It’s January of 2004. Michael Andrews is at number one with “Mad World.” After two weeks Michelle takes over with “All This Time.” Black Eyed Peas, Victoria Beckham, Atomic Kitten, Kelis, Franz Ferdinand, and Scissor Sisters also chart. In news, Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity land and do not discover Ice Warriors. Tony Blair narrowly avoids defeat on a Higher Education bill. BBC Director General Greg Dyke, successor to John Birt, resigns in the fallout from the Hutton Report. And a whale explodes in Taiwan.

While in audios, The Creed of the Kromon. First off, Charley gets raped. Again. Which is, what, the third time, basically? Minuet in Hell, Neverland, and now this? Never mind her being the “in love” one. Apparently she’s the raped one. Goodie.

Of course, what we have here is a classic case of sci-fi rape, which is to say, rape that would not be possible without a sci-fi conceit of some sort. This causes an interesting problem for people, in that a lot of them are really good at pretending that sci-fi rape is not, and I use this term with the irony dial set to maximum, legitimate rape. For some reason if you rape someone with science fiction concepts it’s just a metaphor for rape, in much the same way that killing them with a phaser is just a metaphor for them being shot. Note that, by this bit of sarcasm, I do not mean that fictional characters who are shot by phasers are shot in real life. What I mean is that phasers are not treated as metaphorical violence within the narrative. Whereas with sci-fi rape there’s a bizarre and horrifying tendency for everyone to act like it wasn’t really rape, it was just a metaphor in a story.

So we have Charley drugged, impregnated, subjected to brainwashing, and put through intense physiological changes whereby she becomes a giant insect. These are the events of extreme fetish pornography. Actually, I suspect it would be less upsetting as extreme fetish pornography, as at least then one imagines everyone would be willing to admit to the fact that this is a story about rape. Instead we get a story that seems to think it’s just a fairly usual romp about people getting captured by aliens and rescued, albeit one with a bit of a social conscience about runaway capitalism. Charley remembers nothing of what would euphemistically be called her “ordeal” and accurately called her “extended rape,” and so everybody decides it’s basically OK and they go off adventuring again. Without telling her what happened.

What bothers me here – OK, well, where to start, but what bothers me most fundamentally here is the fact that this would not be handled this way if it were anything other than sci-fi rape. It’s only rape that gets the magic veil of metaphor whereby as long as it happens with imaginary things it doesn’t count. Which is typical, really. I mean, it’s just the same mildly sociopathic crap that infests the program in almost all of its really stupid moments since the 1980s.…

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It’s December of 2003. Will Young is at number one with “Leave Right Now,” which lasts for half the month at which point Ozzy and Kelly Osbourne take over with “Changes” for a week. The Christmas number one goes to Michael Andrews’s version of “Mad World.” Girls Aloud, Westlife, Michael Jackson, Ja Rule, Outkast, the Black Eyed Peas, Dido, Evanescence, Christina Aguilera, and Darkness also chart.

It’s been a bit news-wise. Switzerland joined the United Nations, Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed during re-entry, SARS and the Iraq War broke out, the Human Genme Project was completed, Rowan Williams was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, and Roman Abramovich took over Chelsea. This mont, meanwhile, the M6 opened a toll branch to relieve congestion, and Mick Jagger became a knight.

While in specialty shops, the first story of the Divergent Universe arc, Rob Shearman’s Scherzo. Scherzo takes Rob Shearman’s approach to its natural endpoint. All of Shearman’s stories are about self-made prisons: the worlds we cannot bring ourselves to fall out of. Over his first three he steadily expanded the scope of these prisons: the individual psychic hell of The Holy Terror into the indictment of the class system and its victims in The Chimes of Midnight out into a sprawling but incisive critique of the entire notion of collective mythology in Jubilee. He’s steadily gone larger and larger, and here, with his last full-out original Doctor Who story, he takes the last road open to this approach: he goes very, very small.

Scherzo is a two-hander. It cheats a little bit – it does actually have a third character – but that character consists entirely out of sounds made by the Doctor and Charley for most of the story, and when it does start speaking for itself it’s still played by McGann and Fisher. But virtually the entire audio consists of the Doctor and Charley talking. This makes it a profoundly intimate story – character driven in a way that no story since The Edge of Destruction possibly could have been. (And its debt to The Edge of Destruction is as profound an influence on Scherzo as The Power of the Daleks is on Jubilee.)

But the story goes considerably further than just the intimacy of scale. It’s not just that this is an audio with only two people, it’s an audio where the world is as small as it can possibly be. Scherzo, for virtually its entire length, features the Doctor and Charley making their way through a featureless void. But what’s really notable is the way in which the world collapses inwards: the Doctor and Charley lose all of their senses save for hearing, such that the phrase “walking” takes on a strange meaning. Eventually their physical bodies merge, rendering their very corporeality suspect.

What happens, in other words, is that their world collapses to be as small as it can possibly be – for much of the audio there is nothing to their world but what is in the audio.…

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and continuity, everyone at least got to do celebrated party pieces. Were they pale imitations of what they had actually meaningfully accomplished in the past? Yes, but at least it was celebratory. It’s at least perfectly easy to sit down with The Five Doctors and have a good time. Whereas with Zagreus you just get four hours of listening to people putting in far more effort than the material deserves.

The person worst served in this regard is Paul McGann. And as with much of Zagreus, the worst part is the nagging sense that people are sincerely trying for quality. McGann spends virtually the entire story talking to himself, or, in other places, talking to a random set of sentences recorded by Jon Pertwee for a fan film mixed so as to be virtually unintelligible. It’s all very amnesia and uncertainty as to who he is, and it gives an awful feeling that the point of the exercise was to really give Paul McGann a chance to act. But like Minuet in Hell there seems to be a bit of confusion about what acting is: it’s not actually the practice of saving a poorly written scene. Yes, McGann is good enough to save most, though not all of the scenes he’s in, but it’s dreadful to hear him set on the task in the first place.

Yes, there are moments of real charm through all of this. The Alice in Wonderland stuff is a great idea. But even with that there’s a horrible cynicism to it. The story flirts with deciding that Doctor Who is really Carrollian before having Romana declare it all a lot of nonsense. Similarly, there’s obvious promise in the idea that maybe we’ll deal with a Doctor/Companion love story, except that Charley is characterized as being in love with the Doctor with all the complexity and subtlety with which Orllensa was characterized as the Russian one in Embrace the Darkness. It consists of nothing so much as Charley delivering the line “I love you” in a variety of different tones of voice. And that’s before we get to the TARDIS becoming a creepy jealous lover who tries to take revenge on Charley because of the Doctor’s loyalty to her. And, of course, almost everything to do with Uncle Winky feels a hair’s breadth from brilliance.

But let’s look at why it’s so bad. In particular, let’s look at the story’s central idea, the absolute duality between time and anti-time. We gave this idea a pretty thorough hiding back with Neverland, but there the objection was largely political. And, well, let’s face it, there’s still a fair chunk of Doctor Who fandom that wants to insist that the series is apolitical, so let’s switch gears and make the more straightforward objection: the time/anti-time dualism is just boring. It’s one of the oldest sci-fi tropes imaginable. It has no meat left on the bones. There is nothing whatsoever interesting to say about it. Absolute dualism is, in fact, so boring that when given it as a story premise back in 1978 Robert Holmes rebelled and wrote The Ribos Operation instead.…

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It’s August of 2002. Gareth Gates is at number one with “Anyone Of Us (Stupid Mistake).” That lasts a week before Darius’s “Colourblind” unseats it for two weeks followed by Sugababes’s “Round Round,” and, on the last day of the month, Blazin Squad’s “Crossroads.” Shakira, Vanessa Carlton, Nelly, Ashanti, Linkin Park, P. Diddy, Will Smith, and Coldplay also chart.

In the month between Neverland and this, the International Criminal Court was established, and WorldCom went belly up. While this month Central Europe was hit by bad floods. This is the extent of what Wikipedia says about August of 2002. The page for 2002 in the UK has day-by-day updates on the murder of two ten-year-old girls, but really that’s just not the direction I like to go in with these.

While in books, Camera Obscura. We have, of late, been keeping one eye on the future in the blog. There are reasons for that, most notably that we’re inches away from arriving into it. But it has obscured one of the original modes of analysis of this blog, which is the analysis of Doctor Who within the context that it’s made. Again, I am mostly at peace with that, if only because the context in which the wilderness years can be examined is so misleading. But let’s take one final opportunity to draw a curtain over the future and take a piece of the wilderness years on their own terms. And what better choice than the best Eighth Doctor Adventure we’re going to look at – the consensus second best Eighth Doctor Adventure by the consensus best writer. This is the best the wilderness years got. So let’s take the book entirely on the terms of its time.

We have largely obscured the degree to which this Sabbath plotline did not work, mainly by looking mostly at the two books where it does work. In The Adventuress of Henrietta Street Sabbath is a credible alternative to the Doctor. But it’s more important to realize how that book contrasts Sabbath with the Master. Sabbath is not the Doctor’s opposite but his tentative replacement: the post-Time Lord universe’s version of what the Doctor was to the pre-Ancestor Cell continuity. He pointedly exists outside the Doctor/Master opposition, which is the entire reason Miles brought the Master into The Adventuress of Henrietta Street in the first place. Unfortunately, as with every other idea Miles contributed to the Eighth Doctor Adventures, hardly anyone picked up on it meaningfully. Sabbath appeared in subsequent books, but as exactly the sort of cut-rate Master clone that he was designed not to be.

And then there’s Camera Obscura, one of two books to break the rule that nobody ever picks up meaningfully on Miles’s stuff. (The other is The Taking of Planet Five, one of several front-runners for the book version.) This is not surprising. Lloyd Rose rapidly established herself as the find of the latter half of the Eighth Doctor Adventures with The City of the Dead, and so was inevitably going to be rewarded with a big plot book if she wanted one.…

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It’s June of 2002. As it feels so empty without him, Eminem is at number one. Things empty fast, as Will Young takes over with “Light My Fire.” Two weeks after that is Elvis vs JXL with “A Little Less Conversation,” which plays out McGann’s second season. Atomic Kitten, Enrique, Ant and Dec, Kylie Minogue, Nelly, Scooter, and Oasis also chart. And in news, a ten meter-wide object casually explodes over the Mediterranean Sea. Also, the sun goes dark. Thankfully, they’re totally unrelated. Also, the US Congress admits that the telephone was actually invented five years before Alexander Graham Bell by Antonio Meucci.

While on audio we have McGann’s second “season finale,” Neverland. Doctor Who, prior to the new series, was never good at the season finale in the contemporary “wrap up all the plot lines” sense. In total the number of times it’s solidly stuck the landing in capping off a story arc number about two – Enlightenment and Timewyrm: Revelation. It’s not always that the efforts are bad – No Future, for instance, is a charming book, albeit the weakest of Cornell’s first four New Adventures, and So Vile a Sin is a tour de force that was wrecked only by its scheduling problems. But past that you have lackluster efforts like Lungbarrow, The Ancestor Cell, and, to go back a bit further, The Armageddon Factor or Trial of a Time Lord.

Indeed, the history of Doctor Who is, up to the point we’re at now, mostly a series of exceedingly good cases against the entire logic of metaplots. They’ve never actually gone well for the series. And not just in the “one bum installment” problem that any serialized work is going to have: Doctor Who has consistently, when getting to the end of its metaplots, failed spectacularly to stick the landing.

And it’s not even that Neverland is bad. At least twenty minutes too long, sure, but not entirely unpleasant. The problem is really that, conceptually, it’s a damp squib at best. Gallifrey is facing the greatest crisis in its history, all of time is unraveling, and oh look, we’ve got some fresh new revelations about Rassilon. Fantastic. I mean, Doctor Who was really hurting for all of these things.

It would be one thing if Neverland actually had anything new to say about any of these ideas. It doesn’t of course, a fact that may or may not be related to the fact that there is nothing whatsoever new to say about any of these ideas because they are mediocre ideas that have been done to death. (Shall we recall the funniest sequence Kate Orman and Jon Blum ever wrote, in which “Dark Sam” plays up the Doctor’s dark and mysterious past to some villains, prompting the Doctor to ask how she knew all of that, to which she replies that it was just the plot of a Babylon 5 episode she’d seen once?) But there’s not having anything new to say and there’s the lengths of superficial banality that Neverland shoots for in its concept, and, unnervingly, the latter is by far the more impressive.…

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It’s May of 2002. Sugarbabes are at number one with “Freak Like Me.” That lasts a week before Holly Valance takes number one with “Kiss Kiss,” followed by Ronan Keating’s “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” and finally Liberty X’s “Just a Little.” *NSync, S Club Juniors, Mary J Blige, and Pink also chart. In news, a lengthy standoff at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ends. East Timor attains independence. And the Mars Odyssey Rover finds signs of water ice on Mars.

While in specialty shops, Time of the Daleks. For the second time in this “season” of McGann stories, we have to start by remembering that Jubilee hasn’t come out yet. Just as Shearman’s work in Embrace the Darkness is clearly waiting to really break out massively with Jubilee, it’s impossible to look at Time of the Daleks without feeling like its central idea is one that Jubilee did better. At its heart this is Perversity of the Daleks – a story whose raison d’être is having the Daleks do things that feel utterly wrong. And it succeeds. Daleks quoting Shakespeare is gorgeously, deliciously perverse. It’s a brilliant idea, and it in and of itself justifies Time of the Daleks as a story.

The trouble is, and this is what Jubilee figured out a year later, is that if you’re going to do a story based around a moment of perverse wrongness, you need to figure out how to stretch that moment of wrongness and produce variations on it. Jubilee starts out wrong and careens progressively downwards into sicker and more twisted options until you get to properly wonderful moments like the Daleks brutally slaughtering a bunch of little people while archly noting that “Daleks do not sing.” But all Time of the Daleks really has is “Ooh, isn’t it kind of kinky to have Daleks quoting Shakespeare?” And then, after a few minutes of that, it’s out. It’s got nothing other than a very traditional Dalek story.

Which would be one thing if Big Finish hadn’t done three of those in its first year, knocking out the Dalek Empire trilogy to which this story is an ostensible sequel. So now, eighteen months after the third one of those, we get another Dalek story that plays at the idea that it might do something unusual with the concept for about an episode, then dutifully goes back to being Dalek Empire, Part Four. But that’s not the world we’re in. This is the fourth Big Finish Dalek story. We weren’t starved for Daleks anymore. And so bringing them back for the fourth time in two years – a rate unseen since the 1965-67 stretch of The Chase through Evil of the Daleks – seems like it should require a more substantial new idea, as opposed to this Shakespeare business, which feels like a bare minimum refresh.

Yes, it’s also Paul McGann’s first Dalek story, which livens things a bit. But it also, in many ways, just highlights the problem. What’s the point of giving every Doctor a Dalek story if you’re just going to do the exact same story every time?…

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It’s April of 2002. Gareth Gates is at number one with “Unchained Melody,” which lasts almost the whole month before Oasis unseat them with “The Hindu Times.” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Nickelback, Marilyn Manson, Britney Spears, and Shakira also chart. Christ, so much for historicization. In news, a military coup to unseat Hugo Chávez fails, and the Queen Mother’s funeral takes place.

Audios, then. It’s more than a little jarring to go from Seasons of Fear to Embrace the Darkness. The Eighth Doctor audios hadn’t done something so self-consciously sci-fi since The Sword of Orion, and that was a deliberately nostalgic throwback. Here there’s less of a clear sense of that. Embrace the Dark is old-fashioned, yes, but it doesn’t trade on an explicit image of the past in the same way that The Sword of Orion does, or even, for that matter, in the same way that Seasons of Fear did. And yet it still feels out of place. Why?

The first thing to realize is that it’s a story at odds with its medium. And, more to the point, that its medium is actually relatively new.  Two-CD sets featuring self-contained four episode audio adventures aren’t something that really has a lot of precedent. Sure, radio drama does, and books on tape do, but this isn’t either of those. Unlike radio drama, it’s not serialized or transmitted live. Unlike books on tape, it’s not an adaptation of something else. So the shape and structure of it are up in the air. On top of that, the audios are fundamentally tied to the structure and logic of classic Doctor Who, which is to say, everything must be a four-parter of approximately half-hour parts.

The result of this, or at least a result of this is that the basic structure of the audios is at times wonky. For instance, there’s a pretty good Doctor Who structure in which each of the four episodes represent a different phase of the story, with cliffhangers that reveal new information that change the stakes. For television, at least, it’s a good structure, albeit with some flaws. But those flaws are largely intrinsic to any episodically serialized story – mainly that the half-hour format is a straitjacket. But there’s always a structure, and you learn to write to your structure.

The problem, however, is that the structure exists to solve the problems of serialization. The “change the premise slightly every episode” approach ultimately developed as a response to the failings of structure and pacing in much of the Hartnell era, where stories would often expand or contract arbitrarily to fill the space allotted to them, with little thought about how to structure them on an episode-by-episode level. And it’s a reaction against the slow pace of serialization. Terror of the Zygons – to pick a story that really embraces the “change the tone weekly” approach well – does it in part so that after four weeks of Zygons the audience is still fresh.

Embrace the Darkness is perfectly structured along these lines.…

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It’s March of 2002. Westlife are at number one with “World of Our Own,” which goes a week before Will Young takes over with “Anything is Possible/Evergreen.” This lasts almost to the end of the month, but Gareth Gates’s “Unchained Melody” ends up playing us out. Kylie Minogue, R Kelly, Shakira, Nickelback, Ali G and Shaggy, Celine Dion, Marilyn Manson, and Natalie Imbruglia also chart. In news, the US war in Afghanistan goes on, though really, it’s not like I’m going to write that for every entry for the remainder of the blog. Milly Dowler goes missing, which will turn out to have impressive effects on the British newspaper industry. And the Queen Mother dies, it being another bad year for the monarchy.

And in specialty shops, Seasons of Fear. There is a problem that plagues writers. It manifests in one of the most depressing comments imaginable from readers: I liked your old stuff better. Nobody likes being told this. And understandably so, given that its distinct implication is that you’re washed up and past your prime. It applies to all forms of art, really. But there’s a real problem underlying the complaint: people early on in their careers have a hunger and an ambition that often fades with critical and financial success. Even a very good writer like Neil Gaiman suffers from it: once he hit mainstream American success with American Gods he entered a decade-long fallow period in which he did virtually nothing that wasn’t predictable and catered to his existing fanbase, and it was only when he was put in the position of writing for an audience that hadn’t heard of him, and with an editor who was as accomplished a writer as he was that he turned out The Doctor’s Wife. (And notably, this, along with marriage, seems to have given him a late career spring in his step.

But there’s another and somewhat bleaker reason this happens, which is that some artists fuel their best work with anger or depression and, as they mature, grow to be altogether stabler and happier people. And in terms of his Doctor Who work, Paul Cornell largely has that problem. His first four New Adventures are all brilliant, but they’re animated in a large part by Cornell’s tangible anger in the period. When, later in the New Adventures, he settled down and wrote his comedy books like Happy Endings and Oh No It Isn’t!, both of which are terribly fun, but neither of which have anything like the impactful heft of Love and War, little yet Human Nature.

Cornell has said that he wrote The Shadow of the Scourge and The Shadows of Avalon from a very dark place, and it shows. Both are flawed works, but they very much rekindle the crackling passion of his early New Adventures. But by Seasons of Fear Cornell had gotten his head screwed back on, was working with his girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancee Caroline Symcox, and was largely back to the more comedy-adventure mode of his latter New Adventures.…

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