Rags

There’s a hot new music ticket in town and they are making waves wherever they play. The music is loud and crude, the attitude is snarky and violent, and the deaths that follow every gig are making the authorities nervous. The Doctor is not interested in the music at all but in the strange energy waves he is detecting from the area when the band plays. As the mobile horror show rolls along gathering a caravan of the dispossessed, UNIT are called in to oversee national security. Jo falls under the thrall of the band and finds herself reveling in the blood lust. And when they need him the most, the Doctor becomes trapped in the nightmare void world of the Ragman, and there he will stay while the world is torn apart to the beat of the music.

It’s nothing new, this premise of sex drugs and rock ‘n roll spelling doom for the world as we know it. Woodstock was heralded by frightened conservatives as the beginning of the end of society with its message of free love and peace, and the same fears are usually stoked anytime a band starts to gain following among those who might be a bit different from the conservative norms. The events in Rags, or at least those which take place during the concerts, are probably what was going through the heads of people who feared Marilyn Manson’s rise to popularity; the outbreaks of violence, the sudden sexual passion between some of the revellers and a decrepit depraved singer screaming messages of hate to all who will listen.

The problem here is Rags can’t really pull off the whole “doomsday band” deal, even if the band is just being reanimated by some old monster stuck on Earth for centuries. I remember reading this once before when it was first published in 2001 and thinking that I don’t remember enjoying it. I was right. I didn’t. It was actually a struggle to finish it, and the reasons are simple: it didn’t feel like Doctor Who.

The Doctor has had moments of crisis and self doubt but it’s tremendously out of character for him – in this incarnation especially – to submit to despair, and especially to the simple parlour tricks of the Ragman. Sure the Ragman has a reality trap inside the back of the cattle truck leading the procession across the countryside, but it’s just not a convincing domain at all. I’m not sure what it is about it that did not come together for me but I found myself bored by the Doctor’s plight and when he eventually does rally to take on the evil I found it hard to swallow that all it takes is a good telling-off.

The UNIT folks are not really themselves either, especially Jo who is left behind to go under cover and just gets swept up with the rest of the hysterical masses, even turning on Mike Yates and the Doctor himself. The Brigadier even falls to the hysteria eventually and orders his troops to open fire on an unarmed mass of hippies and punks. “Hippies and punks”. The phrase gets used a bit too much to describe the crowd of music fans. And really, if UNIT clashed with a civilian mass to this extent there would be no more UNIT; the Brig would be out on his ass along with his senior staff. The level of violence that follows each of the music concerts makes the national news each time as well so it’s hard to imagine that this would simply be forgotten.

The job of the expanded universe novels is to add new adventures to the established series but not to come along and go so off into left field that the events described couldn’t help but create massive waves. There’s the odd one that comes along with a dramatically different narrative style but so far none of it has come close to impacting the stories around it; some have given some characters a bit of a shake up but what’s described in Rags – local police being physically torn apart by mobs amongst other things – would change the landscape. It’s sloppy and careless writing in my opinion – Mick Lewis and whoever was editing this range should have known a lot better.

Back to the TV series now where things will have magically returned to normal…

NEXT EPISODE: THE SEA DEVILS