Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Parasite by Jim Mortimore (featuring David Gillespie-Pratt, Dan Pinn & Gareth Bowley)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Parasite by Jim Mortimore (featuring David Gillespie-Pratt, Dan Pinn & Gareth Bowley) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:01
  Bernie Summerfield stepped from the TARDIS, lost her balance,
• 0:06
  floated forward 100 metres and thumped head first into the base
• 0:10
  of a 60 kilometre high tree. The Doctor followed his
• 0:15
  companion rather more cautiously from the ship, took her by the
• 0:20
  hand and helped her into a more comfortable position.
• 0:24
  Didn't I mention the lack of gravity here?
• 0:27
  Sorry. And Bernice groaned and rubbed
• 0:30
  her head. Her stomach was doing flip
• 0:33
  flops. She stared angrily at the
• 0:35
  Doctor, but his expression of absent minded concern only made
• 0:39
  her want to giggle, despite the pain in her head.
• 0:43
  And so much for the old space legs.
• 0:45
  She said ruefully. She heard the sound of laughter
• 0:48
  and looked up. Hey Benny, did you know you're
• 0:50
  upside down? Ace had also left the TARDIS.
• 0:54
  She closed the doors and was standing beside the Doctor, all
• 0:58
  perfectly normal, except that from Beneath's point of view,
• 1:03
  they were the ones who were upside down.
• 1:06
  I'm not even going to dignify that observation with a reply.
• 1:09
  She said as firmly as she could manage, ignoring the fresh
• 1:13
  laughter from Ace. She looked around, trying to
• 1:16
  settle her stomach by sheer willpower so she could
• 1:19
  concentrate on her surroundings. The ground appeared to be
• 1:22
  hanging a few feet above her head.
• 1:25
  As she looked closer, she realized it wasn't the solid
• 1:28
  ground she'd assumed, but simply a mass of vegetation growing
• 1:32
  around and through itself until it became too dense to see
• 1:35
  through. The vegetation swirled with
• 1:38
  light, bright points glimmering through washers of dimmer
• 1:42
  colour, and for a moment she was caught by a shift of perspective
• 1:47
  so that she seemed to be looking into the mouth of a vast cave
• 1:51
  filled with fluorescent crystals.
• 1:54
  Blinking, she looked away, only to have perspective play another
• 1:59
  trick on her. Now she was looking along the
• 2:01
  length of the tree into which she had collided.
• 2:04
  The tree receded through layer after layer of foliage towards a
• 2:09
  vast ocean that strode with colour.
• 2:13
  There were what appeared to be a number of rocks drifting lazily
• 2:16
  from the surface of the ocean into the atmosphere.
• 2:20
  Ribbons of glowing water trail from the rocks collecting into
• 2:23
  free floating globes or crashing back into the ocean with a
• 2:26
  thunderous roar. At least, she expected to hear a
• 2:31
  thunderous roar. It was actually several minutes
• 2:34
  before the sound of the water came distantly to her ears, a
• 2:37
  low rumble that made the leaves on the trees shiver and shimmer
• 2:41
  with even more light. Suddenly, Bernice realized,
• 2:47
  really realized, how far she was looking, how tall the tree was,
• 2:52
  how distant the ocean, how big the rocks.
• 2:56
  She clutched on to the nearest solid object for support and
• 3:00
  remained gazing stupidly into the distance.
• 3:04
  If this tree was really as long as it looked, then every branch
• 3:08
  that sprung from it would be at least as tall as a normal tree,
• 3:12
  and the ocean would be several 100 kilometers away, and the
• 3:15
  rocks would be as big as grief, as big as mountain Rangers ever
• 3:23
  had. A moment when words weren't
• 3:24
  enough. Benice said quietly to no one in
• 3:26
  particular. Ace nodded.
• 3:28
  Oh, yes. She folded into a ball, twisted
• 3:32
  and called her limbs, and hung motionless beside Benice, now
• 3:35
  also, relatively speaking, the right way up.
• 3:38
  Have you been here before, Professor?
• 3:40
  Ace asked. If the Doctor noticed Ace's use
• 3:43
  of an old familiar name, he didn't acknowledge it.
• 3:47
  As it happens, no. Where do you reckon we are,
• 3:51
  then? Some sort of artificial
• 3:52
  biosphere? In reply, the Doctor pulled a
• 3:56
  brass telescope from his pocket, extended it to its full length,
• 3:59
  and handed it to Bernice. Benny, you've been on artificial
• 4:02
  worlds before, What do you think?
• 4:05
  Taking the telescope with a grin, Benny peered through it at
• 4:09
  her more distant surroundings. The Virat Veil was nothing like
• 4:14
  this. She lowered the telescope and
• 4:16
  shook her head. Seems too random to me.
• 4:19
  Who'd want to build a biosphere when the trees are higher, the
• 4:22
  mountains, and the mountains fly in and out of the ocean?
• 4:25
  She stared around herself, remembering to grab hold of a
• 4:28
  branch for stability at the last moment.
• 4:30
  And anyway, where's the sun? Perhaps it's gone out.
• 4:34
  Ace flipped her hair back and tucked it into the collar of her
• 4:37
  denim shirt to stop it drifting around her face.
• 4:40
  Yeah, this could be one of those biospheres where everyone's died
• 4:43
  and it's all sort of out of control, overgrown.
• 4:45
  You know, like that similarity thing you were telling me about
• 4:48
  Benny. Based on the book.
• 4:49
  Oh, by what's his name? Precisely?
• 4:52
  Said the Doctor dryly beneath, pursed her lips thoughtfully.
• 4:56
  You mean all this? She gestured around herself,
• 5:00
  forgot to hold on to the branch, began to spin slowly.
• 5:02
  It might have been artificially created after all.
• 5:05
  I wouldn't be too quick to discount any possibility if I
• 5:08
  were you. The Doctor appeared around,
• 5:11
  snagged a lump of rock drifting past, brought it close to
• 5:13
  examine it. He tapped the rock smartly with
• 5:16
  the handle of his umbrella and then held it to his ear.
• 5:18
  For all the world like a child listening to the sound of the
• 5:21
  ocean in a seashell, he mused. A loosely compacted a
• 5:27
  sedimentary aggregate. And that's interesting, not to
• 5:30
  say odd. Yes, indeed, most odd.
• 5:34
  Is that so? Benice managed to say.
• 5:36
  She spun helplessly beside him. The doctor appeared to notice
• 5:39
  Benice's plight for the first time.
• 5:41
  He and Ace each took hold of 1 of Benice's arms and gently
• 5:44
  brought her to a halt. Indeed, the doctor continued.
• 5:48
  Sedimentary. A rock is created by the
• 5:51
  compaction of layers of sea ooze are the skeletal remains of
• 5:54
  marine creatures and other debris compaction.
• 5:57
  He added for emphasis by gravity.
• 6:01
  Ace grinned. I expect you've noticed the lack
• 6:03
  of gravity here. Thanks for the geology lesson.
• 6:10
  Beneath muttered crossly, letting go of Ace in the
• 6:12
  Doctor's arm. So we've got an impossible rock.
• 6:15
  Well that's OK if it's right in with the rest of the
• 6:17
  surroundings. As the Doctor flipped away the
• 6:19
  rock she added. Talking of which, I don't
• 6:22
  suppose you've got anything in the TARDIS which might make it
• 6:25
  easier to get around? Well, as it happens.
• 6:28
  Oh come off it you pair of wims, this is wicked.
• 6:30
  Ace flipped again in mid air, twisted until she was at right
• 6:34
  angles to beneath, and the Doctor then placed her feet
• 6:36
  firmly against the tree and pushed herself off in a long
• 6:40
  glide. Better than fun fairs.
• 6:42
  She said distantly. I'm going to explore.
• 6:44
  Coming, anyone? Well.
• 6:47
  Benice glanced at the doctor, detected the faintest of smiles
• 6:50
  edging the corners of his mouth. He tipped his battered fedora
• 6:53
  forward and scratched his head. Why not?
• 6:55
  He offered his arm to Benice When she took it, he swung her
• 6:59
  around and threw her after Ace. She yelped an alarm, arms
• 7:03
  flapping wildly as she speed for the second time through the air.
• 7:06
  Hey, what's the big idea? The doctor grinned.
• 7:09
  Grasp the moment, Benny. Enjoy yourself.
• 7:11
  You may never get another chance.
• 7:14
  A minute or two later, Menisce grunted as Ace clamped an arm
• 7:17
  around her waist, absorbing her momentum skillfully and bringing
• 7:21
  her to a halt. This time she was thankful to
• 7:24
  notice the right way up. Benisce moved slowly through the
• 7:32
  storm shattered city, trying to find the place where the Doctor
• 7:35
  had come to rest. Every now and then she came
• 7:38
  across a piece of wreckage she identified as alien to the
• 7:41
  city's construction. Trying to visualize the object
• 7:45
  from within the pieces might have come.
• 7:48
  Bernice was surprised to find herself picturing a raft.
• 7:52
  What had the doctor been up to? Windsurfing the artifact could
• 7:56
  add a whole new dimension to that sport.
• 8:00
  Peripherally, she was aware of large sections of the city
• 8:03
  shaking themselves to pieces. Ellie Nekus had vanished into
• 8:07
  the crowd of rigors swarming across the sail control lines.
• 8:12
  The sails stretch for half a kilometre before the city, and
• 8:16
  the monkeys were tiny specks on the hundreds of ropes, reminding
• 8:20
  Bernice of the classic 1950s Gulliver she'd once pirated from
• 8:24
  the Museum of Terran Cultural Heritage on Triton.
• 8:28
  The city shook not with the impact of rocks, even though
• 8:32
  there were hundreds of such impacts, but with the strain of
• 8:35
  the linking structures. A sails unfold, looped out into
• 8:39
  the storm filled with air. The city began to roll, twisting
• 8:43
  tent buildings into thick ropes of cloth and wood, trapping
• 8:47
  screaming monkeys inside and crushing them between the heavy
• 8:50
  structural poles. Boulders of all sizes slashed
• 8:54
  through the sails meet along rips that appeared as pin holes
• 8:58
  because of the distance. Overhead the ocean swung as the
• 9:02
  city rolled. Glimmering multi coloured light
• 9:04
  flickered through the clouds of dust and rubble.
• 9:07
  And then came the lightning, vast sheets of light twisting
• 9:12
  through the sky, boiling the moisture in the air and
• 9:15
  increasing the frenzy of the storm beneath.
• 9:18
  Smell, ionization. The flash of light illuminated
• 9:21
  hundreds of wriggling monkeys scrambling through the city.
• 9:25
  A distant orange glow told her some part of the city had begun
• 9:29
  to burn. Now she was going to find the
• 9:32
  doctor in this. She reeled.
• 9:35
  The sky came down and punched her, crushed her and tossed her
• 9:39
  aside, smashed her through the tent and into a scaffolding of
• 9:42
  branches. Thunder Beneath shook her head.
• 9:46
  Everything was silent. Her head was full of cotton, her
• 9:52
  ears rang and she lurched dizzily as she tried to
• 9:55
  orientate herself. She felt bile rise in her
• 10:00
  throat. She couldn't, couldn't move
• 10:02
  properly. Her arms and legs wouldn't move
• 10:04
  properly. She cried out with frustration,
• 10:06
  heard nothing except the dreadful ringing in her ears.
• 10:10
  She was deaf. The Thunder had deafened her
• 10:15
  head reeling beneath, felt herself swept away from the
• 10:18
  sails and deeper into the city. Whenever she grabbed A handhold
• 10:23
  to try and control her motion, vibrations warmed her arm into a
• 10:28
  body. The city was coming apart.
• 10:30
  She had to find the doctor. Had to find Elenakis.
• 10:34
  Then the city opened before her, a vast section ripped away by
• 10:38
  the storm. Lightning flashed again, the
• 10:41
  white light primal, almost welcoming after the visual chaos
• 10:46
  of the last few days. She felt the city shudder as
• 10:50
  Thunder crackled around her, felt her own body shake, thought
• 10:55
  she heard nothing more. Fires began, spread, then
• 11:00
  through the chaos of familiar shape, back lit by the fire.
• 11:04
  Hat. Umbrella eyes turned in wonder
• 11:08
  to the storm drinking in the view.
• 11:10
  Dr. She screamed the name aloud even though she couldn't hear
• 11:15
  it, knew he must have heard her voice because he turned, reached
• 11:20
  out casually with his umbrella to snag her as she will pass.
• 11:24
  Dr. Yosef, are you OK? It's me, Benny, are you all
• 11:27
  right? And then his eyes lower to her
• 11:30
  own, distant, disturbed, his mouth working, the words a
• 11:36
  beacon in the storm, the meaning plain even without sound, the
• 11:41
  shock more of a blow than even the Thunder.
• 11:46
  Who are you? He asked.
• 11:52
  So just before we start the latest episode of the Hamster
• 11:55
  Book Club, I want everyone listening, everybody in the
• 11:59
  room, just to pause for a second to take yourself back.
• 12:03
  It's Christmas 1994, you've written your list for Santa and
• 12:08
  you've asked for dragon fire on video, some Dappo Dalek figures
• 12:12
  and a brand new Doctor Who book. Christmas morning you race
• 12:17
  downstairs, you've got Cursive Paladin.
• 12:19
  OK, fair enough, you can get on with that.
• 12:22
  Some he man figures that you didn't ask for but you did get
• 12:25
  that brand new Doctor Who book and it's called Parasite.
• 12:32
  You ask your mum will you read this to me?
• 12:35
  Will you read my new Doctor Who book?
• 12:37
  And she says yes. And eventually your mum gets to
• 12:42
  the following statements, we can locate the site of the bleeding
• 12:47
  within the skull. With this, GAIL said.
• 12:50
  What goodwill that do? Bannon's voice came again,
• 12:53
  clearer this time, echoes fading.
• 12:56
  We must relieve the pressure on her brain, obviously, but how?
• 13:01
  After a moment, Bannon said. Fetch the drill.
• 13:06
  Bernice began to moan, and something to stop her biting her
• 13:10
  tongue. When we use it.
• 13:15
  Merry Christmas, Doctor Who fans, in 1994, welcome back to
• 13:20
  the Hamster Book Club. And if you haven't guessed, the
• 13:24
  subject this month is the much maligned but certainly
• 13:29
  interesting 1994 novel Parasite by Jim Mortimer.
• 13:33
  And tonight, to pick apart the parasite and to see what lies
• 13:38
  within, I have three highly evolved guests.
• 13:41
  With me today I have Mr. Joe Ford, Dan Pin and Gareth Barely.
• 13:47
  Good evening, gentlemen, and how are we all?
• 13:52
  Who's going first? I want Christmas back.
• 13:54
  I want Christmas back. I've already got one thing to
• 13:58
  say, the artifacts. An egg.
• 14:02
  See Doctor Who would never go and do something like that again
• 14:05
  by ending a story with the reveal that it's an egg.
• 14:08
  I mean, at least it wouldn't just kill the egg off and just,
• 14:12
  yeah, do something as brutal as that.
• 14:14
  This isn't the only original novel that Star Trek Voyager
• 14:17
  nicked idea or so from, but it's probably the the most memorable.
• 14:24
  Is Star Trek Voyager nicking the plot a good sign or a bad sign?
• 14:29
  Depends what you think of Star Trek Voyager.
• 14:33
  I don't mind it, I love it. Now we have an ice breaker, but
• 14:37
  I do have a pre question and I'm going to look at the three say
• 14:42
  then pre, pre question, pre question.
• 14:45
  Well, you all started this before we went into the episode
• 14:47
  by saying you was going to open things up for us.
• 14:51
  So, you know, be careful with your language.
• 14:55
  My language is highly moderated and certainly suitable for
• 14:58
  children, but who the fuck picked this book?
• 15:04
  I remember. Now I think it was by consensus,
• 15:07
  wasn't it? Well, I think it was more case
• 15:10
  of we hadn't picked a book. I took a picture of my
• 15:12
  bookshelf. To which Joe, I believe your
• 15:16
  response was. I've seen it, but I'm not sure I
• 15:18
  want to suggest it. That's right.
• 15:19
  Well, I knew Dad might be on board because it's a new event
• 15:22
  shelf so and he loves those so. Oh, and actually Gareth, you
• 15:24
  love the new adventures as well. Don't.
• 15:25
  You do you like new adventures I.
• 15:27
  Think I thought we'll be all right.
• 15:28
  It seemed like a good idea at the time.
• 15:32
  Not giving anything away because you powered to dry because some
• 15:37
  of us have been a bit more open in in our responses to this
• 15:40
  book, some a bit more guarded, some quite surprising.
• 15:45
  But let's kick off with an icebreaker because one of the
• 15:48
  common things when we do new adventures and we've talked
• 15:50
  about this more than once, is when is something Doctor Who?
• 15:55
  When is it it? So the icebreaker question, and
• 15:58
  I'm going to come to Dan first on this, is, what is your line
• 16:02
  where Doctor Who no longer feels like Doctor Who?
• 16:07
  Yeah, it's it's a very good question because because there's
• 16:12
  lots of ways you could go with this.
• 16:14
  But what I thought, why do I watch Doctor Who?
• 16:19
  I watch Doctor Who or read Doctor Who or listen to it or
• 16:22
  whatever as escapism. So my line in the sand for when
• 16:30
  Doctor Who, it goes strays into territories where it shouldn't
• 16:37
  is, I think real world suffering.
• 16:41
  So I think I think, you know, it's absolutely fine if you've
• 16:44
  got aliens from the planet Zag invading and there's lots of
• 16:47
  people getting shot and all that sort of stuff.
• 16:50
  Don't really, you know, because that's that's fantasy.
• 16:53
  That's, you know, but it's when, when it does things like in
• 16:58
  Death in Heaven, where it's actually talking about the dead
• 17:03
  loved ones of people saying please don't cremate me and all
• 17:07
  that sort of stuff that is kind of stepping too far.
• 17:11
  And I, and I think it, it's, it's, it's kind of, you know,
• 17:15
  and, and to be fair, I don't know if it's done it that often.
• 17:21
  And I think the nearest it perhaps came in in classic who
• 17:25
  was probably Perry being strangled by the 6th doctor in
• 17:30
  the Twin dilemma. Because I, I, I, you know, I
• 17:34
  grew up in a home when there was a, a fair bit of domestic
• 17:37
  violence and what have you. So, but that again, it's going
• 17:42
  into a place where Doctor Who shouldn't go.
• 17:45
  And, and yes, so for me, it's, it's sort of real life, real
• 17:50
  world sorrow and suffering. I don't think Doctor Who should
• 17:56
  go there. That's my my Ted comment.
• 18:01
  How about you, Gareth? Well, I might seem a bit, a bit
• 18:06
  bland by comparison, because it's, for me, it's any story
• 18:12
  that kind of sexualises the Doctor.
• 18:15
  The minute the Doctor is sexualised, I'm out.
• 18:19
  Which is probably why I don't get along with a lot with
• 18:22
  Stephen Moffatt. You might have heard about that,
• 18:23
  you might not have. You know, it's once you're
• 18:27
  sexualising that character, it just becomes a normal person,
• 18:31
  nothing special about them. You keep that element away from
• 18:35
  that individual. It makes them compelling and
• 18:38
  different by having it there. But beyond that, I did ever
• 18:42
  think about the books themselves.
• 18:44
  And I think I might have said this before, but for me, the
• 18:47
  books often have. I often visualize them with
• 18:51
  what's there at the time. Could they have made this at the
• 18:55
  time that it's representing? So if a story is made in 1974,
• 18:59
  if I'm reading a novel in 1996, could this have been made in
• 19:03
  1974? And I picture things as if it
• 19:06
  was made in 1974, so something that doesn't gel with that era
• 19:11
  instantly. It feels anachronistic to me and
• 19:14
  sticks out like a sore thumb and becomes a little bit
• 19:15
  uncomfortable under the Doctor Who banner for me.
• 19:18
  What? About you, Joe.
• 19:23
  I try to think what story is my line in the sand, and I think it
• 19:28
  is a new adventure and it's Damaged Goods, which I think is
• 19:32
  an extraordinary book, beautifully written book, but it
• 19:37
  is utterly without hope. Every character in Damaged Goods
• 19:41
  is miserable at the beginning of the book and more miserable, if
• 19:44
  not dead by the end of the book. Barely features the doctor.
• 19:49
  It's got sucked jobs down back alleys.
• 19:51
  It's got people shooting up cocaine and then their heads
• 19:54
  exploding with cocaine. At the end it has a woman that's
• 19:58
  lost her baby and finds out that the baby she thought that she'd
• 20:04
  taken home was actually somebody else's.
• 20:09
  And so she's got a yearning for her child, and at the end the
• 20:12
  doctor makes her literally give birth.
• 20:15
  To an alien which murders her in the most obscene way, but also
• 20:21
  it's like a representation of everything that has defined her
• 20:25
  life and that she hates. It's just obscene.
• 20:29
  It's a really obscene book. And I just don't think Doctor
• 20:33
  Who should ever be that without hope.
• 20:35
  I think I feel as if there's the Doctor should come in and and at
• 20:39
  least try and improve people's lives.
• 20:42
  And the Doctor's barely in that book.
• 20:44
  He's sort of there on the sidelines.
• 20:45
  He's the one that's arranging for the baby to be taken to
• 20:48
  other people. He's the one that's treating his
• 20:50
  companions like they're working for him rather than they're his
• 20:54
  friends. And yeah, it's just, like I
• 20:58
  said, Russell Davies, astonishing prose, like amazing
• 21:02
  characterization, unforgettable characters in that book.
• 21:05
  But it's in no way Doctor Who. And I think the 8th Doctor books
• 21:10
  are not guilt free of this either.
• 21:13
  You know, they they step into this territory affair few times.
• 21:17
  I would say end of revolution, man.
• 21:19
  The doctor picks up a gun and shoots somebody in the head
• 21:21
  like, and that's how the book that's the climax of the book.
• 21:25
  Yeah. So I think, I think maybe when
• 21:27
  it's trying to be too adult for its own good and totally
• 21:31
  forgetting it's sort of what Dan's saying, totally forgetting
• 21:35
  that there's younger people that might want to really stroke
• 21:38
  watch, listen to this stuff. So I think that's my line.
• 21:41
  It is. It's not so much the doctor or
• 21:44
  the companions or anything like that.
• 21:46
  It is the the the impact that those people will have on the
• 21:51
  characters lives that they're having and that there just
• 21:54
  should be a sense of hope in Doctor Who.
• 21:59
  I'm going to be really, really dull by kind of agreeing and
• 22:02
  saying my lines are very similar to all three of you all sort of
• 22:05
  combined, I think, Boo. Think out your own.
• 22:09
  I'm it's a it's a merging melting pot.
• 22:12
  It's kind of thing is like I was thinking about I was watching a
• 22:17
  particular TV story this morning and I was thinking about it.
• 22:20
  I was watching Joy to the World for reasons and I think that
• 22:24
  bless. You.
• 22:26
  That for me is a good for me, a good example of the real world
• 22:32
  encroaching maybe too much into Doctor Who.
• 22:35
  And it's something that happens quite a lot, particularly with
• 22:37
  the modern series. And it's like what this weekend
• 22:41
  gone. I've, I've met up with one of my
• 22:43
  oldest school friends who was my Doctor Who friend at school.
• 22:45
  And we were talking quite a lot about, you know, why did we
• 22:47
  watch it? Why did we get into it?
• 22:48
  And it was because a lot of it, it was the escapism.
• 22:51
  It was fun. It was kind of getting away from
• 22:55
  the madness that was the the 90s when you start kind of saying,
• 23:00
  no, no, we're actually going to get rid of allegory.
• 23:02
  We're going to just stick COVID in there.
• 23:05
  We're going to stick the stuff from Dark Water in there really
• 23:09
  quite brutally. It's like this is too reworld.
• 23:11
  This is this is not the escapism that I'm after.
• 23:15
  I'm also the same with sexualizing the doctor as well,
• 23:20
  regardless of the gender of the doctor of the person being
• 23:23
  sexualized with or anything. We've just been watching Day of
• 23:26
  the moon and this is it. Day of the moon, Impossible
• 23:30
  astronaut. There's some really dirty jokes
• 23:33
  Moffat's put in there as well, resexual jokes, and it's like
• 23:36
  this. It doesn't feel right.
• 23:37
  It doesn't feel like it belongs in Doctor.
• 23:39
  You're getting turned on at the end of that when she's killing
• 23:42
  all the silence. She's literally murdering a load
• 23:44
  of people. And he's going, Yeah, I like
• 23:47
  what's happened to you, Doctor Who.
• 23:49
  It's portrayed as being sexy and it's like she's she's murdered a
• 23:54
  whole load of silence and it's sexy.
• 23:55
  And that's also again, some of the the tone as well.
• 24:00
  So and also a great it has to have a bit of hope.
• 24:04
  It has a bit of positivity. You can have the occasional
• 24:06
  downbeat ending or something that's quite nice to have now
• 24:08
  and again, but not all the time. It gets depressing and you don't
• 24:14
  want Doctor Who to be a depressing experience.
• 24:18
  I mean, there'll be people say, well, this season was depressing
• 24:22
  on the whole. Most stories have something
• 24:24
  positive or something to take from them.
• 24:27
  But when you think of something like Genesis the Daleks, which
• 24:29
  is a widespread planet wide massacre where lots of people
• 24:32
  will die and it all comes down to a few people in that bunker,
• 24:35
  even that ends on a note of hope.
• 24:37
  Yeah, the Daleks have been finished.
• 24:39
  What comes of them might be something good.
• 24:41
  You know, like there's still, there's a, there's a glimmer,
• 24:44
  even though it's really dark. I mean, they did try because
• 24:48
  there was a couple of Colin stories where they ended on a
• 24:50
  bit of a downbeat and they had that little downbeat music queue
• 24:52
  because they use it on twin Dilemma and they use it on
• 24:54
  vengeance and Varos. And I thought, is that going to
• 24:56
  be not vengeance and Varos tax excitement?
• 24:58
  Is that is that going to be like all these six doctor stories end
• 25:01
  with a it's a bit sad, I think. Thank God they.
• 25:04
  Stopped doing that. I never misjudged anyone I've
• 25:08
  never spoken to before in my life as much as I did Litton.
• 25:13
  Don't worry, they'll someone will do a book or they'll recast
• 25:15
  him for a big finish. It'll be fine and they'll
• 25:18
  explain it. Oh.
• 25:19
  White comics, They're on it already, don't worry.
• 25:24
  So, OK, so following on, let's go back to Parasite.
• 25:30
  How does Parasite challenge or does it expand the idea of what
• 25:35
  a Doctor Who story can be? I'm going to start with Joe on
• 25:39
  this. One, I think it's heart is in
• 25:44
  the right place because the opening 50 pages of Parasite,
• 25:48
  once you get over that weird prologue about that woman's kid
• 25:52
  being murdered, and I know what that was all about.
• 25:54
  I'm not even sure how that's hard into the rest of the book,
• 25:56
  if I'm honest. But once you get, you start
• 25:58
  exploring the artifact with the students, you know, and you've
• 26:01
  got Doctor Who and his fabulous companions, Bernie Summerfield
• 26:04
  and Ace, especially new Ace, fresh from space Fleet.
• 26:09
  And they're flying around the artifact, you know, exploring
• 26:12
  this strange region of space, which could turn out to be the
• 26:17
  most hopeful and jolly and and imaginative and creative of all
• 26:21
  adventures. I certainly think it gets off on
• 26:25
  the right foot. This.
• 26:26
  And I was really impressed with the 1st 50 pages.
• 26:31
  Yeah. Then the murders start and then
• 26:35
  the the companions start transforming in various
• 26:38
  spectacular, agonizing ways. And I was sort of was getting to
• 26:43
  a point where I was like, oh, this really could have been 150
• 26:46
  page novella, you know, rather than a 300 page book.
• 26:49
  Because there's so many bloody things of them wandering around,
• 26:52
  sort of flying, swimming around the artifacts, you know, finding
• 26:56
  body parts and decapsitated monkeys and things like that.
• 27:00
  So by the end of the book, all of that suggestion of the
• 27:04
  exploration of wonder, it sort of got mired down in a ton of
• 27:11
  violence and just pain. That's the word we're using,
• 27:16
  isn't it? Pain.
• 27:17
  And yet then at the end of the book, it separates the doctrine
• 27:21
  is opponent. At the end of the book, they
• 27:23
  come back together again, and there's that same spark there
• 27:27
  was at the start where they're all trying to work out how to
• 27:31
  make this bloody thing give birth or whether to stop it.
• 27:35
  They have a moral debate and suddenly it's it's a hopeful
• 27:39
  book again. I think Jim Mortimer needs help
• 27:43
  from his editor to make his ideas palatable and enjoyable to
• 27:51
  read, and I certainly don't think he had the help here that
• 27:54
  he needed because I think this could have been a stunning book
• 27:58
  and it irritated me a lot. Does that answer your question?
• 28:03
  I think it answers my question, Gareth.
• 28:07
  Well, I think when we last spoke, I mentioned I looked at
• 28:10
  my Goodreads star rating on this one and I'd given it two stars.
• 28:16
  2. 2 I've read it again and I've given it two stars.
• 28:24
  I think I think as as as a book, I think it's fine.
• 28:31
  It's got it's got it's fairly competent in its story.
• 28:34
  I did find an interview with Jim Mortimer from 2002 online where
• 28:39
  he basically said this was his Arthur C Clarke attempt.
• 28:43
  He really liked Arthur C Clarke and this was what he is now for
• 28:45
  me, that's I'm off the table for that because I'm, I'm not so
• 28:50
  keen on hard sci-fi. So I'm already on the back foot
• 28:54
  a little bit with this. And I just, I just found the
• 28:59
  book a slog, really a slog to get through because of the the
• 29:07
  nature of the writing didn't really let up, but also the pain
• 29:09
  element. I didn't want to keep reading
• 29:11
  it. I've been sneaking in all the
• 29:12
  stuff between which I don't normally do, which is
• 29:17
  unfortunate. Are you a secret reader?
• 29:21
  I might be. Yeah, I've got.
• 29:23
  I've got enough to keep me going for a while.
• 29:24
  We've seen you. Under the covers with your copy
• 29:27
  of The Eyeless or whatever it was and the Torch.
• 29:31
  But it's it it, Like I say, it's a competent sci-fi novel.
• 29:36
  Is it Doctor Who now? But let's put it this way.
• 29:37
  Beneath is even trying to escape the book on the cover.
• 29:42
  Now can I fight you on that? Because I think.
• 29:45
  I think this is Doctor Who. I think, I think the premise of
• 29:48
  this is Doctor Who, them exploring this really unusual
• 29:52
  realm of space. Maybe the tone isn't, but I do
• 29:56
  think he's got like a germ of a great idea here and a great
• 30:00
  Doctor Who story. He actually admitted himself in
• 30:03
  that interview the this is the one he didn't plot very well.
• 30:07
  Out of all the books he's written, this is the one he
• 30:08
  didn't plot very well, and this is the one he would repurpose to
• 30:11
  be a stand alone novel in its own right.
• 30:13
  Which already makes me think, yeah, it was never fully
• 30:16
  realised as a Doctor Who tale. And the fact that the Doctor
• 30:20
  Beneath and Ace are kind of split off for so long.
• 30:23
  The Doctor's absent for a huge chunk of it, and even when he's
• 30:26
  in it, he's half asleep or just floating around somewhere
• 30:29
  already. I'm like, no, no, I'm, I'm
• 30:31
  turning this down. I don't want to.
• 30:33
  I'm really, I'm switching off from this because I have no
• 30:36
  idea. All the background characters
• 30:38
  are kind of when the notes I've written for this are ridiculous
• 30:44
  trying to follow them, and I can see even my own handwriting is
• 30:46
  getting bored as I'm writing and I sound like a ranty old man
• 30:49
  now, so I think perhaps I'd better stop there.
• 30:51
  Oh. No, we love it.
• 30:53
  I mean, why is this called a Doctor Who book?
• 30:55
  How many pages was he in in this bloody thing 10.
• 30:59
  Yeah, it just, it just and you know, it maybe maybe they were
• 31:04
  testing the water with the back door pilot for Bernice.
• 31:07
  But Paul Bernice gets pulled between pillar and post
• 31:10
  literally and ripped apart literally.
• 31:12
  And thrilled in the head to the point of I just I don't know who
• 31:17
  I'm following in this anymore. By the time I get to the end, we
• 31:20
  spend ages with, what's his name, Urquhart.
• 31:23
  Sorry, am I skipping all over the rest of the questions?
• 31:25
  But you know, you spend ages with Urquhart thinking, oh,
• 31:28
  wait, great, wonderful, wonderful.
• 31:29
  What what does he actually do? By the time you get to the end
• 31:31
  of it, what does he actually do? What does he actually
• 31:33
  contribute? I couldn't actually tell you who
• 31:35
  Urquhart is, I've forgotten him already.
• 31:37
  It was the pilot on the shuttle, the pilot, but there was huge
• 31:40
  chunks about him in this. Before he got turned into
• 31:43
  probably huge chunks. And he got.
• 31:46
  Tentacled, didn't he? Did he get tentacled?
• 31:48
  He They all got tentacled very, very quickly.
• 31:51
  This is the way I'd want to go, you know, cut into little pieces
• 31:54
  and flying about the artefacts, little bits of Joe going about
• 31:58
  into people's mouths. Oh, lovely.
• 32:03
  At that point, I'm moving as on Dan, you've kept your powder
• 32:06
  dry, but you can't do it forever.
• 32:09
  No, no I can't. I am going to sound a little bit
• 32:16
  like Joe's answer here because once I got past the prologue,
• 32:23
  which was just plain nasty for no reason, I probably enjoyed
• 32:31
  the 1st 70 pages I think, which which I think takes us up to the
• 32:35
  bit when the two shuttles are coming in to the artefacts.
• 32:41
  And I was quite, yeah, I was like, well, this is really good.
• 32:44
  I, I, I, I liked the, the psychedelic, very 1990 sci-fi
• 32:51
  psychedelic kind of world building, you know, where
• 32:55
  everything was weird colours and it was upside down and back to
• 32:58
  front and gravity was all over the shop and what have you.
• 33:01
  And, and, but I then hit a bit of a wall with it and, and, and
• 33:09
  I think it's that sort of unrelenting suffering and pain
• 33:18
  and death and it, and it was sort of like, and there was,
• 33:21
  there didn't feel like there was any respite from it.
• 33:26
  You know, it was sort of like this horrible thing happened.
• 33:29
  And then it was like the next horrible thing happened.
• 33:32
  And then this even worse horrible thing happened.
• 33:35
  And, and, and, and, and it, it, it began to kind of wear me down
• 33:41
  a little bit to where I was then kind of leaning a bit more
• 33:45
  towards Gareth's opinion on it. Kind of I, I started to find it
• 33:50
  a bit of a chore And, and I felt, I found myself only
• 33:55
  reading like, I don't know, 10 pages at a time and that was all
• 33:59
  I could do. And then I put it down.
• 34:04
  So, you know, on one hand, I loved the creativity of the, the
• 34:09
  weird world that they were in, but I really disliked the death
• 34:15
  and the suffering that Jim Mortimer really wanted to go to
• 34:19
  town on. And it was almost, it was and,
• 34:24
  and in many ways he, it felt like he was more interested in
• 34:29
  building his world than he was as, as Gareth says, plotting the
• 34:34
  book properly. So I, I don't know, it's, it's a
• 34:42
  weird one because, because it's in some ways it really was very
• 34:47
  good and in other ways I really hated it.
• 34:51
  And I, I really don't know where I, where I stand on it at the
• 34:55
  moment. I'm sort of like just, you know,
• 34:59
  you know, springing back and forth like a pendulum between
• 35:02
  the bits I liked and the bits I really didn't like.
• 35:06
  Yeah. So I'm not I do the bits of it
• 35:15
  that I think are a Doctor Who book, like Joe says, the the the
• 35:20
  the expiration that you you begin to get with the doctor and
• 35:24
  and Benice and Ace at the beginning that that feels like
• 35:30
  Doctor Who. But then you would be hard
• 35:38
  pushed to kind of then say the death and the horrible body
• 35:43
  horror that we get on this is in line with with with Doctor Who.
• 35:48
  But then in the 90s, were kids actually reading these books?
• 35:56
  It was it was adolescence, wasn't it like this.
• 35:58
  And let's. Hope not.
• 35:59
  Yeah, exactly. You know, so so where they was
• 36:03
  he was he aiming for the audience that was actually
• 36:05
  reading it rather than, you know, the the family or whatever
• 36:08
  you want to say. But we can.
• 36:10
  Do an actual correlation between all of those serial murderers in
• 36:14
  those Netflix documentaries and whether they I read Jim Altimer
• 36:17
  books when they were children? I think there might be some
• 36:20
  correlation. I mean, I, I do wonder whether
• 36:24
  he's all right with, you know, because to, to why is Facebook
• 36:28
  like me? He's not.
• 36:29
  No, no, I haven't. He's not.
• 36:32
  He's gone down that sort of mad conspiracy theory route.
• 36:35
  He's an old man, That's the thing.
• 36:39
  You do wonder, you know, to be able to write this kind of book
• 36:47
  and and I know that you're going to want to bring up blood heat.
• 36:51
  I I really enjoyed blood heat, but it is grim and and it I
• 36:55
  wouldn't want my Doctor Who to be like that all the time.
• 36:58
  But it just seems that and even like is it bell Tempest?
• 37:02
  He wrote in the 8th Doctor which man alive is.
• 37:06
  Blowing up whole solar. Systems.
• 37:07
  Yeah, exactly. And so.
• 37:09
  It's his death count gets bigger.
• 37:11
  Eternity weights. He steps it.
• 37:14
  Up like God. He's not there.
• 37:15
  I mean, what could you do beyond your solar systems, you know?
• 37:19
  So it's, yeah, it's weird. I don't know how to really
• 37:22
  answer your question and that's why I'm rambling around here
• 37:26
  kind of thing, because I think it I think it does expand
• 37:29
  because it's got that that hard sci-fi, that kind of world
• 37:32
  building that's really, really good.
• 37:34
  But then it's a it it does challenge because it you kind of
• 37:38
  think, oh man, you can't do that in a doctor book, can you?
• 37:41
  He has, and the editor let it go.
• 37:45
  And yeah, so do you. Wonder if perhaps they shouldn't
• 37:47
  have hired someone to edit his books but just use that money to
• 37:51
  like give him some therapy and then maybe the books would be a
• 37:54
  bit more pleasant. Would it?
• 37:56
  Was it still Peter? This is Levine's.
• 37:58
  She says in the whole adventures, this was her first
• 38:01
  one that she you know, what am I looking for commissioned, thank
• 38:10
  you very much. This is the one that she the
• 38:12
  first one that she commissioned and took from commissioned to
• 38:15
  the shelf, right. So she's new at this as well.
• 38:18
  Yeah, yeah. And I think she quickly started
• 38:22
  turning things around because this is the this we have slap
• 38:24
  bang in the middle period of new adventures where it's.
• 38:28
  Pain arc the. Pain arc, you know, come off of
• 38:32
  falls the shadow and is it the book that we so I think we were
• 38:38
  talking on the chat about books nobody remembers.
• 38:41
  I was like, does anybody ever talk about Saint Anthony's fire?
• 38:46
  Only the only thing, because, because that's Gatus, isn't it?
• 38:51
  And the only thing I remember about it is people go, yeah,
• 38:54
  it's not as good as Nightshade. So yeah, everyone says.
• 38:58
  Parasites not as good as blood heat.
• 39:00
  But I'm I'm here to tell them they're wrong today.
• 39:03
  Wow. We might fight over that then.
• 39:08
  The lines are being drawn. Can we use oils?
• 39:13
  Jelly Jelly. Oh, everyone fell.
• 39:16
  We can eat it afterwards. David, what do you think of this
• 39:21
  book? Moving, moving, moving swiftly
• 39:23
  on from that odd segue. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm in Gareth's
• 39:29
  camp here, safe away from you 2 in your Jelly.
• 39:34
  I'm not a hard sci-fi person. That was a really bad way of
• 39:39
  starting that sentence. What's your language?
• 39:43
  It's, it's something I struggle with.
• 39:45
  I find it hard to visualize at times kind of what's going on
• 39:48
  because you what? So they're floating upwards now.
• 39:50
  What, what, what they're doing what?
• 39:52
  It's just not a genre I get home with.
• 39:56
  That big inside ocean that was everywhere, you know, the sea
• 40:00
  that was coming in from the sky. I.
• 40:03
  Probably would have liked it more if I didn't find some of
• 40:05
  the prostyle a bit of a dirge at times, but we'll probably come
• 40:09
  back to that. I, it's, it's not my, it's not
• 40:12
  my cup of tea type of science fiction.
• 40:14
  So I don't think even if it was well written, I would probably
• 40:16
  still struggle with it. I did like the the the 1st 50 or
• 40:22
  so pages. I think I'm going to agree.
• 40:23
  I so I was, I had a plan to get through it quickly, which is I
• 40:27
  was, I was going to do 5050 page bursts because it's like this.
• 40:30
  If this is meant to be a dog, I'm going to have a plan to get
• 40:32
  through it. And I think I did the first 50
• 40:34
  pages and that was kind of fine. But every time after that, that
• 40:38
  50 pages got shorter because it's like, I don't think I can
• 40:41
  take much more than a chapter tonight because it's like, oh,
• 40:46
  pain. Oh, so oh, Ace stuff in her eyes
• 40:48
  gouged out. Oh, she's carving herself up
• 40:51
  beneath is getting a hole in the head.
• 40:53
  Oh, somebody's melted. It's.
• 40:55
  Yeah, What you should do, you should have a, you know, if
• 40:56
  you're having a tough day. Yeah.
• 40:58
  Just imagine those people in the book are the people that are
• 41:01
  very irritated during the day, getting drilled and eviscerated
• 41:04
  and things like that. So it's just I.
• 41:07
  Found what Doctor Who's does it charge?
• 41:11
  What Doctor Who's story could be.
• 41:12
  It felt a bit joyless as well. I mean, not all Doctor Who's
• 41:15
  stories are full of joy. Back to joy again.
• 41:18
  But the, you know, there's a bit, there's like a bit of
• 41:21
  humour, a bit of wit or something.
• 41:23
  I just felt there was none of that though.
• 41:26
  It was just a bit grim, a bit bleak.
• 41:29
  It's this hard spy sci-fi I don't get on with.
• 41:32
  So yeah, I'm sure. You're not talking about bloody.
• 41:37
  Bloody it's got Joe Grant in it, Feral Joe Grant and and and
• 41:41
  baby, yeah, and there's a time ram and something and bloody
• 41:48
  it's got salaries and dinosaurs. According to the cover, this has
• 41:51
  got Bernice in her wonky hand. Because if, if you wonder what
• 41:55
  I'm talking about, go and look at the cover of Parasite.
• 41:57
  Go and check out Bernice's hand, because there's something not
• 41:59
  right there at all. It's got that fabulous tent city
• 42:02
  with all those crazy monkeys flying about the place.
• 42:06
  I look at, I look at the cover and there's like this, this,
• 42:08
  there's a, I'm assuming that's one of the seven armed monkeys
• 42:11
  on the book. That'll be the photograph today.
• 42:16
  All right. David, can you hold up the
• 42:22
  cover, please, while we do it? Yeah.
• 42:30
  Thank you. This is the point where I got.
• 42:33
  How do I do the screenshot again?
• 42:35
  I've forgotten I've I'll get. I'll take it from the Zoom call,
• 42:39
  don't you worry. Yeah, this, this, this is, this
• 42:44
  was not a book for me. This is definitely from the when
• 42:46
  I've read the New Adventures through this middle period was
• 42:49
  the one I absolutely struggled with because they've clearly
• 42:52
  been told tone down the sex, tone down the bad language,
• 42:56
  although there's a couple of shits in there.
• 42:59
  But it's like, but what they clearly can do is the violence
• 43:03
  and the torture and the the the nastiness.
• 43:06
  And I think that's why I think we see in some of these books of
• 43:09
  this period, they just dial it up.
• 43:11
  And I wonder if Rebecca Levine coming in is like, no, I want to
• 43:15
  start steering this in another direction.
• 43:16
  Ace is gone soon, thankfully. They're starting to sew this.
• 43:21
  Clearly they're they're working it quickly.
• 43:22
  They're starting to sew the seeds, starting to stop.
• 43:25
  That I lie, that in this she's sort of thinking, yeah, I don't
• 43:27
  know if I want to stick around anymore.
• 43:29
  You know, I think I'm, I'm my own person now.
• 43:32
  Well, there's a, there's a nice bit at the end which, no, I'm
• 43:35
  going to say I'm going to keep my Paradigdron.
• 43:36
  There's a bit at the end which I thought summed up my feelings on
• 43:38
  this book. Oh, it's a particular thing that
• 43:40
  Ace does in the one of the last chapters.
• 43:44
  Yeah, this was a this was a dog. It's not the worst book we've
• 43:47
  done. The worst book we've done is
• 43:48
  still Dalek Generation. Because nothing will be worse
• 43:51
  than that. That's still the absolute pits,
• 43:54
  but. I have been eating Jelly blobs
• 43:56
  ever since, so I must say so he did put an idea in my head.
• 44:00
  There is a disappointing lack of Jelly blobs in this book.
• 44:03
  We did have some in Last Dodo. We had some in Generation.
• 44:06
  Jellyfish going about the place, murdering people or eating each
• 44:10
  other actually. There's no train or a
• 44:13
  redoubtable inspector in this like we've had in two previous
• 44:16
  ones we've enjoyed. That's true.
• 44:19
  Can I fight you on the process? I'm sorry to fight everybody
• 44:21
  today, but can I fight you on the pros?
• 44:24
  You can you can you can try. I think Jim Mortimer is a
• 44:27
  superbrier of pros. I think this is it flows.
• 44:31
  He has a good grasp of language. And even though he's describing
• 44:36
  things that are just utterly loathsome, he does them with a
• 44:40
  real pequency. And I've wrote down a lot of
• 44:44
  quotes of, like, horrible things, but I was like, yeah,
• 44:47
  I'm really feeling that I'm. It's horrible because it's well
• 44:50
  written. It ain't horrible just because
• 44:52
  it's nasty. And he does.
• 44:55
  He does. I think he's trying to capture a
• 45:00
  sense of wonder as well as horror in this, and I think he
• 45:05
  does do that pretty well. Like I had no trouble reading
• 45:08
  like the the passages were too dense without enough dialogue.
• 45:13
  That was my issue. And there was no chapters.
• 45:15
  What stupid idea. Who has a book without chapters?
• 45:18
  So you can't break it up yourself.
• 45:19
  Those numbers, they don't count. That's just irritating.
• 45:22
  Just write a book and don't try and be clever like that.
• 45:25
  But the actual, I don't know. The reading of the prose I found
• 45:30
  really easy, and I find it with all of his books even.
• 45:33
  Bloody sorry, that's all. That's fine.
• 45:37
  I think he was already onto a loser because it's just not my
• 45:40
  type of science fiction. So I think at that point it's
• 45:42
  just not, even if it's probably like the best ever written, it's
• 45:45
  just not going to do anything for me.
• 45:46
  I mean, I mean this in the Polaris sort of way, you know,
• 45:49
  But you and Gareth have both said that.
• 45:50
  So I'm starting to wonder now if the problem is your tastes
• 45:53
  rather than this book. I I said I thought it was a good
• 45:56
  general sci-fi book. It's just, it's just not my cup
• 46:00
  of tea. As David said, I'm, I'm more a
• 46:02
  coffee drinker. So you know, I can, I can dive
• 46:05
  into a fantasy book no problem. But with this, I think, I think
• 46:12
  I put it on the chat. I, it might have got Babylon 5
• 46:16
  CGI going off in my head, which to be honest, ain't that pretty
• 46:20
  as we all know back on it. But that's the era that this
• 46:22
  would have been made in. And so I've got fringing going
• 46:25
  off left, right and centre which which is really off putting.
• 46:29
  Wow, did it look that unconvincing in your head,
• 46:32
  Gareth? Like the shadows in space, you
• 46:33
  could barely see them. Is it one of those things where
• 46:37
  it's all perfectly fine, but as soon as there's a visual effect
• 46:39
  going on, the quality of the picture drops?
• 46:41
  It's a little bit, yeah, yeah. Gone down a grade?
• 46:43
  You're in the middle section. Was anybody else armed with
• 46:46
  treats when reading that bit? I was like, I need a reward to
• 46:49
  read more of this pain. I'll add a coffee and like a
• 46:51
  chocolate bar in my head like just to get through.
• 46:55
  It I must admit I am. I am feeling slightly better
• 46:58
  than both Dan and David have have have felt the same as me
• 47:01
  though because I'm I'm a 50 pages kind of guy a day.
• 47:05
  That's what I do in general and I just could not do it.
• 47:08
  I got to 25 was the most I could do in a single sitting and I had
• 47:11
  to break it up for myself. I I slowed down as well so.
• 47:15
  It's with us. I mean, if the fact that you had
• 47:17
  to start giving yourself treats as a sort of bribe to get
• 47:20
  through the book. For every murder, I had one more
• 47:24
  Kit Kat. Yeah, I put on a bit that way.
• 47:27
  That's a shit. Parasite drinking game.
• 47:30
  Well. Gareth, don't do it.
• 47:32
  You'll be under the table. I did say.
• 47:36
  I'm not sure I could have done treats because because I would
• 47:38
  have thrown up because because I think because the horror was so
• 47:44
  graphic. He he described it so, so well.
• 47:49
  You didn't really have to use your imagination too much to
• 47:52
  kind of Oh my. God, you know, like the artefact
• 47:55
  shovelling them down and then bringing it up.
• 47:58
  Yeah, yeah, you know, you know, the the IT was the thing in
• 48:02
  Ace's eye that was that as. Soon as you start bringing eyes
• 48:05
  into things against. Yeah, it's not a goal.
• 48:08
  Because the line, David said. I just couldn't believe it
• 48:10
  fetched the drill. I was like no please.
• 48:12
  No, when I read that and I'm like, really?
• 48:17
  And then then falling on the yeah, she'll need something to
• 48:20
  bite down on me. At least they didn't.
• 48:23
  At least they cut away. But.
• 48:25
  The drill was bad, but the injection with the bleach,
• 48:27
  surely, Yeah. Or the bit where you realise
• 48:31
  that Bernice was being eaten by that octopus.
• 48:35
  Oh, how lovely. These lovely little jellyfishes
• 48:37
  around me. Oh my God, they're eating my
• 48:38
  arm. What's going on?
• 48:41
  Oh boy, it could have been. It could have been a really
• 48:43
  wondrous place, couldn't it? The artefact.
• 48:47
  I think it's good. I think that was the thing,
• 48:49
  though, wasn't it? It, it yes, it could have been,
• 48:52
  but he chose to make it not by everything in there could kill
• 48:57
  you in some horrific fashion. Even even the even the monkey
• 49:01
  things, they they obviously they they microwave you to death.
• 49:04
  You know, it's sort of like. Isn't there mass slaughter of
• 49:07
  the monkeys? By the end their whole tent city
• 49:10
  is ripped to pieces. The the the, what's it called
• 49:15
  the pregnancy cycle of the artefact.
• 49:17
  Man, it's a tough going, isn't it?
• 49:22
  Is so this is a 7th Doctor novel?
• 49:27
  He's barely in it, but what do we make of the trail of the 7th
• 49:32
  Doctor on the 6 pages that he appears in?
• 49:35
  So Joe, you can kick us off here.
• 49:39
  Well. I mean, there was one bit where
• 49:41
  he took this light space buggy out to attack the octopus.
• 49:45
  He's like, I'm off like that. I was like, yes, I want to see
• 49:48
  McCoy doing that so badly. But really, I really the 7th
• 49:52
  Doctor, because he shuts down his intelligence centres
• 49:55
  somewhere around page 60 and that's it.
• 49:58
  That's all we see at the end of the book.
• 50:01
  They're like, Oh yeah, he's he's floating about over there.
• 50:04
  It's like the second doctor in the mine, robber sitting in that
• 50:06
  chair. He's sort of gliding around with
• 50:08
  his eyes shut. Yeah, it's not in it.
• 50:14
  What can I possibly say about a character that doesn't appear in
• 50:17
  the book? The little he's in, the little
• 50:22
  he's in. He's got great grasp on the
• 50:23
  character, I think a better grasp than him bloody as well.
• 50:29
  I'll get there. But yeah, he's barely in it.
• 50:32
  Sorry, Gareth. No, no, I agree with you.
• 50:34
  He's like pickled in time, like Gokins in a jar.
• 50:37
  Literally he's just floating around.
• 50:39
  I think what I think very early on there's there is a
• 50:42
  description of him disappearing off almost chimpanzee like using
• 50:46
  his brolly to hook on and swing along things.
• 50:48
  And again, I'm not buying it. I just can't see it.
• 50:54
  No, because in my head I've got the remembrance of the Dalek zip
• 50:58
  line with the little tip tipping legs going underneath so that
• 51:03
  that gracefulness of him gliding through the air.
• 51:05
  I just don't see the 7th Doctor doing that.
• 51:06
  I can see him doing some kind of.
• 51:08
  The cliffhanger to Dragon fire though, a bit like that.
• 51:11
  Yeah, yeah, going. Through the artifact.
• 51:13
  But then, but then like you said, the rest of it is just a
• 51:15
  floating body or even when he's waking up, he's going.
• 51:18
  No, got to go back to sleep. And that's it.
• 51:23
  If he got this script, he would have been so happy.
• 51:25
  Yeah, He had to set it up for like a day.
• 51:26
  He's filming. By the time, usually one of the
• 51:29
  things we end up doing when when we go through this is a
• 51:33
  statement about sucking eggs, but you know, the doctor will
• 51:36
  work the problem out, the doctor will solve the problem, but the
• 51:39
  doctor shut down. So we don't get to experience
• 51:43
  that problem through the doctor or even the resolution of that
• 51:46
  problem. Really.
• 51:47
  Oh, waking back up again. No, he's gone again.
• 51:50
  And yeah, it just gets a bit tedious after a while.
• 51:53
  I I I did perk up every time he floated into view in someone's
• 51:56
  view that was way out of reach while city's being destroyed,
• 51:59
  but it was few and far between. Like the Doctor.
• 52:02
  Oh, there he goes. It was just so fleeting.
• 52:05
  I'm over here. I need you.
• 52:09
  Yeah, quick, grab him, you know, Yeah, it's.
• 52:14
  And then you when you find out why he's been shut down and what
• 52:18
  his impact is, and then you get that mind model almost towards
• 52:24
  the end between midnight, is it midnight and him.
• 52:29
  So you can see a little bit of how that pays off and how it
• 52:32
  leads into the resolution. But for me, it's too little too
• 52:35
  late by that point. He's been absent for far too
• 52:39
  long. Didn't you think his
• 52:41
  confrontation with Bannon at the end was great?
• 52:43
  When they're talking about the morality of whether this thing
• 52:46
  should be allowed and whether Bannon should be allowed to
• 52:49
  exploit it or not, I thought that that was like the emergence
• 52:52
  of that angry Happiness Patrol. 7th Doctor, you.
• 52:55
  Know it was kind of interesting that though, because you know
• 52:58
  about the the reaction to that because in some ways it's the
• 53:00
  discussion we had on the last dodo, just in a different way.
• 53:04
  At what point do you interceive? Yeah.
• 53:07
  Although it's very odd, wasn't it, when he went?
• 53:09
  Well, never mind, We'll let it give birth.
• 53:11
  And all those people out of the system is probably going to
• 53:13
  kill. Well, survival of the fittest.
• 53:14
  And that you're Laura the jungle.
• 53:16
  Let's go, Benny. Ace, let's go.
• 53:18
  Very strange. It's not a fan of him in this
• 53:22
  one. It's not quite the ending is not
• 53:25
  quite, you know, he's getting cold sense of wonder.
• 53:27
  It's the piss off. Come on Ace, let's leave it to
• 53:32
  lunch. Yeah, I mean, it's not really a
• 53:41
  Doctor book, is it? It's not not a 7th Doctor book
• 53:44
  because because I think, like reading this, I think the main
• 53:47
  character and it's probably ace. And, and the reason for that is,
• 53:54
  is what the guys have already said, you know, the, the, the
• 53:57
  Doctor's barely in it when he is, well, for large parts of
• 54:02
  that, he's like unconscious. He's, he's shut down, you know,
• 54:05
  to, to avoid, you know, being being taken out of by the
• 54:08
  artefact. But saying that there were,
• 54:12
  there were moments that I really quite enjoyed it.
• 54:20
  The 7th Doctor in this like I I think it was good when he was
• 54:24
  with GAIL and he's building the rafts and and then and then
• 54:30
  they're sort of flying it and and I, I there were moments of
• 54:36
  that and you go yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's Sylvester
• 54:39
  McCoy. And and also like Joe said, the
• 54:42
  confrontation at the end when when he he gets shot, I suppose
• 54:47
  isn't he as well. That felt very McCoy, but but
• 54:52
  those are two very, very tiny bits in the entirety of the book
• 54:56
  sort of things. So yeah, there's not really a
• 55:02
  great deal to kind of hang your hat on, really.
• 55:05
  And your umbrella, in this case I.
• 55:08
  Would in Mortimer's three new adventures in Blood Heat, he
• 55:12
  says at the end, Oh yeah, I'm going to leak all life out of
• 55:15
  this universe and everyone's going to die.
• 55:17
  Let's go. That's basically the last scene
• 55:19
  of Blood Heat. At the end of this he says, oh,
• 55:21
  well, nevermind, I'm sure the system, they'll put up a good
• 55:24
  fight. Let's go.
• 55:25
  And then in eternity weeps 2/3 of the Earth's wiped out and he
• 55:29
  goes, oh come on, let's go Jim Moore.
• 55:32
  But don't think much of the 7th Doctor, does he?
• 55:35
  No, I, I think he, he's very much tapping into that the, the
• 55:40
  Dark Times champion bit, isn't he?
• 55:44
  The the you know, like when we did like bad therapy a few
• 55:49
  episodes back, you know, you, you feel with that Matt Jones,
• 55:55
  He's picked all of the best elements of the seven doctor and
• 55:58
  brand with those. Whereas this is a classic
• 56:01
  example of of a of a new adventures writer probably
• 56:06
  picking all of the wrong qualities and running with those
• 56:09
  the dark nuts and the, you know, fighting, you know, evil since
• 56:15
  the dawn of time and all this sort of business.
• 56:19
  Bad therapy. Do you remember?
• 56:21
  That bad therapy? Oh, then when he did that
• 56:24
  fabulous party at the end and that's how he solved the day.
• 56:27
  Oh, wonderful. Yeah, yeah.
• 56:31
  So it, it's, yeah, there are bits in it that I that again,
• 56:38
  that I think we're very 7th Doctor ish.
• 56:40
  But but there were a lot where it wasn't.
• 56:42
  And that and that the fact that he's barely in it is it's very
• 56:47
  difficult to kind of comment on the, on the betrayal too much.
• 56:52
  Yeah, I agree with you all. I think how can you have a
• 56:56
  Doctor Who book with Doctor Who's barely in it and you know,
• 56:59
  eternity weeks? It's a similar thing of like
• 57:02
  it's on television. You know, Doctor Light stories
• 57:05
  are the necessity of production. These things happen and
• 57:08
  sometimes they make a virtue out saying let's do a Doctor Light.
• 57:12
  You don't really have a an excuse for doing Doctor Light in
• 57:16
  your books. This and we talked before, well,
• 57:18
  you know, what do you expect from a Doctor Who's story?
• 57:22
  I'd like some Doctor Who to be in it and to be driving the plot
• 57:26
  or at least be kind of affecting the plot when he's in it.
• 57:30
  I think he's effective and I like some of the stuff that he's
• 57:33
  doing. I did, I did like the bit with
• 57:34
  the raft. I thought that was a very
• 57:37
  doctorish type of thing. And I think that's what that's
• 57:42
  the quintessential element of what Doctor Who brings is the
• 57:44
  character of the Doctor. Once you don't have him in it,
• 57:49
  then it just becomes an ordinary sci-fi book.
• 57:51
  You may still have Ace and Bernice, but it's missing
• 57:55
  something fundamental. And then talk a good, good
• 57:58
  therapy, bad therapy. Sorry is we were said at the
• 58:01
  term. Good therapy after this?
• 58:04
  It's. We said that you could hear
• 58:06
  McCoy reading most of the dialogue from that book.
• 58:10
  I mean, there's very little 2nd Doctor dialogue in this book.
• 58:13
  At times I wasn't quite sure if I could hear him saying it.
• 58:16
  I mean, he'd probably give it a go.
• 58:17
  You'd probably need to, you know, reading it from his pages
• 58:20
  and his Big Finish booth. But.
• 58:23
  He's just not enough. And it just seems like a really,
• 58:28
  you know, I think with Eternity weeps, it was meant to be a
• 58:30
  little bit of AI always interpreted as they're going to
• 58:32
  do the Bernice books. Let's start centring Bernice
• 58:35
  because she's going to spin off. But here it's like, why would
• 58:39
  you want to do a story where the doctor's almost completely
• 58:41
  absent? It's a very old.
• 58:43
  I've got a theory choice. I think there's certain new
• 58:45
  adventurous writers that just don't want to write Doctor Who.
• 58:47
  They want to write science fiction novels, and this is the
• 58:50
  only outlet they're ever going to have to do that.
• 58:53
  I think Cartmel falls under this as well because you look at
• 58:55
  Cartmel's three and he's barely in any of those.
• 58:57
  I've just done Warlock and he's in two chapters worth of that
• 59:01
  300 page book and it's all about this sort of tough cop.
• 59:05
  You know, he wants to write that book about, you know, animal
• 59:07
  experimentation and stuff that tattoos shouldn't kind of go
• 59:10
  near. So yeah, maybe maybe Mortimer
• 59:13
  just doesn't want to write Doctor Who.
• 59:14
  He wants to write his big science fiction novel, which is
• 59:17
  a laudable goal, but should it be here?
• 59:20
  Should be here. And I think that's the nail on
• 59:22
  the head for me. So when you would talk about
• 59:24
  picking books and ideas, any of those where you say things like
• 59:28
  all the doctors barely in it, he's only in two chapters.
• 59:30
  That's almost immediate for me. Kind of, yeah.
• 59:32
  I'm not. I'm not interested in that.
• 59:33
  I'm not interested. Which one?
• 59:35
  You know, if it's Matt Smith, I'll be on behind that.
• 59:38
  Oh, Matt Smith. What's he ever done to you?
• 59:41
  Very annoying. Willy Wong.
• 59:43
  Yeah. How do you how do you feel about
• 59:45
  like Birthright? Earlier on in the range we had
• 59:48
  Birthright, which was a Doctor Light book, wasn't it Because
• 59:52
  the, the, the, the, the the ploy was, wasn't it?
• 59:56
  The the the Doctor was off having adventures in Iceberg
• 1:00:00
  while Ace and Benny were. I don't know if Ace was in it
• 1:00:04
  was it was just Benny, wasn't it?
• 1:00:06
  It. Was Ace and Benny Yeah, having
• 1:00:11
  their venture in in birthright so they've they've split them
• 1:00:15
  but but I mean I I quite enjoyed.
• 1:00:18
  Birthright, I think that might be the exception to my rule
• 1:00:20
  because I remember, but that's because they had that they had
• 1:00:22
  that conceit of saying we're having the the doctor story and
• 1:00:25
  the companion story because we're going to separate them and
• 1:00:28
  do but. What Nigel Robertson does in
• 1:00:30
  Burr Fry, though, is he absolutely writes a Doctor Who
• 1:00:33
  story. He just takes the Doctor out of
• 1:00:35
  it. It's Victorian London, it's
• 1:00:37
  aliens trying to invade the Earth.
• 1:00:39
  We go pop off to the alien planet and there's a tyrant
• 1:00:41
  trying to take over. Like it feels like
• 1:00:43
  quintessential Doctor Who, even if the this kind of doesn't, a
• 1:00:48
  warlock kind of doesn't. If we talk about Ace and
• 1:00:54
  Bernice, that goes on nice segue into the next question, because
• 1:00:57
  obviously if we talk about the Doctor, talk about the other two
• 1:01:00
  regulars, Ace and Bernice, and it's fair to say this is a bit
• 1:01:04
  of a tough journey for the for our two characters.
• 1:01:09
  Is this a, is this a good book for them as characters?
• 1:01:12
  So it's not a good book for them in terms of their experiences.
• 1:01:17
  And how well does Jim Mortimer capture them.
• 1:01:21
  I'm going to start with Gareth with this.
• 1:01:25
  One, I always find it strange coming back to the new
• 1:01:28
  adventures Ace, especially reading the new adventures out
• 1:01:32
  of sequence. I think because I I read them
• 1:01:35
  initially majority of them in order when I first read them, I
• 1:01:39
  think I got to experience growing up for want of a better
• 1:01:44
  word. And coming to this one, I've
• 1:01:48
  found it strange because I've kind of gone to the factory
• 1:01:50
  reset in my head for Ace at the end of season 26.
• 1:01:55
  And I don't know if that's because I've not read the books.
• 1:01:57
  And again, this is this is a me thing rather than a book thing.
• 1:02:01
  I think I've, I've just gone back to that version of Ace
• 1:02:03
  because the big finished stuff that's existed since that's
• 1:02:07
  what's fresh in my head again. The journey of both of them,
• 1:02:16
  it's very interesting because it follows on from what Joe said
• 1:02:18
  earlier. It's about the discovery of the
• 1:02:19
  world. It's more about the world of the
• 1:02:21
  impact of the world on them and the people that they're with us,
• 1:02:25
  they're going around. But most of those people just
• 1:02:30
  don't make it out of this. In fact, none of them.
• 1:02:33
  All of them. Yeah.
• 1:02:35
  So I don't want to come down too heavy on this because again, I
• 1:02:40
  think that like we've said, the doctor was in a comatose state
• 1:02:44
  and absence. I think Bernice is either being
• 1:02:47
  tortured by some description. I think you're right.
• 1:02:49
  When she finds comes across, you see her comes across the
• 1:02:51
  briefcase at the beginning. Isn't it when they find the
• 1:02:54
  Benjamin Greene's briefcase that has the beginnings of a
• 1:02:58
  hallmarks of a good Doctor Who story?
• 1:03:00
  Nice bit of evidence that's been put forward.
• 1:03:02
  But after that point, it's just relentless for them, for both of
• 1:03:07
  them. And I think with me, I always
• 1:03:10
  struggle a bit with Bernice in general.
• 1:03:13
  I don't know why. I don't know why I've always
• 1:03:16
  struggled with Bernice as a character and I can't explain
• 1:03:20
  it. And so kind of think, well, but
• 1:03:25
  the monkeys eater if they want to, you know.
• 1:03:30
  Get back from her, I'll fight all you fucking monkeys.
• 1:03:33
  But again, this, this the, the, I think the book meself has
• 1:03:36
  weighted more towards Bernice than Ace.
• 1:03:38
  I think Ace kind of becomes a bit of a background character
• 1:03:41
  until you get to the end when you know what we're talking at
• 1:03:45
  drills and cleaning fluid, etcetera, etcetera.
• 1:03:49
  And so I do wonder if it is them testing that water with Bernice
• 1:03:53
  is a central character to be looked at and to view a world
• 1:03:56
  through. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:09
  I, I think it's for me, I think it's a good book for both of the
• 1:04:15
  characterisations of Ace and, and Venice, because I think at
• 1:04:20
  this point we're, we're used to the, the space bitch Ace.
• 1:04:24
  That's, you know, guns and you know, shoot first, ask questions
• 1:04:31
  later, always falling out the doctor and arguing with him and
• 1:04:34
  all this stuff. But I think, like in this book,
• 1:04:38
  it's that Ace is kind of written quite well to the point where
• 1:04:47
  where it's not as jarring a development for Ace as, as, as
• 1:04:54
  you know, from, from the Ace that we saw on TV, it, it's just
• 1:04:59
  an older, more cynical Ace in their side field.
• 1:05:05
  And, and, and, and I also like the fact that, you know, instead
• 1:05:09
  of the let's blow everything up, let's shoot everything up.
• 1:05:13
  She's using her training from that, from being like a, you
• 1:05:16
  know, a space marine type thing here to, to, to help the
• 1:05:21
  survival, not just of herself, but of her friends and of the
• 1:05:25
  people that she meets as well. So I think it's, it's quite good
• 1:05:28
  from that point of view of, of, of, you know, because I, I think
• 1:05:34
  I, I disagree a little bit with you, Gareth.
• 1:05:36
  I think this is it feels more of an Ace centric book than it does
• 1:05:41
  beneath, because beneath is is is ill a lot of the time and and
• 1:05:47
  and again unconscious at various points throughout there.
• 1:05:53
  But I I think he writes Ace quite well in this and and and
• 1:05:57
  not to the point where she's as annoying as she is in other new
• 1:06:02
  adventures around around this time where they've just made her
• 1:06:06
  thoroughly unlikeable and as far from the Ace that we we we
• 1:06:11
  watched on TVI think with Benice.
• 1:06:15
  I'm really glad that Benice is in this book because I think
• 1:06:19
  she's the only one that offers any humour.
• 1:06:25
  There isn't a great deal of humour in this, but because
• 1:06:28
  Benny's is sarcastic and sardonic and you've got that dry
• 1:06:33
  wit all the time. And I and I, I quite like the
• 1:06:36
  the devil actually forms with with is it allentious?
• 1:06:40
  The the the monkey, the way that he's so he's so literal and then
• 1:06:49
  the way that that bounces off her sarcasm.
• 1:06:52
  I, I just thought that was really, really good.
• 1:06:54
  So so but man alive are they both put through the ringer And
• 1:06:58
  it I mean, like certainly with Benice, it's sort of like as the
• 1:07:04
  book goes on, the the the horror that happens to her just gets
• 1:07:08
  ramped up and up and up you would get.
• 1:07:11
  Off wouldn't. You you would get off at this
• 1:07:13
  point. Yeah.
• 1:07:15
  I mean, that's, I mean, I mean, like we've alluded to her being
• 1:07:21
  pumped full of the, the cleaning fluid by by Ace to kind of is it
• 1:07:27
  to to form a callus around the, the parasite that's inside her
• 1:07:31
  that she got because she eats the monkey flesh of the monkey
• 1:07:36
  that she killed. It's it's like, oh man, alive,
• 1:07:39
  you know, sort of thing. And, you know, the fact that she
• 1:07:42
  nearly dies at that because that plunker drew kind of gets in the
• 1:07:47
  way and of Ace doing going through with her plan.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah. So so I mean, they're really put
• 1:07:54
  through the ringer. But but I I I really think both
• 1:07:56
  of them are written very well. I think like, and I and I think
• 1:08:01
  of we needed Bernice's humour in this to, to lighten a lot of the
• 1:08:07
  dark and, and it's just a very tiny glimmer of light in order
• 1:08:12
  that. But yeah, so I think, I think
• 1:08:15
  for for both the companions, I think it's quite a good book
• 1:08:17
  other than the horrors that happened to them.
• 1:08:22
  Joe, bear in mind you're going to be talking about Ace here.
• 1:08:24
  Can you can you keep it civilized?
• 1:08:28
  I absolutely can because I'm 100% with Dan on this one.
• 1:08:32
  I think they're both beautifully characterized in this book,
• 1:08:35
  especially Ace. And the the reason why I think
• 1:08:39
  Ace is a million times better written in this than in Blood
• 1:08:42
  Heat where I just found her an angst ridden teenager that just
• 1:08:46
  wanted to hurt everybody and it was thoroughly depressing.
• 1:08:50
  Is she's got a sense of self-awareness in this book.
• 1:08:52
  There's a line where she goes. I seem to scare a lot of people
• 1:08:56
  lately, a lot of people, not least of all myself.
• 1:08:59
  She's aware of how she's coming across now, and things are about
• 1:09:02
  to change as she departs in that piece.
• 1:09:05
  It's so refreshing to hear. But as well, she's fiercely
• 1:09:09
  protective of Bernice in this in Blood Heat, she was actively
• 1:09:13
  trying to frighten Bernice in the opening scenes in the TARDIS
• 1:09:16
  in a way that I've found deeply unpleasant to read.
• 1:09:20
  And here she's like, she's my friend, all right?
• 1:09:22
  She's a pain in the fucking ass she goes.
• 1:09:24
  But you know, I love her and I'm going to look after her.
• 1:09:27
  And there's several times in the book where she's, you know,
• 1:09:30
  going out of her way to try and look after her.
• 1:09:34
  And on Bernice's side, yeah, they do both go through hell.
• 1:09:39
  I love the scenes where Bernice, there was some really
• 1:09:42
  intelligent discussion where they were talking about religion
• 1:09:46
  and faith. And it was a bit like it
• 1:09:49
  reminded me of Deep Space 9's The Emissary, where Cisco meets
• 1:09:52
  the profits and the monkey was going, well, what is this love?
• 1:09:56
  What is this religion? What is this?
• 1:09:58
  And she has to explain. And she's such a an erudite
• 1:10:01
  character that she, it means Mortimer gets to explain some
• 1:10:05
  really weighty ideas in amongst all the torture porn, which I
• 1:10:09
  thought was really nice. And the two of them together are
• 1:10:12
  piercing together all of the weird stuff that's going on that
• 1:10:17
  they can't quite figure it out. Eventually they piece it all
• 1:10:20
  together and figure out that this thing is pregnant.
• 1:10:23
  It's a biological cycle that they're trapped in, and this is
• 1:10:26
  what we've got to do. So they're they're really smart,
• 1:10:29
  the pair of them as well. Yeah.
• 1:10:31
  I, I thought they were pretty great.
• 1:10:34
  The only thing I can't get behind is just the the extreme
• 1:10:38
  levels of horror that they have to face.
• 1:10:42
  But if if it was these characters in a lighter,
• 1:10:47
  peppier, wittier book, I'd think I'd be in 7th heaven.
• 1:10:54
  I think, I think the bits with Benny's was sometimes my
• 1:10:58
  favorite bits because I I sorry, Gareth, I disagree.
• 1:11:02
  I really, I really like Benny's. I came to Bernie's first through
• 1:11:07
  the audio. So anytime I read, go back and
• 1:11:09
  read, this is always Lisa Bauerman's voice in my head.
• 1:11:12
  And it's, it's quite startling at times how you can read books
• 1:11:16
  written four or five years before she was cast and you can
• 1:11:18
  still hear her voice in that character.
• 1:11:20
  So it shows that the writers generally knew how to capture
• 1:11:23
  Benice's voice, which usually usually slightly dry, slightly
• 1:11:26
  sarcastic, slightly taking the piss out of things, but also
• 1:11:29
  being able to be serious and bring what was needed to the
• 1:11:33
  story. David, no, no, it isn't your
• 1:11:35
  your first. Yes, it was.
• 1:11:38
  That great line where she goes, at least I don't have to have
• 1:11:41
  that awkward conversation about what what's happened to my
• 1:11:44
  pussy. It's so great.
• 1:11:48
  I think somebody who just managed to inhabit the character
• 1:11:51
  straight away and is just as I say anytime I read anything with
• 1:11:55
  her in it, particularly this stuff, is like I will always
• 1:11:58
  hear her voice reading it and I could hear her voice in this
• 1:12:02
  less so Sophie Aldridge's ace. There are times I I'm glad that
• 1:12:07
  she was less space bitch, but there were times where I just
• 1:12:09
  did find Ace a bit like unlikeable.
• 1:12:12
  But I think we're probably supposed to because obviously
• 1:12:14
  there's little bits with her and Drew and it's like, I've got all
• 1:12:17
  these parasites under my skin here.
• 1:12:19
  Terrified person. I need you to cut me open.
• 1:12:22
  And I'm kind of on his side with that one a little bit because
• 1:12:25
  it's like I'd faint. Yeah.
• 1:12:28
  That's so funny, that bit. She's like, Oh my God, I know
• 1:12:31
  what's happening. She's like, like, no, tell us,
• 1:12:34
  tell us, please. What the hell is going on in
• 1:12:36
  this book? We can't have you and the doctor
• 1:12:38
  with all the answers asleep. I think the most frustrating
• 1:12:42
  thing is you've got 3 central characters obviously all going
• 1:12:45
  off having their own storylines from the Doctor Who's just
• 1:12:48
  asleep and they're not interacting.
• 1:12:51
  And sometimes the the fun of having these characters is them
• 1:12:55
  interacting with each other. The Ace and Bernice's
• 1:12:58
  relationship has come a long way since Blood Heats and No Future
• 1:13:02
  and everything like that, where they've gone through, you know,
• 1:13:04
  hating each other and everything and now they're in a better
• 1:13:06
  place and. Should have been the three of
• 1:13:09
  them, the three of them having extended dialogue scenes in this
• 1:13:12
  strange space, figuring it all out.
• 1:13:14
  It would have been great. And instead, they're kind of
• 1:13:18
  stuck with, you know, they're all sort of paired up at
• 1:13:20
  different times with different characters.
• 1:13:22
  I think with Bernice with the Monkey King, whose name I can't
• 1:13:26
  remember at Lencers. There were some good bits there,
• 1:13:30
  But let's segue. It's not better the next
• 1:13:33
  question on my list, but it feels more natural.
• 1:13:36
  Next question. We've got a relatively small
• 1:13:38
  guest cast in this story. Does anybody make an impact?
• 1:13:45
  No. Does anybody stand out you.
• 1:13:48
  Tell me the names and I couldn't tell you a thing about any of
• 1:13:51
  them. Well, there was the captain
• 1:13:53
  whose name you forgot, and then Urquhart, Yes.
• 1:13:58
  Rhiannon. Rhiannon, She was being kept
• 1:14:01
  alive for some reason I can't remember.
• 1:14:03
  Now, but why was it? Why was it?
• 1:14:05
  Did I miss the bit that explained why her intelligence
• 1:14:08
  or why her persona was the one that would that the planet went
• 1:14:10
  for next after the Doctor when the Doctor shut himself down?
• 1:14:14
  And that. Ever explained?
• 1:14:15
  Because she'd been before, I think.
• 1:14:18
  Right, OK. It's almost the groundwork had
• 1:14:20
  been put in and then you know, and was she?
• 1:14:22
  In a relationship with the other woman because the other woman
• 1:14:25
  was fucking obsessed with her all the time.
• 1:14:27
  Where's Rihanna? What's happening to Rhiannon?
• 1:14:29
  I was like, oh God. But I don't think they were were
• 1:14:32
  they just made. No, no, they, they were just
• 1:14:34
  really good friends. They they, they, they just
• 1:14:36
  shared a room, but there's nothing.
• 1:14:38
  Between them, if you fellows were flying about the artefacts,
• 1:14:41
  you know I'd be obsessed with trying to find you lot as well.
• 1:14:43
  So, you know, I won't judge her too.
• 1:14:45
  Much the 11 of the interesting characters though was Benjamin
• 1:14:47
  Green Midnight. I thought the Midnight bits were
• 1:14:52
  really, really good when the Midnight was trying to explore
• 1:14:56
  that sense of self in terms of who they are.
• 1:15:01
  Oh, I'm not me. What am I?
• 1:15:02
  What's a me? You know, all that sort of
• 1:15:04
  thing. I quite enjoyed those bits.
• 1:15:06
  But again, that's sort of in isolation from everything else.
• 1:15:09
  And obviously the set up at the beginning with Benjamin Green
• 1:15:12
  joining in the the Dome and being shown round and you're
• 1:15:14
  like, OK, this is this, let's see where this is going.
• 1:15:17
  And then they all get naked. Yeah.
• 1:15:21
  So if I had to pick an MVP out of the characters, is Benjamin
• 1:15:25
  Green Midnight for me? My MVP of the guest characters
• 1:15:29
  was one that doesn't even feature the founding families
• 1:15:32
  from robots of Death that get mentioned all the bloody time
• 1:15:34
  but never appear once. And, you know, you'd learn about
• 1:15:37
  civil wars and there's sort of this tyrannical families
• 1:15:40
  treating people badly and every now and again.
• 1:15:43
  Religion isn't it as. Well, you do get these like off
• 1:15:47
  screen organizations or characters that are actually
• 1:15:50
  more interesting than the ones you're spending time with.
• 1:15:53
  And I did think that was quite interesting and just more of
• 1:15:58
  expansion of robots of death as well.
• 1:16:01
  We had that shuttle full of students where I think they they
• 1:16:03
  named a couple of them. One began with the letter Pi
• 1:16:05
  think, but they pretty much became cannon fodder or tentacle
• 1:16:09
  fodder. And every single corpse, didn't
• 1:16:12
  they? There was 8 corpses and he
• 1:16:13
  explained every single one. They got a paragraph each.
• 1:16:16
  Corpse #1 has been destroyed by this.
• 1:16:19
  Literally that one. Corpse #2 has been blown out
• 1:16:22
  from the inside. Do it like Bullseye in one he'd.
• 1:16:25
  Had a bad day that day, all right, when he sat down at the
• 1:16:28
  typewriter. And then, of course, we've got
• 1:16:31
  GAIL and Drew. And this is where you probably
• 1:16:34
  don't have to take a moment to remember who they were.
• 1:16:37
  No, I know Drew was the most annoying character in the entire
• 1:16:41
  book because it just other than fainting, because I thought that
• 1:16:47
  was quite funny when when Ace asked him to sort of cut the
• 1:16:51
  parasites out of it with the the Shard of glass.
• 1:16:54
  Everything he did was so selfish and and he was he was like it
• 1:17:00
  was he was infatuated with Rhiannon, wasn't he?
• 1:17:04
  He, he, he, you know, to the point where that was the be all
• 1:17:07
  and end all for him, his, his, you know, reason for struggling
• 1:17:13
  on in this this harsh hostile environment.
• 1:17:17
  But. But he, he just came across as
• 1:17:19
  an absolute wanker And, and it's sort of yeah, you know, so, so
• 1:17:25
  he, he, he stuck out, but for all the wrong reasons.
• 1:17:28
  And I just, I just like and, and the fact that he's well, one of
• 1:17:34
  the last people to get killed as well, which is, was a bit
• 1:17:37
  annoying. The monk was pretty cool, wasn't
• 1:17:41
  he? I did like a monkey.
• 1:17:43
  I, I was really scared actually, that monkey was going to die
• 1:17:45
  several times. So I was like, no, please don't
• 1:17:47
  kill the monkey. And then he killed like hundreds
• 1:17:50
  of thousands of them. So I was like, fair.
• 1:17:52
  Enough many monkeys gave their life this information.
• 1:17:55
  They were sort of bits were floating in people's orifices,
• 1:17:58
  weren't they? In their mouths and up their
• 1:17:59
  nose and things. Monkey blood and monkey fingers
• 1:18:02
  and. And then Benice.
• 1:18:04
  Benice gets a nice light snack with the one that she killed.
• 1:18:07
  Was it a tongue or something going in?
• 1:18:08
  I can't remember. I, I, I, I don't know, but it
• 1:18:12
  was repeating on her for, for the rest of the book, you know,
• 1:18:15
  just burping and just the taste of monkey flesh.
• 1:18:19
  And it was like, why? Why do we need to know that?
• 1:18:23
  Why is that adding to this book, this story?
• 1:18:26
  I suppose it's hint. I suppose it could be.
• 1:18:28
  Is it hinting that something that she's ate is kind of there?
• 1:18:32
  I mean, it's it could have been done a bit better.
• 1:18:36
  Yeah, it's a bit gross. I mean, I think we're sort of
• 1:18:39
  coming to the conclusion generally that most a bit like
• 1:18:42
  the last Dodo, the guest characters were kind of
• 1:18:45
  forgettable or annoying, one or the other.
• 1:18:48
  And I think even more times with with GAIL and Drew towards the
• 1:18:51
  end, it's just like, oh shit, they're still in it, kill them.
• 1:18:55
  Kill them off really quickly. You don't even see it, do you?
• 1:18:59
  Is it? Is it Ace or Beneath that comes
• 1:19:01
  across or or they may be in the. Oh, just the bodies, don't they?
• 1:19:04
  One of the regulars comes across the bodies just lying there,
• 1:19:07
  being pecked up by. You just couldn't be bothered to
• 1:19:10
  even write them out. He's like, yeah, I don't.
• 1:19:13
  I don't even care that joke. About that.
• 1:19:14
  I've just gone like, oh, my God, Have you seen GAIL and Drew?
• 1:19:17
  And then they come flying path being pecked to death.
• 1:19:22
  Did you get on the phone to say you wouldn't go?
• 1:19:24
  Eric? Hello.
• 1:19:25
  Yeah. I've got these two expendable
• 1:19:26
  characters at the end of my book.
• 1:19:28
  Kill them. All right?
• 1:19:29
  Yeah. There is something very sayward
• 1:19:33
  in few of these things. There's a lack of a doctor.
• 1:19:36
  It's extremely violent. It's clearly like he would
• 1:19:39
  rather be writing something else.
• 1:19:40
  I bet he loved Resurrection of the Daleks.
• 1:19:43
  Jim Warmer. You know, maybe, you know, maybe
• 1:19:46
  he, you know, his favorite book is Revelation, because that's
• 1:19:48
  another one that we've done which at least that.
• 1:19:51
  Book Beating people to people. You know, when we were younger,
• 1:19:53
  we always rewound our favorite scenes from Doctor Who.
• 1:19:56
  I was always rewind the bit where Ace gets surrounded by the
• 1:19:59
  Daleks and remember the Daleks at the end of episode 2.
• 1:20:02
  I bet you Mortimer was there on that bit where the man's face
• 1:20:05
  melts and resurrection what's happening.
• 1:20:07
  I'll bet you love that bit. Well, he has the word pain in
• 1:20:13
  it. Early in the week I took out
• 1:20:15
  APDF of the book, did a little search because obviously the
• 1:20:19
  pain is a constant theme. But like I said, how many times
• 1:20:23
  do you think Jim Ultimate uses the word pain in this 300 page
• 1:20:27
  book? 7A Little bit more than 7 How
• 1:20:32
  40? 8:00 I'm going to.
• 1:20:37
  Get 23. 119. That's a lot of pain.
• 1:20:44
  That is, that is a lot of pain. I think it's that means it's
• 1:20:47
  pretty much on every 3rd page you have something to do with
• 1:20:51
  pain and there's more pain and would I what I noticed.
• 1:20:54
  I'd order of pain with that. And that's, I think that's why I
• 1:20:58
  struggled with it because it's just like this is this is
• 1:21:00
  relentless. This is just ongoing.
• 1:21:05
  So. We kind of touched on this.
• 1:21:08
  I'm, I am actually deliberately going to skip a question because
• 1:21:10
  I'm going to add a new question towards the end, which I didn't
• 1:21:12
  announce, but we've kind of touched a little bit on the
• 1:21:16
  writing style. But do you find Morton's writing
• 1:21:21
  style accessible or alienating? Joe, you can go first.
• 1:21:28
  I really liked his writing style here.
• 1:21:30
  Another thing I didn't like about Blood he was he does his
• 1:21:34
  weird staccato sentences, which is like two or three words, and
• 1:21:39
  then he goes to the next line and then the next line, panting,
• 1:21:42
  running, fasting. And I just found all that so
• 1:21:45
  annoying and trying hard to impress.
• 1:21:47
  Whereas here he is writing thick paragraphs but with very visual,
• 1:21:54
  very visual prose. So I, I, I thought it was an
• 1:21:58
  easy book to read. I mean, I, I said earlier, yeah,
• 1:22:01
  I, I just think the, the, the Rebecca Levine should have gone
• 1:22:04
  may add some chapters, put some dialogue in to break it this
• 1:22:08
  heavy prose up. And and add, add, add some quiet
• 1:22:13
  bits because because I think that's the thing we go from from
• 1:22:16
  horrible to horrible to horrible sort of incidents.
• 1:22:19
  And there's no there's no places to pause and catch your breath
• 1:22:24
  as well. Which do.
• 1:22:25
  You think she was reading this right, going oh the first 6
• 1:22:27
  pages was this quite light exploration?
• 1:22:29
  Love, oh God, what's happening here?
• 1:22:31
  Oh, murder, murder, murder. Murder.
• 1:22:33
  I'm sure it's going to get light in a minute. 00 And then she
• 1:22:37
  kept going, and she thought, well, that's the whole book,
• 1:22:40
  just print it. Maybe forget any of the.
• 1:22:45
  Pages. Just like, have you got any of
• 1:22:47
  the books ready to go? I was like, no, I was like,
• 1:22:48
  shit, just stick it it. It might be that it was just too
• 1:22:51
  long and it's like we have to cut it out.
• 1:22:52
  It's like, just keep all the vital bits of the story and take
• 1:22:55
  out any interesting character development for Gale and Drew or
• 1:22:58
  anything like that. I mean.
• 1:22:59
  It's 308 odd pages, isn't it? Then you could make this 280
• 1:23:03
  pages and take out the worst excesses of the violence.
• 1:23:08
  But even even the book lures you into a false sense of security
• 1:23:11
  because it's it's written as three parts.
• 1:23:15
  The way they stick those very. Yeah, but that's what I mean.
• 1:23:19
  It's already set to itself up, bearing in mind this is a Doctor
• 1:23:22
  Who and Mccoy's doctor did 3 parters.
• 1:23:25
  And then you look at how they're actually set out there and
• 1:23:28
  already you're like, well, that's not following a format,
• 1:23:31
  is it? You know, it's, it's following
• 1:23:34
  the Cartmel script editor thing of like having, you know, sort
• 1:23:38
  of lots happening in episode 1 and then loads of running around
• 1:23:41
  in episode 2, then more running around in episode 3 and then two
• 1:23:44
  minutes to wrap this thing up. Yeah, it's like you said, it's a
• 1:23:47
  novella. They found a lot of extra stuff
• 1:23:48
  for Chapter 2 and just bunged it in there as a special edition.
• 1:23:50
  Great novella this. Yeah.
• 1:23:54
  I think it's, it's, it's the curse of McCoy of like not
• 1:23:56
  having a decent editor of his stories at times just to kind of
• 1:24:00
  keep it nice and concise, keep it tight.
• 1:24:02
  Oh, she. Gets so like Rebecca Levine.
• 1:24:04
  Oh, she does. She does.
• 1:24:06
  I mean, we've covered, but she's still doing it by bad therapy to
• 1:24:09
  the. End to all the.
• 1:24:10
  Way to the end. Then then she strikes gold.
• 1:24:13
  We I think we've said it before the final third, the new
• 1:24:16
  adventures is pretty strong. So this is you know, this is
• 1:24:20
  your first story. This is probably it's been it's
• 1:24:22
  probably on the to do pile. We'll make it work.
• 1:24:27
  And two people from them. One look at this range is a
• 1:24:29
  great quote. In the whole adventures, she
• 1:24:31
  took one look at this range and what they were producing, and
• 1:24:34
  she just goes ice. Yeah, I wanted rid of her like,
• 1:24:39
  straight away. And she knew she knew how to fix
• 1:24:41
  this. But obviously it takes time, you
• 1:24:44
  know? I think the audience needed to
• 1:24:46
  be weaned off Ace because it was such a seventh option.
• 1:24:49
  Ace was such a big thing, you know, because we were also
• 1:24:53
  hooked into their adventures and everything.
• 1:24:54
  Like, if you're going to write her out, you kind of have to do
• 1:24:58
  some groundwork and kind of we have to take a couple of books
• 1:25:01
  to go set up the fact that she's going to leave.
• 1:25:03
  Because I I wonder how Phantom would have reacted.
• 1:25:06
  Like. If you don't have to write her
• 1:25:08
  out, she could be there for the all all the time, but it's like
• 1:25:11
  the character was done. We could have had.
• 1:25:13
  Rayne the safecracker instead. Couldn't we in Exodus and all of
• 1:25:16
  that. Before you throw it to everyone
• 1:25:18
  else about the prose, I just want to say the best character
• 1:25:21
  in this book by a country mile was the artifact itself.
• 1:25:25
  And that's where all of his love and that's where all of his
• 1:25:28
  passion goes in this book. And as AI mean, by the end of
• 1:25:33
  it, I was bored of the biological functions of the
• 1:25:35
  artefact. There's only so much I can learn
• 1:25:37
  about the dilating fallopian tubes and all of this, of this
• 1:25:41
  thing. But it was beautifully imagined
• 1:25:47
  and weird and different and exotic and God, just take away
• 1:25:54
  the hurt. And again, there's something
• 1:25:57
  there. There's a great germ of an idea
• 1:25:59
  there. But yeah, I, I do think when
• 1:26:01
  he's writing about the artefact and he, he writes about it a
• 1:26:04
  lot, he, you can see his passion, you can see what he
• 1:26:08
  wants to write. Dan.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah, that's the thing. Because, because, because I
• 1:26:24
  think that I, I, I'm slightly, that's because I leaned towards
• 1:26:28
  where Joe is with it, that I did enjoy how he wrote things.
• 1:26:36
  I just didn't necessarily enjoy the topics that he was writing
• 1:26:40
  about. So, so I think, I think his
• 1:26:42
  style of writing I quite liked, I quite enjoyed.
• 1:26:46
  It was very visual. It was, it was very, very
• 1:26:49
  descriptive. And so I found that accessible.
• 1:26:53
  But then I found the fact that he wasn't much interested in
• 1:27:01
  telling a a Doctor Who story really, was he?
• 1:27:05
  He, he wanted to, to do the artefact and, and just to go to
• 1:27:10
  town on that, which which he does in, in large chunks and of
• 1:27:15
  this book. But it's, I think it's what
• 1:27:21
  alienates me from his writing. So again, it's that pendulum I'm
• 1:27:25
  swinging from, from, you know, 2 points of view here is the fact
• 1:27:30
  that it's so grim and there's, there's very little light in it.
• 1:27:36
  There's very little room to breathe.
• 1:27:38
  You know that that it felt like it was just set piece to set
• 1:27:41
  piece to set piece towards the end.
• 1:27:45
  And and I think that's when I started to find the book hard to
• 1:27:52
  digest in, in large portions as it were.
• 1:27:59
  So it's, it's weird on one hand like, like maths, the first
• 1:28:06
  question of the night. On one hand there were bits that
• 1:28:09
  I really, really enjoyed. And then on others there were
• 1:28:11
  bits that I really, really didn't like.
• 1:28:13
  And it was, it felt quite hard to get through to, you know, as
• 1:28:20
  I said, to the point where I was only able to read about like 10
• 1:28:23
  pages at a time. And then I had to put it down
• 1:28:26
  and go off and do something else and then come back to it, which
• 1:28:30
  normally I like to read a bit more than that.
• 1:28:36
  Yes. So it's a, it's a really hard
• 1:28:38
  one to gauge because there were bits of it that were good that
• 1:28:43
  he, he really does really well. But then because he's writing
• 1:28:47
  about so much horror and horrible things happen to
• 1:28:51
  people's bodies because there's a, there's a lot of evolving and
• 1:28:57
  mutating, even the bits about, you know, like spores going into
• 1:29:03
  people and stuff like that. I, I, Oh yeah, it made, made me
• 1:29:07
  go there sort of cringe and what have you sort of things.
• 1:29:10
  So it's, it's really weird. I, I just, you know, I, I find
• 1:29:17
  it accessible on one hand, but alienate him and the other.
• 1:29:20
  And, and so it's a really hard, it was a really hard one to
• 1:29:24
  gauge It's. Such a baffling thing, isn't it?
• 1:29:27
  Because he's clearly got the talent, but he doesn't have.
• 1:29:30
  I don't think he he allows any of his books to be likeable or
• 1:29:34
  pleasurable. No.
• 1:29:36
  And that's so weird. Because I, I felt when I read
• 1:29:44
  Belt's emphasis that that's, that's so in my reread of the
• 1:29:48
  8th Doctor books, that's where I've got to.
• 1:29:50
  And I've been stopped. I've been parked there halfway
• 1:29:54
  through that book for, for months and months and months
• 1:29:57
  because I, I, it's just, it's so hard to just read about
• 1:30:05
  suffering all the time. Because as I said with the
• 1:30:08
  icebreaker, Doctor Who should be about escapism.
• 1:30:11
  It should be, you know, it should be about fantasy, it
• 1:30:13
  should be, you know, it should be about the wonders of of of
• 1:30:17
  the the artefact. But unfortunately he wants to
• 1:30:21
  tell that story, but he also wants to tell the horrors of it
• 1:30:25
  and, and basically everything in there.
• 1:30:27
  There's nothing in that thing that's nice.
• 1:30:29
  It's all going to kill you, apart from perhaps the monkeys,
• 1:30:32
  but even they had to go at beneath them and trying to cook
• 1:30:36
  her alive with the smoke. Needed like a mad dogs, an
• 1:30:40
  Englishman or something like that in this run, didn't they?
• 1:30:43
  Something that was just light and fluffy and accessible and
• 1:30:45
  funny. And they do get there because
• 1:30:47
  then they start adding in happy endings and whatever you might
• 1:30:51
  think of it, sky pirates and books that are wackier and
• 1:30:54
  funnier. Zampa, you know, that are a bit
• 1:30:57
  lighter. So so there's a there's a sort
• 1:31:00
  of a juggling of tones. But yeah, boy, boy, this is this
• 1:31:04
  is Doctor Who's depression this period.
• 1:31:08
  And if you're already depressive like me, that's not a great
• 1:31:11
  thing to read if you're reading these in order.
• 1:31:14
  No, no. What did you make of it, Gareth?
• 1:31:18
  I mean, I, I agree with Dan. I, I, I like the writing.
• 1:31:24
  I didn't have a problem with the writing at all.
• 1:31:26
  It needed to be there to tell that world because of how
• 1:31:30
  strange and exotic it was. The fact that I'm not
• 1:31:33
  particularly keen on that telling of a tale is, is
• 1:31:40
  unfortunate because otherwise I might be having a different view
• 1:31:43
  on it in terms of the book overall.
• 1:31:45
  But I, I can, I can respect the writing for what it was.
• 1:31:48
  I don't like the chapters at all, how they're presented in
• 1:31:52
  this book. And I think that comes back to
• 1:31:55
  some of what Dan said in terms of the the incidents and how
• 1:31:58
  they care and how it rolls. I think it's at the top end of
• 1:32:00
  this. He admitted he didn't plot this
• 1:32:02
  one very well. And it kind of feels like so it
• 1:32:04
  just kind of feels like a bit of a rush job to get through.
• 1:32:07
  And that really broke it down for me.
• 1:32:10
  So I don't think it's a fault of the writer that I didn't like it
• 1:32:13
  as much, but I think the format it was presented in didn't help
• 1:32:17
  it for me. I mean, case in point, I read
• 1:32:20
  another book. I don't know if you chaps that
• 1:32:22
  do this. They're on good reads.
• 1:32:25
  They have a series of challenges every month and they open new
• 1:32:29
  ones up every month for you to try a different book.
• 1:32:32
  So I did try a different book. I went to a romance fantasy
• 1:32:35
  book. I'm not a romance fantasy kind
• 1:32:38
  of guy. I'm not sure.
• 1:32:41
  I'm not sure I've ever read a romance book.
• 1:32:44
  But I'll be honest with you, I absolutely detested the book
• 1:32:47
  that I read. I got through the end of it
• 1:32:48
  because I never leave a book unfinished.
• 1:32:50
  Heck, I've read Sex and the City, which I did purchase
• 1:32:55
  myself by accident. But this one, I never felt like
• 1:33:00
  I wasn't enjoying the reading of it.
• 1:33:03
  It just took a long slog of a time to get through.
• 1:33:07
  Who knows, maybe I could be talking on my backside because
• 1:33:10
  that might be what he wanted me to experience, The actual pain
• 1:33:13
  of going through all this. I think you're in that middle
• 1:33:17
  section. You're supposed to be as lost as
• 1:33:19
  Ace and Benny are, throwing around from one horrible thing
• 1:33:24
  to another. But I don't want to be lost like
• 1:33:27
  Ace and Benny going through Doctor You.
• 1:33:30
  Need doctor figure you need someone to lead you through all
• 1:33:33
  this. I really need.
• 1:33:33
  The Doctor in a Doctor Who book. I read The Eyeless after this,
• 1:33:37
  right? And I read it in less than a day
• 1:33:39
  now. It's a shorter book.
• 1:33:40
  It is a shorter book, but it's 20 pages per chapter.
• 1:33:43
  Each chapter focus on a different character, and it's
• 1:33:46
  almost like a little short story in its own right.
• 1:33:48
  There's great points to stop, you know, like cliffhangers at
• 1:33:52
  the end of the chapters that make you want to keep going.
• 1:33:54
  Oh yeah, that's how you do it. That's a pleasurable book to
• 1:33:57
  read. We were just lost in this,
• 1:34:00
  weren't we? We're just in the artefact
• 1:34:04
  ourselves. Maybe that's what he's kind of
• 1:34:06
  going for is like, I want the readers to experience the pain
• 1:34:10
  of reading this book. Well, why does he hate us?
• 1:34:14
  Well, he seems to hate every all the characters that he's
• 1:34:16
  created. He seems to hate the characters
• 1:34:18
  that he's been presented with. What did we ever do to you, Jim
• 1:34:21
  Mortimer? What did Liz Shaw ever do to
• 1:34:25
  him? Come on, Liz Shaw, get me
• 1:34:26
  started on that. In For the uninitiated, in
• 1:34:30
  eternity, we've. Called this book Eternity Weeps
• 1:34:33
  because it feels like an eternity going through.
• 1:34:34
  You want to cry afterwards? No, I would have called it the
• 1:34:38
  the dilating Philippian Tube. Oh, actually, that would give
• 1:34:42
  her the ending, wouldn't it? I would have called it the
• 1:34:45
  treadmill of pain because that's what it felt like the.
• 1:34:50
  Treadmill of pain, yes. You've been to my gym then, have
• 1:34:54
  you? Every gym's like that could
• 1:34:56
  have. Called the Eat Eater of Monkeys,
• 1:35:00
  but that's just Benice's. Yeah, we he could have done the
• 1:35:06
  black sheep cover with Benice's mouth and a bit of monkey coming
• 1:35:09
  out. Oh.
• 1:35:10
  My fingers are coming up. Excuse.
• 1:35:12
  Me. I can't really add any more to
• 1:35:17
  what you're saying. This is as I said earlier, this
• 1:35:19
  just was not my cup of tea type of book.
• 1:35:21
  So I found it a bit. I think it was the, the lack of
• 1:35:25
  levity, the lack of let up in there just because Danny said
• 1:35:31
  it. It's like you could just do with
• 1:35:32
  a little bit of a pause or a break.
• 1:35:34
  I'd like to a bit more than bringing the characters together
• 1:35:36
  and just getting them interacting more, more dialogue
• 1:35:39
  to sort of break up some of the really large prose.
• 1:35:42
  I'm quite a simplistic reader. Maybe that's, that's just on me.
• 1:35:46
  I, I, I was alienated by the book, which is, I suppose again,
• 1:35:50
  maybe that's the intention. This is an incredibly alien
• 1:35:53
  environment. So it maybe is meant to freak
• 1:35:56
  you out and be a bit odd and a bit different, but I I struggle.
• 1:36:01
  Horrors to horrify you then. Has this been the most
• 1:36:04
  successful book we've had so far?
• 1:36:08
  I mean this that's that's a good epitaph for all this book.
• 1:36:10
  This isn't as far as I'm aware, this is not a well regarded book
• 1:36:14
  in your adventure can and I'm sure in one of the DWMS features
• 1:36:18
  they had it. I think they had a nice graph
• 1:36:20
  where they all scored. I'm sure this is one of the low
• 1:36:22
  points, but it's it's. He loved it.
• 1:36:27
  He gave it 4. Stars.
• 1:36:28
  He gave four stars, but he gave force a shadow.
• 1:36:31
  Five stars. And I've yet to meet many people
• 1:36:34
  who can. Yeah, Gareth's face at this
• 1:36:36
  point is a picture. Cast dispersions on Craig Hinton
• 1:36:39
  because he's no longer with us. Did he have a painting room that
• 1:36:41
  we know of? Maybe he likes that sort of
• 1:36:43
  thing. Well.
• 1:36:44
  I also think it's sort of like he was, I mean, I don't know if
• 1:36:47
  he was involved in the new in new Adventures at that point,
• 1:36:51
  but he was obviously wanting to write for the New adventures and
• 1:36:54
  it was almost like maybe I shouldn't give them bad reviews
• 1:36:57
  and that's my foot in the book. I don't know, because no,
• 1:37:01
  because that's how it feels, because it's not like man of
• 1:37:04
  life, you're reading a totally different, different book.
• 1:37:07
  He does. Review them really highly.
• 1:37:11
  I think Millennial Writes came out not long after.
• 1:37:15
  Oh OK, his foot in the door is better.
• 1:37:17
  Be nice. It's a bit like DWM now isn't
• 1:37:19
  it? Where they pray.
• 1:37:20
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's hard to kind
• 1:37:22
  of slag off your boss, isn't it? Sort of thing in front of their
• 1:37:25
  face sort of thing. So yeah.
• 1:37:27
  WM, are you listening to this? The four of us, all right, We're
• 1:37:30
  honest. So get.
• 1:37:31
  Us in to do your reviews. I mean, that was the thing going
• 1:37:34
  back to 90s WDWM is that more so with the videos.
• 1:37:38
  They were quite happy to play publish some.
• 1:37:41
  Scathing reviews, friend of Oh my goodness, the battlefield
• 1:37:45
  one. Well, they admitted they never
• 1:37:47
  watched it. Oh.
• 1:37:48
  Was that Vanessa Bishop? I mean, she was very eccentric.
• 1:37:52
  She's the only person I've seen to give a really negative review
• 1:37:55
  of Spear from Space. Oh, she went after all the
• 1:37:58
  classics. And they were.
• 1:38:00
  Raved about all the duds. She was the Fraser Gregory of
• 1:38:03
  the time. Whoever reviewed Rebus operation
• 1:38:07
  gave it one star. That was Gary Russell.
• 1:38:09
  He hates that story. I mean, what planet is he on?
• 1:38:13
  Well, maybe he needs to come visit the artefact, yeah.
• 1:38:16
  We should have made him read this, shouldn't we?
• 1:38:18
  No, he he did a lot of the adventures either, did he?
• 1:38:20
  That's why he skipped straight over to the missing adventures
• 1:38:22
  the first opportunity he could get.
• 1:38:26
  So I've got, I do have the final question, but I kind of we've
• 1:38:30
  talked about this, we've skirted around it, we touched on it.
• 1:38:33
  So what we have here is one of the more negatively rated, well
• 1:38:39
  acclaimed new adventures. On the other side, we have Blood
• 1:38:43
  Heat, which is generally incredibly well regarded and it
• 1:38:47
  has featured in several top tents.
• 1:38:51
  Joe, you said on our chat, you said on our chat.
• 1:38:54
  And I think Gareth, maybe we take a side, take a step back
• 1:38:56
  here because this is really potentially for Dan and Joe to
• 1:38:58
  find. Hang on, hang on.
• 1:39:00
  Where's the chili? So they're my.
• 1:39:04
  Fridge. I'll go get it.
• 1:39:05
  I want I want to get you out of space for for a few minutes to
• 1:39:08
  say your controversial statement that you believe the Parasite is
• 1:39:12
  a better book than the critically acclaimed Blood Heat.
• 1:39:17
  Yeah, but Blood Heat is critically acclaimed because
• 1:39:20
  it's lazy and it basically says, Oh well, what if Inferno meets
• 1:39:24
  Doctor Who and the Silurians alternative universe and, you
• 1:39:28
  know, a load of lizards? And in this sort of populated
• 1:39:33
  London is such a boring concept and it fails to give any of its
• 1:39:38
  characters a motivation. All the Brigadier keeps saying
• 1:39:42
  throughout whilst he's committing these atrocities is I
• 1:39:45
  did it for the children. That's all he says throughout
• 1:39:47
  the entire book. You've got 3 regulars that are
• 1:39:50
  in complete disarray with each other.
• 1:39:53
  Ace is particularly unpleasant in this book, and horrible
• 1:39:57
  towards Bernice. The Doctor is absent for most of
• 1:40:00
  the book again, but when he's there, he's him and Ace.
• 1:40:03
  So they're rowing at the start of the book and they're rowing
• 1:40:05
  again at the end of the book because he's just sort of let
• 1:40:08
  the air out of the universe, like air out of a balloon.
• 1:40:12
  Whereas Parasite, right, which has massive problems, as we have
• 1:40:15
  said. Yeah, I think Parasite is a a
• 1:40:17
  story that wants to tell a much more imaginative story with a
• 1:40:21
  higher a different idea than reheated old Doctor Who stories.
• 1:40:28
  It does give you though, you guys have all said it that there
• 1:40:31
  are there's no relief from this. There are there are extended
• 1:40:34
  dialogue scenes between Bernice the the monkey or whoever she's
• 1:40:38
  midnight. Is it whoever she's talking
• 1:40:40
  about, about faith and all of that.
• 1:40:42
  Those are pauses in the action. And there's there's stuff at the
• 1:40:46
  beginning and there's stuff at the end as well.
• 1:40:47
  Whereas blood bloody is just unrelenting, fatalistic horror
• 1:40:52
  throughout. I mean, there's a bit towards
• 1:40:54
  the end of it. I just couldn't believe it was
• 1:40:56
  so shocking. I actually did a reading of it
• 1:40:59
  for the episode that's coming out tomorrow where the Silurian
• 1:41:02
  child is running around in the chaos of the climax going, mom,
• 1:41:06
  mom, where are you? Where are you?
• 1:41:07
  And a fucking dinosaur foot comes down and crushes half of
• 1:41:11
  him to death and his house. And it's just horrible.
• 1:41:16
  Yeah, so I think blood he, and I don't think blood he's as well
• 1:41:20
  written as this either, is all over the place.
• 1:41:24
  There's burnt corpses, there's dead babies.
• 1:41:28
  It's just the most horrible book I can remember reading in a
• 1:41:32
  long, long time. Whereas I think this is
• 1:41:36
  horrible, but it has more of a sense of wonder, and at the end
• 1:41:40
  it certainly has more of a sense of hope.
• 1:41:43
  So that's why I prefer this to that.
• 1:41:45
  I understand why everyone loves it because it's big, bold,
• 1:41:48
  powerful images of, you know, London covered in forests and
• 1:41:52
  you good old unit fighting the Silurians under the sea and
• 1:41:55
  things like that. But God get into the depths of
• 1:41:58
  it. It's ugly blood heat.
• 1:42:00
  It's a really ugly book with nothing pleasant to say about
• 1:42:05
  anybody. And that's why I don't like it.
• 1:42:07
  Whereas the 1st 60 pages of this couldn't be more the reverse of
• 1:42:11
  that. The 1st 60 pages of this book
• 1:42:13
  are I thought I was in for a good time.
• 1:42:17
  I wasn't. I thought I was.
• 1:42:19
  There we go. I'm done, right?
• 1:42:21
  The jelly's yours. Dan, we've had Joe's point.
• 1:42:24
  Do you have a counterpoint? It's hard for me to talk about
• 1:42:30
  Blood Blood heat without nostalgia because you never
• 1:42:37
  forget your first love, do you? And, and blood, blood heat was
• 1:42:41
  the 1st new adventures that I, that I actually bought.
• 1:42:47
  And I think, I think I'm, I'm one of those Doctor Who fans
• 1:42:51
  that's probably more trad than rad.
• 1:42:55
  So blood heat kind of plays to, to, to that.
• 1:43:00
  Whereas whereas with what we've just read, Parasite is very much
• 1:43:04
  radical because it's, it's trying to, to tell hard science
• 1:43:09
  fiction in, in the Doctor Who universe.
• 1:43:13
  But yeah, I mean, I, I mean, this is the obviously the first
• 1:43:19
  time I've read Parasite. I've read Blood Heat, you know,
• 1:43:23
  when I was, I think I must have been about 1314 perhaps.
• 1:43:28
  And I've gone back to it and reread it multiple times.
• 1:43:32
  I won't be rereading Parasite. It really won't be.
• 1:43:37
  But I just, I just think it's, it's just those images of, of
• 1:43:45
  I'm a real sucker for those sort of alternative histories.
• 1:43:48
  Like, you know, I like things like s s Great Britain Boy and
• 1:43:52
  sort of SSGB by Byland date and stuff like that.
• 1:43:57
  Man in the High Castle. I, I just love that sort of
• 1:44:01
  alternative timeline history kind of thing.
• 1:44:04
  So it just, it just plays to the things that I really, really
• 1:44:08
  like. Why can't?
• 1:44:09
  It be a hopeful alternative timeline though.
• 1:44:11
  Why is everyone so cynical and angry and miserable and.
• 1:44:16
  That was that was the era of of the New Adventures though,
• 1:44:20
  wasn't it? They were all a bit like that
• 1:44:24
  and it was just kind of playing, playing to that kind of thing a
• 1:44:29
  bit where. Ace is burning dogs alive, dogs
• 1:44:32
  are attacking them and then she's setting them on fire and
• 1:44:35
  I'm like why am I reading this? But you could say that there was
• 1:44:39
  a lot in this book that you think, why am I reading this?
• 1:44:43
  You know about this? Yeah, exactly.
• 1:44:45
  You know, So, yeah, I think it's very much Jim Mortimer's bag,
• 1:44:51
  isn't it? Because, Because I think, I
• 1:44:53
  mean, I don't think I've I've read the first one that he he Co
• 1:44:59
  wrote, but but obviously I've read his his three new
• 1:45:02
  adventures that he's wrote by himself and then belt and pissed
• 1:45:08
  and they're all very, very grim and sort.
• 1:45:12
  Of forever, you know that you did for the Beni line.
• 1:45:14
  That was it was a bit like the Davinci code in the future that
• 1:45:18
  was far less violent and nasty. But but I think I think it's I
• 1:45:23
  think like it feels like his for me, it feels like he started
• 1:45:28
  with his best book, blood heat. This one not so good.
• 1:45:32
  And then eternity reapes is the worst one for the new adventures
• 1:45:35
  because I think I think I put that in my my bottom 10.
• 1:45:39
  I think eternity reapes. I remember rightly.
• 1:45:41
  Yeah, I get the I absolutely get the nostalgia thing because my
• 1:45:46
  first date, Doctor Boot was Eaters of Wasps, which we've
• 1:45:49
  covered. Now, I would acknowledge that
• 1:45:51
  Eaters Wasps is no great piece of literature and it isn't
• 1:45:55
  trying to be anything but a rollicking fun story, but it's a
• 1:45:59
  classic for me, you know? But I know I know another reader
• 1:46:03
  that likes stuff like this, like Parasite would read Eaters a
• 1:46:06
  Wasp and go. I mean, that was a target in all
• 1:46:09
  but name, wasn't it? So yeah, I get it.
• 1:46:12
  I absolutely get it. And I understand what I
• 1:46:15
  understand why people like it as well.
• 1:46:17
  Just wasn't for me. I've got the same nostalgia with
• 1:46:19
  Bloody as well, because it was one of the first year adventures
• 1:46:22
  I read, so it's always the one that kind of opened the door to
• 1:46:26
  reading those books and maybe they got better or not.
• 1:46:29
  Gareth. Do you listen to these?
• 1:46:30
  But maybe, maybe give that episode a miss if you do.
• 1:46:35
  Right. I might have to Gareth.
• 1:46:37
  I know this was kind of I drew this is a battle Royale between
• 1:46:39
  Joe and Dan, but do you have a preference between Parasite and
• 1:46:42
  Blood Heat? It's, it's a funny one because I
• 1:46:47
  haven't read Blood Heat since I first read it in the 90s, but
• 1:46:54
  Blood Heat does have the one that one of the things I don't
• 1:46:59
  like, which is alternate realities because you're in
• 1:47:04
  trouble then. Well, I can't stand Inferno.
• 1:47:08
  To me, once you get to alternate realities, nothing matters.
• 1:47:12
  He don't like Inferno or Bernice.
• 1:47:15
  I mean who invited this man along?
• 1:47:17
  That don't mean. It we need to be more
• 1:47:18
  controversial opinions than that.
• 1:47:22
  I can't wait. I will, I I I may be saving that
• 1:47:26
  for my last ever podcast appearance, my most
• 1:47:28
  controversial 1. Joe Ford, you're a cunt.
• 1:47:31
  Oh, sorry. But no alternate realities to
• 1:47:34
  me, a cannon fodder because you're asking me to buy into
• 1:47:38
  something that actually doesn't really matter.
• 1:47:42
  And I struggle with that straight away because
• 1:47:46
  essentially we're going to be we're we're just looking at
• 1:47:48
  these characters for convenience and telling this story.
• 1:47:52
  And, and I the MCU is going up its own cinematic backside with
• 1:47:57
  alternate realities of this, that and the other.
• 1:48:00
  They did it with the, well, the third Spider man movie, you lose
• 1:48:03
  me right now where that was fine.
• 1:48:05
  I didn't have a problem with that.
• 1:48:06
  But then suddenly it went into all the stuff about the TVA and
• 1:48:09
  all of this. And I was just like, do you know
• 1:48:11
  what? I just don't care.
• 1:48:12
  What if you have a subject called What if?
• 1:48:16
  Gareth, you must have really struggled with Wish World then
• 1:48:19
  that was all set in an alternative reality.
• 1:48:25
  But no. But again, you know exactly what
• 1:48:27
  a substance substance other than.
• 1:48:29
  Poppy, if she was there or who knows.
• 1:48:32
  Actually came out of which wheel?
• 1:48:33
  By the end of it? What actually affected the
• 1:48:35
  characters and how were they affected by what their
• 1:48:37
  experience there? Because we ain't seen any of the
• 1:48:38
  others again, so what's the point?
• 1:48:40
  Why? Why am I engaged with this
• 1:48:42
  piece? What did Inferno do by the end
• 1:48:44
  but essentially tell us the same story 2 times over?
• 1:48:46
  But one time we didn't quite work out OK.
• 1:48:50
  We got through 7 episodes of that to be the time the same
• 1:48:53
  thing twice and and so. Even more trouble with this one
• 1:48:57
  because it just sort of turns off the universal.
• 1:48:59
  Yeah, they just sort of flicks the switch and goes, well, see
• 1:49:01
  you later, everybody. Yeah.
• 1:49:02
  And and that's where I struggle. If if you're going to have
• 1:49:06
  alternate realities, it's got to mean something.
• 1:49:08
  It needs to have an impact and a lasting impact on something, not
• 1:49:13
  just a a show of the week saying we're going here and that's it.
• 1:49:15
  You know, Harry Kim was doing that every week on Voyager.
• 1:49:18
  If we're going back to the Voyager now, it is how many
• 1:49:19
  alternative realities did bloody Harry Kim ever create?
• 1:49:22
  In fact. What about the lower dates one
• 1:49:24
  where it's a whole load of Harry Kim's that they get together at
• 1:49:27
  the end of that? Always comes back to Harry Kim.
• 1:49:30
  Gary Oh, bloody Harry Kim So yeah, I think if you had to ask
• 1:49:34
  me which was the better book, I'd probably go with Parasite.
• 1:49:40
  It was an experience and that I can't deny.
• 1:49:45
  I think they should put that on the back cover.
• 1:49:47
  It was an experience that I can't deny.
• 1:49:51
  I don't think I can sell out anything.
• 1:49:52
  Some weirdos think this is better than blood heat.
• 1:49:55
  Of course, I may reread Blood Heat in a few weeks time and
• 1:49:58
  then change my mind on that by that point.
• 1:50:00
  Like I say, it's been a long time since I've read Blood Heat.
• 1:50:03
  Can I tell you something exciting, Right?
• 1:50:05
  Yeah. Our book club, this podcast,
• 1:50:07
  yeah, has been doing better than Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan
• 1:50:11
  Mcneil's podcast in the TV reviews ratings.
• 1:50:15
  Isn't that great out of the pool, Harry?
• 1:50:18
  Kim Well, I I used to listen to that and they would go, what do
• 1:50:23
  we remember from this episode? And they go, well, not a lot.
• 1:50:25
  And I said, well, what's the point of doing a podcast about
• 1:50:28
  something where you're like, yeah, I don't be doing this.
• 1:50:30
  I'm not in it. Listen to Habsor Blunt Pen Knife
• 1:50:33
  where we go into intense detail about Jim Mortimer's pain
• 1:50:36
  fetish. Why wouldn't you?
• 1:50:39
  Well, of course not. This is a classic you know you
• 1:50:41
  can cut out. Enjoyed it, so you can enjoy it
• 1:50:43
  at home too. Well, you've read it, so you
• 1:50:46
  don't have to. Can I?
• 1:50:47
  Ask one last question. Has sort of reading this book
• 1:50:49
  with its intense torture scenes and, you know, people floating
• 1:50:53
  about in bits and things like that, Has anybody been
• 1:50:56
  encouraged to kill anybody or, you know, behave in a
• 1:50:59
  particularly violent way? No more.
• 1:51:01
  Oh Gareth, look at Gareth is poking.
• 1:51:04
  Sorry. What God?
• 1:51:08
  Nothing. I'm just going to go and grab
• 1:51:10
  the drill, you know? Don't forget the bleach on your
• 1:51:13
  way out. The thing that surprised me,
• 1:51:18
  though, is I would have said that when when I was younger.
• 1:51:22
  I I like, you know, when we, we talk about trout and rad, you
• 1:51:28
  know, but we also talk about gun and frock.
• 1:51:31
  I was definitely more gun than I was frock.
• 1:51:34
  But then coming to read this, I'm like, I'm not so sure I am
• 1:51:38
  anymore. I think.
• 1:51:39
  I think I've mellowed and kind of because I guess this is more
• 1:51:43
  gun than frock. And about a woman giving birth.
• 1:51:48
  So it's quite frock in a very gum sort of a way.
• 1:51:54
  Just kind of got a gun, she's got a knife or something.
• 1:51:56
  Just a bit of glass shot of glass that they found.
• 1:52:00
  Yeah, but I'm not so sure I am anymore.
• 1:52:04
  And and because I read this and I'm thinking no, this isn't for
• 1:52:09
  me. Did you make me think though,
• 1:52:11
  you know, you know, sort of the average woman who's incubating a
• 1:52:13
  child, you can tell I'm gay because I said incubating.
• 1:52:17
  Well, are there all these sort of life forms and organisms in
• 1:52:21
  there being absorbed and eaten and murdered whilst that child's
• 1:52:25
  coming to be? Is this what Jim Morton was
• 1:52:27
  saying to us? And that those organisms all
• 1:52:31
  have lives of their own, like these little monkeys.
• 1:52:33
  I, I don't remember it in this sort of you know, you know, you.
• 1:52:39
  Could go down. You could go down to the cells
• 1:52:41
  within your own body, couldn't you?
• 1:52:42
  Yeah. For that analogy.
• 1:52:48
  Yeah, I think on that point of discussing the human biology
• 1:52:50
  system, whether or not we've got small monkeys inside ourselves
• 1:52:52
  just eating and spewing pollen everywhere, it might be time to
• 1:52:56
  move on. What happens to all the little
• 1:52:58
  sperms that don't make it? Believe they get absorbed into
• 1:53:03
  the body. I don't know why I know that.
• 1:53:06
  That's what happens for the monkeys in this They get killed
• 1:53:09
  and then they suck in all the nutrients.
• 1:53:12
  They're like sperms. OK, well, we've learned
• 1:53:15
  something. I feel I've definitely learned
• 1:53:18
  something. We've read Parasite and I've
• 1:53:20
  learned the fate of the rest of the sperm.
• 1:53:22
  So think of the last three books.
• 1:53:24
  We've done gay politics, we've done extinction species, and now
• 1:53:27
  we've done biological education. I'd love to know where we're
• 1:53:31
  going next. Well, before we obviously we go
• 1:53:34
  into our rankings and our final three, where are we going next,
• 1:53:38
  gentlemen? Oh, did we actually decide?
• 1:53:41
  Yeah, I think you've been reading it.
• 1:53:43
  We're off to, we're off to, we're off to Scotland.
• 1:53:46
  Yeah. It it with there is we are
• 1:53:51
  bringing out your dead, aren't we?
• 1:53:53
  Is it bring out your dead? Bring.
• 1:53:55
  Yeah, but we're not doing another Jim Mortimer book.
• 1:53:58
  Jonathan Morris. Yes, Lake.
• 1:54:01
  City with. This was your recommend, Dan,
• 1:54:04
  wasn't it? It was, yeah.
• 1:54:06
  It's 12th Doctor adventure. This is my first 12th doctor
• 1:54:08
  adventure because it's not an ear I've ever touched.
• 1:54:11
  I do need to find a copy of it, but I think I found out because
• 1:54:13
  I want the hardback if I can find it.
• 1:54:16
  I'm looking forward to this because.
• 1:54:18
  I'm 100 pages in and just loving it.
• 1:54:22
  The 10 I think I'm on yes. So I must be about similar sort
• 1:54:25
  of way into it as. You, Bill, ask all the smart
• 1:54:29
  questions I really love. That sound.
• 1:54:32
  There's some nice interactions with Bill and the other
• 1:54:33
  characters from what I remember as well.
• 1:54:36
  So we're saying this has got some potentially some
• 1:54:38
  interesting prose companions that are well drawn and
• 1:54:41
  interacting with other people and probably toned down the
• 1:54:45
  mutilation and pain, no. There's an absolute obsession
• 1:54:48
  with death and body horror in. This book as well, but it.
• 1:54:51
  Remembers to make it about people all the time.
• 1:54:54
  Yeah. And how?
• 1:54:55
  They're and it has human. As a joke.
• 1:54:57
  Great joke. So.
• 1:54:59
  We we have a great starting counterpoint.
• 1:55:01
  When we get to that episode now, we've just done it.
• 1:55:04
  We've just done it. So with our top three lists that
• 1:55:10
  we usually do theme this time, obviously, because this is a
• 1:55:13
  very divisive novel, but it clearly has its champions.
• 1:55:17
  So the challenge I set was to name three Doctor Who stories
• 1:55:22
  that you love but not many other people do, but with the caveat
• 1:55:25
  that you have to do one book, 1 audio, 1-TV story.
• 1:55:30
  And Gareth, we're going to you first.
• 1:55:35
  OK, well some of these people might have heard before so I'll
• 1:55:39
  go with the first two. So the book has to be No future,
• 1:55:45
  which I know a lot of people don't like.
• 1:55:47
  Joe right now is caressing his hand lovingly with his head.
• 1:55:53
  No future. No future similar similar to Dan
• 1:55:56
  with Blood Heat. It's a nostalgia factor.
• 1:55:58
  It's got lots of warm fuzzy feeling unit folk in it.
• 1:56:02
  It's got the time meddler in it in the Monk pops not to like,
• 1:56:06
  all right, the covers not to like.
• 1:56:08
  But the story itself is quite good and it doesn't it doesn't
• 1:56:14
  impinge on continuity when you get to the end of it.
• 1:56:17
  One fingers of a deadly weapon. You know what I mean?
• 1:56:19
  It's that kind of washed away at the end of it.
• 1:56:21
  So it seems it's nicely within continuity.
• 1:56:25
  My second one is TV story is Space Babies because it's one
• 1:56:32
  that gets no love on any podcast that I've listened to in recent
• 1:56:37
  times. And I think I have said before
• 1:56:40
  that that is the last episode that all my family watched and
• 1:56:43
  enjoyed together, and the rest of them all disappeared
• 1:56:47
  thereafter and left me all alone to suffer through the end of
• 1:56:52
  Series 1 and the rest of series 2.
• 1:56:56
  What was space babies so bad? They said.
• 1:56:58
  I'm sorry, we can't do anymore. No, my my youngest who's 4
• 1:57:02
  watched space babies, adored it, got to the Devil's Court and
• 1:57:05
  kept going. Where's the space babies?
• 1:57:06
  Where's the space babies? Where's the space babies?
• 1:57:09
  Going to play now? He got so bored with it.
• 1:57:11
  My oldest by 73 yards and Don Bubble was going.
• 1:57:14
  There's no doctor in this. I'm off.
• 1:57:16
  And my wife didn't even get beyond Legend of Ruby Sunday,
• 1:57:20
  which is a blessing in many ways.
• 1:57:22
  In a way, she survived what many of us had to suffer through.
• 1:57:26
  Yeah, joy to the world. Oh God.
• 1:57:29
  And the other one. For that today the.
• 1:57:33
  Other one, the audio is the paradise of death.
• 1:57:36
  Oh. I love paradise because.
• 1:57:40
  Paradise, I really. Oh, besties.
• 1:57:45
  Oh, maybe we'll that. There's definitely a book club
• 1:57:48
  coming out about that now with the four of us.
• 1:57:51
  I, I think he's got everyone always seems to, well, the
• 1:57:54
  majority of you obviously not not well learned folk that we
• 1:57:56
  are, but everyone seems to slag off the paradise of death
• 1:58:00
  whenever they get the opportunity.
• 1:58:01
  And I think it's a rollicking thing.
• 1:58:05
  Have you ever seen the crab clawed Camellius before
• 1:58:06
  Brigadier? No, you're not seeing one now
• 1:58:08
  neither. It's just it, it feels fun, it
• 1:58:11
  feels free. It's new Doctor Who for the
• 1:58:13
  first time since 1989 and it was a great time to be there.
• 1:58:18
  Even the fact that they repeated 1 episode twice, you know it
• 1:58:22
  was, it's a joyous bit and I would recommend it to anyone
• 1:58:25
  that ever wants to listen to them.
• 1:58:28
  But you ghost event space. I think it's just the conceit of
• 1:58:34
  the Brigadier family for me, the Italian heritage that I kind of
• 1:58:38
  come up against. But the paradise of death for me
• 1:58:40
  doesn't put a foot wrong. I enjoy immensely every time,
• 1:58:44
  even if it's just for Jumper. We're shouting moron.
• 1:58:46
  Don't you know the width of your own car?
• 1:58:49
  Justice for Jeremy Fitz Oliver. Is having the best time with it.
• 1:58:56
  I think on Blue Sky the last couple of weeks Johnny Jonathan
• 1:58:59
  Morris has been reviewing Paradise of Death.
• 1:59:02
  I don't think he enjoyed it very much and you know, I don't want
• 1:59:07
  to judge people but I bloody miserable.
• 1:59:10
  Johnny, you better be kinder about it, all right?
• 1:59:12
  Because we're coming for your book next, all right?
• 1:59:15
  I know you listen to some of these.
• 1:59:19
  Dan, watch History. Yeah, the audio was was a little
• 1:59:26
  bit hard actually, because I, I suppose I was kind of stuck in
• 1:59:30
  that big finish kind of rather than thinking of paradise of
• 1:59:37
  death. So I haven't, I don't think
• 1:59:41
  I've, I've listened to as much Big Finish as you guys have.
• 1:59:45
  So I've gone for one that I, I really, really enjoy and I, I
• 1:59:52
  don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything about it.
• 1:59:55
  So it's one of those forgotten ones.
• 1:59:57
  But it's Masters of Earth, which is a 1/6 Doctor and Perry
• 2:00:03
  adventure set in the Dalek occupation of Earth before the
• 2:00:08
  1st Doctor got there and nobbled their plans.
• 2:00:11
  I just really, really love it. I mean, I mean, you know, it's
• 2:00:14
  majority of it's set in Scotland and, and you've got varga plants
• 2:00:19
  and all kinds of, of things and, and I just, I just really,
• 2:00:24
  really enjoy it, but I've never heard anyone say anything about
• 2:00:27
  it, good or bad. I mean I've got a doc, I heard
• 2:00:30
  reviews about it that on my blog I gave it 9 out of 10 I loved.
• 2:00:34
  It well done, Joe. It's like it's done in real
• 2:00:36
  time. They just run from one action
• 2:00:38
  set piece to another. Really sort of horrific action
• 2:00:42
  occurring, but great. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:00:46
  Then for the TV stories, I'm going to go forward the
• 2:00:50
  mysterious planet because again, I think I, I, I think we, we are
• 2:00:59
  lovers on this podcast of Trial of the Time Lords.
• 2:01:05
  But like, I think like the mysterious planet doesn't tend
• 2:01:08
  to get really spoken about Again.
• 2:01:11
  It's, it's, and if it is, majority of people seem to not,
• 2:01:16
  not like it, But there's, there's so much in it.
• 2:01:19
  I love those beautiful visuals that you get at the beginning of
• 2:01:22
  the of the doctor and Perry going through that, you know,
• 2:01:27
  that autumn forest with the mist and all that sort of stuff that
• 2:01:31
  you've got the wonderful music. I think you've got brilliant
• 2:01:34
  double acts like glitz and Dibber and, and I like a lot of
• 2:01:39
  the characters from either the, the, the village up top or the,
• 2:01:45
  you know, mob station. I just really, really enjoy it.
• 2:01:49
  And it's one that doesn't, I don't think.
• 2:01:53
  It doesn't seem to come very high in Doctor Who polls and all
• 2:01:56
  that sort of stuff, but it's one of mine.
• 2:01:58
  It's my favorite sick Doctor story, actually.
• 2:02:03
  And then can you guess what book it is?
• 2:02:08
  Is it no future? No.
• 2:02:10
  Oh. Is it blood?
• 2:02:12
  No, it can't be bloody. Everyone loves that.
• 2:02:14
  It's a parasite. No it isn't, but I'm surprised
• 2:02:18
  Joe hasn't got this one. But it's shakedown, no?
• 2:02:22
  No, I don't know. People tend to quite like that
• 2:02:24
  one as well. Now tell me.
• 2:02:28
  God Engine. Oh God.
• 2:02:30
  Oh, that seems so obvious now. I, I, I, I feel like I'm
• 2:02:36
  probably the only person other than Craig Hinton and his mum
• 2:02:39
  that have actually, this is very good.
• 2:02:44
  I really love it. I don't know why, but I do, you
• 2:02:49
  know, Ice Warrior cock and all. It's like this.
• 2:02:55
  It's just so disturbing. It comes out of a pubic sack.
• 2:03:01
  Oh God, who knew we needed to know about Ice Warrior sex?
• 2:03:07
  But yeah, I just really enjoy it.
• 2:03:09
  No one else does so, so sue me. I'm sorry.
• 2:03:15
  Parasite. There was there was a rather
• 2:03:18
  unfortunate moment yesterday. I was out for a run and
• 2:03:20
  obviously there was a bit of banter on the group and I look
• 2:03:22
  at my watch to see what the notification is and it was just
• 2:03:24
  the words Ice Warrior cock. Guilty.
• 2:03:27
  And I'm just, OK, so husband looking over your shoulder at
• 2:03:30
  the time, like thankfully not because I think that would take
• 2:03:36
  some explaining. And to be honest, I might have
• 2:03:38
  just been overheard and it'd be like, what were you saying?
• 2:03:42
  So yeah, it's maybe I'll just buy a copy of God Engine and say
• 2:03:45
  read that and that'll explain everything.
• 2:03:48
  Scaly and mucus. You didn't get that in cold
• 2:03:53
  water. Oh yeah.
• 2:03:57
  Scaly warrior cock What? Clearly, there is clearly a
• 2:04:03
  market out there for it. There's a lot of.
• 2:04:08
  They do they like, they like reproductive systems.
• 2:04:12
  Anyway, that's not a Segway. But Joe, what's your top three?
• 2:04:16
  My episode, my story, sorry from the TV is the much reviled
• 2:04:21
  arachnids in the UK, which I fucking love.
• 2:04:25
  I think Kristoff is somewhere in the stratosphere.
• 2:04:29
  Recently cancelled I hear, but very funny.
• 2:04:33
  It's about Ruddy great spiders going around a hotel, eating
• 2:04:38
  people and dragging people called Kevin down drains.
• 2:04:41
  I mean, it's the B movie we all needed.
• 2:04:43
  It's got Yas's family in it and they're great fun, impeccably
• 2:04:47
  cast. It's got the scenes of Graham
• 2:04:50
  back at his flat that are so moving.
• 2:04:53
  Anyone who's lost somebody and has gone, like when I went back
• 2:04:57
  to my mum's house after after we lost her, how anyone could be
• 2:05:01
  failed to be moved by those scenes.
• 2:05:04
  But most of all, it's like Jodie Whittaker is just on fire in
• 2:05:09
  this episode. She literally just throws
• 2:05:10
  herself down that drain. It goes, whoa, it's a big
• 2:05:13
  spider. You know, she goes at one point,
• 2:05:17
  I need somebody to tell me what's going on.
• 2:05:19
  And Kristoff goes, there's a great spider in there, and he's
• 2:05:22
  eating my bodyguard, Kevin. And she just goes, yes, thank
• 2:05:26
  you, Very succinct. Then she throws herself in.
• 2:05:29
  It's just a great laugh. I don't know what's wrong with
• 2:05:31
  everybody. Yeah.
• 2:05:33
  So I just think that's absolute gold.
• 2:05:35
  And fuck off the lawyer. My audio, it's more divisive
• 2:05:41
  than reviled. I think people love it.
• 2:05:43
  I think the people that hates it really hates it.
• 2:05:46
  It's a companion chronicle called The Scorchies, featuring
• 2:05:51
  Katie Manning playing pretty much every single part.
• 2:05:55
  So it's her whole array of Manning voices and she's playing
• 2:05:58
  every character. It's like a play school kids TV
• 2:06:03
  show. Yeah, she played all the
• 2:06:05
  different, like, kiddie characters and the doll and the
• 2:06:08
  wacky scientists and all that. But they're sort of taking over
• 2:06:10
  the world through the TV's and it's got songs in it.
• 2:06:15
  There's one called They're taking a piss out of Blue Peter.
• 2:06:18
  Joe is making a thing. It's got light sand.
• 2:06:22
  It goes Bing. What a lovely thing to sing
• 2:06:25
  about. Joe is making a thing anyway.
• 2:06:28
  She's having the best time. I'm having the best time.
• 2:06:30
  My other half hates it with a passion.
• 2:06:34
  So yeah, the school cheese and my book is the much much hated
• 2:06:41
  The Last Resort from the 8th Doctor alternative universe arc
• 2:06:45
  towards the end. Very complicated.
• 2:06:49
  You need a bit of a diagram to get through it because every
• 2:06:53
  single scene is set in a new alternative universe.
• 2:06:56
  Gareth, avoid this one. You don't realize for the first
• 2:06:59
  half of the book that that is the case.
• 2:07:01
  So you think Paul Leonard isn't paying attention to the
• 2:07:03
  characters. He's right, and he's getting the
• 2:07:05
  details wrong from scene to scene.
• 2:07:07
  And then you slowly realize that the whole of the multiverse has
• 2:07:10
  been shattered. And by the end of the book,
• 2:07:13
  literally, they're all clumping. All the multiverses are clumping
• 2:07:17
  into one and and you've got hundreds of millions of
• 2:07:20
  Tardises, doctors, Fitzes and Angies all clumping in ancient
• 2:07:25
  Egypt together and created a whole new bloody universe out of
• 2:07:29
  that. It's just mad that book, it
• 2:07:32
  needs a lot of patience and it it's going to be a tough read
• 2:07:37
  for most people, but I love the ambition of it.
• 2:07:40
  Leonard is an accolade of Mortimer, and you can tell
• 2:07:44
  because the body count is high in this book and there's an
• 2:07:48
  awful lot of pain, but there's a lot of smarts in it too.
• 2:07:51
  If you're willing to go in there and unpick it and work with it
• 2:07:55
  and have fun with it, I think it's a great book.
• 2:07:57
  So. So on audio, I mean, I went
• 2:08:05
  straight to being finished and didn't think about the BBC play
• 2:08:07
  because I really like Paradise of Death.
• 2:08:09
  I really like Ghosts of In Space as well.
• 2:08:12
  I mean, it's, there's got a lot of problems.
• 2:08:15
  There's a lot of people describing what they see.
• 2:08:17
  You've got some really dubious accents and it's a bit on the
• 2:08:21
  long side. The novel's worse.
• 2:08:23
  The novel is horrifically bad. That was a chore, that.
• 2:08:28
  One my my audio has to be. I quite like Zagreus and I'm
• 2:08:34
  probably 1 of about three people.
• 2:08:36
  Who do I know? Somebody was going to say
• 2:08:38
  Zagreus. I don't don't ask me why, I
• 2:08:42
  just, it wasn't what I expected going in for the, the, was it
• 2:08:46
  40th anniversary special? But it was like, I remember
• 2:08:49
  being like, oh, they're doing something different with it.
• 2:08:51
  They're not just doing a traditional multi doctor story.
• 2:08:53
  They're trying something different.
• 2:08:55
  And it was big and it was epic and it was long.
• 2:08:59
  I haven't listened to it for a few years.
• 2:09:00
  So who knows, Maybe my opinion was I just remember coming away
• 2:09:04
  from that going. I really enjoyed this.
• 2:09:06
  Was it Sophie Aldred and her career high?
• 2:09:09
  Her one scene as Captain Duck that impressed you.
• 2:09:13
  I think that, and I think it was Sylvester's Winky as well.
• 2:09:16
  Oh, Uncle Winky. Yeah.
• 2:09:18
  Where are the children? Let's not go there.
• 2:09:23
  Yeah, new the books, I've talked about this before.
• 2:09:26
  I love the ancestor cell. I think for a lot of people it's
• 2:09:30
  probably a bit continuity heavy. It's quite a lot happens, but I
• 2:09:35
  think I it was the nostalgia kicks in there for as well
• 2:09:38
  because I got back into Doctor novels at that point by I'd read
• 2:09:43
  it in Doctor Magazine. They were having this big reset.
• 2:09:46
  But I was quite interested in what the review of Ancestor
• 2:09:49
  sell, so I thought I'll pick it up.
• 2:09:51
  And I remember actually really enjoying it and it was a really
• 2:09:54
  exciting read. I don't think it's very well
• 2:09:56
  thought of, but I really enjoyed it.
• 2:09:58
  I really liked it on television. And Joe, this is your fault
• 2:10:03
  really, that I really like Underworld.
• 2:10:06
  Now. I mean, Underworld has got a lot
• 2:10:08
  of problems, a lot of problems. But because when we did our
• 2:10:13
  commentary on it, I did a bit of research and a lot behind the
• 2:10:16
  scenes and watched it with probably more closer eye than
• 2:10:19
  I've ever done before in my life.
• 2:10:20
  Because it's always been one of those stories that kind of went
• 2:10:22
  in one ear, went out the other. And I've actually found this
• 2:10:25
  quite a lot of bits in it I do like and quite enjoy.
• 2:10:29
  And now I'll probably stick up for it, as could of, you know,
• 2:10:31
  the the ugly duckling of the Tom Baker era.
• 2:10:35
  But I don't think it deserves its reputation.
• 2:10:38
  I think there's far worse stories on television.
• 2:10:40
  I think there's some far worse visual effects in Doctor Who
• 2:10:44
  than there is in Underworld. So I will always stick up for
• 2:10:46
  it. So you think that?
• 2:10:48
  Bit where they're going down in that lift shaft sort of.
• 2:10:50
  Is that the campus thing ever in doctor?
• 2:10:54
  How can you hate a story where you've got Louise Jameson?
• 2:10:57
  That wonderful shot Louise Jameson is trying, Tom Baker
• 2:11:00
  couldn't give a shit, and Norman Tipton doesn't quite know what
• 2:11:03
  to do. He's sort of flapping his scarf
• 2:11:05
  as he's going down and he's great.
• 2:11:08
  He's so bored. Oh, gentlemen, that has been
• 2:11:13
  fascinating. I think we got more out of
• 2:11:16
  Parasite than I anticipated. I thought it was going to be
• 2:11:19
  when you suggested it. I thought we're going to just
• 2:11:22
  end up being really negative, give it a kicking and actually,
• 2:11:26
  what do you think we've been? I don't.
• 2:11:27
  Think this is the episode people thought they were going to air,
• 2:11:30
  you know, and that's usually the best kind of episode I was.
• 2:11:32
  Going to say I think people will might pick it up and start
• 2:11:35
  thinking, oh, this is going to be giving it a kicking a
• 2:11:37
  traditional dog of a book. But even though I might not have
• 2:11:41
  enjoyed it, there's still things to recommend.
• 2:11:45
  But I think it's probably time to call it a day.
• 2:11:49
  Call it a night because we've got to go off and start reading
• 2:11:51
  Plague City and get ready for our next edition.
• 2:11:54
  So that remains to say thank you to Joe, to Dan and to Gareth.
• 2:11:59
  I think I will never look at this book cover quite in the
• 2:12:03
  same way again because once it's going back on the shelf, I don't
• 2:12:05
  think I'll ever be looking at it again.
• 2:12:08
  Thank you and good night. Ladies.
• 2:12:13
  That's the BBQ monkey quick. Everyone up the fallopian tube.
• 2:13:06
  The.