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