Eruditorum Press

Christmas and Easter nihilists

you were expecting someone else

You Were Expecting Someone Else 21 (The Monsters Inside)

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The Monsters Inside is one of the first three books in what is unofficially called the New Series Adventures, although even that name seems, in hindsight, ever so slightly wrong. The name derives from the two other BBC Books lines that existed in 2005, the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the former of which we covered from January through April, and the latter of which we looked at alongside each of the past doctors. And the name picks up on this, implying as it does that the New Series Adventures are going to exist alongside the other two lines.

In hindsight this is rubbish. Neither the Eighth Doctor Adventures nor the Past Doctor Adventures were going to survive the year. We knew that about the Eighth Doctor Adventures, actually, but as of May, when this came out alongisde The Clockwise Man and Winner Takes All to launch the New Series Adventures, the theory was that the Past Doctor Adventures were going to keep running indefinitely, with the Eighth Doctor range being folded into it. Indeed, in May the Eighth Doctor Range hadn’t actually quite wrapped yet, with The Gallifrey Chronicles coming out the next month, alongside Eccleston’s regeneration.

All of which is to say that while to the mainstream Doctor Who was a titanic hit that was coming back for a second season and was set to be one of the BBC’s crown jewels, to fans May of 2005 was a bewildering period in which there were in fact three incumbent Doctors, the Paul McGann era having yet to resolve, the Eccleston era ongoing, and the Tennant era announced. And the question of what the auxiliary merchandise for the series would be like was still very much an open one.

Because there were, in fact, a lot of ways the merchandise could go. It could, of course, target fans. That was what Doctor Who merchandise had been doing since the 1980s, after all. That’s why the Doctor Who Cookbook and $125 Doctor Who stained glass windows made for selling in America as pledge awards for PBS existed – because adult fans could be trusted to buy this crap. And certainly this type of merchandise still exists, as apparently there are people who want to spend fifty pounds for a box set of the Pandorica chair and a River Song action figure. Or, for that matter, thirty pounds for a Winston Churchill action figure bundled with a Dalek with tea tray accessory. (And that’s just the new series. You can also, these days, spend thirty-five quid for action figures of Peri and Sil from Vengeance on Varos)

A reasonable person might have expected this to be how all of the new series merchandise would work: high end collectors items for the undiscerning Doctor Who fan with an excess of disposable income. This was basically how the novels had worked in the wilderness years, with Virgin and then BBC Books pumping out two books every month in what was actually the biggest flood of new Doctor Who material in the series’ history, especially once Big Finish got in on the act with audios.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 20 (The Book of the World)

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Well, it’s almost the right cover.

The Book of the World was, in essence, Lawrence Miles showing off that he could write a good Doctor Who script for the modern series. He put it up on the web for a week before taking it down, but you can still track down copies with only a little bit of dedication because nothing vanishes from the Internet. The script  actually dates to late 2007, making it a Tennant-era concern, and it wasn’t actually released until just before Silence in the Library, so actually is virtually a Moffat-era concern. But, to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to keep Lawrence Miles around as a theme that long. He’s a wilderness era theme, and the nature of his point here applies just as well as it would closer to the time of composition. Better, in many ways, as The Book of the World is very much an attempt at showing how Lawrence Miles would have rebooted the series, and holding that discussion back until 2007/2008 would have seemed strange. The script’s concerns are very much 2005 sorts of concerns, wherever it came from.

So in the wake of Lawrence Miles’s last moment of any major significance to the course and direction of Doctor Who, let’s look at him as a whole. One of his most steadfast assertions, which carries through virtually everything he says about or in Doctor Who – and even if I’ve not covered it all, I’ve read virtually all of it – is that he is not a science fiction person. This claim must come off strangely to anybody who is not Lawrence Miles, since reading his material it’s self-evident that he is, in fact, a science fiction person. Surely only a science fiction person would ever come up with the premise of Alien Bodies, in which a time traveller discovers that his own body’s “biodata” is being used as a weapon in a futuristic war. I mean, it sounds like something only a sci-fi person could ever come up with.

Certainly his fanbase is overwhelmingly comprised of sci-fi people. I mean, this goes without saying, yes? Someone whose writing credits exist entirely in spin-off media of a sci-fi show, and, at times, spin-offs of those spin-offs, and who is buried neck deep in the cult television paratext is clearly and self-evidently a sci-fi person, right? Well, sort of right.

See, the real point Miles is making when he says he’s not a sci-fi person and Doctor Who isn’t a sci-fi show is that in his view Doctor Who is a fantasy show in the tradition of magical realism. Which, again, he’s not wrong. The logic of Doctor Who is, as we’ve said before, really a traditional British one of eccentric spaces and portals to other worlds that has as many roots in Alice in Wonderland and Chronicles of Narnia as it does in, say, Quatermass. That’s not the only tradition Doctor Who comes out of, of course – it also owes a lot to the tradition of literary science fiction that the BBC was invested in.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 19 (Scream of the Shalka)

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The list of proper “alternate Doctors” is relatively small: you’ve got Cushing, of course – the alternate Doctor who has actually impacted culture in any meaningful sense. You’ve got the Curse of Fatal Death set of Doctors, but they were never actually meant to be taken as seriously as they are. And you’ve got Trevor Martin, but since he was in a 1974 stage play that nobody knew much about until 2008 when Big Finish did an audio adaptation, he’s pretty firmly purely a trivia answer.

It’s worth thinking a little bit about the nature of “alternate Doctors” in this regard. Our pool of three noteworthy interests contains exactly zero that were ever intended by anyone as a serious alternative to Doctor Who. Cushing’s Doctor existed only to provide a platform upon which Dalek thrills could be built. The Curse of Fatal Death was, as noted, a joke, though for all its quality it turned out to be not nearly as funny as fans taking it seriously as a plot to kill off Doctor Who by burning through the remaining regenerations, a viewpoint that is fascinating in its utter wrongness. And Trevor Martin was a disposable product to handle the fact that Jon Pertwee didn’t want to do the show. None of these are “alternate” Doctors, as that suggests some sort of fully functional alternate history in which they are Doctor Who, and none of them could possibly support that. They’re trivia answers.

Which brings us to Scream of the Shalka. On the one hand it’s clearly a trivia answer – the hardest answer to “name the three contexts in which Richard E Grant has appeared in Doctor Who.” On the other, we have to remember that this was a completely sincere attempt at rebooting Doctor Who, intended as such a big deal that Davies cited his guilt over killing off the project as part of why he hired Cornell to write Father’s Day. (That and Cornell being bloody good, of course.) Richard E Grant was announced as the official Ninth Doctor, and the plan was that this would spin off into a proper series of Doctor Who. It’s just that before it actually came out it got completely pre-empted by Russell T Davies, and so Grant became an alternate Doctor by default.

And so the first and most obvious question to ask about Scream of the Shalka is whether it ever could have worked. Is this in fact the first properly “alternate” Doctor – an alternate launching point into forty years of new adventures, as Cornell breathlessly hyped it before the bottom dropped out. Certainly much of the familiar scaffolding is there: we have a post-traumatic Doctor with a new status quo following some hazily defined event. The Master Robot ruefully seeking redemption is charming, not least because Derek Jacobi is a national treasure who’s having an absolute blast. The villain is solid, which is impressive, as there was an awful lot else to launch in this story and doing a mediocre villain that’s just a placeholder against which the Doctor gets to define himself is a pretty standard response to that problem.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 18 (The Eighth Doctor Comics)

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First off, an announcement: I’m funding the second edition of the William Hartnell book via Kickstarter. The link is here. Please, contribute, spread the word, et cetera. There are some lovely perks available – most of the tiers amount to “pre-order the book,” but if you’re interested in signed copies, that’s up there too. Also, for all the people who have ever requested that I cover something in one of the future volumes, here is your chance to make me. Plus there’s a Kickstarter-exclusive essay to be had at any donation level.

You might fairly ask why I’m funding the project this way. The answer is pretty simple: I know the financials on a new book. I know how much a book makes in its first month and how to balance production costs against that. But I have no idea how to budget an updated edition, and I don’t want to put out a bunch of money on production and then have the book take six months to earn out. So I’m trying to fund it via presales. If the Kickstarter falls through it doesn’t mean the book won’t happen, but it’ll mean some… reevaluating.

Also, I have some really fun stretch goals if it funds, so, you know. There’s that. So, yes. On to today’s post.

As we said on Wednesday, there are six Eighth Doctor eras, abortive as some may be. And with this we come to the final one of them: the Doctor Who Magazine comic. It’s telling that of the eight Doctors to have had a comic in Doctor Who Magazine the only three where the comic is highlighted as a specific and important part of the era are the ones that coincided with what is widely, if not universally, considered a problematic era elsewhere. The Mills and Wagner Tom Baker strips provided a desired tonic to the controversial levity of Season Seventeen. The Parkhouse/Ridgway Sixth Doctor comics were valued in a large part because of how problematic the era itself was. And here we get the third era of Doctor Who Magazine comics that people are very invested in: the Eighth Doctor comics.

They’re not the salvation of the Paul McGann era. I mean, nobody expected me to say they were, right? They have some charming ones – most notably “Where Nobody Knows Your Name,” a one-off strip featuring the return of Frobisher. Several of the moments of high drama work quite well – when the Doctor’s main comic strip companion, Izzy, gets turned into a fish person there’s some lovely emotional beats. And a fake regeneration into Nicholas Briggs’s Audio-Visuals Doctor is delightfully cheeky, as plot twists go.

There are, in other words, lots of bits to love. But it’s still a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, which means characterization is at a minimum. The Eighth Doctor is as featureless here as ever, running firmly as “generic Doctor” with occasional outbreaks of fight scenes. As with the previous two times there’s been a selection of people who think that the comics are the “real” version of the Doctor, it’s more a criticism of the rest of the era.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 17 (Grant Morrison’s Doctor Who Comics)

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“Why,” one might reasonably ask, “are you suddenly doing late 80s Doctor Who Magazine comics featuring the Sixth and Seventh Doctors when you’re supposed to be hip-deep in the Eighth Doctor era?” And one would have a fair question. The answer, dear reader, is that we’re beginning a bit of a thing with this post: a four essay run that leads up to Lawrence Miles’s mad masterpiece Interference. The gameplan is simple: next Wednesday we do Interference. Monday we do the lead-in to it with Dead Romance, Miles’s second Benny New Adventure, albeit one without, you know, Benny in it. Friday, meanwhile, we’re going to do The Invisibles so that we can be ready for one of the major things people compare Lawrence Miles to, namely Grant Morrison. Which brings us around to today, where we finally get around to looking at the three Doctor Who comics Grant Morrison wrote in the late 80s, having skipped them at the time because, well, they just didn’t fit anywhere well.

It’s not that Grant Morrison isn’t an influence on Doctor Who. But he wasn’t at the time these comics came out, and he wasn’t going to be for a good long while. More to the point, he was nowhere near the approach anyone else was using for Doctor Who around this time. He didn’t really start making a splash on his own terms until the tail end of the Cartmel era, and the fact of the matter is that it was Alan Moore and then Neil Gaiman who was serving as the major influence for writers in the late 80s/early 90s. The first time you can really point at something and say “that’s Grant Morrison’s influence on Doctor Who” is Daniel O’Mahoney’s The Man in the Velvet Mask, which is blatantly taken from the second storyline of The Invisibles. So I held this back until now.

First, then, an overview on Grant Morrison. He’s one of the bigger names of the British Invasion of comics, and one of the first to make the jump to the US (his debut on Animal Man came in 1988, although he had some text pieces in 1986, which was the beginning of his mainstream career). He’s also a prominent magician/occultist, favoring the style of magic generally described as Chaos Magic, which first popped up in the late 1970s, and which we’ll talk about in more detail on Friday. He’s still quite active in comics, currently writing both a Batman and Superman title for DC, as well as having some creator-owned projects in the pipeline. And he’s endlessly linked to some big Hollywood deal or another, none of which ever seem to materialize.

Yes, if you think this all begs for a comparison to Alan Moore, you’re not wrong. Of course two prominent practicing magicians/British comics writers who emerged at around the same time get compared to each other. And more to the point, they don’t get on at all. Cards on the table: since the Moore/Morrison rivalry forms the spine of what will be my next sprawlingly over-large project after I finish TARDIS Eruditorum (still over a year away, so fear not), I can’t exactly leave it be.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 16 (The Infinity Doctors)

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The Infinity Doctors, BBC Books’ 35th Anniversary book, presents the adventures of an unspecified version of the Doctor having adventures on Gallifrey, seemingly, but not necessarily prior to An Unearthly Child. The result, unsurprisingly, is wholly incommensurable with continuity. Cheekily, and typical of Parkin, he builds this out of an excessive loyalty to continuity. Parkin has noted that he built The Infinity Doctors by taking all of the Gallifrey stories at once and taking them seriously in such a way as to generate a tangled mess that makes internal sense but contradicts virtually everything outside of it. So if you try to place The Infinity Doctors as a prequel leading up to the series you run into the problem of Susan’s tangible absence. Repeated reference is made to Lungbarrow even though it provides an alternate theory of the Doctor’s departure from Gallifrey. The villain is nicked from The Three Doctors and another character from The Arc of Infinity, but both stories are nearly impossible to reconcile with the Time Lords’ relationship with Omega here. And so on and so forth. It’s all true, therefore none of it is.

As with Iris Wildthyme, the most interesting question is where the brakes get slammed on in this process. Parkin, after all, is not going to just casually destabilize the entire narrative of Doctor Who. The Infinity Doctors is carefully related to everything that’s going on around it even as it rebels and blows up all of the normal structures. The main clue, unsurprisingly, comes at the end, as the Doctor ponders the adventure here and comes to the conclusion that Gallifrey is unable to change and thus broken, and that he’s therefore going to have to go have adventures in time and space instead. So there we have it: the defining aspect of Doctor Who and what keeps it coherent is its mutability: the fact that it is subject to change.

In a purely factual sense, at least, this is more or less true. Doctor Who is still on the air in 2013 in a large part because Innes Lloyd took the decision in 1966 to recast the lead actor, thus allowing the show more or less completely free rein to change with the times. And while I might be the sort of person to quibble that this is perhaps somewhat flatter than a broad philosophical commitment to pleasure and fun in as many configurations as can be found, it seems unfair to complain merely that Parkin doesn’t have as thoroughly philosophic and theoretical a foundation as Paul Magrs.

Anyway, there’s a more interesting point to be made in all of this, which is that Parkin also constrains the extent of change. This takes place both on a pragmatic level – however much The Infinity Doctors may embrace change, it doesn’t throw anything from the past away. But more telling is its conclusion, in which the mind duel between the Doctor and Omega is resolved in part when the Doctor says that the power to rewrite anything renders it meaningless.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 15 (The Curse of Fatal Death)

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The Curse of Fatal Death is a 1998 comedy spoof of Doctor Who written by Steven Moffat. It’s also embedded below this paragraph. If we want to get accusatory, of course, it’s also a work of cynicism by somebody who doesn’t really like Doctor Who and only wants to mock what’s wrong with it. There is, puzzlingly, an entire line of thought about Moffat that works on this logic, insisting as it does that he does not actually like Doctor Who very much, and how he’s only interested in writing for it in order to show how smugly superior he is to it. Not that I think any of my quite respectable and sharp readers would actually go with this line of argument, even the camp that doesn’t like Moffat. But this is still a surprisingly persistent line of argument. 

Though for the sake of honesty, at least, we should probably admit that there are less adamant versions of the argument that we could make if we were so inclined, and that these versions are perhaps more compelling. Most of them would focus on the infamous tipsy ranting session he had with Paul Cornell, David Bishop, Andy Lane that got transcribed by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club for their fanzine Time Space Visualizer, in which he made several of his most trotted out quotes like, “If you look at the first episode of Doctor Who, that betrays the lie that it’s just the 60?s, because that first episode’s really good. The rest of it’s shit,” “some old actor like Tom Baker would come to a shuddering halt in the middle of the set and stare at the camera, because he can’t bear the idea that someone else is in the show,” and “You’ve got Patrick Troughton, who was a good actor, but his companions – how did they get their Equity card? They’re unimaginably bad.” These quotes do not endear Moffat to some people.

There are two defenses to mount here. The first is that the easier to find version of this ranting session is the one at the Doctor Who Interview Archive, which reformats it to look like an interview. It wasn’t – it was four fans drinking and bitching on tape. The DWIA version cuts out all the stuff that isn’t Moffat, and a fair amount of the stuff that is, completely losing the sense of tone and giving a terribly misleading sense of what was going on, making it sound like an interview where he was the center of attention. The full interview makes him come off much better, in part because it sets up the sort of conversation that was actually being had – one that Moffat is quiet for long stretches of. And he comes off much better in it.

But why reach for the weak defense. Let’s go for the strong one: he’s right. I mean, I love 1960s Doctor Who – and, crucially, so does Steven Moffat. But the Hartnell era is a mess.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 14 (The Seventh Doctor Comics)

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I will confess that the comics posts have increasingly become some of my least favorite to write. The reasons are fairly straightforward – there are basically no points in the history of Doctor Who where comics were the primary medium for the series, and they were often treated disposably as a result. When they had serious talent attached to them it tended to be incidental, and because the talent in question was in the earliest days of their career, and was thus taking assignments as rubbish as the Doctor Who Magazine strip. More often the Doctor Who comics were done by artists who never broke out more widely. For instance, yes, there’s a Grant Morrison/Bryan Hitch comic from 1988, but it’s Morrison when his only major credit is Zenith in 2000 AD and Hitch in some of his earliest work ever. There are scattered exceptions – John Wagner and Pat Mills most obviously – but for the most part the Doctor Who comics look like the disposable page-count ballast that they have been for almost every publication that has ever run them.

That’s not to say they haven’t been good at various times, but rather that their quality is almost completely independent of what’s on screen. Indeed, their content is almost completely independent of what’s on screen. Steve Parkhouse did the same sort of hazily plotted phantasmagoric stories with Peter Davison that he’d been doing with Colin Baker. The Mills/Wagner stories juxtapose meaningfully with Season Seventeen nowhere except in Lawrence Miles’s childhood. The story of the comics is very rarely related substantively to the story of the series at large.

That makes these entries, even when I’m writing about a good stretch of comics, frustrating, as they become “we interrupt your history of Doctor Who for a complete tangent having nothing to do with any of the blog’s current themes.” I mean, I have an actual coherent (at least in my own head) arc worked out for the blog through to Love and War or so. I’ve got this really nice parallel track going between the fact that the show, at the moment of its cancellation, needed to evolve and the fact that it needed to find a way to exist within the contemporary television landscape instead of as a cult oddity, and I’m all set to go through months of tracking what was compelling in genre fiction and what was compelling in mainstream British television, and how the New Adventures were constantly trying to negotiate that and come up with a new vision of Doctor Who. And now I have to interrupt all of that for another post about this backwater aspect of Doctor Who’s history where I struggle to find two thousand words to say about largely mediocre comics. Which is a minor complaint, as things go, but in practice this paragraph largely exists to set up a rhetorical turn in the next one.

The one exception to the backwater nature of Doctor Who comics came in 1990, the first year since 1963 in which there was simply no Doctor Who on the air whatsoever save for the endearingly awful “Search Out Science” episode featuring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, and John Leeson as K-9.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 13 (The Video Games)

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Right. We should finally get around to dealing with this backlog of Doctor Who video games I haven’t been dealing with, shouldn’t we? I don’t really have a clever introduction here – this is just one of those “we needed to do it eventually, and here’s a nice big gap between stories that begs to take a post or two like this, so let’s take advantage of the transitional nature of the era” posts. Let’s get on with it.

The curiously named Doctor Who: The First Adventure is an odd duck – a collection of four minigames each flagrantly ripped off of an existing game. In sequence you took the Fifth Doctor (or at least, he was the one on the box) through a Pac-Man-like maze to find the three segments of the Key to Time, a Frogger-style prison break, a Space Invaders-inflected battle with “Terrordactyls,” and, finally, a 3-D Battleship clone searching for the Box of Tantalus, which presumably contains a satsuma at the bottom, just a bit further down than you can actually reach. There are other snarks to make here – the fact that apparently the Doctor has nineteen regenerations total these days, for instance, and that the TARDIS on the packaging looks as though happiness did, in fact, prevail.

The interesting point, however, is that there’s a clear arbitrariness to this. This sounds nothing like a Doctor Who plot. Indeed, it doesn’t sound like much of any other kind of plot. It sounds like an excuse to stitch together Pac-Man, Frogger, Space Invaders, and Battleship(s) into a single computer game. Which, not coincidentally, it probably was. Similarly, the next two Doctor Who computer games were fairly straightforward executions of existing genres. Doctor Who and the Warlord was a standard issue text adventure, and Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror was a sequel to another game that got reskinned as a Doctor Who game midway through development. These are, in other words, not so trying to make a game about Doctor Who as they are games that Doctor Who has been cudgeled into. (Doctor Who and the Warlord, I’ll admit, may be an exception – Graham Williams is apparently among the developers. I can’t get it to run easily on anything I own, and while what I can read makes it sound like a bog standard text adventure, I also suspect there could be more to it. But it sounds unpromising.)

This leads us to an important observation to start with about video games, which is that they are not narrative devices in the same way that other popular media are. That’s not to say, as some extreme positions in game studies have, that narrative is completely extraneous to video games. It’s clearly not. But they’re only indirectly narrative objects. A video game, at its core, is about the interaction of a player and a set of rules through a specific mechanism of control. Most good games are first and foremost about exploring the implications of these controls.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 12 (Steve Parkhouse)

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So, I’ll admit, part of why I’ve been dragging my feet on ever doing a comics entry post-Tom Baker is that I knew that I was going to get pilloried in a way I haven’t been pilloried since pointing out that Inferno’s pacing is a complete shambles. Because everybody points to the Sixth Doctor comics, and particularly the Steve Parkhouse-penned/John Ridgway-drawn ones that are the ones I’m really focusing on this entry (The Grant Morrison ones will get a look when we cover The Invisibles, which will be next year), are apparently widely praised as the best Sixth Doctor stories in existence and as highlights and classics.

And, I mean, they’re good, but… they have real and massive problems of their own. Or, actually, not of their own. For the most part their problems go hand in glove with the problems we noted last time in the series in general. What is good about them is largely (though not exclusively) that they are ambitious and epic in a way that the television series was not in the mid-1980s, and that they have a level of consistent aesthetic and atmosphere that the series lacked.

The thing is, both of those are in many ways functions of the medium. One of the advantages that comics have over other visual media is that the budget and what is depicted are utterly unrelated. Whereas if Steve Parkhouse were to try to write “Voyager” (his most acclaimed story) for television, well, one doesn’t imagine he’d have gotten much further than “EXT. VAST FROZEN WASTELAND – NIGHT,” and if he somehow had, “an ice covered tall ship rests among the frozen peaks” would have been the end. Similarly, when you’re only dealing with a writer and an artist as creative personnel it’s not exactly the same challenge to get them all on the same creative page as it is to get a bunch of designers, musicians, costumers and actors on the same page as the writer, script editor, and producer.

So yes, both of these things are accomplished by the Parkhouse comics quite well, but to use them as the basis for a comparison with the television series is a bit pointless. It’s one of the basic differences between the media. The real question is whether these are good comics.

Certainly it’s easy to see the appeal. “”Voyager”” rightly gets the bulk of the credit – it’s an absolutely gorgeous and lush story full of creepy and haunting images. (I’m usually skeptical of colorization of black and white comics, but IDW’s color version of “Voyager” is absolutely gorgeous) There’s a long-standing train of thought within Doctor Who in which the Doctor is cast into hallucinatory or surreal realms, dating back at the very least to The Celestial Toymaker and, I would argue, all the way back to The Edge of Destruction. But there can be no doubt that “Voyager” is one of the most successful applications of this.

Much of its success comes from excellent taste in what images to use.…

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