for Fitz to solve it too. Which is to say that even though we know the contents of the Doctor’s lost memories, we expect that he’ll pursue them because they are, within the story, a mystery. If nothing else, the idea of the Doctor blandly ignoring a great big mystery jars.

So the problem is less that the amnesia doesn’t help create any stories as that the story it helps create is the one story that Justin Richards has decided they shall not tell: the story of the Doctor trying to find his memories. Which means that every single book starts from a position of frustrated desire for the reader. Everything the reader knows about how stories work tells them to expect to see the Doctor trying to get his memories back. And every single book is saying “no, we’re not doing that.” And that’s not a death sentence for the books, but it’s a problem. It means every single book is starting at a slight but significant disadvantage with readers.

And on top of that, there’s the basic fact that the amnesia was never going to stick. I mean, BBC Books were putting out twenty-two Doctor Who books a year. Eleven of them were set in the Eighth Doctor’s memory. Big Finish was doing another twelve, all with a memory-having Doctor. And the assumption is still that Doctor Who is going to run forever.…

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It’s April of 2001. Hear’Say are at number one with “Pure and Simple.” Emma Bunton unseats them a week later with “What Took You So Long,” which lasts two weeks before Destiny’s Child take it with “Survivor.” Lil Bow Wow, Janet Jackson, Gorrillaz, Robbie Williams, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Madonna, and O-Town also chart. In news, a Chinese fighter jet crashes into an American one, resulting in an international incident, which leads to George W. Bush’s first major foreign policy crisis. He manages not to completely whiff this one. Give him time. Also, Slobodon Miloševi? surrenders to the police, and the Netherlands become the first country to legalize same sex marriage. All of this happens on the same day, April 1, at which point the month gets tired and overworked and decides not do anything else.

Oh, yes, and Big Finish releases Minuet in Hell. Let’s start with the bit that if I ignore I’ll be rightly scolded in comments, and that if I pay attention to everyone will say that I’m being tiresome and imposing my personal issues and values on the story. The story is frightening in its internalizing of misogyny. Charley is kidnapped off the streets and turned into a “pretty little satin bottom,” where she’ll cater to the whims of the customers of a “gentleman’s club” and submit to their physical punishments whenever they want to administer them. This is treated as little more than another obstacle for a plucky adventurer to overcome. As is usually the case with things like this, the problem comes when the fantasy horror is far too close to a real one. Human trafficking and sexual slavery happen to real people. Treating a thinly sanitized forced prostitution as generic adventure filler is grotesque. And it sets a nasty tone for the whole piece.

That admitted, let’s move to the other thing that jumps out about this: its portrayal of the United States is ludicrous. I’m actually not quite as bothered by this as the consensus is. Yes, the accents are awful, but I avoided skewering Nicola Bryant or the entirety of The Gunfighters on those grounds, so starting now seems silly. The premise rather painfully strains credulity – I’m at a loss for why the subplot of forming a fifty-first state called Malebolgia is included, as it is at once ludicrous and pointless. But under the surface is an idea with some teeth, particularly coming four months after the inauguration of George W. Bush. This was surely on Gary Russell’s mind as he revised Alan Lear’s Audio-Visuals script during the 2000 campaign.

The Bush administration, barely four years in the ground, is a difficult thing to historicize, not least because it was, in fact, so disastrously bad. Its failures were in many ways worse than even the most pessimistic predictions in 2000. And thus in many ways the horror of what was has erased the sense of horror at Bush’s election in the first place. On top of that, the election itself was overshadowed by the fact that its results fell within the margin of error of voting itself.…

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It’s March of 2001. Atomic Kitten are “Whole Again” at the top of the charts. That lasts a week more before Shaggy takes over with “It Wasn’t Me.” That gives it up to Westlife’s “Uptown Girl,” which goes down to Hear’Say’s “Pure and Simple,” which lasts the rest of the month. Outkast, Melanie B, Nelly Furtado, Ricky Martin and Christina Aguilera, the Gorillaz, and Manic Street Preachers also chart, the latter managing to take both the 8th and 9th slot in a single week.

In news, the Russian space station Mir crashes into the Pacific Ocean. It does not hit the target Taco Bell floated in the ocean, which meant that Taco Bell did not have to give out free tacos for a day. Notably, they did not float the banner anywhere near where Mir was expected to land. The Real IRA detonates a car bomb outside BBC Television Center. And Mac OS X is released.

While on CD racks, The Stones of Venice. This marks an odd milestone for McGann’s Doctor. The character, as we’ve previously discussed, had been developed considerably over the nearly five years since the TV Movie aired. This development, however, had taken place without McGann, since it was all in novels. And more to the point, whatever development McGann has put into the character since 1996, it’s not influenced at all by the Eighth Doctor Adventures, which McGann has surely never read. And while there’s a clear production fork between the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Big Finish line, that fork was only sort of in the writers, in that each line had their own stable of primary writers. (Admittedly more of the Eighth Doctor Adventures’ “primary” writers crossed over to do Big Finish work than visa versa.) And this is one of the subtler but significant differences between the two lines: one of them had the Eighth Doctor as a literary creation inspired by maybe five minutes tops of McGann’s performance in the TV Movie, and the other had the Eighth Doctor as created by Paul McGann in a frenzied five-day stretch in which bits of the stories were recorded completely out of order.

On top of that, we have McGann not having been terribly thrilled with the part as he was forced into it for the TV Movie. In the twelve years since Storm Warning McGann has made his desire to reinvent the part clear, perhaps most notably in his active attempts to get a new costume created for his Doctor and his documented dislike both of the Victorian costume and the wig they put him in. So these two approaches had a really fundamental point of divergence. The Eighth Doctor Adventures frantically picked over the TV Movie for any hints of a usable Doctor and came up with the particularly romantic, free-spirited Doctor. McGann, meanwhile, was looking to break with the TV Movie and start over. The schism here is fundamental.

And with The Stones of Venice we have the moment where McGann first encounters a script written by one of the mainstays of the Eighth Doctor Adventures.…

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It’s February, 2001. Limp Biskit are at number one with “Rollin.” A week later it’s Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again,” which manages the of-late unheard of feat of actually staying at number one for more than one week. In fact, it rides out the rest of the month. Whetus, Dr. Dre, Usher, Jennifer Lopez, U2, Mya, Papa Roach, Dido, and the Backstreet Boys also chart. In news, over four hundred people die in El Salvador following an earthquake. Ten people die in a high speed train crash near Selby, North Yorkshire. And a massive outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spreads over the UK, causing quarantines and a culling of cattle so massive in scope that the British Army was required to assist.

While in audio CDs we have The Sword of Orion. As we’ve already discussed, the Big Finish line has an overt focus on being “classic” Doctor Who. But with The Sword of Orion that gets downright literal: this feels like it was written in 1988. Mainly, as it happens, because it was. But the history of that, as well as the fact that it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb in 2001, is worth looking at in more detail. Which means that we have to do the actual history of Big Finish, which we largely skipped last time in favor of some remarks on style.

The first thing to understand are the origins of Big Finish as a company. A fair amount of their personnel had originally worked on the Audio Visuals line in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Audio Visuals line were fan-made Doctor Who audios that starred Nicholas Briggs as an alternate version of the Doctor, and featured several names that are of obvious future relevance to Doctor Who: Garry Russell, Jim Mortimore, and Andy Lane all worked for them, as did Bill Baggs, who directed The Airzone Solution and whose company put out several other almost-but-not-quite Doctor Whos, including audios featuring K-9 and Lalla Ward as “The Mistress,” and ones featuring “The Professor and Ace,” and, later, a run of Faction Paradox audios by Lawrence Miles.

So eventually a chunk of the Audio Visuals folks formed a proper company and got the rights to do a run of Bernice Summerfield audios, which they did a good enough job with to persuade the BBC to give them the rights to do some actual Doctor Who audios. Initially only Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy signed up. Tom Baker declined because, well, that’s the sort of thing Tom Baker does. And Paul McGann didn’t so much decline as not even have the offer forwarded to him because his agent at the time was Janet Fielding, who was in a period where she vocally disliked Doctor Who and didn’t think doing the audios was the right career move for him. Then McGann changed agents and ended up doing the Big Finish audios after all, and now you’re more or less caught up.

Unsurprisingly, when Big Finish started up they turned to the Audio Visuals line and remade a few of their greatest hits.…

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It’s still January of 2001, so I suppose I’m kind of stuck not having much of an intro here. This marks the point in the McGann era where we jump tracks. Thus far we’ve focused primarily on the Eighth Doctor Adventures. We’re still going to cover another six of those (well, five, technically), but for the next month and a half or so we’re going to focus on the other McGann era: the Big Finish audios. This means a couple of things. First, these posts won’t have the “I’ll Explain Later” headers, for the simple reason that all of the Big Finish material can easily be bought on their website, making it less necessary to get people up to speed. Go buy these, basically. They’re cool. Second, it means that we have something today that we haven’t seen, or, rather, heard since the TV Movie itself: Paul McGann’s Doctor as played by Paul McGann.

This is a strange thing. McGann at once has a nearly blank slate and years of expectations and assumptions that he has to contend with.. The script does McGann few favors here, making him talk to himself for almost a full episode in the most “and now I will explain the plot to nobody” manner imaginable. It’s unfortunate, and more than a bit amateur hour. Yes, this story is meant to introduce a new companion, but the natural consequence of that should have been a start in which the Doctor arrives and gets into the action, not an episode of solo TARDIS scenes. It butchers the episode’s momentum, but worse, it butchers McGann, who rings in the sixth year of his tenure as the Doctor still trying to figure out how to play the part.

Already, though, some cross purposes are arising. McGann is in the deeply awkward position of stepping into a role that’s been defined in his absence. Momentarily, at least, the flaws of the Eighth Doctor Adventures are helping him slightly: his role may have been defined, but not with any consistency. And while it’s absurd to suggest that Big Finish wasn’t influenced by the BBC Books portrayals, they’re also reacting against BBC Books and creating their own version of the Eighth Doctor. Still, there’s a tension between what the script wants, which is for the Doctor to be the proper Edwardian Adventurer that allows Charlie to be the Edwardian Adventuress she proclaims herself to be, and what McGann seems to want, which is to play the Doctor as Ford Prefect: blasé and a bit snarky, rolling his eyes a bit at the plot around him.

If one wants to try to classify Doctors, one could do worse than dividing between leading man Doctors and reactive Doctors. The leading man Doctors are the ones who are played as active figures at the center of things: Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Colin Baker, and David Tennant. The reactive Doctors, on the other hand, are the ones who flit about the edges of the story and tend to react to what’s going on.…

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I’ll Explain Later

Since we’re skipping an awful lot of books from now on, I’m not going to attempt to summarize those. Father Time is the penultimate book of the earthbound series, and tells the story of the Doctor and his adoptive daughter Miranda, a mysterious and, one might say, unearthly child with two hearts. Over the course of a decade the Doctor raises Miranda and eventually stopping some aliens who are sworn to kill her and helping her take over the universe to boot. Nobody has a poor word for it. Lars Pearson calls it “one of the most mature Who books,” and Doctor Who Magazine’s new-look review column proclaims that Parkin “nails the character” of the Doctor. Fitting for the seventh-best story in Shannon Sullivan’s rankings.

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It’s January of 2001. Bob the Builder is at number one with “Can We Fix It,” which is holding off Eminem’s “Stan” in one of the most entertaining musical battles imaginable. Rui Da Silva takes over with “Touch Me” as week later, then Jennifer Lopez with “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” and finally Limp Bizkit with “Rollin’.” S Club 7, Westlife, Destiny’s Child, Leann Rimes, Britney Spears, and the Baha Men also chart in what may be the worst month for music ever.

While we were out, Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, informally known as Long Kesh prison, closed in Northern Ireland. Slobodon Miloševi? left office. A local gang attempted to steal the Millennium Star from the Millennium Dome, but were foiled spectacularly. The dome also shut down to visitors after a year, now being part of The O2. And the 2000 US Presidential election played out, seeing the election, or, at least, Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush. While this month, Bush is actually inaugurated President, Wikipedia launches, and the AOL/Time Warner merger is approved.

While in books, Lance Parkin is back with Father Time. Parkin’s books have an odd tendency to start from a position that can almost be described as trolling. He begins with a premise that is tailor-made to piss off and alarm fans, or, alternatively, one that seems self-evidently impossible. His books consistently feel as though they were written in response to dares – he takes ideas that sound like they cannot possibly work and tries to make them work. In this regard he is perhaps the most high concept writer of the Wilderness Years – more even than Lawrence Miles and Paul Cornell.

But there’s a cheek to Parkin’s iconoclasm. He writes unwritable stories not quite by formula, but at least by a simple and reliable method, which is to find an escape route from the premise itself. The Infinity Doctors is perhaps the definitive example of this: a story that reconciles all the disparate takes on Gallifrey through excessive fealty to all of them. In a similar spirit, Father Time takes on the “impossible” premise of “what if the Doctor had a daughter” and proceeds to carefully avoid the major reason the story is impossible, which is that it’s a premise that should completely alter how Doctor Who works, and that any failure to allow it to do so opens up another Problem of Susan, only a bigger one that can’t be hand-waved with the “well, the show drifted slightly from its original premise” argument that ultimately avoids, if not removes, the problem.…

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I’ll Explain Later

The Burning is the start of the six-book Earthbound arc, in which the Doctor spends a century hanging around Earth waiting for the TARDIS to finish regrowing itself and to meet Fitz. Its plot is thoroughly straightforward and simple: the Doctor stops a fire elemental from killing people in Victorian England. Although in practice things are a bit more complex than that. It was at the time terribly well-regarded: Lars Pearson called it “a striking, contemplative story of Victorian terror,” while Doctor Who Magazine deigned to give the Eighth Doctor Adventures a cover feature for it and said that it “confirms the vast improvement in the Eighth Doctor novels of late.” Still, it only makes it to thirtieth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings.

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It’s August of 2000. Craig David is at number one with “7 Days.” Robbie Williams unseats him a week later with “Rock DJ,” then comes Melanie C with “I Turn To You,” and finally Spiller with “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love).” Ronan Keeting, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Eminem, and Storm also chart. In news, riots break out on a council estate in Portsmouth as over a hundred people attack the home of someone named as a pedophile by News of the World. Dora the Explorer debuts. The Confederate submerine H.L. Hunley is raised to the surface, and four days later the Russian submarine Kursk sinks to balance the scales. And Reggie Kray is released from prison due to his expected death from bladder cancer. (He’ll die in October, just over a month later.)

While in books, The Burning: the big relaunch of the Eighth Doctor Adventures’  fabled new direction after the excesses of Lawrence Miles. Written by newly installed editor Justin Richards, it was a huge deal as a novel simply because, well, in the previous book the Eighth Doctor Adventures blew up everything they had been doing so far and most of what defined Doctor Who, and everyone was understandably curious where they were going with all of this, if somewhat less than enthused.

Given all of this, what is striking about The Burning is its traditionalism. The novel goes out of its way to include the standard elements of Doctor Who, including a military whose failure to trust the Doctor exacerbates the situation. The story is self-consciously the most traditional Doctor Who story imaginable. In many ways the real giveaway is the Victorian setting. There aren’t actually a lot of Doctor Who stories set in the Victorian era, but because Doctor Who has so many roots in Victorian imagery and concepts it feels iconic and proper to put the Doctor in a Victorian setting. So we have a Victorian setting, a pool of secondary characters who are steadily killed off, a military whose effectiveness is damaged by their failure to trust the Doctor enough – it’s basically “put the Hinchcliffe era in a blender, then cook at medium heat until a thick reduction forms. Serve over 240 pages.”

Which begs the question of why anyone bothered.…

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We’ve skipped The Fall of Yquatine, Coldheart, The Space Age, and The Banquo Legacy. One’s got a giant worm, one’s rapey, one got credited with capturing the Eighth Doctor perfectly despite being adapted from a twenty-year-old TV script that didn’t even have him in it, and one’s West Side Story in space. The Ancestor Cell is the big one – the novel that wraps up all of the plot lines that have been running since Alien Bodies. In it Gallifrey is destroyed, the Doctor loses his memory, Romana turns very evil and dies, and Faction Paradox is thoroughly dealt with. As one might imagine given the adamance with which they hated this entire plot line, Doctor Who Magazine called it a “surprising success” and “essential.” Lars Pearson wrote the politest and most supportive review ever to compare a book to “surgery without any anesthetic.” And the fan consensus dumps it at fifty-fifth, with a 60.2% rating.

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It’s July of 2000. Kylie Minogue is “Spinning Around” at number one, which is replaced a week later by Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” That goes a week later to Corrs’s “Breathless,” then Ronan Keating’s “Life is a Rollercoaster,” and finally Five and Queen with “We Will Rock You.” S Club 7, Coldplay, Oasis, Limp Bizkit, Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child, and Savage Garden also chart.

Since The Shadows of Avalon the Playstation 2 came out, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia, the whole Elián González thing wrapped up, the Tate Modern opened, India’s population reached one billion, and the Human Genome Project was finished. While during the month this book came out, France wins the European Championships in football. In shuffles of power, the delightfully oxymoronic Institutional Revolutionary Party sees seventy-one years of power in Mexico come to an end, Bashar al-Assad takes over Syria, and Alex Salmond resigns as the head of the Scottish National Party. Big Brother premieres, and the News of the World pushes Sarah’s Law, the UK version of Megan’s Law, which would continually disclose the residences of all convicted sex offenders.

And in books we have The Ancestor Cell, a book that is almost universally recognized as a bit of a bad move, in the “invading Russia in winter” or “watching Timelash with your new girlfriend” sort of senses of that phrase. This is all completely true. This is not a good book on any level. Its prose is turgid, its plotting is awkward at best, and its ideas are bone-headed. It consistently insults the reader’s intelligence while cheerily driving its plot forward as an outright idiot plot. (I particularly love the moment where the Time Lords forget that putting a Klein Bottle in the time vortex flattens it and lets the contents escape, which on the one hand misunderstands a Klein Bottle and on the other hand assumes that Time Lords are prone to forgetting basic facts about how four-dimensional objects work.) It is an absolutely awful book. But the particulars of why it’s bad are almost immaterial.…

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