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Outside the Government 8 (Dead Romance)

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Dead Romance is, it seems, the best Lawrence Miles novel ever. Possibly the best Doctor Who-related novel ever. And so, whatever the larger argument I may be making about Lawrence Miles’s failings are, and I am, in fact, making one, we should probably stop and sort out the fact that this is bloody fantastic. Because it is. Whatever the flaws of the Morrison/Miles approach in general, Dead Romance is a book that works and works very well, and it illustrates the things that approach can do.

What everybody praises about Dead Romance is its twist ending. So here’s the thing. I kind of hate twist endings and, if someone were foolish enough to give me despotic powers over all fiction, I would impose a ten-year moratorium on them along with creepy children and procedurals with social misfit lead characters. The problem with twist endings is that they’re cheap. They’re a cheap way to get out of having to write an ending that actually follows from what comes before. They’re what you do when you can’t actually resolve what you have in an interesting fashion – you decide in the last act that you’re going to throw everything away and establish a new premise for your story.

And yet Dead Romance actually makes it work. There are a couple tricks here. The first is that the narrator is complicit in the deception. This makes a big difference, simply because it means that the deception is thoroughly motivated. When the book pulls the rug out from under us it does so for reasons that are intimately related to the things that Christine has wanted all book, most notably to feel as though she’s real. Everything about why she’d be lying to the reader is set up early on. Furthermore, the revelation itself is set up early on. The revelation that Christine is inside a bottle universe from the rest of the Virgin line is essentially the same revelation as the one that she was just a clone grown by Cwej.

Secondly, it turns on an entirely believable revelation about a character we already know. Cwej is a known quantity to readers of the New Adventures, even if he hadn’t actually appeared in a while. And while we might want to believe that he would never do the sorts of things depicted here, the fact of the matter is that it’s all too easy to believe that he could get this far in over his head and make decisions this bad. It’s quintessential Cwej, tragically enough. And because the twist hinges on that, it avoids the feeling of arbitrariness that plagues some twist endings.

Thirdly, and crucially, it ends up making Christine a more interesting character. Through most of the book we assume she’s the lone survivor of the world, which is interesting but arbitrary. We’re looking at the world through the eyes of the one person who happened to be lucky enough not to die. Fair enough, but ultimately arbitrary. But by establishing that she’s a clone with implanted memories we get a reason why she should survive, which is that she’s not really of the world in the first place.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 52 (The Invisibles)

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That I’d have to deal with Grant Morrison before tackling Lawrence Miles in full is obvious. They are, of course, constantly compared. But exactly why is actually a bit tricky. Miles, at least, has been a bit grumpy about this in interviews, snarking, “Oh, that’s right. Start suggesting links between my books and the work of Grant Morrison, why don’t you? It’s not like I’ve heard that before.” And yet there’s not an obvious point of similarity besides a (largely undeserved) reputation for being complex and full of ideas. And yet the comparison is irresistible. Even before I’d gotten around to reading any of Miles’s books I knew, implicitly, that the point where I dealt with Interference was also when I was going to deal with Grant Morrison. Something about them seems inexorable and impossible to disentangle. And having worked my way through quite a lot of Lawrence Miles now, the connection seems at once more obscure and more straightforward. The fact of the matter is that there is little particularly Morrisonesque about Miles’s work beyond the fact that both of them are a bit mad and cerebral.

So, the big Grant Morrison post, in which we look at his work. Except, as I’ve already noted, that’s a monstrous rabbit hole. I don’t want to derail this blog into a meticulous study of Grant Morrison. But equally, he is an important influence on sci-fi media, and it’s impossible not to deal with him. So let’s look, with fantastic superficiality, at Morrison’s magnum opus, namely The Invisibles. The Invisibles is a comic series published from 1994 to the start of 2000 in which Morrison depicts a magical war between the Invisibles, punk anarchist magicians, and the Outer Church, paragons of order and conformity. It’s a philosophically dense and convoluted work – in no way incoherent, but undoubtedly difficult. The book is also notoriously semi-autobiographical; Morrison loves to boast about how he based most of The Invisibles on his own life experience as a practicing chaos magician, and about how the book in turn changed his life, with things he wrote taking place in his life. Which sets up what it is, but not what it’s like.

To be honest, for the most part, The Invisibles is a bit of a mess. Individual moments of splendor stick out, but the book is adept at self-sabotage and when it doesn’t take itself out in a spectacular own goal DC Comics/Vertigo are usually right behind it and ready to clean up. The crowning dishonor are issues 4-2 of the third series, which was published as a countdown to the millennium starting with issue #12 and ending with #1. Aside from overshooting due to delays and finishing six months past the millennium, the big climactic storyline in issues 4-2 were done as an artists’ jam of most of the artists to have worked on the series previously, along with a few others. Unfortunately the end result was sloppy, with several artists failing to follow directions and several more failing to be given them such that the actual plot and exposition of the series’ entire cosmology was hopelessly unclear.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 17 (Grant Morrison’s Doctor Who Comics)

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“Why,” one might reasonably ask, “are you suddenly doing late 80s Doctor Who Magazine comics featuring the Sixth and Seventh Doctors when you’re supposed to be hip-deep in the Eighth Doctor era?” And one would have a fair question. The answer, dear reader, is that we’re beginning a bit of a thing with this post: a four essay run that leads up to Lawrence Miles’s mad masterpiece Interference. The gameplan is simple: next Wednesday we do Interference. Monday we do the lead-in to it with Dead Romance, Miles’s second Benny New Adventure, albeit one without, you know, Benny in it. Friday, meanwhile, we’re going to do The Invisibles so that we can be ready for one of the major things people compare Lawrence Miles to, namely Grant Morrison. Which brings us around to today, where we finally get around to looking at the three Doctor Who comics Grant Morrison wrote in the late 80s, having skipped them at the time because, well, they just didn’t fit anywhere well.

It’s not that Grant Morrison isn’t an influence on Doctor Who. But he wasn’t at the time these comics came out, and he wasn’t going to be for a good long while. More to the point, he was nowhere near the approach anyone else was using for Doctor Who around this time. He didn’t really start making a splash on his own terms until the tail end of the Cartmel era, and the fact of the matter is that it was Alan Moore and then Neil Gaiman who was serving as the major influence for writers in the late 80s/early 90s. The first time you can really point at something and say “that’s Grant Morrison’s influence on Doctor Who” is Daniel O’Mahoney’s The Man in the Velvet Mask, which is blatantly taken from the second storyline of The Invisibles. So I held this back until now.

First, then, an overview on Grant Morrison. He’s one of the bigger names of the British Invasion of comics, and one of the first to make the jump to the US (his debut on Animal Man came in 1988, although he had some text pieces in 1986, which was the beginning of his mainstream career). He’s also a prominent magician/occultist, favoring the style of magic generally described as Chaos Magic, which first popped up in the late 1970s, and which we’ll talk about in more detail on Friday. He’s still quite active in comics, currently writing both a Batman and Superman title for DC, as well as having some creator-owned projects in the pipeline. And he’s endlessly linked to some big Hollywood deal or another, none of which ever seem to materialize.

Yes, if you think this all begs for a comparison to Alan Moore, you’re not wrong. Of course two prominent practicing magicians/British comics writers who emerged at around the same time get compared to each other. And more to the point, they don’t get on at all. Cards on the table: since the Moore/Morrison rivalry forms the spine of what will be my next sprawlingly over-large project after I finish TARDIS Eruditorum (still over a year away, so fear not), I can’t exactly leave it be.…

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If There Were Stars Up There, We’d Be Able to See Them, Wouldn’t We? (Unnatural History)

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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.

——

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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You Were Expecting Someone Else 16 (The Infinity Doctors)

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The Infinity Doctors, BBC Books’ 35th Anniversary book, presents the adventures of an unspecified version of the Doctor having adventures on Gallifrey, seemingly, but not necessarily prior to An Unearthly Child. The result, unsurprisingly, is wholly incommensurable with continuity. Cheekily, and typical of Parkin, he builds this out of an excessive loyalty to continuity. Parkin has noted that he built The Infinity Doctors by taking all of the Gallifrey stories at once and taking them seriously in such a way as to generate a tangled mess that makes internal sense but contradicts virtually everything outside of it. So if you try to place The Infinity Doctors as a prequel leading up to the series you run into the problem of Susan’s tangible absence. Repeated reference is made to Lungbarrow even though it provides an alternate theory of the Doctor’s departure from Gallifrey. The villain is nicked from The Three Doctors and another character from The Arc of Infinity, but both stories are nearly impossible to reconcile with the Time Lords’ relationship with Omega here. And so on and so forth. It’s all true, therefore none of it is.

As with Iris Wildthyme, the most interesting question is where the brakes get slammed on in this process. Parkin, after all, is not going to just casually destabilize the entire narrative of Doctor Who. The Infinity Doctors is carefully related to everything that’s going on around it even as it rebels and blows up all of the normal structures. The main clue, unsurprisingly, comes at the end, as the Doctor ponders the adventure here and comes to the conclusion that Gallifrey is unable to change and thus broken, and that he’s therefore going to have to go have adventures in time and space instead. So there we have it: the defining aspect of Doctor Who and what keeps it coherent is its mutability: the fact that it is subject to change.

In a purely factual sense, at least, this is more or less true. Doctor Who is still on the air in 2013 in a large part because Innes Lloyd took the decision in 1966 to recast the lead actor, thus allowing the show more or less completely free rein to change with the times. And while I might be the sort of person to quibble that this is perhaps somewhat flatter than a broad philosophical commitment to pleasure and fun in as many configurations as can be found, it seems unfair to complain merely that Parkin doesn’t have as thoroughly philosophic and theoretical a foundation as Paul Magrs.

Anyway, there’s a more interesting point to be made in all of this, which is that Parkin also constrains the extent of change. This takes place both on a pragmatic level – however much The Infinity Doctors may embrace change, it doesn’t throw anything from the past away. But more telling is its conclusion, in which the mind duel between the Doctor and Omega is resolved in part when the Doctor says that the power to rewrite anything renders it meaningless.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 15 (The Curse of Fatal Death)

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The Curse of Fatal Death is a 1998 comedy spoof of Doctor Who written by Steven Moffat. It’s also embedded below this paragraph. If we want to get accusatory, of course, it’s also a work of cynicism by somebody who doesn’t really like Doctor Who and only wants to mock what’s wrong with it. There is, puzzlingly, an entire line of thought about Moffat that works on this logic, insisting as it does that he does not actually like Doctor Who very much, and how he’s only interested in writing for it in order to show how smugly superior he is to it. Not that I think any of my quite respectable and sharp readers would actually go with this line of argument, even the camp that doesn’t like Moffat. But this is still a surprisingly persistent line of argument. 

Though for the sake of honesty, at least, we should probably admit that there are less adamant versions of the argument that we could make if we were so inclined, and that these versions are perhaps more compelling. Most of them would focus on the infamous tipsy ranting session he had with Paul Cornell, David Bishop, Andy Lane that got transcribed by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club for their fanzine Time Space Visualizer, in which he made several of his most trotted out quotes like, “If you look at the first episode of Doctor Who, that betrays the lie that it’s just the 60?s, because that first episode’s really good. The rest of it’s shit,” “some old actor like Tom Baker would come to a shuddering halt in the middle of the set and stare at the camera, because he can’t bear the idea that someone else is in the show,” and “You’ve got Patrick Troughton, who was a good actor, but his companions – how did they get their Equity card? They’re unimaginably bad.” These quotes do not endear Moffat to some people.

There are two defenses to mount here. The first is that the easier to find version of this ranting session is the one at the Doctor Who Interview Archive, which reformats it to look like an interview. It wasn’t – it was four fans drinking and bitching on tape. The DWIA version cuts out all the stuff that isn’t Moffat, and a fair amount of the stuff that is, completely losing the sense of tone and giving a terribly misleading sense of what was going on, making it sound like an interview where he was the center of attention. The full interview makes him come off much better, in part because it sets up the sort of conversation that was actually being had – one that Moffat is quiet for long stretches of. And he comes off much better in it.

But why reach for the weak defense. Let’s go for the strong one: he’s right. I mean, I love 1960s Doctor Who – and, crucially, so does Steven Moffat. But the Hartnell era is a mess.…

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A Cosmos Without Iris Wildthyme Scarcely Bears Thinking About

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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.

——

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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Rip This World Apart For Just One Cell (Alien Bodies)

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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.”

——

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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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 51 (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

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There are a vast number of potential paragraphs beginning with “the really brilliant thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is…” It is one of the most emphatically innovative and transformational shows in the history of television. There is no case to be made that it’s one of the most popular television programs ever – it toiled in the low ratings expected of The WB and UPN (more about which in a moment), but nor was it some televisual equivalent of the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall show, where nobody watched but everybody who did watch was terribly important. The show changed everything: the nature of fandoms, the standard model of how to write both genre television and “regular” television, and the landscape of American television.

The latter of these is perhaps the least interesting in terms of this blog, but it’s important both in understanding how the show came about in the first place and, at least somewhat interestingly, in understanding how Doctor Who could become a hit in its own right in the US. The key thing to understand about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that it exists because the channel it debuted on, The WB, was an unsuccessful minor channel. Broadcast television in the US works very differently from how it does in the UK. The entire country is served by regional channels, the bulk of which affiliate with national networks. The big three up into the 1980s were NBC, CBS, and ABC, each of which have essentially 100% coverage of the country. An affiliate commits to showing certain numbers of hours of national programming in the correct time slot, but fills the rest of the schedule either with local programming or material bought for syndication. (There’s also PBS, which still uses the affiliate model, but is basically what Rupert Murdoch would have the BBC be if he got his way, i.e. Wholly dependent on continually running fundraisers to stay alive.)

In the 1980s the big three were joined by a fourth network, Fox. The way in which a new network launches is important to understand: it has to acquire affiliates from across the country, scooping up existing low-rated channels. In markets where no such channel exists or will sell the new network simply won’t exist, or will exist as a secondary affiliate of an existing network, showing programming at odd hours of the night. Accordingly, Fox was at first much smaller potatoes, having lower penetration and lower ratings, which meant that big ticket obvious hits went to the other three while Fox had to content itself with oddball programs like The Simpsons and The X-Files. Then, in 1995 two more networks launched: The WB and UPN. By then Fox was reasonably sized and they were the small potatoes – sufficiently small, in fact, that they merged together to form The CW in 2006 because they couldn’t stay afloat on their own.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was originally made for The WB, although it jumped to UPN for its final two seasons.…

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AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED! (War of the Daleks)

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I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped The Bodysnatchers and Genocide, which languish in the forties of the seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures unloved and unhated. We’ll be doing that a lot. War of the Daleks is the last of the books commissioned under Nuala Buffini (actually, this and Legacy of the Daleks apparently came in at the same time), and is absolutely loathed. It has… um… Daleks in it. And a very, very infamous retcon, which I talk about in enough detail below as to not be worth outlining here. It’s 66th out of 73. Lars Pearson says that the retcon in question “will skewer you in pitchfork-like fashion,” while at the time Dave Owen calls it an “unambitious tribute… rendered in hackneyed prose that should not have survived editing.” Ouch. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s October of 1997. Elton John is at number one with “Something About The Way You Look/Candle in the Wind ’97.” This gets at one of the news stories we’ll talk about in a moment, and raises the question of what could possibly unseat a cathartic tribute to Princess Diana from the charts. Answer: The Spice Girls, with “Spice Up Your Life.” The Backstreet Boys, Oasis, Will Smith, Janet Jackson, Aqua, and Chumbawumba also chart, the latter with an unabashed and straightforward execution of The Manual. In news, since we last checked in Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Princess Diana died, causing everyone in America to be inexplicably upset, Scotland voted to create its own parliament, as did Wales, and Mother Theresa died too. While during this month, the Grey Lady goes color, and the BBC gets a new logo.

In books, meanwhile, War of the Daleks. That War of the Daleks is a mind-wrenchingly awful book at least mostly goes without saying. Still, since this blog is written for a non-specialist audience, we may as well rehearse its flaws. First among them is the simple fact that Peel is not a great writer. He never has been. And so with a book in which he’s stuck with an ambiguously characterized Doctor and a new companion he makes a harder swing to Generic Doctor than any previous book. Peel’s Generic Doctor is apparently Pertwee, with Sam defaulting smoothly to Jo Grant. But this masks the larger problem, which is that Peel is spectacularly uninterested in any of these newfangled ideas that have been cluttering Doctor Who up for the last ten years and just wants to do good old-fashioned adventure stories.

As a result War of the Daleks is overtly and consciously an imitation of Terry Nation’s style. The Doctor gives generic moral lessons of the most banal sort, mostly about following orders and duty and various other things. Peel is fascinated by the divisions of Dalek society and by describing Dalek weaponry and various special Daleks in detail, and more or less uninterested in stitching together an actual plot. On top of that, the plot he has is riddled with holes. To take only one example, in chapter seven Davros is informed that there are still Daleks loyal to him on Skaro, and treats this as good news.…

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