Across The Darkened City and competing canons

(MAJOR SPOILERS for Across The Darkened City by David Bartlett, the second story in Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor volume 2 and I do mean MAJOR, this is basically all about the big reveal of the story).

Doctor Who canon is really weird. On the one hand you have a series that has a profound love affair with its own past which produces sequels all the time. I'm posting this between the transmission of two episodes featuring a version of the Cybermen not used on television since 1966 for really no better reason than as a thank you to a lead actor who loves the design. On the other hand, there are few people who can claim Doctor Who canon has any consistency.

According to televised Doctor Who, not bringing in any later expanded universe material, the Doctor both built from scratch and stole the TARDIS; the Brigadier retired from UNIT half a decade before meeting Sarah Jane Smith at UNIT; the same author wrote the story that established the Doctor has only thirteen lives, co-wrote one that established that Tom Baker was the Twelfth Doctor and then wrote Davison's (therefore Thirteenth) Doctor's regeneration.

When you start subbing in EU material it only gets stranger: Peri has three or four different fates (two of them even produced by the same author for the same company); Ace has at least five; Sarah Jane dies in 1997, a decade before her own TV show begins where she is neither a corpse nor a zombie; Gallifrey is destroyed twice; the Eighth Doctor leads several contradictory lives.

So sometimes you just have to shrug and pick the explanation you prefer. You don't have to choose. I've nothing against The Sarah Jane Adventures but I also loved Bullet Time, the novel that kills off Sarah Jane. Sometimes, though, you end up with a clash where you pick a side almost on reflex.

Across The Darkened City is a two-hander in which Steven and a semi-functional Dalek are the only survivors of a spaceship crash. There's an abandoned Dalek transmat on the other side of a ruined, monster-infested city and if Steven drags the Dalek there on a cart the Dalek will chip off back to Skaro and give Stephen the co-ordinates for the planet he was abducted from (and where the TARDIS currently is). Its a pretty standard such shipwreck story where the Dalek elicits some sympathy and the two start working together in a way that suggests both are suffering some element of Stockholm Syndrome. Its a decent story and Nick Briggs does his usual excellent job with the Dalek vocals.

An element that comes up every now and again is that the Dalek is a special, superior form of Dalek that “needs” to survive and return to Skaro. Across the story its suggested that this Dalek has empathy and is preserving Steven's life for more reasons than sheer pragmatism.

The bit I like about the twist I'm about to describe is that the way this Dalek acts, with a degree of emotional intelligence enough to manipulate Steven into not just helping it but sympathising with it, is an interesting way to link the Hartnell era Daleks with the Troughton era version. This Dalek has been engineered to display the emotional intelligence the Daleks display in David Whitaker's two Dalek stories which makes it superior to the Daleks as imagined by Terry Nation (it helps that I am absolutely on the side of Whitaker in this particular debate).

Then it turns out this isn't just some random genetically re-engineered Dalek because in the final scene it gets put in a new casing, gets a deeper voice and turns out to be the Emperor.

Now, as unfashionable as it is to disbelieve that John Peel (not the sainted DJ) contributed anything of worth to the Dalek mythos, one idea I always loved (from his Evil of the Daleks novelisation) was that the Emperor was the very first Dalek, the one who shot Davros in Genesis. It made a beautiful sense to me that in a society of total conformity with no names and barely any form of rank (nothing seems to exist between mission commanders and drones) the only true distinction that could nominate an ultimate authority figure was killing the creator of your entire species.

He's the Emperor because he killed “god” and in my own personal headcanon I'm sticking with that. It just seems a bit more fitting than having the Emperor being another random Dalek experiment.

That's just my humble, of course. Its Doctor Who canon, do as thou wilt is the whole of the law.

The 1st Doctor, Ben and Polly: a rare treat

Yesterday, this appeared in my Big Finish account and it occurred to me that this is the first time in a long time I've bought something from them because it was special.

You see, this box set contains two stories featuring one of the rarest casts in Doctor Who: the First Doctor, Ben and Polly. This crew only appeared in three stories on TV, all of which dovetail into each other rather directly. As a consquence, amongst all the hundreds and hundreds of books, comics, audios and short stories retroactively slotted into Doctor Who continuity this is a very rare set of characters.

By my count there's a novel (Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole), a recent Short Trips audio, this box set and that's about it. This particular TARDIS crew might be more than half a century old but its nice that there's finally some new material for them.

Hell, its nice that Ben and Polly are getting new stories at all, as screwed over as they got by circumstance on TV. Of their entire run of stories only one (their first) exists in its entirety. Others have been reconstructed for DVD release but as good as some of the animations are they still represent something of a barrier to more casual fans getting to know them. Plus, the fact that Jamie turned up and became the iconic Second Doctor companion whilst making Ben sort of redundant as the action man companion hardly helps them, either.

Also, their departure is absolutely crap, one of the worst handled in the entire classic series.

And The War Machines, that one surviving story with Ben, Polly and the First Doctor? It paints such a vivid picture of their dynamic that I've always wanted to see more of it. Unfortunately, The Smugglers never left much impression on me (most of the missing stories I've only experienced in audio left me like that, I should really track down the Loose Cannon reconstruction) and The Tenth Planet sadly has to have Ben fill in for the Doctor to the detriment of the Ben's character, in my view.

So you can understand why I've always craved more of this tantalisingly brief and under-documented cast.

I really should dig up my copy of Ten Little Aliens, I never did get around to reading it. 

After "The Beginning" (what I thought)

It helps that my assumptions about this story were totally wrong. This is in no way the story of why the Doctor absconds from Gallifrey, though the script makes plentiful allusions to Lungbarrow so clearly Platt sees that as a story already told. Fair enough, though as he has Susan note “there's always someone else's version”.

The first episode is a patchwork of bits and pieces from various previous sources, the little details about the Doctor's origins we already know: the Hand Of Omega floats along unnamed, there's a silent cameo by Clara straight out of The Name Of The Doctor, and even a moment that explains away how Susan could have named the TARDIS and it be the generic Time Lord name at the same time. There's even a sweet scene that calls back, or perhaps forwards, to Idris' description of their first flight in The Doctor's Wife.

Talking of Time Lords, somehow, in spite of all the other sacred cows being slaughtered and lines being crossed, Platt keeps to two of the big unwritten rules of Doctor Who fiction: at no point in this story are the Doctor's people named as Time Lords and there planet is never called Gallifrey. No one seems to know why this started but no matter how radical or revisionist the writer's inclinations might be none of them use “Time Lord” in a story set before The War Games and no one uses “Gallifrey” in one set before The Time Warrior. I'm sure there's one or two exceptions (The Empire of Glass springs to mind) but it really does seem to be a hard limit for an awful lot of writers. Not that there aren't anachronisms aplenty: there's a sonic screwdriver, the Hand, and a few bits of Gallifreyan lore get described even if they aren't named.

This visit to the very beginning is pretty brief and before long the Doctor (and he is “the Doctor” here, which is a little odd in light of how he gets named in An Unearthly Child, but I suppose he has to be called something) and Susan are in the TARDIS and taking off in a mad dash to escape the (unnamed) Chancellery Guard.

Much of the rest of the first episode plays out as a TARDIS story, a prequel to The Edge of Destruction in a way. It even has an explanation for the black sharpie inscription on the fast return switch, which is both unbelievable fanwank and rather cute.

There's a lot of “origin” material here outside of the TARDIS stuff. Since we see this story through Susan's narration we get a very sensory experience of the first time she and the Doctor walk out onto an alien world. We get to hear their first encounter with aliens and the moment when the Doctor begins his lifelong obsession with planet Earth.

The big contribution to the mythos here is, of course, Terry Molloy as Quadrigger Stoyn, this trilogy's villain. In this story he's some poor pleb the Doctor and Susan accidentally abduct (he won't be the last, of course) since he was working on decommissioning the TARDIS as they took off. He's been abducted, scarred in the process and is none too happy with the Doctor for it. He's a pretty useful contrast given that Platt takes pains to make the Doctor a rebel by his people's standards but not a hero by ours, keeping that initial TV arc intact.

Stoyn is portrayed as a by-the-book sort of no ambition who just wants to get home, a home the Doctor is dead set on not returning to. By the end of the story it becomes clear just how much Stoyn is willing to compromise to get home, a selfishness that makes the grumpy, stubborn pre-Season One Doctor heroic by comparison instead of invalidating the way he develops in the series.

So, overall: yes, I enjoyed it and it avoids a lot of the issues I anticipated it stumbling into. Its really less “The Beginning” and more “The First Adventure”, which is a much smaller hit to the mystery of how it all began. 

Before "The Beginning" (philosophical issues)

Tomorrow I'm going to post a review of The Beginning, Marc Platt's Companion Chronicle telling the story of how the Doctor and Susan stole the TARDIS. As I write this I haven't yet listened to it because I want to get some thoughts down about the whole idea of Doctor Who “prequels” and why I find them a little problematic.

On one level I think its important that Doctor Who begin with An Unearthly Child. There's a definite character arc that starts there and pays off somewhere during Marco Polo in which the Doctor moves from being a scientific observer to something like a functional hero figure. This makes pre-Unearthly Child stories a challenge, to say the least, because before Ian and Barbara stumble into his life the Doctor really isn't the sort of person who has adventures.

This isn't to say there have been no good stories set before the series but the ones I've liked tend not to be about the Doctor so much as Susan. The novella Time And Relative and the audio The Alchemists both use Susan as a protagonist and the Doctor (known simply as “Grandfather” at this point) as more of a background figure. In Time And Relative, Susan and her school friends are trying to reach the Doctor through a vicious snowstorm while in The Alchemists he's been abducted by the SA and Susan is trying to rescue him.

The Beginning is a different beast, I feel, since this is very much a Doctor-centric idea: the moment he absconds from Gallifrey. True, the story is (and can only be) narrated by Carole Ann Ford as Susan but there's little way I can foresee to background the Doctor in this set-up.

Then there's the issue of whether this is something the mythos needs. There are stories I am sure every fan has written in their head at some point and the big two are 1) the death of the Thirteenth Doctor and 2) this. When just about every fan has their own personal conception of such a huge unseen moment it runs the risk of being disappointing by default just because it differs from what people imagined. There's certainly a strain of criticism concerning The Time Of The Doctor that follows this (not that there aren't valid criticisms of Time to be had, just that quite a lot of criticism falls into this category).

Of course, this is a real moment of culmination for Marc Platt, who has been working towards this story for a very long time. His 1989 TV script Ghost Light was meant to be about visiting the Doctor's family home and he eventually told that story in his novel Lungbarrow which introduced ideas about the Doctor's life on Gallifrey he expanded in the audio Auld Mortality. So he has form, to say the least, though some of his ideas have always been controversial.

And that's not to mention that, in my personal view, the Big Finish audios are canon. I'm of the opinion that just about every officially published Doctor Who story is canon regardless of contradictions so this, to me, is THE story of how this went down, not just a version of the story. That raises expectations in a way that might not be helpful to my eventual appraisal of the story.

Tomorrow: what I actually thought of the thing. 

The Scorchies: period appropriately bonkers

I'll be honest, this one has been sitting on my shelf for over a year and the only reason I got round to it was because there's a sequel in Jago & Litefoot I want to understand. I'm wary of parodies these days since they seem to swing too often towards the mean-spirited but this was a great story of a particular sort Big Finish haven't put out before.

It has to be said first, lest I seem ungrateful, that given the limited resources they're working with Big Finish have done a fantastic job just to create Third Doctor audios. A majority of the era's principal cast have passed on, some of them years before Big Finish even started. They've made some corkers, as well: The Last Post and Find And Replace are amongst my favourite Doctor Who audios of all time.

There has been something missing, though. They've done great UNIT action, a cool Peladon story and some seriously good revisionist takes on the era but what they hadn't done until now was a properly balls-to-the-wall insane, new idea every five minutes Bob Baker and Dave Martin style story.

That's all fixed now as James Goss serves up a story about Jo Grant being captured by genocidal puppets from outer space. Its the closest I've seen Big Finish come to those insanely over-the-top Baker and Martin stories like The Mutants or The Claws Of Axos. It actually manages to be as colourful as Claws thanks to some excellent cover art. Guest star Mervyn Hayes even managed to gets the cadence of his speech just right to sound like it fits the around the exaggerated facial movements of a Muppet. He plays all the puppets, except Amble the Fairly Ugly Doll who's voiced by Katy Manning (and there may be no better “Jo Grant” moment than where Jo stands up for Amble's body image, its just perfect).

Back to the parody thing: I love The Muppet Show, repeats of that were a staple of my childhood, so I like that this is the sort of parody that's also part tribute act. You can sort of see how The Scorchies would have worked as a cheap Muppets knock-off on regional kids' TV. They've captured Jo in the middle of a broadcast and put her in the role of the episode's guest and interrogate her in the style of an interview. Its is brilliant. There are even a couple of songs which fit perfectly well with the theme but aren't cringeworthy in any way. They're actually quite catchy.

I'm really looking forward to how these characters work in a Victorian setting with Jago & Litefoot. 

The Companion Chronicles to return as box sets. Yay!

There was an article in Big Finish's Vortex magazine about their new series The Early Adventures that slipped in, off-handedly, that The Companion Chronicles would be returning next year as box sets.

Now, to set out some biases off the bat: The Companion Chronicles is my favourite Doctor Who series ever. Not the modern series, not the classic series, the McGann audios or even the hallowed New Adventures but The Companion Chronicles. I'm not trying to be contrarian but the series was consistently inventive both in offering new perspectives on classic characters and by experimenting with different narrative approaches to work with the limits of a small cast, usually of no more than two actors. By necessity they were very character based and given how underwritten many of these characters were on television it gave the actors a real chance to shine.

I loved them but I did respected that Big Finish chose to end them when they were riding high. After eight seasons and a few specials the series clocked up over eighty releases and if ideas were getting thin on the ground I'd rather have eight seasons of enjoyable and inventive than having two or three more seasons of flogging a dying horse.

Am I looking forward to the box sets? Hell yes.

One thing The Companion Chronicles were great at was working with their limitations, they were designed around them. The whole idea was to give Big Finish a way to tell stories for eras where principal actors have passed away. The series expanded a little from that initial brief in its middle years but that was always the core of the project: First, Second, Third and (when Tom Baker wasn't yet on contract) Fourth Doctor stories when full cast stories weren't possible. The general format was a companion actor (again, this occasionally went off-topic) and one other actor. Most were basically talking books with dialogue sections whilst some were fully dramatised two-handers.

I think the box set format might be a nice new limitation for them to play with. Box sets have generally been good for Big Finish series. In fact, with the mini-season format the Main Range adopted in 2009, The Companion Chronicles were the last man standing in the anthology format. I did like the anthology format, I did like getting a different TARDIS team every month but I think a tighter focus is almost always a good thing.

As supporting evidence I give you another BFP series to go from singles to boxes: Bernice Summerfield, which ran for eleven series as singles before going to box sets for its last six. The singles had an overarching plot that was sprawling and very hard to get into whilst the switch to box sets provided a tighter focus. Each box has had a theme or a setting of its own and then spends however many discs exploring the high points of the concept before the next one offers up its own idea.

Yes, there have been boxes where I wish the big idea had lasted longer. I genuinely think Epoch was a couple of discs too short but is that even a criticism? The fact that I was left wanting to hear more of Bernice's life in Atlantis and the idea of a world where all history more than 57 years old is banned just means the writers cut themselves off before the idea had a chance to go stale, which is exactly what I praised The Companion Chronicles for doing at the top of this post.