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Hamster Book Club - The Adventures Before (featuring Michael Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Mule had a very boring job. Essential, but boring.
• 0:06
  He worked in the Chancellor Suite 1 of 1000 Gallifreans who
• 0:10
  hadn't quite earned the rank of an actual Time Lord but still
• 0:14
  had an important part to play in their hierarchy.
• 0:18
  Mule spent his days staring at holographic displays that showed
• 0:21
  galaxies, planets, Suns, and solar systems.
• 0:25
  It was his job to take whatever he'd been assigned to and study
• 0:29
  it, make notes, watch the progress of individual races,
• 0:33
  catalog their rise and fall. This was the bread and butter of
• 0:37
  Gallifrean life. The whole leaf of the Time Lord
• 0:40
  since the days of Raslon had been to observe the universe.
• 0:44
  Watch it play. Witness to the cycle of life and
• 0:47
  death. So it was recorded but never
• 0:49
  interfered with. That was the best use of their
• 0:52
  temporal powers. Apparently.
• 0:55
  Mule didn't agree. He had seen the birth of planets
• 1:00
  that had witnessed their deaths. Civilizations that had much to
• 1:03
  offer art, love, and technology that could benefit billions of
• 1:07
  other worlds were left to flounder, even destroying
• 1:11
  themselves by accident or being obliterated by terrible forces
• 1:15
  of evil. After centuries of this, day in,
• 1:19
  day out, Mule made an observation.
• 1:22
  Not to his superiors or his friends or colleagues, just to
• 1:26
  his own hearts. He would do something about
• 1:30
  this. He knew he couldn't use
• 1:31
  Gallifrean technology for this, but there were others out there
• 1:35
  who had rudimentary understanding of time travel.
• 1:38
  None that had mastered it like the Time Lords.
• 1:41
  None that had their strict morality.
• 1:43
  Either. The Daleks, for instance, or the
• 1:45
  Sontarans, who had used time to wage wars which, if they got too
• 1:50
  close to Gallifrey in its interest, could be secretly
• 1:53
  sealed off in a time bubble, unaware that they were just
• 1:56
  fighting the same battles over and over again.
• 2:00
  But races such as the Moanans, the Pharaohs, the Nekistani were
• 2:04
  peaceful civilizations who were content to play with basic
• 2:08
  localized time manipulation without fracturing timelines and
• 2:12
  erasing histories. One day, Mule decided to leave
• 2:16
  Gallifrey. He was going to steal ATT
• 2:18
  capsule, but that would be traceable.
• 2:20
  So he used his position to attract the attention of a
• 2:23
  passing Starship and was teleported aboard, promising the
• 2:27
  caption a treasure. There was no treasure, but it
• 2:31
  got him away from Gallifrey, and thus he began his adventures
• 2:34
  away from his home world. He used his knowledge to save
• 2:37
  planets and his technology to make federations and alliances
• 2:41
  survive. If Gallifrey ever tried to find
• 2:44
  him, they failed. Mule reckoned he simply wasn't
• 2:47
  important enough for anyone to notice he'd gone.
• 2:50
  But being away from Gallifrey's sphere of influence changed Mule
• 2:54
  in ways he hadn't expected. He began to understand the baser
• 2:58
  instincts of the universe. His life became hedonistic as he
• 3:02
  enjoyed the rewards of grateful peoples and planets.
• 3:06
  He took risks, Risks of the kind that most Gallifreans would
• 3:10
  never experience, and that led to occasional errors.
• 3:14
  But if he died in a bar fight, or falling from a base jump
• 3:17
  platform, or forgetting to check the seals on a space suit, well,
• 3:21
  So what? He would just regenerate into a
• 3:24
  new body. Within a decade he'd gone
• 3:26
  through 7 new bodies and faces. This also had the added bonus of
• 3:30
  meaning that if he was ever pursued by anyone to whom he
• 3:34
  owed money or stolen from, he was pretty unfindable.
• 3:38
  But stories began to get around about Newell.
• 3:41
  Bounties were offered on this man who could live again and
• 3:44
  again. After all, if somebody could
• 3:46
  find, slice and dice him and study his unique Physiology,
• 3:51
  maybe everyone could enjoy the kind of immortality he seemed to
• 3:54
  have. Mule himself was forever
• 3:57
  searching for something similar. Raselon's genetic secrets, those
• 4:02
  tiny things that he had discovered and implanted into
• 4:05
  every strand of Gallifreian DNA. Not to sell it, but because by
• 4:10
  now he was on his final body. So Mule built an army.
• 4:15
  Oh it had taken many years on countless shady deals and
• 4:19
  exploitations, but finally he had it.
• 4:22
  The plan. Simple.
• 4:25
  Attack Gallifrey and force the time loss to give up the secret,
• 4:28
  Give himself a whole new cycle of regenerations.
• 4:31
  And so he had promised his army give them the secret of eternal
• 4:36
  life too. But Mule the Fool forgot 2 very
• 4:39
  important things while out in space, living his lives oh so
• 4:43
  frivolously. He forgot the Gallifrey and
• 4:46
  Observers, of which he had once been one, missed nothing.
• 4:51
  Secondly, he forgot that Raselon didn't give up his secrets
• 4:54
  easily. So when Muir's secret army
• 4:58
  approached Gallifrey and secretly stormed through the
• 5:00
  constellation of Castebarus, he realized too late that it wasn't
• 5:04
  really much of A secret. A force field enveloped his
• 5:07
  entire flotilla, and before his eyes, everything and everyone
• 5:11
  around him vanished. Because the time laws were
• 5:14
  utterly benign towards the universe until threatened.
• 5:19
  The army didn't cease to exist. It and the people who made it up
• 5:23
  were erased from existing at all.
• 5:27
  Entire timelines were wiped out, new ones replaced them, woven
• 5:31
  from Gallifrey's time looms and inserted into the past, present
• 5:35
  and future. No one would ever remember those
• 5:38
  people. Their timelines had never
• 5:40
  existed because the new ones have now been in place forever.
• 5:45
  The technology of the Time Laws was as powerful and unique as it
• 5:49
  was unforgiving. No one would ever know.
• 5:52
  Mule wondered how often he had done this in his old job, new
• 5:55
  timelines being woven and thus his own memories of being past
• 5:59
  such an event similarly rewritten.
• 6:02
  How dare you? He screamed into the void as
• 6:06
  reality disintegrated around him.
• 6:09
  I dare, replied the booming voice.
• 6:12
  I have to dare because you dare to betray everything I created
• 6:17
  and fought for, and rather than being dead, erased, unwoven mule
• 6:24
  within a vast stone chamber, a tomb at its heart.
• 6:28
  All around him the voice echoed. I have lifted you out the Time
• 6:33
  Lords ugly headfield they will believe you erased with the rest
• 6:37
  of your forces. And what happens to me?
• 6:40
  You asked his on the same captain.
• 6:42
  You will face penance. You will have an eternity to
• 6:46
  think about what you have done and reflect upon your hubris to
• 6:50
  believe the gifts I gave our people were yours to abuse.
• 6:55
  Mew never had the chance to respond.
• 7:09
  123. I'm used to going the other way.
• 7:14
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 7:17
  My name is Joe Ford and as ever, it is an extreme delight to
• 7:23
  welcome back. I mean I say welcome back.
• 7:25
  You're practically a fucking Co host these days, the amount of
• 7:28
  these things you've done. Mr. Michael Mills.
• 7:31
  Hello, Joe. That's quite a compliment.
• 7:33
  Thank you very much. You know you've done over 20 of
• 7:36
  these now. Oh, maybe we should stop.
• 7:39
  Some podcasts haven't lasted that long, you know, Are we, are
• 7:44
  we 2 are falling out soon? Yeah, that's what usually
• 7:46
  happens. They start a podcast and then,
• 7:47
  you know, risks emerge. Well, we'll find out what you
• 7:51
  think of this episode's book, I suppose.
• 7:55
  What is this episode's book, Michael?
• 7:58
  I'm so glad you asked Joe. This episode's book is Doctor
• 8:02
  Who The Adventures before from BBC Books.
• 8:07
  We've had a a small discussion about this before on our
• 8:11
  Battlefield episode with James Lark, where he suggested that
• 8:15
  nothing could entice him less than the premise of Doctor Who
• 8:19
  the adventures before. Well, indeed, but as eagle eared
• 8:23
  listeners will have picked up, James's criticism was really
• 8:27
  grossly unfounded because he got the name wrong before Before the
• 8:32
  adventures. Which is amateur.
• 8:35
  Amateur. And that's why he's not here on
• 8:37
  this episode. It's not here because he's got a
• 8:41
  library. You don't want to read this
• 8:42
  shit. That's why he's not here.
• 8:44
  Well, look, before we talk about the adventures before and what
• 8:48
  that's all about. Because it is a short story
• 8:51
  collection. Probably one of the Is this like
• 8:54
  the the most recently released Doctor Who book?
• 8:58
  It's one of them, isn't it? Oh, certainly.
• 9:01
  I mean, to be honest, the release schedule of BBC books
• 9:05
  these days is hard to comprehend.
• 9:08
  I'm sure there is a strategy, don't get me wrong, but
• 9:10
  certainly we've moved beyond the days when it was the past Doctor
• 9:13
  adventures, the 8th Doctor Adventures, and even beyond
• 9:16
  three new series adventures two or three times a year.
• 9:20
  Can you get? That right could they?
• 9:21
  They brought out two of Shooty's books and then one was held back
• 9:24
  for about 5 months for some reason.
• 9:28
  Bet there's a story there, I know.
• 9:29
  I mean, honestly, Michael, the the the names of these books
• 9:33
  coming out, I don't think they're trying anymore.
• 9:35
  One of them is called Fear, Death by Water.
• 9:39
  That's not a Doctor Who title, is it?
• 9:42
  No, I mean, I would go as far as suggest that's not a title.
• 9:46
  But anyway, my question for you, for our little icebreaker today
• 9:50
  is 1. I want to know what you think of
• 9:52
  short story collections. Have you read many of them
• 9:55
  within Doctor Who or not? And my second is what's your
• 10:00
  preference? Do you prefer a short story
• 10:02
  collection centered around a theme or just a random
• 10:06
  collection of stories to enjoy? Go.
• 10:10
  Yeah, well, I, I, I do enjoy short story collections and I've
• 10:13
  read quite a few of them, both Doctor Who and non Doctor Who.
• 10:17
  I I like them. I, I think they're a different
• 10:20
  way of engaging with the story. Ideally, they should be a
• 10:22
  different form of story as well. I think I think we've touched on
• 10:25
  this in the podcast in, in the past that a short story
• 10:28
  shouldn't just be a shorter version of your novel.
• 10:31
  A comic strip shouldn't just be ATV story where the pictures
• 10:35
  don't move. But I think in a series, in a
• 10:40
  franchise, in a intellectual property like Doctor Who, where
• 10:44
  there should be so much variety in in there due to its very
• 10:48
  nature, I think different types of story are really good way of
• 10:52
  forcing you to have different types of adventure.
• 10:55
  And so I, I do like short stories.
• 10:57
  Of course, the problem with any short story collection is some
• 11:02
  of it's going to be good and some of it's going to be bad.
• 11:04
  And that's just that is inevitable.
• 11:06
  They are, by their nature, mixed bags.
• 11:10
  In terms of whether I think they need a linking theme or not, my
• 11:15
  short answer is no. OK.
• 11:19
  My longer and more useful to the podcast answer is yeah, they
• 11:25
  probably do, at least in practical terms.
• 11:27
  At least in commercial terms if you think about it as well.
• 11:30
  I was racking my brain after you posed this question to me in
• 11:34
  advance. A little glimpse behind the
• 11:36
  magic there, Listeners 1. Sort of advance.
• 11:39
  He usually gets about 20 minutes.
• 11:42
  And I was thinking about this, and I don't know that we've
• 11:46
  actually had that many. We've had a lot of Doctor Who
• 11:49
  short story collections at this point, Plenty.
• 11:53
  But I don't know that we've had that many that haven't had a
• 11:56
  theme. I can think of Short Trips and
• 11:59
  the excitingly titled More Short Trips, but even by Short Trips
• 12:07
  and Sidesteps, which was the the third of the BBC Books short
• 12:11
  story collection. Imagination boggles with these
• 12:13
  titles. Isn't it short?
• 12:15
  Trips and Sidesteps is a much nicer title I think.
• 12:18
  The more trips, yeah. Absolutely.
• 12:19
  More more short trips but like. Big Finish made a made a like a
• 12:23
  whole range of theme short story collections, didn't they?
• 12:26
  Those you know, Christmas and oh God, that's the only one I can
• 12:30
  remember now. There was, I swear there's like
• 12:32
  25 of them They. Ran for years, those, those
• 12:35
  things. So to get back short trips and
• 12:38
  side steps even that had a sort of loose theme, which was the
• 12:40
  idea that they would try and be stories that were a bit unusual
• 12:44
  for Doctor Who or fitted into odd parts of continuity.
• 12:48
  So there was one of them with the the Peter Cushing TARDIS
• 12:51
  crew. There was another that took
• 12:53
  place after the Ultimate Adventure, you know, that sort
• 12:56
  of thing. And then, yeah, when Big Finish
• 12:58
  took up the license, everyone of theirs has a theme.
• 13:03
  Some of those were very tight, and they almost became kind of
• 13:07
  entire stories we're told across the course of these.
• 13:10
  So you have things like short trips to the centenarian, which
• 13:12
  was a great idea. It was the story of one man's
• 13:15
  life who lived from 19 O 6 to 2006.
• 13:18
  And it was the story of his life through his encounters with the
• 13:22
  Doctor at different points, really.
• 13:24
  An idea. But in the last book then you've
• 13:27
  got such a a overview of that man's life.
• 13:31
  That's a great idea, yeah. It's really good fed into the
• 13:35
  companion Chronicle Mastermind as well, FAC fans.
• 13:42
  And you also had ones like Short Trips 2040, which was very
• 13:44
  exciting, which was set in the future year of 2040 where they'd
• 13:48
  clearly, the editor, I imagine had mapped out, done, you know,
• 13:50
  all sorts of Bibles and stuff for people to know what we were
• 13:53
  imagining this future year was like.
• 13:55
  And then it was about all different doctors turning up in
• 13:57
  this year at different times. Some of them were much looser,
• 14:00
  especially early on. You had things like short trips,
• 14:03
  companions. I got 2/2 for my birthday this
• 14:07
  year because they're so expensive, but Mark's been sort
• 14:09
  of buying them for me in trips and traps as he finds them.
• 14:12
  And I got it was the horror 1. You know where they've all got
• 14:15
  the red faces screaming on the front.
• 14:17
  Universe of terror that's. The one, I mean, some of the
• 14:20
  rise in there though, Joe Lidstar, Rob Schumer and I can't
• 14:22
  wait to get go with that. And the other one he got me was
• 14:26
  the Zodiac one as well, which I was like oh God that just sounds
• 14:30
  terrible but I'll give it a go. Yeah, and Zodiac might even have
• 14:34
  been their very first time, I'm sure.
• 14:35
  I'm sure someone will message us to tell me how very wrong I am.
• 14:39
  But yeah, there were a lot of ones where they were sort of
• 14:41
  picking themes off the shelf. There's one a day in the life
• 14:45
  where the stories all take place over a full 24 hours.
• 14:50
  But it's different time, you know, different slices of the
• 14:52
  day from different days. Every single theme you've just
• 14:59
  mentioned there sounds more intriguing to me than the
• 15:01
  adventures before. You know, like, are we just left
• 15:05
  with the dregs now? Well, I mean, some of them were
• 15:09
  a bit more. I think when they got odder,
• 15:12
  they didn't get weaker, they just got a bit.
• 15:14
  They did get quite loose. So to answer that question about
• 15:16
  themes as well, some of them were much looser.
• 15:17
  You have things like short trips, farewells.
• 15:19
  That's all right. Writing a story around theme of
• 15:21
  farewell. Is this one like short trips,
• 15:24
  the quality of leadership. Oh.
• 15:26
  Dear OK, maybe they were getting a bit desperate at that point.
• 15:30
  Yeah, and we had about four different Christmas ones, but
• 15:33
  that's all right. Christmas is always fun.
• 15:35
  But in terms of whether they need it, I think when you're
• 15:37
  producing that many short story collections, you can't just keep
• 15:40
  doing short trips. More short trips, yet more short
• 15:42
  trips. Guess what?
• 15:43
  Short trips. I can't believe it's not short
• 15:45
  trips. Hey guys, short trips.
• 15:48
  You think it's exciting then to sort of give, if you give the
• 15:52
  the person that's right in the short story, right?
• 15:54
  We want to 6th doctor and Perry's story and this is the
• 15:57
  theme and immediately connections are going to make in
• 15:59
  your brain of the sort of story you want to tell, right?
• 16:02
  So you're giving them just enough and then just say, but do
• 16:04
  whatever you want within within that thing.
• 16:06
  The best short story collection I have read in many, many ideas,
• 16:10
  and you put me onto this and John Arnold as well, was The
• 16:14
  Winter Time Paradox by Dave Rudd.
• 16:17
  And I think that's the best one I've read because it is a single
• 16:21
  author right in that book. So there was a consistency of
• 16:24
  quality throughout. The writing was of a really high
• 16:27
  standard, but Jesus, he weren't short of an idea either.
• 16:32
  No, it's like a man downloading all of the ideas about Doctor
• 16:36
  Who over his entire life into a short story collection, and it's
• 16:38
  great. We must do it at some point.
• 16:39
  Father of the Daleks is that? Was I think that was probably
• 16:43
  the best of the of the lot. But I I love the whole book.
• 16:47
  I just thought it was brilliant. Being outside Doctor Who for a
• 16:50
  minute to talk about short story collections more generally, my
• 16:53
  understanding is they're not that popular.
• 16:56
  Publishers don't want to pick them up.
• 16:58
  They don't want to sell them because they're really tricky.
• 17:02
  They're really tricky things to sell.
• 17:04
  You know, if you if you have a novel, you can have a nice blurb
• 17:07
  on the back that tells you what that story about.
• 17:09
  You can have a cover. You can maybe even, let's be
• 17:11
  honest, you know, emphasize things right and wrongly a bit
• 17:14
  to to give the impression that it's maybe like a book people
• 17:17
  have already read that sort of thing.
• 17:19
  But short story collection and maybe it's just something people
• 17:23
  in certainly in the UK in the Anglosphere just aren't used to
• 17:26
  picking up. So they're they're tricky
• 17:27
  commercial propositions because what are you saying you're
• 17:30
  selling? Here's a bunch of stories by.
• 17:32
  A load of different authors potentially.
• 17:35
  Potentially or well actually, because you do get anthologies
• 17:37
  and I'm sure, I'm sure people who work in the publishing trade
• 17:41
  will be able to remind me what we say collections and we say
• 17:44
  anthologies like they're the same thing.
• 17:46
  I think there is a difference. I think 1 is all works by the
• 17:48
  same author. 1 is works by different authors.
• 17:52
  So you do get, you know, anthologies do sell.
• 17:54
  There's lots of Christmas murder mystery anthologies out there
• 17:58
  and that sort of thing, I think. Doctor Who's even unusual though
• 18:01
  within genre Thai in fiction because I'm aware of like the
• 18:05
  Star Trek books and a few of the and Star Wars, and there's in no
• 18:09
  way as many short story collections in those universes.
• 18:12
  It's usually, like you say, just a book by a single author where
• 18:16
  you can just push whatever the plot is or the name of the
• 18:19
  author. Yeah, I can't speak to Star Trek
• 18:22
  so much, but I know Star Wars Time fiction a bit better.
• 18:24
  And there are some, but again, they tend to have a fairly clear
• 18:29
  idea. They tend to have a very clear
• 18:31
  theme. They're all things like tales of
• 18:33
  the bounty hunters and stuff like that.
• 18:34
  And it's explaining backgrounds for all them characters you saw,
• 18:37
  stood, stood around impostrikes back, but not as many of them.
• 18:41
  And when you do get outside of time, fiction, short story
• 18:44
  collections being published and being promoted in a big way,
• 18:47
  they tend to be big name authors.
• 18:48
  Stephen King is probably the most obvious example.
• 18:52
  And that's because you can say, what are we buying?
• 18:54
  What are we? What are we selling you?
• 18:55
  We're selling you a load of Stephen King.
• 18:58
  And people go, oh, good, I like him.
• 18:59
  He's good. Even then, I would I would put
• 19:02
  money that Stephen King's short story collections don't sell as
• 19:07
  much as his actual novels do, which is a shame because some of
• 19:10
  them are very good. Yeah, I.
• 19:11
  Think it would need to be quite a big name.
• 19:13
  I'm going to say this with a slight distaste in my mouth, but
• 19:16
  if JK Rowling decided to do a short story collection of Harry
• 19:20
  Potter books, they would sell like hotcakes, wouldn't they?
• 19:24
  Yeah. And so that comes back to
• 19:25
  whether you need a theme. I don't think you need a theme
• 19:27
  in order to have good stories, but I think in order to actually
• 19:30
  get people to pick things up so people know what they're have a
• 19:33
  sense of, what they're engaging with and going in with, you
• 19:36
  probably do, from a utility perspective, do.
• 19:40
  You imagine then, that the reason why there are so many
• 19:45
  short story collections within Doctor Who fiction is because of
• 19:49
  the format of Doctor Who. Just that infinite diversity of
• 19:52
  being able to go anywhere, tell any story with, you know, a huge
• 19:56
  amount of regular characters to choose from now.
• 19:58
  Like, there's so much choice, isn't there?
• 20:00
  That really, technically, as long as your imaginations roll
• 20:02
  in, they never need to stop, do they?
• 20:06
  No, indeed, because unlike almost any other genre, genre
• 20:12
  franchise, you need to make a decision with any of those about
• 20:17
  which version of it are we doing in any case.
• 20:19
  So with Star Wars, are we doing, is this short story collection
• 20:24
  going to be a bunch of things from the original trilogy or the
• 20:27
  prequel trilogy, or is it going to be tying into one of the
• 20:30
  franchises? You can't really imagine them
• 20:32
  doing a collection where one story was set just after The
• 20:36
  Empire Strikes Back and the next one was The Mandalorian and then
• 20:39
  the other one was one of those cartoons.
• 20:42
  It does. Feel like an expansive universe,
• 20:44
  Star Wars. But really, it's quite finite
• 20:46
  compared to Doctor Who, isn't it?
• 20:48
  Yeah, well, I think, I think it's Doctor Who.
• 20:50
  That's unusual because part of Doctor Who's longevity is that
• 20:54
  it allows itself to be endlessly rebooted and changed within
• 20:57
  continuity. That's the thing that's
• 20:59
  remarkable about it. So Doctor Who you can have, yes,
• 21:02
  all those different types of stories, but all those different
• 21:03
  line UPS. You can have a short story with
• 21:07
  the second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria, and then another one
• 21:10
  with the 5th Doctor Tegan and Nyssa, and then one with the 3rd
• 21:13
  Doctor and Liz, and then one with the 15th Doctor and Ruby.
• 21:18
  And that doesn't feel odd in any way.
• 21:20
  That's just that's how Doctor Who operates.
• 21:21
  Where is if you're reading a Star Trek short story
• 21:25
  collection, Unless, unless it was very explicitly the premise
• 21:28
  that we're going to do 1 from each franchise, you can't
• 21:31
  imagine one in which oh, this one's about McCoy and Scotty.
• 21:36
  Oh, and then the next one's going to be about Janeway and
• 21:39
  Chikote. And the one after is going to be
• 21:41
  the guy with the funny face from Deep Space 9 and one of the
• 21:43
  other people from Deep Space 9. The one.
• 21:45
  With the funny face that's Oh no, how dare you.
• 21:49
  We're used to change though, aren't we?
• 21:51
  So, so this format isn't like, you know, I, I always say like
• 21:54
  the videos came out Willy nilly a first doctor one a 6th doctor
• 21:57
  one. Yeah, I, I literally was
• 21:59
  introduced Doctor Who in this fashion going from different
• 22:02
  doctors and different. So this is not unusual to me at
• 22:04
  all. Do you know there's another,
• 22:06
  there's another version of a short story collection very
• 22:08
  quickly before we go into this that I, I always bang on about
• 22:12
  because I, I, it's kind of unique.
• 22:15
  And that is the Paul Cornell edited Life During Wartime that
• 22:20
  he did in the Bernie Somerville range.
• 22:22
  And he takes on the challenge and it is mad challenge.
• 22:26
  And he pulls it off magnificently of telling a
• 22:30
  single story as if it's by one author with a beginning, a
• 22:34
  middle and an end leading to a big cliffhanger, but with 15
• 22:38
  different voices in there telling a variety of stories
• 22:42
  within the collection during an occupation.
• 22:46
  And Jesus Christ it. I mean, it has the consistency
• 22:50
  of quality that it was a single writer, but you get the strength
• 22:56
  of every it's, it's a short story collection that has had an
• 22:59
  intense amount of work put into it.
• 23:01
  But fuck me, it reaps rewards, that is.
• 23:03
  Have you read that one? I haven't.
• 23:06
  I haven't, although I have listened to the audio that's
• 23:11
  follows on from the end of it and confused everybody at the
• 23:13
  time. Well, yeah, telling half a story
• 23:16
  is a book, and half a story isn't audio.
• 23:18
  What were they thinking? Well, then I suppose to sort of
• 23:21
  lead into our book. Then it's like, there's been so
• 23:25
  many of these things now. Yeah.
• 23:26
  So obviously lots and lots of lessons have been learned about
• 23:30
  how to create the perfect short story collection.
• 23:33
  Why was the Adventures before such a dog?
• 23:38
  Well, let's not lay all our cards on the table at this
• 23:40
  point, Joe. I'm going to keep some things
• 23:42
  back. I mean, it's, it's, I would
• 23:44
  argue that it's, it's difficult to assess a short story
• 23:47
  collection as a whole. And that's sort of the problem
• 23:49
  with short story collections. And it's not just what is this
• 23:51
  that I'm going into at the end of it can often feel like, what
• 23:54
  was that I just read? What am I being asked to talk
• 23:56
  about? I do think as we've moved into
• 23:58
  this, you know, the modern era of, of Doctor Who, the sort of,
• 24:01
  I guess, shall we say post 50th ERA of Doctor Who and tie in
• 24:08
  just don't. Get it, Mike.
• 24:10
  I don't get it. I don't get it's so scattershot
• 24:13
  what they've done with the targets and then the odds
• 24:16
  current books and then random big authors coming out and
• 24:20
  there's just no, there doesn't seem to be any plans for it at
• 24:23
  all. They're just like, Oh my God,
• 24:24
  let's just do this book. OK, go.
• 24:27
  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think when Moffett left the, I think
• 24:34
  RTD one, Rosa Davis was very hot on everything.
• 24:38
  You know, all brand stuff was very closely looked after.
• 24:40
  And that was because he was doing far more than he would
• 24:43
  need to do for his role or anyone would normally be
• 24:45
  expected to do. But, you know, there's all sorts
• 24:46
  of stories about, you know, him giving a very clear briefing on
• 24:50
  the sort of approach that he thought the Doctor Who adventure
• 24:52
  comic strips should take. We got references to the books
• 24:57
  as early as Boomtown, right where Rose mentions Justicia
• 25:00
  from the monsters Inside, which was It's so Great that was
• 25:05
  released during the only time. It's happened.
• 25:07
  Isn't it A book reference in the TV show I?
• 25:10
  Mean that that it's happened back close.
• 25:11
  There's been like more explicit references I think in.
• 25:14
  Bad Wolf. You know, they mentioned Lucifer
• 25:16
  rising at one point. Well, a lot of people miss the
• 25:21
  the chap that River Song is talking to at the end of the
• 25:25
  wedding of river song the academic is Professor Candy from
• 25:28
  Steven moffett's Doctor Who short story continuity errors
• 25:32
  and. Others.
• 25:33
  Wow. Yeah, very much point in that.
• 25:37
  Episode's favour, then, probably the only point.
• 25:41
  But I think so he we have he was very tightening.
• 25:44
  I think then Steven Moffett bit looser.
• 25:46
  But you know, there was still a sort of strategy to everything I
• 25:48
  think after Moffett left. And this is not AI, don't think
• 25:50
  this was Steven Moffett himself. And this is certainly not a
• 25:53
  reflection either Steven Moffett or Chris Chipnall.
• 25:55
  I think also, oh, what was his name?
• 25:57
  The brand manager left at the same time as well.
• 26:00
  And I think I, from what I understand, I think it all just
• 26:03
  got a bit more split up, you know, people responsible for
• 26:07
  different things. And maybe that's why it felt
• 26:08
  like there was less of a coherent strategy around
• 26:10
  everything. I think also the success of the
• 26:12
  50th anniversary for Doctor Who was kind of to blow open
• 26:16
  continuity. And suddenly we could talk about
• 26:18
  classic Doctor Who in the same breath as new Doctor Who, which
• 26:21
  we all take for granted now, But there was such a firewall
• 26:24
  between those things for such a long time.
• 26:27
  But the downside of that I. Think you've only got to look,
• 26:29
  compare the single season that Martha did and how many books
• 26:33
  came out when. And there's about 20 books, like
• 26:37
  there's a lot of Martha books. And then look at the bill year
• 26:41
  and I think there's 22 books that come out in the bill year.
• 26:44
  So, so certainly the the output has reduced significantly by
• 26:48
  that point. Yeah.
• 26:49
  There's a lot. There's lots of things going on.
• 26:51
  I think Doctor Who was still a popular show.
• 26:54
  It's drift away from being the biggest show on television is
• 26:58
  undoubtedly part of that. So by the time we come to the
• 27:01
  Adventures before and all of these other short story
• 27:03
  collections at the same time, I think you're seeing, I think
• 27:09
  they're light to pick up. I think short stories can be
• 27:11
  unthreatening. Oh, I don't know if I want to
• 27:13
  read a whole Doctor Who book, but I might pick up a bunch of
• 27:15
  Doctor Who short stories that I can dip in and out of.
• 27:18
  And their themes tend to be, and I don't criticize them for this,
• 27:22
  they tend to be much more crabby.
• 27:24
  You like Doctor Who. Here's something that ties very
• 27:27
  directly into Doctor Who. I don't think you could do short
• 27:30
  trips, farewells. Now, you know, I don't think
• 27:32
  that's going to sell on the shelves in Waterstones.
• 27:35
  But things like a bunch of short stories about the Master, a
• 27:38
  bunch of short stories about River Song, a bunch of short
• 27:41
  stories set before classic adventures.
• 27:45
  The sad truth is, isn't it is? I think when Doctor Who wasn't
• 27:50
  on television, the books were just more ambitious and more
• 27:54
  interesting. And when Doctor Who is on
• 27:56
  television, they not only have to adhere to what's happening on
• 28:00
  TV, but they also have to be a little.
• 28:03
  Safe, I think, yeah, I think so. I think there's, again, I think
• 28:08
  there's lots of things that are playing into that, though.
• 28:10
  I think part of it is those, a huge part of it is that there's
• 28:14
  greater brand control. Russell T Davies would never let
• 28:16
  anybody write damaged goods after he took over.
• 28:19
  In fact, he didn't. He didn't.
• 28:20
  He wouldn't. Let it go out on BBCI, would he?
• 28:23
  Remember they wanted wanted to put it out when the first series
• 28:26
  1 came out. He's like, no, for God's sakes,
• 28:28
  no. There is also that thing that
• 28:30
  others have said, that one that once the TV series came back,
• 28:34
  every every other sorts of medium, Doctor Who had to take a
• 28:36
  step down in the rankings in terms of its importance.
• 28:41
  So, you know, if if you want to write Doctor Who, let's face it,
• 28:44
  a lot of people have moved on to wanting to do Big Finishes.
• 28:47
  A lot of people with ambition. You know, if I want to write
• 28:49
  Doctor Who and do stuff there, they would be finished.
• 28:51
  Mark Gatiss, I don't think wrote another Doctor Who book after
• 28:54
  Big Finish started doing stuff as an example.
• 28:58
  What is? Interesting that, you know, is
• 28:59
  that since the eye has been taken off the ball, maybe a
• 29:02
  little bit on what's coming out in print is and I've done a
• 29:07
  couple of research. I've done a couple of James
• 29:08
  Gossel, you and me are going to do the blood cells soon.
• 29:11
  I've read Dead of Winter and I suppose it's still quite
• 29:13
  popular. Then the winter time paradox,
• 29:15
  some really unusual offbeat books have sort of slipped
• 29:20
  through the cracks, which is nice, but I think they are the
• 29:23
  exception rather than the role. I think what we've read in the
• 29:27
  adventures before, because I've also read Georgia Cook's 15th
• 29:32
  Doctor book recently, and that was similarly underwhelming, I
• 29:38
  think. I don't say they're not trying.
• 29:41
  I mean, underwhelming is a good word for this short story
• 29:45
  collection. What would be your one word to
• 29:48
  describe it ambiguously before we go into all of the stories?
• 29:53
  Ambiguous. Well, should we?
• 29:59
  Should we step into the adventures before and see, you
• 30:03
  know, just how writing a prelude for so many Doctor Who TV
• 30:07
  stories can enhance or damage their reputation?
• 30:14
  Let's so vote for the Duke first story, story one.
• 30:18
  We have The Boy and the Dalek by Mark Griffiths and this is a
• 30:24
  prequel to the Daleks. One thing that's worth
• 30:27
  mentioning is the prequels are in continuity order, so we start
• 30:30
  off right back in the 60s with a prequel to the 196364 episode,
• 30:36
  The Darks. Is there a prequel to the?
• 30:38
  Daleks. Yes.
• 30:40
  I mean only at the end of the story, right?
• 30:42
  Like. Well, I think something that
• 30:44
  we're going to probably talk about quite a lot with these
• 30:46
  stories is the varying relationship.
• 30:48
  I think at times the adventures before the before is really
• 30:52
  bearing a lot of it, as is in some cases the word adventure if
• 30:55
  I'm being honest. Sometimes it's the adventures
• 30:58
  after. I figure because the emphasis is
• 31:01
  is the consequences of ATV story rather than saying.
• 31:05
  We'll get on to that, Joe, but for now, so we have the the
• 31:08
  story of the Boy and the Dalek, in which, confusingly, the
• 31:13
  Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria answer a a distress
• 31:16
  signal like they always do to the.
• 31:19
  Teddy bears picnic. Yes, the Teddy bears.
• 31:22
  The the stress signal is the Teddy Bears picnic.
• 31:24
  They land on a spaceship where they meet a Dalek and a the
• 31:29
  Dalek shows them its story via a video game.
• 31:33
  Don't worry about that. But it's not.
• 31:34
  It's genuinely not going to prove to be important in any
• 31:36
  way. Neither is the fact that the
• 31:39
  Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are in this.
• 31:43
  They're just irrelevant to the story being told.
• 31:45
  They are literally just the avatar to which the Dalek can
• 31:48
  tell the story. It's really interesting, yeah.
• 31:51
  They really don't do much at all.
• 31:52
  And it's, it's, it's quite confusing because I don't know
• 31:55
  that they're terribly recognised, but they're very
• 31:57
  thinly sketched. But I don't know, it's a
• 31:59
  recognisable sketch. And it also seems to ignore the
• 32:01
  fact that both of those characters know the Daleks and
• 32:03
  have been to Scaro. Yes.
• 32:06
  Which? Is a bit odd that's.
• 32:07
  The doctor say, well, I've not been there for years and years.
• 32:10
  At one point I'm like, no, no, you were literally there when
• 32:12
  you met Victoria. Yeah, like, yeah.
• 32:15
  Yeah, I mean, come on, Peter, I assume these are.
• 32:18
  Being written by Doctor Who fans, right?
• 32:21
  But no Griffiths. Griffiths has written a few
• 32:23
  Doctor Who thinks these days. And also, you know, these sorts
• 32:27
  of slips were forgivable Once Upon a time.
• 32:31
  But anyone can read a wiki now. Anyone can go on and see what in
• 32:36
  what stories does Doctor Who visits Scaro or when did did
• 32:41
  Jamie ever go meet the Daleks. You know, it's not, it's not
• 32:45
  tricky. I find it harder.
• 32:46
  It's it speaks, I think, to a certain lack of care in the
• 32:50
  whole thing, maybe from maybe from the editors, maybe lack of
• 32:53
  time, like how much oversight is going.
• 32:55
  It gives. It just gives me the slight
• 32:58
  worry that these things are being thrown together a little
• 33:00
  bit. You know, that no one caught
• 33:02
  that sort of thing. And it's not the only instance
• 33:04
  either in this book. I'm not an editor of books,
• 33:07
  right, but I did find myself reading these, especially this
• 33:10
  first one. I'm just writing a series of
• 33:12
  questions that I wanted to ask Mark Griffiths.
• 33:15
  Why this set of regulars meet in the Dalek?
• 33:19
  Why is he behaving in this way? Why are we telling it from this
• 33:22
  person's point of view? I just feel as if there's been
• 33:24
  no dialogue between the editor and the author with some of
• 33:28
  these stories. The framing.
• 33:30
  Narrative is completely inessential.
• 33:34
  The story would work just as well, possibly better, if you
• 33:36
  just went into it and told it doesn't.
• 33:39
  It doesn't serve a purpose, that narrative in.
• 33:42
  The Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode.
• 33:45
  Stars. Yeah, he's off.
• 33:46
  He's off. Far beyond the stars.
• 33:48
  Absolute classic, right? There's a it's all set in 1950s
• 33:52
  and he's a short story writer of science fiction stories, right?
• 33:55
  And they get sketches, and then they're told to take the sketch
• 33:59
  away and write a story based around it.
• 34:01
  And he goes here. I've written a sketch, Honeymoon
• 34:04
  on Andorus. It's about a lovely little girl
• 34:06
  who meets an alien and teaches it how to love.
• 34:09
  And that's written as a joke, right?
• 34:10
  As a Joker for the sort of terrible that is literally this
• 34:14
  story. Yes.
• 34:16
  So the flashback story we're told is of a little boy whose
• 34:19
  family family spaceship crash landed on Scaro.
• 34:23
  He survived and became friends with a Dalek who was looking
• 34:27
  after some crops. But the Dalek, he's the.
• 34:30
  Gardener, Michael The. Gardener Dalek.
• 34:32
  That's right. Dalek 444, as I was told many
• 34:37
  times in the story. And Dalek 444 realizes that the
• 34:44
  little boy has been hunting the magnetons.
• 34:47
  He's been hunting magnetons that eat the crops and realises that
• 34:53
  because he's hunting the megatons they lose less of the
• 34:56
  crops, so therefore I've never seen.
• 35:00
  You smile so much talking about a story so.
• 35:03
  Therefore, they, they, they, they develop a mutually
• 35:06
  beneficial relationship. And then eventually, would you
• 35:10
  believe it, the other Daleks, the other Daleks, the other
• 35:12
  Daleks find out that there's a little boy on Scar Row.
• 35:14
  They steal his spaceship and they want to exterminate him.
• 35:17
  But Dalek, Dalek 444 you, you never guess what he does.
• 35:21
  You never guess what it does, Joe it.
• 35:22
  Gets in the way. It says no, don't do this, he's
• 35:25
  my friend. What is this thing you call
• 35:29
  love? And then this is the singer.
• 35:32
  I can't believe this was an actual line.
• 35:34
  I suspect you are malfunctioning 444.
• 35:38
  This is not Dalek like behavior. I was like, oh boy.
• 35:44
  I said totally, 444 sacrifices himself to save the little boy
• 35:48
  for some reason, puts him well, puts him inside a Dalek casing
• 35:51
  and sends him away in his repaired spaceship.
• 35:53
  The reason he puts him inside the the repair inside Dalek
• 35:56
  casing is so that in the framing narrative, the Dalek can go da
• 35:59
  da and open up and it's the little boy and you will you will
• 36:01
  fall off your chairs. But right, I read this as a
• 36:06
  story, and it was bad enough as a story, because I think this is
• 36:09
  genuinely quite badly written. Like the prose is quite badly
• 36:12
  written, but God who read this in the audio?
• 36:17
  I couldn't figure out who it was.
• 36:19
  Barnaby Edwards, OH. Barnaby, God bless you, man.
• 36:22
  I mean, there is an argument now for Nick Briggs doing every
• 36:25
  single Dalek voice. OK?
• 36:27
  And Dalek's talking are so boring.
• 36:30
  Yeah, the best writers of Dalek stories realize this and put in
• 36:34
  like, humanoid protagonists or a villain like Davros, right?
• 36:37
  To make the dialogue more interesting, there's whole
• 36:41
  sections of Daleks talking to each other where I was like,
• 36:44
  this couldn't be more tedious. But I quite enjoyed this Oh.
• 36:51
  Michael No. Why?
• 36:55
  This was my least favorite of the set.
• 36:57
  Go on. I mean, I I do not pretend there
• 37:00
  are a lot of flaws since there are deep flaws.
• 37:02
  The the framing section almost ruined it for me.
• 37:06
  But the actual story of the little boy on Scara, I don't
• 37:08
  know. There was just a certain you're
• 37:10
  a. Dad, I keep forgetting this.
• 37:11
  Oh, no, no. No, no, no, that's not it.
• 37:13
  It's. But there was a certain
• 37:15
  prelapsarian joy to the whole thing.
• 37:17
  You know it. It read like prelapse.
• 37:19
  Right. Prelapsarian referring to before
• 37:22
  Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, you always.
• 37:26
  Educate me in interesting ways. This episode's word is
• 37:29
  prelapsarian. Prelapsarian I'm.
• 37:32
  Going to get it in somewhere towards the end of the episode.
• 37:35
  But I, yeah, I just think there was a certain innocence to it,
• 37:38
  but it felt like something partly because of the continuity
• 37:43
  errors, perhaps partly because of how UN Dalek like the Daleks
• 37:46
  are in it. Probably just because of all the
• 37:48
  references to things like Arcalis Flowers, Phi Beams and
• 37:51
  the Golden Emperor. That just felt like something
• 37:54
  from a slightly rubbish tatty Dalek annual that now sells for
• 37:57
  £600 on one of those. Dreadful comics.
• 38:00
  You know when they'd given up on the comics a bit and it was in
• 38:03
  the back of countdown? Even down to having a little boy
• 38:06
  as the protagonist, you know, that feels like something of
• 38:08
  that was thrown together by a an underpaid writer who's got eight
• 38:12
  of these to get out before he can go home.
• 38:14
  And he's just drawing on sort of boys own adventure stuff.
• 38:17
  You know there was a so you're. Saying you enjoyed this because
• 38:20
  it's really, really bad. No, I just.
• 38:26
  The ending as well. The ending.
• 38:28
  But so the Dalek mutant has been exterminated and he's sort of
• 38:31
  dying and crawling through the jungle, like just trying to get
• 38:35
  away. And then as warping, warping
• 38:39
  noise appears and out steps for strangers, he's like tries to
• 38:43
  raise his tent to go up to to say go away, The Daleks are
• 38:47
  evil. And then he expires and oh,
• 38:49
  well, that'll leave them to their own devices.
• 38:51
  They'll have to take their own chances.
• 38:52
  And that's it. That's so all this bullshit
• 38:56
  happened just before the story of the Daleks.
• 38:58
  I don't believe it for a second. I mean the the Dalek city as
• 39:03
  described here doesn't seem to match the largely dead and
• 39:07
  abandoned city that the First Doctor Susan in a Barbara where
• 39:11
  was. The Emperor in the Daleks.
• 39:14
  In a cupboard, OK. Fair enough, fair enough.
• 39:18
  But I did get to thinking I was like, oh please don't be doing
• 39:21
  this for every one of these short stories.
• 39:23
  Don't just tell her really bad vignette and then just link it
• 39:28
  up very tenuously at the end of the story.
• 39:32
  Like, what does this tell us about the Daleks within the
• 39:34
  premise of The Avengers before? What does this tell us about the
• 39:37
  Daleks? What does this add to it?
• 39:39
  That's what they're doing here. They're doing the adventures
• 39:41
  before the adventure, right? Yeah, yeah.
• 39:44
  And I suppose the argument would be that it gives us a bit more
• 39:48
  colour of what Scarrow is like, but then it doesn't match.
• 39:53
  But that's also why I love it. You know, it's a bit of campy
• 39:56
  rubbish. It's floors reminded me of
• 40:01
  floors that I presumably have some sort of nostalgic
• 40:03
  attachment to, which is no more quality.
• 40:05
  I will agree it's a terrible way to open the collection.
• 40:09
  Like if this had been buried somewhere in the middle, you
• 40:11
  might have enjoyed it a bit more.
• 40:13
  Oh, oh, I like Daleks. And, and they mentioned fly door
• 40:17
  gold and the moons of Scara. You know, I like a continuity
• 40:21
  reference. Do you think they.
• 40:22
  Just wanted to open with a Dalek story.
• 40:25
  No, I think they wanted to do them in continuity order, and
• 40:27
  this was the earliest one someone had written.
• 40:29
  I think it's as simple as that. I mean, I would sort of, you
• 40:33
  want to open with a banger, right?
• 40:34
  I mean, there ain't really a banger in this set, but the
• 40:38
  best, the best of Well, do you have anything else to say about
• 40:42
  this one? Because really, I found this
• 40:44
  painful to read and more painful to listen to.
• 40:48
  The second Doctor gives Harrison the boy's name is Harrison.
• 40:51
  The 2nd Doctor gives Harrison some Junior Pridonian robes to
• 40:54
  wear like he does. You know how he's always going
• 40:56
  on all that? He's a Pridonian.
• 40:58
  This won't be the last reference to the Pridonian chapter in this
• 41:02
  short story collection, you know.
• 41:04
  We will get it. Well, look, let's move on then
• 41:07
  to the second, that's second short story, The Roots of Evil
• 41:11
  by Steve Cole. An actual author.
• 41:14
  An actual published writer. Hurrah, Mark.
• 41:17
  Griffiths is published. What is he written books He's.
• 41:21
  Written kids books? Yeah.
• 41:22
  Oh boy, moving on. Well, Steve Cole, a reliable
• 41:27
  Doctor Who author, then maybe I'll frame it that way.
• 41:32
  And this is a prelude to The Seeds of Doom featuring our
• 41:38
  Scorpy hired assassin. And what was the fellow's name?
• 41:43
  What's the fellow's name from Unit?
• 41:44
  I didn't write it down, Johann. Lats.
• 41:47
  Lats. That's it.
• 41:48
  Yeah. So LATS unfortunately activates
• 41:53
  A disintegrated gun down in the UNIT vaults and winds up
• 41:56
  murdering one of his fellow UNIT personnel.
• 42:00
  So realized oh shit I better get out of here.
• 42:02
  Grabs as much data as he can and he's gone.
• 42:05
  And some of that data involves information about an evil alien
• 42:10
  plant. He takes that information to
• 42:14
  Harrison Chase the Fey camp super villain from Seeds of
• 42:18
  Doom. And then it's a scorpion Lats
• 42:22
  going back to UNIT to to capture the plan.
• 42:26
  I thought this was pretty good actually.
• 42:30
  I. Agree.
• 42:31
  This is This is good stuff. This should have opened.
• 42:33
  This should have been, absolutely.
• 42:35
  Yeah, yeah. And this is absolutely an
• 42:37
  adventure before, yes. It is an adventure and it
• 42:39
  happens before and I was like absolutely.
• 42:41
  So we should be doing this. We should be marking them.
• 42:43
  Is this an adventure? And does it?
• 42:45
  Does it? Maybe half a mark for the Boy
• 42:48
  and the Dalek. Tenuous sort of Link this one,
• 42:51
  yes. Tick.
• 42:52
  Full 2 points for for this one, No, I liked this before.
• 42:57
  I think it's more what I was expecting when I went in, you
• 42:59
  know, some because one of the things about.
• 43:01
  So here's what I like about this premise.
• 43:04
  You know, James Lark aside, I think one idea that does have is
• 43:08
  that Doctor Who, in the words of Kim Newman, mass manufacturers,
• 43:12
  dystopias, you know, you're, you're producing or throwing
• 43:15
  away worlds almost every single week.
• 43:17
  Stephen Moffett made this point. You know, he said that he said
• 43:20
  the Silurians would be the basis for an entire franchise.
• 43:23
  And yet they're just one of the recurring villains in Doctor
• 43:26
  Who. And so I think having a set of
• 43:29
  stories that explore those worlds before the Doctor has
• 43:31
  arrived in them, it's interesting.
• 43:33
  They've got the scope for, you know, they've got, they've got
• 43:34
  the room and I think what is. Remember that the man bold
• 43:38
  enough to turn off the entire universe and then rewrite it in
• 43:42
  his own image? You know, I don't think anyone.
• 43:47
  Oh, sorry. In Amy Pond's image.
• 43:49
  There you go. Anti muffet sentiment is a heck
• 43:52
  of a drug isn't it? Just melts people's brains.
• 43:55
  I'm hooked. Just like Paul lasses on the
• 43:59
  plan in this. Nice.
• 44:01
  Very good. Well done.
• 44:02
  Yeah. And I think, I think Scorpion
• 44:04
  Harris and Chase are characters that it's nice to have a bit
• 44:06
  more of. You know what I liked about
• 44:08
  this? What I liked about this is that
• 44:10
  Stephen Cole really captures that sort of ITV spy drama that
• 44:17
  is I think is unique in Doctor Who to the Seeds of Doom.
• 44:20
  The Seeds of Doom's not the first ones to say the seeds.
• 44:23
  Doom feels like the Doctor and Sarah Jane have been there's
• 44:26
  been a booking mix up and they've been given an Adventures
• 44:29
  storyline to deal with. But that's why I love it.
• 44:32
  I think it's really the. Avengers.
• 44:33
  I mean, The Avengers is a bit quirkier and more eccentric than
• 44:37
  the Caesar Doom. Caesar Zoomer has some real grit
• 44:39
  to it all. Right the the professionals with
• 44:42
  more aliens and less misogyny. It's all.
• 44:44
  Guns and bombs and just genuinely terrifying assassins.
• 44:49
  Yeah, and you can get the World Ecology Bureau turning up who
• 44:51
  the doctors working for There's there's never been mentioned
• 44:55
  before. Yeah, but I love it didn't
• 44:58
  didn't you think that both Scorby and Chase were spot on
• 45:04
  authentic to how they were presented in the Season 2?
• 45:08
  Yeah. I mean, Scorby, I like score,
• 45:10
  but I like score but almost as much as John Chalice liked
• 45:12
  score, but presumably because it was the one other role in John
• 45:15
  Chalice must be the only person who's ever been in Doctor Who.
• 45:18
  Who gets Who got really excited when people asked him about his
• 45:21
  Doctor Who work and not the thing they always asked.
• 45:23
  Lovely, though. He was always a phantom, but he
• 45:26
  was utterly murderous, unpredictable.
• 45:28
  He was brutal. Everybody was throwing Tom Baker
• 45:30
  those fucking tin cans. It's a really brutal episode all
• 45:34
  around. The seeds of doom.
• 45:35
  I'm surprised you know everyone talks about talents of Weng Chai
• 45:38
  Yang, brains of Morbius. I'm surprised no one ever brings
• 45:40
  up Seeds of Doom. It's utterly horrible at points,
• 45:43
  but I. Did also love as well.
• 45:45
  I love the idea that Lats made a mistake and he panics and he
• 45:49
  improvises and that that was a really great start to the story
• 45:53
  because you're like shit, well, where's this going to go?
• 45:57
  And then it does follow that predictable seeds of doom root
• 46:01
  of that. He gets infected by the plant,
• 46:06
  but it's genuinely quite horrific.
• 46:08
  Like Cole can write horror in his prose and the transformation
• 46:13
  from last to this horrible plant creature with faces for like
• 46:16
  petals. It's really horrible.
• 46:19
  Yeah, it's, it's a really. It's a really a nice way of
• 46:24
  squaring the circle, which is that if you're going to have
• 46:26
  Harris and Chase be the villain, The thing is, what does Harris
• 46:29
  and Chase wants? He wants plants.
• 46:31
  That's what he's after. You know, he's the sort of,
• 46:32
  there's a slightly super villainy element to him about
• 46:35
  that. That's his thing.
• 46:36
  Like Gold finger, except Green finger.
• 46:39
  There we go and take it well. Finger.
• 46:44
  That's hard. He therefore he's not going to
• 46:51
  write a story in which, for some reason, Harris and Chase wants
• 46:54
  to buy Cyberman technology leftover from the invasion.
• 46:57
  He's going to want a plant. So OK, we're going to do another
• 47:00
  story about him chasing down plants, but that's fine because
• 47:02
  that's what he wants. But if there was a different
• 47:04
  alien plant, there's no reason we can't have more alien plants.
• 47:07
  We've got all sorts of alien robots and alien mammals and
• 47:10
  lizards and the rest of it, but it's a different type of threat
• 47:15
  and it's a really clever idea. So where is the crinoid is about
• 47:18
  physical transformation. This is about mental
• 47:20
  transformation. And there's this really lovely
• 47:22
  idea that you get infected by it and it buries its roots in you,
• 47:25
  but it buries its psychic roots in you.
• 47:28
  And that's, as you say, it's. It's.
• 47:31
  So creepy. Just.
• 47:32
  The imagery as well he wrote it, A dark obelisk protruded from
• 47:36
  the centre of the petals like a giant tongue.
• 47:40
  You know, he's really good at sort of grossing you out like
• 47:42
  that. Yeah, there's a little bit of,
• 47:45
  I'm just, you know, showing the the limits of my reading here,
• 47:48
  of course. But there are points where I was
• 47:49
  thinking a little bit of, you know, John Wyndham, Day of the
• 47:52
  Triffids. Just the way in which real
• 47:55
  things can be off putting, like weird plants can be really
• 47:59
  unsettling. It doesn't need to be all jaws
• 48:02
  and stuff. It can just be a bit off.
• 48:04
  I could see this being done on 1970s television with a big.
• 48:09
  With a dreadful model work for the for the Indian plant at the
• 48:12
  end. But you can see a really, you
• 48:15
  know, a really lovely alien, horrible plants being made on
• 48:19
  that sort of budget as well, can't you?
• 48:21
  Well, what I. Really liked about this as well.
• 48:22
  It was so focused on just a couple of characters.
• 48:24
  I mean, it's not like the first one where it starts off with the
• 48:26
  Second Doctor and then it becomes about the Boy and the
• 48:29
  Dalek and then at the end it becomes it is just about lats
• 48:32
  and score, beat and chase, but mostly lats.
• 48:34
  And I really like the fact that in the middle of this, I think
• 48:37
  he's been, he's been infected by this point.
• 48:41
  He says to score. But you know, maybe we can break
• 48:43
  into UNIT and we can use the technology for altruistic
• 48:46
  purposes. I was like, oh mate, you are
• 48:48
  talking to the wrong bloke. And Scorby has such disdain for
• 48:52
  him throughout. Like there's no point where
• 48:55
  where you think, oh, this is going to be a friendship or
• 48:57
  they're going to work together. And we know he's not in the
• 49:00
  Seeds of Doom, so we know he's going to come to a grizzly end.
• 49:03
  So I was just sort of waiting like, oh God, how's he going to
• 49:05
  die in this? And then you just get that
• 49:07
  lovely bit at the end where it's basically, you know, this is
• 49:09
  going to be the beginning of a beautiful working relationship
• 49:13
  between Scorpion Chase. And then we're bang straight
• 49:16
  into where we start with Seeds of Doom.
• 49:18
  I think it is a great use of the premise.
• 49:21
  Yeah, it's been and and as well as Scorpio, as you mentioned, he
• 49:24
  does capture that otherworldliness of Harris and
• 49:28
  Chase as as played by Tony Beckley, magnificent actor.
• 49:33
  Although I was like Steve Carl, stop it, stop it now when he
• 49:37
  started bringing in Professor Kettlewell's Metal eating virus
• 49:40
  from Robot. And I'm like, so the basically
• 49:42
  the premise for this is what happens if the alien plant from
• 49:45
  Caesar Doom meets Professor Kettlewell's Metal Eating virus?
• 49:49
  Surprisingly entertaining is the answer.
• 49:52
  Yeah, and for those keeping count, this is yet another place
• 49:55
  that unit sends leftover alien junk.
• 49:58
  It's this one's called the Junkyard, so add it to the
• 50:01
  Vault. The vault, What was the one in
• 50:03
  Lethbridge? Stuart Was that the vault that?
• 50:04
  Was the vault the black? Archive Black.
• 50:06
  Archive the junkyard. Jesus, they've got bases
• 50:10
  everywhere. It's like tortuous but for alien
• 50:12
  junk. And I've got to say, I didn't
• 50:14
  miss the Doctor or a companion in this, because I think that's
• 50:19
  was a great original creation and those two characters from
• 50:21
  Caesar Doom are strong enough. Yeah, like I say, I want, if I
• 50:25
  want to see the adventures before, I don't particularly
• 50:27
  want to see what the Doctor was doing before, because I know
• 50:28
  what the Doctor was doing before.
• 50:30
  I watched the episode before. I want to know what everyone
• 50:32
  else was. Oh no, What that world was up to
• 50:34
  before they dropped into it. And.
• 50:36
  It, you're right. It's just so authentically,
• 50:39
  authentically sort of 70s spy drama, isn't it?
• 50:43
  Yeah, lovely. I could have done a book with
• 50:46
  this, like a whole book. And Cole?
• 50:48
  Can just write as well. I wasn't going.
• 50:50
  I wasn't wincing at the sentences as I was reading them.
• 50:54
  No, no, no, no. He, you asked for some story.
• 50:58
  How much story do you want? Says Steve Cole.
• 51:00
  I'll cut it off the block for you although.
• 51:03
  I'll just say one thing, Steve, All right?
• 51:04
  If you're listening, I know you listen to a few of these or I
• 51:06
  just just hold back on the adjectives a little bit.
• 51:08
  All right? You, you do like a, an adjective
• 51:11
  or two. Well, where next?
• 51:15
  We're going to Australia. Oh, how?
• 51:18
  Exciting Brisbane by any chance? Little did she know by Janet
• 51:23
  Fielding. Now, I sent you a message,
• 51:27
  Michael, saying, do you imagine Janet Fielding actually wrote
• 51:31
  this book and knows what department C-19 is?
• 51:33
  And in typically patronizing fashion, you went no Joe.
• 51:40
  No, I mean, I, I don't, I don't think that Janet Field thing
• 51:43
  knows what's a part of the scene. 19 is Joe, I wrote.
• 51:45
  This in. I don't know and I wouldn't care
• 51:47
  to speculate and I don't mean I mean baby, who knows, who knows
• 51:53
  certainly, but you know, you know, I am confident.
• 51:56
  I I liked this one. This was another one I liked
• 51:59
  like. This was my favorite of the set,
• 52:01
  yeah. I think.
• 52:02
  Me too as well so and I think so.
• 52:04
  It's a prequel to Arc of Infinity, but don't worry not.
• 52:08
  Not a Gallifrey Omega prequel to Arc Infinity.
• 52:10
  Don't worry, not a prequel. To Arc of Infinity, this is a
• 52:13
  sequel to Timefly or a sequel to Season 19?
• 52:19
  I think of what it's a prequel to season 20.
• 52:23
  You tell me anywhere in this where Arc of Infinity is
• 52:26
  mentioned beyond the possibility of a visiting Amsterdam at the
• 52:30
  end, she. Literally.
• 52:31
  She literally gets on the planes at the end, but the.
• 52:33
  Rest of it's all about everything that's happened
• 52:35
  previously. Anyway, please continue.
• 52:38
  I know so it's it is set between time flight and arc of Infinity
• 52:42
  with Tegan back on Earth and I so in terms of who who wrote it,
• 52:47
  I I mean, I think clearly this is not this is not they haven't
• 52:51
  just slapped Janet Fielding's name on this.
• 52:52
  There's clearly enough insight and understanding of the
• 52:54
  character here that feels born of someone who has spent a lot
• 52:59
  of time with that character and thinking about that character
• 53:01
  and. In Australia as well.
• 53:04
  And thinking about them in Australia, yes, but from a human
• 53:08
  way, I always get a little. I don't know about you, but in
• 53:12
  any series, not just Doctor Who, when it's the actors are getting
• 53:19
  a turn to write for the characters, there's a little
• 53:22
  bit. To me that always goes a bit.
• 53:25
  You know, I'm slightly bracing. I'm slightly bracing because
• 53:28
  read. A child who said love you.
• 53:32
  That's Bates. But you know, this could be Star
• 53:35
  Trek as well. You know, there's a worry that,
• 53:37
  oh, is this going to be the one in which they reveal the depths
• 53:41
  of the the depths of the character and how actually they
• 53:43
  understood everything and a little bit wish fulfilment or a
• 53:48
  little bit just route, even route one sometimes.
• 53:52
  I ioffer full apologies to Janet Fielding for having thought that
• 53:56
  leading up to this. This is a remarkably emotionally
• 53:58
  intelligent book that explores Teigen's feelings about coming
• 54:04
  back to Earth. Because at this point, of
• 54:05
  course, she doesn't know she's going to go off again.
• 54:08
  And it's impressive the degree to which the book treats that
• 54:11
  fact with irony, with dramatic irony.
• 54:13
  We know Tegan's going to go back off, but she thinks this is her
• 54:16
  back on Earth. And I have been changed by this,
• 54:19
  and it's created problems for me in my life as well.
• 54:21
  So I think this thing that she was returned back 24 hours
• 54:25
  later. Department C-19 have created a
• 54:28
  cover story. But this leads to tension with
• 54:30
  her family, especially over the death of her aunt.
• 54:32
  She's already phoned up her dad and told him the truth and he's
• 54:35
  like, oh Tegan, why are you talking about the Master?
• 54:38
  You know, another planet. Well, and he he thinks that
• 54:41
  she's she is being flippant and disrespectful of the death of
• 54:45
  his sister, you know, Aunt Vanessa, which is something that
• 54:48
  is just skimmed over again that until the power of the doctor
• 54:51
  that the master murdered Tegan's aunt.
• 54:56
  What if the premise here is what if Eric, Oh God, I can never say
• 55:00
  his name? Eric, the script editor from
• 55:03
  from the Davison era, I'm not going to say his surname had the
• 55:06
  emotional intelligence to realize that events have
• 55:10
  consequences because they never did on TV, but they explore it
• 55:15
  really well here. What?
• 55:16
  If Tegan had the emotional depth and world of Ace, say yes,
• 55:21
  you're right. And so it's about her returning
• 55:25
  to Australia to visit her father for the first time.
• 55:27
  And her brother. We meet.
• 55:28
  We meet Keegan's brother, who's who's very nicely captured as
• 55:31
  well. Feels like he's a character
• 55:32
  drawn from life, you know, and she's trying to make amends.
• 55:38
  And there is a fantastical element which is surprise,
• 55:41
  surprise, the Mara reappears and attempts to basically destroy
• 55:48
  Tegan's home. And again, there was a bit of me
• 55:51
  that was going, oh, it's another spin off story in which Tegan
• 55:55
  faces the Mara again. I don't.
• 55:58
  Know why? Just the fact that it's in
• 55:59
  Australia where there are genuinely terrifying, poisonous,
• 56:04
  deadly snakes, that makes sense to me.
• 56:06
  I was like, yeah, that's a good way of linking those two things
• 56:09
  together. Well, and also the fact that it
• 56:11
  is Tegan's home life that she has returned to Earth from this
• 56:14
  fantastical time away, but she's brought the worst thing that she
• 56:18
  encountered with her, you know, and that it's attacked, that
• 56:20
  it's dealt with in a in a much more almost symbolic way at
• 56:26
  times. You're not entirely clear at
• 56:28
  points what's the separation between reality and what has
• 56:30
  actually happened because the Mara, because the Mara is
• 56:33
  messing with her sense of perception.
• 56:35
  I think there's even points at which you're wondering, is the
• 56:38
  Mara back or is Tegan just losing a bit because of the
• 56:40
  stress and the emotional, the emotional stress that she is
• 56:43
  under in this? It's really well done.
• 56:45
  It's really well judged and I really, I really enjoyed it.
• 56:51
  I thought it was a. Very more insight into Tegan in
• 56:56
  this short story than I did in her 21 odd television Doctor Who
• 57:02
  stories. Like just the opening.
• 57:04
  The opening where she says after travelling in the TARDIS, the
• 57:08
  planes didn't have the same allure they once had.
• 57:10
  Or the fact that she compares all of the environments that
• 57:13
  she's in now to the alien planets that she's been on.
• 57:15
  Like you can see how she's been affected by her travels.
• 57:18
  The fact that she failed her assessment and was fired from
• 57:21
  the airline because she had a Barney with a smoker on the
• 57:25
  plane. Because she's seen the future.
• 57:27
  And you know, that's not the way we're going.
• 57:30
  Yeah, it's, it's fantastic. It is this, it is a it's a bit
• 57:35
  of a character piece. There is plot to it, but it is
• 57:37
  very much focused on the character of Tegan and where she
• 57:40
  is before arc of Infinity, before she meets Doctor, that
• 57:43
  she has matured. But that that bit maturation is
• 57:45
  not just a part of is not just because she's with the Doctor
• 57:49
  that she has continued to grow since she came back in having to
• 57:52
  re acclimatize to life in terms of having to make sense of
• 57:55
  everything that happened within, within recognizable reality.
• 57:59
  She is becoming a more mature and a more confident person.
• 58:04
  And it didn't just reminded me, you know, Fielding.
• 58:08
  She's reminded me of the main asset that such authors bring,
• 58:11
  which is when you get actors, people who are not Doctor Who
• 58:14
  fans, who are actors who have a different relationship with
• 58:16
  Doctor Who, when they come and they look at these characters
• 58:19
  and they want to tell stories about them.
• 58:21
  Do you know what? They're not fucking nerds.
• 58:24
  Yeah, but so there's a lot of maturity to it.
• 58:27
  There's like an emotional maturity to this.
• 58:29
  But as well, it's really hard to capture a believable family unit
• 58:35
  with this much brevity. She's got 20-30 pages and the
• 58:39
  brother, like the brother's very relaxed.
• 58:43
  She she says he was tolerant of people in the way that she never
• 58:46
  was. Instantly.
• 58:47
  You can see their relationship there, that her dad, that
• 58:52
  they're too similar, they're both abrasive, they're both
• 58:54
  comfortable in conflict. I, that's me and my dad.
• 58:57
  I absolutely can see that relationship there and then
• 59:00
  within those 30 pages. And her dad go on this enormous
• 59:05
  journey where at the start of it, he's like, how dare you mock
• 59:09
  the death of my sister to the end where he says, Oh my God, my
• 59:13
  eyes have been open to the fact that there are wonders in this
• 59:16
  universe. And I believe you.
• 59:19
  And she's like choking back tears.
• 59:21
  It's really well done. It's really.
• 59:24
  Well done. And we we have to mention, by
• 59:26
  the way, a massive cannon drop here, please, Wiki editors.
• 59:32
  He stood by. Tegan was not born Tegan
• 59:36
  Jovanka. Tegan was born Tegan Graham.
• 59:41
  Jovanka was her mother's middle name, which she took as her
• 59:46
  surname as a sort of, I think, feminist statement when she
• 59:48
  turned 18, which was intended to hurt her father because just
• 59:52
  because she unfairly blames her father for her mother's death,
• 59:56
  which she realized because that's the journey she goes on.
• 59:58
  It's not just her father. She also realizes that she's
• 1:00:00
  been really unfair to her dad. And as she has become a grown
• 1:00:04
  up, and I think that's the sense you get since she's come back
• 1:00:06
  now. She is, she's an adult.
• 1:00:07
  Obviously she's an adult before you went.
• 1:00:09
  But you know, you remember what it was like when you were 23.
• 1:00:12
  You were an adult. But by the time you were, I
• 1:00:15
  don't know, 2830, you were an adult.
• 1:00:17
  You've begun to understand things a lot better.
• 1:00:19
  Not only. Is not only is taking her mum's
• 1:00:21
  like that, like I I understand I've done things with my family
• 1:00:26
  designed to hurt them when I feel as if they deserve it.
• 1:00:29
  That's just a very, very human thing to do.
• 1:00:32
  But it feels so Tegan as well, to take her mother's name and be
• 1:00:36
  empowered by her mother's her mother's middle name.
• 1:00:39
  Is it middle name? It's.
• 1:00:40
  Middle name because one, because actually the other thing, I
• 1:00:42
  think the thing it's born of, you know, the, IT does that
• 1:00:45
  wonderful thing that they that people often suggest what you
• 1:00:48
  should do when you write Thai and fictional or any sort of a
• 1:00:52
  piece in a continuing narrative is what's something that doesn't
• 1:00:55
  work. Let's start that.
• 1:00:56
  Let's start the story from there.
• 1:00:57
  And in this case, it's the very practical point that something
• 1:01:00
  we've all sort of ignored for 40 years is that Jovanka isn't a
• 1:01:05
  surname. Well, it never was, was it?
• 1:01:08
  It was. It was supposed to be her first
• 1:01:11
  name and they wanted to choose between them and someone got it
• 1:01:13
  wrong. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:16
  So we go, oh, by the way, Chibanka isn't a surname that
• 1:01:18
  people, that's not the name people have.
• 1:01:19
  But I feel like in 20 twenties we're more aware to the fact
• 1:01:21
  that you can't just, you know, slap names from other countries
• 1:01:24
  onto people's surnames and pretend that that's that's OK.
• 1:01:28
  There was two things in there as well that really spoke to me
• 1:01:31
  because it just reminded me of being a kid.
• 1:01:33
  I and they could have been so pony, both of them if the Triani
• 1:01:37
  what Triani wantytongs, which is the bits and bobs that you find
• 1:01:41
  when you're younger, right? So that's the word that they
• 1:01:43
  have, because every family's got that right.
• 1:01:45
  They're sort of names for certain things, the bits and
• 1:01:48
  bobs, straw or whatever. And also Daisy did it, which is
• 1:01:54
  you is weaponized in this because if Daisy did it is what
• 1:01:58
  you say when something inexplicable happens, but
• 1:02:02
  clearly somebody's done it and doesn't want to own up.
• 1:02:05
  And her dad sort of says at the start, So what you're saying is
• 1:02:08
  Daisy did it when she's telling him the truth about what
• 1:02:11
  happened with Auntie Vanessa. And then at the end when he
• 1:02:15
  realizes that's true, he says to her, Daisy did it as a way of
• 1:02:20
  endorsing that he believes her. It's really beautiful.
• 1:02:23
  It's very well done. I mean, it's they're both things
• 1:02:26
  that could have so easily become twee if they weren't landed
• 1:02:31
  well. But yeah, they speak to the way
• 1:02:33
  in which so much friction in the families is born from the fact
• 1:02:37
  that we all remember we we can't view other family members
• 1:02:41
  outside of the impression and the outline we have them from.
• 1:02:45
  When we were all younger, our parents would always view us as
• 1:02:47
  their children and the sort of children we were.
• 1:02:49
  We will view our parents as the way we view them when we were
• 1:02:54
  annoyed teenagers and all the rest of it.
• 1:02:56
  And so it all, as you say, it becomes weaponized.
• 1:02:58
  Oh, Daisy did it. Oh, of course you haven't
• 1:03:00
  changed. This is what you're always like.
• 1:03:02
  This is what you've always been like, always blaming it on some,
• 1:03:04
  on someone else. And you can't view those people
• 1:03:06
  in three dimensions. It's a story about it's a story
• 1:03:09
  about Tegan becoming an adult. And part of that is a big part
• 1:03:14
  of that is, is learning to see your family members as adults,
• 1:03:18
  to move. That's sort of the last moment
• 1:03:20
  of childhood, isn't it really? When?
• 1:03:22
  She breaks down at the end of this, as you know, we don't see
• 1:03:25
  Tegan crying a lot. Well, that bit and forced
• 1:03:28
  doomsday over the console that became a meme.
• 1:03:30
  But you know, like in a genuinely heartfelt way and says
• 1:03:34
  that she blames herself because she said to her auntie Vanessa,
• 1:03:38
  no, no, no, let's go down the Barnett bypass.
• 1:03:40
  She's literally the reason why her auntie was there for the
• 1:03:44
  master to kill. It's I don't know.
• 1:03:47
  I felt for Tegan in a way that I never have before.
• 1:03:50
  I just thought this was a polished read.
• 1:03:53
  I thought it was it literally. I almost didn't need the alien
• 1:03:56
  stuff. I could.
• 1:03:57
  I could have just read the character stuff.
• 1:04:00
  It was strong enough. And it wasn't flashy, stylish
• 1:04:02
  Poe. It wasn't Steve Colwin, his
• 1:04:04
  crazy adjectives. It was just a solid, well told,
• 1:04:09
  very moving short story. Yeah.
• 1:04:12
  But the alien stuff works because it uses the Mara
• 1:04:15
  intelligently, as being from the darkness of the mind.
• 1:04:18
  It is a story about mental struggle, about about grudges
• 1:04:25
  against oneself and against others.
• 1:04:27
  You're right, Tegan. Tegan begins to admit that she
• 1:04:30
  blames herself for her aunt's death, but also through the
• 1:04:35
  story, acknowledges that that's not fair on herself.
• 1:04:37
  You know, the emergence of the Mar in this doesn't feel forced.
• 1:04:42
  It doesn't feel famished. It feels like no, no, no.
• 1:04:44
  That's what makes that monster exciting and effective.
• 1:04:49
  And they've deployed it here in a very different setting, and it
• 1:04:52
  has that terrifying moment. You know, the best bit in the
• 1:04:55
  best bit in The Stolen Earth, when for all that, I'm not
• 1:04:59
  necessarily always the biggest fan of Elizabeth Slayton's
• 1:05:00
  acting. The bit when Sarah Jane Smith
• 1:05:03
  sees the Daleks and she's like, oh, not here, not, not in my
• 1:05:08
  actual life. And there's something of the
• 1:05:11
  similar going on here with the reemotions of the Mara.
• 1:05:14
  Yeah, and it just reminds me again that, man, we could have
• 1:05:18
  done with some of this in the 80s Doctor Who would be a very
• 1:05:21
  different show, but it would be a better show in the 80s because
• 1:05:25
  a lot happens to those poor people.
• 1:05:26
  You know, Nisa loses her home planet, Adric loses his brother,
• 1:05:30
  Tegan loses more family members than I care to remember, and
• 1:05:33
  none of it's dealt with. And this just shows how very
• 1:05:36
  simply it could be done. And it also proved to me as well
• 1:05:38
  this short story that I prefer the approach of a character
• 1:05:44
  heavy, plot light short story because spoiler, the next story
• 1:05:49
  is very exposition heavy and character light.
• 1:05:54
  And I had the opposite reaction. Would you like to take us there,
• 1:05:57
  Michael? Yes, the next story is The Four
• 1:06:01
  Faces of Immortality by Gary Russell.
• 1:06:05
  Which is yourself, folks? Which is a sequel?
• 1:06:09
  Boo. Come Prequel, Yeah.
• 1:06:13
  Now come on, are you giving us a tick?
• 1:06:15
  I'm not giving this a tick. I think so.
• 1:06:17
  So we, this is our fourth story so far.
• 1:06:20
  We have got 11 undeniable, 1 undeniable prequel.
• 1:06:25
  Yeah. Because this, this is like, it
• 1:06:27
  is a sequel to The Five Doctors. Yeah, but it's a prequel to a
• 1:06:33
  couple of minor characters that turn up in unspoken roles in The
• 1:06:37
  Five Doctors. So so, And if there's any nerds
• 1:06:41
  listening, they might have worked out already that this is
• 1:06:44
  about Barusa being introduced to the other faces on the side of
• 1:06:49
  Rasalon's tomb at the end of the five.
• 1:06:51
  Do you have their? Names there Michael.
• 1:06:55
  I didn't. Pandad, Jarrell and Mule.
• 1:07:02
  Pandad, Jarrell and Mule, yes. And so we learn.
• 1:07:05
  The prequel element is that we learn the stories by which they
• 1:07:10
  came to be so in tombs and along the way we get just about all of
• 1:07:20
  time. Lord law, you've.
• 1:07:21
  Not written them all down as well, have you I?
• 1:07:23
  Haven't written them all down, but I've got the Seventh Door,
• 1:07:26
  the Hand of Omega, Ruslan Omega and the other Sally, Avian and
• 1:07:29
  Sharda, Nemesis, Validian, Pantak, Zagreyas, Phanticarian
• 1:07:33
  for God's sake, Vancel, the the Virgins, the Division, the Time
• 1:07:36
  were, the Inner Council, the High Council, Gold Ushers,
• 1:07:38
  castellans and coordinators, the Keeper of the Matrix, the Under
• 1:07:41
  Cloisters and the Cloisters, vampires and bow ships, the
• 1:07:43
  Death Zone, the Ubliet of Eternity, the Ruslan Impromatur,
• 1:07:48
  Ronan's Farrells, and the fucking Decastani.
• 1:07:51
  Now, can I make a suggestion? Yeah, that gridding together all
• 1:07:57
  of this continuity into one package is an entirely fruitless
• 1:08:03
  affair. This is the work of all those
• 1:08:06
  things you just mentioned. There are the work of individual
• 1:08:09
  creatives making it up as they go along across a 60 years in
• 1:08:16
  various mediums. Yeah.
• 1:08:19
  It's. Not supposed to hold together,
• 1:08:21
  that's what massive package. I don't understand why we're
• 1:08:24
  doing this except for me reading this short story and getting my
• 1:08:29
  diploma of Russell on. Please put the coroner on my
• 1:08:32
  head. But.
• 1:08:33
  You know what The thing is, you can do stories that takes, OK,
• 1:08:37
  what if we look at everything that we've been told about the
• 1:08:39
  Time Lords in disparate stories in disparate places at different
• 1:08:42
  times. We look at what they actually
• 1:08:44
  tell us about what Gallifrey and the Time Lords are like and what
• 1:08:48
  their history is. And then we tell a story
• 1:08:49
  starting from that premise. And we have that.
• 1:08:51
  And it's called The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin.
• 1:08:53
  It's one of the best Doctor Who books ever written.
• 1:08:56
  This is it's it's, it is in the very classic sense, fan wank.
• 1:09:03
  Is there even a place for this sort of fan wank anymore?
• 1:09:07
  Do you know? I said.
• 1:09:08
  I I thought who? Is this for?
• 1:09:10
  Who is this? Who is this story for it?
• 1:09:13
  Feels weirdly old fashioned, doesn't it?
• 1:09:16
  And it's in its continuity obsession.
• 1:09:19
  It feels like, oh we, I can now write a story that has
• 1:09:23
  references to all these things. But you know what?
• 1:09:25
  I actually that wouldn't care. And there's a part of me that
• 1:09:29
  can, you know, I'm a nerdy fan. There's a part of me that
• 1:09:33
  enjoyed spotting all of those references and writing them
• 1:09:35
  down. I'm not going to deny it.
• 1:09:37
  I was on a train, right? And Mark was telling me just
• 1:09:39
  shut up because I just kept going.
• 1:09:41
  Oh God, like the old woman over over the other side was getting
• 1:09:45
  really annoyed. But there's a, you know, I'm a
• 1:09:49
  fan. I like making a list, but I need
• 1:09:53
  that you're like a list fan. No, indeed.
• 1:09:56
  But I need there to be a story. If that was all colour, you
• 1:09:59
  know, if that was all sorts of fun colour around the story that
• 1:10:02
  I'd enjoy. But I'm the big issue for me is
• 1:10:05
  that this this story doesn't go anywhere.
• 1:10:09
  And I think actually the ends of the Five Doctors.
• 1:10:13
  I remember watching it when I was still a young kid.
• 1:10:15
  It was the first Davison story. I remember sitting down and
• 1:10:18
  properly watching and I really loved it.
• 1:10:20
  I thought it was fantastic. And the ending of it I'd have
• 1:10:23
  been this is on UK Gold Saturday afternoon, repeat and I'd have
• 1:10:28
  been 1011 And the end where his face goes appears on the side of
• 1:10:33
  the tomb and all the stone faces come alive and they all go
• 1:10:36
  mutely looking around in despair and then they all turn to stone.
• 1:10:40
  That scared the shit out of me and stayed with me.
• 1:10:44
  I remember lying in bed really scared by this.
• 1:10:47
  So even, you know, what would have been 15-16 years later
• 1:10:52
  after his first on this was still scaring little kids.
• 1:10:56
  The stories we are told about how they ended up being there
• 1:10:59
  and the way in which it attempts to slightly change the nature of
• 1:11:03
  their punishment. So the the resolution is that
• 1:11:07
  actually at the end of it, Barusa realizes he's not just
• 1:11:10
  hearing the stories of those who've already been failed the
• 1:11:14
  game of Rasalon, lost the game, won and lost the game of
• 1:11:16
  Rasalon. He's going to hear the story of
• 1:11:17
  all the others who will do it over the centuries to come.
• 1:11:20
  And listening to those stories forever is the punishment.
• 1:11:23
  I mean, a quite brave to put in this story.
• 1:11:26
  God, imagine if listening to boring stories forever, imagine
• 1:11:30
  how terrible that would be. A fight worse than death?
• 1:11:33
  Yeah. But also, none of it is as scary
• 1:11:37
  or as effective or as simple as those faces because.
• 1:11:42
  They're not imaginative enough. Pandant is put in there because
• 1:11:47
  he doesn't want to be president. He just wants to access the
• 1:11:50
  president's secrets. So he was immortality.
• 1:11:52
  So that's exactly the same as Barusa Jarrell.
• 1:11:55
  She wants information. She thinks the secrets of
• 1:11:58
  Wrestle On should be everybody else's.
• 1:12:00
  Who gives a shit? So that's why she's put in
• 1:12:02
  there. And Moore is the risk taker of
• 1:12:04
  Gallifrey, forgotten and hedonistic.
• 1:12:08
  He's promised the secret of immortality to his big army that
• 1:12:11
  he's amassed. And because Ruslan doesn't give
• 1:12:14
  away his secrets so easily, he's shoved in there as well.
• 1:12:17
  And it's just all so boring. Yeah.
• 1:12:20
  And, and you know, I I knew this was a Gary Russell story before
• 1:12:23
  I checked. I have to say I was listening to
• 1:12:25
  the audio book and I missed who the author was.
• 1:12:26
  Was it when? Van Sale turned up in the first
• 1:12:29
  scene or the mention of the of the Trods.
• 1:12:32
  No one else remembers the Nekistani at this point.
• 1:12:35
  Joe was. It that Validium was a huge part
• 1:12:39
  of this story for. God, that's what he started,
• 1:12:41
  Karen. Did you mention him?
• 1:12:43
  Yeah. I mentioned Vanticarian.
• 1:12:45
  That's a name I've not heard that Vanticarian was the
• 1:12:49
  password if you need to get into the Fitzroy Tavern.
• 1:12:52
  Was he really? No.
• 1:12:56
  You could tell me oh shit and I'll believe it.
• 1:12:58
  My biggest problem with this, yeah is it leaves Gallifrey as a
• 1:13:03
  bog standard science fiction planet from any half width SF
• 1:13:08
  series, because all it is now is a series of bullet points.
• 1:13:12
  There's no mystery left in Gallifrey at all.
• 1:13:14
  It's so depressing. At one point someone goes, Oh
• 1:13:17
  well, he'll just regenerate. Nevermind, it's so matter of
• 1:13:20
  fact. Do you remember when the first
• 1:13:22
  regeneration happened and it was what the hell is going on now?
• 1:13:25
  It's like 80s Doctor Who where all regenerate and all of this
• 1:13:29
  stuff. You know, the terrible Zodins
• 1:13:31
  knocked out every other week. There's just no mystique to it
• 1:13:34
  all the cloister raves what the one of the very few decent ideas
• 1:13:39
  in Hell Bent. Don't come at me.
• 1:13:42
  Genuinely creepy idea. And he explains what they are.
• 1:13:46
  I don't want to know. The one thing you don't do with
• 1:13:50
  horror is explain it in excruciating detail.
• 1:13:54
  It's sort of like you can imagine Gary Russell 73 yards in
• 1:13:57
  which she goes at the end. Oh, she's a time traveler.
• 1:14:01
  But I I I love. Gary Russell, right?
• 1:14:03
  Yes, he, he comes on this podcast and I think he is a
• 1:14:07
  massively competent director of audio audio drama.
• 1:14:11
  I think he can write a fun script as well.
• 1:14:14
  I, I just don't like his writing in prose.
• 1:14:17
  I what he's doing, it just doesn't shine with me at all.
• 1:14:21
  He wants to make the Doctor Who universe feel cohesive, but for
• 1:14:26
  me it's in a way that makes it feel smaller.
• 1:14:30
  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, I think you've hit the nail on the
• 1:14:32
  head there because I, I mean, I don't mean to be as much me
• 1:14:35
  though, although I've been a bit mean because I like a lot of
• 1:14:37
  this stuff as well. I think the scales been just
• 1:14:40
  this I really like and that's a very continuity fuelled story
• 1:14:43
  and it's something that wants to make a particular ear of Doctor
• 1:14:46
  Who feel cohesive, but it it produces an interesting story
• 1:14:49
  out of it. I think he jests at scars.
• 1:14:51
  I will listen to that a couple years ago.
• 1:14:52
  It's it's so. Much fun.
• 1:14:55
  I I used to hate that and I did a complete 180 on that one.
• 1:14:58
  We did it for Finish Big and he was like, right, I'm going to go
• 1:15:01
  with the premise that the Valley Yard is doing all the things
• 1:15:03
  that the Doctor can't do and the universe is fucked because of
• 1:15:07
  it, and he just goes for it. I, I re listened to that a
• 1:15:11
  couple of years ago off the back of Time Lord Victorious and I
• 1:15:14
  thought this is everything that Time Lord Victorious wanted to
• 1:15:17
  do and has done it with that, with that sort of simplicity
• 1:15:23
  that I just complained this doesn't have.
• 1:15:25
  So this is, this is what the docks would be like if he didn't
• 1:15:28
  hold himself back. This is what the docks would be
• 1:15:29
  like if he actually set out to try and rectify things if he was
• 1:15:33
  that arrogant. But we've both been reading John
• 1:15:37
  Higgs's excellent book Exterminate, Regenerate, the
• 1:15:40
  story of Doctor Who, and he hits the nail on the head with that
• 1:15:46
  when he's talking about the deadly Assassin, which is.
• 1:15:49
  The Deadly Assassin is one of the best stories and one of the
• 1:15:51
  worst things that ever happened to Doctor Who.
• 1:15:53
  That's my opinion. But the way that John Higgs puts
• 1:15:55
  it is that what the Deadly Assassin did in effect was to
• 1:15:59
  remove mythos and replace it with law.
• 1:16:04
  So instead of horror, so the time rolls and Gallifrey do just
• 1:16:10
  become this set of understandable facts and names.
• 1:16:14
  And I know people like the Gallifrey audio series, but I've
• 1:16:17
  always been very cold on them because they just turned, they
• 1:16:21
  just turned Gallifrey into The West Wing in space, which was
• 1:16:24
  what people pitched it as. And that just sounded like such
• 1:16:27
  a bad idea at their best. Like the politicking is really
• 1:16:31
  fun and and because you've got Leela and Rohana and canine and
• 1:16:35
  and Brexit help, there's great characters and at their best
• 1:16:37
  they are really fun. But yes, it is a problem that is
• 1:16:42
  constructed out of all of this bloody look.
• 1:16:45
  The result of Deadly Assassin is as you get that protracted
• 1:16:48
  sequence at the end of Invasion of Time Episode 1 where he's
• 1:16:51
  having the finger and taking the coroner and the stick of wrestle
• 1:16:55
  on and the weird pink blow up cushion of Wrestle on and like,
• 1:17:00
  what are we doing? What has happened to the magic
• 1:17:03
  of Doctor Who, as the man said in Dwight?
• 1:17:06
  Well, also for me, it just it for me, it pierces right to the
• 1:17:09
  heart a misunderstanding of what makes Doctor Who good and why.
• 1:17:13
  I think the character of Doctor Who is interesting, exciting,
• 1:17:16
  which is he's the one who ran away from the gods, right?
• 1:17:19
  He is he's Dionysus. He is dummy Dionysus, the one
• 1:17:23
  who took the five Prometheus. He is Prometheus.
• 1:17:25
  He ran away. The thing that makes Doctor Who
• 1:17:27
  interesting is that he's is the one who ran away.
• 1:17:29
  Gallifrey when he says it's boring and stayed and all the
• 1:17:34
  rest of it. I was really watching School
• 1:17:36
  Reunion recently and there's that great.
• 1:17:39
  I forgot how good the dialogue is in that episode.
• 1:17:42
  And there's the wonderful bit where Anthony heads says your
• 1:17:45
  your characters were peaceful to the point of indolence.
• 1:17:48
  You know, it's talking about them like gods that went on
• 1:17:52
  Doctor Who. There's an irony there.
• 1:17:54
  When Doctor Who says my people were boring, he's talking about
• 1:17:58
  the gods. He's talking about the gods who
• 1:17:59
  are happy to sit on Olympus and watch the universe.
• 1:18:01
  It should be beyond our comprehension because he wants
• 1:18:04
  to be like us. Remember that bit in Time and
• 1:18:06
  Relative where Susan recalls what happened when the TARDIS
• 1:18:09
  left Gallifrey and all of the clocks which had just been sat
• 1:18:12
  around started ticking because they because they became real by
• 1:18:16
  entering his numerous That is it perfect Gallifrey?
• 1:18:18
  This is boring shit and it makes me dislike Doctor Who You.
• 1:18:23
  Just hit something there with School Reunion.
• 1:18:25
  You, you sparked A synapse when? Because I think that's how you
• 1:18:29
  use continuity. That fabulous sequence between
• 1:18:32
  Sarah Jane and Rose, where she's going Daleks, I bet the emperor,
• 1:18:36
  the Loch Ness Monster. Seriously.
• 1:18:40
  And it's so funny. And it's just a load of
• 1:18:42
  references where we're really excited to hear them, but it's
• 1:18:45
  got a character point to that scene as well.
• 1:18:47
  And it's just fucking funny. All the things that this is not,
• 1:18:50
  it's this is like a dry and dusty lecture on Gallifrey.
• 1:18:55
  You know, reading this is the reason why he left Gallifrey.
• 1:18:58
  It's so boring. We don't need this anymore,
• 1:19:01
  we've got wiki articles. It does read like that, doesn't
• 1:19:05
  it? Yeah.
• 1:19:07
  Should we move on? I would I would just leave it on
• 1:19:11
  the point where describes someone mapping out the
• 1:19:16
  hierarchies of the inner council and the high counts from the
• 1:19:19
  rest of it, and it all seemed very dull indeed.
• 1:19:25
  It is very dull yes. So we love you, Gary, but don't
• 1:19:28
  do this anymore. All right?
• 1:19:29
  I'd really. Like to just discuss.
• 1:19:31
  Irritatingly right? Beth Axford, who is, you know,
• 1:19:34
  edited this collection of stories.
• 1:19:36
  She's had this delivered to her, this boring exposition on
• 1:19:39
  Gallifrey, the dullest planet in the universe.
• 1:19:42
  And then she commissions another one later in the collection with
• 1:19:46
  an even more boring planet. Oh my God.
• 1:19:48
  Anyway, we'll get there. Please, can we move on to
• 1:19:51
  Becky's Impossible Day by Beth Axford herself?
• 1:19:57
  Yes, I'm going to say one thing to you, and that is I don't
• 1:20:00
  think that an editor of books needs to be a good writer, OK?
• 1:20:05
  I think they need to be a good editor of books.
• 1:20:08
  Yes, writing and editing are related, but different skill
• 1:20:12
  sets. And I've known plenty of people
• 1:20:14
  who are wonderful writers and they can't edit for toffee.
• 1:20:17
  And some of the finest editors I have known don't like putting
• 1:20:21
  pen to paper. From there, I think they are
• 1:20:23
  different skill sets. I 100% agree.
• 1:20:25
  However, if you are going to insert yourself within a
• 1:20:29
  collection of short stories, then you do need to be a good
• 1:20:33
  writer. The problem is, I don't think
• 1:20:36
  Beth Axwood is a good writer. And this, alongside the first
• 1:20:41
  one, I think was the weakest of the set because I just don't
• 1:20:45
  understand the purpose of what it's trying to do and I don't
• 1:20:48
  really understand how this could take place.
• 1:20:51
  OK, yeah, Joe, I was going to say this.
• 1:20:54
  Five stories in. It's not a prequel, Joe.
• 1:20:59
  Oh shit, no it's not, is it? It takes place so it's
• 1:21:03
  ostensibly A prequel to Rose, except it's not a prequel on its
• 1:21:06
  own terms. It's at best a mid call, an
• 1:21:08
  integral. What do we call them?
• 1:21:09
  A mid call? A mid call, an integral?
• 1:21:11
  A story that takes place within sorry, a piece of dramatic
• 1:21:14
  temesis, Joe One. Out of five so far and.
• 1:21:20
  Stephen Cole really, really holding this premise on his
• 1:21:23
  shoulders at this stage. It takes place within rows,
• 1:21:28
  except the bit where it happens doesn't exist in rows.
• 1:21:33
  But hang on, haven't the dummies smashed out the windows already?
• 1:21:36
  It's. After the dummies have smashed
• 1:21:38
  out the windows. But but after the dummies smash
• 1:21:41
  out the window, the Doctor is completely in Roses company up
• 1:21:45
  until that, up until they leave at the end of the story.
• 1:21:49
  So there's nowhere for this story to happen.
• 1:21:51
  And even if it did, it would suggest that the Doctor, in the
• 1:21:53
  middle of the Autons running about the place just sort of
• 1:21:56
  steps away, flies across London and deals with an unrelated
• 1:22:00
  issue. My other issue with this is that
• 1:22:04
  my best friend, yeah, works in a nail salon, right?
• 1:22:08
  So this should speak to me in some way.
• 1:22:11
  Yeah, I can make Kate Becky in this story.
• 1:22:15
  OK, And I get we're doing a Rose thing again.
• 1:22:21
  An ordinary girl in an ordinary job facing something
• 1:22:25
  extraordinary. The trouble is she's just not
• 1:22:28
  interesting enough. Like, I mean, I don't know if
• 1:22:31
  Rose was that interesting in Rose, but the performance was
• 1:22:34
  there. But there's no performance here,
• 1:22:35
  you know, what do we what what do we learn about her in this?
• 1:22:40
  She's got a best friend. She likes a Chinese take away.
• 1:22:45
  She's creating her own business. I just feel like it's somebody
• 1:22:49
  maybe that Beth Axford know that she transplanted in a Doctor Who
• 1:22:52
  story. But I'll tell you what, normal
• 1:22:54
  people in Doctor Who stories are kind of dull.
• 1:22:57
  You know, they need, they need ausp of some kind.
• 1:23:00
  And she ain't got none, Becky. Well, that's the whole premise
• 1:23:04
  of Rose, isn't it? That the Doctor sees something
• 1:23:07
  in her that he doesn't see in everybody else?
• 1:23:11
  It's a story that is. So it takes place at nail salon
• 1:23:15
  in the Wings of Rose, in which the Doctor helps Becky deal with
• 1:23:24
  an alien that steals colour. A few thoughts.
• 1:23:30
  Cool number. One, the story is has this very
• 1:23:35
  generic model that has emerged since Doctor Who came back in
• 1:23:39
  2005. It's very Doctor Who adventures
• 1:23:43
  in that period when there was a period in my memory where Doctor
• 1:23:46
  Who adventure comic strips every second one would follow the
• 1:23:49
  structure of normal person. Might be a school child, might
• 1:23:53
  be cleaner, might be someone who works in a supermarket.
• 1:23:56
  They encounter an alien. The Doctor turns up the Doctor.
• 1:24:01
  The Doctor, with the help of normal person, identifies some
• 1:24:05
  surprising but unsatisfying repellent to the alien.
• 1:24:09
  They say ah, you're great. And the and the Doctor leaves
• 1:24:13
  and normal person is left thinking What a guy.
• 1:24:16
  Michael, you could be describing Smiley's mirror exhibit, you
• 1:24:19
  know. We'll get there, We'll get
• 1:24:22
  there. And sorry, it's just this
• 1:24:25
  version. I think it does feel a lot like
• 1:24:27
  a Doctor Who adventure comic strip, except I think it would
• 1:24:29
  have worked better as a Doctor Who adventure comic strip
• 1:24:31
  because the idea of a creature that steals colour is a visual
• 1:24:36
  idea. Yeah, and you can't see it in In
• 1:24:40
  the Woods, so I don't think the power of the idea comes across.
• 1:24:43
  You can imagine it as a comic strip working really well, the
• 1:24:45
  colour literally bleeding out of the panels, that it would be
• 1:24:49
  brilliant. It would almost be a little bit,
• 1:24:50
  you know, Lux like to put it in if they were.
• 1:24:52
  Doing it as a comic, they would set it in somewhere slightly
• 1:24:56
  less mundane than a nail salon, where the only stakes are Oh
• 1:25:01
  dear, Becky can only do monochrome shellac now you know.
• 1:25:08
  But also it it, it also feels like it's learned a bad lesson
• 1:25:12
  from Russell D Davis, which we've moaned about elsewhere,
• 1:25:15
  which is his tendency to rely on symbolism rather than logic in
• 1:25:19
  his resolutions. And so here, the way they.
• 1:25:23
  Yeah. And so the way in which they end
• 1:25:27
  up repelling the monster is by thinking dark thoughts.
• 1:25:30
  Now death by bad memories is up there with buried alien
• 1:25:34
  spaceship as cliches that should not be allowed to be used in
• 1:25:38
  Doctor Who anymore because people have used them too often
• 1:25:41
  and they can't be trusted and they need to tell a different
• 1:25:44
  stories. But also it's it's A twist too
• 1:25:48
  far. You know, it doesn't really
• 1:25:49
  work. It's a sort of the idea that you
• 1:25:51
  can steal colour is a nice imaginative idea doesn't really
• 1:25:54
  make sense, but that's fine because it's fantasy, right?
• 1:25:57
  But then your your resolution is this sort of metaphor that kind
• 1:26:00
  of relies on the English language more than it relies on
• 1:26:04
  anything else, any sort of internal nothing to do.
• 1:26:07
  With colours? How?
• 1:26:08
  Is it all linked? Up emotions, colours, I don't
• 1:26:12
  know it. You might as well say our
• 1:26:13
  primary. Ideas.
• 1:26:15
  I don't see how they're linked. You might as well say, oh, we
• 1:26:17
  need something dark. Oh, I'll stick 7 on the DVD
• 1:26:21
  player. You know it's I.
• 1:26:22
  Remember once right, this is going back to UK gold times.
• 1:26:25
  There was this advert for payday loans where in typically subtle
• 1:26:31
  fashion, these people are living miserable lives.
• 1:26:34
  And it's literally in black and white, you know?
• 1:26:36
  And then they're going about they've got no money, and then
• 1:26:38
  they get a payday loan and suddenly woo the whole world's
• 1:26:41
  in colour. Yeah.
• 1:26:43
  And they're so happy. And obviously that's a dismal
• 1:26:45
  idea and terrible marketing for payday loans.
• 1:26:47
  But it sparked an idea in my head of like, there's a really
• 1:26:50
  interesting story to be told, a powerful story about taking
• 1:26:55
  colour away from the world and how that affects people, because
• 1:26:58
  it absolutely does affect us in so many different ways.
• 1:27:02
  You know, you could tell a story about art and use that premise
• 1:27:06
  and it would be really quite profound nail Polish.
• 1:27:12
  It's, I mean, it could. So we talked right at the start
• 1:27:16
  of the episode about short stories and different forms of
• 1:27:20
  story, allowing you to tell different types of story in
• 1:27:23
  Doctor Who. But you also have to make sure
• 1:27:24
  that the one you're telling is appropriate for the theme.
• 1:27:26
  And I can see a comic version of this where actually the fact
• 1:27:29
  it's in a nail bar works because you can have all the colours
• 1:27:32
  splashed. It's an excuse to have 100
• 1:27:34
  different colours in one setting all across the place.
• 1:27:36
  You know, you could do, you could do an art classroom or
• 1:27:38
  something like that as well. But I don't have a problem with
• 1:27:41
  that. And I think monster that steals
• 1:27:43
  colour is a nice simple Doctor Who E idea.
• 1:27:45
  I just don't think it it works here.
• 1:27:47
  I just and I think the resolution doesn't work.
• 1:27:49
  I think it's being told in the wrong place.
• 1:27:51
  I also think, as you said, it wants to be the story of a
• 1:27:55
  normal person encountering the Doctor A we have lots of those
• 1:27:58
  anyway. But also I just don't believe
• 1:28:00
  that a normal person would react in the way that Becky does here.
• 1:28:02
  So her whole the so part of the peril that's being set up here
• 1:28:05
  is is the threat to her business.
• 1:28:07
  You think actually that's, you know, that's a normal thing to
• 1:28:09
  worry about. If an alien did storm into the
• 1:28:11
  middle of your business that you'd work to support, you would
• 1:28:14
  be worried about the financial viability long term.
• 1:28:17
  But when the doctors resolved, she just, she just.
• 1:28:20
  Stakes we're used to, though, in a Doctor Who store.
• 1:28:22
  Is it? I mean, nail salons are 10 a
• 1:28:23
  penny. I'll be all right, but.
• 1:28:25
  Not EV, but not for Becky, not Becky's nail salon.
• 1:28:28
  You know, not everything but. But The thing is, at the end of
• 1:28:32
  it, her shop is trashed and she just smiles and begins sweeping
• 1:28:36
  up her ruined livelihood without even a sort of past.
• 1:28:40
  Well, that was sort of passing thought for the insurance.
• 1:28:43
  I thought it was really weird as well at the end.
• 1:28:45
  It's sort of overstresses the emotional implications on Becky,
• 1:28:51
  like losing her mum and her realising about the Time Warner
• 1:28:54
  and all of that. So it's sort of emotionally,
• 1:28:56
  it's going for huge stakes. But within this underwhelming
• 1:29:01
  setting, I don't know. There was just a disconnect here
• 1:29:04
  where I was like, yeah, you're trying to tell me this is really
• 1:29:07
  important stuff to these people. I just don't care like.
• 1:29:12
  There's also a bit where Becky gets handed the Sonic
• 1:29:14
  screwdriver and has a has a an image of the John Hurt Doctor.
• 1:29:19
  And again, that's annoys me the way in which tie insurance a big
• 1:29:23
  finish are guilty of this, but so are others of sort of just
• 1:29:27
  devaluing things that were quite powerful when they first
• 1:29:30
  appeared. So we're now at the stage where
• 1:29:31
  the War Doctor wants wants. The Doctor's greatest secrets
• 1:29:36
  now appears to any rando who picks up the Sonic screwdriver.
• 1:29:41
  And you're right, these ordinary people have an extraordinary
• 1:29:45
  adventures. They are so 10 a penny now that
• 1:29:47
  you have to do something pretty impressive to stand out in that
• 1:29:51
  crowded market there. Were two entire big finished
• 1:29:55
  short trips collections on that theme, how the yeah how the
• 1:29:58
  doctor changed my life and snapshots.
• 1:30:00
  So you know, this has been done a lot.
• 1:30:03
  Yeah. So, I mean, I don't really have
• 1:30:07
  anything else to say. I, I thought this was just
• 1:30:09
  incredibly dull and I'm, I'm not sure how it could be fixed.
• 1:30:14
  Some of these others I could figure out how they could be
• 1:30:16
  fixed, but I just didn't find the setting interesting, the
• 1:30:19
  character interesting, how it was written in.
• 1:30:22
  Yeah, this just wasn't great. Stick to editing.
• 1:30:28
  And then we move on to our sixth story, Smiley's Mirror Effects
• 1:30:34
  by Janelle McCurdy. Now show.
• 1:30:38
  Is this a prequel? Well, only because Lady
• 1:30:43
  Christina turns up at the very end.
• 1:30:47
  But no, technically it does have no effects at all.
• 1:30:50
  She just happens to be passing. So, yeah, so it begins
• 1:30:54
  immediately after Journeys End with the TARDIS returning to
• 1:30:58
  Earth to rest, because it's sort of the TARDIS is returning to
• 1:31:02
  Earth to rest because it's just kind of bounced back to the last
• 1:31:04
  place it was because it's so exhausted itself.
• 1:31:07
  Pulling a planet across the universe.
• 1:31:08
  Great. That's fine.
• 1:31:10
  But that's a sequel. And it ends, as you say, with
• 1:31:13
  the revelation that the museum it's all been happening in is
• 1:31:16
  the International Gallery from Planet of the Dead.
• 1:31:18
  There's a passing reference to the cup of Apple Stan being on
• 1:31:20
  display and that, and then Lady Christina is getting ready to
• 1:31:23
  steal it, and the Doctor goes off because he's runs off
• 1:31:27
  because he's detected, realized that the wormhole he detected
• 1:31:31
  earlier was not the one that he just dealt with.
• 1:31:33
  So there's something else going on.
• 1:31:35
  So it follows immediately on from Journey's End, leads
• 1:31:38
  directly into Planet of the Dead, and entirely erases the
• 1:31:40
  next Doctor from continuity in the process.
• 1:31:43
  Fair. Enough, I'll mind you.
• 1:31:44
  No, it does mention the cyber king.
• 1:31:46
  It does mention the cyber King. I take rewind a second, all
• 1:31:49
  right, Because I need to talk about the start of this story.
• 1:31:52
  Yeah, which had more exposition than the TV movie opening scene.
• 1:31:58
  I mean, it's immediate exposition about returning
• 1:32:01
  planets, parallel universes. Sarah tell him he had the
• 1:32:04
  biggest family on the Earth towing the planet through space,
• 1:32:07
  facing the Cyber King where he left Donna, Martha, Sarah wrote.
• 1:32:11
  All of that is explained in the and it has no impact on the
• 1:32:15
  story whatsoever. It's just all dumped on you at
• 1:32:19
  the start of this. I'm like, why are you doing this
• 1:32:22
  well? I'm sorry but the passingness of
• 1:32:24
  the reference to the Cyber King I missed it makes me feel like
• 1:32:27
  they forgot about the next Doctor as well and had to add it
• 1:32:29
  in. But why is it all there?
• 1:32:31
  I don't understand. It doesn't impact the Doctors
• 1:32:34
  how he behaves in this story. It's literally like this writer
• 1:32:39
  proving well. I watch series 4.
• 1:32:41
  OK, thank you. So did we.
• 1:32:42
  That's the only reason we're reading this book, because we're
• 1:32:44
  Doctor Who fans. Yeah, there's, it lacks a
• 1:32:47
  certain lightness, doesn't it? I think you could.
• 1:32:49
  Even if you wanted to, to make that point that it set
• 1:32:53
  immediately after and that the TARDIS is recovering, you could
• 1:32:55
  cover it in a line, couldn't you?
• 1:32:57
  About. Even then goes on to explain
• 1:33:01
  what psychic paper is. We know what psychic paper is.
• 1:33:05
  Fucking hell. It goes on to talk about the
• 1:33:07
  little girl in the family of blood.
• 1:33:09
  Yes, thank you, we watched that. I don't understand why all this
• 1:33:11
  shit is in here. Who do you think is reading this
• 1:33:14
  story? Who doesn't know what psychic
• 1:33:16
  paper is 0? Boy, introducing the idea of a
• 1:33:20
  TARDIS to somebody that appears to like should be a companion,
• 1:33:24
  right? Because it we do the whole
• 1:33:26
  reveal of the TARDIS. Halfway through this apparently
• 1:33:30
  scary story, we go to the TARDIS for an interminable sequence.
• 1:33:35
  So we're in a nice safe space and but someone that the Doctor
• 1:33:38
  knows for 5 1/2 minutes and then leaves at the end.
• 1:33:42
  It's happening. And if you did need TARDIS and
• 1:33:45
  psychic paper and all the rest of it explained to you, then the
• 1:33:48
  ending is going to be really confusing because you're not
• 1:33:50
  going to get that it's a setup for something else I.
• 1:33:52
  Know, can I ask you a question? Yeah.
• 1:33:56
  Why do. And the the books have been
• 1:33:59
  especially guilty of this lately, but certainly in like
• 1:34:04
  Moffitt's time as well. Why do people just keep
• 1:34:07
  insisting on putting irritating children in Doctor Who?
• 1:34:10
  I don't understand. Because kids don't want that.
• 1:34:13
  Yeah. Kids do not want to see
• 1:34:15
  themselves in Doctor Who stories.
• 1:34:17
  Kids kind of want to hang out with adults.
• 1:34:19
  Yeah. That's why they like this stuff.
• 1:34:21
  And adults, you may be the exception.
• 1:34:24
  Like, I don't want to hang out with irritating brats, you know?
• 1:34:27
  I worked in a nursery for two years.
• 1:34:28
  That was enough. I don't need him with my Doctor
• 1:34:31
  Who's stories. Who are these characters for?
• 1:34:34
  Yeah, it is odd, isn't it? Maybe it's just that assumption
• 1:34:36
  that because Doctor Who is a children's program, therefore we
• 1:34:39
  need children in it. I don't think you can't have
• 1:34:42
  children in it. I think on TV there are often
• 1:34:45
  challenges of putting them in there, that you can be putting a
• 1:34:47
  lot of weight on a young actor. Hey, sometimes it really works
• 1:34:51
  with the young girl in silence in the library.
• 1:34:53
  That's magnificent. That's, that's fantastic,
• 1:34:55
  Amelia. Pond perfect.
• 1:34:56
  Perfectly pitched. Brilliant.
• 1:34:58
  But it's always a risk and there aren't.
• 1:35:02
  It's a tough thing to write children convincingly as well,
• 1:35:04
  right, Because you're writing them from the point of view of
• 1:35:06
  an adult. I think Stephen Moffett does it,
• 1:35:08
  does it quite well. I think you know without
• 1:35:10
  thinking about those two examples were him but most.
• 1:35:12
  Writers nothing though, from the Doctor, the Widow and the
• 1:35:15
  wardrobe. But that's Becky, kids.
• 1:35:16
  I mean, come on. That should have been vetoed
• 1:35:19
  from that point on. I think there's also something
• 1:35:22
  that's when, if you want to compare it to if you want to
• 1:35:26
  draw on classic kids fiction, and a lot of them do have child
• 1:35:31
  protagonists, but often they're, to use a cliched word, ciphers.
• 1:35:35
  There's not a huge amount to them because if you're going to
• 1:35:38
  have a child, the child reader wants to view themselves in the
• 1:35:41
  place of that child, right? It doesn't mean they necessarily
• 1:35:43
  they don't have to be so generic that they could literally be
• 1:35:46
  you, but you don't want too many things divorcing them from you.
• 1:35:49
  So you think about, I don't know, the weirdstone of
• 1:35:52
  Brissingham and right, the two main child characters in that
• 1:35:55
  you barely learn anything about them beyond their names and the
• 1:35:57
  fact that parents have gone away.
• 1:35:58
  Or the demon headmaster books similar.
• 1:36:01
  You know, we get bits, we get a bit sketched in there about
• 1:36:05
  Dinah Hunter, Dinah Hunter, but not too much here.
• 1:36:10
  You're sort of being told a bit too much about these children.
• 1:36:13
  You know, you think I thought if I were a child, I couldn't view
• 1:36:17
  myself being in their shoes. What makes this kid stand out
• 1:36:24
  from from the pack? They lost their friend.
• 1:36:27
  They're a mirror exhibit. They save the doctor at the end
• 1:36:32
  of the story. I don't, I don't know.
• 1:36:34
  I just don't understand who this kid is.
• 1:36:37
  Well, her mother works for units and she's blessed with the name
• 1:36:40
  Nova Star. Oh, oh, that's a brilliant name.
• 1:36:43
  That is brilliant, that. Was the most Kenneth Williams
• 1:36:47
  you've ever sounded on this podcast better?
• 1:36:49
  Than Jacob Dudman did in the reading Oh boy, I don't know
• 1:36:53
  like I'll tell you what Luke Malloy read this short story
• 1:36:56
  collection and loathed every single story.
• 1:36:59
  Yeah and he sent me a message and I think it applies most to
• 1:37:03
  to this particular short story. He said I hate the whole that
• 1:37:07
  will do attitude that applies to 90% of Doctor Who's quite
• 1:37:11
  substantial output. And he did put in brackets
• 1:37:14
  including the TV show but he's just been a prick there.
• 1:37:18
  But there is a sense of that will do here.
• 1:37:21
  A load of continuity references at the start, a sort of random
• 1:37:24
  kid character as our identification figure, a basic
• 1:37:29
  threat in a mirror maze, a solution.
• 1:37:32
  And then Lady Christina coming along at the end, it's also
• 1:37:35
  meet. Yeah, I know what you mean.
• 1:37:37
  And again, just to go back to it, that point about it's
• 1:37:40
  picking up from the end of Journey's end, but then also
• 1:37:42
  sort of has to acknowledge that the next Doctor happened as
• 1:37:45
  well. Just be like, OK, that doesn't
• 1:37:47
  really work, but let's just pretend it does things that
• 1:37:51
  Doctor Who Time writers should be banned from doing.
• 1:37:54
  Another one for the list is having the Doctor encounter a
• 1:37:57
  monster that he was told about as a child and like it.
• 1:38:00
  There literally isn't a Time Lord fairy tale that wasn't
• 1:38:03
  actually just basic fact at this stage of the smiley.
• 1:38:05
  Can go on the list with the Crafius and the Time Worm and
• 1:38:10
  all the rest of them. And I hate it as well in these
• 1:38:13
  stories where they just sort of improvised the rules as they go
• 1:38:16
  along. They introduced a monster and
• 1:38:18
  then the get out clauses. Oh, well, didn't you know this
• 1:38:21
  is how you defeat those? No, because there was no set up
• 1:38:24
  for that at all. So you haven't done anything
• 1:38:27
  impressive or surprising. You've just told us that's how
• 1:38:29
  they're defeated. For a different podcast I've
• 1:38:33
  recently been listening to The Land of the Dead, the early
• 1:38:37
  Peter Davis and Pig Finish, which it used me to realise the
• 1:38:40
  characters spend 4 episodes before they realise, oh we can
• 1:38:44
  just set them on fire. You know, that's not an
• 1:38:46
  incredibly direct way to kill something anyway.
• 1:38:49
  And so I think whenever someone, just, whenever a Doctor Who
• 1:38:52
  story just pulls a resolution out of its arse, just pretend,
• 1:38:55
  oh, we set that one on fire. Yeah, I just came out of this
• 1:38:58
  going OK, those were a bunch of words strung together that I
• 1:39:02
  read, but none of this will impact.
• 1:39:05
  We'll tell you something interesting, though, about it.
• 1:39:07
  It's the only story in the entire collection that is
• 1:39:12
  traditional story focusing on the Doctor.
• 1:39:14
  Oh. Well then it's even more of a
• 1:39:17
  shame it's so mundane. But again, it just, I think you
• 1:39:22
  don't need to do that right? The best story, the two best
• 1:39:25
  stories, I think, from what we've done so far.
• 1:39:29
  No spoilers for the last couple, but of those discussed so far,
• 1:39:32
  the two that are furthest from having the doctor in them.
• 1:39:34
  Yeah, right. Absolutely the roots of.
• 1:39:36
  Evil. And little did you know there.
• 1:39:38
  Was a bizarre editorial detail here as well, because obviously
• 1:39:43
  Nova Star, the great detective, this fabulous child that's going
• 1:39:46
  to go on and solve all crimes or or whatever, have her own spin
• 1:39:52
  off series. And then in the last one, right,
• 1:39:54
  Osgood's sister's called Nova. And I was like, oh, Nova's back
• 1:39:58
  from the other one. No, there's a different person
• 1:40:00
  called Nova in the same show. I mean, it's not a common name,
• 1:40:04
  is it? You don't meet many novas, do
• 1:40:06
  you? Apart from the obvious one.
• 1:40:09
  Every every town's got a Nova, Michael.
• 1:40:13
  Should we move on to the fall of Apple Apochea?
• 1:40:16
  Yes, the penultimate story I haven't written.
• 1:40:19
  Who wrote? This Who wrote this one?
• 1:40:21
  El nori. Hello.
• 1:40:24
  El Nori. Now I want to understand why,
• 1:40:27
  because I think the girl who waited.
• 1:40:29
  So this is a genuine prequel? Yes, yes, at a big, big tick.
• 1:40:36
  Possibly the only tick, but a big tick.
• 1:40:40
  This is set on the planets that we're on in The Girl Who Waited,
• 1:40:44
  which is a very popular episode. Be careful when you're
• 1:40:48
  approaching very popular episodes with your short stories
• 1:40:52
  that are supposed to add to it. It's a paradise planet, right?
• 1:40:57
  That can take away your fears and insecurities and turn them
• 1:40:59
  into fabulous pieces of art. Yeah, Now I think that's quite
• 1:41:05
  an intriguing premise, but unfortunately that's where the
• 1:41:09
  intrigue ends and we are effectively introduced to a very
• 1:41:13
  mid range Star Trek, the Next Generation planet with High
• 1:41:18
  Ambassador Selidor and Profan, the Apple Apacheon and all.
• 1:41:22
  I mean, Chris Chimel could have written this.
• 1:41:24
  The names that were in this bloody story.
• 1:41:28
  It's kind of PO faced and functional and it never because
• 1:41:35
  these are a people that apparently have, how do they
• 1:41:39
  describe it? One of the oldest planets in the
• 1:41:41
  universe, it's inhabitants, one of the longest surviving
• 1:41:45
  civilization through wars and technological revolutions,
• 1:41:49
  telepathy, empathy and two hearts.
• 1:41:51
  You know, they've but they've taken out sort of passion and
• 1:41:54
  emotion and anger. So it's that sort of Star Trek
• 1:41:57
  planet where nobody gets too excited.
• 1:42:00
  And so unfortunately whilst reading this, I didn't get they
• 1:42:03
  basically he brings down the the downfall of the entire planet
• 1:42:07
  and everyone's just sort of going 0 dear, you know, like,
• 1:42:11
  yeah, it did have a lot of oomph to it, this one.
• 1:42:15
  Can I make a confession? Joe you.
• 1:42:17
  Loved it. No.
• 1:42:20
  Oh, I can't remember anything about this story.
• 1:42:25
  Well. I finished I.
• 1:42:27
  Finished the book 2 weeks ago that nothing has stayed in my
• 1:42:32
  head about it at all it. Could be because some of the
• 1:42:35
  writing was perched atop a lower mounting peak.
• 1:42:39
  You know, it was even written like a TNG script.
• 1:42:42
  I mean, basically the whole story, or the first half at
• 1:42:45
  least, is told in the style of a boring history lecture about
• 1:42:48
  Apple Appachea rather than actually experiencing anything.
• 1:42:51
  We're just one of many spectators learning about this
• 1:42:53
  boring planet. But then one of the three ruling
• 1:42:57
  families of Uxia comes to visit and the the what's his name?
• 1:43:02
  Hi, Ambassador Selador says right, because I want to replace
• 1:43:07
  him. He's art is not good enough
• 1:43:08
  anymore. So he's like, right, I'm going
• 1:43:10
  to really make a great piece of art from this lady from Uxia
• 1:43:14
  because they've, they've suffered terrible wars and for
• 1:43:17
  some reason she's got a child with her and creating art out of
• 1:43:22
  the emotions of child is prohibited.
• 1:43:24
  Very Star Trek The Next generation.
• 1:43:27
  And so he creates this fabulous crystal tree.
• 1:43:31
  And then it sort of lost me after that the tree was created
• 1:43:35
  and then the whole planet just started sort of melting and then
• 1:43:38
  it ended. I was, I had no idea why.
• 1:43:40
  Apparently it was because it was because he created the art out
• 1:43:44
  of the kids, but I couldn't really understand why I hadn't
• 1:43:48
  set up the rules enough for me to sort of figure out what
• 1:43:50
  happened at the end of the story.
• 1:43:52
  But he did just sort of shrug his shoulders and go, Oh dear,
• 1:43:55
  you know, that's the end. So you have nothing on this one
• 1:44:01
  then? My notes tell me that the
• 1:44:03
  visitors include 1/2 general. I just I, I, I, I tell you, I
• 1:44:12
  tell you what my relations was. And TNG is spot on for all the
• 1:44:15
  reasons you've said, but also because I kind of fell in love
• 1:44:18
  with TNG when it used to be repeated on BBC Two late at
• 1:44:23
  night on a Friday, going into a Saturday morning, right around
• 1:44:27
  time if you'd been out, you'd get home.
• 1:44:28
  Stick the telly on. Oh my God, yes, it's Reichorn
• 1:44:31
  Wolf. Brilliant.
• 1:44:32
  I'm going to fall asleep and this would have been like, this
• 1:44:37
  has that perfect feeling of something that you could just
• 1:44:40
  fall asleep to in your halls of residence when you're a bit
• 1:44:43
  drunk and it would keep you awake and it would all be very
• 1:44:47
  gentle and it would all be very nice.
• 1:44:49
  But the plots, oh, it just drifted in and out.
• 1:44:53
  It's just so. We think these passive planets
• 1:44:56
  are interesting though. Like you know the the, the best
• 1:45:00
  thing, you know good dramas, emotion, right?
• 1:45:02
  Passion. It's people getting angry.
• 1:45:05
  It sort of goes back to a little bit what we touched on with the
• 1:45:08
  four faces of immortality, right?
• 1:45:10
  It is. It is inherently and explicitly
• 1:45:12
  not dramatic to say this is a planet where nothing happens.
• 1:45:17
  Although we've already decided that's Gallifrey.
• 1:45:20
  But it would be like the girl who waited playing out with Rory
• 1:45:23
  going, Oh, well, just shut the door.
• 1:45:25
  She's old, nevermind, you know, like, let's go.
• 1:45:28
  And just being very casual about everything.
• 1:45:30
  What made that so great was, you know, was the anguish and the
• 1:45:34
  angst at the end of it. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:37
  And there's no. There's no angry anguish, no
• 1:45:39
  nothing. Nothing that left more than the
• 1:45:43
  lightest of impressions on my brain.
• 1:45:46
  Boring. Planets and doctors who are So
• 1:45:48
  it's really boring. Christopher Beulus, Doctor Who
• 1:45:51
  planets. But honestly, Chris, you,
• 1:45:53
  everything you've written is better than this.
• 1:45:55
  Like, yeah, forgettable, shall we say?
• 1:45:58
  But I have some good news. Go on the.
• 1:46:02
  Final story in the collection is called The Morning of the Day of
• 1:46:08
  the Doctor prequel. Yes, excellent, solid.
• 1:46:13
  So we, I think we got up to three.
• 1:46:17
  Out of eight. Well done, Beth.
• 1:46:23
  Oh boy, yes. Well, I unfortunately, I also
• 1:46:28
  had issues with this one. Now Ingrid, I don't well, maybe
• 1:46:32
  she did write this. I don't know.
• 1:46:34
  I. Think she did?
• 1:46:35
  I can believe Ingrid Oliver wrote this.
• 1:46:37
  Like, it wasn't badly written, but it's basically a day in the
• 1:46:41
  life of Petronella Osgood before.
• 1:46:43
  Not a day, doctor. Not today.
• 1:46:45
  No, no, no. We've seen the day in the life
• 1:46:47
  of Petrine Osgood. That's the day of the doctor.
• 1:46:48
  This is the morning of the day of the life of Petrine Osgood.
• 1:46:51
  Her trouble is right, she ain't got much going on in her life.
• 1:46:54
  A cat comes to visit her. She's got a sort of not great
• 1:46:59
  relationship with her sister. She kind of fancies the guy she
• 1:47:03
  works with, but she can't tell him.
• 1:47:05
  She has a little chat with the curator from Day of the Doctor.
• 1:47:09
  They discover the paintings where the glass is smashed out
• 1:47:12
  and she's sort of excited about meeting the Doctor.
• 1:47:16
  But like, I mean, this is literal setup for their the
• 1:47:19
  doctor, right? Literally putting the pieces in
• 1:47:22
  place for the doctor to step into this story.
• 1:47:25
  So that is a positive. But I, I mean, the day of the
• 1:47:29
  doctor, man, it was so exciting. Like her life, her her day isn't
• 1:47:32
  boring, but this part of it is. This is to go back to the very
• 1:47:37
  start of the episode what James Lark was suggesting this episode
• 1:47:43
  would this book would be purely about what a lovely and normal
• 1:47:46
  day it would Rex Farrell had this is I don't want to rag on
• 1:47:52
  it too much. You're right that it is.
• 1:47:54
  Here are the things that went on before the actual incident
• 1:47:57
  started. But but I do think it is more
• 1:48:02
  nicely written. I think the prostyle is nice and
• 1:48:05
  a lot of what's in here I think similar to Janet Fielding's
• 1:48:08
  piece on Tegan, I think Ingrid Oliver does have insights is the
• 1:48:12
  character of Osgood. I don't think they're terribly
• 1:48:15
  revelatory, and that's in part because Osgood is the problem.
• 1:48:18
  Here compared to the Tegan one, where that was, yeah, revelatory
• 1:48:22
  because. But that's partly just that's
• 1:48:24
  because the show has got better at this sort of thing.
• 1:48:27
  So Osgood is a product of a time where the show does examine the
• 1:48:30
  emotional lives and inner lives of its characters a bit more.
• 1:48:34
  So we already have a sense of who she is over the stories
• 1:48:36
  where she appeared. A lot of this was already kind
• 1:48:38
  of done in the Death in Heaven and the Zygon Invasion.
• 1:48:43
  But you know, it's still nice. It's a nice little portrait of a
• 1:48:46
  character we all feel fondly about.
• 1:48:47
  I like the thing about, you know, she's, she's not asexual,
• 1:48:52
  she's just lacking in confidence.
• 1:48:53
  I quite liked that she used. To work in a call centre,
• 1:48:57
  riveting used to work used. To work in a call centre.
• 1:49:02
  I think I like the I like the stuff with her sister.
• 1:49:07
  Again, it doesn't really tell us anything that we didn't learn
• 1:49:10
  from that one line in the Day of the Doctor, which I still think
• 1:49:14
  is more effective it. Did it better in the winter time
• 1:49:16
  paradox. She's in that one.
• 1:49:18
  The sister. She.
• 1:49:20
  Yeah, the Osgood one from that. Yeah, she writes the forward for
• 1:49:23
  that one. That's another good one, The
• 1:49:26
  Winstone Paradox that's basically Osgood does diehard in
• 1:49:29
  unit HQ. It's very good.
• 1:49:31
  Yeah, that actually gets noticed by Kate Stewart in the 1st
• 1:49:34
  place. You know what I kind of would
• 1:49:36
  done though, and I kind of hate doing this because I'm no
• 1:49:39
  writer, but I I thought the most interesting part of this was the
• 1:49:42
  last three minutes where she's coming to realize why she wants
• 1:49:49
  to meet the doctor so badly. I would have made that the whole
• 1:49:53
  short story just like give a huge a huge reason why she sort
• 1:49:59
  of grabbed onto his adventures and and why they mean so much to
• 1:50:04
  her. And then have the the zinger at
• 1:50:07
  the end be where he walks in and they meet for the first time.
• 1:50:10
  Boom, very powerful. Yeah, and I think something
• 1:50:14
  maybe we've learnt through these stories is for that, for the
• 1:50:17
  premise to work, you need to expand the world a bit more and
• 1:50:22
  therefore you need to reflect back on what happens.
• 1:50:24
  I think one of the problems with Smiley's mirror effect is that
• 1:50:28
  it is lit It it's the one that in some ways is the most literal
• 1:50:31
  interpretation of the title. It is the adventure before
• 1:50:36
  Planet of the Dead. But they can't all just be that
• 1:50:41
  because that's boring. You've just got you just have a
• 1:50:42
  load of stories that just end with at the start of the of ATV
• 1:50:46
  story. The ones that are best here are
• 1:50:47
  the ones that tell us more about the world that we've seen.
• 1:50:50
  They expanded it, they give us some new context, they give us
• 1:50:52
  new angle or they just give us more score B.
• 1:50:55
  That's great as well, I think. I think.
• 1:50:57
  What I realized from the morning of The Day at the Doctor by
• 1:51:00
  Ingrid Oliver is that in the Doctor Who episodes, yeah.
• 1:51:05
  On the TV, yeah. We see the most interesting part
• 1:51:08
  of every day, and we don't need to see the rest.
• 1:51:10
  You know, because that's all boring when people are going
• 1:51:12
  about their lives. Yeah, this is the Yeah, You are
• 1:51:16
  in danger of breaking that rule of drama, which is enter a scene
• 1:51:18
  as late as possible and leave as early as you can.
• 1:51:21
  And this goes ah, but what if we joined it a bit earlier?
• 1:51:25
  And so, so just everything falling into place.
• 1:51:28
  It's like you said, it wasn't, it wasn't awful, but it didn't
• 1:51:32
  light my fire like I, I there. There's an interesting story to
• 1:51:36
  be told with Osgood. There's a character I really
• 1:51:39
  like. I find her a little bit.
• 1:51:43
  She's sort of like a sad, lonely character, isn't she?
• 1:51:45
  And I think there's something you can do with that that would
• 1:51:48
  really pour on the heartstrings. This doesn't get there.
• 1:51:53
  Yeah, I I think I don't want to hate on it too much because it
• 1:51:57
  is one of the more nicely written pieces in the
• 1:52:00
  collection. It suffers from coming at the
• 1:52:02
  end which gives it a certain weight and I think if the rest
• 1:52:04
  of the collection was stronger I would not feel it's lack so
• 1:52:10
  much. There are some nice details in
• 1:52:12
  you know, good Oliver is a comedian.
• 1:52:14
  She you can tell she has that eye at points as well.
• 1:52:16
  Nova does appear in this and for some reason I just kept seeing
• 1:52:18
  was big sues from Peep Show. Oh.
• 1:52:21
  Really. Yeah.
• 1:52:22
  I was just seeing that kid for some reason.
• 1:52:25
  But there's some nice bits like it's a bit where I love the
• 1:52:28
  whole bit about Osgood ending up having to sort out Katie's
• 1:52:32
  broadband because she just offers to in a nice way and then
• 1:52:36
  ends up actually having to do it and she's on the hold.
• 1:52:40
  The hold music is called me maybe by Carly J Reps and which
• 1:52:43
  is so on point for 2013. She's a.
• 1:52:46
  Fixer, isn't she? She's like fixing her sister's
• 1:52:49
  love life as well. She's that person that's sort of
• 1:52:51
  never the main character, but always the person fixing the
• 1:52:54
  problems for the main character. And there's a story in that as
• 1:52:58
  well. It.
• 1:52:59
  This one reminded me a lot of the old DWM preludes to the New
• 1:53:06
  Adventures, and it was just sort of a little bit a chapter's
• 1:53:09
  worth of extra detail about one of the characters.
• 1:53:15
  It it kind of left me wanting more from the character, but not
• 1:53:22
  in this style. Now, I wouldn't mind more on the
• 1:53:24
  character. I mean, Ingrid Oliver.
• 1:53:26
  I just, I wish it hadn't actually had to be a prequel.
• 1:53:29
  I wish she'd written this for one of those other collections
• 1:53:32
  that's all about, you know, stories about the companions.
• 1:53:34
  And she'd given it some incidents itself to wrap this
• 1:53:37
  around. As it is, it is just.
• 1:53:40
  Rather than just isn't Hanford by this sort of premise in the
• 1:53:43
  Windsor paradox. So you can just throw her into a
• 1:53:47
  crazy adventure and and and it is a lot more fun.
• 1:53:51
  Well, Michael, can I ask you very quickly before we out,
• 1:53:55
  where would you have started? Which story would you have
• 1:53:57
  started with for this collection and which one would you have
• 1:54:00
  ended with? If I mean of the ones that are
• 1:54:04
  existing here, yeah, I would have I think to begin and end on
• 1:54:09
  a high. I would have opened with the
• 1:54:12
  pure Doctor Who extending the fun, extending the tone of the
• 1:54:16
  roots of evil. Come in, Bam, here's some extra
• 1:54:19
  fun and the Doctor Who, here's what's going on before.
• 1:54:21
  Here's those characters. And I'd have ended it on, I
• 1:54:24
  think, little did you know, by Janet Fielding, because it's
• 1:54:28
  such a mature piece. It's the, it's the one that I
• 1:54:31
  thought about the most since already and I think it's the one
• 1:54:34
  that gave us the most actual sort of grist to talk about
• 1:54:36
  here, you know? Extended media, both Big Finish,
• 1:54:42
  because like Tegan's had some great stories from Big Finish in
• 1:54:44
  the last couple of years, and the book that given me so much
• 1:54:48
  context to that character that I'm actually viewing the TV
• 1:54:51
  stories in a different way. And that's what this stuff
• 1:54:53
  should do, right? Yeah. 100% hundred and I can see
• 1:54:57
  that character becoming the character in the power of the
• 1:54:59
  doctor. You know, I can see how she ends
• 1:55:01
  up, how she ends up being there. My.
• 1:55:03
  Hit right there was 2 out of 6. What was yours?
• 1:55:08
  I think 2 out of 6, I think I, I think the roots of even little
• 1:55:12
  did you know are genuinely good bangers.
• 1:55:16
  I think there are a few that I'd be willing to defend and say I
• 1:55:19
  don't think they're bad. I think the morning of the day
• 1:55:22
  of the Doctor would fall into that character, that category.
• 1:55:25
  I think in a better book it would have come across better.
• 1:55:28
  I, I, I liked, I took, I took, I took some fun from the Boy and
• 1:55:34
  the Dalek to spite myself. But I completely, I completely
• 1:55:37
  understand that it is not actually good.
• 1:55:39
  I just enjoyed it. Had it been like A5 panel comic
• 1:55:43
  strip by Mark and how to handle it, you know?
• 1:55:46
  Well, I had to listen to poor Barnaby Edwards doing all those
• 1:55:49
  Dalek voices. Smiley's mirror effect and the
• 1:55:52
  fall of Appalachia just didn't leave enough on me to think
• 1:55:56
  anything about the four phases of eternity grated, and I
• 1:56:00
  thought Becky's impossible day was actually poor.
• 1:56:03
  I don't want to pile on Beth Axford, but what I do want to
• 1:56:09
  say is like Justin Richards was the creative consultant and
• 1:56:16
  editor of Doctor Who books for a long, long time.
• 1:56:18
  I think it was about 15 years. It was a long time he did all of
• 1:56:23
  it. You know, the second-half of the
• 1:56:24
  8th Doctor books and then a large amount of the new series
• 1:56:27
  adventures and there was a competence, whether it was a
• 1:56:32
  good or a bad story, there was a competence to what he released
• 1:56:36
  in that time. My issue is, is I don't think
• 1:56:41
  the bar of competence is as high anymore.
• 1:56:47
  And there are short stories here that Justin Richard would look
• 1:56:49
  at and just send back and say no, do again, do it again.
• 1:56:53
  Like this isn't good enough. You haven't fought through the
• 1:56:55
  premise well enough. There's no character through
• 1:56:57
  line in this. What are you trying to say?
• 1:57:00
  How have you structured this? You know, and yeah, I think what
• 1:57:06
  I'm trying to say in a kind way is isn't really good enough, not
• 1:57:11
  for the money they're asking you to spend.
• 1:57:14
  Yeah. And I think I know it's saying,
• 1:57:16
  I don't know because obviously this is all this is all effort
• 1:57:20
  and all we can say is how much we enjoyed it.
• 1:57:21
  It's possible others would read it and did.
• 1:57:24
  You check out reviews? Did you check out any reviews?
• 1:57:26
  It was very mixed on this. But you know, when I don't enjoy
• 1:57:29
  something unless I unless I read something where I feel there is
• 1:57:33
  something that is actually in some way offensive or
• 1:57:35
  problematic, I and, and I should just, I don't think there's
• 1:57:39
  anything of that in here at all. But but I always it's.
• 1:57:44
  Passionless enough that that that you just can't get offended
• 1:57:47
  by by any of it, you know? No.
• 1:57:50
  But I always hope that when I don't enjoy something, I always
• 1:57:51
  hope someone else did. You know, that it's just me,
• 1:57:54
  because I'd always rather enjoy things than not enjoy them.
• 1:57:56
  But I yeah, I know what you mean.
• 1:57:58
  And some of those little points of continuity, I don't worry
• 1:58:02
  over them in the fanish way. It doesn't.
• 1:58:04
  I'm not getting annoyed that that story doesn't actually fit
• 1:58:08
  into that story or actually it doesn't make there any sense
• 1:58:12
  that the Dalek city from Boyd the Dalek is the Dalek city from
• 1:58:14
  Daleks. That doesn't annoy me in any
• 1:58:16
  fanish. It all has to make sense sort of
• 1:58:19
  way. I just worry it speaks to a
• 1:58:21
  certain lack of attention or lack of time or lack of thought
• 1:58:24
  given to it which. Is what Luke said, right?
• 1:58:27
  It's they've sort of churned out a load of content, whether
• 1:58:31
  that's been entirely well thought through content.
• 1:58:34
  But I'm pleased we do that and I'm pleased we talked about
• 1:58:36
  short stories because that's something we haven't done
• 1:58:38
  before. I just next time we'll, we'll
• 1:58:41
  tackle the winter time paradox and well, I think we both know
• 1:58:46
  we're going to have a lot more fun with that.
• 1:58:48
  Well, do you want some exciting news, Joe?
• 1:58:51
  Oh, go on. They're.
• 1:58:53
  Doing a sequel. What's this?
• 1:58:57
  The Adventures After is coming out later this year from BBC
• 1:59:01
  Books. You're.
• 1:59:02
  Lying to me are you doing? Not Israel the.
• 1:59:05
  Adventures after this was the adventures after.
• 1:59:07
  Maybe all those stories will be the adventures fucking before.
• 1:59:11
  Oh. You know, I hope so.
• 1:59:12
  I really what's. Going to be the third one, The
• 1:59:15
  adventures in the middle. Yeah.
• 1:59:17
  Oh, Jesus Christ. Well, you know, at least they're
• 1:59:20
  running with a theme. Michael, I believe a little
• 1:59:23
  birdie told me that birdie was you in many episodes of Hamster
• 1:59:28
  that you are quite keen on the 12th Doctor and Clara.
• 1:59:34
  Yeah, I think they're fantastic. Don't you, Joe?
• 1:59:40
  We'll get there. So I would like to invite you to
• 1:59:44
  read from an author that you and I have praised highly in the
• 1:59:48
  past, Mr. James Goss, to read The Blood Cell, featuring the
• 1:59:53
  12th Doctor and Clara. How do you feel about that?
• 1:59:57
  I feel ambivalent until I've read it.
• 2:00:00
  I've already read it. I've fucking loved it, right?
• 2:00:02
  I'm just gonna say this, right? I'm gonna say this.
• 2:00:04
  And this is not really a spoiler, but.
• 2:00:07
  People only say that before they say a spoiler.
• 2:00:09
  I. Promise you, I promise you it's
• 2:00:11
  ambivalent. But I'll say this, in Dead of
• 2:00:14
  Winter, which I recently read, right, there's an end of chapter
• 2:00:17
  where the Doctor gets shot in the head.
• 2:00:20
  And I thought it was a Jupiter. No, it was genuine.
• 2:00:22
  The Doctor got a bullet straight in the fucking head.
• 2:00:24
  Yeah. And he followed that up with a
• 2:00:26
  joke, a whole page where the question at the start was, what
• 2:00:29
  was the last thing in the Doctor's mind before he died?
• 2:00:31
  Answer at the bottom, upside down, a bullet.
• 2:00:34
  I mean, Jesus Christ. And and it floored me.
• 2:00:37
  I'll say in the blood cell, there was a similar graphic
• 2:00:42
  moment at the end of it where I was like, yeah, James Goss ain't
• 2:00:46
  playing by the rules. He's he's willing to fuck the
• 2:00:49
  kids up a little. And it happened twice in that
• 2:00:52
  book. So I really hope you enjoy it.
• 2:00:55
  I do. You're going to do the reading,
• 2:00:57
  aren't you? The audio book Yes, read by Hey
• 2:01:02
  Dougie's Colin McFarlane. A lovely voice.
• 2:01:05
  Well, until then, how are we going to end this sort of thing
• 2:01:08
  in an adventures before sort of time away?
• 2:01:12
  By running off to the next podcast episode, welcome back to
• 2:01:16
  Absolute Pen Knife, where we're talking about The Blood Cell by
• 2:01:20
  James Goss. The.