Eruditorum Press

A magical ritual to pay our rent

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 31 (The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness)

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The weakness of Doctor Who in 1985-86 would be one thing if it were a weak period for British television in general. Instead, however, two of the most acclaimed British television productions of all time aired during the Colin Baker era. The first, at the end of 1985, was Edge of Darkness. The second, airing at the tail end of Trial of a Time Lord, about 26 hours after each of the last four episodes and then for another two weeks after, was The Singing Detective.

For those not reflexively versed in the nuances of British television, Edge of Darkness is a conspiracy thriller written by the creator of Z-Cars and directed by Martin Campbell, who went on to be a serious director who did such high profile work as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and, less satisfyingly, the recent Green Lantern film. If the name sounds vaguely familiar as a Mel Gibson film, I’m very sorry for you, as that’s Martin Campbell remaking the series as a film a few years back and very much not good. The plot concerns a police detective whose daughter is gunned down in front of him and the nuclear conspiracy that unfolds as he investigates her death and discovers that she, not he, was the target.

The Singing Detective, on the other hand, is one of the two things that people point towards when picking the masterpiece of Dennis Potter, himself the consensus best writer in British television history. It stars Michael Gambon as a writer with a debilitating skin condition (one that Potter himself also suffered from) who drifts among his stay in the hospital, the detective novel he’s writing in his head (in which Gambon also plays the  lead, the eponymous singing detective), and memories from his childhood.

It goes without saying that both are very, very good. Less clear is whether they’re meaningfully comparable with Doctor Who. Certainly both have wildly higher production standards. Indeed, in the case of The Singing Detective the production standards were actually too high – Dennis Potter had wanted the hospital scenes shot on video to look like a sitcom, but he was overruled and the whole thing was done on film. As a result, both are much better looking than Doctor Who.

And this is not, to be clear, just a special effects thing. Television is a visual medium. We Doctor Who fans are used to overlooking bad effects, but in doing so we can be prone to blinding ourselves to just how much good directing can matter. (Consider the degree to which Revelation of the Daleks was salvaged by Graeme Harper. Even in the new series directors matter to a great extent – consider how much The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex were elevated by Nick Hurran’s revelatory direction.) It’s not just that Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective look ritzier, they’re fundamentally better and more complexly shot pieces of television. Doctor Who didn’t have the money to let directors cut loose the way they can in these shows, and as a result struggled to get directors as good as these – one of the few claims in the infamous Eric Saward Starburst interview I have no trouble believing.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 11 (Slipback)

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With Doctor Who off the air for eighteen months everyone involved was, for obvious reasons, interested in finding some way to get some new Doctor Who out. And so they ended up doing a radio series of six ten minute episodes written by Eric Saward. The end home of this series was part of a BBC Radio 4 children’s magazine show entitled Pirate Radio 4. Since he was writing for an overtly children’s audience Saward, to his credit, recognized that his usual space marine action approach was a no go. Accordingly, he channelled Douglas Adams.

Wait, what?

Let’s not forget that one of the foundational myths of the Nathan-Turner era is that the show was irrevocably broken by the Graham Williams era and that it was “silly.” Eric Saward was among the pilers-on, accusing the Williams era of insulting the audience. Now, suddenly, he’s trying to mimic the approach of Williams’s script editor?

The problem is that between the time when that myth was laid down – 1980 or so – and 1985 – there’d been a necessary reevaluation of things. In 1980 Douglas Adams was a comedy writer who’d had a decent success with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with the novel coming out towards the end of his time on the show. Accordingly, he could be dismissed as having made the show silly. But 1985 he’d gotten to book four of the trilogy and was a reliably best-selling author. And suddenly he was a major point of legitimacy for Doctor Who – someone the program wanted to boast about its association with instead of boasting about moving past.

But more than that, there is something odd about the spectacle of Eric Saward writing light comedy. I mean, he attempted dark comedy on a regular basis – there’s a great moment in the infamous Starburst interview when, pressed on the idea that Doctor Who isn’t funny anymore, he pointed out that Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors, and Revelation of the Daleks are all comedies. Which, I mean, they technically are, but… this is clearly not what those critics meant. This, though, is the only real instance of him doing an extended piece of straightforward comedy in Doctor Who on his own initiative (as opposed to in the course of a salvage job).

It’s not very good, but it’s not very good in the same ways that The Visitation is not very good – a case of the whole being markedly less than the sum of its recycled parts. Many, if not most, of the ideas are genuinely funny, but the story is in many ways wholly encapsulated by the drunk ditz computer, a funny idea that overstays its welcome by a considerable margin. Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Doctor Who has always faltered when people attempt explicitly “for children” versions of it. This is no worse than The Pescatons before it or The Infinite Quest after it, if we’re being honest. Indeed, it’s probably better than either.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 23 (The Nightmare Fair)

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Right. So, a little over a year ago I had a blog that was just starting to get some attention. And I came upon a story that, well, kinda sucked. And the thing is, it was a story that had a surprisingly good reputation, but the story itself was really, really rubbish. Plus there were some really uncomfortable racial elements to it, and it was the second story in a row to have those, and I wrote an entry that tore the story to shreds. And writing it, I was getting a nice build-up going, so I went for broke in the conclusion and suggested that the story should be exiled from the canon on the grounds that it’s racist and terrible.

So, funny thing, it turns out that if, right when people are just starting to take notice of your blog, you viciously slaughter a mildly sacred cow this rapidly becomes one of the things you’re best known or. It’s not actually one of my most read posts, which I’m fine with, but to this day if I see a link in my referral logs from something I haven’t heard about before and I click through, over half the time it’s someone citing my blog to say that the story is a bit racist. It is unmistakably the case that The Celestial Toymaker (or, really, the combination of that and The Daleks’ Masterplan three entries earlier) is where my blog made itself. Because apparently nobody had really made the observation that The Celestial Toymaker was a piece of racist crap. (And it was. And it’s deliberate. I didn’t quote the novelization in the entry, but I’d like to point out the quote I’ve been pointing to since writing the entry: “The Toymaker was lounging in a black Chinese chair behind a laquered Chinese desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scenes of chinese life,” and, its counterpart a few sentences later, “The Toymaker stood up, a tall imposing figure, dressed as a Chinese mandarin with a circular black hat embossed with a heavy gold thread, a large silver red and blue collar and a heavy, stiffly embroidered black robe encrusted with rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls set against a background of coiled Chinese dragons.” Also, the Toymaker is Chinese.)

So you can imagine that it was somewhat comforting to open up Graham Williams’s The Nightmare Fair and discover that someone actually had noticed this problem before me. After a bunch of referring to the Toymaker as a Mandarin, Williams, at about the halfway point of the book, drops all pretense and just becomes a wonderfully snarky jerk about the fact that watching Michael Gough pretend to be Asian is kind of horrifying. My favorite bit, for what it’s worth, is “Stefan carefully tore off the printed sheet and made his way towards the Mandarin, who was standing, listening attentively to a technician in a white coat who looked distinctly as though he had the better right to the eastern style wardrobe the Mandarin favoured.”…

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New Adventures: Draft List For Discussion

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The big document in which I keep the schedule for upcoming stretches of the blog is rapidly getting short (by which I really just mean that it only goes out to the end of July, but by the standards of the document that is, in fact, short). And since we’re in the midst of a big section of not-television anyway, it seemed like a good time to have the talk about what novels I cover in the Virgin era. I’ve got a draft list below. But I want to get input from the rather delightful community that’s sprung up on this blog as well.

The list is already a bit larger than I’m happy about, so while suggestions for what to add are more than welcome please note that some argument as to why I should add it and, better yet, an argument for something I should cut will help the case tremendously. (Of course, so will raw populist appeal – if I get a wave of comments demanding I cover Shadowmind then I will. Weeping.)
I also want to be clear – this is not a list of the best NAs or of the most important ones. They’re the ones I think I can get the most interesting and thorough coverage of the Virgin era through. So there are choices that are there because I think I’m likely to have a fair bit to say about them, and important books like Death and Diplomacy that are left out because I think I’ll struggle to get to 2000 words. 
That said, here’s the tentative list:
Timewyrm: Genesis/Exodus (as one entry)
Timewyrm: Apocalypse/Revelation (ditto)
Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible
Cat’s Cradle: Warhead
Love and War
Transit
The Highest Science
Deceit
Lucifer Rising
White Darkness
Birthright
Blood Heat
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
Conundrum
No Future
All-Consuming Fire
Blood Harvest
First Frontier
Warlock
Set Piece
Sanctuary
Human Nature
Original Sin
Head Games
The Also People
Warchild
SLEEPY
Happy Endings
Christmas on a Rational Planet
Return of the Living Dad
Damaged Goods
So Vile a Sin
The Room With No Doors
Lungbarrow
The Dying Days
I want to also nod at some of what I’m imagining will be the obvious comments and questions. To wit:
Nightshade: Yes, it’s Gatiss’s first published piece of Doctor Who and the first NA to be written by someone who went on to write for the series. Honestly, though, I just don’t like Gatiss enough to want to cover another book of his. I fear running out of things to say about Gatiss on the basis of his four episodes. Adding a book doesn’t thrill me. That said, I remember very little about the book – is it interesting on merits beyond being by Gatiss?
The Pit: I know William Blake is in it. All I would have to say is that this is a terrible portrayal of William Blake that completely misses everything about why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting. Having already written infamously on why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting, I don’t see 2000 words here.
…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 22 (The Song of Megaptera)

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Among the many services Big Finish provides for Doctor Who at large is a helpful testing of various pieces of fanlore regarding unmade stories. There are, for instance, people who wonder whether Prison in Space would really have been as unbearably terrible as it sounds. And as it happens (and we’ll cover this in the Troughton book this fall), yes, yes it would have been. But there is perhaps nowhere this service is more valuable than in the Saward era. One of the less resolvable debates surrounding the Saward era, and one that will play into the next two entries heavily as well, is the nature of the writers. Simply put, there’s some solid evidence of some very good writers having scripts rejected during this period while people like Glen McCoy and Anthony Steven had scripts made. It’s one thing when Pip and Jane Baker, two writers who are at least fast and reliable, get repeated commissions. It’s quite another when they’re actively commissioned over Christopher Bidmead and PJ Hammond, as, in Season 23, they were.

Of what I’d consider the big three of baffling rejections – the twin rejection of Christopher Priest’s Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, PJ Hammond’s Paradise Five, and Pat Mills’s Song of the Space Whale, two – Hammond’s and Mills’s – have subsequently been recorded by Big Finish. Since the fan lore has Hammond’s rejection being down to Nathan-Turner and not Saward, whose influence I am more interested in tracking at the moment, let’s opt for Mills’s script, now renamed Song of Megaptera.

For those who don’t obsessively memorize every detail I cover on this blog, Mills, along with John Wagner (who was a co-author on earlier drafts of this script) co-created Judge Dredd with artist Carlos Ezquerra, and co-wrote the earliest Doctor Who Weekly comic strips. Song of Megaptera was, originally, a story for a Tom Baker comic strip, but Mills was persuaded that it was too good for that and instead sent it to the production office where it was, at various times, considered for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, and, finally, Colin Baker before finally being abandoned. In discussing its scrapping Pat Mills has stated that one of the reasons Saward gave for objecting to it was that Saward didn’t like Mills’s decision to portray the ship’s captain as working class, preferring the idea of a classless future.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first – in a litany of poor creative decisions that can be laid directly at Eric Saward’s feet, making Timelash over this is one of the most inexcusable. It is flat-out inconceivable how any remotely sane or reasonable script editor could look at Timelash next to this script and conclude that Timelash was going to work better. The Twin Dilemma was an aggregate of brain-searingly bad decisions, but I’m not convinced that any given decision, and particularly any given one of Saward’s decisions about The Twin Dilemma was prima facie worse than this.

It is not that Song of Megaptera is a flawless story.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 30 (Doctor In Distress)

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I have for the most part avoided significant discussion of Ian Levine, typically gesturing to the fact that eventually I’d do this post. So let’s take the bull by the horns here and lay this question out in its most damningly blunt form: can Ian Levine be blamed for Doctor Who’s cancellation?

This is, of course, terribly unfair. Although no Gareth Jenkins, there’s something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth about a sustained attack on Ian Levine’s role in the series’ history. At the end of the day, Levine in 1985 was a 30-year-old geek and acted the part. He was a poor spokesman for Doctor Who in the public eye, yes. But more than anything one feels bad for him for being put there in the first place. His biggest problem, in many ways, was that he played the role that the cancellation crisis cast him in – slightly maladapted uberfan – too well.

I’d also be lying if I said that, as a 29-year-old socially maladapted Doctor Who fan, I didn’t have at least some visceral understanding of where Levine was coming from. Being an angry geek in 2012 is easy. There’s a whole Internet for hard-headedly arguing on. And adamant as I am that one argues on the Internet for the entertainment of the lurkers, I’m not nearly daft enough to pretend that I don’t like getting to vent obsessively on forums. Where do you think I learned to write 2000 words a day? I’ve been drawn inexorably into being a hard-nosed tit in Internet arguments too many times not to understand Levine. Time warp me into 1985 with no Internet to argue on and give me an in with the production office of Doctor Who and I’d probably smash a television as a publicity stunt too. At least Levine holds down steady employment, which is, let’s face it, more than we can say for my overeducated ass.

And so to some extent one is left wanting to let sleeping dogs lie. 1985 was a long time ago. Ian Levine is nearly 60 now. At some point one has to stop blaming someone for dumb shit they did in their early 30s. And if nothing else, the 1985 crisis is a footnote in the history of a wildly successful show. Perhaps lingering axes to grind exist among those who were making the show – or at least those who are still with us – but it’s tough to say that we the chattering public still have anything at stake in this fight. We’re not so much beating a dead horse as beating the empty space where once a horse carcass lay. These days Levine is mostly just another bloke with a Twitter who says stupid things about Doctor Who or DC Comics occasionally. So really, I’m one to talk.

And so I’ve avoided going too far into Ian Levine. But he can’t be avoided entirely. For one thing, he presents himself as a central player in this time period to this day.…

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Outside the Government 3 (A Fix With Sontarans)

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All right chums, time’s up. Let’s do this.

This was written both before the Jimmy Saville scandal broke and before anything from Richard Marson’s book about John Nathan-Turner leaked. The former alone would have required a complete rewrite of the post. The latter would have required some discussion somewhere in the blog. In tandem, they render this post almost completely beside the point, and it will receive a full rewrite in the book version eventually. Until then, enjoy the most obsolete post on the blog.

Doctor Who fandom is spectacularly bitchy. Sometimes – even often – this is a virtue. Mind  you, it’s an often misunderstood virtue. For one thing, the bitchiness is often mistaken as actual dislike, sometimes to puzzling effect. (The most obvious example here is people who take Moffat’s somewhat infamous interview comments about the classic series as actual dislike for the classic series) It’s not, and the central joke of almost all of fandom’s bitchy, snarky comments about bits of Doctor Who is that despite the obvious faults of the series we love it to pieces. Even with the really terrible episodes that we claim to actively hate there’s the underlying joke that we’ve watched them a dozen times and have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of how crap they are. The fact that this involves being vicious to Doctor Who is almost incidental – after all, for most of the active history of fandom everybody thought Doctor Who was kind of crap. Doctor Who fandom, unusually for a fandom, has tended to favor ostentatiously loving the show in spite of it being crap over trying to defend Timelash, and really, who’s going to fault them for it.

But, and it’s a big but, there are times when the bitchiness of fandom tips into a bit of a dark side. And to be frank, this is one of them. A Fix With Sontarans is widely mocked and hated. And this is, if not inaccurate, more than a little unfair. Let’s start with the context. A Fix With Sontarans is a mini-episode shot for the show Jim’ll Fix It, in which the late Jimmy Saville extravagantly grants the wishes of people who write in. And in the case of A Fix With Sontarans, a kid named Gareth Jenkins wanted to be on Doctor Who, so Eric Saward lashed together a little TARDIS-set mini episode featuring the Sontarans, which they had around at the time for The Two Doctors. Nicola Bryant wasn’t available for filming it, so they roped in Janet Fielding. The plot is exactly the sort of thing that people do for something like this – the Sontarans and Gareth both get teleported onto the TARDIS, Gareth helps save the day, there’s a cute bit about how he’ll apparently someday be a great military leader against the Sontarans.

It’s crap, of course, but it’s crap in the exact ways you’d expect it to be. Gareth Jenkins can’t act at all and is utterly timid. Colin Baker got the script late enough that he was forced to scribble lines on the console.…

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Am I Becoming One Of Your Angels (Revelation of the Daleks)

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“Actually, come to think of it, Eric Saward has never
written for vegetables. That does kind of make me jealous.”

It’s March 23rd, 1985. Philip Barley and Phil Collins are at number one with “Easy Lover.” Madonna, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston,  David Cassidy, and Nik Kershaw all also chart. Lower in the charts, Billy Bragg, The Smiths, and The Damned chart. In real news, ummm… actually all I’ve got, and I regret that I am not making this up, is that production of the Sinclair C5 electric tricycle is suspended. That’s all we’ve got. Sorry. Let’s move to television and Revelation of the Daleks.

What is most interesting about Revelation of the Daleks is that, other than the fact that it’s rubbish, it’s one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever. This is, to some extent, just a restatement of our theme for Season 22 – that every story in it is a brilliant story about how terrible a story it is. Consider, for instance, the sequence in the first episode that pulls back from the Doctor and Peri to the DJ watching the Doctor and Peri to Davros watching the DJ watch the Doctor and Peri. It’s a thing of absolute beauty – one of the most narratively complex sequences in the classic series. And it’s merely the most clever of a bunch of intense clevernesses. This whole story is about passing control of the narrative around and about who does and doesn’t have authority over what’s going on.

The best Dalek stories involve unleashing the Doctor and the Daleks into someone else’s story – a drama about a space colony, the Forsythe Saga, a World War II movie (I’m talking about Genesis, not Victory), or, more recently, a bunch of reality programs, The Invasion, or Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures, and a sitcom starring Catherine Tate that Catherine Tate is taking a week off from. Superficially, at least, Revelation of the Daleks mirrors that structure. Indeed, it’s on the whole a very straightforward and competent execution of that structure, well-directed by Graham Harper. Episode one shows us the world of Necros, episode two shows us Daleks slaughtering everybody on the world of Nekros. But there’s something ever so slightly wrong about this, and for that we need to look deeper at the notion of control of television.

There’s an important technological shift to note in a discussion of control over television that happened over the course of the early 1980s, which was the mainstream adoption of the remote control. It’s easiest to compare this to earlier television technology. When, in 1971, Doctor Who did a story with a bunch of very fast cuts among things and called it The Claws of Axos, the effect was that of a strange assemblage of imagery. That is, the somewhat confusing, rapid cuts around the Axon spaceship had the effect of creating an overall collage. This is because a 1971 television wasn’t built to change channels quickly – you had to get up and change it.…

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By No Means The Most Interesting (Timelash)

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This shot is a redemptive reading all on its own.

It’s March 9th, 1985. Dead or Alive are spinning right round. Like a record, baby. They continue to spin all story long, with Madonna, Prince, and Jermaine Jackson also charting. In news, Mikhail Gorbachev takes over in the Soviet Union, and Mohammed Al Fayed takes over Harrods. Riots break out at the FA Cup quaterfinal between Luton Town and Millwall, presaging ominously the Heysel Stadium disaster that summer.

While on television, Timelash.

Ah. Timelash. Apparently the second worst Doctor Who story ever. Indeed, its flaws are obvious – it’s in many ways The Horns of Nimon only with Paul Darrow instead of Graham Crowden, and while Darrow’s solution to the problem of the script is much the same as Crowden’s, he lacks the sheer mass of cured pork necessary to pull it off completely. For what it’s worth, this isn’t the second worst Doctor Who story by some margin – let’s put it at the very least behind both Warriors of the Deep and The Celestial Toymaker. But it’s tough to argue this works, even if it’s not quite as bad as its reputation. Never mind that, though. I remain not terribly interested in discussing the quality of Season 22 directly. Instead let’s talk about something that’s much odder than people tend to make it out to be about this story: Herbert.

It is worth observing that the model of “the Doctor teams up with a figure from history to fight aliens” was actually invented by Pip and Jane Baker for The Mark of the Rani, then reiterated in the next story filmed, namely Timelash. Yes, the historicals involved meetings between the Doctor and historical figures, but those were just that – historicals. Given that King John was a duplicate, George Stephenson is actually the first historical figure the Doctor encountered at all since 1966, and the first ever outside of a pure historical. Nowadays we’re used to this, with the historical figure team-up happening a minimum of once a season, but it’s remarkable that this model didn’t exist prior to 1985. Nobody remembers to put Mark of the Rani and Timelash on their list of Doctor Who stories that changed everything. (And both deserve credit, as there’s no way to seriously argue that one inspired the other.)

The relevance of George Stephenson as a choice can probably be put down to the quirks of Pip and Jane Baker as writers – it is consistent with their general aesthetic. More interesting, for my money, is H.G. Wells. Wells is lionized as a the father of modern science fiction, which is interesting given that almost nobody talks about any of his books following The First Men in the Moon in 1901. Indeed, Wells is an excessively sanitized character, the popular accounts of him largely treating him as a sort of pleasantly eccentric proto-steampunk figure instead of the aggressively socialist writer he actually was.

So what we have here is a defanged and largely pointless version of the father of science fiction appearing in a defanged and largely pointless imitation of scads of classic Doctor Who stories.…

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A Well-Prepared Meal (The Two Doctors)

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Before we start, I just wanted to give everyone an update on the Troughton book – and this seems the appropriate post to do it in. I’ve switched to paying someone to copyedit in the hopes that it will reduce the number of infelicities that creep into the text. Unfortunately, that person is booked through to July, which means that the book is probably looking at a fall release.

That said, once I finish the first draft on the Wonder Woman book this summer I am taking a few months to do revisions on a couple of projects – both getting some proper academic work, and doing my revisions and additions to the Pertwee, Baker, and Davison/Baker volumes one after another and with the ability to focus on them as a main project instead of as something I’m fitting around the blog and another book. So while the wait for Volume 2 of TARDIS Eruditorum is going to be longer than I’d hoped, the wait for volumes 3-5 should be considerably shorter.

On to the post.

That’s right, it’s the same picture again.
It’s one way of learning visual literacy!

It’s February 16th, 1985. Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson remain at number one, remaining there for all three weeks of this story. Kirsty MacColl, The Commodores, and Howard Jones also chart. More inspiring are the album charts, where The Smiths’ landmark Meat is Murder debuts at number one in what is one of the most perfect thematic convergence of music charts and Doctor Who in some time.

In real news, William J Schroeder is the first person to receive an artificial heart and leave the hospital. It doesn’t go terribly well, admittedly, but it happens. EastEnders starts, and the day after the story ends the miner’s strike ends. Oh, and Doctor Who gets cancelled. Damn.

When last we looked at this story the question was whether or not it functioned meaningfully as a Patrick Troughton story, and it was found wanting. Lucky for it, then, that its primary job was not to function as a Troughton story but as a Colin Baker story, a job that it performs markedly better at. Especially so under the model I’ve been approaching the series under – indeed, the “Baker era as exorcism” theory has, perhaps, no evidence better than this.

It can hardly be called a surprise. I said we’d have to drop the “no talking about the production team” rule for this story, so let’s go ahead and point out that this is a Robert Holmes script. Holmes is always a nice writer to deal with as a critic simply because the authorial intent objection falls away. Holmes is a smart and clever enough writer to have intended much of what we’ll find here, and it’s only the alchemical embellishments that strike me as at all improbable.

The key detail is the part of the story everyone seems most ready to ignore – the Sontarans. Apparently Holmes was not terribly thrilled at the instruction to include the Sontarans, but was eventually mollified by Eric Saward pointing out that nobody had done them right since he created them.…

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