Elizabeth Sandifer

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I’ll Explain Later

We skipped David McIntee’s Autumn Mist, which was a bit of a flop. Taking up both the Eighth Doctor Adventure and Past What is the significance of retconning Planet of the Spiders out of existence? There are some answers we can simply rule out as terribly silly. It does not, obviously, do any violence to Planet of the Spiders as a 150-minute long stretch of video. That remained pleasantly inviolate on everybody’s bookshelf in VHS form, as it had for the For reasons not entirely unrelated to a desire to be ostentatious, I periodically claim to have no ethical principles, only aesthetic ones. In this regard the Remote seem almost designed to be interesting to me. That said, it’s not as though either Miles or I have terribly original ideas here: the idea that there’s a link to be found between aesthetics and ethics has deep roots. Kant made Miles’s comments on the bottle universes are difficult to quite square away. He claims to have created them to sort out the continuity between the Virgin line and the BBC Books line, with the book that convinced him that the BBC Books line wasn’t set to be in the same universe as the Virgin line being The Eight Doctors, and blames writers like Kate Orman and Gary Russell for When talking about Grant Morrison and The Invisibles I posited that Morrison was of the man’s party and didn’t know it. That is, he is hopelessly torn between a revolutionary aesthetic and a commitment to working within a fundamentally anti-revolutionary form. A similar affliction seems to plague Lawrence Miles, albeit one that I simply haven’t read enough to resolve quite at this Doctor Adventure slot for the month, Interference is a two-part Doctor Who novel featuring both the Third and Eighth Doctors. We’ve covered it once already, and as with The Two Doctors, it is my intention not to repeat myself, though equally, not to contradict myself. Much. If I can avoid it. In any case, Interference is the big one, both literally and figuratively, setting past eight years. Nor, of course, can this be claimed as in any meaningful way similar to War of the Daleks. War of the Daleks was stupid because it ran roughshod over stories and told us that what we saw on the screen was wrong. Interference renders Planet of the Spiders non-canonical, yes, but it keeps it intact as it explicit in The Critique of Judgment, and it appears that Hannah Arendt died in the earliest stages of working on a book that would have explicitly based a theory of political philosophy on Kant’s aesthetics. I make the claim because it’s amusing and brash, not because it’s terribly original.…

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I’ll Explain Later

No, really. I will. But I’m traveling this weekend and forgot to bring the stuff I need to write this section.

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It’s June of 1999. Shanks and Bigfoot are at number one with “Sweet Like Chocolate.” I have zero idea what this means. It’s overtaken a week later by Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” which is not by Kurt Vonnegut. Like a good novelty record it goes down after a week and S Club 7’s “Bring It All Back” takes over, then Vengaboys’ “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!” So yes. Shania Twai, Sixpence None the Richer, Jamiroquai, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Geri Halliwell, The Chemical Brothers, Madonna, Britney Spears, and *Nsync also chart. Sadly the world fails to end six months after this trainwreck.

Since we left things off, Augusto Pinochet was placed under house arrest in the UK, much to Margaret Thatcher’s consternation. Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela. The euro was established, and there was a leap second. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah were extradicted to the UK over the Pan Am 103 bombing. TV presenter Jill Dando was murdered outside her home in Fulham. And Manchester United win the Champions League as part of their treble-winning season. While this month, Napster debuts, George W. Bush declares that he’ll seek the Republican nomination for the presidency. And Thabo Mbeki is elected President of South Africa.

While in books, Kate Orman and Jon Blum’s Unnatural History. So, since she’ll be on her way out of the books as of the end of the month, we should probably talk a bit about Sam, this book being all about her. She is in many ways a legacy of the tortured birth of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. We’ve talked about how this left the Eighth Doctor himself as a hazily defined character subject to the whims of the writers. That, at least, began to settle out over time, with a reasonably consistent vision of him as a particularly energetic and passionate Doctor cropping up often enough to at least claim that there is a characterization, if not often enough to constitute a consistent one. But there was a second problem in all of this: the latest iteration of the Problem of Susan.

Sam Jones was consciously designed as the most generic companion imaginable. To the point of letting Terrance Dicks draw her up. The last time Terrance Dicks did this, however, someone failed to get the memo and inadvertently cast Iris Wildthyme as the companion, so that attempt at genericness went out the window. This time there are no actresses to enliven proceedings, and so over time Sam Jones has slumped into being the single blandest and most generic companion it is possible to imagine.

This is a problem by any measure. I’m not one for the view that the companion is the “point of view” character or whatever, but it remains the case that the companion is useful for having interesting reactions to things that advance the plot or provide unusual perspectives on it.…

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I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped… oh lordie. Kursaal (58th on Sullivan’s rankings), Option Lock (37th), Longest Day (67th), Legacy of the Daleks (72nd), Dreamstone Moon (59th), Seeing I (A quite reputable 9th, and will be covered in the book), Placebo Effect (62nd), and Vanderdeken’s Children (56th), a list that more or less explains all on its own why I skipped them. This is The Scarlet Empress, the novel debut of Iris Wildthyme, who we already dealt with way back in the Pertwee era, but who is basically a loud drunk woman who may or may not have really had all the adventures the Doctor pretends to have. Lars Pearson calls this “a sensuous story, full of colors and scents.” At the time, Dave Owen called it “perfect carefree holiday reading.” It is the 18th most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, or so people say. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide.

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It’s September of 1998. The Manic Street Preachers are at number one with “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.” In fact All Saints are next with “Bootie Call,” so, you know, that turned out to be wrong. Robbie Williams goes next with “Millennium,” then Melanie B with Missy Elliott and “I Want You Back.” Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Boyzone, Aerosmith, and Savage Garden also chart. My ex-wife really liked Savage Garden. Hindsight is 20/20.

While we’ve been not paying attention to anything… there have been some things. Titanic came out. The US military accidentally killed twenty people in Italy by having a low-flying plane cut the cables of a cable car. Windows 98 comes out, and the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya are bombed by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. But the big news, frankly, is that the Belfast Accord is signed, bringing something approximating stability to Ireland for the first time in decades. During this month, on the other hand, Google is founded. Since I have a friend turning in her resignation at her current job so she can go work for Google today, we’ll take that as a good omen.

While in books, The Scarlet Empress. Marvelous. So, this book is terribly clever. This goes without saying. And it’s the sort of book that absolutely should exist within Doctor Who. But to some extent we should draw a line here and ask how it is that we got to September of 1998 without any book like this existing. Here we are, a hair’s breath from thirty-five years of Doctor Who, and we finally have a piece of unabashed and unflinching postmodernism that starts explicitly from the premise that Doctor Who is a genre and that its rules are narrative. We’ve flirted with it before, of course, but it’s been one note in a larger composition, so to speak – a facet of a larger point.

The obvious thing to contextualize The Scarlet Empress with is the aesthetic of frockery that dominated the Virgin era. Of course, there are some difficulties here – first among them that Magrs, in his afterword to the book, admits to having had some frustration with Virgin, both with the overly manipulative take on the Seventh Doctor and on their turn towards science fiction where he preferred magical realism.…

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Alien Bodies, by Lawrence Miles, is the landmark Eighth Doctor Adventure – the one that changed everything. It introduces Faction Paradox, the War, kills off the Doctor, introduces the Dark Sam plot, and probably does a fair number of other things I’m not thinking of at the moment. Steven Moffat has praised it. Everyone has praised it. Everyone. It’s the fourth most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, with an 84.1% rating.  Jackie Jenkins, guesting for Dave Owen in Doctor Who Magazine, declared that it “nourishes itself through constant questioning,” which sounds like a touch of faint praise. Lars Pearson, unsurprisingly for someone who would go on to publish Miles’s Faction Paradox series, calls it “one of the best ‘Who’ novels ever.” Lawrence Miles, meanwhile, says that it “isn’t even that good.”

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It’s November of 1997. Aqua is at number one with “Barbie Girl,” and I think we’ll just leave that to be a metaphor. For something. I refuse to decide what. It lasts nearly all month, and then is finally overtaken by a massive supergroup covering Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” in support of the BBC and the license fee, which is to say that things are clearly changing in terms of the BBC and it’s willingness to be proud of itself. Backstreet Boys, Chumbawumba, Spice Girls, LL Cool J, Natalie Imbruglia, Moby, Hanson, and a duet between Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion also chart.

In news, MCI and WorldCom merge to become MCI WorldCom, which then became WorldCom, which then imploded in a massive and spectacular accounting scandal to nobody’s surprise and nobody’s edification. Mary McAleese is elected as President of Ireland, succeeding Mary Robinson in the world’s first female succession of another female as an elected head of state. The BBC begins online news service having previously only covered a few specific events, and the British Library opens a public reading room at its new not-in-the-British-Museum site.

While in books, we finally get to the bits where Lawrence Miles becomes Doctor Who’s driving creative force. It’s a short period – we’ll be out of it by the end of the month – and yet is by any definition one of the most important things to happen in the space between the TV Movie and Rose. It’s also terribly controversial, both because of the scope of Miles’s ambitions and ideas and because of his, shall we say, somewhat abrasive style. This sets up something of a choice. For the most part, all things being equal, I like to keep the lens on the present of Doctor Who. The Wilderness Years are a bit of an exception, in that I let the new series hang over them. The reasoning here is fairly simple: to present the Wilderness Years as they were would be to read them with a sense of continual despair at the fact that Doctor Who is never coming back, because that’s what we all genuinely believed more or less until Rose’s ratings came in. This, while authentic to the time, is a very silly way to read them now, so instead I’ve let the knowledge that the series does come back seep into things simply because it makes it feel less absurd.…

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