Wonderland

It’s January in San Francisco of 1967 and the summer of love is somewhere out there. All the free spirits of the free world are converging on the Haight-Ashbury district to listen to music, to enjoy free love, and to take as many drugs as they can get their hands on. The Doctor, Polly and Ben arrive and meet a girl named Summer who is looking for her lost lover, and almost immediately the Doctor begins to experience visions from his past which are obviously messages – but is there a connection? A new hallucinogenic called Blue Moonbeams might just be it.

Wonderland is another of the short lived Telos novella range, and despite being only 93 pages long it packs more of a punch than the much longer Dying in the Sun which takes place a year earlier and just a few hundred miles away. It’s a different California vision; no glamour of Hollywood, just the commune lifestyle of the long haired hippies of the time (and probably all the associated b.o. that comes with it). Wonderland does not paint an entirely rosy picture of the time either; while for the most part the people arriving to take part in the celebrations are there to enjoy themselves and make a stand against the way the world is turning, there are also those who seek to benefit from the gathering in their own ways – the worst being the odious drug dealer known as the Goblin and a local party-throwing pusher named Mathilda. I’ve not been to San Francisco for a long time but when I was there last in 2002 the summer of love was very over, but just the way this all came together makes me believe that author Mark Chadbourn either was there or he’s just brilliant at evoking the era. My closest comparison would be to the community feeling of Kensington Market back in hometown Toronto.

I am still astounded that this much was packed into such a short tale. It may be because the narrative is told from Summer’s point of view as she tries to make sense of the Doctor, Ben and Polly and what they are doing there at the time. All she wants is to find Denny, her boyfriend, and she is frustrated at the Doctor’s nonchalant attitude about her plight, while his companions are more sympathetic. The Doctor is painted as a bit less of a clown than he is normally portrayed to be; he only seems to want to help Summer when it is going to be a direct benefit to his investigations, and at times he comes off as a bit sinister. Polly and Ben are themselves, but they understand that this is how the Doctor operates and back him up much to Summer’s outrage. The whole tone of their relationship is just a bit darker, with the companions accepting that the Doctor, sometimes, has his own agenda and they just follow where he leads. I enjoyed this new mysterious take on the second Doctor a great deal.

Once more I find myself annoyed that such brilliant work as what was done at Telos came to such a quick end at a mere 15 titles, but on the other hand at least I have them all. Sometimes a little nugget of change thrown in with the rest of the series continuity shows how versatile something like Doctor Who is to jump not only between media but also to have not-so-light moments for otherwise light characters. This is not to say that Telos were unique in this approach, but their edgier way of doing it just makes it seem all the better.

NEXT EPISODE: LOST AND FOUND