TARDIS Eruditorum

It’s August of 2002. Gareth Gates is at number one with “Anyone Of Us (Stupid Mistake).” That lasts a week before Darius’s “Colourblind” unseats it for two weeks followed by Sugababes’s “Round Round,” and, on the last day of the month, Blazin Squad’s “Crossroads.” Shakira, Vanessa Carlton, Nelly, Ashanti, Linkin Park, P. Diddy, Will Smith, and Coldplay also chart.

In the month between Neverland and this, the International Criminal Court was established, and WorldCom went belly up. While this month Central Europe was hit by bad floods. This is the extent of what Wikipedia says about August of 2002. The page for 2002 in the UK has day-by-day updates on the murder of two ten-year-old girls, but really that’s just not the direction I like to go in with these.

While in books, Camera Obscura. We have, of late, been keeping one eye on the future in the blog. There are reasons for that, most notably that we’re inches away from arriving into it. But it has obscured one of the original modes of analysis of this blog, which is the analysis of Doctor Who within the context that it’s made. Again, I am mostly at peace with that, if only because the context in which the wilderness years can be examined is so misleading. But let’s take one final opportunity to draw a curtain over the future and take a piece of the wilderness years on their own terms. And what better choice than the best Eighth Doctor Adventure we’re going to look at – the consensus second best Eighth Doctor Adventure by the consensus best writer. This is the best the wilderness years got. So let’s take the book entirely on the terms of its time.

We have largely obscured the degree to which this Sabbath plotline did not work, mainly by looking mostly at the two books where it does work. In The Adventuress of Henrietta Street Sabbath is a credible alternative to the Doctor. But it’s more important to realize how that book contrasts Sabbath with the Master. Sabbath is not the Doctor’s opposite but his tentative replacement: the post-Time Lord universe’s version of what the Doctor was to the pre-Ancestor Cell continuity. He pointedly exists outside the Doctor/Master opposition, which is the entire reason Miles brought the Master into The Adventuress of Henrietta Street in the first place. Unfortunately, as with every other idea Miles contributed to the Eighth Doctor Adventures, hardly anyone picked up on it meaningfully. Sabbath appeared in subsequent books, but as exactly the sort of cut-rate Master clone that he was designed not to be.

And then there’s Camera Obscura, one of two books to break the rule that nobody ever picks up meaningfully on Miles’s stuff. (The other is The Taking of Planet Five, one of several front-runners for the book version.) This is not surprising. Lloyd Rose rapidly established herself as the find of the latter half of the Eighth Doctor Adventures with The City of the Dead, and so was inevitably going to be rewarded with a big plot book if she wanted one.…

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It’s June of 2002. As it feels so empty without him, Eminem is at number one. Things empty fast, as Will Young takes over with “Light My Fire.” Two weeks after that is Elvis vs JXL with “A Little Less Conversation,” which plays out McGann’s second season. Atomic Kitten, Enrique, Ant and Dec, Kylie Minogue, Nelly, Scooter, and Oasis also chart. And in news, a ten meter-wide object casually explodes over the Mediterranean Sea. Also, the sun goes dark. Thankfully, they’re totally unrelated. Also, the US Congress admits that the telephone was actually invented five years before Alexander Graham Bell by Antonio Meucci.

While on audio we have McGann’s second “season finale,” Neverland. Doctor Who, prior to the new series, was never good at the season finale in the contemporary “wrap up all the plot lines” sense. In total the number of times it’s solidly stuck the landing in capping off a story arc number about two – Enlightenment and Timewyrm: Revelation. It’s not always that the efforts are bad – No Future, for instance, is a charming book, albeit the weakest of Cornell’s first four New Adventures, and So Vile a Sin is a tour de force that was wrecked only by its scheduling problems. But past that you have lackluster efforts like Lungbarrow, The Ancestor Cell, and, to go back a bit further, The Armageddon Factor or Trial of a Time Lord.

Indeed, the history of Doctor Who is, up to the point we’re at now, mostly a series of exceedingly good cases against the entire logic of metaplots. They’ve never actually gone well for the series. And not just in the “one bum installment” problem that any serialized work is going to have: Doctor Who has consistently, when getting to the end of its metaplots, failed spectacularly to stick the landing.

And it’s not even that Neverland is bad. At least twenty minutes too long, sure, but not entirely unpleasant. The problem is really that, conceptually, it’s a damp squib at best. Gallifrey is facing the greatest crisis in its history, all of time is unraveling, and oh look, we’ve got some fresh new revelations about Rassilon. Fantastic. I mean, Doctor Who was really hurting for all of these things.

It would be one thing if Neverland actually had anything new to say about any of these ideas. It doesn’t of course, a fact that may or may not be related to the fact that there is nothing whatsoever new to say about any of these ideas because they are mediocre ideas that have been done to death. (Shall we recall the funniest sequence Kate Orman and Jon Blum ever wrote, in which “Dark Sam” plays up the Doctor’s dark and mysterious past to some villains, prompting the Doctor to ask how she knew all of that, to which she replies that it was just the plot of a Babylon 5 episode she’d seen once?) But there’s not having anything new to say and there’s the lengths of superficial banality that Neverland shoots for in its concept, and, unnervingly, the latter is by far the more impressive.…

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It’s May of 2002. Sugarbabes are at number one with “Freak Like Me.” That lasts a week before Holly Valance takes number one with “Kiss Kiss,” followed by Ronan Keating’s “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” and finally Liberty X’s “Just a Little.” *NSync, S Club Juniors, Mary J Blige, and Pink also chart. In news, a lengthy standoff at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ends. East Timor attains independence. And the Mars Odyssey Rover finds signs of water ice on Mars.

While in specialty shops, Time of the Daleks. For the second time in this “season” of McGann stories, we have to start by remembering that Jubilee hasn’t come out yet. Just as Shearman’s work in Embrace the Darkness is clearly waiting to really break out massively with Jubilee, it’s impossible to look at Time of the Daleks without feeling like its central idea is one that Jubilee did better. At its heart this is Perversity of the Daleks – a story whose raison d’être is having the Daleks do things that feel utterly wrong. And it succeeds. Daleks quoting Shakespeare is gorgeously, deliciously perverse. It’s a brilliant idea, and it in and of itself justifies Time of the Daleks as a story.

The trouble is, and this is what Jubilee figured out a year later, is that if you’re going to do a story based around a moment of perverse wrongness, you need to figure out how to stretch that moment of wrongness and produce variations on it. Jubilee starts out wrong and careens progressively downwards into sicker and more twisted options until you get to properly wonderful moments like the Daleks brutally slaughtering a bunch of little people while archly noting that “Daleks do not sing.” But all Time of the Daleks really has is “Ooh, isn’t it kind of kinky to have Daleks quoting Shakespeare?” And then, after a few minutes of that, it’s out. It’s got nothing other than a very traditional Dalek story.

Which would be one thing if Big Finish hadn’t done three of those in its first year, knocking out the Dalek Empire trilogy to which this story is an ostensible sequel. So now, eighteen months after the third one of those, we get another Dalek story that plays at the idea that it might do something unusual with the concept for about an episode, then dutifully goes back to being Dalek Empire, Part Four. But that’s not the world we’re in. This is the fourth Big Finish Dalek story. We weren’t starved for Daleks anymore. And so bringing them back for the fourth time in two years – a rate unseen since the 1965-67 stretch of The Chase through Evil of the Daleks – seems like it should require a more substantial new idea, as opposed to this Shakespeare business, which feels like a bare minimum refresh.

Yes, it’s also Paul McGann’s first Dalek story, which livens things a bit. But it also, in many ways, just highlights the problem. What’s the point of giving every Doctor a Dalek story if you’re just going to do the exact same story every time?…

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It’s April of 2002. Gareth Gates is at number one with “Unchained Melody,” which lasts almost the whole month before Oasis unseat them with “The Hindu Times.” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Nickelback, Marilyn Manson, Britney Spears, and Shakira also chart. Christ, so much for historicization. In news, a military coup to unseat Hugo Chávez fails, and the Queen Mother’s funeral takes place.

Audios, then. It’s more than a little jarring to go from Seasons of Fear to Embrace the Darkness. The Eighth Doctor audios hadn’t done something so self-consciously sci-fi since The Sword of Orion, and that was a deliberately nostalgic throwback. Here there’s less of a clear sense of that. Embrace the Dark is old-fashioned, yes, but it doesn’t trade on an explicit image of the past in the same way that The Sword of Orion does, or even, for that matter, in the same way that Seasons of Fear did. And yet it still feels out of place. Why?

The first thing to realize is that it’s a story at odds with its medium. And, more to the point, that its medium is actually relatively new.  Two-CD sets featuring self-contained four episode audio adventures aren’t something that really has a lot of precedent. Sure, radio drama does, and books on tape do, but this isn’t either of those. Unlike radio drama, it’s not serialized or transmitted live. Unlike books on tape, it’s not an adaptation of something else. So the shape and structure of it are up in the air. On top of that, the audios are fundamentally tied to the structure and logic of classic Doctor Who, which is to say, everything must be a four-parter of approximately half-hour parts.

The result of this, or at least a result of this is that the basic structure of the audios is at times wonky. For instance, there’s a pretty good Doctor Who structure in which each of the four episodes represent a different phase of the story, with cliffhangers that reveal new information that change the stakes. For television, at least, it’s a good structure, albeit with some flaws. But those flaws are largely intrinsic to any episodically serialized story – mainly that the half-hour format is a straitjacket. But there’s always a structure, and you learn to write to your structure.

The problem, however, is that the structure exists to solve the problems of serialization. The “change the premise slightly every episode” approach ultimately developed as a response to the failings of structure and pacing in much of the Hartnell era, where stories would often expand or contract arbitrarily to fill the space allotted to them, with little thought about how to structure them on an episode-by-episode level. And it’s a reaction against the slow pace of serialization. Terror of the Zygons – to pick a story that really embraces the “change the tone weekly” approach well – does it in part so that after four weeks of Zygons the audience is still fresh.

Embrace the Darkness is perfectly structured along these lines.…

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It’s March of 2002. Westlife are at number one with “World of Our Own,” which goes a week before Will Young takes over with “Anything is Possible/Evergreen.” This lasts almost to the end of the month, but Gareth Gates’s “Unchained Melody” ends up playing us out. Kylie Minogue, R Kelly, Shakira, Nickelback, Ali G and Shaggy, Celine Dion, Marilyn Manson, and Natalie Imbruglia also chart. In news, the US war in Afghanistan goes on, though really, it’s not like I’m going to write that for every entry for the remainder of the blog. Milly Dowler goes missing, which will turn out to have impressive effects on the British newspaper industry. And the Queen Mother dies, it being another bad year for the monarchy.

And in specialty shops, Seasons of Fear. There is a problem that plagues writers. It manifests in one of the most depressing comments imaginable from readers: I liked your old stuff better. Nobody likes being told this. And understandably so, given that its distinct implication is that you’re washed up and past your prime. It applies to all forms of art, really. But there’s a real problem underlying the complaint: people early on in their careers have a hunger and an ambition that often fades with critical and financial success. Even a very good writer like Neil Gaiman suffers from it: once he hit mainstream American success with American Gods he entered a decade-long fallow period in which he did virtually nothing that wasn’t predictable and catered to his existing fanbase, and it was only when he was put in the position of writing for an audience that hadn’t heard of him, and with an editor who was as accomplished a writer as he was that he turned out The Doctor’s Wife. (And notably, this, along with marriage, seems to have given him a late career spring in his step.

But there’s another and somewhat bleaker reason this happens, which is that some artists fuel their best work with anger or depression and, as they mature, grow to be altogether stabler and happier people. And in terms of his Doctor Who work, Paul Cornell largely has that problem. His first four New Adventures are all brilliant, but they’re animated in a large part by Cornell’s tangible anger in the period. When, later in the New Adventures, he settled down and wrote his comedy books like Happy Endings and Oh No It Isn’t!, both of which are terribly fun, but neither of which have anything like the impactful heft of Love and War, little yet Human Nature.

Cornell has said that he wrote The Shadow of the Scourge and The Shadows of Avalon from a very dark place, and it shows. Both are flawed works, but they very much rekindle the crackling passion of his early New Adventures. But by Seasons of Fear Cornell had gotten his head screwed back on, was working with his girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancee Caroline Symcox, and was largely back to the more comedy-adventure mode of his latter New Adventures.…

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It’s February of 2002. Enrique is at number one with “Hero,” which lasts the entire month. Britney Spears, George Harrison, Pink, Ja Rule, No Doubt, Alien Ant Farm, Brandy, S Club 7, and Victoria Beckham also chart. In news, the Golden Jubilee proper happens, as do the Mitt Romney Winter Olympics. Slobodan Miloševi?’s trial begins at the Hague. And Princess Margaret dies of a stroke.

While on audio CDs, we have one of the highlights of the McGann era: Rob Shearman’s The Chimes of Midnight. If Invaders from Mars was frustrating for its lack of places to hook critical analysis onto, The Chimes of Midnight is at least a story where we’re spoiled for choice. Rob Shearman is a critic’s writer; his stories are dense with themes and references, bristling with self-awareness and commentary. They almost compel a critical response. In a way it poses its own problem. Invaders from Mars prompts little at all, existing in such a way as to defy speech. The Chimes of Midnight is almost more dangerous: it is a work that is capable of dictating its own critical response. It’s terribly easy to write an entry that is exactly what you’d expect a critical look at The Chimes of Midnight of being.

Critics hate this sort of thing. I was talking with my co-author on the They Might Be Giants book the other day about the way in which art rock is lacking in academic respect in a large part because it self-analyzes, and in doing so defies critique. The cynical explanation for this is that we hate being made obsolete. The more worked through explanation is that there’s a value to critique being independent of the work, and the self-awareness of art rock and other such self-critiquing forms is a barrier to that.

But these objections omit the possibility that there’s a reason for self-awareness beyond controlling the critique. The Chimes of Midnight is a prime example. Yes, it’s terribly self-aware, but this is part of Shearman’s basic theme for Doctor Who. All of his stories focus on confined worlds. The Chimes of Midnight is a prime example, taking place across just over two hours in the servants’ quarters of one house, although those two hours happen several times. But more than its limited space and time, The Chimes of Midnight, again like much of Shearman’s work, is focused on the constraints of our internal worlds. As the story unfolds it becomes increasingly clear that we are not so much in the basement of a house as in the internal psychic world of one of its inhabitants.

This works very, very well on audio, especially modern audio. The survival and, to a real extent, proliferation of audio as a narrative medium in recent years stems from one simple fact: it’s terribly good for a commute or an exercise routine. The Big Finish audios are overwhelmingly listened to in cars or through headphones. This makes audio an unusually claustrophobic medium these days. Unlike the screen-contained video, audio surrounds us in a tight bubble of diegesis.…

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It’s January of 2002. Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman are at number one with “Something Stupid.” Daniel Bedingfield unseats them a week later with “Gotta Get Through This,” then Aaliyah’s posthumous “More Than A Woman,” which was in turn unseated by the posthumous rerelease of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Clearly a month for nostalgia and digging things up after their time for sentimental reasons. I wonder who’s writing the story this month. In any case, S Club 7, Kate Winslet, Puretone, Pink, Dr. Dre, and the Chemical Brothers also chart. In news, the Euro enters circulation. Daniel Pearl, an American reporter, is kidnapped in Pakistan and eventually murdered. And it’s the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, if you’re into that sort of thing.

While on CDs you can buy in specialty shops, Paul McGann kicks off his second “season” as the Eighth Doctor with Mark Gatiss’s Invaders From Mars. I’ve already largely tipped my hand on this: I am decidedly not a fan of most of Mark Gatiss’s output. Invaders from Mars, however, presents an unusual sort of problem. Unlike Gatiss’s worst moments, it is at least not blatantly offensive. It avoids, for instance, accidentally backing the British National Party. Its storytelling is, by many reasonable arguments, deeply flawed, but there’s a reasonable case to be made that those flaws are more accurately described as a difference of aesthetics.

More than almost any other writer in the wilderness years, and certainly more than any other writer of the new series, Mark Gatiss has an aesthetic of nostalgia. Under many circumstances this would be outright unbearable. Gatiss was prone to a self-conscious embrace of the “trad” aesthetic, most notably in things like Last of the Gaderene, in which he does an almost note-perfect imitation of the Pertwee era. There are few writers who can be said to pull this off well. But whatever objections I might have to Gatiss’s work at large, it’s difficult to argue seriously that he wasn’t good at it. He wrote rarely, but his were among the most beloved of “trad” novels.

Part of this is that, although he is ruthlessly nostalgic, he has considerable range in his nostalgia. There’s a bit of a classical sensibility to his nostalgia; it reaches back to stuff that was already fairly old when Gatiss was a child. Gatiss is at home being nostalgic for Victorian fiction, 1950s sci-fi television, and World War II movies. It doesn’t make him any less prone to uncritical recitations of the things he’s nostalgic for, but it adds a pleasant sort of variety to proceedings. Invaders from Mars largely trades on this. It is, first and foremost, a piece of nostalgia for 1930s American radio. The result is that for all its traditionalism, it’s unlike anything else the McGann audios do. It’s terribly old-fashioned, but it’s so old-fashioned as to end up being reasonably creative.

It’s also, as with the best nostalgia, a meditation on tone rather than content. As a result, there’s a bit of a hodgepodge to it.…

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We should begin with context. The Adventuress of Henrietta street was released in November of 2001. Songs to reach number one in the charts that month included Afroman’s “Because I Got High,” Westlife’s “Queen of My Heart,” and Blue’s “If You Come Back,” while other artists to chart included Kylie Minogue, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Lopez, Cher, the Dandy Warhols, Destiny Child.

News stories over the few months before the book came out included the execution of Timothy McVeigh in the US, the sentencing of Jeffrey Archer, the launch of Windows XP, 9/11, and the introduction of the iPod. The month the book came out, on the other hand, the Police Service of Northern Ireland replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and, actually, that’s about it – not a terribly exciting month.

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a uniquely problematic novel, and a proper understanding of it is only possible through consultation with the various drafts of it that exist. These drafts are at times obscure and difficult to find, but taken together present a considerably more complete portrait of the work. Some things, for instance, can be ruled out decisively. The rumors, for instance, that there exists a fully narrative draft that discards the novel’s conceit of being written as a historical study of surviving documents is wholly false. Although Miles did, as is popularly reported, fail to mention this detail to Justin Richards when pitching the book, it is clearly a part of his basic concept. Simply put, the occult goals of the book would not be possible without such a conceit.

Ah yes. The occult goals. This is, after all, a novel in which the Doctor literally finds a whore to be his Scarlet Woman, and uses her in a grand alchemical wedding to root himself in the Earth. To accomplish this without the ambiguities and gaps introduced by the pseudo-historical would be a challenge, whereas the structural conceit allows Miles considerable leeway to work his spell by giving him considerable ability to leave things unsaid and to create moments of potent ambiguity. The false history, as a format, allows for fundamental manipulation of the nature of things.

Within the magical context of 2001, of course, to conduct such dramatics without at least some consultation with the dominant magical figures of the age would be foolish in the extreme. The earliest surviving manuscript of The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, in fact, survives in Alan Moore’s papers. Moore, who was in the final stages of producing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when the manuscript crossed his desk, was none too pleased with aspects of the book, and wrote Miles a detailed account of his objections.

Moore’s letter to Miles, at a mere twenty-nine pages, is uncharacteristically perfunctory, betraying a deeper sense of frustration than his public comments, or lack thereof, would indicate. It is evident that Moore took Miles’s manuscript extremely personally, and that his reservations were substantial. A representative passage:

As you of all people must know, when someone writes about an incident after it’s happened, that is history.

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