Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - The Gallifrey Chronicles (Redux) by Lance Parkin (featuring Jon Arnold, Andrew Batty & Luke Sims-Jenkins)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - The Gallifrey Chronicles (Redux) by Lance Parkin (featuring Jon Arnold, Andrew Batty & Luke Sims-Jenkins) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  It was 200 feet of running before Trix looked back and
• 0:02
  realized Fitz wasn't with her. They come down the emergency
• 0:06
  slide and started to run. The captain and the copilot have
• 0:10
  been right behind them. They'd overtaken Fitz and come
• 0:12
  alongside Trix. The air had been humming the
• 0:15
  whole time and she thought it was the blood rushing into her
• 0:18
  ears after the crash. It was only as she looked up
• 0:22
  that she saw squadrons of monsters passing overheads.
• 0:27
  The plane was pretty well intact, but there were flames on
• 0:29
  the ground and she could smell fuel, so there was a real risk
• 0:32
  of an explosion. Emergency vehicles were heading
• 0:35
  their way, blue lights flashing, fire tenders, an ambulance,
• 0:40
  smaller vehicles. Tricks couldn't yet make out in
• 0:42
  the evening gloom. She stopped and turned around.
• 0:46
  There was a crowd of monsters between her and Fitz, a dozen of
• 0:49
  the creatures about 20 feet away from each of them.
• 0:53
  Fitz skidded to a halt. Go, Fitz shouted.
• 0:57
  They're after me. So these were the four.
• 1:00
  Almost as one, the insects were looking from Fitz to Tricks as
• 1:04
  if they were unsure what to do. They were great, flecked with
• 1:07
  silver, their bodies ungainly and a little asymmetrical.
• 1:11
  The light was glinting of compound eyes the size of beach
• 1:13
  balls. Their joints clicked and clacked
• 1:16
  as they moved. Tricks stood perfectly still.
• 1:20
  Try to work out why she wasn't dead.
• 1:23
  They were following their instinct to attack the nearest
• 1:25
  human, but with two targets identical distances away, they
• 1:29
  were having difficulty reading between them.
• 1:31
  They were animals, Trix realized, not human beings.
• 1:35
  Some sort of social insect like a bee or an Ant.
• 1:40
  Fitz understood the situation too.
• 1:42
  He started to take a step towards the vore.
• 1:44
  What are you doing? She screamed at him.
• 1:47
  Saving your life tricks, you have to run, he shouted.
• 1:51
  Stay back from it. She yelled at him.
• 1:53
  If she took one step away, she sold the insects dilemma for
• 1:56
  them and they pounced on Fitz. One step towards them and they
• 2:00
  could take her, but he would be safe for a moment at least.
• 2:04
  Her foot lifted off the ground. No, Fitz shouted.
• 2:08
  What do we do? Trix asked.
• 2:11
  The drivers of the emergency vehicles had seen the monsters
• 2:14
  and they were staying back. No help was coming.
• 2:17
  There was an aeroplane primed to explode behind Fitz.
• 2:20
  Backing away wasn't going to be an option.
• 2:23
  I love you, Fitz Shouted. Fitz, not like this.
• 2:28
  We can make it one of us. Can you?
• 2:31
  There's another way. There's time to, you know there
• 2:34
  isn't tricks. Tell me your real name.
• 2:38
  She told him. Even from this distance she
• 2:40
  could see him smile. Suits you.
• 2:44
  Fitz took a single step forwards.
• 2:46
  One of the monsters decided, half walking, half hopping.
• 2:50
  It loomed up in front of Fitz. The others decided to all
• 2:54
  following it. Cigarette Fitz arse holding the
• 2:58
  packet towards the floor. For a moment there was an edge
• 3:01
  of nervousness in his voice. He took one for himself.
• 3:05
  It's my last one, I promise. Fitz lit the cigarette, took a
• 3:10
  drag. I've always used humor as a
• 3:12
  defence mechanism, Fitz told the monsters.
• 3:15
  Right now I prefer body armor, but there you go.
• 3:18
  One of the creatures edged forwards, jaws mashing.
• 3:22
  It seemed curious about the Ziggy.
• 3:24
  They churned up the grass as they'd come over.
• 3:28
  Fitz took a puff. The thing is, the joke's on you.
• 3:33
  I'll beat you. The woman I love is going to get
• 3:35
  away. I saved her.
• 3:37
  For once in my life, I'm the bloody hero.
• 3:40
  So I'm going out on top. Yeah, I win.
• 3:44
  Fitz flicked the cigarette away. The monster raised a claw.
• 3:48
  Another had shuffled into place behind him. 1/3 was to his left,
• 3:52
  a fourth, to his right, 1/5, a 6th, a 7th, an eighth, a ninth.
• 3:57
  Well, after the first few, it didn't matter anymore.
• 4:00
  All of them were facing him. Are you not waiting for my last
• 4:03
  words? Yeah.
• 4:05
  OK, let's have a think. Fitz made a show of scratching
• 4:08
  his chin. Got it.
• 4:10
  Here they are, the last words of Fitzgerald Kriner, space hero.
• 4:16
  Fitz jabbed 2 fingers up at the nearest 4, right in front of his
• 4:20
  face. Then, as one, the creatures
• 4:23
  leant forward, opened their Moors, expelled rasps of white
• 4:27
  vapor and tricks saw Fitz die. She didn't hear him fall.
• 4:32
  He didn't cry out or make any other sound.
• 4:34
  One moment he was alive, next he wasn't.
• 4:37
  He'd fought an enemy that couldn't comprehend his heroism.
• 4:40
  He died saving her. She had to get away for it to
• 4:44
  mean anything. Tricks turned and run faster
• 4:47
  than she'd ever run. Behind her, one of the
• 4:49
  aeroplane's engines exploded. Then another, then another.
• 4:53
  Then the last one. The fireball obliterated the
• 4:57
  boar and threw Tricks off her feet.
• 5:00
  She barely noticed Fitz was dead.
• 5:20
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 5:23
  My name is Joe Ford and since the beginning of time, Gallifre.
• 5:29
  No, I'm not going to do the Deadly Assassin open for this
• 5:32
  particular episode. We are here to cover.
• 5:36
  Given that Andrew Batty once said, should we cover the
• 5:39
  entirety of the 8th Doctor range?
• 5:42
  Sort of somewhere near the start of that journey, we're doing the
• 5:44
  end The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin.
• 5:49
  You're not going mad. This has been covered once
• 5:51
  before on the Hampster Book Club, but I have got two of the
• 5:55
  biggest 8th Doctor Adventure fans on this call.
• 5:58
  And you know John's going that way as well the longer he hangs
• 6:01
  out with us. So we are going to be doing it
• 6:04
  again and giving our opinions on it.
• 6:07
  Those two fans I was talking about is, of course, the
• 6:11
  slightly sniffly but glorious Andrew Batty.
• 6:15
  Hello, you just snotted into the microphone then?
• 6:21
  Of course, we have Luke Sims Jenkin with us as well.
• 6:23
  Hello, Luke. Hello.
• 6:26
  How are you doing? I'm, I'm very excited.
• 6:31
  I just want to say, I know you guys have done this, this book
• 6:34
  before, but I, I put off the last five EDA's for 20 years.
• 6:39
  Then it was the last four and it was the last three.
• 6:42
  And I've read the last three this year, and I've read, I've
• 6:46
  read the. The.
• 6:47
  Book we're doing Gallifrey Chronicles.
• 6:49
  I've read it about 2 1/2 times. Less than a month.
• 6:52
  So so disappointed with it that you're never going to read an AF
• 6:56
  Doctor book ever again. I'm so happy it ends well.
• 6:59
  Yeah, so. That's the idea of doing all the
• 7:02
  all the dog range, doesn't it? I know we haven't touched Kassar
• 7:05
  right that bullshit yet. And that beautiful voice there
• 7:10
  belonged to John Arnold. All in block capitals.
• 7:14
  Hello, John. Hello.
• 7:15
  How are you, Joe? Well, Saturday morning, you
• 7:19
  know, very unusual. We normally gather in the
• 7:21
  evening, but here we are in the morning.
• 7:23
  How absolutely marvellous. Thank you very much.
• 7:26
  Now fellas, we've got AII posed our scene setter.
• 7:32
  I must remember that's what it's called today.
• 7:35
  And it's a bit of a biggie actually.
• 7:38
  It's the where do you put in your hierarchy of Doctor Who?
• 7:43
  Are you ready for this? The comics, the books, the
• 7:48
  audios, and of course, the TV series.
• 7:52
  So let's let's see where your loyalties lie with these various
• 7:56
  sections of Doctor Who. And do you know what I think we
• 7:59
  should ask Luke first do? You want me to go from bottom to
• 8:05
  top or? At the bottom, whatever
• 8:10
  direction you want to. Go all right.
• 8:15
  Well, because I've had the least amount of experience with them,
• 8:18
  except for like the complete 5th Doctor collection.
• 8:21
  I I got the comics down the bottom.
• 8:24
  It's not an indictment on the, on the quality of them or
• 8:27
  anything like that. It's just I've, I love comics as
• 8:30
  well. And for some reason I've just,
• 8:32
  that's one of my biggest blind spots, Doctor Who comics.
• 8:34
  So I put that at the bottom and then I I broke I broke two of
• 8:40
  these up. So you'll you'll you'll get what
• 8:42
  I've done in just to tick next I'll put the the new series.
• 8:45
  Yep. Oh, OK.
• 8:52
  Yeah. Oh, look, you know, there's,
• 8:54
  there's some stuff in there I absolutely adore, but you know,
• 8:57
  I'm not not the hugest fan of it.
• 9:01
  There's, I don't know, like like like at least like five seasons
• 9:04
  of it I think are fucking awesome and the rest all like
• 9:07
  here and there episodes. The rest.
• 9:10
  The next would be I guess big thing because I've just, I've
• 9:14
  just devoured so much of it in the last 20 years or so.
• 9:19
  Just listing and relisting to all sorts of things.
• 9:22
  I like to move around a lot and it's just handy to always have
• 9:26
  Doctor Who in my ears. I've got a lot of.
• 9:27
  Space to move around in there, you know.
• 9:33
  What? In my head, yes.
• 9:35
  No, I made it a big finish. There's plenty of it in the last
• 9:37
  20 years. Oh yeah, I went, I was going to
• 9:43
  put a cap on it like, but yeah, I don't know, like just put it
• 9:49
  in there as a, as A1 glorious hole.
• 9:52
  And next I go for the the classic era because my favorite
• 9:57
  part of Doctor Who can and probably wouldn't exist without
• 9:59
  it, you know, and that's probably the second most part of
• 10:03
  Doctor Who I enjoy and re enjoy the most.
• 10:07
  And then #1 is what we're here to talk about the, the books.
• 10:11
  Probably spend more time reading the books than ever.
• 10:14
  I grew up Doctor Who books is how I got into Doctor Who.
• 10:17
  Dad gave me a copy of the web of Fear and books were always
• 10:21
  cheaper. So rather than give me a VHS
• 10:24
  that cost 2990520995 for one story, didn't even matter if it
• 10:30
  was like 2 parts, 4 parts, 6 parts.
• 10:32
  Oh my God, it's just $30. All right.
• 10:34
  Or they could get me like 2 books for 20 bucks because
• 10:37
  they're about 995 each. There we go.
• 10:40
  So I always had more Doctor Who books than I did any other form
• 10:43
  of Doctor Who. So that was the kind of Doctor
• 10:45
  Who I devoured the most and probably still is.
• 10:48
  Yeah, I. Didn't think anybody was going
• 10:50
  to put the books above the TV series, but here we are.
• 10:54
  Well, that surprised me, John. Come on, Ed, what's your list?
• 10:59
  OK, it it's like I'm going to be a bit on this and go.
• 11:03
  It's not the quality of the range, it's just what I reach
• 11:07
  for first comfort. So at the bottom, purely because
• 11:13
  there's so much better I haven't experienced.
• 11:16
  I've got to put big finish because I'm overwhelmed.
• 11:20
  I just overwhelmed by the volume of it.
• 11:22
  I love so much of it, you know, it's great.
• 11:25
  So many actors, you know, the resurrection of coal back in the
• 11:28
  back right at the start was the most glorious things anyone's
• 11:31
  done with Doctor Who in this century.
• 11:34
  So, you know, he's, he's kind of become one of the family again.
• 11:38
  But yeah, big finishes kind of stuff.
• 11:40
  I I reach for last, although I do reach for it.
• 11:43
  I just haven't got time to catch up with it, you bastards.
• 11:46
  Are you sure it's not because the the median quality of Big
• 11:49
  Finish is sort of average? I wouldn't couldn't possibly
• 11:53
  comment, but I refer you to finish big.
• 11:56
  OK. Thank you.
• 11:57
  I. Mean they've got past the sirens
• 12:01
  of time, so I figured they're doing all right, you know?
• 12:04
  They've been going so long now we've just had the redux of
• 12:06
  Sirens. Of.
• 12:07
  Time somehow are even worse than the original.
• 12:12
  Oh. My God, yeah.
• 12:15
  Luke Sorry, John. One second.
• 12:17
  Luke, do me a favour. Yeah, yeah, that's just proved
• 12:22
  it. You've got a slight delay where
• 12:24
  you are because there's a, there's about a two second gap
• 12:27
  between stopping a question and then you answering.
• 12:32
  Do me a favour. Just very quickly come out the
• 12:34
  call and go in again. It should stabilize if you do
• 12:37
  that. All right.
• 12:39
  You just mean like get out of here and come?
• 12:41
  Back, yeah, literally fuck off and then come back and it should
• 12:47
  oh, oh, he's gone. Scintillating content for our
• 12:51
  listeners here. That's right.
• 12:54
  I mean, I might take this bit out, you know, I've learnt, you
• 12:58
  know, you can't actually remove sections of a call.
• 13:02
  I don't know really. There was 1.
• 13:06
  There was one book club where we'll it wasn't ours.
• 13:09
  I think it was the James Lark Book Club where they we were all
• 13:12
  going for a book going. I think it was published in.
• 13:16
  We're not there for 5 minutes trying to figure it out.
• 13:19
  Oh no, he's not coming back. I've opposite him.
• 13:22
  You've told him to fuck off and then yell.
• 13:25
  There he is. Hello.
• 13:29
  Hi. That's perfect.
• 13:30
  There you go. Let's just do a little test 1.
• 13:34
  2. 345. 69. Perfect.
• 13:39
  Absolutely perfect, right, John? I'm so sorry, John.
• 13:42
  That's all right, John. Just pick up after the big
• 13:44
  finish there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just.
• 13:47
  Yeah, So yeah, third place I would put the comics.
• 13:52
  I unashamedly adore periods of comics, particularly the early
• 13:56
  DWM stuff. You know, one of my formative
• 13:58
  memories is the Doctor soon to wear locks in Dogs of Doom.
• 14:02
  Tide of Time was just mind blowing, and Voyager is one of
• 14:06
  my favorite pieces of Doctor of all time.
• 14:08
  So that and well, even in Titan comics, stuff like 10 to the
• 14:12
  11th Doctor runs in there. Gorgeous, but again, I don't
• 14:18
  reach for them first. So second place ego here.
• 14:26
  Ego go on go on. What do they 2nd place Joe?
• 14:29
  What do you think it? Determines whether you're going
• 14:30
  to be invited back or not. Come on.
• 14:33
  It's the TV series, the TV series as a whole.
• 14:39
  Oh OK, did the Chipna wearer push it into second?
• 14:42
  No, not at all not. It's just they abandoned me for
• 14:48
  15 years. God damn it, never forgive me.
• 14:51
  It broke my heart. The books never went away.
• 14:55
  Did. They no, we're getting gaps of,
• 14:58
  you know, the year between series.
• 14:59
  Now you go, you go away. It, it, you know, it is like
• 15:03
  someone you love, do they love you back?
• 15:06
  You know, it's like, you know, I'm not going to do River from
• 15:09
  Husbands of River Song here, but you know, that kind of thing.
• 15:14
  So yeah, I, I do love it. I, I unashamedly love it.
• 15:19
  Or I, I think it's one series. There's bits, there's bits of it
• 15:22
  I don't love, but that's the same with any range.
• 15:25
  Or I love it but I don't like it, if that makes sense.
• 15:28
  Yeah. So yeah, I I love a lot of the
• 15:30
  chip lira as with there for a commentary on one of them.
• 15:33
  So you'll find that out somewhere.
• 15:35
  Yeah, Legend of the Sea Devils. Of all the ones you could have
• 15:38
  chosen exactly. But you know, there's, there's
• 15:42
  merit in everything. Somewhere.
• 15:44
  Well, I wonder what your number one's going to be there.
• 15:46
  Number one, it's why we're all here.
• 15:48
  Let's face it, it's it's the books.
• 15:51
  I wanted a Doctor Who book range right through the 80s.
• 15:56
  I grew up on the targets. It's the way I experienced most
• 15:59
  of those pre 80s stories for the first time, ran through them.
• 16:05
  You know, I took on one notorious car journey.
• 16:08
  I took nine books for 1/2 hour car journey just in case we
• 16:12
  broke down and the targets aren't that long.
• 16:15
  But yeah, 9, nine, yes. And I don't think anything was
• 16:23
  like the robots of Death or into the Fendal.
• 16:25
  It was what it had Autumn invasion and that kind of
• 16:29
  length. The person stuff, demons as
• 16:32
  well. I love that.
• 16:33
  So yeah. And then when the series went
• 16:36
  away, the books were there just there for the 15 years and they
• 16:40
  they kind of sustained it. You know, they bent doctor into
• 16:44
  all sorts of new and interesting shapes.
• 16:46
  It's, you know, it's love. It's just something I
• 16:51
  unashamedly love what they were doing.
• 16:53
  It's it's it's kind of where the fans took control and they've
• 16:56
  never let it go. Whether that's a good thing or a
• 16:58
  bad thing is in the mind of the listener here.
• 17:02
  OK, so that's two for the books. First, I really didn't think.
• 17:05
  Even though this is a book club, I still figured the TV show was
• 17:08
  going to come first. We've done like 20 books, but
• 17:12
  we've done like one TV story, so you know.
• 17:16
  That is true. But but you've read a lot of
• 17:18
  books, right? And I'm assuming you've done the
• 17:19
  run of the TV series. Well, Andrew, are you going to
• 17:23
  surprise me as well, or is somebody going to put the TV
• 17:26
  series? On let's see, let's see.
• 17:31
  So yeah, at the bottom, I was kind of deliberating because,
• 17:36
  yeah, I'm trying to like, think about that.
• 17:38
  Each one as a whole. So like the comics isn't is the
• 17:43
  bottom one, even though there's like some comics that I
• 17:46
  absolutely bloody love like particularly the 90s DWM stuff,
• 17:49
  the ex Doctor stuff is really, really good.
• 17:53
  I think like as a whole there's quite a lot that I don't really
• 17:56
  enjoy in the comics, particularly like the Titan
• 17:58
  comics stuff that's been around for like the last 15 years or
• 18:03
  so. I'm just not really interested
• 18:05
  in that. And when you go back into sort
• 18:06
  of those 60s comics, like there, you know, they're, they're
• 18:10
  quirky and they're a bit kitsch, but they're not like they're not
• 18:14
  going to be hitting the top, top of anyone's top ten list.
• 18:17
  So, yeah, comics at the bottom, with a caveat that the 8th
• 18:20
  Doctor range is really, really good.
• 18:23
  Next, the audios. And again, I was deliberating
• 18:28
  with whether to put them at the bottom.
• 18:30
  Again, similar to what John was saying about there just being so
• 18:33
  much, so much audio that I haven't listened to, I will
• 18:37
  never listen to. But there are those core ranges
• 18:41
  like the early 8th Doctor stuff and the companion, Companion
• 18:46
  Chronicles, which is like some of my favorite Doctor Who ever.
• 18:49
  So yeah, that's kind of where where we got to with that.
• 18:54
  We don't care about these two. Come on, this is the two we want
• 18:56
  to know about. Then.
• 19:01
  The books. Oh, finally, somebody.
• 19:05
  The books are #2 like, I love, I love.
• 19:08
  But yeah, I mean, you all know I love the books.
• 19:11
  And I suppose they're the ones where I've sort of got most of
• 19:14
  a, of a sense of like a whole series running through with like
• 19:20
  I've read most of the 8th Doctor books and quite a lot of the new
• 19:23
  adventures and sort of follow the Arcs and all that stuff.
• 19:25
  So they feel more, I think they feel like the most current of
• 19:29
  the sort of spin offs because they were there when they were
• 19:32
  the only thing and you know, continuing stories and really
• 19:35
  exciting. So that's why the books are my
• 19:38
  number 2. And then the TV series has to be
• 19:39
  #1 because that's where it all started.
• 19:41
  And all of this stuff pulls from the TV series.
• 19:46
  And you know, when we're talking about like, Canon, like the TV
• 19:51
  series is what counts, Why am I saying that I don't care about
• 19:54
  Cameron anyway. TV, Yeah, I love the TV series.
• 20:00
  And you know, like just the excitement of finding VHS tapes
• 20:05
  in second hand shops and stuff as a kid will never be beaten.
• 20:10
  What do you mean as a kid? Now if you find a doctor, my
• 20:13
  God, you've got to buy it right? If you found one now, oh, there
• 20:17
  you go. Looks proofing it by pulling out
• 20:19
  his inferno. I never.
• 20:21
  Had inferno as a kid and I found it for 5 bucks an op shop so I
• 20:25
  was like Oh my God. But do you still have a VHS
• 20:28
  player? Yeah, it's over.
• 20:29
  There. Oh, handy.
• 20:30
  OK, that's good. Well, I want to put in a slight
• 20:34
  caveat with my list of At one point I would have put all four
• 20:39
  of these first, right? So for a long, long time, it
• 20:44
  would have always been the TV series because that was my into
• 20:47
  Doctor Who. And honestly, it kept, it's
• 20:49
  never going to get better than that.
• 20:51
  Then I found the books and I read all of the new adventures
• 20:55
  and all of the 8th Doctor adventures and fuck the TV
• 20:57
  series. It's never going to get better
• 20:59
  than this. Then Big Finish started coming
• 21:02
  out and it was proper Doctor Who being performed and it was new
• 21:05
  stuff and you know, I did my doco reviews website and it was
• 21:09
  never going to be better than this.
• 21:11
  And then once I'd exhausted absolutely everything, I was
• 21:15
  like, well, that's it, I've consumed all of Doctor Who.
• 21:18
  And then someone went, no, you haven't read the comics.
• 21:20
  And I ordered all of the graphic novels and just for a tiny
• 21:23
  window of about 3 months I read all of them and I was like, well
• 21:30
  it's never going to get better than this.
• 21:33
  So it's all depends where I am in my life and what I'm because
• 21:37
  I tend to just dive into one of these and that's the best doctor
• 21:41
  whoever because they've all got their strengths and witnesses.
• 21:43
  However, right now it goes the comics because like everybody
• 21:49
  else, I have the least amount of exposure to them and I just find
• 21:54
  it less urgent reading still pictures than I do all the
• 22:00
  others. Second place would be Oh my God.
• 22:05
  Can't. Believe.
• 22:06
  Oh, sorry, 3rd place, right this second.
• 22:10
  It's the TV series, which I'd obviously love and have
• 22:15
  explored, but I'm talking about right this second.
• 22:17
  Yeah, but unfortunately it has been disappointing me of late
• 22:23
  and I've just exhausted the TV series.
• 22:25
  So I write this second, the TV series, sort of second in my
• 22:29
  love. Then it's Big Finish because I
• 22:33
  do my Finish Big podcast and I'm just loving going through the
• 22:37
  old stuff and sort of dealing with some of the new stuff as
• 22:40
  well. And I'm properly engaged with it
• 22:42
  right now. And my favorite thing to do and
• 22:45
  podcast and experience at this second is Doctor Who books.
• 22:50
  I mean, I've read sticks Doctor Who books this week.
• 22:53
  I'm just devouring them. And I'm immersed in that world
• 22:56
  again. And I'm absolutely loving it.
• 22:58
  So ask me in a year or two, that list will be completely
• 23:01
  different. You know, the TV series would
• 23:03
  have come back with a vengeance. And I'll be like, oh, fuck the
• 23:05
  books. Who cares about them, You know?
• 23:07
  But right now, Esther books. OK, Well, Andrew, you're the
• 23:12
  only one who talks any sense on this call.
• 23:14
  Well done. As usual, Let's swing around to
• 23:19
  the book we're here to talk about today, the Gallifrey
• 23:21
  Chronicles, held up by Andrew there.
• 23:25
  And actually that could be my first question.
• 23:27
  What do you guys think of the? Cover of the Gallifrey
• 23:29
  Chronicles, the very last of the Ape Dr. Books, John.
• 23:35
  I love it. It's, it's got that call back
• 23:38
  to, yeah, the ape doctors interference and all that with
• 23:42
  the, with the Gallifrey symbol just on that kind of parchment.
• 23:46
  So it's kind of summing up what I'm doing with the book.
• 23:48
  And it's got a bloody great big fly underneath it and on the
• 23:51
  back. I, I love it.
• 23:55
  It's just, it's just nuts. And I don't know what the swirly
• 23:58
  bits going behind it are, but. Look at all the sort of swirly
• 24:04
  blue energy on the back as well. Is that the how do you say it
• 24:07
  psychiatrics? Siggy Yeah.
• 24:12
  Probably every one of these covers had swirly blue energy
• 24:14
  on. The whole series started with
• 24:19
  like the whirly blue, like the swirls and then like the
• 24:22
  treasure or that's. What it is?
• 24:23
  It's the swirls from the early. It's got swirly, sort of white,
• 24:29
  swirly energy on the front as well, you know, just to shake
• 24:32
  things up at the end. Well, I I very quickly want to
• 24:36
  ask everyone now, Luke, do you like the cover?
• 24:38
  Yeah, the same, exact same fly there as well.
• 24:43
  So, you know, they do reuse images on the the double back
• 24:46
  sheet people. Yeah, I like it.
• 24:50
  I like it more than I've now that I've read the book than I
• 24:52
  did beforehand because I was like, you know, when I first
• 24:55
  read the book, I didn't even notice the fly behind the thing.
• 24:59
  I just saw the. Part really.
• 25:00
  Wasn't until like after I'd read it.
• 25:01
  I'm like, wait, there's a bloody fly there?
• 25:03
  Oh wow. I mean, it's a shadow and you
• 25:06
  can see his horrible legs underneath it as well.
• 25:08
  If there was a murder mystery, I'm not putting you down and see
• 25:11
  if it's OK. Andrew, do you like the cover?
• 25:14
  I really like the cover. I mean, I really like the Seal
• 25:16
  of Brassilon. I think it's very beautiful and
• 25:19
  aesthetically pleasing and I understand why they slap it on
• 25:21
  the cover at any opportunity. It looks great.
• 25:24
  It's nice. You know, it links back to the 8
• 25:27
  Doctors, links to interference, shows that through line of the
• 25:30
  of the books there. Yeah, it's great.
• 25:32
  Is it baffling that the Paul Mcgann's on this cover the very
• 25:35
  last 8th Doctor book technically?
• 25:39
  I mean, they didn't put him on very often.
• 25:40
  So that's true. The last time we saw him, oh,
• 25:43
  Deadstone Memorial was that sort of ghost, wasn't it?
• 25:46
  Yeah, that's right. He's like a diamond shape or
• 25:48
  something. That's what they've stuck him
• 25:50
  on. Given, you know, the new series
• 25:52
  is back at this point, I think this is released.
• 25:53
  What between Doctor Dancers and Boomtang somewhere in there?
• 25:59
  Now fellas, this book has a lot of work to do right at the end
• 26:05
  of the 8th Doctor ranges, bringing to an end 70 Doctor Who
• 26:09
  stories that are very dense, full of continuity and a running
• 26:14
  storyline. My first question to you all is,
• 26:17
  OK, what were your expectations going into this the first time
• 26:21
  or did you have any and how has it been coming back to it for
• 26:27
  this call today? Let's go to Andrew.
• 26:31
  First, yeah, I suppose back in the day expectations were high
• 26:38
  in that I'd. I'd followed all of the 8th
• 26:40
  Doctor books and I think, you know, I wasn't holding out that
• 26:46
  much hope I think for this one. Well, I wanted I wanted it to do
• 26:49
  really well. But, you know, like they, as
• 26:53
  we've talked about before, the 8th Doctor books could be really
• 26:55
  frustrating and that they just didn't really wrap things up or
• 26:58
  didn't really address things. And, you know, something would
• 27:01
  happen in one book and then just not be mentioned for 50 books
• 27:04
  time and things were plot. Those would be left hanging.
• 27:07
  So I was kind of like, oh God, are they going to do this last
• 27:10
  book and just not really wrap anything up?
• 27:14
  But they did and they did it really well.
• 27:18
  So yeah, it kind of it makes some of those frustrations
• 27:24
  worthwhile in that they did actually come to an end.
• 27:27
  There's like a yeah, he did a really good job at wrapping
• 27:31
  things up. Do you imagine, and I'm, I'm
• 27:33
  just asking you this now, do you imagine this is the work of
• 27:36
  Justin Richards, who's got a list of things that have not
• 27:38
  been covered, right, Lance, you've got to include all of
• 27:41
  these. Or is this the work of Lance
• 27:44
  Parkin, you know, continuity man extraordinaire, brief history of
• 27:47
  the universe, etcetera. Just going right, I've got, I've
• 27:50
  got to somehow pull this together.
• 27:52
  I think the latter, because I think if the former was true,
• 27:57
  then there would have been more of that throughout the whole
• 27:59
  range because he was the man with the power to do that and he
• 28:02
  didn't do it. It felt like it was sort of on
• 28:04
  an author by author basis what they did with those story arcs,
• 28:07
  and it was just a bit free and loose and, yeah, frustrating at
• 28:11
  times. Essentially, the the satisfying
• 28:15
  nature of the 8th Doctor books is entirely down to one man.
• 28:21
  Yeah. Thanks, Lance.
• 28:22
  What a man. OK, John, expectation versus
• 28:26
  reality versus coming back to it now it?
• 28:30
  It felt at the time like it beat the Rangers went while you're
• 28:33
  down for a while because it had gone to, you know, one every
• 28:36
  other month and the reschedule was getting eccentric, shall we
• 28:40
  say, on on with the with the 8 doctors.
• 28:45
  So it kind of felt, even without the TV series, that it would
• 28:48
  have been in a kind of slowing down and finishing phase.
• 28:53
  So obviously my expectations are partly shaped here by the dying
• 28:57
  days because Lance did such a good job in wrapping up the new
• 29:00
  adventures and looking forward with that.
• 29:03
  And, and so, yeah, I, I enjoyed it.
• 29:07
  And I think we're going to come to this plenty times.
• 29:10
  And it's something Lucas kind of allude to endings.
• 29:14
  You kind of feel they've got to have weight, they've got to be
• 29:17
  heavy, they've got to give meaning to stuff.
• 29:21
  And this is such a light read it's unreal.
• 29:27
  Surprisingly so, right? Yeah, totally.
• 29:30
  It it, it just flies by and you don't realise how much it's
• 29:33
  getting through. And the thing I love about Lance
• 29:38
  doing endings, and it's again, going back to done days, they're
• 29:43
  not endings, it's just endings. They're new beginnings as well.
• 29:47
  They they look forward as much as they look back.
• 29:50
  And I think that's where Lance's strength is here.
• 29:51
  So I went back to it and I absolutely love that it was
• 29:57
  looking forward as much as looking back.
• 29:59
  And I, I know Luke didn't hear it.
• 30:01
  It's what kind of the companion exits.
• 30:03
  This one of my favorite companion exits exactly because
• 30:06
  it's doing that. Right.
• 30:08
  And Luke, I realise you know your first to last read of this
• 30:12
  is 3 weeks. You had an enormous amount of
• 30:18
  expectations for this, but we know because we've talked about
• 30:21
  it. How did it do?
• 30:24
  I just, I just wanted it to be good.
• 30:26
  If it was just like A7, I'd have been pretty happy.
• 30:32
  I loved the last five 8th Doctor novels, including the ending
• 30:35
  with this one. From Tomorrow, Windows to this.
• 30:40
  I think that's the last five. I think they're all great.
• 30:44
  Miley's my very own. I guess I'm to the slaughter.
• 30:46
  I know it's not for everyone, but I think it's because of the
• 30:48
  penultimate book. It might.
• 30:49
  People might not like it so much because it doesn't do anything
• 30:52
  to wrap anything up except to tie in.
• 30:54
  Why? There's why Tom says there's
• 30:56
  only a certain amount of moons in.
• 30:58
  I do remember reading out the time.
• 31:02
  What the hell is Steve Cole doing?
• 31:03
  There's only one book left. Why are we?
• 31:05
  Doing this booklet. But yeah, so I just wanted to
• 31:11
  wanted it to be good. And I opened it up and I was
• 31:16
  like, really? It's the last book and you
• 31:18
  couldn't give me Henrietta St. font like I wanted.
• 31:22
  Like I wanted it to be longer. Then I read the book and then I,
• 31:27
  you know, I think the first time I put it down, I realized I was
• 31:29
  about 80 pages through it and I was like, oh, holy shit.
• 31:33
  I like, there's a lot going on. There's A and, and it's easy to
• 31:39
  follow. It's easy to follow in a way
• 31:41
  that it reminded me of all sorts of other adventures and books.
• 31:44
  And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's dropping things in.
• 31:46
  It was like this because I wasn't fresh on everything
• 31:50
  except maybe the last five books and and things here and there,
• 31:54
  but it did a great job of reminding me of what things
• 31:56
  were. And if it didn't, I was like, I
• 31:58
  think I know what that is and look it up.
• 32:00
  I'm like, oh, yeah. And it even has times, even has
• 32:04
  time to have the sides in it. Like I'm just going to take 20
• 32:07
  pages to give you a nice extra chapter of Father Time.
• 32:11
  Did you like Father Time? Yes, he's an extra chapter of
• 32:14
  it. Yes.
• 32:18
  Don't want that do the whole 80s please of just just give us as
• 32:24
  much as you can Lance all that and he he gives us he gives us
• 32:30
  the exit for the companions without giving us the exit.
• 32:33
  You know they're going to leave very soon, but they're just
• 32:37
  going to jump in and help the doctor just destroy the war.
• 32:41
  The the kind of threat just how who cares how they just you just
• 32:47
  know they're going to do it because of all the all the other
• 32:50
  stuff that they've all gone through.
• 32:51
  It's fine. I get stuff in this.
• 32:53
  I always wanted. Oh my God, I like, I guess, all
• 32:56
  right, not always wanted. I'm a recent last five or six
• 33:01
  years I've gotten into Roman history and I'm reading the
• 33:04
  start of this book. I'm like, Oh my God, that could
• 33:06
  have been a whole book and I would have loved it.
• 33:08
  This story on Moldova, I could have done with that whole book,
• 33:10
  too. He has.
• 33:11
  Yeah. Adventures.
• 33:13
  In the orchy, the orchy I want. Oh my God, it doesn't go.
• 33:17
  And the doctor's like, all right, see you later.
• 33:19
  I'm going. I've been given the mention of
• 33:23
  Claudia. We know his experience, so he'd
• 33:25
  be all right, you know? Oh my goodness.
• 33:30
  Oh, and then I finally get what I've always wanted.
• 33:34
  He meets the Daleks, Fitz and it's and it's like he's already
• 33:38
  met them millions of times. Oh, it's every second trip we
• 33:41
  meet these guys. Oh, so boring, didn't it?
• 33:43
  Reminds. You of the new adventures when
• 33:46
  they weren't allowed to say the word darling and he's just going
• 33:49
  to every length to describe them without actually saying the
• 33:52
  words. Actually describing them, Yeah.
• 33:56
  And it's just there's a then there's some sometimes you get
• 34:02
  Lance editorializing a bit like him saying like, you know,
• 34:08
  paraphrasing here that he preferred sometime never having
• 34:12
  the the Crystal Council people rather than the Daleks, kind of
• 34:16
  like, fuck the Daleks. Let's do something different.
• 34:19
  I like this more. And his and.
• 34:21
  And it hadn't been published yet.
• 34:24
  Remember, Doctor, we're going to have a conversation soon.
• 34:26
  Yeah, I'm. I'm ready.
• 34:28
  I'm going all over the place. It hasn't even come out yet.
• 34:34
  I knew this was going to happen when you started, You know, can
• 34:39
  I just say on a personal. Level floodgates have been open.
• 34:41
  My single favorite message that I've received in the last year
• 34:45
  is the message you sent on our group chat.
• 34:48
  I'll just go in bits is dead. I could see you reading that
• 34:56
  bit. I'm sorry for the really bad
• 34:58
  impression of you now, but just I could just see you reading
• 35:00
  that end of chapter going get out of here.
• 35:08
  I was just waiting for you to hear that because I was like, oh
• 35:11
  man, you just won't be able to handle it.
• 35:14
  I do remember there was like before I even got to that I'm
• 35:17
  like, Oh my God, I'm looking at all this stuff that's happened
• 35:20
  and then I read the next 5 pages or something that fits is fits
• 35:25
  is dead. But, you know, like I, I
• 35:27
  withheld myself from piffing the book across the backyard.
• 35:31
  And I thought, well, they didn't find the body disappeared.
• 35:34
  The the if there's no body. Yeah.
• 35:36
  Yeah. There we go.
• 35:37
  He's he's still alive. And thank you.
• 35:40
  Very well done and obviously we will cover all of that.
• 35:43
  What a question I want to ask all of you then is this is a
• 35:47
  book that looks back a lot, right?
• 35:49
  I mean, as I was sort of taking notes the first time I read this
• 35:52
  through for the book club, I was like, wow, this really covers
• 35:56
  the whole of the 8th Doctor range in in various ways.
• 36:01
  How do you think this works as a celebration of or, you know,
• 36:06
  sometimes it was a critique of the 8th Doctor range.
• 36:09
  And what was your personal favorite, like Kiss to the past?
• 36:14
  Let's go to John this time. It it's Lance always a critique.
• 36:20
  He's an old school fan. He's got he's got an old school
• 36:23
  brain on him. You like the line about the
• 36:25
  covers? They were always.
• 36:31
  I got to say, and it'll be covered in great detail.
• 36:34
  My favorite kiss to the past year is Angie and what she gets
• 36:39
  up to after she leaves. That is so new series because
• 36:43
  that's exactly what the doctors, he looks after his companions.
• 36:46
  He's kind of anticipating where we're going.
• 36:48
  So it's it's kiss to the past and a kiss to the future at the
• 36:51
  same. Time set up as well, isn't it?
• 36:53
  It's set up in Trading Futures and Deadstone Memorial as well.
• 36:56
  It's exactly it's perfect character idea, Fran.
• 37:00
  It's exactly what she would do. She would be so bloody doctor to
• 37:03
  just go, well, I can't do that for moral reasons.
• 37:05
  It's like, stop that relief so much isn't.
• 37:08
  It so refreshing as well that someone's left the Doctor and
• 37:11
  they're doing really well for themselves like that.
• 37:14
  I'm back. I'm going to make some money.
• 37:16
  Yeah. Good.
• 37:19
  I think it's what it's what he sets ASAP with afterwards.
• 37:21
  If we believe the you know, the DVD trailer stroke power of the
• 37:26
  Doctor sets up a business. Happy days.
• 37:30
  And what about you then, Andrew? What was your favorite kiss for
• 37:32
  the past? Or was it the same one?
• 37:35
  I like that as well, but probably the going back to the
• 37:41
  ancestor cell and the yeah, I mean, I haven't, I haven't read
• 37:47
  the ancestor cell in years, but that it's kind of similar to
• 37:51
  what the what the Day of the Doctor does, of kind of going
• 37:54
  back to that moment in the Doctor's past and turning a
• 37:56
  defeat into a victory. And yeah, having that weird like
• 38:04
  matrix fight between the Doctor and Grandfather paradox is
• 38:09
  great. And then having like the little
• 38:11
  hints of compassion being sort of behind the scenes.
• 38:14
  But she doesn't really come into this book.
• 38:16
  She's just sort of hinted at, which is really nice and kind of
• 38:19
  loops all into that, like where the Doctor is going in the
• 38:22
  future in our imaginations. So, yeah, that that whole, I
• 38:28
  mean, it's kind of the crux of the book, the kind of like
• 38:29
  redemption of the Doctor for destroying Gallifrey.
• 38:34
  And you find out that what you thought happened didn't really
• 38:36
  happen. And it happened in a very
• 38:37
  different way, which, you know, they've they've wholesale lifted
• 38:42
  for the day of the Doctor. And yeah, just those kind of the
• 38:48
  way that that whole stuff is not, it's not fully spelled out.
• 38:55
  You're kind of left to kind of put the pieces together
• 38:57
  yourself. So you learn, oh, you know, the
• 39:00
  the Time Lords are in the Doctor's head.
• 39:02
  He's downloaded the whole of the Matrix to his to his mind.
• 39:07
  There's all this stuff about like universes in bottles again,
• 39:10
  you know, is that going to play something in the pot?
• 39:12
  There's all these hints to like compassion coming back and
• 39:14
  canine going off to find her on the planet where we were a few
• 39:19
  books ago. So just all of that whole bit of
• 39:22
  kind of going back to the ancestor cell and all those
• 39:26
  threads that were left dangling. That has been frustrating for
• 39:30
  like the last 40 books. So I have a many it's been since
• 39:34
  that point and making it feel like someone, someone did care
• 39:38
  about this and did want to give us a resolution to this stuff
• 39:42
  that should have maybe happened quite a few years back.
• 39:46
  But they're doing it now and it's kind of it's and the way
• 39:50
  that it's kind of left in Europe.
• 39:51
  It doesn't have to be a three book series on it.
• 39:54
  It's it's satisfying here because you're kind of left to
• 39:57
  make up the ending yourself. He does.
• 39:59
  Obviously he rewrites that section because it's Lance
• 40:02
  Parkin prose rather than Peter and Julius and Stephen Cole
• 40:06
  pros. But I have read the answers so
• 40:08
  recently and this version it's it's more gripping the the
• 40:13
  descriptive prose is far more ghoulish and weird.
• 40:19
  It's more violent as well. That scene between him and Greg
• 40:22
  is properly viscerally violent in this.
• 40:26
  And of course, he makes the big change, doesn't he?
• 40:28
  Of whoever looks at Grandfather paradox in Ancestor Cell, it's
• 40:32
  explicit. That's it.
• 40:33
  Is the Doctor in this book? He's like, no, I don't like
• 40:36
  that. That's not where the Doctor ends
• 40:38
  up. It's whoever is fighting
• 40:40
  Grandfather paradox. That's what you see is a mirror
• 40:42
  of yourself. Very Inquisitor from Red Dwarf.
• 40:45
  But that's also very Terrence Dix, isn't it?
• 40:47
  To like, oh, I'm just going to, you know, I'm just going to tidy
• 40:50
  this bit up in my book or my novelization of it or something
• 40:54
  like that. Lance does that all over the
• 40:56
  place. It it ties back to the first
• 40:58
  book of course in the 8th Doctor Terrace goes.
• 41:00
  I fucking hate the TV movie so I'm going to completely reckon
• 41:03
  everything about it. That line was in this.
• 41:06
  Did you not see it? When he looked back, it was full
• 41:08
  of illogical events. Just like in the end.
• 41:12
  Last pocket. A very naughty man.
• 41:16
  Well, what about you then, Luke? Kiss to the past.
• 41:19
  I do like that he offhandedly defeats Omega at one point in
• 41:25
  this book, doesn't he? Like Omega springs a trap?
• 41:29
  He's like, I don't even really know who you are anyway, I got I
• 41:32
  got other stuff to do, OK. Oh, the master.
• 41:38
  I thought it was Omega. No, it's the master from the TV
• 41:41
  movie in the iPod. Oh, really?
• 41:44
  He's linking it into the TV movie as well.
• 41:47
  See, well, that's just that's just as cool.
• 41:50
  See, I I read it like as the I haven't been.
• 41:53
  I'm not. I see.
• 41:54
  That's what my. Books.
• 41:55
  I'll read it. Again, now fresh on the TV.
• 41:57
  Yeah, it's just, like, needed a fourth time.
• 42:00
  Yeah, well, I like that. I like the aside with Miranda
• 42:04
  because it ties into the book as well, because Rachel's there.
• 42:07
  She's a big part of it. There's just way too many.
• 42:10
  Like I think my one of my favourites is just on page 130
• 42:16
  and it starts at the bottom. And it's just like the Doctor is
• 42:19
  like, like the Doctor is the finest dreams of hundreds of
• 42:23
  human beings refined as they tapped away at their
• 42:25
  typewriters. And it's just like, it's just
• 42:28
  this beautiful paragraph of about how so many people kind of
• 42:34
  kept the show alive during the wilderness years because they
• 42:37
  just love this bloody character so much and just didn't want him
• 42:41
  to to disappear and that. Should be agonizing.
• 42:44
  So lovely. That putting that in, but that
• 42:46
  should be terrible, but I just was welling up reading that bit.
• 42:51
  And it's who it comes from as well.
• 42:52
  It it's a good right of doing that.
• 42:54
  Not it's got weight to it Again. See, Luke, I was half expecting
• 42:57
  you to go in the same thing as our group chat.
• 42:59
  K 90, dude. What's behind the freaking wall?
• 43:03
  It's. It's.
• 43:06
  And he gets one of the most important things to do.
• 43:09
  Like by the time the book ends, like, Oh yeah, we're just going
• 43:11
  to jump down and beat these flies.
• 43:14
  What's where's canine? Or he's gone to Espero or the
• 43:17
  half life planet to get me a flower to get my memories back.
• 43:21
  So he doesn't get his memories back the whole in the book, but
• 43:25
  this book is sort of an ending. But you know, you get to.
• 43:29
  I don't know. Yeah, I did.
• 43:31
  Still are canine, though, right? He's described as having a
• 43:33
  prissy voice. What is it, Canine?
• 43:37
  Will you tell me? Please remind me to tell Fitz
• 43:39
  this. OK.
• 43:40
  And then canine's, like, right? Oh, I'm gonna kill you now.
• 43:43
  So, logically, this is the last time I can tell you this.
• 43:46
  Tell Fitz this right now. I'm gonna kill you.
• 43:48
  Oh, he's wonderful. He's great.
• 43:50
  And he gets the alien bodies entrance as well, like the
• 43:53
  Croton in that it's described like a Dalek and then it's K9.
• 43:59
  It's astonishing how you can make a description of canine
• 44:01
  sound like a Dalek, right? Yeah.
• 44:05
  Gorgeous. I mean, my favorite kiss to the
• 44:07
  past with this what? And this is when I realised how
• 44:10
  clever Lance Parkin was in tying this whole range together in a
• 44:15
  way that it otherwise wouldn't have been.
• 44:17
  Is when he takes. So in City of the Dead, Lloyd
• 44:20
  Rose does a sequence inside the Doctor's head where he meets the
• 44:24
  7th Doctor at a war, and it's just supposed to be like a new
• 44:26
  adventure style sequence inside his head.
• 44:29
  That's what Lloyd Rose was doing at the time.
• 44:31
  None of it was continuity or part of this arc.
• 44:34
  And then Lance goes, oh, I could use that.
• 44:36
  That all that she describes. Those are blossoms falling from
• 44:39
  a tree that could be all the time memories.
• 44:43
  And that's just so clever. It means that that's like a
• 44:46
  pinpoint in this arc now that was never supposed to be
• 44:50
  retroactive. No, no, you're wrong.
• 44:53
  It wasn't part of it. I didn't.
• 44:56
  Know those flowers? They are the Gallifrey of
• 45:00
  flowers of remembrance, which are the one from the ancestor
• 45:06
  cell that the bone structure is mimicking.
• 45:10
  Who? What did that?
• 45:11
  Lloyd Rose or I? Think Lloyd Rose.
• 45:14
  Yeah, she put that in as kind of like the 7th Doctor is guarding
• 45:16
  those memories. Yeah.
• 45:19
  And. I I think, I think the 7th
• 45:21
  Doctor comes back in camera obscure as well maybe.
• 45:23
  I think there's maybe something like a bit more.
• 45:25
  Planning going on than our fault then in this range.
• 45:29
  Well, again, I don't know if it's planning or just the
• 45:31
  authors doing their own sort of thing and then Lance picking up
• 45:34
  on these little bits that have been left and then wrapping them
• 45:37
  up. Because I think that that bit is
• 45:40
  very, I think it's definitely about the Doctor's memories and
• 45:43
  the 7th Doctor guarding them when Lloyd Rose does it.
• 45:46
  And then he's he's picked. I don't know if she ended it to
• 45:49
  lead anywhere or if it was just, you know, a nice metaphor for
• 45:51
  that book. But then he's gone back and been
• 45:54
  like, oh, there's this bit. Anyone have her number?
• 45:56
  Can we ask her? How deliberate were you in
• 45:59
  cahoots of Louds Park in this whole time?
• 46:03
  Although the, the, the bit where I was like, Oh my God, when it
• 46:06
  all sort of clicked was when he said what?
• 46:08
  Just minus the five from all the, the blue blossoms that were
• 46:12
  there. And that's obviously the five
• 46:13
  Time Lords 545. Where's 5?
• 46:16
  Isn't it? 5 isn't Yeah.
• 46:18
  That's right. Yeah, well, I, I think I
• 46:20
  messaged in the chat about like the Time Lord survivors and
• 46:23
  there are probably about 15. We know who was intended as the
• 46:30
  five. The master because I remember
• 46:33
  the rosette. Iris in Mad Dogs, Yeah.
• 46:38
  Although there's dispute as to whether Iris is time built on
• 46:41
  date as or not so board like case.
• 46:46
  Anybody else? Manil.
• 46:49
  Man, you know. Obviously the obviously the
• 46:51
  doctor. Oh, apparently here on wiki it
• 46:54
  says the minister of chance who's.
• 46:56
  That, yeah. That's from Death Comes to Time,
• 47:00
  yeah. And the Infinity Doctor or the
• 47:05
  Emperor? Who's that?
• 47:09
  Oh, is that the Doctor from the Infinity Doctors?
• 47:11
  And the he's also the father of Miranda.
• 47:16
  I think the 8th Doctor is meant to actually be Miranda's
• 47:20
  biological father, but not until the future.
• 47:23
  This stuff already. Makes sense to Lance Parkin, all
• 47:26
  right? Because in this in this book it
• 47:29
  details the. The.
• 47:31
  The four or the five that there are.
• 47:34
  But then when you think about it, there's actually more
• 47:36
  because there's Erasmus from Timeless and there's Nivet, who
• 47:46
  is the Time Lord who goes off with compassion at the end of
• 47:49
  the ancestor cell. And there was some more as well.
• 47:56
  But yeah, but take a note. Andrew.
• 47:59
  This was this. This was the sort of shit I was
• 48:01
  writing in those little notes in my copies of these books, and
• 48:06
  still survive in some of them. Hang on, the numbers can't be
• 48:09
  right. Someone's rewriting time.
• 48:10
  What's going on? I would totally read an
• 48:13
  annotated version of this that that that Lance would release
• 48:18
  just. Released a chapter from A Brief
• 48:19
  History of Time. It's in there, Luke.
• 48:21
  All right, he covers it all. Oh, really?
• 48:23
  I'll rewrite it slightly then. The answer in that last in
• 48:27
  podcasting to you with Lance, aren't they?
• 48:30
  There's never. Oh, there's never seen a lot of.
• 48:32
  Days. That's right, I should be
• 48:33
  bringing out an omnibus on that soon, and the Gallifrey
• 48:36
  Chronicles is in fact covered. Maybe I should put that out
• 48:38
  alongside this? Yeah.
• 48:41
  A good idea. There you go.
• 48:43
  OK, I'll rewrite what I said then.
• 48:45
  Not that he he changed the meaning of City of the Dead, but
• 48:49
  he certainly pulled all the threads together in a really
• 48:52
  beautiful way. Well, fellas, then let's move on
• 48:57
  to the characters, shall we? In this book, let's talk about
• 49:00
  the Doctor fits and tricks. Now you know how I do this.
• 49:05
  I'm going to throw it out, one through each of you.
• 49:07
  So quick, say your piece, whoever was the Doctor.
• 49:12
  Oh, I was going to talk about Fitz, if you like.
• 49:14
  Oh oh. Yeah, you should.
• 49:17
  OK, well then off you go then, Luke.
• 49:21
  I, I wanted, I wanted to meet the Daleks.
• 49:26
  I don't care that he says he met, met them a billion times,
• 49:28
  but by this point I, we've never read it.
• 49:30
  So I was very happy crossed that off my off my list.
• 49:34
  And I was wondering how you'd do a really good exit with Fitz
• 49:38
  because he never seemed like the kind of guy that would leave.
• 49:41
  And then you read Deadstone memorial.
• 49:42
  That kind of set it up that he has a really good conversation
• 49:46
  with the doctor in that, which kind of plants those seeds and
• 49:51
  and then you get to this, this book and, and he decides to
• 49:55
  leave in a similar way that Sam Jones does like, all right, the
• 49:58
  next time we're on earth, that's it.
• 50:00
  We're we're done. That's that's the end of it.
• 50:02
  And it happens. And he kind of he kind of sticks
• 50:05
  with it. He does stick with it, which is
• 50:08
  which is surprising and. He's he.
• 50:11
  He's. Still, a man out of time like
• 50:13
  the 60s will always be be his his time.
• 50:17
  I just I really wanted him to have a really good send off and
• 50:21
  I think he named they nailed it. But there's also him being us
• 50:27
  like it's the last book. You're a fucking pussy, doc
• 50:30
  Doctor Who. You don't remember anything.
• 50:33
  I do. What is your problem?
• 50:36
  Oh, he is the reader of that policy.
• 50:38
  He's absolutely the reader. Yeah.
• 50:40
  You don't remember it until you do.
• 50:43
  OK. Yeah.
• 50:45
  Oh, so you don't know how to do any of this stuff.
• 50:47
  Well, then you reference this and then you reference that.
• 50:49
  So what don't you know? What do you know?
• 50:51
  Are you lying to everybody? Like, what's this like?
• 50:54
  That was just an amazing thing. And I like that he gets his
• 50:58
  happily ever after with with Trix, who you still don't know
• 51:02
  anything about. And I don't think Trix would
• 51:03
  have it any other way. I think.
• 51:06
  I think that's perfect that you don't know anything about this
• 51:09
  woman still because she doesn't want you to.
• 51:11
  So I think maybe Lance sit down on purpose because I because he
• 51:14
  could have done he does so much with everything else that he
• 51:18
  definitely could have done an aside with tricks and he
• 51:20
  decided, you know what, she's going to be a mystery forever
• 51:22
  except. Patricia, Patricia Joanne Paul.
• 51:25
  Yes, it's responsibly maybe. And and he and he kind of grows
• 51:31
  up a bit over the course of this book where he's like, you know,
• 51:35
  I wanted the screaming fans. I wanted, you know, I wanted
• 51:39
  the, I wanted to be like one of The Beatles or something like
• 51:42
  that. Instead just playing to 20
• 51:44
  people at the pub. That's, that's three songs.
• 51:46
  So you just cheat with one of them by making it an alternate
• 51:49
  reality version of a Beatles track that, you know, man, I
• 51:53
  would have, oh man, that, that sounds absolutely amazing.
• 51:56
  I want to, I want to hear those songs.
• 51:57
  And the lyrics of that song are in the back of this book.
• 52:00
  The, the first song he, he plays and it's, and it's, it's
• 52:03
  wonderful. I like the lyrics quite a bit.
• 52:05
  So not only can he, can he write a really good Doctor Who novel
• 52:09
  that somehow balances all the spinning plates, but manages a
• 52:13
  nice bit of verse too? Mr. Lance Parkin It feels like
• 52:16
  something Fitz would write as well.
• 52:18
  It has this kind of 60s kind of feel to it.
• 52:21
  He wasn't sure about the chorus. He told tricks, and so he didn't
• 52:24
  have the chorus in it like that. He has a whole bunch of those
• 52:29
  cigarette butts in the TARDIS and then he goes to the Doctors.
• 52:32
  Like, this place is huge. There's no bloody ashtrays.
• 52:35
  But hey, Fitz, empty bottles made, he's just.
• 52:41
  Using that back wall, isn't he? That's where he flicks them all.
• 52:44
  He's just flicks them all he gets.
• 52:49
  He gets to grow and he gets to change it.
• 52:52
  It feels like it it it feels both organic in a way like it
• 52:59
  it. They didn't build on this for
• 53:01
  like the last five or ten books. It's mentioned in Dead Stone,
• 53:05
  not so much in Tudor Slaughter and then it's built upon here,
• 53:08
  but it it feels right. It feels like there's some gap
• 53:13
  in a bit of time. Human tricks kind of hooked up
• 53:17
  and sometimes change doesn't you know, it isn't a build up.
• 53:22
  It it can hit you just like that.
• 53:24
  And I feel like it's it's a part of that for Fitz as well.
• 53:26
  So I was very happy with his exit.
• 53:28
  He gets his he gets his dream lady as well.
• 53:32
  And I just I kind of I kind of loved it, you know, and he
• 53:35
  doesn't you don't see him fully, fully leave because, you know,
• 53:40
  like how do you do a really good companion exit that would
• 53:42
  satisfy me? You don't you have them all jump
• 53:44
  in with the doctor right at the end and how does he leave?
• 53:49
  I could make that up myself and I feel like Lance giving me that
• 53:54
  open endedness made everything that happened to Fitz kind of a
• 53:58
  lot more satisfying. Just he scared the piss out of
• 54:00
  me with Fitz's death though and I wanted to strangle him but
• 54:03
  other than that. I think Lance Parkin was always
• 54:08
  going to try and kill Fitz at some point in this book.
• 54:13
  So yeah, I thought he was. It's one of the highlights of
• 54:17
  the book for me. Yeah, I loved it.
• 54:19
  Do you know what? I'm perfectly convinced that the
• 54:21
  Ultimate Bromance and Doctor Who isn't the Doctor and Fitz.
• 54:24
  It's you, Luke and Fitz. And I'm so pleased that you've
• 54:28
  got the ending that you want it, because I would have devastated
• 54:32
  me for you to have read this and gone.
• 54:33
  No, I think if he had been dead, that might have been the case.
• 54:38
  John, did you like how Fitz was written out?
• 54:42
  Yes, because as it's I chose those my favorite companion
• 54:45
  exits because it's open-ended. I think you put these you can
• 54:51
  see how the ending might happen because of, you know, him and
• 54:56
  tricks end up shagging. If you haven't read the book,
• 54:58
  sorry, what you do listen to this podcast, go and read it
• 55:00
  straight away. So you know that there's kind of
• 55:04
  the seeds of that that you see where that's going and it does.
• 55:09
  And that kind of relationship between fits and tricks does
• 55:11
  power the book. And I, I love that thing that
• 55:16
  Luke was saying about the, you know, the playing to 20 people
• 55:19
  in a pub. And that, again, this is a
• 55:21
  metaphor for the wilderness years.
• 55:23
  Essentially, you're playing to Banda.
• 55:25
  You're playing to, I think it's 2020 odd, 1000 people tops.
• 55:28
  You are playing to the pub. But it's satisfying and it's fun
• 55:32
  and it's worthwhile. And you can get so much out of
• 55:35
  it because you know you have an audience who wants to be there.
• 55:38
  So when you. Think of when you think of
• 55:40
  everything he's been through in the last, what, 50 odd books?
• 55:44
  Yeah, at the end of time, the beginning of time, all those
• 55:48
  invasions, all of that stuff. And the happiest moment is when
• 55:51
  he's just singing a song to 20 people.
• 55:54
  That's. Just a huge It's human, isn't
• 55:56
  it? It's character.
• 55:57
  Lance is quietly so good at character.
• 56:02
  Yeah. And I just love that kind of the
• 56:06
  adventures go on, make them up in your own head.
• 56:09
  You don't need a full stop on these things.
• 56:14
  It it Yeah. It's equivalent of it's one of
• 56:16
  my favorite comic of like the past 15 years.
• 56:19
  So the Wicked Dubai, which ends on a blank page.
• 56:21
  And basically it's a challenge the reader to go and continue
• 56:25
  themselves what they loved about it.
• 56:27
  And that's what this ending is. If you love the stories, go have
• 56:31
  fun. It's open for you now.
• 56:35
  Andrew, anything to add about fits?
• 56:42
  Yeah, I echo all of that. But then also the doctor
• 56:45
  bringing him back from the dead at the end of the book is just
• 56:49
  such a lovely moment. And I was actually quite moved
• 56:53
  by it. Like had a little bit of a tear.
• 56:56
  My that and the open mic night and the bit where Fitz come
• 56:59
  comes back like they they it packs an emotional punch.
• 57:02
  And the way that tricks is kind of like it hasn't really hit her
• 57:08
  that Fitz is dead. And then it does.
• 57:11
  And then she meets the older woman who's also lost her
• 57:13
  husband. And then the Doctor has that
• 57:15
  kind of moment of triumph at the end where he comes in and he
• 57:20
  brings Fitz back, who's been there all along and the husband
• 57:22
  of this old woman. And it's just a really, really
• 57:25
  lovely moment. And it's another it's like
• 57:27
  triumph upon triumph at the end of this book where you're just
• 57:30
  like, yeah, Master, you can get in the bin.
• 57:32
  Gallifrey, that's back. I'm going to I'm going to defeat
• 57:37
  the war and a my companion back from the dead.
• 57:40
  And it's just it's it's like those punch in the air moments,
• 57:43
  which the the 8 Doctors 8 Eighth Doctor range didn't have, didn't
• 57:48
  often have that much of that sort of like, yes, well done.
• 57:52
  Like it was often kind of like muted or like a little bit sad.
• 57:59
  Everybody lives moment. Yeah, absolutely.
• 58:02
  Well, because I think. We'll talk about the Doctor.
• 58:05
  It does take some effort to study a lot of the critiques
• 58:12
  through Marnell that the readership had of the Doctor in
• 58:16
  the second-half of the books, avoiding what's happened,
• 58:19
  running away, being a coward, etcetera, and then to rug pull
• 58:24
  at the end and just turn it all into a massive triumph.
• 58:27
  And it was just Jesus. I just want to say one last
• 58:29
  thing about Fitz, and that is Lance doesn't like Fitz as a
• 58:34
  character. And I think it says a lot to him
• 58:37
  as a writer that he knows that the audience is massively
• 58:41
  invested in that character after all this time.
• 58:44
  And he's determined to give him a memorable ending and a
• 58:48
  satisfying ending and just just to make him the most human
• 58:52
  companion I think we've ever had in.
• 58:54
  It's just beautifully, beautifully written.
• 58:56
  He does manage to scrub clean Fitz's room in the TARDIS.
• 59:00
  All right, fine. I can't kill him.
• 59:02
  Well, he's no trace Room in the TARDIS.
• 59:04
  Get out of here. That bit makes me emotional when
• 59:06
  all that fabulous console room from the TV movies all just
• 59:10
  wiped aside and I'll know Christopher Ecksten's come in,
• 59:13
  you know, I mean, it's delightful as well.
• 59:16
  Like, you know, the TV movie is divisive, shall we say.
• 59:22
  He's determined. He's determined.
• 59:24
  He's going to key everything that the 8th Doctor's done into
• 59:27
  this book. So you've got the Master in the
• 59:29
  eye of Harmony. And the line I brought back
• 59:33
  someone from the dead on the first day of the job is
• 59:36
  absolutely about Grace and Eugene.
• 59:38
  So, so Terence may have been criticizing it in the 8 Doctors
• 59:42
  at the beginning of the range, but at the end of the range,
• 59:45
  we're going to celebrate it. And that's kind of gorgeous.
• 59:49
  It's the right spirit to end on there.
• 59:50
  It's because no matter what your your personal opinion of the TV
• 59:54
  movie is, it's someone's favorite.
• 59:56
  Someone got into Doctor Who, that someone fell in love with
• 59:59
  Doctor Who because of that movie.
• 1:00:01
  And that's exactly what is it. It's yeah, it's R.E.M.
• 1:00:07
  They don't like showing you happy people, but they don't
• 1:00:11
  slag off the song because it's someone's favorite and they will
• 1:00:15
  love it and that's what matters. Yeah, it it's you can't.
• 1:00:21
  Obviously criticism is by, but just don't be nasty about the
• 1:00:24
  way you slap these stories are. And I think some writers can do
• 1:00:30
  that if they don't like a character you know, you know,
• 1:00:34
  and you don't know with Lance affairs in this book.
• 1:00:37
  Well, OK, Shall we? I mean, I suppose we should
• 1:00:40
  cover tricks right now. We've alluded to the fact that
• 1:00:45
  this is a bit of a tricky companion that came in at the
• 1:00:47
  11th hour, is deliberately elusive in that she wears
• 1:00:52
  disguises all the time. And this is the book, obviously,
• 1:00:55
  that has to tells a lot of the book from her point of view.
• 1:00:59
  Actually, who wants to start with tricks?
• 1:01:03
  I mean, we'll all have a say, but.
• 1:01:05
  I'll. Start with.
• 1:01:06
  OK, go for it. And yeah, it's really nice that
• 1:01:10
  she gets a good chunk of the book told from her perspective
• 1:01:13
  because it feels like other than Half Life, the brightest haven't
• 1:01:18
  really bothered to do anything with her, even though she's
• 1:01:22
  she's been in the range since 2002 and now we're in 2005 and
• 1:01:27
  nobody apart from in Half Life has done anything with her.
• 1:01:30
  We've not really discovered who she is, what her, what her real
• 1:01:34
  background is, what her motivations are, not really who
• 1:01:39
  she is as a character. So yeah, it's nice to have that
• 1:01:42
  big chunk of the book from her perspective at the end.
• 1:01:45
  And although it is frustrating that we don't get like her, this
• 1:01:50
  is who she is Moment. Yeah, I guess, you know, it's
• 1:01:57
  that thing of, like, you get enough to know where the
• 1:02:00
  storyline's going. But I just wish that someone
• 1:02:04
  maybe in the Tibber Slaughter slot had done a tricks book
• 1:02:08
  before the line ended. And it's one of those things
• 1:02:11
  where you can kind of see the dots not all lining up.
• 1:02:14
  And I think probably that's one of the biggest frustrations of
• 1:02:19
  the range, that they just don't do anything with that character.
• 1:02:23
  There's a there's an interview with Mark Michalowski that wrote
• 1:02:27
  Half Life and he says he wanted to write that book.
• 1:02:30
  He he would love to write that book that finally just exposes
• 1:02:33
  it all. And I think maybe they just run
• 1:02:36
  out of time to the slaughter. Seems like a rush book to me.
• 1:02:40
  So maybe they just run out of time.
• 1:02:41
  Yeah, I think that the frustrating thing about these
• 1:02:44
  books at the time was, oh, they've run out of time, have
• 1:02:46
  they? Was like, no, you've had this
• 1:02:48
  character in the book since time 0.
• 1:02:51
  You've had all this time. You could do this in one book.
• 1:02:54
  You have 250 pages to explore whatever you want.
• 1:02:57
  It's not like, I don't know, like they they could have if
• 1:03:01
  they wanted to, but they're just their eyes just weren't on that
• 1:03:04
  ball. And it's like, why bother in
• 1:03:06
  introducing a character that you don't do anything with?
• 1:03:08
  And that's, yeah, I did this when I slagged off tricks as a
• 1:03:12
  character and we did our least favourite book companions.
• 1:03:15
  But, you know, it's just one like this wouldn't have happened
• 1:03:20
  with like Rebecca Levine. Like there would have been a
• 1:03:22
  clear idea of who this character was if there was a mystery, how
• 1:03:26
  it's going to play out, when it's going to play out, what the
• 1:03:28
  back story is and how you deliver that to the audience,
• 1:03:31
  not just, oh, we've got this mysterious woman might do
• 1:03:35
  something with her. I don't know.
• 1:03:36
  She likes wearing wigs. That's the.
• 1:03:40
  One line pitch. She loves wearing wigs.
• 1:03:44
  And yeah, and she's pretty like that.
• 1:03:47
  It's just, yeah, it's, it's like if it's like if the season 1
• 1:03:53
  Clara just, they kept with that Clara and just never really
• 1:03:58
  resolved what was going on with that character and kept her in
• 1:04:01
  the series for three years without giving you anything
• 1:04:06
  about it. So I think she's one of the
• 1:04:09
  biggest failings of the range for me.
• 1:04:10
  But she is treated well in this book and she gets a lot of kind
• 1:04:13
  of emotional development. And that relationship with Fitz,
• 1:04:16
  even though it's just in this book, it does convince and.
• 1:04:21
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:04:23
  Yeah, I think with a, with other writers, that could have not
• 1:04:27
  happened. It could have just been like,
• 1:04:28
  oh, OK, the companions are getting together, whatever.
• 1:04:32
  But he manages to sell that and make it feel like she does
• 1:04:35
  really care about Fitz. And she's also thought about
• 1:04:37
  their future, which is great. That whole stuff with Angie.
• 1:04:42
  So yeah, mixed feelings on tricks.
• 1:04:45
  I thought like, at the start they're both sort of tentative,
• 1:04:49
  like, is this the relationship? Are we just fucking?
• 1:04:52
  What's going on? And it's not until he's singing
• 1:04:55
  in the bar, she looks at him and she thinks, this is going to
• 1:04:59
  work. And you're like, yeah, OK.
• 1:05:01
  I, I absolutely. And I could have just thought,
• 1:05:03
  oh, I just want a few more when they're in a relationship
• 1:05:05
  together. I just thought, I mean, you
• 1:05:06
  know, I want more anyway. Yeah.
• 1:05:10
  I, I that didn't have to be believable, that relationship
• 1:05:13
  that it comes out of nowhere at the 11th hour.
• 1:05:16
  But it's properly written. It's, it's OK.
• 1:05:19
  There's that moment of, you know, lust, infatuation,
• 1:05:22
  whatever at the start. And then a moment we go, no,
• 1:05:25
  this is long term. I do.
• 1:05:27
  It's more than physical, but yeah, I I do love that there's
• 1:05:32
  that background of, you know, the, the, the police come up and
• 1:05:37
  go, yeah, Patricia, Paul or whatever we want you for murder.
• 1:05:42
  Fine, if that's back story you want, it's there.
• 1:05:45
  But if you don't want it, you can move it on to anything else.
• 1:05:48
  I think Andrew's right. It's like tricks is kind of like
• 1:05:52
  Mel, which is kind of like I'm sure there's a background, but
• 1:05:55
  it's it's kind of the facts and that's it.
• 1:05:58
  And no one's done. No one is really apart from Mark
• 1:06:01
  McCloskey done the work to put, you know, fill in the gaps
• 1:06:05
  between the lines there to flesh her out as a character.
• 1:06:09
  Possibly. I know I understand it's three
• 1:06:11
  years, but it's three years where the release shed will slow
• 1:06:14
  down to a near halt. You know, was it the four or
• 1:06:18
  five months between two slaughtering this?
• 1:06:20
  So I think she's a victim of that kind.
• 1:06:23
  There was less narrative space around.
• 1:06:25
  Every book had to feel important purely because it's happening
• 1:06:31
  with such a gap between them. I I kind of wonder if that's why
• 1:06:35
  she didn't get explained. You know, there wasn't just in
• 1:06:39
  Richard Newfield. There was a narrative space to
• 1:06:41
  explain. He wanted those books to come
• 1:06:43
  out, tell good stories and never.
• 1:06:46
  But it should have happened. And it's what he's doing with
• 1:06:49
  tricks is what what he did to set Benny up in her own range in
• 1:06:53
  the dying days. It's that character, it's that
• 1:06:56
  fleshed out. It's you explore her feelings.
• 1:06:58
  Yeah. And again, I think this is part
• 1:07:00
  of the relationship. It's where she thinks Pitts is
• 1:07:03
  dead. That, again, is part of the
• 1:07:05
  relationship. But then she realises what she
• 1:07:08
  does love about him and that is gloriously done.
• 1:07:13
  And she. Yeah, it's great.
• 1:07:15
  She is a resourceful. She's independent.
• 1:07:17
  This relationship isn't just her going gooey eyed about a man.
• 1:07:22
  It's an equal relationship. It's sad, beautifully so yeah, I
• 1:07:26
  I think it's kind of again a a redemptive thing.
• 1:07:29
  I think Lance is attempting his redemptive reading events but
• 1:07:33
  also it's a redemptive reading of tricks me in this.
• 1:07:36
  And you say equal, she's like, OK, I'm going to shoot some
• 1:07:39
  clothes out for you because we're going somewhere classy.
• 1:07:41
  Oh, and I'm going to take you to see my bank manager because you
• 1:07:44
  know, I've, I've got £1,000,000 in the bank and I think she
• 1:07:48
  might be in charge a little bit. I quite like that, though.
• 1:07:51
  I mean, there is a line. There's a line which really made
• 1:07:54
  me sit up where the doctor, she goes to the doctor.
• 1:07:58
  You're running away from something in your past.
• 1:08:00
  And he goes, oh, it takes one to no one.
• 1:08:03
  Takes one to no one, Patricia. And you're like, OK, He knows.
• 1:08:07
  He knows what her back story is. We don't, but he does.
• 1:08:12
  Well, and it's gorgeously done again.
• 1:08:16
  Like. If it just decides to punch a
• 1:08:18
  cop in the face for us. So that's love right there.
• 1:08:22
  She's a cop. Very.
• 1:08:23
  Pretty Who do you visualise as tricks?
• 1:08:28
  Oh. I don't.
• 1:08:31
  I don't tend to visualise actors or reference points.
• 1:08:34
  I don't know why I kept seeing Jerry Ryan from Star Trek
• 1:08:37
  Voyager. Sort of gorgeous, sultry, full
• 1:08:41
  lipped. I'm going to, I'm going to go
• 1:08:43
  60s blonde and maybe a 60s blonde.
• 1:08:46
  He would know. I'm going to go on a black man.
• 1:08:48
  Why not very? Nice.
• 1:08:51
  I see you had a. Lot of yeah there.
• 1:08:54
  You go, you go, you know? She wear, they wear.
• 1:08:59
  Like there's one scene where they're both in sparkly cat
• 1:09:01
  suits. I think it's the Dalek section
• 1:09:03
  of Mars or whatever. And I was like, I could see, I
• 1:09:07
  could say I want a black man wearing something like that,
• 1:09:09
  which is we're in the tight leather for a lot of episodes
• 1:09:11
  anyway, so. Who cares about tricks?
• 1:09:13
  I want to see Fitz dressed. Up on that.
• 1:09:15
  So sorry, I think they've both got like fake eyelashes on at
• 1:09:19
  the same time. Yeah.
• 1:09:21
  Yeah, have. They got those wigs from UFO on
• 1:09:23
  as well. Oh man, how can you say that,
• 1:09:25
  Andrew? I see her more as sort of like
• 1:09:29
  petite but very feisty blonde, sort of like, you know, Sarah
• 1:09:33
  Alexander who was in Coupling, like the block Coupling or like
• 1:09:39
  Rosamund Pike. He was in like a Bond film
• 1:09:41
  around. Like I always actually used to
• 1:09:43
  cast the character characters in my head so I had someone to
• 1:09:46
  imagine. So those were like the two that
• 1:09:48
  sort of were in my head when I was reading these at the time.
• 1:09:50
  Whilst we're playing this game, then what about Fitz?
• 1:09:55
  Fitz was a bit for me, was a bit like Doyle from Angel.
• 1:10:00
  Oh yeah, it was a bit ramshackle, wasn't it?
• 1:10:05
  Unfortunately, I prettied him up because Matt DeAngelo played him
• 1:10:08
  in a big finish and I just love thinking about Matt DeAngelo, so
• 1:10:12
  I just see him in a lever. Jacket It's alright because I
• 1:10:16
  know who John Blum saw when he wrote bits, and it's a mutual
• 1:10:19
  friend of ours, so I just see him.
• 1:10:21
  Oh, OK, Luke. Well, yeah, I I kind of, I have
• 1:10:27
  Matt Dandler's voice. Oh, man, they only did 25
• 1:10:30
  minutes of that. I could.
• 1:10:33
  I know I could go with that a lot more.
• 1:10:35
  Yeah, that works for me. I don't know.
• 1:10:37
  I kind of don't. I don't, I don't know.
• 1:10:40
  Sometimes I just put me in him a little bit.
• 1:10:42
  You know, I don't think about it too much about who would play
• 1:10:45
  him because you never see what his face looks like.
• 1:10:49
  He's not on any covers. I haven't seen that much artwork
• 1:10:52
  of, of him. Are there any Doctor Who comics
• 1:10:55
  that feature fits? No, but he wasn't some of those
• 1:10:59
  sort of pictures, wasn't he coming soon pictures and things
• 1:11:02
  like that. Yeah, yeah, they're very under
• 1:11:06
  represented compared to the Virgin characters.
• 1:11:09
  Aren't they? There you go.
• 1:11:10
  He looks like Luke, and that's official.
• 1:11:12
  Oh, there we go, Luke in a leather jacket.
• 1:11:15
  OK, well, there you go. Just do the last one then.
• 1:11:17
  Very quickly. What about Angie Kapoor?
• 1:11:19
  Because mine's really embarrassing.
• 1:11:21
  I'll just see Connie. Huck.
• 1:11:27
  Anyone else? I mean the the woman.
• 1:11:30
  From this life that should be based on or Palmindra Nagra,
• 1:11:38
  who's in Bend it Like Beckham, The one who's not Keira
• 1:11:40
  Knightley. Yes, that's a good Luke.
• 1:11:45
  Anyone for Angie? I like the lady from Ben like
• 1:11:48
  Beckham now that Andrew said that.
• 1:11:50
  So that's going to be in my head now.
• 1:11:52
  I think that's official. As you watch Connie hark on Blue
• 1:11:55
  Peter, she's really annoying, so I just sort of switch it up a
• 1:11:58
  bit after that. Oh, I love Connie.
• 1:12:03
  Is that my era of Blue Peter presenter?
• 1:12:05
  So we've covered fits, we covered tricks, but of course,
• 1:12:09
  the important character here is the 8th Doctor himself.
• 1:12:13
  John, take us away. I absolutely love what they do.
• 1:12:19
  They talk to you and it's purely down to the one moment at the
• 1:12:23
  end where they talk about the memories.
• 1:12:25
  We're talking about getting them back.
• 1:12:28
  And it goes So what? And it works.
• 1:12:34
  And The thing is, I know what Lance is doing.
• 1:12:37
  It's a fact this kind of range has been powered by, so you
• 1:12:42
  know, Faction Paradox powered by Sabbath.
• 1:12:45
  As you know, the the Crystal Council, I can't remember their
• 1:12:48
  names, their council mate, and it's been about unravelling
• 1:12:52
  mysteries. It's about what's there and it's
• 1:12:57
  a statement. It doesn't matter.
• 1:12:59
  It really doesn't matter. It's what matters.
• 1:13:02
  It's what's going on now. What matters is the adventure
• 1:13:04
  that's happening now and that's kind of the spirit of the 8th
• 1:13:09
  dock that I love. We've already said about it.
• 1:13:12
  It's alluded to the way he rewrites that climax, the
• 1:13:17
  ancestor cell, where he makes it a triumphant moment rather than
• 1:13:23
  this kind of moment of defeat. That it that it is in the
• 1:13:28
  antecel. It's it the, the amnesia is a
• 1:13:32
  triumph. It's it's, you know, it's a
• 1:13:33
  feature. It's not a bug.
• 1:13:35
  It works. It's what he wants.
• 1:13:38
  It's it's not a not a weight that he has to carry, but it's a
• 1:13:43
  sacrifice that he was happy to make.
• 1:13:45
  It makes the Doctor absolutely the most heroic version of the
• 1:13:50
  Doctor that that could be. Again, it yeah, it makes sense
• 1:13:55
  for the city of the dead as well, because in city, I read
• 1:13:57
  that recently and every time he starts looking back, the
• 1:14:02
  darkness is there and he's absolutely terrified.
• 1:14:05
  And this sort of gives a reason for that, right?
• 1:14:08
  That he can't go looking for those one because they're not
• 1:14:10
  there, and two because there's like a fail safe telling him not
• 1:14:13
  to go looking because the matrix memories are there.
• 1:14:16
  Yeah. And again, if you want, it's
• 1:14:18
  almost alluding back to the TV movie with Grace Wade.
• 1:14:22
  You know, he's talking back to why she wants to be a Doctor.
• 1:14:25
  Why does he want to be a Doctor? This is the reason because, and
• 1:14:29
  it's before, you know, Stephen Moffatt gets here with his
• 1:14:31
  illusion to what the Doctor means.
• 1:14:32
  This is Lance's version of that. And it's what I want for a
• 1:14:38
  character I've been following for 70 odd books.
• 1:14:42
  I want that kind of not a moment, but a moment catharsis
• 1:14:47
  at least a moment where you can go, yes, I'm really happy and
• 1:14:51
  this is what it does. And the ending again, we're
• 1:14:55
  going back to it's perfect, that open ending where they're just
• 1:14:57
  jumping in, saving there again, because that's what the Doctor
• 1:15:00
  does. Lance understands the Doctor Who
• 1:15:02
  doesn't do endings because obviously you've got
• 1:15:05
  regeneration. What happens?
• 1:15:06
  He walks away a new man Great. And he knows, you know, he knows
• 1:15:11
  there's a new version and he how do you kind of marry up the
• 1:15:16
  ending of these books with knife doctor?
• 1:15:18
  You don't because you know, I'm sure they wouldn't let someone
• 1:15:22
  like Lance, who for all the greats every time he's not seen
• 1:15:26
  enough to get a look at Russell T Davis's scripts Rose.
• 1:15:30
  So he leaves it in a kind of perfect place where you can.
• 1:15:34
  We've got this narrative space as well.
• 1:15:37
  It it's just, you know, it's Doctor Who as a triumph,
• 1:15:41
  fundamentally this. And it's the 8th Doctor as this
• 1:15:44
  kind of triumphant character, as a hero, not weighted down by
• 1:15:48
  amnesia, not weighted down by Gallifrey, not weighted down by,
• 1:15:52
  you know, the ideas that Lawrence Miles leaves behind for
• 1:15:55
  others to work because he doesn't do the endings.
• 1:15:57
  He was, he wasn't interested in giving faction paradox storyline
• 1:16:01
  and ending. He wanted it to go on forever in
• 1:16:03
  the background. But this is, yeah, giving the
• 1:16:09
  reader very, very generous kind of gift of how this is the
• 1:16:16
  doctor you've always loved. This is what he's like.
• 1:16:18
  It is best. This is what he's like.
• 1:16:21
  The chapter of Father Time. My God, this is what he was like
• 1:16:26
  at his weakest when he had amnesia.
• 1:16:29
  It's absolutely a summation of why you should love this 8th
• 1:16:35
  Doctor of the books. And sort of why every part of
• 1:16:40
  that journey has made him who he is today as well.
• 1:16:45
  I have suspect that most of that his writing process was reading
• 1:16:48
  the entire range. And how do I finish it?
• 1:16:51
  Yes, I wouldn't put it past him. Well, you know, the bit that
• 1:16:54
  made me laugh the most was when he was like, oh, well, you know,
• 1:16:57
  I've got some time in the TARDIS.
• 1:16:58
  I'll read one of these books about Gallifrey.
• 1:17:01
  And then he starts reading it. He can't even get to the end of
• 1:17:03
  the first page. He's like, oh, it's so boring.
• 1:17:06
  Like the trouble with there's nothing interesting ever
• 1:17:09
  happened there. I was like, yes, thank you,
• 1:17:11
  Lord, thank you. Oh.
• 1:17:13
  There's something Gary Gillett said that every showrunner
• 1:17:16
  eventually goes back to the Gallifrey stuff, and he's right.
• 1:17:20
  And you think he's going to do that here, right?
• 1:17:22
  It's called the Gallifrey Chronicles.
• 1:17:24
  And it's like, no, at the end we will build the new Gallifrey.
• 1:17:27
  Thank God we didn't get to see it.
• 1:17:28
  It would have been very dull. You don't get the Chronicles,
• 1:17:31
  you don't get Gallifrey. It's a great title.
• 1:17:34
  Well, Luke the 8th Doctor. I think if 7's the master
• 1:17:42
  manipulator, this guy's the master improviser, the master of
• 1:17:45
  living in the moment. It's all about the now and
• 1:17:49
  what's next, not what happened before.
• 1:17:51
  I love that scene where Marno was like, Marnell's like, you're
• 1:17:54
  just this coward. He's got, like, trauma and PTSD
• 1:17:57
  and he's like, you watched my adventures, right?
• 1:18:00
  Yeah. Do I seem like a coward to you?
• 1:18:05
  No, he's not. He's he's he's the hero.
• 1:18:08
  I've seen him stomp people in a couple of these books, too,
• 1:18:12
  Usually really evil people who kind of deserved it.
• 1:18:15
  But this, that was probably early on in this version of the
• 1:18:18
  8th Doctor, where he hasn't quite figured himself out yet.
• 1:18:21
  And, you know, some of these people disturb him so that he's
• 1:18:23
  just going to beat the crap out of them.
• 1:18:26
  But yeah, he's all about living in the moment and improvising.
• 1:18:33
  It's it's it's never been too big a deal for him to get his
• 1:18:37
  memories back. And the fact is, like you find
• 1:18:41
  out in the book, they're not there anyway.
• 1:18:43
  In his head. He can't just go, Oh, I'm just
• 1:18:46
  oh, there they are. I just met the matrix and this
• 1:18:49
  fail safe is going like no, get back back away from this.
• 1:18:54
  You know, you don't. So it's not necessarily him
• 1:18:58
  telling himself, no, you can't have these memories now.
• 1:19:02
  And I found that kind of really satisfying as well.
• 1:19:04
  So it wasn't him all this time chickening out from that because
• 1:19:09
  this guy's not a chicken, isn't there?
• 1:19:13
  Isn't there a book? I think might even be Fear
• 1:19:15
  Itself where he just like throws himself into this depressurizing
• 1:19:19
  room, manages to save two people and then jump into a thing and
• 1:19:25
  put the thing over them. So they're all like like safe
• 1:19:28
  and he's got maybe some burns and stuff on him and he didn't
• 1:19:30
  even know he could do that. Fitz.
• 1:19:31
  Like, did you know you could do that?
• 1:19:33
  No, he just ran out there and did it.
• 1:19:36
  That's him all over, just running out and having
• 1:19:39
  adventures and staying on top of things.
• 1:19:43
  Yeah, I guy made me punch the air a couple times.
• 1:19:47
  He got his everybody lives moment as well.
• 1:19:49
  He got to save, save everybody. They did give me a tease because
• 1:19:54
  he's like, apparently they know who I am.
• 1:19:57
  Like this Brigadier guy. I don't know.
• 1:20:00
  And I was like, I want to see that meeting.
• 1:20:02
  I want to see that. That's what like, there's so
• 1:20:05
  many really cool, cool little things about this character.
• 1:20:09
  His conversations with Rachel like Rachel's like.
• 1:20:12
  Oh boy, those. Scenes this cynical person who's
• 1:20:16
  had like who? Who, I don't know, she's got
• 1:20:18
  depression or something like that, but you know, she has this
• 1:20:21
  really negative view on life. It's like, but here's all the
• 1:20:25
  things you could have done just on this planet.
• 1:20:27
  You could have gone to the Great Wall of China to see this.
• 1:20:30
  You could have gone over here to see that.
• 1:20:31
  You could have experienced all of these things and you chose
• 1:20:34
  not to. You know, they're all these
• 1:20:36
  things are out there waiting for you or to explore, to experience
• 1:20:40
  for yourself. And, you know, there's hope out
• 1:20:43
  there. There's all this kind of stuff.
• 1:20:44
  You can't just, you know, you just can't just wait for it to
• 1:20:47
  come to you. So you have to go out and find
• 1:20:49
  these things. And he doesn't quite convince
• 1:20:53
  her in that moment, but he convinced me.
• 1:20:55
  Like in that moment, I'm like, yeah, I couldn't.
• 1:20:58
  In terms of him. Sort of a lot of things, you
• 1:21:00
  know? Explaining what he's about and
• 1:21:02
  what he can offer people and a look at life that he can offer
• 1:21:05
  people. I think that might be the
• 1:21:08
  perfect example of that in a Doctor Who book.
• 1:21:11
  It's so well written, that scene.
• 1:21:13
  I wanted to take his hand in that moment and go like, you
• 1:21:16
  know what? Screw Marnell, let's go.
• 1:21:18
  You know what? All right, I'm convinced.
• 1:21:21
  Yeah, enormous giant blue bottles that terrify me.
• 1:21:25
  Let's go. I'm going to jump.
• 1:21:29
  And yeah, so his his interaction with Marnell, great.
• 1:21:36
  Just he doesn't know canine, but he kind of senses something
• 1:21:39
  about him and just his interactions with the canine.
• 1:21:41
  And I'm just like, this is just, it's just perfect.
• 1:21:45
  It's a it's a wonderful love letter.
• 1:21:46
  I think it ties up everything that maybe fans might have been
• 1:21:50
  complaining about. I don't, I don't know.
• 1:21:53
  I was happy to go along for the ride too, because this felt like
• 1:21:57
  a new Doctor from the burning onwards.
• 1:21:58
  And I was really happy with his his journey and how he grew and
• 1:22:02
  how he ends up by the end of this.
• 1:22:04
  I like that the TARDIS, he hadn't really, he didn't know
• 1:22:07
  how to fix it. So it's all operating at like
• 1:22:09
  what, 10% capacity? One of the things that have
• 1:22:12
  broken on it is something like something like about the
• 1:22:15
  perception filters, something like that.
• 1:22:17
  And that's probably like an offhand reason landscapes as to
• 1:22:20
  why they suddenly arrive in a cartoon or him just describing
• 1:22:25
  like every book you've read, every frame of a film, It's all
• 1:22:30
  real. It happened.
• 1:22:31
  It's, it's, it's all real, but you know, all that kind of
• 1:22:34
  stuff. Ah, this.
• 1:22:36
  Yeah. He knows what we want to hear,
• 1:22:39
  Lance, doesn't he? It's all real.
• 1:22:41
  I knew it all along. And.
• 1:22:46
  You could say like this is the perfect bridge between this and
• 1:22:51
  Rose. You could always, you could.
• 1:22:53
  You could also say it's the perfect bridge between this and
• 1:22:56
  storm warning as well, because by the time a storm warning,
• 1:23:01
  he's got all his memories back and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:23:04
  That's probably that version of the TARDIS console's been swept
• 1:23:07
  away. Who cares?
• 1:23:09
  But you know that that would work as a bridge point as well,
• 1:23:12
  you know, And he's kind of saying like, it doesn't matter
• 1:23:14
  that there's a whole bunch of McGann audios and there's all
• 1:23:17
  these these books as well. It all.
• 1:23:18
  It all matters if you know you. Every word, every, every line,
• 1:23:23
  all of it. Even the stranger.
• 1:23:26
  Important. Even the stranger and his
• 1:23:29
  adventures with Claudia that I was a couple of weeks Rachel.
• 1:23:34
  Well, there was exciting adventures with Claudia, Yeah,
• 1:23:38
  although at least they didn't the grave list wasn't urinated
• 1:23:41
  on at all. Oh actually, do you remember in
• 1:23:44
  The Stranger he had all those flashbacks of going on holiday
• 1:23:47
  with his male friend and they had a load of sex when there was
• 1:23:50
  a holiday? I mean, it's all Canon now
• 1:23:52
  thanks to this. With nil die shagged.
• 1:23:57
  I still need to know, though. I still need to know, though,
• 1:24:00
  Who is Lorenzo? Delilah.
• 1:24:02
  Frank. I know.
• 1:24:05
  Deborah. Yeah.
• 1:24:06
  Jemima. Katie.
• 1:24:07
  That's like a hyphen. Miranda.
• 1:24:10
  Deborah is from Father Time. That's Debbie, isn't it?
• 1:24:12
  Debbie Castle. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:24:16
  There's a Nina and of course we know Angie and there's a
• 1:24:18
  Beatrice. There's a lot of.
• 1:24:19
  It is. He knows.
• 1:24:20
  He knows we're going to be straight to the reference books,
• 1:24:22
  trying to find all these people, you know, the comics and
• 1:24:25
  everything. When you say it was a Beatrice
• 1:24:27
  tricks. That's right.
• 1:24:29
  Oh, that's right. Yeah, sorry.
• 1:24:31
  She's got like 100 names. It's hard to keep track of all
• 1:24:34
  of them. Yeah.
• 1:24:35
  Some of them he's just made-up though, just to frustrate.
• 1:24:38
  Of course. Jabira.
• 1:24:39
  Casey Anyway, Andrew, the 8th Doctor.
• 1:24:43
  Yeah, I think the thing that's really nice in this book is just
• 1:24:47
  the lack of angst around Gallifrey stuff.
• 1:24:51
  And you'd think given like sort of where pop culture was at the
• 1:24:55
  time, like everyone loved the dark and the angst ridden and
• 1:24:59
  the miserable. And like, you can imagine a
• 1:25:02
  version of this book where it's like, well, why?
• 1:25:04
  Why didn't I destroy my people? But he's like, well, I don't
• 1:25:07
  remember them, I don't care. Like not important in the
• 1:25:10
  moment, don't want my memories back.
• 1:25:12
  And it's just and like his relationship with Mano where
• 1:25:16
  it's like, again, there's a version of this where it's like
• 1:25:18
  the kind of clash of the two last of the Time Lords.
• 1:25:22
  And again, he's just like, who are you?
• 1:25:24
  Like, I don't care. You are like, I just want to get
• 1:25:27
  on with thing. Like it's just really nice and
• 1:25:29
  like unexpected and a smart way of doing this story.
• 1:25:35
  And it's nice that it's Mano this kind of like kind of
• 1:25:39
  fastidious, fussy time law. It's not the master, it's not
• 1:25:43
  Omega or whoever in that role of antagonist for this book.
• 1:25:47
  So you kind of get the the Doctor's sense of like, oh, like
• 1:25:51
  you're one of my people, great, whatever.
• 1:25:53
  Like I don't feel guilty. Like it's just, it's really nice
• 1:25:57
  the way that he does unexpected things with this, but they're
• 1:26:01
  still satisfying. I like to think of mana was like
• 1:26:06
  the the embodiment of the pre burning.
• 1:26:11
  I've doctorate the continuity range going no, come on, I'm
• 1:26:14
  going to tie you up in all this red tape of continuity faction
• 1:26:17
  paradox. You know, the croutons, all of
• 1:26:19
  this and the doctor's like, no, I don't do that anymore and I'm
• 1:26:22
  having too much fun now. You know we don't want to do
• 1:26:24
  that bullshit. Yeah, it was my TARDIS you
• 1:26:27
  nicked. Yeah, whatever.
• 1:26:30
  And I'm sure the stuff about Mana at the beginning where he
• 1:26:33
  regenerates and then gets his memory back, like some of that
• 1:26:36
  fed into the Master and the fob watch and all of that Utopia
• 1:26:40
  stuff, it feels too close not to be.
• 1:26:43
  They were all reading these books, you know, I'll tell you
• 1:26:46
  otherwise, but they was what I really liked on this read, I
• 1:26:50
  realized, was just how many facets of the gave doctor he
• 1:26:53
  gets to show. So in the vignettes at the
• 1:26:56
  start, you get the the fun, you know, bouncing from one of the
• 1:27:00
  set piece to another, going to orgies, pulling down dictators
• 1:27:04
  and all of that. Then you get all the
• 1:27:07
  introspection in the middle and then at the end, like you've all
• 1:27:11
  said, you get the hero, the triumphant 8th Doctor.
• 1:27:15
  And then along the way you get like the magical doctor of
• 1:27:18
  Father time, the snow and, and the kid and all of that, the
• 1:27:22
  climactic 8th doctor fighting grandfather paradox.
• 1:27:25
  And there's just so much of the 8th doctor here that you get to
• 1:27:29
  see. And I think like at the end,
• 1:27:31
  that's exactly what you should be doing, right?
• 1:27:32
  Just celebrate all of it, every part of him, and then have him
• 1:27:35
  go off in the end, you know, like coattails flying, like, oh,
• 1:27:40
  yes, thank you very much. What an ending.
• 1:27:42
  And. It's what Andrew said.
• 1:27:44
  It's it's what Russell TV misunderstood for the TV show.
• 1:27:47
  It's what Lance understands. Don't go dark.
• 1:27:51
  Don't because that's that's not what you want.
• 1:27:53
  An ending you did. I tell me if I'm wrong.
• 1:27:57
  I suspect that the lightness of the pros and the lack of angst,
• 1:28:04
  that might be deliberate because the new series was just about to
• 1:28:08
  start. I think.
• 1:28:10
  I think there's there's a denser version of this that he could
• 1:28:13
  have written because I think far the time is far denser and sort
• 1:28:16
  of detailed heavy than this. But I think maybe that was
• 1:28:20
  enforced and I think it was a good call.
• 1:28:24
  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I would have
• 1:28:27
  appreciated Henrietta St. Font, you know, because I would
• 1:28:29
  have, I would have loved like 7 8,000,000 pages of this for
• 1:28:34
  sure. Like, but that's that's what
• 1:28:37
  this book does in pretty much everything.
• 1:28:40
  It in everything it does. It's giving you the sense of I
• 1:28:44
  want more. I want more of that Rome story
• 1:28:46
  where they blow out the goat monster thing that hates the
• 1:28:50
  doctor. I want more of the that Dalek
• 1:28:53
  story on Mars trying to where the Daleks are trying to
• 1:28:56
  assassinate the Pope who's making the first church on Mars
• 1:28:59
  or something. I want that.
• 1:29:01
  I want more of that. Oh, more of fit settling down on
• 1:29:05
  on Earth and adjusting to life in the 21st century.
• 1:29:09
  Like tricks going like I haven't.
• 1:29:10
  I haven't got the part to tell him about iPods or MP3 players
• 1:29:13
  yet. Because you love.
• 1:29:16
  CD's. Christ on a bike, he goes.
• 1:29:19
  We're not from the future. What are you talking about?
• 1:29:21
  Well, how comes you're talking about a day 2 that doesn't exist
• 1:29:24
  yet and a mode of transport that won't exist for 2000 years?
• 1:29:27
  Oh. Yes, Oh my God, I love the Fitz
• 1:29:31
  that has been travelling through time and space for so long, but
• 1:29:35
  he doesn't know anything about history.
• 1:29:37
  So he's like, oh, it's got to be about Vesuvius, right?
• 1:29:39
  And I'm thinking now this is for like, I'm thinking the same
• 1:29:41
  thing now. Now that happens in like 79 AD.
• 1:29:44
  So he's a bit of a Roman nude now.
• 1:29:47
  And Trisha already knows this. So she's like, I bet you're a
• 1:29:50
  fiver. I bet you a fiver has got
• 1:29:51
  nothing to do with Vesuvius. And it turns out like, yeah, the
• 1:29:55
  monster's like, no, it's got nothing to do with that.
• 1:29:56
  Yeah. By the end of the book, I want
• 1:29:59
  more. I want more of this supposed
• 1:30:02
  meeting between, like, the 8th Doctor, this 8th Doctor and the
• 1:30:05
  Brigadier. I want everything he does.
• 1:30:08
  He leaves me with wanting more. And I I feel like that's better
• 1:30:12
  than a definitive ending would have been.
• 1:30:14
  Isn't that exactly what a last book in a series should do?
• 1:30:17
  Leave you wanting more? Well-being, kind of satisfying
• 1:30:21
  in the way it wraps things up, do.
• 1:30:22
  You know what scene is in my head that plays out five minutes
• 1:30:26
  after the ending? The Brigadier turning up, But
• 1:30:29
  also with him is Sam Jones. And she goes, hi, I'm not dead.
• 1:30:32
  And. We haven't mentioned that yet.
• 1:30:35
  Great Sam Jones's grace, though. That was the evil version of me
• 1:30:39
  that had Lynn for us. A middle name, all right.
• 1:30:41
  Or just, you know, I needed to disappear for a bit.
• 1:30:43
  We faked my death. Oh, yeah.
• 1:30:45
  I've just been hanging out with the brick.
• 1:30:47
  That would be wonderful. OK, well, look, Jesus Christ,
• 1:30:52
  there's so much in this book. We say it's light.
• 1:30:54
  It's packed, right? OK, there's two other things I
• 1:30:57
  definitely need to talk to you people about. 1 is the Vor
• 1:31:00
  invasion, which actually only starts 2/3 into the book.
• 1:31:05
  That's when the moon appears into the sky.
• 1:31:08
  And two is all of this back story about Lana and Penelope
• 1:31:15
  and Ulysses and what is going on.
• 1:31:17
  OK, so let's do the Vor invasion first, right?
• 1:31:20
  OK, so because I feel like the story is sort of bubbling along
• 1:31:22
  quite nicely without an alien invasion, and then boom, there's
• 1:31:25
  flies coming out of the sky taking people out of eight HMV,
• 1:31:29
  spewing vomit all over them, carving them up with their legs,
• 1:31:33
  and terrible things are occurring.
• 1:31:36
  Go who? Anyone.
• 1:31:38
  This to me felt like something like they come from this place
• 1:31:41
  called the Shoal and the way he wants to screw up is, is is
• 1:31:47
  pretty crazy. And it reminds me of the sort of
• 1:31:49
  thing that you might see past the edge of the universe in like
• 1:31:54
  wild beyond that kind of thing. Like maybe on the edge of that.
• 1:31:57
  Like it's that got that same similar kind of vibe to me.
• 1:32:00
  Like that's like the Shoal is not far from there or near there
• 1:32:03
  or something. And and that's, and that's, and
• 1:32:07
  it's like Marnell who's just like you've interfered.
• 1:32:10
  You've interfered. How dare you?
• 1:32:11
  You're not supposed to do that, doctor.
• 1:32:14
  Well, why did the 4th turn up? Isn't it because like, he was
• 1:32:17
  going over there and shooting up the place and all that kind of
• 1:32:19
  stuff and then he pissed off in the TARDIS?
• 1:32:20
  Is that is that is that? A little bit of that, and it's a
• 1:32:23
  little bit of the master as well, isn't it, attracting them
• 1:32:26
  to the earth? Yeah, that's right.
• 1:32:29
  And I feel like this would be a very good and doable new series.
• 1:32:35
  Monster Invasion because kitties and adults.
• 1:32:40
  Everyone in between who would be freaked out.
• 1:32:43
  Freaked out by giant flies that disappear you with their
• 1:32:48
  freaking fly vomit? You don't even need to describe
• 1:32:51
  that. You just can't imagine anything
• 1:32:54
  worse. I fucking hate flies.
• 1:32:57
  The noise, the fact that they vomit and shit on things and
• 1:33:01
  stamp it in and then eat it. I just hate them.
• 1:33:04
  I can easily see them doing something like this in.
• 1:33:07
  That's another thing, like I know you probably hadn't seen a
• 1:33:11
  single frame or know anything about about it, but this does
• 1:33:14
  feel like that perfect kind of marriage between everything old
• 1:33:20
  and stuff that's new. Because I could see that this
• 1:33:23
  being some kind of terrifying gross out invasion the for the
• 1:33:28
  whole family to enjoy for the new series as well.
• 1:33:31
  And it's like don't have to even design aliens or costumes and
• 1:33:36
  stuff, just make them got awful giant flies done.
• 1:33:40
  I thought they were great. I could easily visualize them
• 1:33:44
  like and that's hard for me. I don't really picture stuff in
• 1:33:46
  my brain that often, but I can I can see giant flies kind of
• 1:33:51
  disappearing with their fly vomit and all that.
• 1:33:53
  It's gross and blotting out the sun and then the giant kind of
• 1:33:57
  moon as well, messing up the tides.
• 1:34:00
  Doesn't that moon kind of like eclipse the sun, but it also
• 1:34:05
  like the our moon's kind of in front of it or something for a
• 1:34:07
  time. So you could just see the
• 1:34:09
  contrast and how much bigger the shul moon or something is.
• 1:34:12
  It's I like it. It was very effective.
• 1:34:15
  Is this something that's introduced late?
• 1:34:17
  The ultimate wall that escalated fast because we go from, you
• 1:34:22
  know, a few people dead to 10 million in like 5 pages.
• 1:34:27
  Yeah. And I think it's it's like the
• 1:34:29
  dying days. Like I don't think that the 8th
• 1:34:32
  Doctor book really did 8 alien invasions that that much.
• 1:34:36
  I mean, did did they do another one before this book?
• 1:34:38
  I mean, they probably did. But yeah, that that kind of
• 1:34:41
  upping the stakes for the last book and having like a world
• 1:34:45
  damaging alien invasion is it's always it's always a good move.
• 1:34:51
  And then having your sort of like get out of jail free card
• 1:34:55
  at the end in the like the people that you think are dead,
• 1:34:58
  not all of them are dead. So it actually hasn't had as big
• 1:35:00
  an impact as as we think it has. So like the dead get to come
• 1:35:04
  back at the end, which is a nice, nice way to kind of
• 1:35:08
  resolve it and not have an Earth that's too dissimilar from our
• 1:35:12
  own Earth when we get onto the new series.
• 1:35:15
  And I, I love the comedy of, you know, bits trying to communicate
• 1:35:18
  with tricks as well. Yeah, I try and write on the
• 1:35:21
  mirror. What's that bruise on my arm?
• 1:35:24
  What's going on there? Although you read it and there
• 1:35:26
  are lots of bits where she goes, well, she thought she could hear
• 1:35:29
  him or and things like that. You're like it doesn't make.
• 1:35:31
  The balance of the car isn't it with the steering of someone
• 1:35:33
  else then shouldn't have gone like that.
• 1:35:36
  What is great as well as I think that invasion, right?
• 1:35:38
  He manages to have his cake and eat it.
• 1:35:41
  He manages to do like, you know, those big flies attacking a
• 1:35:44
  plane and it blowing up on the airfield and like a mass murder
• 1:35:50
  in the High Street and all that sort of stuff we love.
• 1:35:53
  And then he takes it down to the really intimate stuff of like
• 1:35:55
  there's a cat wandering about and the fly just comes along and
• 1:35:59
  eats the cat. So it's sort of like the
• 1:36:02
  intimate and the epic as well. I really like that.
• 1:36:05
  That's how to sell the any invasion, you know, without it,
• 1:36:08
  it's really thin if you don't see those human consequences of
• 1:36:12
  little consequences that matter to people.
• 1:36:14
  And that's what kind of makes it work because the war are
• 1:36:17
  deliberate, I think very dope. You can just kind of regeneric
• 1:36:21
  adversary. You know, there's no big goal to
• 1:36:24
  them, no big, but they're just a bunch of basically bastards to
• 1:36:28
  us. So the doctor has to go and beat
• 1:36:30
  them. Well, we go and visit their
• 1:36:33
  their, they're inside in their moon, and it's all got all the
• 1:36:37
  sick all over the walls and they're all sort of.
• 1:36:40
  Flying loads and loads of flies. It's, it's really visceral,
• 1:36:44
  isn't it, the. Factor is high.
• 1:36:47
  OK, well then what about the other thing then?
• 1:36:49
  All of this sort of Time Lord mythology?
• 1:36:52
  I mean, I get a bit baffled with all of that.
• 1:36:54
  If I'm on it, it doesn't truly interest me very much.
• 1:36:57
  But Andrew, you've got a look of distaste on your face.
• 1:37:01
  Well, it's all a bit bollocks, isn't it?
• 1:37:05
  It's, again, it's pulling together threads from the 8th
• 1:37:08
  Doctor books, but it's also stuff from the The Leakley Bible
• 1:37:13
  for the TV movie and the 8th Doctor's Missing Father and all
• 1:37:18
  of that stuff. And then Penelope is from the
• 1:37:21
  Room with No Doors. Yeah.
• 1:37:23
  And she's meant to be the Doctor's mother.
• 1:37:24
  Lana, who's? Oh, Lana's from Infinity.
• 1:37:26
  Doctors Infinity Doctors. So I think that this book is
• 1:37:29
  then implying that she's from the restored Gallifrey of the
• 1:37:33
  future and has come back to ancient Gallifrey or something.
• 1:37:40
  I mean, I think it's that stuff is there for people who like
• 1:37:44
  that stuff. It's nice that it's there.
• 1:37:47
  I personally hate anything that's to do with the Doctor's
• 1:37:49
  parents, where he came from, what inspired him to leave
• 1:37:52
  Gallifrey. I think it's tedious and shit
• 1:37:55
  and it's not important. May I suggest you don't read the
• 1:37:58
  new adventures then? Right.
• 1:38:01
  The the idea of the doctor having a mum and a dad, I don't
• 1:38:03
  care. Well, I don't.
• 1:38:04
  I don't want to meet the doctor's parents.
• 1:38:06
  It's not important, but you know, it's, it's another thread
• 1:38:11
  that's they're the people who've been paying attention to these
• 1:38:13
  little bits. And I think in our Natural
• 1:38:16
  History has some of that going on as well.
• 1:38:18
  So it's and it's, it's sort of implicit enough that you can
• 1:38:23
  read into it what you want if you want that to be the Doctor's
• 1:38:27
  origin story. And they do try and tie it into
• 1:38:30
  the vore because Lana's there. So they do.
• 1:38:33
  He does. I suppose it is just pulling in
• 1:38:35
  more stuff and bringing it into this big port man too of a
• 1:38:40
  celebration of everything. Yeah.
• 1:38:43
  But I suppose if you're going to do that, there's going to be
• 1:38:44
  something as you're less interested than that.
• 1:38:47
  I guess you know that that's all of his like Infinity Doctors
• 1:38:50
  stuff. So it's like, well, that was a
• 1:38:52
  very important to the book, to the range.
• 1:38:54
  I think you'll find everyone. Let's bring in my characters
• 1:38:56
  from there. It's just been.
• 1:38:58
  Reprinted. Why don't you go and buy it?
• 1:39:00
  You know, John, now I know you're sort of quite immersed in
• 1:39:06
  this mythology and stuff, so perhaps, you know, who is Mr.
• 1:39:09
  Saladimir and Ulysses of these people?
• 1:39:13
  See, on this, I'm actually with Andrew because I thought, I
• 1:39:16
  really thought the leaky Bible was such a load of bollocks.
• 1:39:19
  It really is. It's it's the very kind of
• 1:39:22
  American thing of the the lead character has to have daddy
• 1:39:25
  issues and it's just no, who cares?
• 1:39:31
  Tell me a story about them now what they are, what they're
• 1:39:32
  doing, not distant origins. I don't get do that in a few
• 1:39:37
  lines. It's fine.
• 1:39:39
  I don't mind Penelope. Penelope is great because you
• 1:39:43
  know, it's the way Kate writes her in the room with no doors
• 1:39:47
  because she's such a kind of ordinary character.
• 1:39:50
  So I, I, I liked seeing her come back on that front.
• 1:39:56
  I again, I, I'm, I'm with the 8th doctor on this.
• 1:39:59
  It's like. Yeah, whatever.
• 1:40:01
  Who cares? Move on.
• 1:40:02
  Get get on with it. Let's do it.
• 1:40:04
  But I, I'd love that Lance has tried to kind of redeem it.
• 1:40:09
  He's tried to provide this kind of celebration of absolutely
• 1:40:13
  every kind of backdrop there is to do with this character.
• 1:40:18
  But I just, I still just don't, I I just still can't stand that
• 1:40:23
  kind of backdrop to the character.
• 1:40:26
  No, give me, just give me what he's doing now.
• 1:40:28
  Show me him being a hero. And that's what I got from it.
• 1:40:31
  That's my great thing. So yeah, whatever it's there.
• 1:40:34
  I don't mind it. It's been going on since, you
• 1:40:37
  know what I've did. Oh God, there's a reference of
• 1:40:39
  bloody time with Genesis in Year 2, isn't there?
• 1:40:41
  Oh yeah, Paradise Towers. I love my.
• 1:40:49
  There's nothing he won't include in this blood.
• 1:40:52
  It's a celebration of everything, not just, you know,
• 1:40:55
  big doctors. I've just remembered something
• 1:40:57
  that I hated from this back story bit.
• 1:40:59
  Oh God. The TARDIS being Marno's TARDIS.
• 1:41:02
  Yeah. Ate it, ate it.
• 1:41:04
  Get in the bin. No, thank you.
• 1:41:06
  Awful. So it was a war TARDIS because
• 1:41:08
  he was going around blasting the war in it, wasn't he?
• 1:41:12
  Yeah. Yeah, and again, the doctors,
• 1:41:14
  whatever, doesn't matter, move on.
• 1:41:16
  I think that's the thing. If you don't like it, you can
• 1:41:18
  move on. It's great, doesn't matter.
• 1:41:21
  I don't like it and I'm moving on.
• 1:41:22
  I think it was like for the whole book I was going, Oh yes,
• 1:41:25
  oh, that's genius. And then when I started getting
• 1:41:27
  to these bits with Ulysses, hang on, who's this?
• 1:41:31
  What's this got to do with anything?
• 1:41:32
  What? Oh God, I feel like this is
• 1:41:35
  going into all this back story I know nothing about just those
• 1:41:38
  couple of scenes. I was like, and that's why, you
• 1:41:40
  know, I was so pleased to come in this cold.
• 1:41:42
  I thought maybe you people will be able to explain it to me, but
• 1:41:44
  apparently not. You're as in the dark as I am,
• 1:41:48
  and let's just got all the answers.
• 1:41:50
  It doesn't matter, it's the message.
• 1:41:53
  I do know that the Doctor decided to leave Gallifrey
• 1:41:56
  because he thought it was fucking boring.
• 1:41:58
  And guess what? Has it been proved right?
• 1:42:02
  That's right. How many times?
• 1:42:03
  I'm a weirdo who's not even all that big a fan of the Deadly
• 1:42:08
  Assassin either. It needed the companion.
• 1:42:11
  Let's let's be honest, but and and other things.
• 1:42:15
  And you know, I'm, I'm it. It has its place, I guess.
• 1:42:19
  But yeah, Gallifrey is kind of boring.
• 1:42:22
  And I will echo what the three of you gentlemen have said.
• 1:42:26
  Those parts were my least favorite parts.
• 1:42:28
  And if the 8th Doctor was willing to say who cares, let's
• 1:42:32
  move on. Guess what?
• 1:42:33
  Yeah, me too. Marnell.
• 1:42:35
  This is my Titus. I'm like, no, no.
• 1:42:39
  I mean, I'm prepared to give Lance out though.
• 1:42:41
  Like he's clearly very invested in all that bullshit.
• 1:42:45
  I mean. He's supposed to be the master's
• 1:42:46
  dad as well, isn't he, Marnell? If you say so.
• 1:42:52
  I don't. Need to know everyone's family
• 1:42:54
  trees. I do like Marnell's gun though.
• 1:42:57
  The gun they can set to like instant depression or.
• 1:43:01
  That's Underworld. That's a reference to
• 1:43:02
  Underworld, isn't it? The technology they've got in
• 1:43:04
  there, it all comes back to Underworld, you know?
• 1:43:07
  That that also met reminded me of the visitors like Gauntlet in
• 1:43:11
  like in Red Dwarfs. Sorry, I've been watching Red
• 1:43:13
  Dwarf again lately. Plus, I think Andrew is right.
• 1:43:16
  There are absolutely Doctor Who fans that are Michael.
• 1:43:19
  That's a good example. He's obsessed with all of that
• 1:43:22
  sort of Time Lord back story and continuity.
• 1:43:25
  And so you know what, there's stuff for us here, so there
• 1:43:27
  should be stuff for those people as well.
• 1:43:29
  I think I. Liked it when I was 17 when you
• 1:43:32
  know John Peel was doing the California Chronicles, the
• 1:43:35
  original Gallifrey Chronicles book.
• 1:43:36
  I like the Mythologist and you get into.
• 1:43:38
  And you say you were quite precocious at 7.
• 1:43:40
  Say no no. Not particularly.
• 1:43:42
  I don't think on that. He's got like.
• 1:43:44
  Scrolls of wrestle on, like in the back of that book.
• 1:43:48
  Yeah, I laughed that up when I was younger too.
• 1:43:50
  Yeah. But it's what when you get
• 1:43:52
  older, you want more? Well look fellas, I'm going to
• 1:43:56
  ask you now to the impossible is to try and summarise your
• 1:43:59
  thoughts on the Gallifrey Chronicles.
• 1:44:01
  If there's anything we haven't brought up that you would like
• 1:44:03
  to bring up before we head into our top three, let's go across
• 1:44:08
  to the person who came to it last, but most importantly,
• 1:44:13
  Luke. Thank you.
• 1:44:15
  I liked Rachel was tracking down Marnell's books, and she had
• 1:44:20
  trouble tracking them down. And if she could, they were
• 1:44:22
  really expensive and all this kind of stuff.
• 1:44:24
  And they're like, yeah, Lance, like your fucking books are.
• 1:44:27
  Thank you. This one was thankfully kind of
• 1:44:30
  cheap. If you have some really
• 1:44:32
  expensive ones, maybe you should help us out and get them on, get
• 1:44:37
  them reprinted or something like that.
• 1:44:38
  So I mean. You did have the The Dying Days
• 1:44:41
  on the BBC website, you know. I mean like if we can get a
• 1:44:45
  reprinting of the Sands of Time which isn't rare at all.
• 1:44:51
  Like they they reprinted a whole bunch for the 50th.
• 1:44:54
  None of them are rare. Dying days.
• 1:44:57
  Come on man come on. Why?
• 1:44:59
  Why, You know, and it's not like they can't use Benny.
• 1:45:02
  She's in The Big Bang generation, whatever.
• 1:45:04
  Like, come on, they can use Benny's like, yeah, so that was
• 1:45:10
  the TARDIS. Also, he's described it as being
• 1:45:13
  like a book because you know, the book, when you open it up,
• 1:45:18
  it's, it's bigger on the inside than than it first appears
• 1:45:22
  because it's, it's full of mystery and wonder and ideas and
• 1:45:26
  all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, he had a not only did
• 1:45:29
  he have that wonderful description of, of the Doctor
• 1:45:32
  and the many fans who kind of like carried the torch over the
• 1:45:36
  wilderness, he's got that wonderful description of the
• 1:45:38
  TARDIS as well, which I thought was wonderfully beautiful.
• 1:45:42
  Yeah, that's it. I've used all my notes.
• 1:45:49
  I absolutely think it's a perfect way to end a range.
• 1:45:52
  As I said, it's celebratory. It reminds what you loved about
• 1:45:56
  it. It reminds you probably what you
• 1:45:57
  might not like about it. It attempts to the impossible of
• 1:46:02
  summing up a range and yet it wears that.
• 1:46:06
  Also likely but it but the same track the album at the back is
• 1:46:10
  full of. Have your alternative rock music
• 1:46:13
  as well, which isn't quite in the mood of the book as it is
• 1:46:17
  with the pros, I think. But yeah, it's all it's it's a
• 1:46:23
  really nice way to end one phase of Doctor Who and send it off
• 1:46:29
  into another. Yeah, I'm, I'm just glad that we
• 1:46:36
  got this book because I think there they didn't have to do
• 1:46:41
  this and Russell T Davies didn't have to let this range continue.
• 1:46:45
  It could have just faded into nothing after, you know, like
• 1:46:50
  the dead stone memorial or something like that.
• 1:46:52
  So I think it's so nice that we get this kind of capstone to the
• 1:46:55
  range that rounds it all off for the few 1000 people who were
• 1:46:59
  still reading at that point. And it's also weirdly, for a
• 1:47:05
  book that wraps up a 70 book arc, it's just very accessible.
• 1:47:10
  Like it's so lightly written. And I think if you were just
• 1:47:15
  sort of a general Doctor Who fan, I think there's a lot that
• 1:47:17
  you can get out of this. And you don't really need to
• 1:47:19
  understand all of the references and continuity in it to
• 1:47:23
  understand what's going on with the characters and the Doctor
• 1:47:26
  and tricks and fits. So yeah, I think it's a really
• 1:47:30
  strong part of this history of the of the of the wilderness
• 1:47:37
  years. So yeah, weird weirdly for.
• 1:47:39
  So continuity level may be a good entry book for someone.
• 1:47:45
  Right at the end. And, you know, 284 pages, it's
• 1:47:48
  going to be some nice, decent fuel for those Romanian
• 1:47:50
  orphanages. Orphanages.
• 1:47:53
  I wonder, I wonder if there's a kid who watched series 1, read
• 1:48:00
  like the three like hardback 9th doctor books and then saw this
• 1:48:03
  one on the chef like oh, Gallifrey, all the answers, all
• 1:48:07
  the answers and then was was sucked in or scared off for the
• 1:48:11
  rest of their life. I.
• 1:48:13
  Genuinely think that without the Gallifrey Chronicles.
• 1:48:16
  I mean I I love the run. I think they did wonderful
• 1:48:19
  things and good things and terrible things and boring
• 1:48:22
  things and exciting things, but without this it feels like a
• 1:48:26
  less cohesive whole. And I think he did come in at
• 1:48:31
  the end and retroactively sort of cross all the TS, dot all the
• 1:48:36
  IS and make it feel like it was a planned run madly somehow.
• 1:48:41
  Without it, it would feel far less so.
• 1:48:44
  And the bit that made me most emotional in this book, reading
• 1:48:46
  it this time was weirdly when that atom bomb tears through the
• 1:48:50
  TARDIS. Because that was the point where
• 1:48:52
  I was like, no, this, this is this is Lance saying this is all
• 1:48:56
  over now. The 8th Doctor is gone.
• 1:48:59
  His identity at the time is gone.
• 1:49:01
  Every all those adventures, everything they took away from
• 1:49:03
  it is gone. Fitz's room, all of it is torn
• 1:49:06
  away and we're moving on to the next thing.
• 1:49:09
  And then brilliantly, at the end of the book, he suggests, no,
• 1:49:14
  it's not if you don't want it to be, because I'm going to end it
• 1:49:17
  on a cliffhanger and it can keep going as long as you want it to.
• 1:49:20
  No matter what the new series is saying, you can keep keep it
• 1:49:23
  going on. And I think that's just a
• 1:49:26
  wonderful way to win. But again, it's a literal
• 1:49:28
  cliffhanger. They're jumping up a Cliff.
• 1:49:31
  Yeah, it's gorgeous. Absolutely.
• 1:49:33
  Well, a bit better than dragon fire as well, isn't it?
• 1:49:35
  Well, fellas, what a what? A delightful read.
• 1:49:40
  I'm fairly certain wherever we're going next is going to be
• 1:49:42
  less interesting. So what now?
• 1:49:45
  Tricks us? The Doctor looks his free
• 1:49:47
  companions. You tell me.
• 1:49:50
  Rachel takes a deep breath. We all die.
• 1:49:54
  The vore finders here. Murderers like they murdered
• 1:49:57
  Mano. They go back and wait, feeding
• 1:49:59
  on people they've already killed.
• 1:50:01
  They breed safe in this mountain, able to ignore
• 1:50:04
  anything we throw at them, from a squad of troops to a nuclear
• 1:50:07
  bomb. Drop straight down one of these
• 1:50:09
  holes. Then, probably sooner than we
• 1:50:11
  think possible, they fly out of these holes.
• 1:50:14
  Kill all the people, kill all the animals, kill all the
• 1:50:17
  plants, kill all the other insects until it's just them and
• 1:50:20
  their mushrooms left. The whole world becomes a hive.
• 1:50:24
  They find a way to pilot it around like they did that moon,
• 1:50:27
  and the cycle starts again. Fitz has a lopsided grin.
• 1:50:32
  You really haven't been paying attention, have you Love?
• 1:50:35
  They're monsters. He's the Doctor.
• 1:50:38
  There's only one way this is going to end.
• 1:50:41
  Look, this is a whopping great ventilation shaft.
• 1:50:45
  It's a way in. The Doctor leaks down it, coat
• 1:50:48
  tails and hair flapping. Lands finds out what the Voora
• 1:50:52
  planning discovers their weakness.
• 1:50:54
  He confronts them, and then he kicks their ass.
• 1:50:57
  An hour from now, we'll be watching from a safe distance as
• 1:50:59
  this mountain explodes, taking every ball with it.
• 1:51:03
  Leaps down, falls down. More like no one could survive
• 1:51:07
  that. The dogs acute.
• 1:51:09
  I can't even imagine how he hopes to beat them.
• 1:51:12
  That Rachel is your problem, not his tricks.
• 1:51:16
  Tells her nothing ever ends, says Fitz.
• 1:51:19
  Especially not him. He'll die if he does.
• 1:51:23
  He'll do it, saving the Earth, and then he'll come back, all
• 1:51:26
  new and better than ever, with a bit of fashion sense this time.
• 1:51:31
  Tricks suggests the Doctor has been listening to them.
• 1:51:34
  He can also hear the monsters down there, millions of them, at
• 1:51:37
  home in the darkness. The vole are massing soon, and
• 1:51:42
  they're stopped. They will emerge and bring out
• 1:51:44
  the darkness with them. They're countless more like them
• 1:51:47
  all across the universe, those that have destroyed more than
• 1:51:50
  they've created. They must be fought.
• 1:51:54
  A man cannot fight them all, though, not without becoming the
• 1:51:58
  worst monster of all. One day, the Doctor knows as he
• 1:52:01
  gazes down, he will fall. He tugs at the lapels of his
• 1:52:07
  frock coat. Perhaps for the last time.
• 1:52:10
  I have a plan, but I can't beat them alone.
• 1:52:13
  Fitz smiles, takes tricks his hand.
• 1:52:16
  You won't have to. Shall we?
• 1:52:19
  The Doctor asked and he leaps. We do have some work to do 1st
• 1:52:26
  and we've got our top three favorite fan wank references or
• 1:52:33
  moments in the book and I'm going to start.
• 1:52:38
  I mean, there's so much to choose from in the book, isn't
• 1:52:41
  there? It did take me a little while.
• 1:52:44
  Let's go round, you know, one a piece.
• 1:52:46
  We'll start with John, Luke, Andrew, me, John.
• 1:52:51
  Right. This is because it's it's one of
• 1:52:56
  the silliest stories in the whole of the classrooms.
• 1:52:58
  I love it. The cap, the Thai monster,
• 1:53:00
  right? Tom Tip.
• 1:53:02
  And I love that they based the grimmest, most sadistic, most
• 1:53:06
  horrific book in the whole range on the technology on Tom Tip
• 1:53:14
  from the Thai Monster. So yeah, falls the shadow.
• 1:53:19
  It just makes me laugh every single time in that I need a
• 1:53:23
  laugh in the middle of that book I.
• 1:53:26
  Thought you were talking about the quantum Archangel, Do you
• 1:53:28
  know? I thought you were going to.
• 1:53:34
  OK, so we're starting with Tom Tick.
• 1:53:36
  Good place to start, Luke. Well, I'm just going to be a bit
• 1:53:42
  more broad, and because I haven't mentioned the lion once.
• 1:53:45
  The lion, Man, I liked the return of the land of fiction in
• 1:53:49
  Conundrum. You know what's going on with
• 1:53:53
  this world, what's what's happening?
• 1:53:55
  And yeah, it turns out we've been in the land of the fiction
• 1:53:58
  this whole time. I thought that was great.
• 1:54:01
  Tom T The Land of Fiction. Andrew.
• 1:54:06
  I staying with the obscure references the board being a
• 1:54:14
  member of the remote which is a throwaway funny line in
• 1:54:19
  interference that this sort of very innocent silly story from
• 1:54:23
  the 60s is actually like deeply infected by the faction paradox,
• 1:54:27
  which I think is very funny. And and mine is sort of similar
• 1:54:31
  to yours, but different. And that is, of course, the
• 1:54:35
  Daleks. No, sorry, the Crotons turning
• 1:54:38
  up in alien bodies. One of the best chapter endings
• 1:54:42
  ever. The Crotons have come to the
• 1:54:44
  auction, you know, wobbling about, and you think it's going
• 1:54:47
  to be the Daleks. It is glorious.
• 1:54:49
  Especially when that Dalek is sucked out of its casing by
• 1:54:54
  Croton crystals. Oh, it's gorgeous.
• 1:54:56
  Long live the Crotons, John. I'm going to go.
• 1:55:01
  So I thought I was going to go quite back, Angel, I am going to
• 1:55:04
  go creaking because he has to get a mansion here because you
• 1:55:07
  know, him, Lance and Lawrence are the masters of this.
• 1:55:10
  So I'm just going to go for a little reference in millennial
• 1:55:13
  writes because Craig nearly 20 years dead now.
• 1:55:17
  God bless him, and it makes me smile.
• 1:55:19
  He managed to get the giant wasp versus the quarks into
• 1:55:23
  millennial rights. And I just smile every single
• 1:55:27
  time I read that because I know that she loved it.
• 1:55:29
  And I I can just imagine his little face when he was actually
• 1:55:32
  typing that. It must have been having a ball.
• 1:55:34
  So yeah, giant Wasps versus quarks.
• 1:55:38
  Fabulous look. I'm pretty sure I've got my book
• 1:55:43
  correct here, but you'll I guess I've got 3 nerves that'll
• 1:55:47
  correct me if I'm wrong. I like the reference in the
• 1:55:51
  Empire of Glass. This is around this, it's around
• 1:55:53
  here that the first Doctor experiences his time in the
• 1:55:57
  Three Doctors in the time Eddie. So I like that little link
• 1:56:02
  there. And there's some time audio
• 1:56:04
  links in that book as well. Like there's an Irving Brexitol
• 1:56:07
  in that book as well. So yeah.
• 1:56:08
  Empire of Glass, Yeah. By Andy Lane.
• 1:56:10
  Yeah. That's awesome.
• 1:56:13
  I'm going to everybody's favorite 8th Doctor novel, The
• 1:56:17
  Domino Effect. What's continuity?
• 1:56:21
  And man. Constantly speaking up.
• 1:56:24
  Well, there's a bit in that book where it's set in a parallel
• 1:56:26
  universe and we're in the 8th Doctor book where we haven't had
• 1:56:29
  any continuity for ages. And the Doctor kind of meets
• 1:56:33
  these freedom fighters in the parallel universe.
• 1:56:36
  And it's very clearly the Brigadier and Ace.
• 1:56:40
  And, you know, we were so starved in those books in the
• 1:56:43
  latter half of of this kind of stuff.
• 1:56:45
  It was just like a lovely like, oh, you know, we can do this.
• 1:56:49
  We can have, we can have like these old companions turning up
• 1:56:53
  as long as they're in a parallel universe and we don't call them
• 1:56:55
  by their names. But yeah, that was like one of
• 1:56:58
  those just like yay moments. You know Andrew, I went back and
• 1:57:01
  read my review of the Domino Effect.
• 1:57:03
  I gave it 9 out of 10. I was well impressed back in the
• 1:57:07
  day. We may have to revisit this one.
• 1:57:10
  Well, who could possibly be the sinister super villain of
• 1:57:14
  Original Sin behind all these? Oh you bastard, I knew you were
• 1:57:19
  going to go for it. It had to be one second.
• 1:57:22
  Of course, it's everybody's favorite Packer, Tobias Bourne
• 1:57:28
  from The Invasion. I mean, we never saw it coming,
• 1:57:30
  but it's fucking glorious. Love that book.
• 1:57:35
  Freaking love that too Oh my God.
• 1:57:38
  Sorry, Luke. That's all right.
• 1:57:41
  Come on, this has got to be the wankiest wank now for #1.
• 1:57:45
  Well, I'm going to go for a book which is basically nothing but
• 1:57:48
  Bam Wank, but it's Bam Wank for the books themselves.
• 1:57:52
  I'm going to choose, and I can understand if you don't think of
• 1:57:55
  this is like the End of Time Part 2, the last 10 minutes
• 1:57:58
  there. The chapter where Paul Cornell
• 1:58:02
  gives every writer up to that point of the new adventures, a
• 1:58:07
  paragraph of the row with their own characters from all those
• 1:58:11
  books at the wedding. Just a little chat.
• 1:58:17
  And it's just like, yeah, this is what I've kind of loved, or
• 1:58:21
  not loved from the range of views, that kind of sense of a
• 1:58:24
  shared universe building an entire chapter of just being
• 1:58:28
  completely bloody. Looking back, it's basically the
• 1:58:33
  Bamack of the books and I bloody love it.
• 1:58:37
  Wonderful. I'd love to read that chapter
• 1:58:40
  again just to see how everyone prose is different from
• 1:58:42
  paragraph to paragraph. Oh.
• 1:58:44
  God, yeah. Luke.
• 1:58:48
  All right, I've been with one of my my alternates because you
• 1:58:50
  damn straight. I was going to say to buy his
• 1:58:52
  phone right about now. When I was younger, I don't
• 1:58:55
  mind. So I don't really care so much
• 1:58:56
  anymore. But when I was younger, I always
• 1:58:58
  thought it would be really cool with Blake 7 and Doctor Who
• 1:59:01
  crossed over somehow. And it kind of did in November
• 1:59:05
  of 1999. Like I said, book like Chris
• 1:59:09
  Boucher. I know he's he books usually get
• 1:59:12
  shit on a little bit, but last man running's air course Mark is
• 1:59:15
  decent. Science fiction is great and I
• 1:59:18
  haven't read match of the day yet so sorry.
• 1:59:20
  I can't say that but Carnell from what is it killer?
• 1:59:26
  I think the one with weapon that's it that's it from from
• 1:59:30
  the series B story weapon with EMI pack.
• 1:59:32
  He's the master psycho strategist and hey, what, what
• 1:59:37
  didn't he have planned for? Well, it was the wild card of
• 1:59:40
  the 4th Doctor and Leela turning up.
• 1:59:43
  And it made me laugh too, because the character who plays
• 1:59:45
  Carnell does turn or the actor does turn up in 1/4 Doctor and
• 1:59:51
  Leela's story, the image of Fen Dahl, He's the, he's the turned
• 1:59:55
  out to be the bad guy at the end, doesn't he?
• 1:59:56
  So yeah, that's, that's my little bit of fan right there.
• 2:00:00
  So you got the actor who played Carnell in a fourth Doctor
• 2:00:03
  Leela's story. And then you've got.
• 2:00:05
  Carnell turning up in culpa sparkle.
• 2:00:07
  I see Carnell as a he has an almost Paul Marzian life as he
• 2:00:11
  jumps from thing to thing. He's also in the Cowdor City
• 2:00:14
  audios as well. He's everywhere.
• 2:00:17
  OK, Andrew, come on, wankers. So my last one is 1 that's
• 2:00:26
  already been mentioned this episode and it's from the
• 2:00:28
  Gallifrey Chronicles. It's the the reference to Ace
• 2:00:33
  getting some of Mel's memories, which is a reference all the way
• 2:00:38
  back to time when Genesis where John Peel gets his continuity
• 2:00:44
  wrong and thinks that Ace was in Paradise Towers.
• 2:00:46
  And then it becomes a key plot point in the Gallifrey
• 2:00:49
  Chronicles of the Doctor thinking about memories being
• 2:00:53
  edited by the TARDIS and what's happened to him.
• 2:00:55
  So it's just like, again, bringing things full circle,
• 2:00:58
  going right back to the first original novel, picking
• 2:01:00
  something really obscure and doing something silly but also
• 2:01:05
  really important to the story with it in the last book.
• 2:01:09
  And I'm going to end on I'm surprised no one else chose
• 2:01:13
  this. It's the worst, wankiest wank
• 2:01:17
  fest you're ever going to see in a Doctor Who.
• 2:01:19
  Divided loyalties. It's divided loyalties and the
• 2:01:23
  Decker. I can we remember, I can't
• 2:01:26
  remember who's there? The Ronnie's definitely there.
• 2:01:29
  The master, The monk. The monks in there.
• 2:01:32
  Barusa. I think he's the teacher that
• 2:01:35
  obviously the doctor. Anyone else?
• 2:01:37
  Is there? Isn't he?
• 2:01:37
  Tracks. Yeah, just every time.
• 2:01:40
  Lord, that Gary Russell could possibly think of as little
• 2:01:44
  Nippers back in the Time Nord Academy.
• 2:01:48
  Oh, it's just appalling. Please can we do divided
• 2:01:51
  loyalties one day? I mean God.
• 2:01:53
  Yes. Come on, Adric, smelly pyjamas,
• 2:01:55
  we've got to do it. I haven't been divided loyalty
• 2:01:59
  since it came out so. Yeah, yeah, same.
• 2:02:02
  I mean, I feel like the TV, the new series has sort of got as
• 2:02:06
  bad. We've got insanity in sort of
• 2:02:08
  latter years. But oh, the books, man, they
• 2:02:11
  could indulge, couldn't they? That's the big boys.
• 2:02:15
  I mean, at the end of this episode, I've got no idea what
• 2:02:18
  we're doing next. Would someone please enlighten
• 2:02:20
  me? Wasn't the I think it's one that
• 2:02:24
  you called in the chat. You, you were called warminger.
• 2:02:30
  Warminger. How could I forget I'm halfway
• 2:02:35
  through it. The horror.
• 2:02:38
  The horror. Has anybody started it yet?
• 2:02:42
  No, there's a thread going on this podcast, right where I do a
• 2:02:46
  book I really love and I'm excited to talk about, and then
• 2:02:50
  we follow it up with stuff I don't like and I feel like at
• 2:02:53
  least Terry's going to give me something immensely readable and
• 2:02:56
  and fun. So warmonger.
• 2:02:58
  I guess it's a story. How bad could it be?
• 2:03:02
  It's that's how you sift out the gold though, right?
• 2:03:04
  By comparing it to the ship. That's right, and trust me.
• 2:03:11
  Now, Andrew and Luke and I talked about blood harvest Once
• 2:03:16
  Upon a time. You know, we was quite appalled
• 2:03:19
  by a couple of strong references to sexual misconduct.
• 2:03:24
  I'm just going to say now, boys, please prepare yourselves before
• 2:03:27
  you go into this book, all right?
• 2:03:29
  You need to take a deep breath. Even in time works.
• 2:03:33
  This is what I like. Some Rubenesque or something,
• 2:03:35
  the doctor says. OK, Yeah.
• 2:03:38
  I can only think that Justin Richards took the month off when
• 2:03:42
  this. Came in.
• 2:03:44
  Oh, don't worry about Terry, he'll deliver.
• 2:03:46
  It's fine. We'll need to edit a word.
• 2:03:50
  Well, I'm just going to say as an enticement, it's a long quai,
• 2:03:53
  and you'll all find out what that means in the book.
• 2:03:57
  Fellas, thank you for reading the Gallifrey Chronicles.
• 2:04:00
  Thank you for continuing this odyssey through the books.
• 2:04:04
  Oh, now come on. I can never know how to end
• 2:04:06
  these things. Can someone please give thank?
• 2:04:08
  You for celebrating the May, finishing the 8th Doctor
• 2:04:11
  adventures. I've got to celebrate it with
• 2:04:13
  you. 3 Charity did not give a single shit.
• 2:04:17
  Your eyes glazed over when I tried to explain.
• 2:04:19
  I read the last book and it featured all this stuff and just
• 2:04:22
  to celebrate it with you three, it was fucking amazing.
• 2:04:24
  Thank you so much. Oh, let's all leap.
• 2:04:27
  Into this termite I was. Going to say, shall we, the
• 2:04:31
  doctor? Take my hand everybody.
• 2:04:34
  Let's go. The.