The Final Sanction

It’s 2204 and in the wake of the Dalek invasion the Earth military has gotten bigger and better and is embroiled in the last days of a conflict with the Selachians. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive on the front of the final campaign and are swept up in events and divided across enemy lines with the Doctor and Jamie with the Earth forces and Zoe as a prisoner of war of the Selachians. The Doctor knows that they are at a turning point in history and this war is going to end in a horrible confrontation, one he cannot change, but with Zoe in danger of being part of a holocaust, can he just let it happen?

Well this is a grim one. The second Doctor’s tenure is often remembered for it’s comedic moments and it’s parade of monsters, but it was rare to have something along these lines come up. Indeed the on screen adventures didn’t really go there at all, so it’s the BBC Novels which once more take those steps into the darker places, much as we saw with Combat Rock. The Final Sanction doesn’t go as far into the grit and guts as Rock did but it was published first of the two, when the novel series was still not sure how far it could push its own envelope where graphic content was concerned. And certain authors can do it better than others, and author Steve Lyons isn’t really known for gore.

He is, however, known for the Selachians, and here they are again for the third time in this continuity blog. Both of his novels featuring his shark-monsters were published some time before Big Finish waded into the waters of the second Doctor and put out The Selachian Gambit  where Jamie met them, so I was concerned that Sanction might have a continuity-jarring moment where Jamie doesn’t know what a Selachian is, but somehow that doesn’t happen at all and Jamie just knows who they are already. Whew. I myself am still not entirely keen on these monsters as they are pretty much just more mobile Daleks with the feelings left intact. The Selachians have a culture and a whole history from before they became warlike and went on the rampage but they’re just too obvious a substitute monster; at the time on TV the series didn’t have the Daleks to use and when the BBC Books were coming out there were no Daleks either for quite some time unless John Peel wrote the stories (stupid decision by the way).

But my gripes about the Selachians as a baddie aside, they are pretty ruthless and are downright horrible to Zoe. Under their interrogation and imprisonment her haughty intellectual dignity and superiority complex are literally beaten out of her and although she bonds with some other prisoners to mount escape attempts she is very close to breaking point. This is so far the most brutal treatment Zoe has received at the hands of any aliens she has met. Jamie on the other hand effectively enlists with the Earth military so he can help rescue Zoe and gains the admiration of Lieutenant Michaels, and the attention almost seems affectionate in some ways. Jamie is oblivious to this, and it may not be intentional on the author’s part but it just reads as if Michaels might have a thing for our Highland boy. And the Doctor even gets some great moments of conflict which we never really saw for Troughton; that whole changing of history thing is here in a new way. Usually changing history was all about the history we know in the past, but now here’s something new: future history which as far as we know he may be accidentally changing all the time when helping overthrow a dictator or defeating the Cybermen again. Military leader Redfern is destined to go Hiroshima on the Selachians’ home planet, but should the Doctor stop him? Can he stop him? This is where Sanction goes into the darker and heavier realm without the gore of the conflict as the focus, although there is enough justification for it to be both if Lyons really wanted to go there.

But from the wet world of aquatic monsters to the wild west of the future we go…

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