Doctor Who: Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell

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.

 

Published: 2015
Acquired: January 2023
Read: February 2023

This was sort of a reread for me: I actually already listened to it on audio as part of my journey through Bernice stories on audio. When I heard it, I thought it was terrible. Aimless, confusing, overlong, unfunny, belabored. Not even Lisa Bowerman as reader could save it.

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

Ground Zero (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 24)

Ground Zero: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Alan Barnes, Gareth Roberts, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 1995-96
Acquired: December 2020
Read: April 2022

This volume continues the "past Doctor" focus of Land of the Blind, but with a more unified approach otherwise. Bar two fill-ins, every story in the volume is illustrated by Martin Geraghty; the strip hasn't had a unified artistic vision since John Ridgway went from primary artist to one of many back in 1988, so around seven years prior! I like the unity of approach, but even better that it's Geraghty, who is great both with likenesses and storytelling, the combo you need—but don't always find—in a tie-in artist. There's also a new unity of vision behind the scenes; the commentary in this volume by strip editor Gary Gillatt is great stuff, showing how he decided to totally change the approach of the strip.

Curse of the Scarab / Operation Proteus / Target Practice, from Doctor Who Magazine #228-34 (Aug. 1995–Jan. 1996)
stories by Alan Barnes and Gareth Roberts, art by Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, lettering by Elitta Fell

We open with a three-part fifth Doctor and Peri story, a three-part first Doctor and Susan story, and a one-part third Doctor and Jo story. They are all pretty competent. Curse of the Scarab is a decent adventure runaround, with some fun ideas and some more implausible ones; like a lot of Alan Barnes's Big Finish work, this involves plunging the Doctor into a certain moment in historical pop culture, and Barnes is a good pop culture historian, so it works. Some lush artwork from Geraghty helps. Operation Proteus is okay; again, there's some good stuff and some other stuff I found harder to buy, such as the way the cure is deployed. Target Practice is the DWM main strip debut of Adrian Salmon (I guess he was already doing the Cybermen strip, but I won't get to that for some time), and he is one of my favorites. His style is well suited to the subject matter.

from Doctor Who Magazine #235

Black Destiny, from Doctor Who Magazine #235-37 (Feb.-Apr. 1996)
story by Gary Russell, art by Martin Geraghty, inks by Bambos Georgiou, letters by Elitta Fell

Martin Geraghty may be a good artist, but he's not a good enough artist (yet, anyway) to save us from Gary Russell's confusing transitions; there were several moments in this story where I didn't know what was going on or who was who. The resolution is total nonsense, introducing a whole idea never before mentioned in the story.

from Doctor Who Magazine #238

Ground Zero, from Doctor Who Magazine #238-42 (Apr.-Aug. 1996)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Bambos Georgiou, letters by Elitta Fell

It feels different this time...

This story does a lot of things to change it up, to signal that the comic strip as you knew it is at an end. There's an ongoing story in DWM for the first time since, I think, The Mark of Mandragora way back in #169-72... five years prior! Ground Zero picks up on hints dropped in three of the previous four stories in this volume, paying off why a mysterious a voice accosted Peri, Susan, and Sarah Jane.

It's also our first story with more than three installments since Final Genesis in 1993. It uses its five parts to good advantage, twisting and turning through a complicated plot; it has powerful cliffhangers. Obviously the death of Ace, but the reappearance of the old companions and the TARDIS plunging into the human collective unconsciousness are also great moments, well executed. The story uses its space to good advantage.

It also feels very now for the first time in a long time. This is the Doctor of the tv movie, not the show, not just in costume, but in attitude, and in an indication that both he and Susan are part human. The death of Ace adds to this: the strip is an ongoing concern, able to change its own narrative in a way that hasn't been true since the introduction of Bernice Summerfield. But it's not just the death of Ace. The story builds off what has come before and sets up what is to come.

On top of all that, it's a dang good story. I will say it runs a bit intense for my tastes—Peri is put through the wringer in a way I don't quite like—but it's engaging, it's interesting, the identity of the narrator is a good reveal, it has great concepts, it has great visuals. The empty streets, the Threshold, the TARDIS straining itself, the console room exploding, and of course Ace's death. Tremendous stuff, and I devoured it. Though I have enjoyed the strip more than I have not since A Cold Day in Hell!, it really does feel like something special is back.

from Doctor Who Magazine #243

Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #243 (Sept. 1996)
story + art by Sean Longcroft, lettering by Elitta Fell

This is a neat little semiautobiographical story about writer and artist Sean Longcroft's on-again off-again love affair with the show, peronified by him interacting with Tom Baker as the Doctor. Well done, I found it amusing and heartwarming in equal measure. "[Y]ou can't be four years old forever, you know. But part of you always will be."

Stray Observations:

• Gary Gillatt says in the commentary that around this time, strips by Colin Baker, Barry Letts, and Andrew Cartmel all fell through. We've seen good stuff from Cartmel, but the other two leave me a little more apprehensive. Did we dodge a bullet or miss works of artistic genius? We'll never know, I guess.
• It took a few posts of explanation from friendly GallifreyBase posters for me to get the last-panel joke in Curse of the Scarab that Barnes is so proud of in the notes. A bit belabored.
  
• Gary Russell admits he can't actually write comics in the notes, but he only realized this after being punted off IDW's Doctor Who comic after six issues of its eighteen-issue run. I agree, to be frank (his IDW story was terrible), and I admire his honesty. Despite this self-realization, he's evidently writing an upcoming comic for Cutaway...
• I understand the reasoning behind jettisoning the Bernice Summerfield era from the strip's history (#193-208), maybe even all the way back to the first VNA allusion (The Grief in #185). But by showing the classic tv console room being exploded, the strip lops off a bit of its own history, as the new console room was its invention, in The Chameleon Factor (#174).
• It's particularly a shame, as the strip had made this "yes our own history does matter" move before, with the sequence leading up to The Mark of Mandragora. As the new-era strip will do in its next installment in End Game, that storyline even referenced the very first ever DWM story to make it clear that yes, the ongoing story you have read since The Iron Legion is back! But that is gone, along with the VNAs, even though I don't think it had to go with them.
• When logging this collection in LibraryThing, I realized that my children already own a book by Sean Longcroft... he is the illustrator of Usborne's First Book about the Orchestra, a "noisy" book I read them many times until the circuitry shorted. Now that I know, I can actually see it in the style.

This post is the twenty-fourth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers End Game. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
    

Bernice Summerfield: Adorable Illusion by Gary Russell

Bernice Summerfield: Adorable Illusion
by Gary Russell

I'm catching up on my Bernice Summerfield audio dramas, and I paused to read this novel. I listened to it between discs four and five of the Missing Persons box set based on what I read on-line; it's always tricky to place things before you experience them! Having read it, I would now advise listening to it during the Road Trip box set, between discs two and three. (See my Bernice Summerfield timeline for full details.)

Published: 2014
Acquired: November 2017
Read: April 2021

Bernice Summerfield may seem like an audio character now, but of course she was born in prose novels-- and, unfortunately, this is the last one. (All subsequent Bernice Summerfield books have been anthologies.) Doubly unfortunately because 1) this is a medium where she can thrive, and 2) this last appearance of Benny in her original medium is wretched. Like a lot of Gary Russell novels, it feels like he had 100 pages of ideas, and so this is padded out with long, unfunny diversions, and ostensibly humorous exposition. Nothing about the characters here will grab you, and much of the plot makes little sense. (Benny is given the identity of a murderer, on a ship with the parents of the murder victims, and apparently none of these people know what the murderer looks like!) Some subplots work to set up the climax of the New Frontiers box set... an episode that was actually quite bad. The character of Avril Fenman appears here, but shortly before reading this I listened to the audiobook of Fenman's original appearances in The Squire's Crystal and The Glass Prison and this isn't her, it's just a different character with the same name.

Its sole saving grace is that we do get our first (and, I think, only) check in on the Collection cast, the characters who made up the series's ensemble for ten years, but haven't appeared since Escaping the Future, released four years prior. I liked getting to see what happened to Adrian, Bev, and Joseph, though what we see here does make it pretty improbable that Benny never ran into them again.

Review: Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film by Gary Russell

Mass market paperback, 223 pages
Published 1996

Acquired September 2019
Read October 2019

Doctor Who by Gary Russell

I've finished reading the seventh Doctor New Adventures I own, but I have several eighth Doctor books I've never read, and those were the spiritual and literal successors to the NAs, so I'm going to do those next. Before I begin, though, I picked up a book I've always been curious about but have never read: the novelization of the 1996 tv movie starring Paul McGann. It's often called "Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film" (including on the spine), but the title page clearly gives the title as just "Doctor Who," a move that I'm sure has led to absolutely no confusion.

It's by Gary Russell, so it's as workmanlike as you'd expect. Russell fleshes out a lot of background bits. Some work (the prologue with the seventh Doctor is nice, and he almost makes the ending work), but some fall flat (there are bits of the film that are just there to look cool, but fall apart if you think about them, and I would argue that explaining them just makes it worse). I think its biggest problem is that the film succeeds in two areas: visual style and Paul McGann's performance. But those are largely uncaptured on the page; the cool moments don't come across, and the Doctor fades into the background without McGann's charisma.

But hey, if you want a 200-page diversion about the best Doctor, it will do nicely, and I suspect it works well as a transition between the NAs and the EDAs. I guess I'll find out when I read Vampire Science! (Of course, as soon as I track this down used, it's announced that they're re-releasing it as a Target novel with added material. Bah.)

Next Week: The tenth Doctor returns in Revolutions of Terror, as I begin to explore Titan's Doctor Who comics!

Doctor Who at Christmas: Twelve Doctors of Christmas

Hardcover, 318 pages
Published 2016
Acquired and read December 2017

Doctor Who: Twelve Doctors of Christmas

by Jacqueline Rayner, Colin Brake, Richard Dungworth, Mike Tucker, Gary Russell, and Scott Handcock

This set of twelve Doctor Who Christmas tales, a worthy successor to the old Big Finish Christmas Short Trips collections, was my Doctor Who Christmas read for the season, though it slipped in a little late (I think I finished it up December 30th). With twelve Doctor and twelve days of Christmas, things lined up quite nicely.

The stories are an odd assortment, which is kind of always true of these Doctor Who Christmas anthologies. Some are genuinely Christmassy; others just happen to be set on Christmas, but are pretty much standard Doctor Who runarounds. The most Christmassy is definitely the first, Jacqueline Rayner's "All I Want for Christmas," where the first Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki end up in a perfect 1963 Christmas: it beautifully captures the wistfulness and nostalgia of Christmas, of a yearning for a time that's slipped away. Rayner has always demonstrated a sympathy for the first Doctor era, and Ian and Barbara are exceptionally written here. I also really enjoyed Rayner's other story, "The Christmas Inversion," where the third Doctor, Jo Grant, and Mike Yates pick up a distress call from the future and end up in the middle of the events of "The Christmas Invasion"; it's as hilarious as "All I Want" is touching. Jackie Tyler meets the third Doctor! Brilliant.

Many of the others are fine, but not particularly noteworthy, and sometimes the Christmas links are tenuous at best. I didn't really get the point of Richard Dungworth's "Three Wise Men," where the fourth Doctor meets the Apollo astronauts (nothing happens), and Gary Russell's "Fairy Tale of New New York," where the sixth Doctor and Mel meet the Catkind, seemed to have potential, but there's no plot. I did enjoy "Ghost of Christmas Past" by Scott Handcock, where a Time War-era eighth Doctor is trapped in the minute before Christmas and ends up finding a mysterious message in the TARDIS. (It is a little weird from a continuity standpoint, though; it's consistent with the Big Finish stories in giving the Doctor a great-grandson named Alex, but given what happened to Alex in To the Death, it's hard to believe the Doctor would find comfort in thinking about him!)

Sort of weirdly, the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Doctor tales all feature the Doctor teaming up with kids. I wonder why that approach was taken up for three of the four new series Doctors? Each would probably work on its own, or even in a different sequence, but since the stories come back-to-back-to-back, it's a bit repetitive. ("Loose Wire" by Richard Dungworth, the story for the tenth, was the best of them, because Dungworth captures the Doctor exceptionally well here.)

There are a lot of unexpected continuity nuggets, with the Catkind of New Earth, the Master, the Meddling Monk, Rose's red bicycle, the Slitheen, Jackie Tyler, and the Wire (from "The Idiot's Lantern") all popping up-- plus one really unexpected but fun reference in the last story. Even in the weaker stories, the Doctor's voice(s) is well captured, and the whole package is great looking; the cover looks gorgeous in person, and there's a full-page color illustration for each story. This is one of those anthologies whose theme makes it greater than the sum of its parts. Read it on a cold winter night under thick blankets and time travel to your own Christmases past and future.

Next Week: Back to Oz, to discover the debut of a new Royal Historian in The Royal Book of Oz!

Review: Doctor Who: Agent Provacateur by Gary Russell et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 136 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2008)
Acquired May 2014
Read June 2014

Doctor Who: Agent Provavateur

Written by Gary Russell

Art by Nick Roche, Jose Maria Berdy, Stefano Martino, and Micro Pierfederici
Art Assist by Joe Phillips
Inking Assist by German Torres
Colors by Charlie Kirkoff and Tom Smith
Letters by Chris Mowry, Amauri Osorio, and Neil Uyetake

IDW has put out a large number of Doctor Who comics since it acquired the American license in 2008, but I've avoided most of them-- this one because it was written by Gary Russell, whose Doctor Who novels I almost never enjoy. But in May IDW released digital downloads of everything they ever published as a Humble Bundle, and sixteen trade paperbacks for $15 is nothing to sneeze at.

Having finally read this, IDW's very first Doctor Who story, I feel justified in avoiding it. These are six largely self-contained single-issue stories, with a narrative threading through the whole thing. But if you can explain what that narrative actually is, you're a smarter person than me. They don't really work at standalones, either; Russell typically wastes the first 3-4 pages of each story on irrelevant banter between the Doctor and Martha, and then leaving him less than twenty pages to introduce a problem, complicate it, and solve it. Usually it's the solution that suffers; many of these endings are cursory at best. It must be admitted that he really captures the voices of the Doctor and Martha very well, but that is not anywhere near enough to make all 136 pages worth reading.