time can be rewritten

Here’s one, Fact Fans! If you lay the Missing Adventures next to each other in chronological order, then Vicki is staring with alarm at Jo Grant in a necktie. Probably thinking “Oh, she’s the one who got naked and humped a Dalek, isn’t she?” Yes, Vicki, she is. Jealous?

Time Can Be Rewritten is a recurring feature in which stories written in later years that were intended to be retconned into previous eras are analyzed in the context of their presumptive eras. Today we look at Gareth Roberts 1996 novel The Plotters.


So here’s the thing about Doctor Who that we may not have talked about quite enough yet. It has fans. Exactly when it acquired this potential affliction is hard to pin down, but the answer probably has something to do with 1980. And it’s been a solidly mixed blessing. If it weren’t for fandom we wouldn’t have, well, Doctor Who from 2005 on. But, on the other hand, if it weren’t for fandom, we wouldn’t have had Doctor Who from 1985 to early 1987. Which might have been nice.


But Doctor Who has fans. It has fandom. And it’s had it for a really long time – indeed, at this point for a majority of its existence. In fact, given that Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat are two of the biggest anoraks on the planet, as is David Tennant. Seriously, track down the old Podcast commentary for Forest of the Dead with Davies, Moffat, and Tennant just geeking out over Doctor Who in general and basically ignoring the actual episode. Aside from the fact that it is in no way a commentary track, it’s the best commentary track ever. 


So the fact of the matter is that we’re now at 21 years in which fans have been running the asylum, versus at most 26 where they weren’t. We’re nearing the point where fans have run Doctor Who more than normal people have. (In fact, due to events we’ll cover when we get to season 20, arguably we’ve already crossed that point.) And one consequence of an extreme and chronic case of fandom is that tastes have changed.


Which is why things like the Missing Adventures are so interesting. Because this is a book written in 1996 that is about the pleasures of a TV show from 31 years earlier. By a writer who was 28 at the time. So the one thing we can safely conclude about Gareth Roberts’ take on late second season Doctor Who is that it is not in any way based on the experience of actually watching late second season Doctor Who in 1965. Further making this interesting is that Gareth Roberts is one of the writers of the new series, having contributed four episodes thus far with a fifth on the way. So this novel is actually, ignoring some stray comics and short stories, the earliest-set piece of Doctor Who by a writer to have written for the new series. Giving Gareth Roberts the interesting distinction of having the widest span of Doctor Who writing – 195 televised stories take place between this novel and his season five episode The Lodger.…

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I like traffic lights…

Time Can Be Rewritten is a recurring feature in which stories written in later years that were intended to be retconned into previous eras are analyzed in the context of their presumptive eras. Today we look at Simon Guerrier’s 2005 novel from BBC Books, The Time Travellers.


It is November of 2005. The number one singles for the month are Westlife’s “You Raise Me Up” and Madonna’s “Hung Up.” If 2000 was the absolute low point of Doctor Who, this is more or less the high point. On television, Christopher Eccleston regenerated into David Tennant five months ago, and in this month’s mini-episode for Children in Need, the world saw him for the first time.

This book, then, is a holdover – the second to last book to emerge from BBC Books, which had been carrying the Doctor Who torch since 1997. The problem is that in April of 2005, Russell T. Davies’s Doctor Who established the Last Great Time War as a major plot thread. For a variety of reasons that we’ll deal with when we get to this era, this was a phenomenally massive diss to the BBC Books line, a diss that the series has basically made no effort whatsoever to apologize or make up for. So this book is, in many ways, a ghost – the last breath of an already dead strand of Doctor Who history.

Which is perhaps why, unshackled from any actual responsibilities to be good or carry on the tradition of the series or break new ground and ensure the series long term survival, Simon Guerrier was able to do something that had frankly been lacking in the bulk of the BBC Books output – write a really interesting story that filled a meaningful gap in the series history.

See, not to get too spoiler heavy, but in the televised story after Planet of Giants, Susan becomes the first regular character to depart Doctor Who. If, at the end of the third episode of Planet of Giants, you suspected this, you are, frankly, psychic, as the story gives no setup whatsoever for that development. So it makes sense to put something in the gap between the two stories – a decent gap, given that the only teaser at the end of Planet of Giants is that the Doctor has no idea where they are. Admittedly the next episode also begins with the Doctor having no idea where they are, but let’s be fair, that’s true of almost every episode of Doctor Who. (Oddly, Time Travellers is the only story in Doctor Who set in this gap, with other stories preferring the Reign of Terror-Planet of Giants gap despite the fact that, as pointed out by a commenter two entries ago, that gap is actually a bit dodgy, whereas this gap is pretty solid. Indeed, given that Ian and Barbara are visibly surprised that they might be in London at the start of the next story, moving a few more stories into this gap would not be an unreasonable decision on the part of those who are obsessive enough about Doctor Who chronology to care about this sort of thing.)…

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Time Can Be Rewritten is a recurring feature in which stories written in later years that were intended to be retconned into previous eras are analyzed in the context of their presumptive eras. Today, Jim Mortimore’s self-published novel Campaign.


The thing about the past of Doctor Who is that the show very quickly – two televised episodes from here, actually – started actively engaging with questions of its own mythology and past. And so 1964 is never left entirely behind. Even today, stories are actively produced on CD, under official BBC licenses, set in the William Hartnell era. And even beyond that, Doctor Who has, clearly, a long and distinguished history of fandom, which has produced stories, often of dubious value, in the Doctor Who format.

I am not going to do every Doctor Who audio and novel that has ever been written. But I am going to do some of them – ones of particular note or significance. I plan on doing a total of four novels in the Hartnell era, of which this is the first.

Jim Mortimore, when he wrote Campaign, was as accomplished a Doctor Who writer as one could find during the fifteen year interregnum of Doctor Who. He’d written or co-written seven previous novels, most of them extremely acclaimed. His reputation was for dense, complex, and ambitious novels. Campaign proved to be the climax of that career, however – a novel so strange and ambitious that BBC Books declined to publish it after commissioning it, leading Mortimore to self-publish.

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