The Colony of Lies

A colony ship crash lands on the planet Axista Four in the year 2439. Their mission was to find a new home and establish a colony where people are not slaves to their own technology, where people interact differently and life is simpler than it has become. One hundred years later the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive and find a colony on the brink of collapse, where the ideals of their founder to lead a simpler life have led them down a cultural cul-de-sac, and a breakaway group feels they need to abandon those ideals to survive. The arrival of an Earth Federation ship on a mission to bring refugees to the planet only complicates things more, but that's nothing compared to the awakening alien menace that has been dormant all these years.

It's interesting how an attempt to get back to a more basic lifestyle manifests itself as a wild west town in space, where the colonists are more or less living in Westworld just without the androids and the death. Life on the colony isn't the easiest but death is not waiting right around the corner either; the colonists may be at odds but they are not at war either. And the ship that brought them there is not totally destroyed; there's enough technology that survived to be able to bring them up to a more modern way of life if only they'd allow themselves to use it. It's almost like the Mennonites went to space (and I can say that because Mennonites don't use the internet and won't see this). Why the wild west though? That's what I was pondering the whole time. Did Colin Brake want to write a spaghetti western than badly? What was wrong with the Victorian age where there was enough science to get by, but nothing at the levels the colony founder felt were so wrong?

Colin Brake has placed this story during the first major expansion of Earth and its colonies; they're having their problems with the Daleks at this point but otherwise are expanding at their own speed snapping up uninhabited planets left and right. The conflict with the Daleks is creating the refugee crisis and Axista Four is going to become a dumping ground for them, which will put an end to the colony's internal troubles and effectively remove their independence. Undoubtedly the intent here was to loosely link this story to the era of the television episodes Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks and create a small cluster of future history continuity; it's a bit of a ballsy move to try it as there was never much attention paid to continuity where Earth's empire was concerned, and there are disjointed tales all over of Earth's rising, falling and then rising again Empire before it joins a Galactic Federation. At this point, though, Earth has its own Federation of mostly human populated planets, which lines it up with the almost-sister series Blake's 7; making a possible evolution of that Earth (or Terran) Federation going from the xenophobic distopian society of  Blake's 7 to a more inclusive Federation and then into an Empire which would grow and grow before declining as seen in The Dark Path. Linking the assorted Federations and Empires with Doctor Who can be tricky enough but to try and relate it to another series as well would seem foolhardy if the series' were not being made side by side.

But that exploration is somewhere ahead of us as far as this blog goes.

The Doctor comes into this story at the behest of one of his future selves; in fact the story opens with the seventh Doctor and his companion Ace and leads to this adventure in the Doctor's past. Colony of Lies was published in 2003 so the seventh Doctor's penchant for getting involved with events and influencing them to his own design was well established, but as far as this continuity study goes it's a bit of a glimpse into the future if someone had not seen any of the seventh Doctor's episodes. Zoe and Jamie are still with the Doctor, both of them getting a pretty rough ride with Zoe being knocked out a lot and almost tortured by using mental interfaces with computers (she had no such trouble in Little Doctors though) and Jamie getting into very physical dust ups with the Tyranians - a race of canine humanoids who have a prior claim to the planet over the human colonists. There's a particularly pointless bit where Jamie takes on one of them in some cliche trial by combat for honour notion but I have to wonder if Colin Brake forgot about how Jamie dresses when he wrote that part. I mean - has Brake ever worn a kilt himself, let alone gotten into a wrestling match in one? Dignity would be in short supply tussling around on the ground in one; I speak from experience as I wore mine last week on the streets in Ottawa and a sudden gust of wind had me mooning Parliament Hill.

There is also something mysterious about the Tyranians as well but it is thrown into the mix so close to the end it may well have not been put in at all.

Future history saved, the TARDIS crew head back into time and space for another BBC Books novel before returning to the televised adventures...

NEXT EPISODE: THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN