For The Sake Of An Angel (Love and War)
I’ll Explain Later
We have skipped both Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark and Nightshade. The former wraps up the Cat’s Cradle trilogy by having the Doctor acquire some needed “organic material” from a story that is otherwise about getting fairies and unicorns into Doctor Who. The latter is Mark Gatiss’s debut novel, and is quite well-regarded, but the consensus was that I could skip it and so I did. For those keeping track at home, we are now at two writers who made writing debuts in the New Adventures range and who then went on to write for the television series. Next Friday Gareth Roberts will make it three.
Love and War is the ninth New Adventure, and the first by a returning author, namely Paul Cornell. It features the temporary departure of Ace, as she storms out of the TARDIS, enraged at the Doctor for deliberately sacrificing the life of her lover to stop the bad guys (the Hoothi, a race of manipulative fungus). It also features the debut of Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, the New Adventures’ signature companion. It is phenomenally well-regarded, coming in as the ninth-best New Adventure on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, with a rating of 79.4%. I, Who calls it “a paradigm shift” that is “another triumph for author Paul Cornell.” Reviews at the time were similarly enthusiastic, with Garry Russell proclaiming it “probably the most mature and intelligent o the run so far.” It is sufficiently beloved that Big Finish are adapting it into an audio play in October, the first time that a novel has been adapted to audio without also being changed to remove the Doctor. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s October of 1992. The Shamen are at number one with “Ebeneezer Goode,” lasting two weeks before Tasmin Archer unseats them with “Sleeping Satellite.” Two weeks later Boyz II Men take number one with “End of the Road.” Lionel Richie, Prince, and Bob Marley and the Wailers also chart, along with Madonna’s “Erotica.” In albums, R.E.M. do quite well for themselves with Automatic for the People, and rightly so. A fun fact – the two highest-charting R.E.M. singles in the UK are the utterly uninteresting “The Great Beyond” and the brilliant but unheralded “E-Bow the Letter,” both from well after their commercial peak in the US.
Since Warhead, Lindy Chamberlain is finally acquitted for murder on the grounds that dingoes did, in fact, eat her baby. This is actually mildly relevant to Doctor Who, as four years earlier a film of this case, Evil Angels, was produced by Verity Lambert’s film company Cinema Verity. Yitzhak Rabin became Prime Minister of Israel. Hurricane Andrew thrashed Florida, and Black Wednesday took place as the UK was forced to withdraw the pound sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which is about it for the Tory government, which had the fortune of having just won an election and thus getting to hang on for five years despite nobody liking them anymore.
While in October… erm… you’ve got the Sinéad O’Connor pope photo ripping thing.…