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Hamster Book Club - Blood Heat by Jim Mortimore (featuring John Lane) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:01
  Some Barkan shivered with fright.
• 0:03
  He'd never seen any of the great reptiles this close.
• 0:06
  Normally they were used for excavating or transportation of
• 0:09
  loads too heavy or cumbersome for the city mine builders to
• 0:13
  move. Now they were stampeding for a
• 0:16
  part of the city which only a year before they had helped to
• 0:19
  build. So Buckham became aware that his
• 0:21
  mother had linked was summoning him to family transport.
• 0:25
  I'm coming. He turned to run.
• 0:28
  A diplodocus blocked his path, so Barkan stopped.
• 0:32
  The reptile had approached, unheard in the chaos.
• 0:35
  He turned again. More of the giant creatures
• 0:37
  pressed around him, faster, smaller animals darting between
• 0:41
  the giant legs of the larger ones.
• 0:43
  He could sense the panic from the creatures.
• 0:46
  It terrified him. It's like a Barkan.
• 0:48
  Where are you? I'm here, I'm coming.
• 0:52
  He turned once more, slipped nimbly between the flanks of two
• 0:55
  reptiles. Ducks rolled beneath the belly
• 0:58
  of 1/3, dodging huge, thudding legs as he ran.
• 1:02
  Behind him came an enormous crash as his family home was
• 1:05
  smashed aside like a toy. Suck, Barkin, Suck Barkin was
• 1:09
  about to reply when he canoed into another figure, a human
• 1:13
  figure. Suck Barkin stared at the
• 1:15
  mammal, trembling. Good afternoon.
• 1:18
  Being the Doctor, I wonder if you could direct me to the
• 1:20
  palace? I seem to be and all.
• 1:22
  Efominus ran between them. The Doctor dodged backwards.
• 1:26
  Zig Bargain had yelped with surprise and backed away as
• 1:28
  well. His mother leaned again and her
• 1:30
  mind was swamped with fear. It's all right, mother.
• 1:34
  I'm. He screamed as the left hind
• 1:36
  foot of the camera saw us, knocked him to the ground and
• 1:40
  crushed his legs into the rubble of his home to the port.
• 1:45
  There was an explosion and three dinosaurs dissolved into flame.
• 1:48
  The spray from the. Explosion drenched Ridgeway with
• 1:51
  bloody froth. From the rear of the submarine
• 1:53
  came a sudden grinding noise and a shearing of metal.
• 1:57
  He grabbed the intercom, catching to the bridge.
• 2:00
  What the Hell's going on? Engineering reports the port
• 2:02
  drive shaft is sheared. One of the dinosaurs must have
• 2:05
  rammed. The prop crashed on a stick.
• 2:08
  And the whole not. Good Sir.
• 2:10
  Another few minutes and we've had it.
• 2:12
  Hobson pushed open the conning tower, hatched and clam it out
• 2:15
  into the observation. Well, his arm had been
• 2:17
  splintered and bandaged, his eyes were shadows, and a face
• 2:20
  grew with pain. Robin, it has to be now.
• 2:23
  We have to launch the missiles now.
• 2:26
  Which way? Was about to reply when the
• 2:28
  Cronchosaurus leapt from the water and crashed down onto the
• 2:31
  submarine of the conning tower, wrecking the Hatch mechanisms of
• 2:35
  several launch tubes. Circles within circles, the
• 2:40
  Silurian city glistened in the rays of the late afternoon sun.
• 2:44
  The beam slanted to lay dusty yellow spokes across the disks
• 2:48
  of building, on the spiral paths of rantways and parks gliding
• 2:52
  past beneath the airship and on the thousands of reptiles
• 2:55
  thundering through the streets. Benton watched the animals
• 2:57
  trampling figures and buildings alike into a bloody wreckage,
• 3:00
  and smiled harshly. Rubbing a hand absently across
• 3:04
  his bandaged arm, he ordered the airship lower so he could direct
• 3:08
  the attack more efficiently. He glanced upwards.
• 3:11
  Hundreds of black specks were rising from the city before
• 3:14
  them. Beyond the dinosaurs, he could
• 3:17
  see the faint bronze glitter of airships.
• 3:20
  Benton's smile didn't fault her. He was a.
• 3:23
  Hunter. Now welcome back to the Hamster
• 3:31
  Book Club. My name is Joe Ford and a
• 3:34
  returning guest, Mr. John Lane. Hello.
• 3:38
  John. Hello, Joe.
• 3:40
  I hope it's all going swimmingly for you over there in that
• 3:43
  dimension. Well, it's been quite sunny this
• 3:46
  week, actually. Oh, in this dimension, yeah.
• 3:48
  Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I look at the news,
• 3:51
  you know, and I wonder if we are in the the Nazi dimension.
• 3:57
  Things are things are going in very strange directions, if I'm
• 3:59
  honest, although not quite as bleak as the book we're talking
• 4:03
  about today. Not yet, not yet, but let's
• 4:07
  let's see what the Starmosaurus does next.
• 4:11
  I've seen a fair number of how do you say it, Cycads?
• 4:15
  Is that how you say it? Maybe a bloody love that word in
• 4:19
  this book. Anyway, John, what are we
• 4:24
  talking about today? OK, we're talking about Blood
• 4:27
  Heat by Jim Mortimore or Jim Mortimore or Morty.
• 4:35
  I heard someone I think on what's that podcast, there were
• 4:38
  all stories in the end. I think someone was like
• 4:41
  insisted on calling him Mortimore.
• 4:43
  Maybe it's a joke. It just sounds fun to me that.
• 4:46
  Sounds like the Italian way of saying.
• 4:48
  That Mortimore. Now look, I believe you're
• 4:53
  responsible for us reading this 300 page tone.
• 4:56
  Yeah, sorry, the memory cheats. The memory cheats.
• 5:01
  This is one of those things where the memory cheats.
• 5:03
  Because you're sort of doing them in order, aren't you?
• 5:05
  The new Adventures but you. Skipped.
• 5:06
  Yeah. Yeah, I was, Yeah.
• 5:08
  Just a couple of books. Just a couple of books, you
• 5:10
  know, because I was quite excited to get to dub you
• 5:12
  because, you know, I was again swung by the the really
• 5:17
  evocative cover, one of the best covers ever.
• 5:20
  I mean, it is one of the best covers ever.
• 5:23
  But yeah, it wasn't quite as I recalled it, Right?
• 5:30
  How did you recall it? OK, If I remember right, this is
• 5:35
  like the beginning of a series of of novels set in this, in
• 5:39
  this, this dimension now. And I think maybe what I what
• 5:43
  I'd remembered more was some of the stories afterwards where I
• 5:49
  think you have the humans and the Silurians sort of much more
• 5:54
  sort of In Sync with one another, you know, like sort of
• 5:58
  a cohabiting species doing stuff together.
• 6:01
  Whereas this, this is not that. This is the precursor to that.
• 6:07
  And everything is horrible and grim and shitting, right.
• 6:13
  And yeah, it was, it was like, oh, it was none of the fun that
• 6:18
  I was expecting from the book. I remember, you're right.
• 6:25
  I absolutely remember scenes in later new adventures with Bernie
• 6:31
  Summerfield where Silurians and humans have integrated.
• 6:36
  Yeah. In the future, I do remember
• 6:39
  that, yes. I'm pretty sure I remember Liz
• 6:41
  Shaw and a Silurian like working together as buds, you know what
• 6:44
  I mean? Like maybe that's like a false
• 6:46
  memory, but I'm pretty sure I remember this.
• 6:48
  That's a Jim Moore from a book, as well as the one where he
• 6:50
  kills her off, of course. Yeah.
• 6:54
  He's got a very peculiar take on Liz, I have to say.
• 6:58
  All right. I mean, one of the one of the
• 6:59
  the things that really popped out to me in this book, it is
• 7:04
  that there is some swearing in it, very little.
• 7:07
  But the only person that does it is Liz Shaw.
• 7:10
  On three different occasions. She's the swearer.
• 7:13
  It's really weird. I made a note of that as well.
• 7:16
  I, I put the swear and I was like, that's a Liz line.
• 7:18
  I can't imagine things must be. I mean, I can imagine Benson
• 7:21
  doing it, but he doesn't. I can imagine Ace doing it, but
• 7:24
  she doesn't. It's Liz.
• 7:26
  It's such a weird choice to make her like, you know, say bullshit
• 7:29
  or shit chops or whatever it is she's saying.
• 7:31
  It's very odd. Now we should put this in
• 7:34
  context. We are in an alternative
• 7:36
  universe. We're in an alternative
• 7:38
  universe. So why, why don't you give the
• 7:40
  listeners a bit of a context as to what's occurred to divert
• 7:43
  this universe from ours? OK, so the Second Doctor is
• 7:48
  travelling with Ace and Bernice and they they.
• 7:52
  Fall. Through some kind of dimensional
• 7:55
  rifts, something that we later come to understand has been
• 7:59
  engineered perhaps. And they find themselves on this
• 8:03
  this Earth, but it's completely overgrown with jungle.
• 8:08
  There are dinosaurs from different epochs roaming around.
• 8:13
  And yes, this image, Oh yeah, it's a superb image, absolutely
• 8:18
  like cracking idea. And the reason things are this
• 8:22
  way is because in on this earth, in this dimension, the 3rd
• 8:28
  Doctor was killed and that's why the Silurians were able to take
• 8:34
  over. The virus did the job it was
• 8:37
  meant to do. Nobody found a cure, essentially
• 8:40
  decimated the the human population.
• 8:43
  And humans are now basically like scavenging animals or
• 8:47
  they're in small conclaves. And the conclave that we are
• 8:51
  focused on is 1 headed up by a very embittered Brigadier
• 8:56
  Alistair called. We will get to him.
• 8:59
  We will get to him, yes. I'm only doing it for the
• 9:02
  children, John, Just the children.
• 9:04
  What the hell, I mean, and and why is it for the children?
• 9:07
  I I don't even understand. This is a motivation for for for
• 9:10
  the Brigadier. It's not.
• 9:12
  I mean, if we take it from OK, fair enough.
• 9:15
  I mean, like like the Silurians, the TV series the Silurians is
• 9:20
  very early on in the Briggs evolution as a character.
• 9:26
  It's like it's Pertwee's first season.
• 9:27
  I think it's the second episode, right?
• 9:29
  It's the second adventure. So we don't really know the Brig
• 9:32
  really that well. We've seen him in the Web of
• 9:36
  Fear, I think, and the invasion and that's it, right?
• 9:39
  And spearheaded from space and which he's a very sort of
• 9:42
  correct guy, right. So I can see him being a hard
• 9:45
  ass for sure. The whole children thing that's
• 9:49
  just really out of lefty all I I because they make such a thing
• 9:53
  of it. It doesn't say again.
• 9:55
  And again, doesn't. It again and again and again.
• 9:58
  Is it because at this stage, like, like has he had Kate?
• 10:01
  Did we know that? And he's just like, oh, I'm such
• 10:03
  a shit dad, you know, I mean, Kate, if only if I'd have been
• 10:07
  there for Kate, she wouldn't have been eaten by a triceratops
• 10:09
  or some some weird shit like that in this leg zone.
• 10:11
  I don't know. But it's just.
• 10:12
  Figured it was like a dramatic statement for him to make,
• 10:16
  especially when he's sort of saying it over the dead body of
• 10:19
  a little boy that's died because of something he's done.
• 10:22
  But it's the wrong statement for him to make.
• 10:25
  There's a, a, a, a myriad statements that the Brigadier
• 10:28
  could make that would be more in character, you know, this far
• 10:31
  and no further, you know, like, you know, like the characters in
• 10:34
  like first contact. But you know, this I'm, I just
• 10:37
  do the best I can like this. I, I will defend humanity even
• 10:41
  if it costs me my own humanity. All of those things I can see
• 10:45
  him saying. But like the whole children
• 10:47
  thing was very weird. It was very melodramatic.
• 10:51
  I was sort of figuring that you could basically watch all of
• 10:54
  Doctor Who up until episode 6 of the Silurians where the plague's
• 10:58
  been released. And then, you know, they're sort
• 11:01
  of the wall burns and they come through the wall sort of
• 11:04
  wobbling their heads and kidnapping, well done kidnapping
• 11:09
  the doctor. And and then we're told, what is
• 11:13
  it that they kept? Him.
• 11:15
  Dehydrated and starved for 9 days and then Morka, who is the
• 11:21
  sort of the chief solarian in this, came along.
• 11:24
  Jim Morty. Morka Morty Morka, yes, came
• 11:27
  along like Jim Mortimer and murdered him horribly, which is
• 11:31
  like that is a powerful. It's a again, there's some,
• 11:35
  there's good stuff in here, like conceptually, there's great
• 11:38
  stuff in there for sure, absolutely.
• 11:40
  Like the there's a few key ideas that are really, really good.
• 11:43
  So the the idea of the Silurians taken over, the idea of the 3rd
• 11:47
  doctor dying and that causing the split, you know, the, the
• 11:50
  strange mishmash Earth that's overgrown now with with with
• 11:55
  jungle that the Silurians have basically re terraformed the
• 11:59
  planet to be. There's some good ideas, but
• 12:02
  there's a lot of stuff around it which is very extraneous.
• 12:05
  It's like a long winded miserablist soap opera, which is
• 12:11
  a shame because you've got these great ideas in there.
• 12:13
  We do get the the 2nd Doctor realizing that, well, it is
• 12:18
  weird that my third persona, my third persona, my third
• 12:21
  incarnation didn't regenerate, which makes him suspect
• 12:26
  something else is at play here. And it's a It's a good point
• 12:29
  that seeds some further stuff along the lines has.
• 12:33
  Been themselves. Yes, I I mean, come on, like lay
• 12:37
  it on as thick as you can, please.
• 12:39
  I'm like, I, I saw the word meddling and I'm like, come on.
• 12:41
  All right, come on. Who could be the surprise Time
• 12:44
  Lord villain? In Yeah, yeah, someone's been
• 12:47
  meddling, someone's been monkey around meddling, the monkeying.
• 12:51
  Around you should have said monkey, and that would have.
• 12:53
  Been who could it be? Yeah, although I have to say I
• 12:57
  do like the Doctor in this book, right.
• 13:03
  He's not so far down the line that he's the mad manipulative
• 13:08
  God yet that Ace despises so much.
• 13:12
  He's got like a sense of humour. He makes little quips.
• 13:15
  He's still angry enough. You know, he's the 7th Doctor as
• 13:17
  we see in the final season. That's that's who he is.
• 13:20
  So like I like him. It feels like the 7th Doctor in
• 13:26
  Ace book, only Ace is a little bit older, a little bit
• 13:28
  grumpier, but he still kind of feels like her.
• 13:33
  I, I, I know that she's older because she's been to Space
• 13:37
  Fleet or whatever the fuck. It was right?
• 13:39
  And she's juggling. Bombs in.
• 13:43
  Her first yeah she's so she's hard bitten, but it she's still
• 13:45
  pretty much the same character, you know, but without as if but
• 13:51
  but though she hadn't gone through any of the healing
• 13:53
  process that she went through in Fenerick, for example, you know,
• 13:56
  like she she she she's supposed to have passed through that
• 14:00
  child barrier but here they've reverted her even though she's
• 14:04
  older and she's still acting in the same way the.
• 14:07
  Whole point of that last scene of Fenrig is that she has worked
• 14:11
  through that stuff and been reborn.
• 14:14
  You know I'll always love the Roy coming out of the waters.
• 14:17
  And survival. Then afterwards, you know, like
• 14:20
  she's again, this is like her whole arc was like, I'm a grown
• 14:24
  up woman. I'm letting go of those childish
• 14:26
  things. I'm not going to be so antsy.
• 14:30
  And here, yeah, there's a reversion to.
• 14:35
  Time see, I agree with you about the doctor and I thought it is a
• 14:38
  gentler 7th doctor in this sort of tentatively going between the
• 14:42
  two camps and trying to get them to negotiate.
• 14:47
  Oh, I really hate the ace of this period.
• 14:49
  Like I just but it's just because her journey in this book
• 14:54
  is and it is leading somewhere because it leads to no future
• 14:58
  where she eventually turns on the doctor apparently.
• 15:01
  And it's a whole thing. But she hates him at the start
• 15:04
  of this book and she's saying to Benny, oh, don't trust him, you
• 15:07
  know, he's a manipulator, blah, blah, blah.
• 15:09
  Then she goes through absolute hell around this book, like sees
• 15:13
  the most horrific things you could imagine, and then is told
• 15:18
  that everybody in that universe is is is going to be wiped out
• 15:22
  by the Doctor. And then by the end of the book,
• 15:25
  she hates him, but just a little bit more than she hated him at
• 15:28
  the start of the book. And I'm like, I don't understand
• 15:30
  why we're hanging with these people.
• 15:32
  Yeah, she's she's thoroughly like inconsistent as well.
• 15:35
  Like at one point during the book she's sort of having a go
• 15:39
  at people for, for fighting wars.
• 15:42
  And then later on in the book she's like, let's fight wars
• 15:45
  more or less. You know what I mean?
• 15:46
  It's like she's given them a hard time.
• 15:48
  She's given Manisha a hard time, you know, because she's been
• 15:50
  fighting back and then later on is like.
• 15:53
  And there's a bit where in the book where she in a very
• 15:56
  powerful moment, she finds the skeleton of the Doctor in the
• 16:00
  Wendley Moore base from the Siluria.
• 16:02
  That's right, yeah. And she's like, oh, God, how
• 16:05
  awful. She's not angry with the doctor
• 16:08
  anymore. She she says that like, oh, OK,
• 16:10
  my, yeah, this is terrible. Poor doctor.
• 16:14
  And then she hates him again. And I'm like.
• 16:17
  Yeah, it's super. It's super inconsistent.
• 16:19
  Like because they still don't know what to do with with Ace.
• 16:23
  I mean, they should have left the world alone, right?
• 16:25
  Because. Benny, didn't they?
• 16:26
  They really want to. Yeah, they want to be actually.
• 16:28
  But like, like, but that's early Ace, you know, like, it's like,
• 16:32
  have some respect for where the. I mean, you're picking up from
• 16:34
  where the series left off is the concept of the books.
• 16:37
  So pick up from where the series left off.
• 16:39
  Don't just sort of like go back to your weird versions of what
• 16:42
  Ace was in your head when you were 12 and you were watching
• 16:44
  it, like do something more interesting.
• 16:46
  And worse than that is it does a disservice to Benny.
• 16:50
  Right. Was she in this?
• 16:52
  She's so wasted. She's in the bit at the
• 16:55
  beginning and she's in the bit at the end, right.
• 16:57
  I mean, and like she's she's supposedly like the delivery
• 17:00
  system for a for a sort of antivirus that will take away
• 17:05
  the fear that comes from the race memory of the humans when
• 17:08
  it comes to Silurians and leaves them like jibling wrecks on the
• 17:11
  floor. But they could have been anyone.
• 17:14
  It could have been fucking Joe the Terrell again, Joe
• 17:18
  absolutely brutalized as a character.
• 17:20
  I I don't know what I mean. It's OK.
• 17:23
  It's OK because let's be honest, Inferno.
• 17:25
  Inferno did some fucked up things with the characters and
• 17:28
  that's the whole idea, you know, we're in a parallel universe, so
• 17:30
  life is different than horrible, so OK, fine, fine, fine, fine.
• 17:34
  Well. There are degrees of horrible.
• 17:37
  Though, but there are degrees, there are degrees of horrible,
• 17:38
  but like we can get back to that in a while.
• 17:40
  But but yeah, Benny, Benny would have been much more interesting
• 17:44
  character. I think like to have her go
• 17:46
  through this journey instead of Ace, who has no no real purpose
• 17:51
  to play here other than, oh, it's got to be the Doctor and
• 17:54
  Ace why we've got Benny neck. What do you think this was
• 17:58
  written before or pitched before Benny was?
• 18:03
  I think so, yes. It feels that way, doesn't it?
• 18:06
  Because she does feel sort of shoehorned in a bit.
• 18:08
  And you're right, I think Mortimer writes so brilliantly.
• 18:10
  Benny's got great sense of humour.
• 18:13
  Yeah, there's absolutely like hear Lisa Barman every time.
• 18:18
  Like she opens the mouth. I absolutely hear her.
• 18:20
  There's a pit where she she's escaping from the Silurian blimp
• 18:25
  on the back of a dinosaur goes woo.
• 18:26
  You know, like she's having the best time.
• 18:30
  And I can imagine like, you know, she's got a hip flask with
• 18:32
  her as well, like she's chucking some some some booze down and
• 18:34
  really enjoying the ride as well.
• 18:36
  But there's like a a moment at the start of the book, and this
• 18:40
  is my big issue with the regular characters at this point, where
• 18:43
  Ace is trying to scare Bernice in the TARDIS.
• 18:50
  Yeah, and, and, and by being violent towards her, I'm like,
• 18:54
  why are we doing this? Yeah, it's, it's, it's peculiar.
• 18:58
  It's, it's just odd. There's there's like something,
• 19:00
  there's some odd notes, right? There's some odd notes.
• 19:02
  So I mean, yeah, I was very excited about the book.
• 19:05
  But in the end, like it was, it was so miserable, right.
• 19:10
  And and that that contrast was so different from the memories
• 19:14
  I'd had, which, like we've spoken about before, was
• 19:16
  probably more about the books that followed rather than this
• 19:19
  particular book. I guess this book stayed in my
• 19:21
  head for the cover and the concepts for the later stories.
• 19:25
  But it was like, Oh my God, this is such a green lead.
• 19:28
  It's it's almost like a, like a sort of a wartime bubble.
• 19:33
  I mean, I'm not big into to war novels.
• 19:36
  I'm not really big into that whole concept, which I know is
• 19:38
  an is an odd thing to say for Doctor Who fan, you know,
• 19:43
  because a lot of the books are about, you know, intergalactic
• 19:45
  battles and what have you. But this has this one is going
• 19:47
  for that gritty feel, you know, like here we have this dystopian
• 19:54
  vision of the future. Beautiful, beautiful jungle
• 19:57
  dystopia, but dystopia full of rabid dogs with mutated rabies,
• 20:02
  you know, so they're like, you know, that's out of nowhere.
• 20:04
  You know, there's this one character that we like gets
• 20:06
  bitten by a dog and like, oh shit, it's no, it's.
• 20:08
  She blows her brains out across the forest because she's
• 20:12
  mutated, isn't she? Yeah, there you go.
• 20:13
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I kept thinking to myself,
• 20:16
  right, that's like when Joe Grant turned up and she's feral.
• 20:21
  She's sort of, sort of reverted to like a Neanderthal, isn't
• 20:24
  she? She's feral.
• 20:25
  And I thought, OK, that's horrible enough.
• 20:27
  That's just a horrible image of our lovely Joe.
• 20:29
  But she's also clutching the bloody rags of her miscarried
• 20:35
  child. I'm like, OK, fine.
• 20:37
  That's as horrible as this is going to get.
• 20:39
  Then. Oh, no.
• 20:40
  Then we go and visit a hospital and there's the corpses and
• 20:44
  skeletons of a load of children that were murdered by their
• 20:47
  parents. I was like, oh, God.
• 20:49
  I mean, I had to put the book down at that point.
• 20:51
  John, I'm done for tonight. And.
• 20:54
  Then, if that's not enough, later on the Brigadier kills her
• 20:56
  by injecting her out of impatience.
• 20:58
  He. Kills Joe, Yeah.
• 21:00
  He objects like he's like she feels like an adrenaline or
• 21:03
  something to try and wake her up to answer some questions that he
• 21:06
  didn't even need the answers to anyway.
• 21:08
  Along the way, you know, we're treated to the dismemberment of
• 21:12
  lots of horses. Also a pack of rabid dogs that
• 21:17
  ice. I love the dogs.
• 21:18
  Literally shoots in the face till their heads are hanging
• 21:21
  off. Doesn't she smart bum the
• 21:23
  fuckers to death with the smart bomb as well?
• 21:27
  You have to rapidly. You have to like there were
• 21:29
  these weird sentences where you rapidly describe what you want
• 21:32
  the bomb to do or something like dogs cap a take, blah blah blah
• 21:35
  blah. Like a huge sentence, like one
• 21:38
  word sentence. It's very, very odd.
• 21:40
  And yeah, it blows them all to shit.
• 21:42
  I mean, if you're a fan of horses and dogs, do not read
• 21:45
  this book, all right? That said, I do think there's a.
• 21:49
  There's a I've got it noted down here where even given like the
• 21:55
  shittiness of of Ace, I think she does get the best line in
• 22:00
  the book. All right, so it's after her and
• 22:03
  Manisha have basically, I think they, they they've chained
• 22:12
  immortal up like he's he's attacked them and they've
• 22:15
  they've had their way with him and and so they've tied him up
• 22:19
  and Manisha says to to Ace, I suppose we walk.
• 22:23
  Yeah, let's get away. Nice nodded.
• 22:25
  Yeah, that way. She pointed.
• 22:27
  What do we do with him? Manisha nodded towards the
• 22:31
  Silurian Acer chain to the inside of the Rover.
• 22:35
  Ace moved. I see what you mean.
• 22:38
  Handbag or shoes? Tough decision, huh?
• 22:42
  That's odd. She got a joke.
• 22:44
  She got a. Joke she got a joke, but it's a
• 22:46
  grim joke. It's a funny 1, you know,
• 22:48
  because like, you know, it's like a yeah, Silerian skin
• 22:52
  handbag. It's a snakeskin handbag.
• 22:53
  It's funny. That is funny.
• 22:55
  It's better than the scene, you know, where she she's forced to
• 23:00
  murder her friend. She shoots him in the heads, and
• 23:04
  then the person that's responsible for her doing that,
• 23:07
  she sort of picks up a broken bottle and he's asleep and she's
• 23:12
  going, oh, wake up, sweetheart, to the Siluria.
• 23:14
  And she's stroking his face with the broken bottle and she's
• 23:17
  going to like, stop. Oh, it's very odd.
• 23:21
  Can I ask you a question then? Can I?
• 23:23
  Well. Why so extreme?
• 23:26
  Why is this book this extreme? In in.
• 23:29
  Because these are the early days when they are very desperately
• 23:32
  trying to say that we're adults. Yeah.
• 23:35
  We're we're we're not like the TV, right?
• 23:39
  This is this is too broad. Yeah.
• 23:42
  But for the screen. And it's not broad at all.
• 23:45
  It's just like it's it's grim for grim sake.
• 23:48
  Because they there's like a habit sometimes that that sci-fi
• 23:51
  franchises have where it confuses what it means to be
• 23:57
  adult, right? To have an adult concept.
• 24:00
  Right. So Discovery, the first season
• 24:02
  of Discovery, Star Trek Discovery did this.
• 24:04
  Yeah, where they mistook being adult to be having some violence
• 24:10
  and having some swear words, right.
• 24:12
  To hear someone say fuck or to find out that like Klingons have
• 24:16
  tits, right? Like nickels on them, right.
• 24:18
  So they're like, oh, look, we saw Klingons having sex and
• 24:21
  someone said fuck. Oh, it's adult.
• 24:23
  I'm like, no, it's not. That's not adult because like,
• 24:26
  you know, my kids hear that all the time because I'm a terrible
• 24:28
  swearer. That's not adult.
• 24:30
  What adult are themes, right. And Doctor Who has always had
• 24:36
  adult themes. That's what's really good about
• 24:38
  it. That's why you want your kids to
• 24:39
  watch it, because it talks about politics, it talks about the way
• 24:42
  society works. It talks about the things that
• 24:44
  are wrong with power structures in the same way that Star Trek
• 24:47
  Deep Space 9, there's Star Trek functions.
• 24:49
  There is talked about war, talked about trauma, talked
• 24:53
  about all of those things. So it talked about the things
• 24:56
  that Discovery talked about but did not require like an 18
• 25:01
  certificate or the stamp of adult on it, because it was made
• 25:06
  so that everyone could get into it and deal with those concepts
• 25:11
  in a way which was respectful to the audience and not just, OK,
• 25:16
  here's someone having their bollocks blown off.
• 25:18
  Now we're an adult, right? So I get the feeling with blood
• 25:21
  that there's this idea that you need really grim, violent
• 25:24
  imagery. Graphic.
• 25:26
  Graphic imagery, right to to somehow separate you from the TV
• 25:31
  show. Which is an odd way to go,
• 25:33
  because the whole reason you have that book is because you
• 25:36
  love the TV show, not the new adventure series that came
• 25:39
  after. You did this one.
• 25:41
  Yeah, Yeah. Especially this one, right?
• 25:42
  So like do something more interesting with the characters,
• 25:45
  right? So have them not be gibbering
• 25:48
  Rex. Or maybe you have a couple of
• 25:50
  them be gibbering Rex. I don't know, maybe, but I don't
• 25:53
  recognise Benton. Well, he's just a sadistic
• 25:57
  bully. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, I mean,
• 26:01
  but maybe you could see. I mean, that's more like like
• 26:03
  John Levine rather than Benton, you know what I mean?
• 26:06
  It's like it's him, but I guess. Benton from Inferno, isn't it?
• 26:10
  Yeah, I guess if there is that, but he's the the thing about
• 26:15
  this book is that they are not so far away from that moment in
• 26:21
  the 3rd Doctor. This is not a lot of time back
• 26:23
  to this, from what I understand, right?
• 26:26
  So to go through that drastic change of character where you're
• 26:30
  in the Brigadier's case, a mania, an order following mania,
• 26:35
  right? He's obsessed with this, from
• 26:37
  these orders, from some blubbering generals, this
• 26:40
  blustering general rather in a in a submarine somewhere.
• 26:43
  He's literally compared to Adolf Hitler in this book.
• 26:47
  Someone makes the comparison between the Brigadier.
• 26:50
  Now I don't care what the Brigadier could possibly have
• 26:53
  gone from, I don't think you could ever make that comparison.
• 26:56
  I almost get the feeling right that Mortimer hates the 3rd
• 27:01
  doctor, or at least hates that first season.
• 27:04
  That's that's that's the feeling I gave I.
• 27:05
  Feel like he's taking a shit on it from a great heart.
• 27:09
  Yeah, I mean, like, I mean, because obviously it's the only
• 27:13
  era where you have that family that you could choose from and
• 27:16
  it would all they would all be recognisable, you know, as those
• 27:19
  characters. Although since there aren't that
• 27:23
  many, well, although we do get like the cameo of Harry at the
• 27:28
  end as well. Harry Sullivan turns up, you
• 27:30
  know, which is, and it was nice to see him because, you know, he
• 27:32
  turns up and he saves the day in his own sort of toffee way,
• 27:35
  which is nice. You know, he doesn't get he's
• 27:37
  getting ripped off by a fucking pterodactyl or some horrible
• 27:40
  shit. He's just like he comes back
• 27:42
  with Bennett, so that's nice. Nice to nice to see you, Harry.
• 27:46
  I'm afraid that your entire universe is about to have all
• 27:48
  the energy drained out of it, but it's nice to see you anyway.
• 27:52
  They'll have some millennia. That's how the Doctor's going to
• 27:54
  sort it out. They've got millennia, don't
• 27:56
  worry. Or wind down in a way, which is,
• 27:58
  you know, not horrible. So, so I mean, like that's
• 28:01
  something, you know, the 2nd Doctor is like, look, I found a
• 28:04
  way to sort of save them as much as possible, otherwise
• 28:08
  everything dies. I mean, this is the best I can
• 28:10
  do. And like, it's still not good
• 28:11
  enough for Ace. You'd think Ace would be like,
• 28:13
  well, OK, that's, that's something.
• 28:15
  But what about the children? But you know what though, right
• 28:18
  that that ending really bugged me because I thought the the
• 28:23
  ending of the internal story of the submarine is about to and
• 28:29
  the brigadiers man to set all these missiles flying into the
• 28:32
  Silurian city and destroy everybody.
• 28:35
  And in our brilliant moment of magic, the Doctor materialises
• 28:39
  the TARDIS around the entire planet, so puts the planet in a
• 28:44
  state of temporal grace. I don't know why he didn't do
• 28:46
  that at the start of the bill. Then no one would have died in
• 28:48
  this thing anyway. Nevermind.
• 28:52
  And then so then they've got to talk because they can't fight
• 28:55
  anymore. The only reason this universe
• 28:59
  has to then after that be wound down, like letting air out of a
• 29:04
  balloon. It's because Jim Mortimer says
• 29:07
  So why can't this universe just be left to exist and have a
• 29:10
  happy ending? I don't.
• 29:13
  Understand, because this is the new adventures, man.
• 29:17
  Everyone must die. Everyone must die.
• 29:20
  There's no walking off into the sunset.
• 29:22
  Not in these books, not genuine. Very odd.
• 29:26
  Did you think? Very.
• 29:27
  Odd. Did you think any of the So I
• 29:30
  didn't think, apart from the swearing, I didn't think Liz was
• 29:34
  so far removed from no. Liz, Liz I like I thought Liz
• 29:38
  was an excellent character. She's the best character in the
• 29:41
  book by far. She's still who she is.
• 29:43
  I just found it weird that she would be the only one that
• 29:46
  swore. It's all it's almost like a kind
• 29:48
  of it's it's almost a funny joke.
• 29:51
  That's the only person that swears in the book is Liz Shaw,
• 29:54
  who was always very correct. And so I guess there there is
• 29:59
  something to be said for for that to be her thing in this
• 30:02
  book. It just didn't ring right to me.
• 30:06
  I'd assumed that she would she would have a better class of
• 30:09
  swear somehow, you know, I mean, she was an educated, smart lady.
• 30:13
  I I would assume something better than bullshit.
• 30:15
  Do you know what I mean? Like it's more or less what she
• 30:17
  says most of the time. Shit and bullshit.
• 30:22
  I mean, I've got them all marked out.
• 30:24
  So page 50 it is. What does she say?
• 30:29
  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 30:36
  Oh yeah, you were always a presumptuous bastard.
• 30:39
  So she starts off with a that one, that one.
• 30:41
  Yeah, fine, because it's followed by presumptuous and
• 30:46
  then does she? Move up to bullshit after that
• 30:48
  then. Yeah, and then it goes to
• 30:49
  bullshit, I think like then it's page 88 for some reason.
• 30:53
  I marked these. Damn.
• 30:54
  Just because it was just, it just it was just so weird to me
• 30:58
  that she would be the only one swearing.
• 31:00
  Yeah, I'm really not at all certain, she says to the
• 31:03
  Brigadier. I could take any more of this
• 31:05
  military bullshit. Great.
• 31:08
  Caroline John is a classical actress.
• 31:11
  She would never say these. Things but yeah, the character
• 31:13
  wouldn't say them either. But then again, you know, that
• 31:15
  character never went through like this, this horrible,
• 31:19
  horrible stuff that happened, you know, and then, and then in
• 31:21
  the last instance, she says that's the brigadiers spoke his
• 31:25
  mind again. What will solve everything is a
• 31:27
  belief that mankind will overcome its aggressors, that
• 31:31
  that right will triumph over evil, that God's on our side.
• 31:35
  That the truth. Will add B movie bullshit
• 31:37
  Brigadier, she says. B Movie bullshit.
• 31:42
  She should say nonsense and it would just be the same.
• 31:47
  It would be the same and it would sound like Liz.
• 31:50
  I had some issues with the pacing of this book as well.
• 31:54
  It's three. Well, it's 300 pages long and I
• 31:57
  think it the the actual take away, the dinosaur attacks and
• 32:02
  the violence and all of that because that just happens ad
• 32:04
  nauseam. The actual plot beats.
• 32:07
  I think this could be half the length.
• 32:09
  And Christ, yes, I think he spends a lot of time world
• 32:14
  building and I want to throw him a big compliment now.
• 32:16
  I think he can write prose, and I think, yeah, you know, he
• 32:19
  describes his Silurian ship bathed in moonlight.
• 32:23
  Yeah. Beautiful the.
• 32:24
  The dinosaur is as violent as it is.
• 32:28
  It is beautifully described. Yeah, it's great.
• 32:30
  It's great. It's welcome.
• 32:32
  But there's too much of it. And halfway through the book,
• 32:35
  I'm like, that's the that's the point, I think, where the Doctor
• 32:37
  then leaves. Yeah.
• 32:40
  I'm like, nothing has happened. You've set up this situation on
• 32:43
  page like 30 and I'm now 150 pages in and all we've done is
• 32:49
  just like go through protracted things of violence.
• 32:53
  Yeah, it's like the whole thing almost was like as a as a
• 32:56
  massive lull, right? It's almost like the whole thing
• 33:00
  is 1 big lull in the action. I mean, even like the action is
• 33:04
  boring to some degree, so it takes ages for stuff to happen.
• 33:08
  The whole protracted journey through the jungle that Ace and
• 33:11
  Benson and a lot of them do to get to these 100.
• 33:15
  Pages. And it's, and it's interminable
• 33:19
  and it feels interminable because almost most of the time
• 33:22
  nothing's happening. And every now and then something
• 33:26
  happens. But it's it's just in that time,
• 33:29
  no one is doing any character growth.
• 33:32
  And they could be right. If you're going to do on that,
• 33:34
  Jeremy, if you're going to, if you're going to make that part
• 33:37
  of the story, then let's have some interesting dynamics
• 33:40
  between the characters. Let's have some more interaction
• 33:44
  between Ace and Benton. I mean, two people who are
• 33:49
  embittered and angry and have become different to who we who
• 33:54
  we knew them to be in the TV series.
• 33:57
  You could make something of that.
• 33:59
  I I didn't ever figure out what motivated Benson to be as nasty
• 34:04
  as he was. Like they didn't really describe
• 34:06
  what he'd been through so. The one thing I got from Benson
• 34:10
  was that he is blindly loyal to the rickety.
• 34:14
  That's, that's it. Because I, I think his
• 34:16
  character, I, I guess his character was always that
• 34:20
  fucking stupid, right? That in the face of complexity,
• 34:26
  the only recourse his tiny little mind would have would be
• 34:31
  the simplicity of following the Brick series.
• 34:33
  Just about. It right.
• 34:35
  And so that's what he does. So like, he is basically
• 34:38
  whatever the brick says. That's his function.
• 34:41
  Am I right in thinking that he sends Benton off?
• 34:44
  So he sends, he takes, sends all those people away so he can kill
• 34:49
  Joe? Is that right?
• 34:50
  No, no, like like that's his impatience.
• 34:53
  He thinks Joe calls the key to some answers that he needs and
• 34:57
  needs her to wake up and tell him, which in the end he
• 34:59
  doesn't. And she doesn't because exactly
• 35:02
  what the doctors tell him what happened happens, which is she
• 35:05
  dies almost immediately because she can't, the body can't take
• 35:10
  the the adrenaline or whatever it is that's in the drug that
• 35:13
  she's administered. And yeah, and so that's all for
• 35:17
  nothing. It's all for it's just weird.
• 35:22
  And I think. There's supposed to be more,
• 35:23
  well building, you know, we go through the capital city and we
• 35:26
  go elsewhere and we see more lush forests and we go to that
• 35:30
  hospital and we see the society that's been left behind, which
• 35:34
  is just fucking miserable for all the people.
• 35:39
  But. I I think maybe that's the idea
• 35:41
  of that that's. Fine.
• 35:43
  But I I think you it's still lacking context.
• 35:46
  I still think like for example, if you just started with an
• 35:50
  image even before the TARDIS, like appears like if you start
• 35:54
  with an image of the Brigadier, like holding the the ravaged
• 36:01
  corpse of his baby daughter or something like that.
• 36:03
  Do you know what I mean? If we are going to do that kind
• 36:05
  of a book anyway, if you start with that but have no further
• 36:08
  context for that until a bit later, you've still got this
• 36:12
  huge story beat that explains a lot about who the Brigadier is
• 36:16
  later, right? Because like I said, this isn't
• 36:19
  much after his introduction to, to, to the Third Doctor.
• 36:24
  It's not long after, long enough for some horrible things to
• 36:28
  happen for sure, right? For sure.
• 36:30
  But then let's see those things happen.
• 36:32
  Let's see the Brigadier descend. Yeah, in Inferno.
• 36:37
  We don't need to. All we need to know is this.
• 36:39
  This is evil Brig. But here, this is not evil Brig.
• 36:44
  This is the same Brigadier right up until the moment he's met the
• 36:47
  3rd Doctor and the Silerian native.
• 36:50
  So he's not grown up in a, in a, in a fascist state.
• 36:54
  He's not grown up under the thumb of some weird guy with a
• 36:57
  moustache on the poster on the wall.
• 36:59
  Right. He's the Brig.
• 37:00
  He struck me as someone pragmatic enough that even if
• 37:03
  the world went to shit like this, he would do his best to
• 37:06
  rally the people that were left. Yeah, he wouldn't lose it like
• 37:10
  this. And try and have a no, the idea
• 37:13
  is he's had a mad breakdown. Isn't it Doris?
• 37:14
  Is it Doris or his wife is dead? And that's why he's as angry as
• 37:19
  he is, because it all comes to the sequence at the end.
• 37:21
  You know, this whole thing about the children is he's holding
• 37:24
  Morcus Egg in his hands and threatening to sort of, but the
• 37:30
  Brigadier would never do this, no matter how pushed he was.
• 37:34
  Threaten a child, an unborn child.
• 37:37
  Yeah, Yeah. It's a really bad
• 37:39
  characterisation, right? Because like, again, because
• 37:41
  these aren't exactly parallel universe characters, They are
• 37:47
  the characters that we met and they've had some horrible stuff
• 37:50
  happen, but I find it very difficult to believe that given
• 37:55
  what would happen, the Brigadier would still act.
• 37:58
  Going going back to the pace. So the first half was very
• 38:03
  measured. And then the last 60 pages it's
• 38:07
  go, go, go, go. Attacks from the Brigadier,
• 38:10
  attacks from the submarine, the Silurians attacking back.
• 38:13
  Oh my God, they've got control of the dinosaurs.
• 38:15
  It's all and I'm like what the fuck?
• 38:17
  Like suddenly it was printing. It happened so fast I didn't
• 38:21
  have a clue what was going on. I honestly didn't know what was
• 38:25
  going on. I had no fucking idea.
• 38:26
  I was like, I don't. This is all so confused.
• 38:29
  There's no clear line here of what people are supposed to be
• 38:33
  doing like is. That delivery thing, is it
• 38:37
  supposed? To be like, no, I think it's
• 38:39
  just badly done because we as readers should know, yeah.
• 38:43
  You're right. You're right.
• 38:44
  Yeah, We should know. We should know who's.
• 38:46
  Or see how it's progressing. And see how it's progressing.
• 38:49
  Yeah, it's fair enough for the characters to feel like they're
• 38:51
  in the middle of chaos, right? But not me as a reader.
• 38:55
  I'm like, what's the plan, exactly?
• 38:57
  I had to go back. What's what's the plan?
• 39:00
  What's going on here? OK, Nicks.
• 39:03
  Gotcha. All right, fine.
• 39:06
  I mean, we had, we had some pretty adrenaline pumped action
• 39:09
  sequences in Harvest of Time, but it was so clear what was
• 39:14
  happening all of the time, wasn't it?
• 39:16
  We knew exactly where we were in that story.
• 39:18
  Yeah. And here as well, you've got
• 39:21
  it's, it's, I suppose this is the idea that that you could say
• 39:26
  works here is that nobody is on the side of the right exactly
• 39:34
  right. Although it's, it's, although
• 39:37
  it's hard to sort of say that the Siberians were exactly in
• 39:42
  the right because they had brutalized humanity.
• 39:44
  It it it was an, again, I think like it's almost like a Pete
• 39:47
  Mctine thing where you go, yes, we should understand the brutal
• 39:51
  dictators have decimated our way of life.
• 39:54
  And you know what I mean? Like we should.
• 39:56
  I mean, it's they're just doing their thing, right?
• 39:58
  They're they're living, thinking, intelligent beings.
• 40:01
  So, yes, Doctor, tell me off for being angry that my family were
• 40:05
  murdered and slaughtered and here's this this tiny bag of
• 40:08
  bones here. That's my son.
• 40:09
  But you're right. Yeah.
• 40:11
  It's a very confused message. I mean, yes, I on one hand they
• 40:15
  are. They should be working together.
• 40:18
  They shouldn't be killing each other, Morka like at the fucking
• 40:21
  top of the toasting pole trying to make things better in secret.
• 40:28
  He's the leader like he just like just tell your fucking
• 40:31
  people that that's what you're doing now.
• 40:34
  It's. Very funny.
• 40:35
  Very funny when he goes. Oh, yeah, Doctor, I'm really
• 40:37
  sorry. I probably shouldn't have killed
• 40:39
  you back then. I'm really sorry, OK?
• 40:41
  And then changes his mind again a bit later on.
• 40:44
  And then changes it back again. There's no consistency.
• 40:47
  The most interesting thing about the Silurians on TV, or one of
• 40:50
  the most interesting things, is, is there is nuanced
• 40:52
  characterizations on both sides. You've got Doctor Quinn who's
• 40:56
  trying to exploit the Silurians scientifically.
• 40:59
  You've got the Brigadier who just wants to blow them up.
• 41:02
  Obviously, you've got the Doctor Who's trying to negotiate the
• 41:04
  peace on the other side. You've got the older one who
• 41:07
  wants to listen and see if they can share the Earth.
• 41:11
  And then you've got the younger one who's violent, who's got his
• 41:14
  sledgehammer tactics with the virus.
• 41:16
  And so there's sort of good and bad on both sides, which is so
• 41:20
  interesting because then you don't really, you never really
• 41:22
  know what's going on. But on this I was like, well,
• 41:25
  the Brigadier is a beast and he's got sledgehammer tactics
• 41:29
  that he just wants to murder the lot of them, so I don't really
• 41:32
  want him to win. And then on the other side,
• 41:34
  you've got what is it immoral who's just happy to send the
• 41:38
  dinosaurs out and murder everyone on that side?
• 41:40
  I'm like, so I don't know. I don't really want either side
• 41:42
  to win. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very,
• 41:45
  it's very odd. Again, the the messages are, are
• 41:48
  confused, right. The Doctor like goes to the
• 41:51
  Silurians, not still not sure why was he trying to talk them
• 41:57
  out? Did he just want to go and have
• 41:58
  a look at their stuff? Like again, it's, you know, and
• 42:02
  he very quickly falls prey to, to to an angry Siloian mental
• 42:06
  powers, you know, basically crippling.
• 42:08
  But still, I don't even know why he's there.
• 42:10
  What, what what did he want to do to convince them to stop?
• 42:14
  I guess to convince them to stop because it will be easier than
• 42:18
  trying to convince the Brigadier to stop because of course they
• 42:23
  have to fight or they die. They are fighting for survival.
• 42:26
  It's not, it's not an equal battle.
• 42:32
  Yeah. And so to expect the humans to
• 42:34
  sort of act in a, in a, in a sort of morally superior
• 42:41
  pacifistic way doesn't make any sense.
• 42:43
  It's not logical that they would do it.
• 42:44
  And it's not logical to it to expect them to be any other way
• 42:49
  or to admonish them for it. Yeah, that seems to be what the
• 42:53
  doctor's doing. He's like, oh, you.
• 42:55
  Oh, I'm so fed up with you. He doesn't want to do both
• 42:58
  sides. On both sides, he has to go with
• 43:00
  the Brigadier at one point and he has to go Walker at one point
• 43:04
  and I'm. Like, but he shouldn't be able
• 43:06
  to go with the Brigadier. Like at that stage, he's like,
• 43:08
  he should be like, fuck no, we need to stop the signing.
• 43:11
  It's like, OK, I, I, I won't condone genocide.
• 43:14
  We're not going to do that. I won't do that.
• 43:16
  But you're right. You, this, this needs to stop.
• 43:19
  Let's find a way for you to survive and then to broker a
• 43:23
  peace activist because that's what he would do.
• 43:27
  This, this is ridiculous. This is not what this is not
• 43:30
  what he would do. It's not what he would do at
• 43:32
  all. What I wanted was for Bernice to
• 43:35
  turn up. At one point.
• 43:36
  I was really hoping it was going to happen and just go, Doctor,
• 43:39
  you're really naive to think that you can you can solve this
• 43:43
  situation given you know, that the humanity has been
• 43:48
  brutalised, you know, and beaten down and that you think you can
• 43:53
  negotiate a peace between the two of them.
• 43:56
  Yeah, but she she'd been the New Adventures version of Nisa.
• 43:59
  Do you know what I mean? Like she's like being put into a
• 44:01
  box somewhere and like told to sleep for half of the book.
• 44:05
  Don't put Bernice in the box, New Adventures writers.
• 44:08
  She's your greatest weapon, OK. Nobody puts Bernice in the
• 44:12
  corner. Oh, well done, well done.
• 44:15
  Come on, Bernie dancing. Yeah, Like, it's, it's, it's,
• 44:18
  it's, it's a strange book. I I, I I kind of feel
• 44:22
  disappointed, right. I didn't want to feel
• 44:24
  disappointed. Yeah, there's a nice.
• 44:27
  I mean, even the ending is sort of like, it's OK, but it doesn't
• 44:32
  even read as a, as a, as a, as a cliffhanger.
• 44:35
  Do you know what I mean? It's, I mean, I would love for
• 44:39
  this to have ended on like, you know, a through line to the next
• 44:44
  story. I think it's it's the next story
• 44:48
  conundrum because I I do think they do run.
• 44:51
  And ice is the left-handed, the left-handed Hummingbird.
• 44:54
  OK, that's a bit of a banger actually.
• 44:57
  And then conundrum. Yeah.
• 44:58
  But you know what? I don't want to.
• 45:01
  I almost feel like after this, I don't want to.
• 45:03
  You know what I mean? I'm so like, you know, I'm going
• 45:05
  to no she. She is a bit shitty with them
• 45:08
  all the way through to No Future, but then things get
• 45:11
  better for then the torture porn starts.
• 45:13
  It was a very strange time, you know, like.
• 45:16
  Yeah, I, I think it got to a point where like nobody was,
• 45:20
  was, was constraining them properly.
• 45:23
  The like the editor or whoever was in charge, like was just
• 45:26
  like, yeah, just do whatever. And they were, they were getting
• 45:30
  off on themselves and they were getting John.
• 45:33
  They needed what more I think they needed more one more female
• 45:37
  writers and and a female editorial hand who turned up
• 45:42
  just after this, which is Rebecca Levine.
• 45:45
  And suddenly in the second-half of the new adventures, sort of
• 45:48
  human nature on which you start getting properly sensitive
• 45:53
  characters and complex emotional relationships and things like
• 45:58
  that. Whereas it's it's very male
• 46:01
  dominated this whole. Yeah, I, I like to call this
• 46:04
  this epoch of Doctor Who, the sausage era.
• 46:06
  But yeah, that's exactly what it is.
• 46:09
  Yeah, it's just like a it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,
• 46:12
  it's a sausage fest. We're drowning in testosterone,
• 46:14
  but not just It's like teenage testosterone you.
• 46:17
  Know yeah, it's teenage testosterone.
• 46:19
  I mean, there's still like there's there's good ideas like
• 46:21
  in the Broads and again in this one, there's some good ideas,
• 46:23
  but it's just surrounded by so much grim wrapping paper that
• 46:27
  it's hard to enjoy. Yeah, what it's trying to do.
• 46:32
  Like you say, it's. Double the length.
• 46:34
  It's double the length that it needs to be.
• 46:35
  This could have been the Target novel, right?
• 46:37
  You could have done a New Adventures Target style novel.
• 46:40
  You don't need to have them. Double the length.
• 46:42
  If you can't do something with the pace that you can't do, then
• 46:47
  then write a shorter book. It's fine.
• 46:49
  We'll have bought it because it was the only Doctor Who
• 46:52
  available. So we would have bought it and
• 46:53
  we would have lapped it up and we would have enjoyed it.
• 46:56
  The thing with like humanity, yeah, is, and humanity has
• 46:59
  depicted in Doctor Who is it always finds a way, right?
• 47:02
  No matter what adversity we go up against, it always finds a
• 47:05
  way. So what I would have loved to
• 47:07
  have seen in this is like the civilization that humanity has
• 47:11
  built within this terrible situation.
• 47:15
  Yeah. And then just provide some
• 47:18
  levity that way, I don't know, families, relationships,
• 47:20
  something. So there's real implications if
• 47:25
  that gets destroyed. And then do the same on the
• 47:27
  Silurian side as well. Show us that civilization, not
• 47:30
  just the monsters, not just two characters.
• 47:33
  Show us clearly you're thinking on a big scale and you can well
• 47:36
  build. So show us what's happening
• 47:39
  there in a way that when those missiles are fired at the
• 47:41
  Silurians at the end, it's not, oh, that pretty building is
• 47:44
  going to get destroyed. It's people are going to die.
• 47:48
  You had a, there's a really good opportunity here to do like a
• 47:50
  sort of a reverse Silurian today where you still have more or
• 47:54
  less the same setup, where like instead of like a few Silurians,
• 47:58
  like under threat from the whole of humanity, now you've got a
• 48:01
  few humans under the threat of a whole lot of Silurians.
• 48:05
  You could have had the Brigadier and a much stronger role as not
• 48:10
  as the leader of of the Humans, but as the second in command
• 48:15
  underneath a much more belligerent, blustery general
• 48:22
  type. Character Joe's uncle.
• 48:24
  I know he turns up later on, doesn't he?
• 48:25
  As the mad mad Admiral of the fleet.
• 48:28
  The mad Admiral? Yeah, the mad Admiral.
• 48:31
  But make him the PTSD driven. Mad Well, that's what I mean.
• 48:35
  In a sense he was, but he was just like hiding in a sub, you
• 48:39
  know, the Brigadier was taking. But how much more interesting
• 48:41
  would it be? And if we had the same that same
• 48:45
  conversation that we had between the Silurians and the original
• 48:48
  TV show where one was like, you know, well, you know, maybe
• 48:51
  they're not all stupid, You know, maybe there's a different
• 48:55
  way, You know, science can help, you know, the the way the doctor
• 48:59
  talks to one of them and he's making sort of headway with the
• 49:03
  intelligence of the creatures rather than the the need to to
• 49:08
  exact revenge on the apes. You could have done something
• 49:10
  similar here, but that seems like too much, too much of A
• 49:15
  hassle for the writer. It's like that.
• 49:18
  This is just going to be a war story, and we're going to hurt
• 49:22
  all the characters that you love.
• 49:24
  We're going to hurt them so that you know that this is like, this
• 49:28
  is Doctor Who. You've never had Doctor.
• 49:32
  This is adult. But like you said, Mortimer's
• 49:35
  clearly he's got ideas, and he's got big, ambitious ideas as
• 49:39
  well. I mean, you've only got to look
• 49:41
  at the illustrations inside. I love the illustrations
• 49:44
  they're. Beautiful, aren't they?
• 49:47
  Yeah, it's one of the notes I made, but it's it's so cool to
• 49:50
  have illustrations in a Doctor Who book.
• 49:52
  Like it just took me back to the target days and I thought these
• 49:54
  are great. This one off the doctor fly the
• 49:57
  pterodactyl over the city towards.
• 50:00
  It's stunning. I've got it on the same.
• 50:03
  Page, but it makes it feel like it's like a really pastoral sort
• 50:06
  of book, you know? Yeah, yeah.
• 50:08
  Like some wonderful Ghibli animation or something like
• 50:11
  that. But no, you know.
• 50:13
  Look, here's here's the one where like, the mad dogs are
• 50:16
  chewing on terrace triceratops bones.
• 50:18
  I mean, appropriately, there is also a picture of the Brigadier
• 50:23
  standing over the corpse of a dead child, which feels.
• 50:26
  Lovely for the book, yeah, Yeah. Yes, but like after this, yeah,
• 50:30
  you get Parasite by Mortimer where he basically writes 300
• 50:35
  pages of torture porn in an alien dimension.
• 50:39
  Then you get Eternity Weeps where he wipes out 80% of the
• 50:43
  population of our Earth for a bad joke.
• 50:47
  Then he writes Bell Tempest in the 8th doctor line where he
• 50:50
  starts just destroying whole planets Willy nilly and I'm like
• 50:54
  who hurt you Jim Mortimer? Like, well, why are you trying
• 50:57
  to just make everything so horrible?
• 51:00
  Yeah, horrible, absolutely horrible.
• 51:02
  I I just don't get it. I don't get it.
• 51:04
  Was that? I wouldn't write comedy.
• 51:06
  I wouldn't see what he would like, what he would produce if
• 51:09
  he wrote a comedy. It would be all the same, except
• 51:13
  the master would be there laughing, you know?
• 51:15
  OK, it's comedy. Look, there's someone laughing.
• 51:18
  I guess that's what his thing would be like.
• 51:21
  No, look, it's, see, the comedy would be laughing if it wasn't a
• 51:24
  comedy. Yeah, it was, it was a it was,
• 51:28
  yeah, I don't know, a bit of a bummer.
• 51:31
  It was a it was a bit of a bum. I was so excited, Jay.
• 51:34
  I was like, oh, man, it's been years.
• 51:37
  It's been years. This is going to be such a great
• 51:38
  fucking adventure. And it was it was just so grim,
• 51:43
  you know, the whole thing with Manisha as well.
• 51:45
  It's just like, you know, it could have been joyous.
• 51:49
  And they they even made that miserable.
• 51:50
  So Ace gets to see her long lost dead friend, like still alive in
• 51:54
  this universe. And they're awkward and nasty to
• 51:57
  each other and argumentative because no one can be happy.
• 52:01
  It's like, this is like, this is like Christmas EastEnders.
• 52:04
  Do you know what I mean? This is Christmas EastEnders of
• 52:07
  Doctor Who. Nothing is good.
• 52:09
  No one is happy. All relationships are shit.
• 52:13
  And of course, in this dimension, Manisha is alive, but
• 52:16
  Ace is dead. On the inside, yes, yeah, yeah,
• 52:21
  yeah. But we we assume that the other
• 52:25
  ace is somehow dead somewhere else or.
• 52:28
  Sulking. I thought the sort of the
• 52:31
  greatest summation of this book was the very last sentence,
• 52:35
  which was he touched the function execute switch.
• 52:40
  That's basically the Doctor turning off a universe.
• 52:45
  That's the description of Jim Mortimer sitting down to the
• 52:47
  typewriter. If we're not going to save this
• 52:49
  universe, why did we go there? We went there so we could have
• 52:55
  the Silurians back, but like make them win and do horrible
• 52:59
  things to the characters that you love.
• 53:01
  So you would go, Oh my God, this is hard hitting and and that's
• 53:04
  it. That's it.
• 53:06
  So we could. Have hitting, Yeah.
• 53:09
  You drew me in. You dragged me in fucking
• 53:12
  Silurian and the Tanosaurus Rex. You drag me in TARDIS sinking
• 53:15
  into the swamp. You pulled me in.
• 53:17
  You could never judge a book by its cover.
• 53:19
  Arthur Paris, Although I suppose this is what happens in the book
• 53:23
  so. Yeah, no, they are.
• 53:26
  They are there, you know, But if it had just been that moment, it
• 53:29
  would have been a much more interesting rate, do you know
• 53:32
  what I mean? But it's not.
• 53:32
  It's like loads of other stuff. And since we're talking about
• 53:35
  dinosaurs, can I just like, look up a fucking like a book of
• 53:39
  dinosaurs, Like, you know, a proper book of dinosaurs.
• 53:42
  And you know what? I'm going to put all these weird
• 53:44
  ass names. In there one.
• 53:47
  No, I think he must have made some of those up shortly.
• 53:49
  I didn't. Recognize I don't no man, No, I
• 53:51
  do. You know what?
• 53:51
  I doubt it because nothing says like I hate you, reader then an
• 53:58
  author that I think that does that to that degree.
• 54:01
  Do you know what I mean? That was how we were introduced
• 54:03
  to this place. The doctor's going, oh, this is
• 54:05
  that dinosaur. And then reeled off a load of
• 54:07
  facts. Oh, this is that.
• 54:09
  Even when the sailors come along, he goes, oh, look, he's
• 54:12
  riding one of those dinosaurs. I was like I.
• 54:14
  Think at one point there was a brontosaurus.
• 54:16
  I think there was a brontosaurus and I remember going a
• 54:18
  brontosaurus. I know what that is.
• 54:22
  We definitely had a pterodactyl, right?
• 54:24
  Yeah, yeah, those. I know them, yeah.
• 54:28
  I mean, I I'm going to keep they are call images.
• 54:31
  That's The thing is I can see why they I can see why Peter
• 54:34
  Divel Evans, when he said I want to write this book.
• 54:37
  You know it. It is very juicy ideas, but I
• 54:41
  just think that the the bloodshed and the melodrama
• 54:45
  needs to be dialed down from 100 to about 40.
• 54:50
  Yeah. Because I can handle, I can
• 54:52
  handle a lot of melodrama, right?
• 54:53
  I'm a bit, you've heard a few of these podcasts.
• 54:56
  I'm a bit over the top, but you know when everyone's going round
• 54:58
  going I hate you, I hate you, this is this.
• 55:02
  Is not proper melodrama. It's not proper melodrama.
• 55:04
  It's again, it's, it's assuming that in order to be gritty,
• 55:09
  there can only be like 1 tone, right?
• 55:13
  And that's it. But like, no, that's you still
• 55:15
  get nuance or you should still get nuance so that you can
• 55:21
  understand what what is gritty and what is not.
• 55:26
  I would say a book has gone awry when it makes that comparison
• 55:30
  between the Brig and Adolf Hitler and he murders Joe Grant
• 55:34
  that that is when a book has gone like, well, how did we ever
• 55:38
  get here? I almost feel like I want to
• 55:42
  like root through, you know, Adolf Hitler's like, speeches to
• 55:47
  see if he mentions anything about for the children, you know
• 55:49
  what I mean? Like, maybe like Morton did some
• 55:51
  weird research and like came across something like that
• 55:55
  because it's what a weird thing to to do.
• 55:58
  I mean, I guess again, he was thinking about Inferno.
• 56:01
  Now in Inferno, you've got a fascist stick, Brigadier.
• 56:04
  Like, you know, he's a brown shirt.
• 56:05
  He's literally a brown shirt. But again, that's because he
• 56:09
  grew up in a fishistic state. This Brigadier did not.
• 56:13
  He had some shit things happen to him, but at this point he's
• 56:16
  already like a fucking Brigadier.
• 56:17
  So surely, you know, he's seen war, he's seen hardship.
• 56:21
  He understands that like war is terrible, sacrifices get made,
• 56:25
  but you hold it together and you don't go fucking blooping.
• 56:29
  What I found even more baffling was in the climax of the story.
• 56:35
  OK, so they've set the dinosaurs on the Silurian camp.
• 56:38
  They've got control of them, the humans.
• 56:40
  And they said, and I thought, OK, well, that's horrific enough
• 56:44
  that these dinosaurs are no, no, no, most of it goes, no, that's
• 56:47
  not that. It's not strong enough.
• 56:49
  It's not horrible enough. I'm going to tell this scene
• 56:52
  from a Silurian child's point of view, and then I'm going to have
• 56:56
  that dinosaur step on that child and grind it into the remains of
• 57:01
  its house. It's so horrible.
• 57:07
  It's horrible. It's, it's because it's confused
• 57:12
  about the way it wants to say the thing that it wants to say,
• 57:18
  which I assume is war is terrible.
• 57:21
  If only we sat down and spoke to one another, right?
• 57:26
  In which case, make it more about that.
• 57:29
  Make it a political book. Make it about those
• 57:32
  machinations. Make it about trying to find the
• 57:35
  peace between these two things the other characters, human and
• 57:40
  Silurian, are trying to sabotage.
• 57:44
  Make it about fat and nobody. Comes to that conclusion either
• 57:49
  in the climax today, because it's only because they're
• 57:51
  forced, they can't fight anymore and it's a literal Deus Ex
• 57:55
  machina where the TARDIS materialises around the planet.
• 57:59
  Without that, this would have just gone on.
• 58:01
  Yeah. It's not like somebody stepped
• 58:03
  back and went, OK, fine, let's negotiate.
• 58:06
  And also, do the humans control all the dinosaurs everywhere and
• 58:09
  is it enough for them? Like the small amount of humans
• 58:12
  left to actually be much of A threat to the Siberians who
• 58:16
  still have fucking airships and shield.
• 58:20
  Is that enough? They could probably take out the
• 58:22
  dinosaurs from oh, I've just remembered something else very
• 58:26
  cool. Sea devils attacking a submarine
• 58:30
  with underwater dinosaurs. Now that was.
• 58:32
  Pretty cool. But then we we, we don't see
• 58:34
  much of them. It's just that one moment, you
• 58:37
  know what I mean? And again, So what?
• 58:40
  Do you imagine this is what the war between the land and the sea
• 58:43
  is going to be like? No, I hope, I hope that is
• 58:46
  better. I mean, because there, there
• 58:49
  there was always a mention of the rivalry between them, like
• 58:52
  it popped up a couple of times. So that I would be curious to
• 58:55
  see right. Like I'm, I'm assuming that's
• 58:58
  what the war is. It's not a war between humans
• 59:01
  and sea levels. I think it's a war between the
• 59:03
  Siberians and the Sea Devils and humans being caught up in the
• 59:07
  middle of. That's why I reckon it's going
• 59:09
  to go on there. I hope I remember.
• 59:12
  In in which case the enemy is people who don't spend enough
• 59:18
  money. You should be better consumers.
• 59:21
  Yeah, why don't you better consumers?
• 59:23
  If you were buying more things then these creatures wouldn't
• 59:26
  have gone to war with each other and that's your fault as a
• 59:28
  consumer. If you were buying more weapons
• 59:31
  as a deterrent, you wouldn't be fighting all right.
• 59:34
  It's another people that time message.
• 59:37
  What does he mean? I don't know.
• 59:40
  I don't know either. I certainly don't know what this
• 59:43
  book was trying to tell me. But do you know what I, I can't
• 59:45
  write off bloody entirely? I, I do think it, it does have
• 59:49
  vivid imagery. I do think it does have good
• 59:52
  prose, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 59:55
  I think the big thing it's lacking is that uneven.
• 59:59
  Where it lacks is that uneven pace that just very unlikable
• 1:00:03
  characters for. Yeah, it's got no heart, Joe.
• 1:00:06
  Yeah, that's it. It's it's lacking a pulse, Yeah.
• 1:00:10
  I don't root for anyone. Yeah, and you should root for
• 1:00:14
  someone. I'd root for the doptics if I
• 1:00:16
  don't know what the fuck he's doing.
• 1:00:18
  No, it was very, very baffling. Oh, and oh, sorry, Oh God, I'm
• 1:00:22
  really coming down hard on this one.
• 1:00:24
  The 1st 20 pages as well. What was going on in the
• 1:00:27
  tardish, you know, but it came through into this universe and
• 1:00:29
  they were sort of what's going on porn inside out.
• 1:00:31
  I was like, oh, what's? That and also the weird way that
• 1:00:35
  they were talking to each other, like it's like it was very
• 1:00:40
  surreal. Do you know what I mean?
• 1:00:43
  They, they weren't talking normally.
• 1:00:45
  They weren't talking to each other in a normal way.
• 1:00:48
  Even if they were, even if Ace and the Doctor were angry at
• 1:00:51
  each other, they would still talk in a normal way to one
• 1:00:54
  another. But there was this attempt to
• 1:00:56
  sort of be weirdly portentous. Something weird is happening.
• 1:01:01
  Hard to talk weird. Isn't it?
• 1:01:04
  It's quite easy to do on TV. You can put in effects and voice
• 1:01:07
  things and it's very hard to do in a book.
• 1:01:10
  I felt that the well. I was going to say, can I say
• 1:01:13
  like don't if you're working your way through this, and I
• 1:01:17
  know you said you don't want to, you don't want to keep going
• 1:01:19
  out. I don't want to stop you reading
• 1:01:21
  books, Jesus Christ. But I will say, I will say the
• 1:01:24
  left-handed Homeburg and conundrum.
• 1:01:26
  I've read them both recently and they have everything that kind
• 1:01:29
  of this book don't. They have more creative ideas in
• 1:01:34
  them and they are funnier and they are very intelligent and
• 1:01:38
  there are great characters in them.
• 1:01:40
  So it's definitely worth going. The only black spot is they've
• 1:01:44
  still got Grumpy Ace. Yeah, no, I, I will get to them
• 1:01:47
  at some point. You know, like I take my time
• 1:01:49
  with these things because I like to, to, to read lots and lots of
• 1:01:52
  stuff. I read a lot, you know, and so
• 1:01:54
  like, it's nice to, to dip back in and going through them just
• 1:01:57
  stops me having to decide what am I going to read.
• 1:02:01
  No, the next one in mine isn't this one.
• 1:02:03
  So what I'll do is that but this, you know, this particular
• 1:02:07
  podcast gives me a chance to sort of dip in and out of the
• 1:02:11
  regions of the Doctor Who booking in the best, which so
• 1:02:15
  that's that's nice. But yeah, I saw a part of other
• 1:02:17
  things that I read outside of Doctor Who.
• 1:02:20
  I do have another question about blood heat for you though,
• 1:02:22
  because this. Is.
• 1:02:24
  This is a popular book. Like, I was quite surprised
• 1:02:27
  actually at the vitriol. When I posted a picture of this.
• 1:02:29
  I was quite surprised. There was a lot of people.
• 1:02:32
  I mean, I was quite rude in the tweet, so maybe that was just
• 1:02:35
  people leaping off of that. But there was a good handful of
• 1:02:39
  people going, oh, that's a classic.
• 1:02:40
  That's a banger. Because they, they, they they're
• 1:02:44
  only remembering when they read it at the time, right?
• 1:02:47
  I bet they hadn't read it since. And if they read it again,
• 1:02:50
  they'll be like, oh, shit, right.
• 1:02:52
  Because now, like, your sensibilities are different.
• 1:02:54
  Like when I was a kid. Yeah.
• 1:02:55
  I think when I was young, I seem to remember I did get a kick out
• 1:02:58
  of reading it because I was. Like fucking when I was young,
• 1:03:01
  yeah, I loved. It because when you're like 15
• 1:03:03
  and 16 or whatever, like you're that age and you're a fucking
• 1:03:06
  nerd and you're kind of into it, like, Oh my God, fucking Joe's
• 1:03:11
  been horribly brutalized. Oh no, Ben sense a twat.
• 1:03:13
  Oh my God. Listen.
• 1:03:15
  Bullshit. This God is.
• 1:03:17
  Being shot in the head, you know, my God.
• 1:03:20
  Because it's a childish idea of grown up, which is what you are
• 1:03:24
  when you're at that tween stage. You're a childish idea of grown
• 1:03:28
  up, and therefore your sensibilities are.
• 1:03:30
  That. Right.
• 1:03:33
  I've got a theory that the The New Adventures came at a time so
• 1:03:38
  obviously Doctor Who's reputation in the late 80s was
• 1:03:41
  at an all time low. Maybe not with the fans, but
• 1:03:44
  certainly with the public, right?
• 1:03:47
  And we're all a bit embarrassed that we still love it.
• 1:03:51
  So along comes this series of books, and I'm not, I am not
• 1:03:54
  writing them all off, but along come this series of books which
• 1:03:57
  are gritty and sexy and violent and all of those things that if
• 1:04:01
  only Doctor Who had been like that in the late 80s, then maybe
• 1:04:05
  that, you know, it wouldn't have gone off the air and everyone
• 1:04:07
  would take it very seriously. It was like that.
• 1:04:11
  In the was actually, it was in the mid 80s, wasn't it?
• 1:04:14
  Yeah, it. Was like that half the reason?
• 1:04:16
  Why it was? People being shot Willy nilly
• 1:04:19
  and being. Crushed.
• 1:04:21
  Yeah. Come on, it was like that.
• 1:04:24
  But so these books here at a time for a whole, I'd say a
• 1:04:28
  generation of teenagers that were embarrassed that they still
• 1:04:32
  like Doctor Who and they can absolutely jump into them and be
• 1:04:35
  like, Oh yeah, it's so cool. It's so adult.
• 1:04:39
  This is a this is a version of Doctor Who that everybody would
• 1:04:43
  respect. But then.
• 1:04:45
  You. You grow.
• 1:04:47
  Up and suddenly things being overtly violent and melodramatic
• 1:04:53
  and angsty and all that, it's a bit embarrassing.
• 1:04:56
  When you're older, bit embarrassing.
• 1:04:57
  And you like? Because you want you.
• 1:04:59
  Well, yeah, you want subtlety. And also as you get older, you
• 1:05:02
  like your your your tastes become more sophisticated.
• 1:05:06
  Yeah. Your ability to to understand
• 1:05:09
  new ones and understand the narrative beats of a story
• 1:05:14
  become more sophisticated. So yeah, these I guess, yeah.
• 1:05:19
  In the end, these are sort of slightly bigger target, you
• 1:05:25
  know, or that's targets at heart a lot of the time.
• 1:05:29
  Again, I don't want to sort of tar out all the new adventures
• 1:05:32
  with the same much because I did enjoy them and there's some
• 1:05:34
  fucking good stories. Right.
• 1:05:38
  Because there were some good people working on them as well.
• 1:05:41
  But yeah, sometimes there was this, there was this thing of,
• 1:05:45
  of writing to a very small niche of humans right at a particular
• 1:05:54
  time in their lives. And you grow up from that
• 1:05:57
  particular time that you're alive.
• 1:06:00
  So yeah, it is a bit embarrassing when you go back to
• 1:06:07
  a book that you think is going to blow your mind again and you
• 1:06:11
  realise I'd like this because I was 12.
• 1:06:16
  You can encapsulate all of what you just said there in one
• 1:06:19
  image. And there's ice in that leather
• 1:06:21
  cat suit with her tits out on the cover of those new
• 1:06:25
  adventures. You know, that is the
• 1:06:26
  encapsulation of that adolescence that you loved, you
• 1:06:29
  know, when you were 13, but you look back now and go, oh, boy,
• 1:06:34
  you. Know that's that's still the
• 1:06:37
  template. I do.
• 1:06:39
  I genuinely think they grew out of it.
• 1:06:40
  Look. At 7:00 and 9:00.
• 1:06:42
  Well, yes, yeah, yeah. Look at the power in enterprise.
• 1:06:45
  They didn't learn. Enterprise.
• 1:06:47
  Hilarious. Any excuse for a decontamination
• 1:06:50
  shower? Yeah, any excuse.
• 1:06:52
  Any. Excuse, You know, if the New
• 1:06:54
  Adventures was on TV they would have had that, wouldn't they?
• 1:06:57
  The radiation room? Come on Bernice, let's get our
• 1:06:59
  clothes off and rub gel into each other.
• 1:07:01
  Yeah, you you know what like Ace would be doing with that
• 1:07:05
  baseball bat and it wouldn't be slap in the dark.
• 1:07:09
  Oh, keep exploring them, you might get there.
• 1:07:14
  Summarise your thoughts on Bloody and then let's never
• 1:07:18
  think about it again until the next time we reread it.
• 1:07:22
  OK, I would summarise it like in the words of John Nathan Turner.
• 1:07:24
  The memory cheats. All right, It is not as good as
• 1:07:30
  I thought it was going to be. There's some good stuff in
• 1:07:32
  there. But it's let down by a desire to
• 1:07:36
  be a very peculiar version of the word adult, which doesn't
• 1:07:39
  quite fit what it's trying to do.
• 1:07:42
  Right. I would say it's, it's, yeah,
• 1:07:45
  it's, it's trying to be something I'm saying.
• 1:07:48
  I think this is right in the heart of that adolescent period
• 1:07:53
  of the New Adventures, very masculine period where there's
• 1:07:57
  only one female voice. She's coming next.
• 1:08:00
  It's the next book. And boy, the the whole range
• 1:08:03
  breathes a sigh of relief when the female voice comes out of
• 1:08:07
  it. Yeah.
• 1:08:10
  And I went into this because you know what?
• 1:08:12
  I read my review of this and I wrote like years back and like
• 1:08:16
  knowing that. And I loved it.
• 1:08:18
  So I went. I went into this expecting
• 1:08:21
  expecting a grim book because I know what Mortimer's like, but I
• 1:08:25
  had no idea it was going to get this bleak.
• 1:08:30
  I've I've read and watched and listened to a lot of alternative
• 1:08:35
  universe science fiction stories.
• 1:08:38
  This might be the nastiest one that I've read.
• 1:08:43
  And like, if, and it's a big if, the conclusion of this book had
• 1:08:49
  been that the doctor got them to sit down and negotiate and then
• 1:08:53
  just left and went off. I'm going to find out who did
• 1:08:56
  this. I would, I might have been a bit
• 1:08:59
  kinder towards it. But the fact then that he just
• 1:09:01
  froze a switch and he goes, right, well, I've got to kill
• 1:09:04
  off all those people to allow our universe to come back to be.
• 1:09:08
  I mean, there's a whole moral dilemma there.
• 1:09:09
  What means our universe more worthy of existence.
• 1:09:14
  I don't know. I don't know.
• 1:09:16
  Yeah. It was just bloody grim.
• 1:09:19
  Yeah, it lack nuance. It lack nuance.
• 1:09:23
  Well, what may not lack nuance, and it certainly will not lack
• 1:09:29
  literary references is the the next direction that you and I
• 1:09:33
  are going into. Possibly a more positive
• 1:09:36
  direction. I'd hope so from the cover
• 1:09:40
  anyway, like it seems to be something more fun.
• 1:09:43
  I got this recently. You know, there's like a,
• 1:09:46
  there's a range of books at the moment that sort of Doctor Who
• 1:09:49
  in in with characters you would assume to be fictional.
• 1:09:54
  There's one with, I think it's Josephine and the Argonauts was
• 1:09:58
  a cool one. I really enjoyed that.
• 1:10:01
  There's Camelot. Doctor Who in Wonderland.
• 1:10:05
  Which was terrible. I loved it.
• 1:10:07
  Are you mad that? One absolutely terrible.
• 1:10:12
  There was the wonderful Doctor of Oz, which was cool, but I
• 1:10:16
  haven't read this one yet. This is The Return of Robin
• 1:10:18
  Hood, and it's a Fourth Doctor novel.
• 1:10:24
  I like it because it's short, which is nice.
• 1:10:27
  It gives me enough time to read it, and it seems like it might
• 1:10:31
  be a lot of fun. Which, yeah, after Blood Heat
• 1:10:34
  would be a welcome addition to my.
• 1:10:40
  That that's is that That and the Missy one are the only two I
• 1:10:44
  haven't read from that range and I've enjoyed all of them.
• 1:10:47
  I think it's just a if you understand the source material,
• 1:10:50
  then they're great fun to read. But they're dishes.
• 1:10:53
  Good writers. My favorite sofa has been
• 1:10:56
  Josephine and the Argonauts. Yeah, Mars has forged a career
• 1:11:00
  away from doctor as and you can tell in in his writing.
• 1:11:03
  Well, let's let's put away child murder and pick up a bow and
• 1:11:10
  arrow instead. John where?
• 1:11:14
  I don't know, I was just last time, but I'll ask you every
• 1:11:16
  time where can people find you online if you.
• 1:11:19
  Wish for them. To do so.
• 1:11:21
  Yeah, these days are only on Bloom Sky and it's JFP lane.
• 1:11:26
  Bloom Sky, so sure, whatever it is.
• 1:11:28
  So it's JFP lane. Well also check out is as yet
• 1:11:33
  I'm released but will be very shortly so by the time this
• 1:11:36
  comes out. Long released Harvest of Time
• 1:11:39
  episode of Hamster of Blunt Penknife.
• 1:11:41
  That was a good book. It was a great book, John.
• 1:11:45
  Thank you very much for your time.
• 1:11:46
  Apologies for making you endure this one, but.
• 1:11:49
  Hey, it was my choice. I wanted to do it, didn't I?
• 1:11:53
  I was like all up for it. I was super excited.
• 1:11:55
  I'm like, Nah, let's do blood heat.
• 1:11:56
  Let's do blood heat. You should be apologizing to me.
• 1:11:59
  No, I'm so sorry for making you read Blood Heat.
• 1:12:04
  I've been having nightmares of children's skeletons.
• 1:12:08
  Yeah, this is, this is, this is the version of blood heat you
• 1:12:10
  get if you if you've overdosed on Viagra and need to go to a
• 1:12:14
  doctor, right. It's, it's, there's too much
• 1:12:15
  blood in that area, it's too hot and you need to do something
• 1:12:18
  about it or you're going to die. So yeah.
• 1:12:20
  Actually, if you're a fan of sort of child murder, if you're
• 1:12:23
  a fan of animal murder. Go read this.
• 1:12:28
  Where are you going? You're going to get, you're
• 1:12:31
  going to get a lot of fun out of it.
• 1:12:33
  I thought you were about to give.
• 1:12:33
  Me another recommendation, whoever's listening if you're a
• 1:12:39
  fan. Of those you love blood heat,
• 1:12:41
  you love blood heat, then you'll love Mein Kampf too.
• 1:12:47
  This time, it's personnel. I'll cut it there.
• 1:12:51
  It's always good to end on a joke.