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One Morning You Awake, And Your Humanity Is a Dream (Vampire Science)

24

I’ll Explain Later

Vampire Science, the second Eighth Doctor Adventure, does Vampires in San Francisco, and is pretty straightforward in that regard. It’s by Kate Orman, now joined by soon-to-be husband Jon Blum, who will co-author three of Orman’s four Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s reasonably popular. Dave Owen calls it “a far more intellectually rewarding read than The Eighth Doctors, which is perhaps understatement. Lars Pearson calls it “a playful – if sometimes overly sappy – story.” Overqualifications aside, it’s the twelfth most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, and one of only five from the first twenty books to end up in the top half of that list. (For whoever was asking, the lowest-ranked is The Infinity Race.) DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s July of 1997. Puff Daddy and a bunch of other people remain at number one with “I’ll Be Missing You.” Two weeks later Oasis unseat them with “D’you Know What I Mean?,” only to have Puff Daddy take it back a week later.  No Doubt, Hanson, Verve, Sheryl Crow, R. Kelly, and Coolio also chart. God, that brings back memories. None of them are good. In happier news, the Pet Shop Boys also chart in there, and Radiohead does quite well for themselves on the album charts with OK Computer. In news, the month opens with the UK handing Hong Kong over to China. The drug fen-phen, a dieting drug, turns out to, erm, kill people. Andrew Cunanan shoots and kills Gianni Versace, and scientists announce DNA analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton supporting the “out of Africa” theory of human evolution.

While in books, Vampire Science. The BBC Books line was, as the current idiom goes, a bit of an omnishambles at launch. So the only sensible way into Vampire Science is in light of that mess. In a period as hazily documented as the BBC Books era some care is necessary in any authorial criticism. Nevertheless, tea leaves exist and I politely welcome anyone with more information to correct me here, especially since I know several figures with personal involvement read the blog. Orman and Blum thank the writers of the next two Eighth Doctor Adventures, Paul Leonard and Mark Morris, for their collaboration in developing the tone and approach of the Eighth Doctor. Conspicuously absent from this list is Terrance Dicks. Separately, in his notes on The Dying Days, Parkin mentions having wanted to incorporate references to The Eight Doctors but being unable to, but does incorporate a reference to Vampire Science. Taken together, these facts suggest that The Eight Doctors was written more or less in isolation, with Dicks not meaningfully participating in the larger development of the line beyond the obligatory and perfunctory introduction of Sam.

This run of three books in which real attempts at making the Eighth Doctor work as a character and concept are bounded on the other end by War of the Daleks, which we’ll deal with on Monday. Like what The Eight Doctors seems to be, War of the Daleks was essentially put into the line fait accompli along with Legacy of the Daleks.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 50 (Neverwhere)

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For all that the TV Movie was a staggering aesthetic failure, it’s telling that so many people in the UK watched it. Yes, nobody actually liked it, but in a way that’s preferable from the perspective of someone who wants something resembling Doctor Who to come back on television and under the name “Doctor Who.” There is, in the wake of the TV movie, at least a clear mandate for Doctor Who’s return. The details on what that return should look like beyond “not like a generic piece of American cult television” were hazy, but it was at least clear that people wanted something Doctor Whoish on their television screens. Jonathan Creek, as we saw, did a good job of feeling like what Doctor Who would feel like if the BBC put some effort into it, but in many ways it is therefore Neverwhere that is more interesting, being as it demonstrates what mid-to-late 90s Doctor Who would look like if the BBC completely half-assed it.

It’s tempting to say that the answer is “not very good,” but saying that requires a slightly strange misreading of history. It’s true that there are many things that are deeply wrong with Neverwhere and that the series disappeared more or less without a trace initially. But one has to take a step back and look at this within the larger arc of Neil Gaiman’s career in order to quite understand what’s going on here. The first thing to realize is that in 1996, Neil Gaiman wasn’t Neil Gaiman yet. His career consisted of some time as a journalist/freelancer followed by considerable success in US comics. His lone novel was Good Omens, co-authored with Terry Pratchett. He was not even a star writer in the UK, little yet in the US. So his doing a fantasy series for BBC2 was a substantive increase in his profile. He wasn’t a novelist doing television – he was a jobbing writer who bounced around media. And in 1996, at least, Lenny Henry’s co-creator credit on the series undoubtedly carried more weight than Gaiman’s name.

On the other hand, Neverwhere was clearly the beginning of Gaiman’s breakout. The US release of his novelization of it and, a few years later, the text from his illustrated novel for DC Comics, Stardust, paved the way for his big debut with American Gods, the novel that firmly lodged him as a major writer. So whatever the inadequacies of the television version, Neverwhere is clearly seminal – the first real step in Neil Gaiman going from a writer who’s influential to a writer who is absolutely huge.

All of which said, there are some inadequacies to the television version. Put simply, and this is hardly an unusual criticism, Neverwhere looks kind of rubbish. It was set to be shot on video and then “filmized,” but the filmization was abandoned after it had already been shot. This means that it looks like it was shot on video, which is generally taken to be synonymous with looking cheap.…

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My Dear Doctor, You Must Die (The Eight Doctors)

57

I’ll Explain Later

The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks, is the launch of the Eighth Doctor Adventures line. Instead of getting all the Doctors together as you might expect, it’s got an amnesiac Eighth Doctor going linearly through his previous incarnations to regain his memories, meeting them during 100,000 BC, The War Games, The Sea Devils, State of Decay, The Five Doctors, Trial of a Time Lord, and immediately prior to the TV Movie. Plus you’ve got the Master three times, Rassilon, Borusa, Flavia, and the solutions to any stray continuity errors Dicks was bothered by. Dave Owen calls it “overambitious, perhaps, but nevertheless immensely enjoyable.” In the same issue of Doctor Who Magazine he rates all the New Adventures and gives Human Nature a three out of ten. So, moving on to sane critics, Lars Pearson calls it a “clusterfish.” It is merely the third worst of the seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures, but it is the worst one we will cover with a rating of 46.2%. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s June of 1997. Hanson are at number one with “Mmmbop.” That lasts until the end of hte month, when Puff Daddy takes over with “I’ll Be Missing You.” Radiohead, the Rembrandts, the Cardigans, Bon Jovi, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Blur, and Echo and the Bunnymen also chart. In news, there was a month gap in which Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov and Tony Blair defeated John Major. In the month itself, Timothy McVeigh is convicted of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the House of Commons votes to ban handguns in response to the year-ago Dunblane Massacre. (The US should be so wise.) And the first Harry Potter book comes out. 
In books, meanwhile, The Eight Doctors. Oh dear.

It is still, over a decade later, difficult to quite wrap one’s head around what went wrong. The TV Movie was awful and looked to have killed any chance of Doctor Who returning on television for the foreseeable future, yes. But most of us had merely allowed ourselves to be optimistic about that. It wasn’t as if anyone thought an American remake was a sure bet of success. Nobody could sincerely say they were surprised by its flaws, or that the series did not come back after it. For all its flaws, it wasn’t even the worst case scenario. Once word of the Leekley bible came out the merely terrible TV Movie started to look pretty good, and there remain those of us who are battle-hardened enough to allow ourselves to remember when the consensus rumor was that David Hasselhoff was going to be the Doctor. The TV Movie was positively merciful. It was merely disastrous. 

In context, The Eight Doctors felt far more glaringly wrong. We expected bad things from Fox. But this was Uncle Terrance himself come to deliver the killing blow. The man who had stepped in to show that the Virgin line had potential with Timewyrm: Exodus. A man about whom just about the worst thing that could be said was that Shakedown was a bit weak, but given that his brief there was to produce a novelization that wasn’t surprising.
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Splendid Chap, All of Them (The Dying Days)

24

I’ll Explain Later

The Dying Days is the sixty-first and final Virgin New Adventure, and the only one to feature the Eighth Doctor. In it he teams up with Benny and the Brigadier and repels an Ice Warrior invasion in contemporary Britain. And may or may not get it on with Benny for good measure before leaving her to star in her own already covered novel line. Dave Owen says that Parkin makes writing Doctor Who “look deceptively easy,” and Lars Pearson calls it simply “sterling.” It is ranked as the fifth best New Adventure, which sounds very good, right between Lungbarrow and Original Sin, which doesn’t really. Its rating is 83.6%. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s April of 1997. The Chemical Brothers are at number one with “Block Rockin’ Beats.” That lasts a week before R. Kelly takes over with “I Believe I Can Fly,” which lasts all month. Don’t worry. We’ve got a closet all earmarked for him.  No Doubt, the Spice Girls, Depeche Mode, Blur, Suede, Orbital, Daft Punk, U2, and Robbie Williams also chart. 
In news, Turin Cathedral is damaged by fire. Virtually the entire village of Thalit is slaughtered by guerrillas in Algeria, one of three massacres in Algeria this month. Gene Roddenberry and Timothy Leary are buried together, or, perhaps more accurately, shot into space. Martin Bell declares that he’ll run to be the MP for Tatton (an election he’ll win). And we lead right into the general election, which, as we’re skipping May, we may as well spoil: Labour wins big.
In books, the much acclaimed but still rather puzzling The Dying Days. By most reasonable standards, Parkin bites off more than he can chew here. He’s simultaneously in the position of wrapping up the Virgin line, setting up the Benny line, responding to the TV Movie, functionally establishing a character for the Doctor, and on top of that gives himself the twin challenges of cramming in a huge number of intertextual references and of never having more than two Ice Warriors in a scene. Being as I feel like the blog could use a bit of whimsy after Wednesday, let’s start with this last and somewhat curious point.
The stated logic for only having two Ice Warriors in a scene is that it’s a rejoinder to Philip Segal’s claim that the reason the TV Movie didn’t have any monsters was that it would have been too expensive and they could only have afforded one costume. So Parkin set out to demonstrate that you could do an entire alien invasion with just two costumes. Several things about this are puzzling. First, of course, is Segal’s comment. Segal is, of course, a terribly unreliable source about the thinking behind the TV Movie, making bewildering claims like that you couldn’t imagine any other Doctor but McGann’s on a motorcycle, or, more bemusingly, claiming that the logo for the TV Movie didn’t evoke any previous era. This budget claim on monsters is probably similarly dismissible – some monster costumes surely could not have cost more than a shot involving a bunch of chickens running around a freeway at night, which was put in for no discernible reason whatsoever. 
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Clinging to the Skin of this Tiny Little World (The TV Movie)

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I don’t like Mondays.

It’s May 14, 1996. (That is the date we’re going with in this post. You’ll understand.) Mariah Carey is at number one with “Always Be My Baby,” while Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Celine Dion, Coolio, Tracy Chapman, R. Kelly, and Whitney Houston also chart. As does Alanis Morissette with “Ironic,” which isn’t. Those are, of course, the US charts. The UK goes with George Michael in number one with “Fastlove,” with Gina G, Smashing Pumpkins, and Blur also in the charts. And, actually, both Liverpool FC and the Manchester United FA Squad dueling it out in the charts instead of the pitch. So that’s funny too.

In news, let’s go with the whole month of May, since we never did. ValuJet Flight 592 crashes in the Florida Everglades, killing 110. Thunderstorms and a tornado kill 600 in Bangladesh. The MV Bukoba sinks, killing a thousand. Eight die on Mount Everest in severe weather. Fifty-three die in a Sudanese jet crash. Outside of calamitous death, Benjamin Netanyahu is elected Prime Minister of Israel for the first time, the Supreme Court overturns a Colorado state law forbidding municipalities from protecting gay rights, and the Duke and Duchess of York divorce.

While on television… we have a problem. Or, at least, I do. This was always going to be an autobiographical post. I feel like I need to put that out front in it, before the analysis. I’ve known this post would be autobiographical since Planet of the Spiders. This entry was in part about the end point of a childhood love of Doctor Who: the moment where it came crashing down, becoming an old past love, on the shelf following Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, remembered with affection, but clearly and decisively left in the past. The weird British sci-fi show I was the only one who had heard of made a new movie for American television, my friends and tormenters watched it, and… it sucked. There was nothing to defend. People came up to me the next day and told me that they’d seen that Doctor Who thing I liked so much, and it sucked. And I couldn’t disagree. They had me dead to rights. The big, climactic return had happened, it was awful, the series keeled over and died again, and that was that. There was nothing left to do but walk away. And so there’s the lens of history. 1992 to 1996: my Doctor Who fandom. Which, of course, involves some reflection on the early days of my fandom, curling up in the corner of a fifth grade classroom in Newtown, Connecticut and reading Target novelizations.

And then the day before I was set to write this post some bastard murdered twenty children in my town.

It wasn’t my elementary school where twenty kids got murdered. I went to Head O’ Meadow school, on the other side of town. I know people who went to Sandy Hook, obviously. The town’s school system worked by having four separate elementary schools that merge together after into single middle and high schools.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 49 (Jonathan Creek)

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This post, for those keeping track, will be the first one of the Paul McGann/Christopher Eccleston book. But since we’re still in the chronological whorl of the late Virgin era, let’s cheat a bit and flip a year ahead, to May of 1997, and to the debut of a show called Jonathan Creek. On Wednesday we’ll watch as Doctor Who blows its big shot at a comeback. But before that, let’s glance at the landscape a year after Doctor Who. Because it’s not just that Doctor Who had a bad TV Movie that scuppered its chance of a comeback for almost a decade. It’s also that Doctor Who, less than a year after the TV movie, was rendered in essence culturally obsolete.

While it is not clear that Jonathan Creek was intended to usurp Doctor Who’s place in Britain’s cultural landscape, one has to admit that shooting Colin Baker seven minutes into the first episode is a pretty good opening bid for this goal. Saying this, of course, requires us to offer some general case theory of what Doctor Who’s place in the cultural landscape is or was. This is, of course, terribly controversial, and everyone who provides an answer to a question like this has at least some agenda in mind. I’ve surely driven off readers with views radically irreconcilable to my own on this point, however, so let’s just take for granted that we’re all more or less on the same page about this.

Equally, though, this is a fraught debate within Doctor Who in the mid-nineties. On the one hand you have the viewpoint of Doctor Who fandom, which has increasingly taken Doctor Who to be a fairly straightforward cult television show in that it exists for fans and is continually obsessed with recitation of its own history. On the other hand it clearly has a solid place within British cultural memory as a beloved institution. This is distinct from something obsessed with its own past. Its past is respected and part of its importance, but to love it is not to be a fan of it so much as to enjoy a part of your culture. Someone who likes sitting down and watching Doctor Who is no more a part of Doctor Who fandom than someone who likes eating Marmite is a member of Marmite fandom. And so Doctor Who is in this case more of an aesthetic – a type of thing one likes and a set of iconography.

These two views are a bit at loggerheads, in that one view is based on a doctrinal view of what Doctor Who is and the other is based on memories of having enjoyed a television program in one’s childhood and wanting to see something that reminds one of it. Which, of course, has next to nothing to do with the specific plots of those things and more with the imagery and feel of them. This is what leads to the existence of people with an adamant belief that Doctor Who should be scary, which usually just means they were of the right age for The Web of Fear or The Pyramids of Mars.…

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