you were expecting someone else

And so begins the endgame of an era, in which I traditionally wander around a bit and look at other things before actually resolving the era. We’ve two more Capaldi-era stories and five entries to cover them with. And today we dip into the BBC Books line for the fourth time this era because I want to talk a little more about Missy, and the alternative is Big Finish’s box set and, well, we don’t do that anymore. So instead we get BBC Books’ anthology of Missy-centric short stories.

Like most BBC Books products, it suffers from the obvious problem of dead weight writers. I’m sure Peter Anghelides is a lovely person (although really you’d think I’d have been burned enough times by the BBC-sanctioned pro-fan class to just stop with that assumption), but there’s simply no reason why one of the writers of The Ancestor Cell should be writing new release Doctor Who material in 2018 except for the fact that they haven’t actually changed editors since the book after that. And yes, there’s also an inevitable firmly adequate story by James Goss and an effort by Cavan Scott that includes metaphors like “a look that would wither Krynoids” and “I’ll gut you like a gumblejack if you use that tone again,” both of which are, charitably, about as well crafted as a Bandrill ambassador. 

But sometimes Richards’ EDA-era rolodex makes good, and this time it offers the delightful double dose of Paul Magrs and Jacqueline Rayner. Magrs is in particular a self-evidently brilliant choice for this—his brand of campy and postmodernist wackiness is an utterly delicious fit for Missy. His story features Missy as a 1920s governess with a bafflingly elaborate plan involving a sentient wish-granting teddy bear named Teddy Sparkles. It’s insane and at one point features a failed attempt to alter timelines that results in 1925 London being attacked by dinosaur skeletons. (“I’ve done it all wrong! I’ve mixed up plain reality with awful whimsy… and now there’s chaos everywhere!,” Teddy says, in the greatest Second Doctor line ever written for another character.)

Rayner’s inclusion, meanwhile, both avoids the deeply embarrassing goof Big Finish managed of having no female writers on Missy (although in this instance the TV series is just as bad—if we continue the assumption that the last scene of Eaters of Light was Moffat, Rayner is presently the only woman to have written Missy) and results in one of the most hilarious and delightful stories in the anthology. It’s an epistolary story taking the form of messages between the Doctor and Nardole coordinating Missy’s shopping lists while she’s in the vault, some automated e-mails from an Amazon-equivalent, a couple of news articles from the St. Luke’s Gazette about a robotic chicken attack, and a series of messages sent by Missy through the two-way space-time telegraph with time-scoop facility she builds with a helmic regulator, azimuth sprockets, sulphuric acid, mercury, and some sugar in which she attempts to incite various historical women into mass androcide.…

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It’s been nearly five years since I last wrote about Big Finish on this site. Much of this gap is due to the fact that it’s only fairly recently that Big Finish’s license was expanded to cover the new series, so there’s been pretty slim pickings post-McGann. But in 2015 Big Finish released their first Torchwood and UNIT audios, and since then new series-adjacent material has been a mainstay of their increasingly bloated line. To date there’s nothing that directly ties into the Capaldi era, but as all of Osgood’s stories and all but one of Kate Stewart’s have Capaldi in them, this seemed the line to check back in on the company with.

It’s no secret to anyone who reads my social media that I’m hostile to Big Finish of late. But I haven’t really talked about that in long form. So instead of beating around the bush and coming to a conclusion that Big Finish is in much the same boat as the novel line in terms of its complete failure to do anything of worth with its license, let’s just start up front with the litany of problems this set has. Its hook is compelling enough—the surviving Pertwee-era actors (save for Fernanda Marlowe) team up with modern day UNIT to fight the Silurians. There are some problems baked into this, like that Benton and Yates are not exactly characters who bring a ton of, well, character to the table, with Benton’s main trait being an earnest masculinity and Yates’s being that he’s played by a rapist. But it’s a perfectly charming premise for what it is, and clearly the sort of thing Big Finish exists to do. 

It’s after the hook that the problems start mounting up. The four episodes of this are written by Matt Fitton and Guy Adams, who currently average about a story a month for Big Finish. Nothing about that is a good idea. Big Finish released, and I am astonished by this figure, a hundred and twenty-five separate Doctor Who audios that were an hour or longer in 2017. Fully 28% of these were by three authors, two of which were Fitton and Adams. Both halves of those statements are absurd. The creative case for making a hundred and twenty-three separate Doctor Who audios in a single year is non-existent. But to do so while so heavily centralizing the work among a small number of writers is simply appalling. Big Finish cycles in more new and first-time writers than their reputation would suggest, but the fact that they are engaging in such grotesque overproduction while continuing to maintain a “no unsolicited submissions” policy and leaning so hard on the same writers (another 39% are accounted for by just nine additional writers, meaning twelve writers are collectively responsible for two-thirds of their output) is the sort of thing that makes it very hard not to tip into outright Levineism and just call “evil.” Really, the only reason not to is that it’s better to save it for the fact that only ten of those hundred and twenty-five are by women, a majority of which are in the Torchwood line.…

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For all that we’ve been picking on the inadequacies of the standard book line, there had been efforts in the background to try new things. For a variety of reasons we didn’t cover efforts like Summer Falls and The Angel’s Kiss in the late Matt Smith era (actually just one reason, which was me saving things for the book), but they certainly represented one effort to change what the book line can and should do. The Legends of Ashildr represents a stab at another possible shape the books could take—anthologies of several short stories. Obviously there are some constraints around this. Just dumping a couple Doctor Who short story collections a year is an invitation for mediocrity with no obvious sales hooks. Whatever one might say about Big Bang Generation, it at least has a hook you can sell it with in a way that wouldn’t be true of a straightforward collection of shorts.

But what does work is grabbing gaps in the series and filling them with anthologies. So, for instance, when you have several hundred years of Ashildr/Me growing and developing as a character between the two halves of her debut you drop a collection of four stories filling in that gap. There aren’t necessarily a ton of things you can obviously do this with. There’s one other big one that we’ll get to towards the end of the era, and a few you could maybe imagining them doing something with that they didn’t (Osgood’s Zygon Adventures, Clara and Me, One Night on Darillium), though many of these start to get into a turf war with Big Finish who one assumes are absolutely dying for Maisie Williams and Jenna Coleman to have a spare weekend they can waste. 

(A quick aside on terminology, since calling people by their preferred names is kind of a thing for me. The credits for episodes list Maisie Williams as playing “Ashildr” in all but The Woman Who Died. This broadly tracks with the Doctor’s inclination—he seems to passive aggressively call her Ashildr as part of his efforts at “redeeming” her. But, well, fuck that sideways with a Tissue Compression Eliminator. I don’t think this is quite a deadname situation, as it’s less rejection of having ever been Ashildr than a statement of having grown and changed, and so I do not have  problems calling her Ashildr prior to her taking on her new name. As these stories keep calling her Ashildr even when doing internal narration [though note my concerns when we reach the final story], I’ll call her Ashildr in this entry, but she’ll be Me going forwards.) 

But when the opportunity presents itself it’s a clear occasion for knocking together a book that’s got a little more freedom to try things and be interesting. With four stories, any of them have the liberty to take risks or display ambition because if they fail there’s three other ones to pick up the slack. There’s opportunities to give new writers a chance.…

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Books like this always pose something of a problem for the project. On the one hand, a book like this, in which Peter Capaldi’s Doctor goes on an adventure with Bernice Summerfield, is irresistible to a project like this. Once I discovered it existed there was literally never a point where I considered not covering it. The new series intersecting with the Wilderness Years at the point where it’s about to come as close to niche interest as it has been allowed to. The possibilities are vast. Except, of course, for the other hand, which is that it’s by Gary Russell. I ranted a bit in the Blood Cell entry about the inexplicable failure of spinoff media to move beyond the same handful of names who have been around since the Wilderness Years, many of them firmly among the B-list of that era. But Gary Russell takes this to another level, or rather several of them. For one thing, he’s been around far longer than the Wilderness Years, having been a prominent figure in Doctor Who at least since his 1984 Doctor Who Magazine review that described Warriors of the Deep as, and I quote, “a flawless story.” While this can probably be chalked up to the magazine’s official editorial policy of “please Mr. Nathan-Turner can we have some more,” it also proves a distressing augury of his own talents. His novels tend to ostentatiously fill high profile gaps—he’s written Liz Shaw’s departure, Mel’s first appearance, and Colin Baker’s regeneration—but to have little ambition for doing so beyond ticking the relevant boxes, and generally a few more to boot. 

And so it’s helpful to begin with what could be interesting about Big Bang Generation, figuring that we’ll move on to what it actually does afterwards. One possibility, of course, is to contrast her with the character she almost certainly partially inspired, River Song. This option, admittedly, was not available to Russell and its foreclosure is in fact why this book exists—he’d pitched a Twelve/River novel but been shot down by Moffat, who had his own plans in this regard and suggested Benny as an alternative. The book still alludes to the similarities between the characters, but detailed exploration is left to Big Finish, who will surely get there some day.

Another plan would be what I alluded to above, exploring the Wilderness Years’ liminal status and generally celebrating the weird gap in Doctor Who. This has merit, in that the Wilderness Years had room to do things that the popularity and legitimacy of the new series denies it, but the new series is, as mentioned, about to go into a kind of weird niche moment. And it would just be nice to have a nice little monument to the trappings of the Wilderness Years. Russell even comes close to this at one point, with a flashback montage of companions that consists of Benny, Clara, Amy, Rory, River, Wilf, Donna, Martha, Captain Jack, Mickey, Rose, Cinder, Molly O’Sullivan, tamsin drew, Lucie Miller, Cr’izz, Charley, Samson and Gemma Griffin, Mary Shelley, Grace Holloway, Ace, Hex, Mel, and Evelyn Smythe.…

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In early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured and had been hacked, resulting in the leak of scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight. A few days later it became clear that the leak was worse than it had initially appeared as a workprint of Deep Breath also appeared on torrent sites, followed, over the course of the next month and a half, by workprints of the other five episodes. The files had been prepared for a Brazil-based subtitling company called Drei Marc, and specifically for a gentleman named Marcelo Camargo who, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the leak itself, became the name most associated with it.

These thing, of course, happen, and generally speaking it’s a sign that a show is popular enough to be worth hacking. And it’s generally not actually a problem for the show. For all the talk of the leak being “embarrassing” for both Doctor Who and the BBC, there were no meaningful negative consequences. All five leaked episodes performed just fine, both critically and in the ratings; indeed they’re among the best-performing episodes of the Capaldi era. Likewise, leak of Rose didn’t hurt anything (and indeed probably helped the series, as the diehard fans hashed out all their arguments over it in advance). Indeed, the truth is that it’s tough to think of any instance where a pre-release leak to torrent sites actually caused any damage. Certainly it never dings Game of Thrones’s ratings. There are at least some instances, most notably the pilot for Supergirl, where there’s a widespread belief that the network itself leaked the episode for publicity purposes.

More broadly, though, the five leaked episodes were actually good. Good material is not harmed by letting people see it. Had Capaldi completely bombed in the part such that the buzz around the screener copies was negative it would have been a very different situation. But even there, if Capaldi had been a disaster this would have been found out on its own. The leaks are largely beside the point. Nevertheless, these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and placeholder musical cues their basic quality was evident.

And yes, I suppose at this point I may as well admit that I watched them at the time. I consider myself in good company, as Moffat admitted that he would have watched them too. I don’t mean this revelation to indicate some larger ethical principle, to be clear. I just couldn’t resist. My wife and I were nearly a year into a running joke of saying “guess what” with the answer being a very emphatic and happy “Peter Capaldi,” with every syllable emphasized. I was dying to see the new Doctor. So I caved. I lasted a solid week or two after Deep Breath leaked, and avoided the scripts entirely, as what I was interested in was the performance, not the plot, but I caved eventually.…

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For all that the Capaldi era marks a golden age for the series, it also marked a heavy decline in the show’s mass popularity. This was, contrary to paranoiacs on GallifreyBase, not a precipitous decline into crisis—the revived series has still never gone below 30th place in the weekly rankings, which puts its cultural footprint in the general vicinity of the Letts and Hinchcliffe eras. But this is still quite the falling from being the biggest show on television. And the fall is visible outside of ratings. The merchandising explosion that peaked around Series 5 had well and truly dried up by now, with only a handful of action figures for the Capaldi era ever filtering out. (So far as I can tell, Bill never even got one.) The rush of shorts that accompanied all of the Matt Smith seasons and peaked with Night of the Doctor abruptly stopped. Even the tie-in novels, which had released at a rate of at least six a season since the show’s debut, dwindled to three per year. This is admittedly still three more novels than Line of Duty or Call the Midwife put out in a year (although Broadchurch turns out to have been surprisingly prolific), but again, it’s a step back for Doctor Who’s omnipresence.

Despite this decline (or perhaps because of it) the Capaldi era was an interesting one for the novels. Of the nine released, two announced themselves as worth covering. Being worth covering has never meant the same thing as being good, of course, but that’s a topic for the other one. The Blood Cell, released as part of the first tranche of three, is just here because it’s actually a solid Doctor Who novel with actual ambitions, several of which it actually fulfills. Its basic premise—the Doctor is in prison—borders slightly on the obvious, given the show’s tendency to bounce them in and out of captivity over the course of a story. But this isn’t a story where the Doctor gets captured; this is a story about prisons. Which is an excellent premise. I remarked on Twitter the other day that Doctor Who would be a more interesting show if its ongoing topic of ambivalence had been police instead of soldiers. I hadn’t gotten to this book yet, but it largely demonstrates my point. Giving the Doctor a tortured and ambivalent relationship with war is just putting him at odds with some of the underlying assumptions of his genre. But giving him a tortured and ambivalent relationship with law acknowledges the tensions within the character himself—it actually gets at the weird mix of aristocracy and anarchism bound up in the character.

This is not, of course, the first time Doctor Who has focused intently on prisons. Lawrence Miles tackled the issue compellingly back in Interference, where he had the Eighth Doctor caught in a Saudi Arabian prison where his usual tricks of breaking out don’t work because the guards are motivated by no reason beyond capricious brutality.…

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