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