time can be rewritten

Time’s Champion – probably the single least findable thing I’ll cover on this blog – is an unlicensed novel by Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon published as a charity endeavor in 2008. The provenance of it is interesting – Hinton pitched the novel to BBC Books, but it was rejected – instead they published Gary Russell’s Spiral Scratch to fill basically the same purpose of giving Colin Baker a regeneration story. Separately the American writer Chris McKeon pitched a story to Big Finish about the Valeyard which was also rejected. McKeon and Hinton got in touch, and Hinton gave McKeon permission to turn his outline of Time’s Champion into a full novel, which, following Hinton’s death, McKeon did.

Let’s get one thing out of the way- this is not a good book. McKeon, who is by far the more involved writer, is a weak prosesmith at best. On top of that, the plot elevates fanwank to a profound art, relying heavily not only on Hinton’s previous novels Millennial Rites and The Quantum Archangel but with heavy references to scads of other stuff. This is not in and of itself a problem, except that it seems to be the entire point of this book –  to try to fit absolutely as many existing pieces of Doctor Who together as is possible.

I’ll attempt something resembling a summary of the plot. The Doctor visits Sergeant Benton’s 70th birthday party, which is also visited by some characters from The Quantum Archangel including the human component of Kronos from the Time Monster and his pregnant wife. Meanwhile, in 1908 a writer is attempting to write a book called Time’s Champion that turns out to be written in quantum mnemonics, the magical language from Millennial Rites. And in 9908 another man with the same name as the 1908 writer is writing a computer virus called Abbadon. Eventually it turns out that both are being manipulated by Morbius’s children to launch an attack on Gallifrey, which coincides with the birth of Kronos’s child.

So all hell predictably breaks loose, the Doctor runs to Gallifrey where he meets up with President Romana, a character from another Hinton book, and several other named Time Lords, then goes into the Matrix where the Keeper turns out to be the Valeyard, who is later revealed to be the Doctor’s stolen regeneration energy caught in a time loop, created by the gods, Pain, Hope, Time, Life, Death, and Fate, as a substitute Doctor because Time wanted the Doctor as her champion but was denied by the other transcendent beings, thus creating the Valeyard as a compromise. Then there’s a bunch more stuff, but it ends with the Doctor taking complete control of the Matrix by temporarily becoming Lord President of Gallifrey, then letting the TARDIS get eaten by a sentient computer virus and using quantum mnemonics to blow up the computer virus outside of the universe, but only after unregenerating in order to trick the Valeyard and destroy him, and then has to become Death’s Champion to save Mel, but cheats and sacrifice himself using the powers of Time’s Champion to force a regeneration, and what is this I don’t even.…

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More than anyone – even Gary Russell or Lance Parkin – the late Craig Hinton has a reputation for fanwank. But the fact that we’re dealing with that list in the first place is interesting. On one extreme we have Russell, who I confess to having relatively little regard for as a fiction writer. (Although there’s reason to rate him fairly highly as an editor or a writer of non-fiction material) On the other we have Parkin, one of the consensus best novel writers. So once again there’s clearly not a direct correlation between fanwank and quality.

It’s tempting to try to chart out some sort of principle based on the fact that Jubilee works and Business Unusual doesn’t. Jubilee deals with the past of the program in broad strokes, Business Unusual gets bogged down in tedious and pointless details. But I’m hard-pressed to buy that as a logic – there’s something desperately unsatisfying about the idea that the details not only don’t matter but necessarily cannot matter and are fundamentally opposed to good storytelling. (For one thing, it would pose an uncomfortable existential challenge to the logic of this blog.)

We’re at a point of transition in the arc of the blog, moving from the decade-long deflation of the series that stretched from The Horror of Fang Rock to Revelation of the Daleks to the invisible reinvention of the series once it moved out of the public eye. One of the things that’s going to happen over that period is, both within Doctor Who and outside of it, an evolution in how storytelling works in what we can broadly describe as genre fiction. We’ll watch this unfold over the next lengthy chunk of the blog, but one of the basic principles of the new way of doing things is that the high concept genre ideas are parallel structures to character-based storytelling. (When we get to the inevitable Buffy post in January or February we’ll deal with the details of this.)

And that’s the difference between Lance Parkin and Gary Russell – Parkin writes in a form that recognizably behaves like that while Russell writes more in the style of the Saward-era continuity writers. And the thing is, even though Craig Hinton’s level of fanwank exceeds both of them, at the heart of things he is a Parkin-style writer. And so we have Millenial Rites, a story that is on the one hand a massive celebration of minutiae and on the other is actually a reasonably functional piece of storytelling in its own right that has an actual point to it.

On its most basic level, Millennial Rites is a story about the Doctor’s fear of the Valeyard and what that does to him. All of its big dramatic beats come out of that – from the Doctor’s realization that his treatment of Mel is putting him on the road to that future to his temporary transformation into the Valeyard late in the novel. Even the smaller details work towards that, with Ashley Chapel and Anne Travers both serving as figures that in their own way grapple with obsessions, paranoias, and temptations, thus backing up the theme.…

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Last time we dealt with Gary Russell we found ourselves reflecting heavily on the notion of fanwank. Broadly speaking, at least, I’m hard-pressed to complain too heavily about fanwank in the novel lines, particularly the Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures, both of which by their nature appeal virtually entirely to dedicated Doctor Who fans. When you’re dealing with an audience of dedicated fans the extent to which you can rely on existing work increases dramatically. There is a fundamental difference between writing novels for a fan audience and writing television for BBC1.

But having navigated the Saward era and its continuity fetishism there become some new issues around this. Or, put another way, the mere fact that there’s nothing wrong with fanwank is not equivalent to fanwank being inherently worthwhile. There are things that you can do when working in the margins of existing work that you can’t do any other way – a fact that is responsible for no small part of my interest in things like Doctor Who and superhero comics. But the margins aren’t interesting in and of themselves – a problem that plagues Gary Russell’s work, and that, in a few paragraphs, is going to prove the undoing of Business Unusual.

But let’s back up and look at the larger situation, since this is our outro to the Colin Baker era. At the heart of the problem is still the Seasonish and the way in which both Season 23s – the transmitted one and the erased one – create a tangible gap in the history of Doctor Who. Colin Baker is the first Doctor to lack a regeneration story, a fact that coincides with Mel being the first companion since Susan to lack an origin story, combined with the deeply unsatisfying nature of the Valeyard, an idea with far more and deeper implications than the series was willing to actually explore, with all of this slotting into the already confused gap introduced by the hiatus.

The result is a period that is the subject of a massive amount of fan theories. And so, having at least determined that the flaw is not inherently Colin Baker, let’s tie off the last issue – was there ever anything interesting to do here? Are the gaps of this era – gaps that we cannot, given the absurd turmoil behind the scenes, chalk up to any deliberate ambiguity – ones that can be interestingly filled? In other words, is the era we’ve just been witness to fatally and irrevocably flawed, or is there actual quality to be had here?

So that’s what this final triptych of entries is going to focus on – three books that fill the holes in and around the gap between Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani. And first up we have Gary Russell with Business Unusual, a novel that proposes to introduce Mel. And give Colin Baker his “missing” Brigadier story. And serve as a sequel to The Scales of Injustice.…

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The first and most obvious thing to say is that the Sixth Doctor does, in fact, work. More than anything else, we ought to acknowledge the fact that Rob Shearman, with Jubilee, makes it so that Colin Baker has an unambiguous classic of Doctor Who under his belt. Baker has a lot of good audios, actually, but this is one that is blatantly a classic. So before we get into anything else we ought look at what it did with Baker’s Doctor that finally got the character to work.

I would argue that there are two things. The first is a trick the show should have picked up from Jon Pertwee, who was so often at his best when his confident and at times outright arrogant Doctor was put on the back foot or the defensive. Baker’s Doctor is helped enormously by the scenes in this story in which he gets to play the Doctor driven mad by a hundred years being locked in the Tower of London. Seeing his Doctor so weakened and afraid has the same effect it does for Pertwee, on top of letting Baker show off some acting ability that he was rarely given the opportunity to on television. Indeed, the mad Doctor in the tower is in many ways an idea perfectly suited to Baker’s Doctor, whose bluster and confidence can be subverted with a wickedness that the Doctors on either side of him couldn’t hope to match.

The other major trick that Jubilee manages to improve Baker is not Shearman’s invention, but a brilliant idea nevertheless: Evelyn Smythe. Evelyn is an interesting concept for a companion – a middle-aged history teacher. OK, so actually, that’s more accurately described as the original concept of a companion, though Evelyn is a good twenty years older than Barbara was. But it’s a compelling move away from the horribly sexualized peril monkey Peri was stuck playing that doesn’t go straight to comedy as Mel, by dint of her casting, did.

The result is a companion who can actually stand up to the Doctor in such a way as to make him no longer seem nearly so nasty. Again, this is largely lifted from the Pertwee era. Pertwee worked because he had Jo Grant for three years and she, no matter what Pertwee did, could smile winsomely and reassert herself with a moment of sheer pluck and charm. That meant that Pertwee’s character was always kept in check. It’s the same thing that made Tom Baker’s grandstanding in the latter days of his tenure bearable – the fact that Lalla Ward could hold her own. And in Evelyn Smythe Big Finish created a character that could stand up to Baker’s Doctor in that way and thus keep him charming instead of overbearing. She was in many ways the companion he should have always had.

That, at least, explains the infrastructure changes Jubilee enjoys. It starts at a higher baseline of quality and potential, and that makes it easier for it to achieve greatness.…

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…ish is one of those pieces that is desperate for you to recognize how clever it is, which would be irritating if it weren’t so damned clever. Indeed, it’s sufficiently clever that an irritating number of reviewers seem to think that this is a lot of clever presentation wrapped around an overly simple story. This, however, involves an unfortunate confusion of plot with story. The plot is standard Doctor Who fare – an expedition to an alien planet inadvertently collects something… evil. It escapes back among the humans and threatens to cause untold devastation. After uncovering malfeasance among the people who went on the expedition the Doctor stops the evil thing and saves the day. As basic as they come, really.

The only tricky bit, really, is that the “something evil” is, in fact, a word and that the nature of the threat is the complete collapse of all language and meaning. The word – referred to as the “ish” – destroys meaning itself – as, of course, does the suffix itself. The threat is that the ish will be unleashed into the Omniverbum, which is essentially the Word of “in the beginning was the” fame.

It’s just that this tricky bit causes the story to extend considerably beyond the straightforward plot. It also, however, enables a mass of cleverness, some of which is oft-noted and some of which is less so. The most obvious thing to observe is that this is a story that required Baker’s Doctor. One of the key characteristics of Baker’s Doctor is a degree of pomposity. Unfortunately, as Tat Wood rather cuttingly observed in About Time, this tends to manifest such that Baker comes off as a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like. Which is to say that the writers had an irritating tendency to write with the thesaurus open such that Baker’s Doctor displays a certain… ludicrous logorrhea, if you will. (The trait is, of course, compounded when Pip and Jane Baker are writing for him, since their tendency is to write everybody verbosely to begin with.)

So for a story that is about words and language there was really only one Doctor to choose. And the story is littered with bits of wordplay and what is less continuity porn than continuity erotica – a bevy of jokes that are both terribly obscure and utterly artful. (An impossibly large encyclopedia volume beginning with DAL, for instance. Or a Delphon joke.) There’s also a rampant set of jokes referencing post-structuralist literary theory – several bits of dialogue are straight lifts from major postmodernist thinkers. (I caught at the very least a Lacan and a Deleuze reference) This is also a compelling bit of timing. The era this story is set during was the real breakout of postmodernism, both in popular culture and in academia, and a story that is about postmodern literary theory is a natural fit – a story that on the one hand would never have been made in the era itself, but on the other still speaks to the cultural concerns of the era.…

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