The Liz Shaw Chronicles

The Big Finish Companion Chronicles range has often been praised for delving further into the perspective of the Doctor’s companions than the series itself would allow; by telling stories from their viewpoints we got to see how they felt about their mysterious time traveller friend and the dangers that would follow them both as they explored time and space. The most intriguing tales hands down came from the Hartnell and Troughton eras as so many of their televised episodes were missing fresh material was welcome, but when it came to the Pertwee years there was just as much demand as the actor himself had passed away and would not be providing any further performances. Actresses Caroline John and Katy Manning dutifully stepped up and reprised their roles from that time as Liz Shaw and Jo Grant respectively, but unfortunately Caroline John herself passed away in 2012. Before passing, though, she returned to the role of Liz Shaw twice on screen at anniversary episodes, once in a spin off video, and five times with Big Finish. It is those five Companion Chronicles I want to look at next as a group.

Released first was The Blue Tooth, a story which saw Liz looking back at her time with the Doctor from some years after they parted ways. She remembers a time when she returned to Cambridge to visit a friend during her time at UNIT – an attempt to return to some semblance of a normal life or at least remind herself of one – only to find that her friend and colleagues of hers have vanished and some strange bits of metal have been found at the scenes of the disappearances. When the Doctor arrives to help her investigate he recognizes some small metallic insects as upgraded versions of Cybermats, and realizes that there are elements of Cyber technology at work left over from their previous invasion attempt.

As it was still early days for the range The Blue Tooth only has Caroline John as a storyteller with Nick Briggs providing Cyber voices, and the feel of it is pretty bare bones compared to later episodes as Big Finish honed their craft more. But it’s an important one to note as the third Doctor never met the Cybermen on screen during his original run, and here we get to hear it happen at last. Caroline John narrates but does drop into impressions of Jon Pertwee from time to time but not every actor is going to be able to ape “their” Doctor to the same level that Fraser Hines does for the second Doctor and this is one example of just that. Personally I feel it would have been better if she had not tried doing it at all. But however it is presented it is still Liz looking back, but not going so far as to be another exit scene replayed; she reflects on when she realized she was going to leave the Doctor but leaves it at that, which is a relief as we don’t need a third version of her departure laying around.

Shadow of the Past was the second release, with Liz returning to UNIT’s top secret Vault after decades of being away. There is something inside the Vault which only Liz is going to be able to deal with as everyone else – the Doctor, the Brigadier, Benton, Yates – are all gone. She encounters a UNIT solider already on the inside and tells him of what she remembers, of a monster from outer space which managed to assume the form of the Doctor and open the planet up for invasion and the bloody battle which followed, and what may still be lurking in the Vault.

Shadow is partly a flashback piece with Liz dropping into storytelling mode when she speaks with Corporal Marshall inside the Vault. A lot of time has passed and Liz knows that there have been several other Doctors by now, all with different faces, but none of them are around this time to help out. In her narrative Liz mentions Captain Mike Yates which would place her flashback moments as somewhere between The Scales of Injustice and Devil Goblins From Neptune (if one takes the latter as the real departure story for Liz). This time it’s Caroline John but with a second actor to take some of the dialogue on as well and loan an additional layer to the story as it unfolds. Both the flashback and the “present” stories move at the same pacing and both resolutions are reached at about the same time. It’s been done before and it’s effective, and it’s just very engaging to hear Liz returning to UNIT so far in the future; her affiliation obviously doesn’t just go away despite not really wanting to be there in the first place, and this would coincide with a reference to her being on UNIT payroll again, specifically on their Moonbase, in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Exactly what would bring Liz back is not entirely revealed; it may be a grudging sense of duty, it may be that her work finally intersected with UNIT’s agenda at a level of her liking, or it may just be the chance to work without being in the shadow of the Doctor.

Sometime before she rejoins UNIT, though, Liz has a colleague who is working on a time travel device in The Sentinels of the New Dawn, the third release. Liz has not been away from UNIT very long at this point and she feels reluctant to contact the Doctor after she has left him, but she needs his help to determine what is going on. The time experiments are more advanced than expected and they are both flung forward in time from the 70s to 2014 where a radical political movement called New Dawn is attempting to use time travel technology to alter the past and capitalize on the future. New Dawn’s forays into science have not only taken them into the realm of time travel but also into genetics, and they have spawned a hideous winged beast as their guard dog in their future.

Liz hasn’t been away from the Doctor very long at this point and has reservations about asking for his help given that she walked out on him, but her relief at his agreement is palpable. The Doctor has a new assistant at this time who is taking a bit of getting used to as she is not a scientist, and in UNIT affairs the Brigadier is working on security arrangements for the world peace conference which actually places this story between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil. There is no animosity between them at all as they deal with New Dawn as a team once more and the adventure works to provide them with a bit of closure which not every companion gets depending on the nature of their departure. It’s good for Liz, allowing her to move on properly without regrets, and the Doctor returns to his life at UNIT with more purpose in getting the TARDIS fixed; if the humans can create time travel devices he should be able to repair his.

Binary was released next, and takes place before Liz leaves UNIT. She’s thinking about leaving, though; she’s stressed and doesn’t feel like she is living up to her full potential. But there is a problem to work on first; there is a supercomputer in UNIT’s possession which requires investigation. The computer is surrounded by a force field though and when Liz gets too close she is miniaturized and pulled inside the computer along with two UNIT soldiers who also got too close. The computer is capable of communicating with Liz and is sending her messages to help her repair its failing systems, but there are other forces at work urging her to destroy the computer from the inside. The Doctor is on the outside talking her through the experience, but Liz is effectively alone and cut off and must solve this mystery by herself.

Liz on her own is something we never really go to see a lot; even when the Doctor was stranded away from her in Inferno we didn’t get much sense of her being able to do things without him around, scientist or no. Here Liz is resourceful and intuitive and at the start of the story she is pretty bitter about her role at UNIT passing test tube to the Doctor and telling him how brilliant he is. One gets the sense that this is somewhere after Inferno and before Eye of the Giant with Liz saying she is going to leave the Doctor, but as she works on her own and sorts out the computer herself she has some second thoughts.

The final Liz Shaw adventure produced is ironically The Last Post, wherein Liz seeks help from her mother to look into some mysterious deaths. Behind the goings on of the Auton Invasion, the Silurian discovery and the drama of Mars Probe 7 Liz has noticed that prominent people who have died were sent letters accurately telling them the exact time of their death. Everyone who has died was on a committee that Liz’s mother heads but her mother isn’t quick to offer any explanations. The Doctor doesn’t seem particularly engaged either but once a letter arrives for Liz’s mum things make a dramatic switch.

Placement first: this would go before Inferno as there are numerous references to the first three stories of Pertwee’s debut series but only vague forebodings about Inferno . Liz isn’t harbouring any of the resentment of Binary yet as she is still getting to know the Doctor and is constantly impressed by what he can do. This would suggest that it takes some time before Liz really starts to resent her secondary role at UNIT although Giant and Scales try to make a point to saying Liz was only a companion of 8 months before she left. The past of the Last Post does make the first season seem as if everything comes at UNIT fast and furious which makes for a bit of a fan-wank really.

At the conclusion of The Scales of Injustice the Doctor remarks that he never really go to know Liz very well, and I think that is true of the fans as well. Liz was just not there long enough to make enough of an impression to make her a household name in fandom. Big Finish have a way of bringing new life to companions we thought we knew, so their Liz adventures have certainly done that along with the three novels; we’ve gotten to see more of her with the Doctor and more importantly more of her without him so we can get to know her ourselves. Knowing that Caroline John isn’t with us anymore to bring Liz back to life is just plain sad and with the BBC Books range not having much in line for past Doctors these days its hard to say if we will see her in any capacity for a while.

One day, though.

NEXT EPISODE: TERROR OF THE AUTONS

The Devil Goblins From Neptune

It's all go for UNIT right now. A mysterious object breaks up as it enters Earth's atmosphere and is immediately followed by a rash of sudden deaths. The Doctor is targeted for abduction by not one but two forces outside of UNIT. Bolstered by the relative success of the Mars Probe missions the British Rocket Group is sending probes to Neptune. The Brigadier suspects infiltration at the highest levels of UNIT command in Geneva. And there are winged devil goblins flying in the skies overhead.

I'll admit I really had a hard time with the title of this one. It's not like Doctor Who hasn't had its fair share of boner titles like The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy but this one just sounded a bit of a joke when it was announced. To put it into perspective, this was the very first novel to feature a past Doctor published in the BBC Books range in 1997, and those of us who had been reading the Virgin Publishing ranges up to this point were a bit worried that the BBC taking the line back in-house might mean a drop in quality. So when the first title of the new range was announced to be The Devil Goblins From Neptune there was a collective "Oh crap!" as if our worst fears were coming true.

But it's not really bad. It's an interesting place for the range to start, joining the Doctor in the early day of his Earth exile and adding a third story to the season "7b" that followed Inferno. The problem with doing that is there are already two previous entries which were planned to work together - Eye of the Giant and The Scales of Injustice - to commit the most serious offence there is in Doctor Who; the sin that is retcon. As I have said before there is a certain arrogance that comes with this practice, and with the previous two tales under the Virgin banner there was the minor league deal of Yates being introduced before his televised debut, and then the bigger one of writing Liz Shaw out as she never got a farewell scene. I've ranted enough about that already, but here we are with Devil Goblins and Mike Yates has been promoted to Captain now, and Liz is still around after all. The BBC Books editors were under no obligation to honour whatever continuity Virgin created but seeing as a lot of the authors were writing for both lines or were at the very least aware of them they might have worked with what was already there instead of ignoring it. Because lo, Keith Topping and Martin Day pretty much decided they were going to write Liz out too. Here's where one's adherence to continuity requires a little bit of flexibility, and if one really wanted to push it, one would be required to believe that the entire story here in Devil Goblins takes place before Liz's exit scene in Scales. As do some of the next entries to come in the form of Big Finish audios. And not to be satisfied with this folly, the author duo also toss in a couple more continuity carrots: a reference to Professor Rachel Jansen from 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks and a mention of Ian Chesterton which kind of shorts out some of an upcoming novel titled The Face of the Enemy, although the blame for the latter would fall more on the writer of that novel as it was published later.

Devil Goblins does a fair share of globe-trotting with the Doctor and Liz taking up with the UNIT USSR and going to Siberia while the Brigadier goes to Geneva, and everyone ends of at Area 51 itself in Nevada, USA where there's a second batch of aliens being held since the 1950s. It's an established notion that in any drama you can tell a story effectively by splitting the action between several characters, but by the time they were done here Topping and Day had their main cast scattered across the planet trying to solve the mystery of winged aliens called the Waro, who somehow had convinced people in authority to undermine UNIT to ensure a successful invasion. But there's a group of Americans at work here as well - there's UNIT USA and there's also the CIA itself which doesn't like to give any authority away especially to foreigners. The Americans are by and large just put across as blustering arrogant types who look down on everyone else around them, while the Russians are painted as haughty and saddled with a superiority complex like no other. Given that the era this is set in was not exactly one of peace and trust these are not too far off the mark for the opposing superpowers at the time, but even still it gets a bit tedious to read without hoping that someone is going to slap one of the offending parties in the face.

I wouldn't say this was a confusing read but a lot of it just seemed like a bit too much at times, especially when the main aliens, the Waro, are not really developed beyond being beasts and then suddenly there is an entire new species - one which is a natural enemy to them - thrown into the mix for the writers to play with. I found myself wondering when it was going to end more than once.

So Liz has been given departure material twice now and her stay at UNIT still seems short. Big Finish is here to the rescue with a few more Liz tales to enjoy and add to the extended season 7 (or 7b as the case may be) material...

NEXT: THE LIZ SHAW CHRONICLES

The Scales of Injustice

A little boy goes missing. A policewoman starts drawing cave paintings on walls. The Doctor is immediately suspicious and believes that the Silurians have re-emerged. His friends are all tangled up in their own pursuits to assist him this time, with Liz receiving mysterious messages which lead her on a hunt for an organization that doesn't officially exist, and the Brigadier struggling to keep UNIT funded while his marriage falls apart around him. And somewhere else behind it all, there is a sinister presence which is undermining UNIT and reaching deep into the government agencies that support it.

There’s certainly a lot going on in The Scales of Injustice. A lot of it is continuity crap retcon, unfortunately. I don’t believe for one second that Gary Russell woke up and realized he had this story bubbling away inside him screaming to be put on paper for all to read – this reeks of being born of a desire to play around with continuity. Still, Russell is a fan himself and fans love nothing more than playing around with the what-ifs of situations never actually documented; look at social media today and you will see evidence of that all around in the form of “fan theory” in headlines. I still maintain, though, that it takes a certain amount of arrogance to actually decide to be the voice who gets to be heard because you’re one of the inner circle of fandom who happen to be producing the material at the time (this would have been 1996).

First up is the inclusion of the Silurians. Hurrah, great, one of the best monsters of the Pertwee era gets another story. But there’s nothing new here; there is no new take of the Silurians as a species and there are a few spoiler lines dropped about their undersea kin, the Sea Devils, who will appear later on in the series. No, the Silurians here are not even plot devices, they are only being used so Russell can offer up a reason why they look different on screen when they return in 1984’s Warriors of the Deep. The truth of why they look different is when the costumes were made for that serial they were updated with little regard for their original design, but for some reason this needs to be explained as a genetic hiccup in Silurian evolution. This is all tossed out the window anyways as the BBC in their infinite wisdom decided to reissue the novel by using one of the modern series Silurians on the cover in an attempt to draw the fickle masses of newbies into past episodes. They still call humans “apes” and by and large they want us all wiped out so they can take back their planet, except for some more reasonable voices looking to co-exist. And then there’s this bit where they become a mindless invasion mob which…. Yeah nevermind.

There’s another organization out there even more secret than UNIT it seems. They pick up the mess UNIT leaves behind; psychologically damaged soldiers get sent off to the Glasshouse to be rehabilitated and the other stuff goes into the Vault. And this nameless organization is run by some creepy pale young guy with a Cyberman body as they take the spoils of invasions and find ways to adapt them for their own uses. Sounds a lot like something called Torchwood but just years before its time. How many secret organizations can there be out there doing the same job?

The Brigadier has a life outside UNIT it seems: he is married to a woman named Fiona and has a daughter named Kate, and the marriage is not going to survive with him mysteriously away all the time. Fiona doesn’t know what he does, which I find really unlikely given the Brigadier comes from a military family, so she thinks he just works in some office and stays late a lot, which just plain makes her suspicious. Kate, is, of course a retcon piece here but at the time she was not headed to lead UNIT in the new millennium as she is in the new series; she was introduced in a spin off called Downtime as a woman living on her own with no connection to her father, the Brigadier, so of course she needs to be written into the story somewhere. Of course, none of this marriage deal with Fiona matches with the continuity recently created in the Lethbridge Stewart series which ran parallel to season six and gave a detailed account of the Brig’s rise from the ranks. I usually say that the original tales should be minded as far as continuity goes so the Lethbridge Stewart stories by my usual policy should be overlooked, but this time I change my mind. The reason is coming up.

Mike Yates gets promoted to Captain over Benton. That’s not the reason though, it just happens in this one because apparently it needed to. Benton. Mind you, gets a moment where he is faced with the reality that he is going to be overlooked for promotion but he realizes he is not officer material anyways, which is an oddly introspective moment for him. It’s almost like someone was doing John Levene a favour here as he always said it seemed like Benton was just a grunt with no brains when he was playing him.

The biggie of the tale, though, is Liz Shaw’s departure. As it has been said already she did get not get a farewell scene and when you are writing a retcon piece this is just too much to resist. At the time it was pretty much a given that Virgin Publishing’s run of titles for this series was coming to an end so the authors were taking liberties all over the place either out of the aforementioned arrogance or maybe just spite that the BBC Novels might ignore all the work done to keep Doctor Who going between Sylvester McCoy’s finale in 1989 and Paul McGann’s televised debut in 1996. Either way, Liz got a departure here which was not entirely unbelievable; she got tired of being an assistant when she had her own work to do. And then along comes the BBC Books series (we’re going there next) and the first thing they publish is a third Doctor and Liz story with – surprise! – a departure scene for Liz which doesn’t match. Okay so normally I would say Scales is the truth and Gary Russell was right – BUT Gary Russell went on to head up Big Finish for several years and when Liz Shaw got some of her own tales to tell in their Companion Chronicles range they are at odds with Russell’s own continuity here. And if the man can’t respect his own work, should it be accepted as the canon departure tale?

So. My own enjoyment of the novel here is to actually stop reading it at page 257 before the departure scene. Sure that still leaves a lot of drivel but it’s still an episode of Doctor Who to read and add to the series tapestry. But really, Gary, really. 

Incidentally, author Gary Russell opens the novel with a jab at the online Doctor Who fan community of its time (1996), the rec.arts.doctorwho group where the authors of the novels made the folly of getting friendly with the fans and a kind of inner circle mentality developed. Russell had published other novels in this series before this one but someone took exception to the accuracy of the science in one and Russell in turn used his first few pages of Scales to pretty much rub it in everyone's face that he was one of the elite series writers so he could use whatever science he wanted to tell his story. No-one really stopped to realize that the whole premise of Doctor Who is probably scientifically unfounded in the first place so debating any of the science in it at all is pretty useless, but fans do love to argue. Still, it's a bit distressing that an author and then a range editor couldn't just leave it alone and move on like a professional.

NEXT EPISODE: THE DEVIL GOBLINS FROM NEPTUNE