The War Games

The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to the muddy fields of France during World War I. They are immediately suspected of being spies and subjected to a court martial, but the urgency behind the matters makes the Doctor suspicious and he realizes that the soldiers on both sides are being controlled by some outside force, its agents in leadership roles among them. But there is more to this than simple infiltration: this is not the real World War I and it is one of many separate time zones where wars from Earth’s history are being played out side by side. Presiding over the carnage are the cold War Lord and his chief henchmen the Security Chief and the War Chief – all waiting to see which groups of humans will survive the war games and emerge as the best soldiers for their own conquest of the galaxy. But the arrival of the Doctor turns things upside down quickly – he recognizes the War Chief as a member of his own race, the Time Lords, and when he realizes how far reaching this scheme is he may have no choice but to call them for help.

At last! It took the powers that be at the BBC almost 6 years to do it, but finally the Doctor’s background is revealed: he’s not simply out exploring the universe, he’s on the run from his own people. The TARDIS is not his – it’s stolen property. And over the years since he has been at liberty his actions have crossed the line as far as the Time Lords are concerned; they are not to get involved with the goings on of other species and planets, just observe and gather knowledge. Without the odd drop of the title of Time Lord in some of the expanded universe media, there has been no mention of this race at all in series televised canon, so it’s all first time reveals here. But the Doctor had been trying to adhere to the rules at first, trying not to draw attention to himself with his indifferent reaction to the plight of the Thals against the Daleks, and his scolding of Barbara for her own designs on changing history. As we have seen over the years, though, he can’t help but get involved with events, the turning point possibly being when he sets Nero’s plans for a new Rome on fire in The Romans. After that, it’s all in for the Doctor when it comes to stamping out evil and fighting the good fight. There was no real plan at the time to bring the series to this point so the Expanded Universe has taken it upon itself to drop the odd bit of foreshadowing about how the Doctor’s people would not look kindly upon his actions, and a bit of retcon has been applied to Susan’s departure in light of this: she would be just as guilty as the Doctor, and dropping her on Earth would have been his way of protecting her should the Time Lords ever catch up to them. It’s interesting to see how in An Unearthly Child the Doctor alludes to plans to one day get himself and Susan home, but once he starts to interfere with evil plans and thwart Daleks he realizes he can’t go back now; he’s gotten in too deep.

The Time Lord double-whammy in this one is the presence of the War Chief, another renegade Time Lord who has fled their planet but has allied himself with an evil regime to ascend to power in their ranks. The moment of revelation is fantastically tense, with he and the Doctor locking eyes across and room and the Doctor reacting in shock, dragging Zoe and running for their lives. The War Chief is not too different from the Monk in his aspirations, although the Monk’s means were not as bloody. The War Chief is perhaps more immediately dangerous in a physical sense; he’s not afraid to turn his guards loose on people and have them killed, and he’s slyly undermining the Security Chief (played with such finesse my James Bree) to gain favour with the War Lord himself. When the Time Lords themselves appear, they are portrayed as calm omnipotent beings, wise in their ways, but a bit on the high and mighty all the same. It’s no wonder the Doctor got out of there when he could.

This is the end for the TARDIS trio though; with the Doctor captured by the Time Lords the team is torn apart with both of the companions sent back to their original times with only their memories of their first encounter with the Doctor remaining. Zoe is returned to the Wheel and carries on as if nothing has happened, even dismissing a slight feeling of having forgotten something as nothing. Jamie is put back in Scotland in the same clothes he joined in, his hair even styled back the way it was, and as far as he knows he just said goodbye to the Doctor, Ben and Polly. This is the second time companions have been left behind against their will (if we do not count the unfortunate demises of Katarina and Sara Kingdom) with Susan being the other notable departure. Jamie and Zoe only leave when they are told because the Doctor tells them it is goodbye and they can’t fight what’s coming anymore. The Doctor is crushed; he knows his friends will not remember him, but he insists he sees that they have been returned home safe before his trial goes any further.

As far as trials go it’s not a very long one at all; the Doctor is read the riot act for his involvement in matters he should have left well alone, but the Time Lords do admit that he has been a positive influence where he has gone and they cannot deny the nature of the evils he has faced and stopped. The Doctor’s sentence is not death, but exile to Earth, which the Doctor thinks could be just as bad. And to make matters worse, the Time Lords are going to trigger another regeneration and block his memory of time travel theory so he cannot escape. The Doctor is outraged, but in the end he is powerless, sent spinning off into the darkness screaming defiance.

The first time I came across this story was in print form, specifically the Target novelization by Malcolm Hulke. It was the usual kind of Target fare with a vague cover and a promising blurb on the back and something like 150 pages of content. I did not get a full sense of the gravity of the trial and the Doctor’s adventures from this back then as I had not actually seen any of the black and white episodes, only a colour episode with the second Doctor crossing paths with the third (still to come). As I got further into fandom I gleefully discovered that The War Games was a mammoth 10 episode story and it was all held by the BBC Archine, so I eventually got to see it on television in two long episodes (1 to 5 and 6 to 10) and then on VHS when it was released properly. And let me tell you, 10 episodes is a lot to take in in one sitting. This time I did a couple episodes a day on the DVD release and enjoyed some of the supplemental materials as well, detailing the production and the story behind the story, including the very real notion that this may have actually been the last Doctor Who episode ever.

When the series did return in six months, there was a new man emerging from the TARDIS and in full colour to boot. The show was going to change along with the Doctor himself, but the Expanded Universe lore has been having fun with this gap between Doctors, exploring a lot of “what if” situations such as what if the Doctor did not immediately go into exile and was employed by the Time Lords as a covert agent? And what happened to Jamie and Zoe after they were returned home? There’s a lot of room for speculation, and that’s where we’re going to go next before returning to the televised series canon…

NEXT EPISODE: FEAR OF THE DALEKS

The Edge

The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to an advanced research facility on an asteroid in space. The scope of the work being done there fascinates the Doctor and Zoe, leaving Jamie somewhat baffled and out of the loop and exploring on his own. But while his friends are having the time of their lives with the scientific aspect of the place, Jamie's wanderings show him a darker and more menacing side to what is going on.

The Edge is the fourth tale in the Second Doctor Boxed Set of Companion Chronicles (Volume 1) and thematically serves as a bit of a counterpoint to the Jamie/Zoe tensions that were central to The Integral. With Fraser Hines performing only with Robert Whitelock as Provost Curtis the perspective is solidly Jamie's and although he still scoffs at the scientific chatter between the Doctor and Zoe he does not have as much of an insecurity complex about it anymore. With the passage of time the rift has been healed it seems, and the crew are a solid unit and ready to take on anything. Jamie even mutters off a few of the baddies they have faced as a team including the Ice Warriors, the Yeti and the space pirates, so continuity-wise this episode fits perfectly right here.

Robert Whitelock also does double duty as station facilitator ____ and his henchman / sidekick Sebastian; he does it so well in fact I didn't realize it was him doing both until the supplemental interview chapters at the end of the program. It's curious that he is coloured blue and the whole audio production leans heavily on a visual they can't actually present, but that's the magic of audio for you. And having enjoyed the recent episodes of Star Wars Rebels I found the literal "blue meanie" of this production to take on the demeanor of that series' villain Thrawn, at least as far as I imagined him looking. Like Thrawn he is cold and calculating and very self assured, certain of his victory over the Doctor but not taking into account the resourcefulness of the companions, moreso Jamie who he assumes is not a threat or of any consequence.

And this is the last of the expanded universe material for this TARDIS crew as a unit. Big change is coming as we return to the televised episodes and a mammoth 10 episode finale for the trio.

NEXT EPISODE: THE WAR GAMES

The Integral

There's a bit of tension in the air in the TARDIS; Jamie is feeling as if new companion Zoe is getting ahead of herself with her cold logic and superiority complex, telling him what to think and how to think it. Zoe is equally exasperated with Jamie's stubbornness and inability to think logically. The Doctor is only too happy to get everyone out of the ship and into an adventure - this time in a psychiatric hospital for patients with video game induced PTSD. The patients are helped by the Integral, a species capable of dampening negative emotions, as well as a computerized system to do the same, but there's a breakdown somewhere in the works, and the asylum is at risk of being destroyed by the patients.

For starters I have this one a bit out of place; it should actually be earlier in the sequence, somewhere after the events of Invasion (or in the case of the Expanded Universe, The Isos Network) when Zoe is still relatively new to the TARDIS crew and she and Jamie are still getting used to each other. Although she has been welcomed into the ship, it's only natural that her affinity for scientific discussions with the Doctor might make Jamie feel like he was on the outside, especially after everything he and the Doctor had been through before Zoe arrived. Zoe naturally doesn't understand what all the fuss is about as it's only logical that she and the Doctor would have a good rapport; the emotional side of a relationship wouldn't even occur to her.

With both Fraser Hines and Wendy Padbury on hand to perform in this one the perspective shifts between them both to accentuate the differences in their opinions; were it simply from Jamie's point of view Zoe would come off as a bit of a shrew, while Zoe would just paint Jamie as an ignorant savage or a child struggling to understand the grownups.

And how about the Integral as benevolent monsters?  They are the perfect business partners for this venture in healing, even if the establishment has been mandated onto the corporation to make up for the damage caused by its own video games. Yes, people got addicted to playing immersive violent video games and the result was an inability to separate real life from the game, and outbursts of violent behaviour were the result. In the presence of the Integral, the violent urges are dampened and the hostility suppressed. The Integral are not stupid though, and their time is money; they're not doing this for free, and the corporation thinks they can do without them if they build a machine to do the same work. And it's pretty easy to see what is going to happen next.

This one was the second last adventure in the Second Doctor Boxed Set of Companion Chronicles (Volume 1) and has now become the second last adventure for our TARDIS crew on this blog adventure. One more to go, and then we're back to the televised episodes to see their final fate.

NEXT EPISODE: THE EDGE

Lords of the Red Planet and Lepidoptery for Beginners

The TARDIS makes a landing on Mars in the distant past. Jamie is understandably nervous about this choice of location; he knows that this is the home of the Ice Warriors, but the Doctor assures him that this is well before their time. Zoe is fascinated and they discover that the planet is not as barren as the Doctor and company expected - there is a major city populated by a race of reptilian creatures on the planet, but genetic experiments have resulted in the creation of the Ice Warriors. The Martians, however, are not a warlike race at this time, but their leader, Zaduur, has ideas of the future and is planning an apocalyptic nightmare for Mars, with her new warrior army ready to conquer.

It was inevitable that there would be an Ice Warriors origin story somewhere, but as this is another of the Lost Stories based on a proposed script from the sixties I'm not sure if it was planned in such depth at the time it was submitted. Origin stories seem to be more of a thing for the current era, so I think a lot of what is in this script is influenced by recent trends. Still, the Daleks got an origin story back in the seventies, and it is quite similar to what was done here with genetic manipulation being at the heart of the rise of this monster species. So the original Martians are not actually the Ice Warriors, they are a less aggressive species with more of an interest in science than in warfare.

At six episodes long it feels a bit on the epic side of things, with the Doctor and company falling afoul of the madwoman Zaduur and spending time running away from Ice Warriors. This is the dawn of the Ice Lord, though, and Zoe manages to befriend him and call upon him for help when she needs it. It seems a little bit too Beauty and the Beast with Zoe able to summon and order about this huge hulk of an alien. But this is one of the times when Wendy Padbury manages to sound a bit more like her younger self (not that she sounds like a senior citizen other times), with Fraser Hines doing double duty as the Doctor and as Jamie.

How about continuity here? Obviously this is after Seeds of Death for Zoe to be familiar with the Ice Warriors, but from an actual Ice Warrior perspective this is far before their original appearance, before Varga and company crash on Earth. There was a moment where I feared we were going to see that crew depart for Earth, but thankfully no, the Big Finish folks avoided that temptation. Interesting though that the main baddie here is a female Martian - and a few years later (this was released in 2013) along comes the new series 2017 episode Empress of Mars with - surprise surprise - a female Martian leader. But that one is a ways off from here.

And that's the last of the Lost Stories for Patrick Troughton's second Doctor. But this crew's run has still not come to an end; there are still some audio episodes left to enjoy.

LEPIDOPTERY FOR BEGINNINGS

The TARDIS lands in what is called a Predicticon, a machine created by a young man named Iolas Blue to predict the future and allow him to rule it. But Iolas forsees the Doctor and company stopping him, so he starts putting things in motion to bring them under his power and eliminate the threat they pose to his plans.

So here's an interesting one in the form of a Big Finish Short Trips story. In less than an hour it tells the story fantastically, making Iolas one of the most smug and insufferable enemies the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe have ever faced. The concept of predicting the future through a complicated series of cause and effect sequences is not something we've never seen before on the new series; in fact entire seasons of the new show have been saved because the Doctor goes to great lengths to explain how time doesn't function that way, and utters that nonsensically idiotic "timey-wimey" bullshit phrase as he does so. Here, however, a much better argument for how cause and effect works is presented without anyone on screen hyperventilating or the audience wanting to either switch off or strangle the script writer. Iolas hitches his plans to the "butterfly effect" theory (hence that really clever title) and even manages to influence events by using a mater transmitter to drop items off in the past which will cause small things to happen and reult in big changes. And of course, as with all self assured villains, Iolas is ultimately too smart for his own good.

No real hints as to what has come before, although Iolas mentions the Ice Lord, Slaar, from The Seeds of Death - but not as a recent enough event to mean it happened right before this one. So this is as good a place as any to put it.

NEXT EPISODE: THE INTEGRAL

The Queen of Time

The TARDIS comes to a dead stop and a face on the scanner screen invites the crew to come outside. The Doctor leads Jamie and Zoe out into the realm of Hecuba, the self-professed Queen of Time, where the clock is her favourite motif and games are her pastime to ease the boredom of eternity. The Doctor is separated from Jamie and Zoe and they are all subject to Hecuba's tests of courage and skill, and although she promises freedom at the end of the ordeal, they all know that letting them go is the last thing Hecuba wants to do.

This is another of the Big Finish Lost Stories, one which was considered for the screen back in the day but was not optioned. The opening scene of the face of Hecuba on the TARDIS scanner sounds a lot like one which was rumoured to be called The Face of God, but its not mentioned in the interview segment of the audio. The whole thing was pulled out of a two page treatment that was submitted by Ice Warrior creator Brian Hayles; I had a feeling there was a lot of stretching done to the existing material but now I can see why. It's not like there are long dragging bits of silence - that's the death of audio really - but there's this ongoing bit where Hecuba entertains the Doctor by having a several course meal served while Jamie and Zoe are being put through hell, the meal itself being a parade of grotesque dishes made ever so revolting, although I'm not entirely sure what the point of it was. Hecuba for all her refinements and schoolgirl giggling (which... yeah gets on the nerves after a while as do her sudden vicious turns which get predicatable) keeps company with hideous beast servants and eats so truly hideous food; one would think with the power she has she would be surrounded with loincloth clad studs and sipping at the champers. Is her enjoyment of gross food supposed to remind us that she is evil? Trust me, we get it, she's a dreadful selfish creature.

The Doctor knows her kind though - this whole episode is reminiscent of The Celestial Toymaker - so he plays along when he must if only to keep Jamie and Zoe safe. This is the second of the Lost Stories to feature a female protagonist with designs on the Doctor (Prison in Space) so I have to ask: is there something I am missing about Patrick Troughton as a sex symbol? Or in the age of new-Who is some of the theme of the Doctor being desirable to all women starting to creep into the Big Finish theatre?

Jamie wouldn't say no to a go with Hecuba, though, he makes that pretty obvious. In fact, his comments about Hecuba's appearance are very much of the time this was written for with a lot of objectification and so on. There's a notion that this sort of sexism might have been a reason why it might have been declined by the production office; it was the late sixties after all and the concept of the sex object female had really departed with Polly two seasons earlier; Victoria insisted on being treated like a lady and Zoe was too smart for it, and although there were no female villains in those seasons one assumes that they too would not be treated like an object.

There's no real signpost to say if this tale does indeed fit here towards the end of the series; no references to other stories to make it easy to drop in. On the other hand though there's nothing to say not to place it here to extend the last days of season six so long as the quality of the story makes it worthwhile. Despite parts of Queen feeling padded and the whole premise feeling a bit recycled it's a fun tale, fun to hear the regulars still having fun in their roles including Fraser Hines doing the second Doctor again.

And there is still one more of these.

NEXT EPISODE: LORDS OF THE RED PLANET

The Wheel of Ice

Sensing something amiss in time, the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to a mining colony set up around one of Saturn's moons sometime in Zoe's own not too distant past. The Doctor delights in this opportunity to examine the frontier era of Earth's space age, but he is also concerned about why the TARDIS had brought them there. The colony itself is in trouble; caught between the bureaucracy of the corporation which owns it and the struggles of the people who effectively live as slaves, there are instances of sabotage and reports of sinister blue creatures scuttling in the shadows.

This is more like it. Get lost, Menagerie.

The Wheel of Ice was the first BBC Books novel to feature a past Doctor for years; the line was rejigged to pump out pretty bland fiction starring current Doctors once the series had returned to television. In 2012, though, someone at the BBC decided that there was merit in revisiting the past Doctors, and author Steven Baxter provided this novel to so just that. And it's pretty damn good.

Wheel has a lot more of a science edge to the science fiction, with a lot of physics and real world technology about starting a colony in space squished into the narrative. This sort of story is right up the alley of the team of the second Doctor and Zoe, both brilliant and both loving a challenge. Together they interact with the people of the Wheel to help them figure out the true nature of the menace that faces them, and a lot of the time the Doctor knows the answers but coaches Zoe along until she herself reaches them. It's all very teacher and protege between them, something that the televised series hinted at but never got to take too close a look at. Zoe has been shown to default to cold logic at times, both in the televised episodes and the new episodes across many formats, and sometimes this is a benefit to her and helps her solve a problem a lot quicker; it's the human side of things which slow her down. The Doctor's gentle nudging allows her to see other angles and have more creative solutions; it's all very reminiscent of the seventh Doctor and his companion, Ace, in the final years of the classic series.

So with all this Doctor and Zoe bonding going on one might expect Jamie to be sidelined, knocked out a lot, or just shoved to the background to just say "Aye" a lot. Not so - Jamie comes into his own as the defacto liason between the administration of the Wheel and the angry youth element of the colony. Falling in with them was at first something the Doctor directed him to do, but as the story progresses Jamie spends time with the youth of the colony as they rebel and escape to the moon Titan, and eventually becomes the only one they will talk to. It's worth noting that had he stayed at home on Earth and lived Jamie would have probably ascended to some level of nobility himself among his own clansmen, so here we see him effectively following those same footsteps albeit in a less permanent sort of way.

As far as placing this one in some timeline goes, it feels like early days for this crew with Jamie telling Zoe if she stays with them long enough she will see many strange things, but there are references to the Ice Warriors and the subversion of the T-Mat technology from The Seeds of Death to indicate that they have been together a long time already. Indeed, the T-Mat disaster is referenced in the novel itself as something relatively recent, with one of the residents of the Wheel being the daughter of it's creator.

309 pages went by very fast. I had the audio downloaded as well but opted for the physical book this time. Given that it is read by Patrick Troughton's son, David, there are moments where his voice channels his father's with the same eerie similarity as Fraser Hines does with Big Finish. I didn't have almost 10 hours of time to set aside for listening though; had there been a road trip on the go then it would have been perfect. I realized early on that I was tearing through it quickly but not out of a sense of "I must finish this" but more because it is fast paced and enjoyable. It's Doctor Who done as a proper science fiction novel, which is not always what we get, and not always what is needed either, but sometimes a good hard scifi romp is just what the Doctor ordered.

NEXT EPISODE: THE QUEEN OF TIME

The Menagerie

On an unknown planet elsewhere in the cosmos, a slowly developing society caught between an age of superstition and the slightest dawn of an electrical age is living in fear. There are rumours of a menagerie of monsters living beneath the main city, and of monsters escaping into the night to terrorize and kill. They also live in fear of an elite order of knights who protect the people from their own thoughts by stamping out all who would acknowledge the past or plan for the future, and especially anyone caught committing the sin of speaking of science. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive and the Doctor is intent on showing his companions how societies separated by great distances can evolve more or less along the same lines over time, but instead they are caught up in the bizarre politic of the planet and the menaces that lay beneath it.

I read this the first time when it was published back in 1995, and when I picked it up again for this project there was this nagging sense of not having enjoyed it at the time. Nevertheless I got started and read on, and realized that no, I do not like this book at all. The first thing I found this time around was that the whole thing just felt so juvenile in its narrative; very simple dialogue, shallow characterizations and then this ridiculously convoluted notion of a religion which denies the past or the future and punishes all for referencing either. This whole concept just reeks of an author desperate to create something new and unique, but let me tell you, crap is universal.

Our series regulars are here and when I realized that this was the very first new fiction with the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in it I understood why they do not exactly leap off the page - no-one had written for them before the time it was published, so granted things might seem a bit vague and general. There's no new ground broken in the TARDIS crew dynamic, except for the usual loyal statements by companions about trusting the Doctor with their lives and all that. The Menagerie was specifically written to take place after The Space Pirates with Jamie commenting that he is glad to see the end of their travels on Milo Clancy's ship, which could mean they were together for a while. That said, though, there is only one more televised story left for this crew before they part ways and they just don't feel as tight a unit as they should be. Further continuity links are added to reinforce the connection to the previous story, but there is a further mention of an Interplanetary Mining Corporation which sprang from the Issigri Mining Corp. At this point in the series there has not been a lot of mention of IMC but they will feature heavily in a future episode and again in several of the New Adventures novels published by Virgin (The Menagerie also being a Virgin release). More of the retcon writing in effect, although it doesn't do much to help place this in a timeline of Earth's future history.

And speaking of tight, the rest of the story is not. I'll start with the names of the characters - or maybe I won't actually name them because I'm feeling a bit too lazy to type them out too much. But they are very science fiction names, lots of Z's and X's tossed in there and some very multi syllabic messes which, again, just scream of an amateurish pulp sci fi and a determination to stay firmly in the b-movie genre. Which, if that were the point, congrats to Martin Day, he did it. But I don't think that was the goal. Neither was creating a sloppy plot where halfway through the story not one but four new species of characters are piled into the narrative, and the motivation of the Knights is tossed aside because one of them secretly loves science but wants everyone around him blown to smithereens. Oh yes and there's this angle about an experimental lab in a lost city gets worked in there as well; despite being mentioned in the prologue where short lived characters get more development than anyone else, it is quickly forgotten until it is clumsily brought back into play.

It was a frustrating read, this. I kept thinking that as more characters poured into the story and the narrative wandered between the adventures of the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie (separated for most of the tale - an old ploy but really it doesn't always have to go that way) that I was going to lose track of things, and I wondered at times if Martin Day himself had, or realized he wanted to do too much in a limited page run and sacrificed some of the story just to include more monsters. It's not absolute dreck, but if some angles had been left out altogether or some of the subplots not used he could have developed a few of the stronger elements better and made a more memorable story.

NEXT EPISODE: THE WHEEL OF ICE