Doctor Who: Big Gang Generation
by Gary Russell
My journey through Doctor Who novels featuring the seventh and eighth Doctors and Bernice Summerfield brings me to this one, which has Benny meeting up with the twelfth Doctor. For the Doctor, it's part of a set of loosely-linked novels called The Glamour Chronicles, where the Doctor keeps bumping into an Ancient technology called the Glamour. For Benny, it takes place following on from the Big Finish box sets set on Legion, seemingly after Missing Persons, and it features her main cast from those stories alongside her: Ruth, Jack, and her son Peter.
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| Published: 2015 Acquired: January 2023 Read: February 2023 |
As a book, it was better, mostly I suspect because instead of having to suffer through every single word of Gary Russell's excruciating dull prose, I could speed read my way through it. So even though the fact that there are repeated, inexplicable digressions about the twelfth Doctor's relationship with the obscure New Adventures character Keri Pakhar, of all people, I could just jump over them.
Keri is not the only annoying use of continuity. It also has the Doctor claiming to Benny that every time he goes to France, he thinks of Guy de Carnac. Seriously? Gary Russell wants me to believe that when David Tennant was snogging Madame de Pompadour, he was thinking, "oh i'm so sad about a one-off character from a mediocre david mcintee NA who died centuries and centuries of years ago in my personal timeline." Go ahead, pull the other one. On top of that, there's a cheeky reference to the NA version of Human Nature, where the Doctor claims he went to "extraordinary lengths" to understand Benny's sorrow over the death of Guy. This is a fundamental misunderstanding and misreading of the events of Human Nature. Benny raises this as a theory on p. 116 of Human Nature, but on p. 202, the Doctor gives his actual reason, which has nothing to do with freaking Guy de Carnac, c'mon.
On top of this, there's an excruciatingly out of character moment where the Doctor and Benny console each other that bad things happen because of fate so oh well, which I think is contradictory to the entire ethos of the programme and of the characters.
The plot doesn't make a lot of sense. It was never clear to me why the Doctor, Benny, and company pretend to be a gang of con artists in order to fool an actual gang of con artists; I don't know what anyone would have done different had they actually been aboveboard about their intentions. Seriously, what was the point of all that?
Even by Doctor Who standards, Gary Russell has little grasp on science. We're told that the planet Legion doesn't orbit a sun... which would surely make it too cold to live on. However, we're also told it has a light side and a dark side; the light side faces the rest of the galaxy. Gary Russell has apparently never looked at the sky and realized the light of distant stars is actually not that light. But we're also told it spins very slowly. Well, if it does rotate, even if slowly, how can you do something like build a city in the middle of the light side?
Continuity-wise, it seems to follow on from the box set Missing Persons. I say "seem to" because given Gary Russell wrote this novel and produced those box sets, the details don't really line up. Specifically, Jack and Ruth are engaged to be married here... whereas there was a not a single hint of any kind of attraction at all in any of the preceding box sets. Like, where did this even come from? Why do this? Bizarre. Only Gary Russell could write a book that has detailed references to novels from over two decades prior but messed up continuity with something he wrote himself five years ago. Similarly weirdly, there's a bit where the Doctor thinks of his past companions, and it's only ones from tv and audio. Like, Gary, I know you know the books "count" because freaking Keri Pakhar is in this book! Are you telling me that Samson and Gemma really loom larger in the Doctor's mind than Fitz?
I was vaguely amused by how the story contorts to avoid mentioning Irving Braxiatel, who was a member of Benny's Legion-era supporting cast, but who could wreck the entire premise of post-2005 Doctor Who if he turned up. The Doctor's not quite the "last of the Time Lords" anymore by the Peter Capaldi era, but the Doctor still certainly shouldn't be bumping into random Time Lords. Braxiatel is only referred to as the owner of the White Rabbit; at one point Benny is probably about to say "your brother" to the Doctor but gets cut off. (Incidentally, the book also makes it difficult to date volume one The New Adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield; Benny says that its events were the last time she saw the Doctor, placing the story sometime between her appearance in The Company of Friends and here.)
So anyway, pretty bad but you can read the whole thing in about a day, because basically nothing that happens matters.
I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: The Glamour Chronicles: Royal Blood
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