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Time Can Be Rewritten 34 (Continuity Errors)

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Back in the dark days of the wilderness years, when I mistakenly thought I had either talent or inclination to write fiction, I had a fiction teacher who cautioned me off of being clever. Cleverness, he gravely told me, is a trap. Once you are pigeonholed as a “clever” writer it is all over for you. Steven Moffat, as it happens, is terribly clever. And this is the source of most of the attention paid to “Continuity Errors,” hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories of the Virgin era, focuses on how clever it is.

This is not wrong. The story is utterly clever. The Doctor meddling extensively with history in order to check out a library book is one of the greatest premises ever. Telling it from the librarian’s perspective so that the shifts in her history happen between the lines is a beautiful little trick. And the cuts away to a lecture about the dangers of the Doctor that casually renders many of the ridiculous premises of the series diegetic add a splendid bit of menace to proceedings, making the familiar trappings of Doctor Who just a bit uncanny.

This, of course, is also the problem. This sort of cleverness comes perilously close to breaking the structure of the series. Yes, it’s terribly fun to have a Doctor who does things like handle a stray attack of evil plants just to make a librarian less angry so that he can stop an alien war. But the entire story hinges on the fact that this sort of thing only works if your perspective isn’t lined up with that of the Doctor’s. The entire point is that the Doctor is having a comically elaborate adventure for seemingly small stakes. This is good for a short story from the perspective of the people affected, but you really can’t build it into an ongoing series where the Doctor is the main character.

In Moffat’s defense, of course, he doesn’t try to. He writes a twenty-six-page short story and then buggers off out of Doctor Who for the next three years, then for another six after that. The fact that he eventually ended up in charge of the entire series does not mean that it’s sensible or valid to interpret his first story as some sort of blueprint for the future. Not even when several of the ideas get used then. Yes, there’s the objection raised by Lawrence Miles to the Graham Williams era whereby granting the Doctor seemingly unbounded power and suggesting that maybe he and Romana can fly “breaks the narrative” or whatever, but that remains as silly in 1996 as it was in 1978. As ever, the issue is that the rules are different in different contexts. It’s much like the old rule of thumb in Marvel Comics that Doctor Doom is a villain that takes the entire Fantastic Four to defeat, except when he’s in a Spider-Man comic, in which case Spider-Man can do it. Or in an Avengers comic, where it takes the entire Avengers.…

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Has it Taught You Wonderful Things? (Human Nature)

29

I’ll Explain Later

Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s May of 1995. Oasis debut at number one with “Some Might Say.” They get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad also chart.

In the news, Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. And Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March.

While in books, Human Nature. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie. Let’s get that out of the way, and then, perhaps more importantly, let’s leave it there. We’ll be back to this story eventually, and we can talk about comparison then. But since I know better than to think I can leave it entirely, the book is better than the movie. So let’s just talk about the book.

To start, it’s good. Better than good. Back with Warlock we played at the idea that the New Adventures could compete with serious literary science fiction, but the ruse was see-through. Andrew Cartmel doesn’t have the prose style for it, though he’s not dreadful by any stretch of the imagination. But go ahead. Put Human Nature up against The Diamond Age. It can hold its own and then some. Are there enough different ways to calmly explain that this novel is an absolute triumph? Perhaps not.

And yet what we have is, on the surface, uninspiring. The plot isn’t just ripped off from Death Takes a Holiday (clearly something in the air, as three years later the movie was remade execrably as Meet Joe Black), it’s unapologetic about it, even still including the Grim Reaper within it. It’s one of those terribly clever novels, and its plot seems to mostly be a canvas stretched out so that Paul Cornell can scrawl his usual enthused claims about the virtues of mundane everyday life, mixed freely, in this case, with stern lessons about the horrors of war that are using World War I, the single easiest war of the twentieth century to demonstrate the horrors of, to make their point.…

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Your Researches Have So Little Regard for Human Life (Sanctuary)

11

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Infinite Requiem by Daniel Blythe. If one were to make a list of the most skippable novels in the New Adventures line, it would easily make the top ten.

Sanctuary, David McIntee’s third and final New Adventure (he wrote two Missing Adventures as well), is the New Adventures’ sole pure historical, and the first such story since Black Orchid. It deals with Christian heretics in medieval France, and culminates in the death of Benny’s romantic interest Guy de Carnac and much emotional trauma. I have an unsettling feeling that somewhere in this entry I instinctively typed Guy Debord, but frankly if I did I’m too amused by it to fix it. Like most of McIntee’s work, it exemplifies averageness: thirty-second on the Sullivan rankings, with a score of 69%. Craig Hinton declares that “even if you don’t like historicals” you should read it, as “you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.” But one page earlier he gave The Ribos Operation one star, so, you know. Trust him as you will. Lars Perason backs him up, though, calling it “one of the best stand-alone books” and proclaiming that “the ending will tear your entrails out,” though this seems intended to be read as a selling point. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s April of 1995. The Outhere Brothers are at number one with “Don’t Stop (Wiggle Wiggle),” which lasts a week before Take That are “Back For Good.” Which turns out to be untrue, though they do make it through the end of the month.  Wet Wet Wet, Celine Dion, REM, Bryan Adams, Boyzone, and a momentary supergroup of Cher, Chrissie Hynde, Nene Cherry, and Eric Clapton also chart. In news, the Oklahoma City bombing takes place in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The recently elected Republicans in the House of Representatives finish passing the bulk of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. While in countries we actually care about… actually, nothing so far as I can tell. This appears to either be a very dull month or a very spotty Wikipedia article on the year.

On to books, such as Sanctuary. There are two kinds of binary distinctions that we’ve drawn up on this blog: ones that have eventually been deconstructed, and ones that haven’t. The latter category is by far the smallest, consisting, at this point, of this binary distinction and the one between Spooner and Lucarotti-style historicals. That’s not to say the distinction is never deconstructed – had we done Doctor Who and the Pirates as a Time Can Be Rewritten entry we would have seen it done. But it is, as distinctions within Doctor Who go, one of the most puzzlingly steadfast, and thus a useful one to turn to as we stumble about

To recap, since the blog has gained a reader or two since the Hartnell days, some of whom might have not bought the Hartnell book, the pure historical episodes of the Hartnell era divide fairly easily into two types.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 43 (Independence Day, Sliders, Xena: Warrior Princess)

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I’ve been batting around the phrase “cult television” for a while, but have managed so far to avoid talking about it in any depth or detail. I mean, we did Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the whole point of that was that it wasn’t cult. We did The X-Files, but had too much fun with paranoia to do its cult aspects. So we should probably slip one more in that deals with cult television. And, perhaps, for good measure, what it’s not. Actually, let’s start with that, simply because “actually successful science fiction of a sort” is probably a more useful baseline to have. So let’s go with Independence Day.

Improbably, and in addition to being an extremely successful movie, Independence Day is absolutely ridiculously fun. And a lot of this comes down to the fact that it is a movie that does not make the slightest effort to be taken seriously. It is not a movie that lends itself to any reading based on its supposed sincerity. Yes, it’s an overtly jingoistic film about how America is the greatest country in the world and Macs are compatible with anything up to and including alien death ships. But that’s not the point. The point is the scene where Will Smith’s dog survives.

The thing about this rather incredible scene is that it’s so spectacularly unsubtle in what it does. So, for those poor souls who haven’t seen the film, the aliens attack with their giant death explosion beam thingy. And Will Smith’s wife, played by Vivica A. Fox, is in her car in a tunnel, and is thus about to explode. So she takes off, with her kids, and runs down the tunnel to find a little nook to hide in and, you know, not explode. Which she does. And to be clear, at this point all of the significant human characters are out of danger. At that point Vivica Fox’s character whistles for their dog, which had been left in the car.

Let us pause for a moment and consider the dramatic implications of this sequence. All danger to the main characters has, at this point, been resolved. Absolutely nobody is in any danger except for the dog, who has been deliberately put into danger. At this point we must pause to consider the tastes of the average American moviegoer who has selected Independence Day for their evening’s entertainment over such options as Phenomenon, The Nutty Professor, and Striptease. These are not people who are going to stand for the death of a dog. The idea that the dog might die is actually slightly more implausible than the idea that Will Smith might bite it. (Will Smith, of course, is the lone black man who is allowed to survive action films.) Which means that this entire sequence has, in effect, been set up to tease the audience with the fact that the dog might die. Needless to say the dog instead runs down the tunnel and scampers into the hiding space just as the shockwave of the explosion rides past.…

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Like I Could Run Forever (Set Piece)

8

I’ll Explain Later

Kate Orman’s second New Adventure, Set Piece, is first and foremost notable for seeing Ace’s departure to become “Time’s Vigilante” and patrol a two hundred year period of Earth’s history via Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart’s mostly functional time machine. The book also finds room for ancient Egypt, Napoleonic France, and late 19th century France in the last days of the Paris Commune. Also a very evil spaceship staffed by robotic ants and a cafe that reiterates through space and time. It’s quite fun, and most people agree: Shannon Sullivan’s rankings put it at fourteenth overall with a 77.5% rating, part of that four-book cluster of Kate Orman books that I’ve mentioned previously. And yet the big two reviews are rather equivocal: Craig Hinton calls it “a masterpiece,” but grouses that Kate Omran is “rather self-indulgent on a number of occasions,” and Lars Pearson can only muster “Good, focused, and clear.” Fools. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s February of 1995. Celine Dion is at number one with “Think Twice.” And that’s February for the number one slot, at least. Madonna, Annie Lennox, Bon Jovi, and a bit of Riverdance also chart, as do things I’ve never heard of but that could well be important: Ini Kamoze, N-Trance, and MN8, for instance. In news, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers goes missing. Michael Foale becomes the first Brit to walk in space. Kevin Mitnick is arrested, and Barings Bank collapses after a securities broker loses $1.4 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. And The Independent publishes the first Bridget Jones column.

While in books, Ace (some would say at long last) leaves the New Adventures in Set Piece, largely wrapping up the strange phenomenon of New Ace. And it is, on the whole, difficult to come up with many words other than “strange” to describe New Ace. She was largely the pet project of Peter Darvill-Evans, who is by this time long gone from editing the New Adventures (it’s not quite clear where the transition was. The Whoniverse guide is the only overt claim I can find, and it has Darvill-Evans’s last New Adventure as Theatre of War), replaced by Rebecca Levene. But even Darvill-Evans seemed to have no real idea what to do with her beyond the concept. Her debut novel was, as we saw, a mess. Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore got one good shot out of the concept, Paul Cornell got two more (one years after the New Adventures had wrapped), and Andrew Cartmel did well enough with the character, though mainly by ignoring all of the New parts of New Ace and just writing Ace, older.

So it’s not a surprise that Levene, fairly early in her time in charge, saw to it that New Ace was written out. And tapping Kate Orman, one of the best Virgin debutants around, for the job is the very definition of sensible. But it leaves Orman with what we usually call the “nightmare brief,” namely having to wrap up a character who never worked in the first place.…

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Roundsomely Layered on the Bone (Warlock)

24

I’ll Explain Later

We have skipped St. Anthony’s Fire, Falls the Shadow, and Parasite, all of which are in the bottom third of New Adventures in Sullivan’s rankings.

Warlock is the second part of Andrew Cartmel’s War Trilogy, and abandons the Cyberpunk of the first volume in favor for a thriller about drug culture and animal experimentation. Which sounds like it should piss a lot of people off, but it actually comes in at a cheerily average twenty-ninth place in Sullivan’s rankings, and does extremely well with the critics. Craig Hinton sums it up as “Warlock is nasty, Warlock is unpleasant, Warlock is sick. And Warlock is a triumph for Andrew Cartmel.” Lars Pearson takes a similar tack, saying that “Warlock strikes your chest dead-center, warming you up and making you angry.” DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s January of 1995. East 17 are at number one with their holdover Christmas #1 “Stay Another Day.” It’s unseated a week later by “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex, who round out the month. Celine Dion, Oasis, Boyzone, Mariah Carey,  R Kelly, and Green Day all also chart, the latter with an actually-successful-this-time rerelease of last year’s single “Basket Case.” So clearly we’re in that part of the nineties. More cheerily, Portishead makes it to number three in the albums chart with Dummy.

In news, the World Trade Organization is established. Star Trek: Voyager premieres, to nobody’s particular joy. The Russians briefly panic and think Norway is trying to bomb them. And the first MORI poll of 1995 shows that the Conservative Party is only trailing Labour by about thirty points, a significant improvement of their previous forty points. They still don’t have to actually go get slaughtered at the polls for two more years, however.

And in books it’s Andrew Cartmel’s Warlock. It was easy, with Warhead, to miss what was going on with Andrew Cartmel. Doctor Who itself was straining hard in the face of unexpectedly becoming a series of novels. Whereas Cartmel was actually making his Doctor Who writing debut, having been the first regular script editor since Terrance Dicks not to self-commission, and the only one since Peter Bryant to have never actually written an episode of Doctor Who. So to try to figure out how Cartmel’s writing was evolving in Warhead is to peer through a glass darkly at what isn’t even close to the most interesting thing in view. But now we come to Warlock, the second part of his War trilogy, and it raises some interesting insights both about Cartmel as a writer and about the shifting role of Doctor Who in relation to the larger body of science fiction.

While it is not quite accurate to say that Cartmel is the last Doctor Who writer to decide that the point of Doctor Who is to do “serious” science fiction, with its premise meaning that it can jump around from idea to idea rapidly, it is accurate to say that at the time of Warlock this is something of a dying idea.…

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I’m Sorry, Sir, You Have No Clearance (First Frontier)

40

I’ll Explain Later

We skipped the largely disliked Strange England by Simon Messingham. He gets better in the BBC Books line.

First Frontier, David McIntee’s second novel, mashes up American UFO myths with Doctor Who, and then, about halfway through, pulls off the return of the Master. The book is altogether lighter than White Darkness, although maintains McIntee’s fondness for lengthy action sequences, upon which its reputation largely hinges. Craig Hinton proclaims it to be “another winner from Mr. McIntee,” while Lars Pearson, who had been skeptical about McIntee’s first effort as well, says that the book “needed to shed about 100 pages and not end with a whimper.” On the whole this novel is apparently stunningly average – thirty-third out of sixty-one on Sullivan’s rankings, with a 68.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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It’s September of 1994. “Love is All Around,” improbably, is still at number one, having landed there way back in June. They stay there for the first two weeks of the month before Whigfield finally takes them down with “Saturday Night.” Boyz II Men, Blur, Kylie Minogue, R.E.M., and Bon Jovi also chart.

Since last we checked in, a fire wiped out the Norwich Central Library. Woodstock ’94 happened, because nothing commemorates the spirit of the 1960s like a massive corporate remake. And the Provisional Irish Republican Army announces a complete halt to all military options. While during the month this book comes out, Louise Jensen is raped and murdered by British soldiers in Cyprus, the US carries out a bloodless invasion of Haiti, and, in a desperate attempt to let me have three items in this sentence, Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Last Theorem again.

And in books, First Frontier. Since the “I’ll Explain Later” section robs me of any chance to bury the lead, we may as well start with the big deal, which is that this book features the return of the Master. Actually, this is still burying the lead slightly, as the real story is in many ways not that the Master is back but that the New Adventures have decided to regenerate him, with the Ainley version of the Master getting shot down by Ace in one of the novel’s innumerable action sequences. This is an unusual move. For a variety of reasons it is unrealistic to have the novels maintain the status quo of the television series – and indeed they haven’t, both introducing Benny and evolving Ace into New Ace.

Nevertheless, there are degrees of this sort of thing. None of the wilderness years lines ever made a sincere attempt at regenerating the Doctor. The only wilderness year regeneration was on television. And the reason for this is relatively obvious: it’s done so that if the series returns to television it can, in theory, pick up where it left off. Even the aging of Ace in Deceit only serves to advance her age by as many years had passed since Survival, effectively keeping Ace and Sophie Aldred’s ages in line.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 42 (The X-Files, Ghostwatch, Twin Peaks)

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We have already discussed in passing the rise of conspiracy theories and a fascination with UFOs in the 1990s. Since the next book we want to deal with is David McIntee’s First Frontier, the New Adventures’ big stab at a 1950s UFO story, it is, I suppose, time to deal with that more thoroughly. The obvious text to look at here is, of course, The X-Files, though we’ll circle back and find a larger pool of things in a bit. 

Unfortunately, if you’re tracking the influence of The X-Files on Doctor Who it is difficult not to have the bulk of it be overwhelmingly negative. The story goes roughly like this: the success of The X-Files, which became Fox’s most successful show among its desired advertising demographic, let to Fox doubling down on “cult” television. This is a phenomenon we’ve talked about in passing a few times, but as we’re finally on the big watershed show in terms of it, we may as well deal with it. The basic idea of cult television is that it has a smaller audience than standard-issue “hit” television, but that its audience is exceedingly loyal. From a studio perspective the advantages of this are twofold. First, loyal audiences buy tie-in merchandise. Second, even though the audiences of cult programs are smaller, they are disproportionately young males with disposable income, a demographic that emits pheromones known to drive advertisers into a lusty stupor. And with The X-Files Fox discovered, or at least thought it had discovered, a reliable formula for this. And so one of the first things they did was agree to fund a TV Movie of an existing cult sci-fi property, specifically a cancelled British television series, which they did straight-up in The X-Files style, right down to filming it in Vancouver. But that’s another post.

Here I am more interested in The X-Files from a cultural perspective, and specifically as an artifact reflecting the role of paranoia in the 1990s and in sci-fi fandom. That The X-Files is a paranoid show ought go without saying. Its entire ordering principle is based around the mythology of government conspiracies to hide the existence of extra-terrestrial life. In this regard it is not alone – in the UK there was, not too long before The X-Files made its debut, the one-off drama Ghostwatch, in which the illusion of a spectral invasion of the BBC was assembled to considerable outcry as popular hosts, including a former Blue Peter presenter, are possessed, murdered, and other such fun. And also in the US is Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s surrealist triumph of a television series.

What is it that links this set together, exactly? The presence of secrets, first and foremost. All three are concerned with the prospect that there is a hidden truth behind things, waiting to bubble up. What is remarkable about Ghostwatch is not so much its existence or style as the way in which it provided a modern day version of the Orson Wells War of the Worlds panic.…

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Vampires in the Stories are Just Pale Imitations of the Real Thing (Blood Harvest)

40

You Were Expecting Someone Else

Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks, is the other portion of the two book cycle that kicks off the Missing Adventures line, the other being the already-talked-about Goth Opera by Paul Cornell. It’s a sequel to State of Decay and practically every story ever on Gallifrey, with Al Capone thrown in to boot. At the time Craig Hinton wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but claimed his “overall impression was of an exciting, compelling book.” Lars Pearson says almost the exact same thing, but says that “Blood Harvest succeeds despite these flaws.” The overall consensus is average – twenty-eighth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s July of 1994. Wet Wet Wet remain at number one with “Love is All Around,” and remain there all month.  Both Reel 2 Real and All-4-One also chart, as do the BC-52s, and, less numerically, Take That and Erasure. Andres Escobar is shot and killed in Medellin, an incident widely believed to be revenge for his scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup, which Brazil wins later in the month. Fourteen firefighters die in a wildefire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Fragments of Shoemaker-Levy begin hitting Jupiter. Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty, and a bomb explodes outside the Israeli Embassy in London. And Tony Blair wins the leadership election for the Labour Party, so he gets to start being a character in these things I suppose.

While on bookshelves, Blood Harvest. I realized, as I thought about this post, that I am fairly sure this is the third-to-last time we’re actually going to cover a Terrance Dicks story. We’ve got The Eight Doctors, we’ll do one of his two New Series “Quickreads” books, but those are actually the last of the Terrance Dicks material we’re going to look at. And so it’s perhaps time to knuckle down and deal with one of those oft-punted topics that I’ve gestured at broadly, namely Terrane Dicks’s politics.

Let’s first set this up in terms of All-Consuming Fire, a book witch which Blood Harvest shares more than a passing resemblance. Both are Doctor Who stories in the classic “mash up some genres” mode, with Blood Harvest combining Doctor Who, vampires, and gangster noir. Both take their relatively mental premises and have a great deal of fun with them. All-Consuming Fire is in several ways better put together – the seams between the Chicago gangster bits with the Doctor and Ace and the E-Space vampire bits with Romana and Benny are weak, and the two settings barely manage to converge at the end. Still, the book is firmly in the range of “great fun,” and is yet another Doctor Who book that clearly has a sense of glee at the fact that it’s Doctor Who, and thus can casually do vampire gangster noir.

Dicks also does a better job than anyone gives him credit for in writing McCoy’s Doctor. This is still McCoy the chessmaster, with an elaborate plan he’s not telling anyone, and Dicks captures that while keeping it comfortably on the same spectrum as other versions of the Doctor.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 33 (The Shadow of the Scourge)

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While Paul Cornell is not the most popular writer to come out of the Virgin era, of the major and acclaimed writers of the Virgin era it is perhaps Cornell who is most indelibly associated with it. Kate Orman penned nearly as many novels for BBC Books as she did for Virgin. Gareth Roberts didn’t write for BBC Books, but was always open about the fact that his real home was the Graham Williams era. And nobody was ever going to mistake Mark “any old fucker with an Equity card” Gatiss for a Sylvester McCoy fan. But Paul Cornell was unambiguously a Sylvester McCoy fan above all other Doctors, and given how many of the iconic New Adventures he wrote it is that era, more than any other, that he’s associated with.

And so it was not in the least bit surprising that when Big Finish decided to do an audio set in the New Adventures era they called on Paul Cornell to write it. But Cornell’s association with the New Adventures was in many ways misleading, in that for all his influence on the line he was, in many ways, diametrically opposed to what the New Adventures were most often taken to be like. The New Adventures are, by reputation, the Doctor Who of the dark, grim, and gritty nineties, with the Doctor as a ruthless chessmaster who manipulates the entire universe. It should already be clear that this reputation is only part of the story, but equally, it’s a real part of it. But if the New Adventures are like that and Paul Cornell is the definitive New Adventure writer than it seems like it should follow that Cornell’s work is like that.

And here we get the rub. Back in the entry on The Highest Science we talked about the rad/trad distinction between books, and why it doesn’t quite work. But there’s a second major distinction between types of Doctor Who, which is the “gun vs frock” debate. We should perhaps start by pointing out that this is a spectacularly loaded framing of a debate. In one corner you have the gun, an implement which the Doctor is typically defined in part by his tendency not to carry. In the other you have the frock coat, which the Doctor habitually wears. So it’s pretty clear which side of the debate whoever framed it falls on, and that is in turn something that influences the tone of the debate. Scads of people identify as frocks, but guns are all “those people.”

The rough contours of the debate are that “gun” writers want Doctor Who to be terribly serious and straightforward, full of violence and properly bad bad guys who are scary and terrifying and must be stopped at great cost. Earthshock, if you want a classic series episode, is probably the gunniest of gun stories. Or Inferno. Terry Nation is a reliably “gun” writer. Frock stories, on the other hand, are camp and fun, and tend to feature the Doctor getting villains to bring themselves down through the consequences of their own schemes.…

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