From
the TARDIS data bank
The
Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks: opening novel of the original
Eighth Doctor novels; published June 1997; it follows on from the
events of the 1996 TV Movie with an amnesiac Eighth Doctor meeting
his previous selves in sequence to get his memories back; the novel
also introduces new companion Samantha “Sam” Jones.
Canon
fodder
The
bulk of the novel takes place during or immediately after televised
stories, we'll get to the full list later. Dicks actively
de-canonises the New Adventures novels from at least First Frontier
onwards, using the Anthony Ainley Master in a section set immediately
prior to the TV Movie, which also contradicts the ending of
Lungbarrow in the process.
In
the “everything is canon in the Doctor Who universe except the
Noddy series (unless the Doctor was lying)” stakes: a Roman officer
in the War Games section of the novel refers to Lurcio's tavern in
Rome so Up Pompeii and Further Up Pompeii canonically take place in
the Doctor Who universe.
Review
There's
this pernicious belief on the internet right now that “objective
review” is something that can exist and I provide no better
counter-argument than The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks. This book
is an infamous failure, a book so completely unsuited to launching
the series it does that its amazing any editor would allow it to.
However, using the only objective metrics I can think of I'd actually
have to recommend it:
You
see, it isn't as if this book is unreadable, far from it. I breezed
through its 280 pages in two sittings, which for me is lightning
speed. Terrance Dicks, elder statesman of Doctor Who and its most
prolific noveliser, is pretty much incapable of writing bad prose.
The characters he lifts from the TV show all act more or less as they
did on television, voices and mannerisms captured near perfectly. The
structure of the novel even gives the mythical new audience it was
supposedly designed for a halfway decent primer on the high points of
the television series. This is as close to an objective analysis of
the novel I can produce and even then, let it be noted by the
delusional people who think this is a good idea, it is still
moderated through my personal and (all together now) subjective
experience.
And once we get past this tissue-thin veneer of
objectivity we are left with a very readable book that is mediocre on
its own merits but where context screws it over into being outright
the worst thing the BBC could have published in that precise moment.
The root of the problem is that what was required, what was requested
and what Terrance Dicks would inevitably produce were wildly at odds.
There are a lot of ways to go with the sentence “The
problem with the TV Movie was...” but the one that concerns us here
is the fact there's almost nothing in the movie telling us what the
new Doctor is like. Between getting Sylvester McCoy in to film a
regeneration and over-egging the post-regenerative amnesia we never
get to see what the Eighth Doctor acts like when its business as
usual. Unfortunately, one of Dicks' oft-stated opinions is that the
Doctor is always fundamentally the same guy and only surface details
change. Add in an editor who was nowhere near as big on co-ordinating
authors as Peter Darvill-Evans and Rebecca Levene were at Virgin and
the idea of strongly establishing an identity for the Eighth Doctor
falls at the first hurdle.
Then there's the idea that a year after the TV Movie
there was going to be a new audience largely unfamiliar with Doctor
Who chomping at the bit to read this thing. I'm all for optimism but
you can go too far in your blue sky thinking. However, if you're
genuinely working under this assumption then Terrance Dicks would
definitely seem like the way to go: he's reliable; his work is of
consistent quality; he's written for just about every Doctor in one
form or another; he knows the series' history because he was a huge
part of it himself; and therein lies the rub...
What was needed was a bold statement about who the
Eighth Doctor is and why the reader should be dropping £4.99 a month
on these books, especially considering they replaced the beloved New
Adventures line. What was delivered was a nostalgia tour through the
history of Doctor Who as Dicks has an amnesiac Eighth Doctor meeting
up with his previous selves one by one. Dicks was already King Of The
Sequels at this point in his career but here he goes into overdrive
giving us a series of interludes and epilogues to 1000,000 BC, The
War Games, The Sea Devils, State Of Decay, The Five Doctors and The
Trial Of A Time Lord before stopping off to give us a prologue to the
TV Movie. What's more, the Sea Devils section is also a sequel to The
Daemons; the Trial Of A Time Lord section is a sequel to The Five
Doctors and a couple of characters and concepts from The Deadly
Assassin turn up for good measure. Obviously, Dicks immensely favours
expanding his own previous work here with every section from the
Second to the Fifth Doctors being based on a story he either wrote or
edited and the Sixth Doctor section being a sequel to one of his
stories as well. Maybe its ego, maybe its just pragmatism, but at the
end of the day it means the lion's share of Doctor Who is being
presented through the lens of one man's body of work.
And none of it says much about any of it. There are few
judgements on the ethics or aesthetic of those previous eras other
than the fact that the First Doctor was wrong to try and kill someone
and Dicks' being oddly down on the Seventh Doctor to the point of
writing him as borderline suicidal. There's no comment on how these
choices relate to the greater whole of the series just “Here's some
nostalgia: enjoy!”. Given the fact that the Eighth Doctor is even
more of a blank slate here than he was on television there's no point
of comparison between then and now because there's nothing to compare
the past with.
All
of this is secondary, though, to the fact this does nothing to launch
the Eighth Doctor as a concept. Dicks plainly dislikes the TV Movie,
which is amazing given how neutral a narrator he was in his
novelisations, describing it as “a weird, fantastic adventure, full
of improbable, illogical events”, a critical mauling not at all
softened by apparently being the Doctor's own thoughts on the matter.
Still, it would have been a start to giving this Doctor some sense of
character but then he stumbles into a trap a Master left behind and
the amnesia sets in. Worse, the book spends chapters at a time away
from the Eighth Doctor, setting up the adventures he's going to visit
rather than having him jump straight into them.
And how on Earth did it feel like a good idea to take
the end of The Trial Of A Time Lord and make it even more complicated
by introducing an alternate timeline into the mix?
This review is in danger of turning into a rant but,
ultimately, The Eight Doctors is more offensive due to circumstance
than in what it actually is. If it had come later in the run or as an
anthology separate from the ongoing series it would, as I say, be
mediocre rather than facepalmingly frustrating. True, Dicks'
unfortunate class politics show up good and proper in the Sixth
Doctor section as we finally meet the Shobogans alluded to in The
Deadly Assassin. They were originally a throwaway line of the sort
Robert Holmes used to flesh out worlds and blatantly never expected
to see expanded (see also, as this novel and many other Dicks-penned
works do, the Celestial Intervention Agency). Here Dicks presents
them as hard-drinking, violent savages living underneath the
Gallifreyan Capitol who speak with a slightly stilted, caveman-esque
vocabulary. He even recycles the trick from The Monster Of Peladon
(largely his own script) of giving these lower class characters harsh
sounding names like Kagar and Marek.
What this series needed was a strong beginning but what
it got was nostalgia: the thing that ultimately doomed the TV series
and crippled the TV Movie with the weight of having to please the
fans with continuity porn and a pointless, time-wasting regeneration.
Sadly, this set something of a tone as the Eighth Doctor novels would
have a very shaky relationship with the series' past over the years.
In the end, reading this book I was confronted by one
question, a question I really think should have been asked more often
by everyone involved in writing this book:
What's the point of this novel?
No comments:
Post a Comment