Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 49 (Jonathan Creek)
This post, for those keeping track, will be the first one of the Paul McGann/Christopher Eccleston book. But since we’re still in the chronological whorl of the late Virgin era, let’s cheat a bit and flip a year ahead, to May of 1997, and to the debut of a show called Jonathan Creek. On Wednesday we’ll watch as Doctor Who blows its big shot at a comeback. But before that, let’s glance at the landscape a year after Doctor Who. Because it’s not just that Doctor Who had a bad TV Movie that scuppered its chance of a comeback for almost a decade. It’s also that Doctor Who, less than a year after the TV movie, was rendered in essence culturally obsolete.While it is not clear that Jonathan Creek was intended to usurp Doctor Who’s place in Britain’s cultural landscape, one has to admit that shooting Colin Baker seven minutes into the first episode is a pretty good opening bid for this goal. Saying this, of course, requires us to offer some general case theory of what Doctor Who’s place in the cultural landscape is or was. This is, of course, terribly controversial, and everyone who provides an answer to a question like this has at least some agenda in mind. I’ve surely driven off readers with views radically irreconcilable to my own on this point, however, so let’s just take for granted that we’re all more or less on the same page about this.
Equally, though, this is a fraught debate within Doctor Who in the mid-nineties. On the one hand you have the viewpoint of Doctor Who fandom, which has increasingly taken Doctor Who to be a fairly straightforward cult television show in that it exists for fans and is continually obsessed with recitation of its own history. On the other hand it clearly has a solid place within British cultural memory as a beloved institution. This is distinct from something obsessed with its own past. Its past is respected and part of its importance, but to love it is not to be a fan of it so much as to enjoy a part of your culture. Someone who likes sitting down and watching Doctor Who is no more a part of Doctor Who fandom than someone who likes eating Marmite is a member of Marmite fandom. And so Doctor Who is in this case more of an aesthetic – a type of thing one likes and a set of iconography.
These two views are a bit at loggerheads, in that one view is based on a doctrinal view of what Doctor Who is and the other is based on memories of having enjoyed a television program in one’s childhood and wanting to see something that reminds one of it. Which, of course, has next to nothing to do with the specific plots of those things and more with the imagery and feel of them. This is what leads to the existence of people with an adamant belief that Doctor Who should be scary, which usually just means they were of the right age for The Web of Fear or The Pyramids of Mars.…
Outside the Government 7 (Down)
I do not mean my criticism of Oh No It Isn’t! to suggest that Virgin’s Benny line simply misused the character. It didn’t. Oh No It Isn’t! is a fantastic Benny novel, and its flaws are almost entirely as an attempt to launch the line, instead of being what it would have been happier being, a particularly silly entry within the line. And there are other books that absolutely play on what Benny is specifically suited to. Lawrence Miles’s Down, for instance, although it falls just short of being a successful book in its own right, is a book that absolutely could not work with any other lead character.
The setup of the book is simple enough: Benny is fished out of the water on an alien planet and spends the majority of the book explaining what happened to her. This explanation is overtly structured as a pastiche of classic adventure fiction in the H. Rider Haggard mould, with chapter titles such as “Dirigibles of Death!” and “The Primordial Soup Dragon!” The exclamation points are, to be clear, part of almost all of the chapter titles. There’s a character called Mister Misnomer who is an overt parody of classic pulp action heroes. To be clear, the story is not merely a pastiche of adventure fiction, it’s a self-aware one. Mister Misnomer isn’t just a parody to the audience, the characters in the story recognize that he is, in reality, an old pulp action hero who shouldn’t even be real. What he’s doing there is one of the basic mysteries of the story.
That’s the superficial structure, at least. It being Lawrence Miles, it’s also a big, soaring book of ideas. Actually, soaring is almost the exact wrong word for this. The book, by the author’s description, is a psychological descent into hell where the frothy adventure story it appears to be gives way to abject psychological horror. The adventure story stuff is, in Miles’s account, window dressing. This actually makes the book come off as less interesting and intelligent than it is. First of all, the adventure stuff isn’t window-dressing, it’s part and parcel of the book’s theme. Second, the book doesn’t give way to psychological horror entirely: it almost gives way, and then gives Benny one of her greatest moments as she resolves the central tension of the book.
Here, at last, we have to talk about the twist. There are two big plot actions Mister Misnomer takes – he begins gunning down a bunch of ape creatures that Benny believes are likely sentient, and he sacrifices himself to save everybody towards the end. Then, at the very end of the book, we find out that Benny has actually edited her own memories to insert Mister Misnomer: in truth she gunned down the ape creatures in a moment of panic, and it was a mildly reformed futuristic Nazi that sacrificed himself to save everybody, which Benny was unable to square away with her own torture at the hands of the Nazis in Just War.…
Outside the Government 6 (Oh No It Isn’t!)
I’ve been saying that the chronology through these parts is wobbly for a while, and have in fact said “now the chronology gets really wobbly” before, but in any case, as Amy Pond would have it, here’s where things get complicated. After weeks of violating real-world chronology in favor of maintaining in-universe chronology, despite believing neither in the idea of a Doctor Who universe nor in an absolute timeline of the Doctor, now I’m even going to bugger that up. And not even in order to go back to a real-world chronology. In order of release the next few entries go the TV Movie, The Dying Days, Oh No It Isn’t!, The Eight Doctors, Down. In-universe they go the TV Movie, The Eight Doctors, The Dying Days, Oh No It Isn’t!, Down. You will notice that the order we’re doing them in, Oh No It Isn’t!, Down, the TV Movie, The Dying Days, The Eight Doctors, is distinctively neither of those actually rational orderings, instead proceeding along that terribly nebulous logic of “thematic reasons.”So, some explanations. Terrance Dicks’s The Eight Doctors is written so as to follow directly from the events of the TV Movie. Notably, it’s also next to impossible to reconcile with Lungbarrow, though you can just about do it if you squint and are determined to make it work. (Dicks, clearly, was in no way determined to do so.) But before The Eight Doctors came out in June of 1997 Virgin did one last Doctor Who-focused New Adventure, which featured Benny meeting the Eighth Doctor – that’s The Dying Days, released in April of 1997. Then, the next month, Virgin released Oh No It Isn’t!, the first of their new New Adventures, which featured Benny as the lead character. Benny’s status quo in this book stems out of The Dying Days, but, for obvious legal reasons, it makes no reference whatsoever to any Doctor Who concepts.
The reason for the shuffle, dear reader, is simple: the Benny line is the future of Virgin, which we’ve been dealing with for months. The Dying Days, on the other hand, is first and foremost a response to the TV Movie. So these books go here, as the final two entries of what will become the Sylvester McCoy book, The Dying Days goes as the third entry in the Paul McGann/Christopher Eccleston book, and it all makes thematic sense even if the chronology is at this point absurd.
As its basic nature and title would imply, Oh No It Isn’t! is a bit of a defiant book. It’s a book about doggedly carrying on the Virgin torch even after the ostensible reason for their existence has gone away. The usual line about the Benny books, shamefully repeated by Peter Darvill-Evans in the “Wilderness Years” documentary on the TV Movie DVD, is that there’s no point in doing Doctor Who without the Doctor. First of all, this is a frankly nasty slight at the decade-plus successful run of Benny adventures at Big Finish that outright put the lie to his suggestion that the Benny books couldn’t work.…
Time Can Be Rewritten 36 (A Death in the Family)
Lungbarrow at least attempted to feed directly into the TV Movie. It didn’t last. There’s about three dozen stories, mostly from Big Finish (whether audio or their Short Trips series), that feature an “older” version of the Seventh Doctor. Arguably the first one of these actually comes just three months after Lungbarrow in the form of Terrance Dicks’s The Eight Doctors, but claiming that would involve trying to reconcile The Eight Doctors with the Virgin line, or, for that matter, with anything at all. But I’m two weeks ahead of myself.
A Death in the Family, ironically, only minimally features the post-Lungbarrow Doctor, focusing primarily on what is normally taken as a pre-Virgin Doctor situated between Survival and Timewyrm: Genesys. (Though even that’s difficult to square away, as we’ll see.) The post-Lungbarrow Doctor appears, and is indeed absolutely central to the story, but as a peripheral character lurking in the background. But despite the relative briefness of his appearance he’s central to affairs. A Death in the Family is at its heart a story in the vein of Battlefield in which the infamously manipulative Seventh Doctor falls into the schemes of the one person who can out-manipulate him: his own future self.
But where Battlefield played Merlin as something that put the Doctor off his game, A Death in the Family has the two Doctors in relative lockstep. Indeed, they are sufficiently compatible in their goals that it borders on a plot hole: the older Doctor’s scheme relies on the younger Doctor making specific decisions requiring knowledge of the overall plan, but on the other hand the younger Doctor is clearly unaware of the older Doctor’s plans. This can be explained as the Doctor faking surprise at various moments, but it’s not an entirely satisfying explanation.
But then again, there’s a fundamental difference between McCoy’s Doctor falling into the schemes of some future incarnation and him falling into the schemes of McCoy’s Doctor only down the line. In this regard it’s telling that A Death in the Family straddles the Virgin era as it does. Because much of the story’s theme is right out of the Virgin playbook: an extended meditation on the nature of the Doctor’s manipulations. And it’s telling, then, that there are no particular differences highlighted between the two Doctors. Their manipulations are wholly compatible, such that the younger Doctor can smoothly slot in and finish a plan he hasn’t actually come up with yet.
But this poses a bit of a tension with the Virgin era, which does ultimately posit an arc for the Doctor’s character from beginning to end. This arc is actually for the most part opposite what people claim for the Virgin era, as we’ve noted: the Doctor’s vastly manipulative schemes increasingly fade to the background as more and more writers favor actually chucking the Doctor into unfamiliar situations. Notably, Paul Cornell, who took the manipulative Doctor as far as it could go with the idea of the Doctor leaving notes to himself from the future, actually stopped doing books where the Doctor has a plan going in after Love and War.…
The Leaves on the Trees are Bright Silver (Lungbarrow)
I’ll Explain Later
Lungbarrow is the final New Adventure featuring the Seventh Doctor, and ostensibly leads straight into the TV Movie. It dusts off the script that Marc Platt had to revise into Ghost Light, which was originally a bevy of revelations about the Doctor’s past and the nature of Gallifrey. As a book it becomes even more sprawling, finally rendering explicit the whole of the not-actually-Cartmel Masterplan, establishing at long last the relationship between the Doctor and the mysterious Other. The Doctor is the Other reincarnated. So that’s a thrilling shock. At the time Dave Owen wasn’t thrilled, calling it “rather more frustrating than rewarding” and saying that “it’s weird and wunderful – but, unfortunately, never simultaneously.” Lars Pearson, more recently, went with calling it “one of the most ambitious ‘Who’ novels ever, worthy of considerable praise.” Pearson’s view carries the day: it comes in fourth in Sullivan’s rankings with an 83.6%, which is good for a tie with fifth place. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
——
It’s March of 1997. No Doubt remain silent at the top of the charts. After two weeks the Spice Girls have a single out – “Mama/Who Do You Think You Are.” That’s not one that charted in the US, but it goes straight to number one and stays there for the rest of the month. The Bee Gees, En Vogue, Bush, Ant & Dec, Boyzone, the Fugees, R. Kelly, the Backstreet Boys, Madonna, and the Pet Shop Boys also chart.
In real news, one of the most famous UFO sightings ever, the Phoenix Lights, takes place. Yes, The X-Files was tremendously popular around now, why do you ask? Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth, the Tamil Tigers kill over two hundred people in Sri Lanka, and the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cultists takes place in San Diego. While in the UK, John Major calls his doomed election, and The Sun promptly endorses Blair. And Teletubbies debuts!
While in fine literature, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow. The book’s existence is an oddity. On the one hand, it was inevitable. The simple reality of Doctor Who fandom was that all of Virgin’s playing around with the Cartmel Masterplan had to be paid off. Never mind that there wasn’t actually all that much playing around with it – the Death/Time/Pain set of Eternals feature far more heavily than the mythology of the Other. It had to be done. Whatever one might think of Lungbarrow, the idea that the Virgin line could end without doing this story is unthinkable.
Which is largely a pity, because it’s rubbish. Every revelation in this book is complete rubbish. Neil Gaiman relates the story of how in an early draft of The Doctor’s Wife he had a line about how the Corsair was an inspiration for the Doctor leaving Gallifrey, and Moffat told him to take it out because the Doctor “does what he does for reasons too vast and terrible to relate.” Which is pretty much the problem – a problem we first noticed way back around Season Twenty and Longleat.…
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 48 (Alan Moore’s Spoken Word Pieces)
People who like this blog and in particular this entry are essentially certain to enjoy JMR Higgs’s new book KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, which is, by his description, “a story about The KLF, Robert Anton Wilson, Dada, Alan Moore, punk, Discordianism, Carl Jung, magic, Ken Campbell, rave, Situationism and the alchemical properties of Doctor Who.” See? Right up your alley if you’re reading this. The book is announced here, with links to where you can buy it in the US or UK.
The Cartmel-Virgin era began with overt and self-conscious parallels to the work of Alan Moore. Actually, that might be a little strong. Let’s try this: Andrew Cartmel was a comics fan, and he stole from the best. Sylvester McCoy’s audition piece, itself spun into the bulk of Mel’s departure scene in Dragonfire, was directly inspired by Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. And much of Cartmel’s tenure as script editor can be read straightforwardly as an attempt to do Alan Moore’s Doctor Who. Given this, it’s a surprisingly honest one that understood what Moore was actually doing on a level beyond “he was adding lots of sex and violence to what were ostensibly children’s stories.” But in most accounts that’s where Alan Moore drops out of the Doctor Who story, replaced by Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman ran more or less concurrently with the New Adventures and was an overt influence.
This is, for the most part, because Alan Moore’s career took a bit of a strange turn in the late 1980s. Following a dispute over payment and rights to Watchmen Moore stopped accepting new work for DC Comics, simply seeing out his existing contract to finish V for Vendetta, which he did in 1989. Instead he began working independently, starting with the publication of AARGH! in 1988 under his own Mad Love imprint. That was also the imprint under which he published Big Numbers in 1990, an aborted magnum opus about a shopping center in Northampton and fractals. This was, unfortunately, characteristic of his work in the period – although some shorter and self-contained pieces such as “Brought to Light” and A Small Killing made it out, his other two big works from the period had what can only be described as convoluted publication histories. Lost Girls, his pornographic work with future-wife Melinda Gebbie, saw some issues published in 1991-92 before vanishing for fifteen years. From Hell had an only slightly smoother ride, managing to get all ten chapters out over the course of five years and three publishers.
The latter of these is, to say the least, a transitional work for Moore. From Hell’s memorable fourth chapter, published in 1991, was inspired in part by the psychogeographic work of Iain Sinclair, with whom Moore struck up a friendship that is almost certainly the most important creative influence of his later career. It is also in that chapter that Moore wrote that “the only place gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”…
You’ve Got Some Battle Scars There (The Room With No Doors)
I’ll Explain Later
We’ve actually legitimately skipped Bad Therapy, which tries to fix up the whole Peri thing, and Eternity Weeps, which casually kills off Liz Shaw and less casually divorces Jason and Benny. It’s not well liked.
The Room With No Doors properly begins the winding up of the New Adventures, and also ties Kate Orman with Paul Cornell for number of books in the range, with So Vile a Sin putting her over the top two months later. Note that the majority of her books came out in the last year. And they were all good to boot. 16th century Japan and a lot of angst on the part of the Doctor and Chris. Dave Owen deems it “a humorous book that is never dull, and frequently delightful,” which I’m not entirely sure is actually a description of this novel. Lars Pearson goes with “a much needed epilogue to the Virgin New Adventures,” which is notable as an actually plausible review. The Sullivan rankings put it at thirteenth, with a 78% rating, making it Orman’s second most liked book. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.
——
It’s February of 1997. Blur are at number one with “Beetlebum.” A week later it’s LL Cool J with “Ain’t Nobody,” then U2 with “Discotheque,” and finally No Doubt with “Don’t Speak.” George Michael, Placebo, Tori Amos, En Vogue, Depeche Mode, the Eels, and Daft Punk also chart, which is actually quite a good little list, if a preposterously late 80s/early 90s throwback chart.
In news, the Hubble Space Telescope begins repairs so that it actually works. Dolly the sheep is actually unveiled to the public, prompting Bill Clinton to ban federal funding for human cloning in a beautiful moment of crass pandering. And the Conservative Party actually becomes a minority government, actually for the second time, having previously gone four days without a majority in January.
While in books it’s The Room With No Doors. The New Adventures proper, as an era with a distinct viewpoint distinct from everything that had come before in Doctor Who, began with Timewyrm: Revelation. But more significant, in many ways, is the two book sequence that continues into Time’s Crucible. These two books, in hindsight, establish the bulk of the New Adventures’ mythology, with Cornell establishing the mythology of the Doctor’s interior landscape and Platt establishing the larger mythology of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. And so as the Seventh Doctor’s period in the New Adventures winds down we symbolically repeat this pair with one more novel dealing with the ideas of Timewyrm: Revelation followed by Platt’s other New Adventure, the final revelation of the “Cartmel” Masterplan.
As is usually the case with the New Adventures, the retrospective emphasis gets put in all the wrong places. Lungbarrow may be the book where all the big mythic revelations about the Doctor are made, but this is the novel where the actual meat of the New Adventures and their take on the Doctor is resolved. The central innovation of Timewyrm: Revelation, of course, was the decision to treat the Doctor’s mind and memories as a landscape such that the history and mythology of the program acquires its own mythos.…
Turn Her Into a Weapon, Just to Bring You Down (So Vile a Sin)
I’ll Explain Later
Well, technically we’ve skipped the rest of the line.
So Vile a Sin, the fifty-sixth and final of the sixty-one New Adventures, concludes the Psi-Powers arc. The novel was infamously delayed when Aaronovitch suffered a hard drive crash and was unable to face the prospect of rewriting large swaths from scratch and in an ultra-compressed timeframe. Accordingly, Kate Orman stepped in to finish the job from what chapters remained and Aaronovitch’s outline, and the book was put out five months late, more or less the day that Virgin’s license to publish Doctor Who books expired. It has tons of big plot points, most notably the death of Roz Forrester. It’s once again quite acclaimed (noticing a pattern in the latter New Adventures?). Dave Owen says that “Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman utterly typify the very best of the New Adventures.” Lars Pearson praises how it “makes Roz one of the most determined and self-actualized companions ever.” Sullivan’s rankings lodge it in with the rest of the Kate Orman books at fifteenth, with a 77.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.
——
It’s November of 1996. The Spice Girls are, unsurprisingly, still at number one with “Say You’ll Be There.” More surprisingly, they’re unseated after a week, giving them only a two week run, as Robson & Jerome take number one with “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted.” That lasts two weeks, then Prodigy come in with “Breathe,” which finishes out the month. Tony Braxton, Michael Jackson, the Fugees, the Backstreet Boys, and Madonna also chart, the latter with Evita’s weird zombie bonus track composed by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for the movie version.
In news, the Tories narrow the gap between them and Labour to a mere seventeen points. The Channel Tunnel catches a bit of fire, and the Stone of Scone is installed in Edinburgh Castle after seven hundred years of being in England, which is largely symbolic, but a very important symbol. Outside of the UK, President Clinton wins re-election and Benazir Bhutto is tossed out of power in Pakistan. And, because it’s fun to say, Tony Silva is sentenced to seven years in prison for an illegal parrot smuggling operation.
While in literature… nothing. No New Adventure comes out. There was supposed to be one, but, well, you know the story. This book forms the single weirdest whorl of chronology the blog will ever cover. Not only does it form part of the tail end of the New Adventures where they were still publishing Seventh Doctor novels after the TV Movie, it was released out of sequence even within the Virgin line. The usual line about this is that this ordering blunted the book’s major moment, the death of Roz Forrester, which was, inevitably, revealed in Bad Therapy the month after So Vile a Sin was meant to come out. Two problems present themselves here. First, the idea that Roz was marked for death was going around fandom for months prior to it being officially revealed.…
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 47 (Touching Evil, The Grand, Springhill)
Let’s change the camera angle slightly, however, and look at Russell T Davies’s career in general as of the mid-90s. He was, at the time, undoubtedly a successful television writer. He was not, however, the Russell T Davies of legend. He was a working writer, making a living entirely off of his writing, and with rising acclaim. But he was not a superstar of television yet. And perhaps more importantly, his work just isn’t up to the standard of what his later work is like. I pointed Monday to the dividing line seems to be the overdose that Davies cites as what got him working on Queer as Folk. We will, of course, do a Pop Between Realities on that show when we get to its appropriate time period in late January and look at where Davies’s work really started to feel like Russell T Davies.
What is perhaps most striking about his projects immediately prior to Queer as Folk is that they are aggressively, unrelentingly dark. Which may sound familiar, because it’s exactly what we were saying about Damaged Goods on Monday. Indeed, let’s go one further. If Damaged Goods does not read like the Doctor Who novel you’d expect the writer of Rose to write, it reads exactly like the novel you’d expect the writer of Springhill, The Grand, and a small bit of Touching Evil to write.
Let’s start with Touching Evil. The show is actually created and mostly written by Paul Abbott, who is another one of the absolute superstars of British television (and who we’re not done with either). Davies only wrote one episode of it, the first half of the first season’s finale. Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray’s T Is For Television, which has been an indispensable reference for both this and the previous entry, suggests that the episode is evidence of how well Davies could write to the specifications of someone else’s show. Aldridge and Murray suggest that the script is unrecognizable as Davies’s work, but this isn’t quite fair. If Davies is writing to spec, after all, the spec is Paul Abbott’s, one of his closest friends and collaborators. It’s not accurate to say that Davies and Abbott are indistinguishable – they’re certainly not. Abbott is more inclined towards a structure of set pieces to generate scenes of intense drama. Davies, left to his own devices, prefers to give characters sparks of intense drama in amongst otherwise low key scenes. It’s not that he eschews the set piece – quite the contrary, he loves a good set piece. But he builds to his set pieces out of character interactions. Davies’ trademark move is to give a character a soaring and triumphant monologue stemming out of relatively ordinary action. Abbott likes to crank the action up to eleven and watch the characters respond.
You can see this difference clearly enough across the two episodes of Touching Evil. Davies’s episode ends with a character confessing to another that he’s committed a vigilante murder. Abbott’s episode continues along this line of plot.…