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time can be rewritten

Time Can Be Rewritten 23 (The Nightmare Fair)

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Right. So, a little over a year ago I had a blog that was just starting to get some attention. And I came upon a story that, well, kinda sucked. And the thing is, it was a story that had a surprisingly good reputation, but the story itself was really, really rubbish. Plus there were some really uncomfortable racial elements to it, and it was the second story in a row to have those, and I wrote an entry that tore the story to shreds. And writing it, I was getting a nice build-up going, so I went for broke in the conclusion and suggested that the story should be exiled from the canon on the grounds that it’s racist and terrible.

So, funny thing, it turns out that if, right when people are just starting to take notice of your blog, you viciously slaughter a mildly sacred cow this rapidly becomes one of the things you’re best known or. It’s not actually one of my most read posts, which I’m fine with, but to this day if I see a link in my referral logs from something I haven’t heard about before and I click through, over half the time it’s someone citing my blog to say that the story is a bit racist. It is unmistakably the case that The Celestial Toymaker (or, really, the combination of that and The Daleks’ Masterplan three entries earlier) is where my blog made itself. Because apparently nobody had really made the observation that The Celestial Toymaker was a piece of racist crap. (And it was. And it’s deliberate. I didn’t quote the novelization in the entry, but I’d like to point out the quote I’ve been pointing to since writing the entry: “The Toymaker was lounging in a black Chinese chair behind a laquered Chinese desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scenes of chinese life,” and, its counterpart a few sentences later, “The Toymaker stood up, a tall imposing figure, dressed as a Chinese mandarin with a circular black hat embossed with a heavy gold thread, a large silver red and blue collar and a heavy, stiffly embroidered black robe encrusted with rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls set against a background of coiled Chinese dragons.” Also, the Toymaker is Chinese.)

So you can imagine that it was somewhat comforting to open up Graham Williams’s The Nightmare Fair and discover that someone actually had noticed this problem before me. After a bunch of referring to the Toymaker as a Mandarin, Williams, at about the halfway point of the book, drops all pretense and just becomes a wonderfully snarky jerk about the fact that watching Michael Gough pretend to be Asian is kind of horrifying. My favorite bit, for what it’s worth, is “Stefan carefully tore off the printed sheet and made his way towards the Mandarin, who was standing, listening attentively to a technician in a white coat who looked distinctly as though he had the better right to the eastern style wardrobe the Mandarin favoured.”…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 22 (The Song of Megaptera)

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Among the many services Big Finish provides for Doctor Who at large is a helpful testing of various pieces of fanlore regarding unmade stories. There are, for instance, people who wonder whether Prison in Space would really have been as unbearably terrible as it sounds. And as it happens (and we’ll cover this in the Troughton book this fall), yes, yes it would have been. But there is perhaps nowhere this service is more valuable than in the Saward era. One of the less resolvable debates surrounding the Saward era, and one that will play into the next two entries heavily as well, is the nature of the writers. Simply put, there’s some solid evidence of some very good writers having scripts rejected during this period while people like Glen McCoy and Anthony Steven had scripts made. It’s one thing when Pip and Jane Baker, two writers who are at least fast and reliable, get repeated commissions. It’s quite another when they’re actively commissioned over Christopher Bidmead and PJ Hammond, as, in Season 23, they were.

Of what I’d consider the big three of baffling rejections – the twin rejection of Christopher Priest’s Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, PJ Hammond’s Paradise Five, and Pat Mills’s Song of the Space Whale, two – Hammond’s and Mills’s – have subsequently been recorded by Big Finish. Since the fan lore has Hammond’s rejection being down to Nathan-Turner and not Saward, whose influence I am more interested in tracking at the moment, let’s opt for Mills’s script, now renamed Song of Megaptera.

For those who don’t obsessively memorize every detail I cover on this blog, Mills, along with John Wagner (who was a co-author on earlier drafts of this script) co-created Judge Dredd with artist Carlos Ezquerra, and co-wrote the earliest Doctor Who Weekly comic strips. Song of Megaptera was, originally, a story for a Tom Baker comic strip, but Mills was persuaded that it was too good for that and instead sent it to the production office where it was, at various times, considered for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, and, finally, Colin Baker before finally being abandoned. In discussing its scrapping Pat Mills has stated that one of the reasons Saward gave for objecting to it was that Saward didn’t like Mills’s decision to portray the ship’s captain as working class, preferring the idea of a classless future.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first – in a litany of poor creative decisions that can be laid directly at Eric Saward’s feet, making Timelash over this is one of the most inexcusable. It is flat-out inconceivable how any remotely sane or reasonable script editor could look at Timelash next to this script and conclude that Timelash was going to work better. The Twin Dilemma was an aggregate of brain-searingly bad decisions, but I’m not convinced that any given decision, and particularly any given one of Saward’s decisions about The Twin Dilemma was prima facie worse than this.

It is not that Song of Megaptera is a flawless story.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 21 (Warmonger)

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Given that none of the BBC Books novels featuring Davison’s Doctor are particularly beloved, the pick of a novel was always going to be one of the two golden turkeys – this or Gary Russell’s Divided Loyalties. I picked this for two reasons. First, Divided Loyalties was a Season 19 book and having just come off of a host of non-televised entries at the end of the Tom Baker era I didn’t want to do two novels in Season 19. And I was pretty firmly committed to Cold Fusion. But the second is that Divided Loyalties received mostly scathing and truly outraged reviews on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, whereas nearly every review of Warmonger consists of several paragraphs of admitting that the novel is unfathomably awful before the author sheepishly confesses that they loved it. (Of course, several of those exist for Divided Loyalties, and more than a few outright pans of Warmonger exist as well)

For those who have never heard of this… interesting book, allow me to provide a basic plot summary. Peri inadvertently gets her arm ripped off by a pterodactyl, so the Doctor rushes her to a pre-Brain of Morbius Karn in the hopes that Dr. Solon will reattach it. He does, but unfortunately the Doctor and Peri get caught up in galactic politics and the rise of Morbius such that Peri is stranded on an alien world as a fierce guerilla warrior against Morbius’s galactic army and the Doctor is rechristened the Supremo and leading an army of Draconians, Sontarans, Cybermen, Ogrons, and Ice Warriors against Morbius in what is, we are repeatedly assured, a terribly dire, ugly war. Eventually he rescues Peri and she makes a drunken pass at him, then they defeat Morbius, the end.

If this sounds like a hot mess, you are underestimating things. But let’s pause for a moment and note two things. First, Terrance Dicks’s gloriously readable prose continues to rescue him. As preposterous as this book is, Dicks is able to make each fresh absurdity another step in a standard plucky adventure, marching cheerily through the action with a horribly compelling glee. Second, Terrance Dicks is surely way too smart a writer to pen a book this bad by accident. In fact, it is my firm conviction that this book consists of Terrance Dicks, elder statesmen of the Doctor Who world, in his 34th year of working professionally with Doctor Who, just unrepentantly screwing with the audience.

Let us boil this question down to its barest essentials. There is a moment, fairly early in the book, in which guerrilla warrior Peri, the Scourge of Sylvana, is captured along with some other guerillas. One begins to shudder as their captor, Lieutenant Hakon, ogles her. The following bit of prose then happens:

Puzzled and repelled, Hakon released her. “What’s the matter with her?”
“She can’t stand to be touched,” said Peri.
“Why not?”
“She was gang-raped by some of your troops when the first wave landed.”
“Some girls have all the luck,” said Hakon.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 20 (Time Crash)

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Convention, apparently, is to place these things in the midst of the end of Frontios while the Doctor is depositing the Gravis, a convention seemingly begun by Paul Magrs’ Excelcis Dawns. Magrs, of course, in typical fashion introduces far more continuity problems than he solves doing this, given that Tegan is on the TARDIS at the time, and anyway, I forgot to write this entry instead of Resurrection of the Daleks at the end of my last stretch of doing this blog, so we’re doing it here.

This also, of course, marks the first time I have to deal overtly with the new series instead of in passing reference. So time to obliterate all notion that I can stitch together some sort of consensus about the series and just start pissing off large sections of fandom, I suppose. I won’t bother playing about – as I’ve said before, anyone expecting the blog to turn sour on the new series is going to be sorely disappointed. Even when I agree with those who criticize it – and I’ll grant that there are deep flaws in the Davies era and fault lines that could turn into deep flaws in the Moffat era – the fact remains that making redemptive readings of the new series is not even remotely difficult. Disliking it frankly requires more effort than liking it, and I just can’t be bothered. If you can, well, I win, because I get more television to enjoy than you do, so there.

But on top of that basic issue there are a few more substantive issues I have with critics of the new series, and Time Crash serves as a bit of a ground zero for them. There’s an objection to Time Crash that gets voiced with some frequency on forums that serves as a perfect moment to repel a general critique of the new series, namely that there’s something wrong with the sequence at the end in which Tennant’s Doctor proclaims Davison’s Doctor to be “his” Doctor. In fact, I’m going to have my Ian Levine moment here and simply declare this objection to be evil.

To be fair, the problem with it is not quite that it doesn’t make sense on its own terms. If you are invested in the idea that the Doctor has a coherent “life” and that he is always the same character then, indeed, the idea of him picking favorites among his past selves is absurd and jarring. I can and will readily grant that. What I not only won’t grant but will remain openly hostile to is the idea that because there’s a context in which that exchange doesn’t make sense this constitutes a problem. And this encapsulates a great number of complaints about the new series, as a strange alliance of people who adore what they think the classic series was and people who just hate Doctor Who in general insist that there are things that don’t make sense or don’t parse, as though their inability to understand something makes them intellectually superior to the overwhelming majority of the audience who has no problem comprehending things.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 19 (Goth Opera)

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The July 1994 launch of the Virgin Missing Adventures line was a strange moment in Doctor Who history. It’s not as though it was the beginning of adding in extra adventures for past Doctors – that was in 1973. But there was an odd dissonance to the basic idea of it. The Virgin books were certainly not exclusively experimental works that tried to push the limits of what Doctor Who could do, but they were certainly well enough known for it. And so the turn towards the Missing Adventures was, for the most part, a bit strange and uncertain. This level of actively rewriting the past had never really been tried before, and to have it done by a company with as much of a reputation for the avant-garde as Virgin seemed pregnant with possibilities, both good and bad.

In practice it rapidly became clear that the Missing Adventures, at least to start, were Virgin’s attempt to better appeal to the so-called “trad” audience who were left cold by their more adventurous New Adventures line. (Or, as Paul Cornell put it in an interview from his “hilariously bitchy” days, to write for the line “you had to abandon any thoughts of originality.”) But the launch of the line was interesting in this regard. July of 1994 had two releases – the debut Missing Adventure Goth Opera by Paul Cornell and a New Adventure called Blood Harvest by Terrence Dicks, with Goth Opera serving as an ostensible sequel to Blood Harvest.

What’s interesting about this is that Terrence Dicks is, for obvious reasons, the very definition of the “traditional” Doctor Who writer, whereas Paul Cornell was one of the leading lights of the New Adventures range. And, of course, they were flipped. Terrence Dicks – who had actually written the Fifth Doctor on television – wrote for the ostensibly weirder line while Cornell wrote for the ostensibly traditional line.

Superficially, at least, the result of this was that both books were fairly traditional, with the Terrence Dicks aesthetic winning out over the weirder one. Certainly Goth Opera has its share of traditional moments, including a chapter that serves mostly to do some of the connective work between the two books. The chapter a beautifully fast-moving bit involving Romana that manages to, in rapid succession, heavily reference The Five Doctors, Carnival of Monsters, and then insert a cameo from Sabalom. It so perfectly nails Dicks’s style that I actually momentarily found myself composing a bit of this post in my head before having to abandon the line of argument I was imagining due to my remembering that it was actually Cornell who’d written this book.

But this is unfair to what Cornell does here. Cornell’s reputation in 1994 may have been for formal experimentation and “difficult” books, but this reputation was, if not misleading, at least only part of the picture. Cornell was, we can safely say at this point, one of the best writers to make their debut in the Virgin line.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 18 (Spare Parts)

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I somewhat adamantly refused to cover the Big Finish line on this blog before this post, simply because I felt like I should start with a “proper” Big Finish audio from their most distinguished line. The Hartnell book has a Companion Chronicles entry in it, and the Troughton, Pertwee, and Baker books will also have Big Finish bonus entries (The Prison in Space, Find and Replace, and Destination: Nerva, most likely). But in terms of the blog, this is where Big Finish enters. So I suppose we should do the ticky box business of explaining what I’m on about before we get to the fun stuff.

Big Finish are the crowning achievement of the professional fan industry – a bunch of people so good at fan-made Doctor Who audios and audio adaptations of some of the Virgin books that they managed to secure a license in 1999 to do original Doctor Who audios. This is important in several regards. First, it led to a considerably muddier sense of what current Doctor Who was in the half-decade before the return of the series. During the Virgin era there was one official continuation of Doctor Who – the New Adventures. You could love them or hate them, but they were the quasi-official Doctor Who. Their replacement with the BBC Books line was controversial enough in its own right, but the fact that the BBC Books line took a turn into the massively controversial a year after Big Finish started and that six months later Big Finish began its own line of 8th Doctor stories meant that for the bulk of the McGann years there were two barely compatible versions of “new Doctor Who” being made.

Second, like the Virgin books Big Finish has had visible impact on the new series. Two stories – Rob Shearman’s Jubilee and this one – were consciously adapted into television stories. Big Finish staff have worked on the program (more about this in a moment), and, perhaps most impressively, Big Finish have managed to retain the rights to produce audios to this day. (Part of this latter point is a genuinely touching bit of public service. Big Finish in effect provides a retirement home for former Doctor Who actors. Its creative merits aside – and there are, in fact, many creative merits – the fact that it gives a modest paycheck to a large number of people who have contributed substantially to Doctor Who, and that it does this by giving them creative work instead of putting them on exhibit in convention halls, is a genuinely good thing.) The Big Finish line is genuinely important to the story of Doctor Who – you simply can’t cover the beginnings of the new series without also stopping off and talking about things like Jubilee and, well, Spare Parts.

Right. Intro material sorted, into the good stuff. The first and most striking thing, when listening to Spare Parts, is how maddeningly possible it is. Marc Platt wrote for Doctor Who just seven years after the period we’re talking about.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 17 (Cold Fusion, Virgin Books, 1996)

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As novels that I couldn’t possibly avoid go, this one ranks pretty highly. I’ve noted several times that, within the classic series, McCoy is “my Doctor,” so to speak. As the only Doctor (after my first three episodes) I didn’t originally know existed he was the one I got to discover without episode guides. But even still, when I got into Doctor Who it had been off the air for three years. The McCoy years may have been the televised Doctor Who that I came to freshest, but until the dark days of 1996 the only Doctor Who that I got to follow as it came out were the Virgin books.

I’m going to cover much of the Virgin and BBC books lines as if they were new episodes when the time comes. (I haven’t gotten a firm list together, but on a quick scan of titles I think I’m going to do about 30 Virgin books and about 15 each of the BBC Books and Big Finish Eighth Doctor stuff.) But my relationship with them was… interesting. I was reading them roughly from the ages of 11-13, which is just a bit too young for them. But this is in some ways the perfect way to relate to the Virgin books. Their darkness, complexity, and occasional jaunts into overt sexuality are as perfect for that age. The mixture of scandalous and salacious content with the fundamental safety of Doctor Who is as gentle a gradient to tackle emerging sexuality as they come – like having a copy of Timeframe with its Katy Manning/Dalek photo as your sole piece of pornography (which, for years, I did).

This book, in other words, merges two of my favorite eras. As Doctor crossovers go, this one is, for me, as good as it gets. Not just because it’s two of my favorite Doctors, but because there’s such an intrinsic contrast between them. The relative gentleness of Davison’s Doctor combined with the dangerous and manipulative nature of the Virgin Books version of McCoy’s are an inspired pairing that offers no shortage of drama.

All of which said, any multi-Doctor story is less about the particulars of a man meeting himself at a different point in his life and more about the comparison of two eras of the show. Doubly so in a book, where we do not get Davison’s Doctor or McCoy’s Doctor but rather their textual ghosts. The Doctors themselves are televisual performances – things created by actors, directors, and writers in a collaborative environment. These are purely literary characters, responding almost entirely to the whims of a singular creator. They are echoes. That does not diminish the validity of their stories, but this book belongs to neither the Davison nor the McCoy eras.

This gets at another issue with the Virgin books (and for that matter the BBC ones) that I’ve largely danced around. I poke at it a little bit in both the Man in the Velvet Mask entry and the Empire of Glass essay in the Hartnell book, and deal with it more extensively in the Scales of Injustice entry, but it’s been a while and it’s high time we tackled the issue of fanwank again.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 16 (The Well-Mannered War, Virgin Books, 1997)

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Sorry this is late – not sure why it didn’t post when it was supposed to. Speaking of books, if you’ve bought mine from Amazon or elsewhere, please consider leaving a review. Even if you hated it. Though, I mean, I’d rather you do it if you liked it.

But not, we should stress, too clever for anyone to enjoy. It’s not accurate either to treat the Williams era as some failed experiment before its time. As we saw before, its ratings were solid even without ITV just collapsing. The AI figures show that people genuinely enjoyed it. And perhaps most importantly, Gareth Roberts exists.

Gareth Roberts has, if we are being honest, done more than anyone to rehabilitate the Williams era. I do not merely refer to his quite lovely “Tom the Second” essay discussed back in the Horns of Nimon entry (and before that in the Armageddon Factor entry), although it is a masterpiece of fan writing and its thesis, which can roughly be summarized as “shut up, it’s really fun” ought be, I think, the thesis of far more arguments both scholarly and popular. But his real contribution to Williams-era rehabilitation are his three novels for the Missing Adventures range, all of them set within Season Seventeen.

There are two ways of looking at these novels. On the one hand, Gareth Roberts, who had already put out The Highest Science and Tragedy Day when the Missing Adventures line started and had firmly nailed down his role as “the funny one.” Given that the New Adventures as a whole were pretty strikingly far from the “funny” brief when the Missing Adventures started up Gareth Roberts, who clearly was a great writer in the wrong era with the New Adventures, was a searingly obvious choice to write for them. And this era was a searingly obvious choice for him to write in. In this regard his first Missing Adventure, The Romance of Crime, was almost inevitable – the sort of thing that just followed instinctively from the premise that the Missing Adventures existed. (Less expected was that one of other things that everyone would naturally assume would exist in the Missing Adventures – a Hartnell historical – also came from Roberts and took until The Plotters)

The other perspective, and the one I prefer just because it involves casting Roberts as a sort of Robert Holmes villain cackling away in a cellar and shrieking about how he’ll show them all and how SOON they will RECOGNIZE the POWER of GRAHAM! WILL! IAMS!, is, well, about what I just described. These novels are unabashedly and gloriously Gareth Roberts with a chip on his shoulder hell-bent on showing the world that they’re wrong about his favorite era of Doctor Who. In this regard The Romance of Crime, which was written with such a sense of traditionalism as to adhere to what could plausibly have been made in 1979, is the most obvious. It is unabashedly an attempt to show not what the Williams era could have been but rather to show what it was, in point of fact, when written competently.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 15 (Eye of Heaven, BBC Books,

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Apparently the RSS feed failed to pick up Wednesday’s post about Mary Whitehouse. If you missed it, it’s over here. 

Among the most stereotypically overdone debates in all of Doctor Who fandom is the debate that took place over the long interregnum between the so-called “rad” and “trad” schools of novels. This was a proper debate, and thus characterized by each side considering the other’s position to be self-evidently silly and essentially unworthy of discussion. Proponents of the “trad” school – short for traditional – favored novels that closely hewed to the approach and aesthetics of televised Doctor Who. They tended to view the “rad” school, with their preference for more radical and experimental novels, as a strange sort of Doctor Who fan who was only fond of Doctor Who when it wasn’t much like Doctor Who. The “rads” on the other hand largely viewed the traditionalists as silly an unadventurous sticks in the mud who failed to appreciate that anything that is traditional Doctor Who now was, at one point or another, radical Doctor Who. (The other 99% of fandom just read books and enjoyed some while not enjoying others.)

As is usually the case with a divide like this, the truth of the matter is that both sides of the debate are rather silly. We’ve already seen how “trad” novels can be subversive and challenging to the aesthetics and approaches of their eras. And we’ve followed the progress of the series closely enough to know that the idea that all changes are radical shifts is nonsense. The series has often improved incrementally, with “normality” being established through small shifts. The Hinchcliffe era really only did a dramatic revolution of a story twice: once with Genesis of the Daleks, and even that is still 80% just “generic Terry Nation story done really well” and would probably have qualified as “trad” by the standards that characterized this deeply silly moment of debate because it had Daleks in it and felt like a Terry Nation script. And then, of course, once with The Deadly Assassin, which is unquestionably “rad.” Still, one example does not change the fact that even in an era full of iconic stories, not much is actually “rad” in televised Doctor Who. And so in this regard we recognize that in fact the very act of writing a Doctor Who novel means that you’re signing up to try to do radical and interesting things within a prescribed form – a tradition, if you will. And that criticizing “trad” novels while extolling the virtues of “rad” ones is the height of idiocy. Right? Good. Moving on.

Here we begin to see the other side. Jim Mortimore is one of the archetypal “rad” writers, which should surprise nobody who has been reading the Time Can Be Rewritten stuff from the beginning. In this novel he manages to avoid casually reconfiguring reality every chapter via an Aristotle-infused video game being played on the TARDIS. Instead he tells his story through two distinct sequences of alternating chapters in which even and odd-numbered chapters each tell a different part of the story.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 14 (Asylum, BBC Books, 2001)

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One more post of dotting ts, crossing is, and playing with some of the concepts from the Deadly Assassin Megapost, then we’ll do Face of Evil on Wednesday. Here I want to look again at the ways in which having an understanding of history and of the world more complex than the ones I critiqued in the Deadly Assassin entry – or for that matter in the Masque of Mandragora essay – makes for better writing than those of Big-Ass Science or the limited views of the nature of time and history espoused by mainstream fandom. And for that we have Peter Darvill-Evan’s almost but not-quite excellent book Asylum.

The first thing that should be said about Asylum is that Darvill-Evans is a much better writer than he is a historian. It’s actually a relatively minor point within the book, but he goes out of his way to have the Doctor endorse a particular historical view of Roger Bacon in which he is not actually a meaningful figure in the history of science on the grounds that his overall worldview was insufficiently empiricist. I am not a medieval/renaissance scholar, and I am not going to wade too far into this debate, but Darvill-Evans’s view amounts to a variation on the idea that the rise of science was a light switch that got thrown somewhere in human history in which everybody became an empiricist.

The argument Darvill-Evans gives the Doctor – that “his main objective is to prepare the Christian world for the coming of the Antichrist, which he believes is imminent” and that “he believes the universe is governed by the idea of the self-generation of likenesses.” The problem is that this argument would rule out Isaac Newton just as well, who was, after all, an alchemist who blew a lot of time predicting the date of the Apocalypse. And anyone who wants to rule Newton out as a scientist is a braver man than I am. 
The thing is, the rise of science wasn’t just a sudden thing. Science came out of an intellectual stew that included theology, what we now classify as occultism, philosophy, and a wealth of other disciplines. Empiricism – whether in soft or Big-Ass forms – ultimately traces its roots back to forms of thought that we now consider deeply unscientific. There’s really not a way around this, and drawing a fence around the development of science that rules Roger Bacon out is just not a good understanding of what science and human development are.

And this is very clearly what Darvill-Evans does. He has the Doctor say that Nyssa’s thesis is inaccurate. Her thesis is explicitly that Bacon is a proto-scientist and that an understanding of the “dawning of the technological age” should extend back at least as far as him, as opposed to merely to the twentieth century or the Industrial Revolution. To say that is flatly untrue is, well, flatly untrue. Whether or not Bacon ought be called a “scientist” proper is beyond my expertise, but he clearly has an important place in the history of science.

…

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